BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 724: The 3-Step System to Scale ANY Real Estate Portfolio
Episode Date: February 7, 2023You need to know how to scale your real estate portfolio. You’ve been stuck at the same number of units, dealing with the same problems for far too long. But what can you do? At what point do you re...ach a limit to the number of rentals you can take on? Is there even a limit at all? For most investors, hitting a wall in your real estate portfolio can feel like the beginning of the end. For David Greene, this just shows that you need to scale a little smarter. And today, he’ll show you exactly how to do it. David, at one point, had a portfolio of over fifty single-family homes. As a result, he was constantly getting calls about evictions, maintenance issues, late payments, and the everyday landlord headaches. He realized that he was spending all his extra cash flow fixing the regularly sprouting problems, so he decided to pivot. Now, he has a cash-flowing, profitable, passive real estate portfolio with multiple types of rentals nationwide and far fewer headaches. Not only that, he’s leading a top real estate agent team, teaching his top agents the same skills in his newest book, SCALE: A Successful Agent’s Guide to Leveling Up Their Real Estate Business. In it, David teaches top agents how to leave the mundane headaches behind and start building a business. But this book isn’t just for agents. If you’re an investor, the same rules apply to you, and learning these skills can help you leverage time, money, and other workers to help you grow an even bigger business. Pre-Order SCALE now, and use code “SCALE724” to get a special discount and access to exclusive pre-order benefits. In This Episode We Cover: A deep dive into David’s newest book, SKILL How David went from blue-collar worker to seven-figure business owner The two pieces of any successful system (and the part EVERYONE screws up) Why finding your weakness is the key to unlocking wealth Learning how to leverage time, money, and workers to build your business bigger The “three dimensions” of scaling and which one you MUST start putting into practice today Fish-cleaning vs. fish-catching and how to adapt your skills when building your real estate portfolio And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Investor-Friendly Real Estate Agent BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets Merch Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area David's BiggerPockets Profile David's Instagram David’s YouTube Channel Work with David Rob's BiggerPockets Profile Rob's YouTube Rob's Instagram Rob's TikTok Rob's Twitter The 5 Things You Need to Build a $1,000,000+ Rental Portfolio Books Mentioned in the Show SCALE by David Greene (Use Code “SCALE724” at Checkout) SKILL by David Greene SOLD by David Greene BRRRR by David Greene Long-Distance Real Estate Investing by David Greene Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-724 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Check out our sponsor page! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 7.24.
If you don't learn lead, you never get to scale.
You will always be managing the people that you have leverage.
You will have a high paying enterprise that is probably doing very well financially,
but you are still very much involved in.
When you get to leadership, you actually are able to influence large amounts of people
over shorter amounts of time.
You can scale to something like what Chick-fil-A has,
or you can scale to something like what,
that Ken McElroy has with his real estate portfolio.
You can get really good at whatever it is you're doing and do it en masse if you can learn the
skill of leadership.
It's going on, everyone.
This is David Green, your host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast here with a special
episode for you today where I get to talk more.
In today's episode, Rob is actually interviewing me about scaling a business.
Rob, I'm going to hand it over to you.
That's right.
We interview you, thy David Green, the titular host, the Bigger podcast.
Bigger Pocket's podcast, man. I'm excited. The roles are reverse. I got the pseudo power. I had all this pressure to succeed. But I'm excited, dude. This was a really good episode where we really, I feel this is a masterclass on scaling. We talk about so many good things for people that are really at that level where they can't get to that next level, right? They can't expand their portfolio. And we really dig through a lot of the concepts that might help people do that, right? We talk about your three dimensions of success, which break down to learning how to do your job, leveraging.
other people and leading. This is really, to me, the golden nugget of the day. So I'm excited for
people's mind to be unlocked on air today. What were some of your favorite parts?
Well, everyone listening to a podcast like this, you and I, because we listen to our own shows,
the goal is to make more money, have more success, have a better life than what we have right now.
It's very simple. A lot of us have that drive to get there, but we don't have a direction
of understanding how to do it or what's even worse. We don't understand the factors that are
working against us in trying to accomplish it, which just leads to frustration and shame and
guilt and this feeling like you could be doing more. So in today's show, we're really trying to get
deeper into what stops people from having more success as well as lay out a clearer path of
step one, step two, step three, what it takes to start learning something and then what the
next step is and then the next step is. Some of my favorite parts was your commentary. I thought you were
very funny today and you did a very good job getting stuff out of me that other people don't.
That's right, man. Well, you know, I,
It's always really fun to get into your mind because I'm always like exposing how unorganized
and not where I want to be. So this is a very inspirational episode. So we'll get into it here.
But before we do, today's quick, quick, quick tip is brought to you by David Green.
Today's quick tip is if you're having a hard time figuring out why you're not making more progress
in real estate investing in business and anything, it might be because you're taking the wrong path.
Start asking yourself the question of,
what feels heavy and what feels like.
Typically the things in life that we are good at, that we have skills, that fate has blessed
us with doing feel light.
We don't mind doing them.
And the stuff that we are not good out that we should be leveraging out to other people
feels heavy and we can't stand it.
I notice this is often the case with very seemingly insignificant tasks that I just put off
forever because I hate them.
Those are the first things that should be leveraged out.
Rob, what do you think?
I got a bonus quick, quick, quick tip.
And that is to pre-order your newest book, David.
scale. If you pre-order it before February 16th, you'll actually be entered to win one of 10 seats
on a coaching call with you, David Green, right? That is right. And little bonus there,
if you order all three of your books in the top producing agent series, sold skill and scale
on the Bigger Pockets bookstore, you'll also get a free month of your exclusive wealth building
mastermind, which is just like the craziest deal of all time. So if you guys want to be entered in
to get all those good bonuses, head over to Biggerpockets.com slash scale.
right now and use code scale 724 for 10% off of checkout.
Remember, that's scale 724.
And if you stick it around to the very end of the episode,
you'll understand why we chose that promo code.
Very good, Rob.
You're getting much better at these intros.
It's called a callback.
You know, I've read it on Wikipedia.
I think it's supposed to be important.
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All right.
Well, let's get into it.
David Green.
You have written five books with nearly 500,000 copies sold.
That's a lot of investors and agents here helping.
You're also the titular host of the Bigger Pockets podcast, the biggest real estate podcast in the world.
We know you.
But David, who are you?
And why are you here today?
Well, that's the first time I've ever been called titular.
I can say that. Well done. And I'm pretty sure I used it correctly. I honestly don't know.
It sounded, I mean, it sounded intriguing at least. People are Googling right now. Like, how do you spell that? And what does that mean? We should let you host more often. You're going to come up big words like this. So who is my SAT word of the day right there.
Who am I? I am much more like our average listener than I am like your average influencer. So I was a blue collar guy. I started working in restaurants when I was young. I went to college, didn't know what I wanted to do.
got a psychology degree. My very last year in college, I switched to a criminal justice minor,
ended up getting into law enforcement, did that for a while, kind of saw how negative the relationship
between law enforcement and the public was going, realized I didn't want to do that until I was 50,
started investing in real estate. I had just been really good at saving money for a long time,
and then I started learning how to invest that money, caught a wave of inflation that really helped
with rising rents and increasing property values, learned strategies like the Burr Method and long-distance
real estate investing. Built myself some wealth, became a millionaire through real estate and didn't
even know it until I was around like 30 years old when I actually started to track my net worth
and then said, okay, this was really hard to figure all this out. Let me start writing books for other
people to teach them how to do it. So I got out of law enforcement, became a real estate agent,
learned the hard way how to just make money being an agent at all. Then I became a top producing agent.
I was the top in the office and I was one of the top in the country. And then I built a team to
take over the agent business I had called the David Green team. And I wrote three books for bigger
pockets on those. So I've written sold skill and now this newest book scale, which is teaching
real estate agents how to begin at their job. And then we mentioned the Burbuk and long distance
real estate investing. See, I'm glad you clarified that because we initially we were talking about
thought this book scale was about how to scale a fish. And it turns out not that. I was like,
wow, that's a big pivot, David. You know, it's funny. A big part of,
of the scale format is comparing fish catching to fish cleaning, actually, within business.
That is an analogy I rely on heavily in the book. So it's funny that you came up with that.
So I'm not completely off. We'll get to that analogy a little bit later because that's actually,
I've heard you talk about it. That's always a really good one. But tell us, how does it fit in
with your other two books? Because you have written a couple of books here. Is this sort of the
final one? Is there more in the series? Is this the culmination of your grand catalog of books?
Not of books, but for the top producer series with Bigger Pockets.
I was written for real estate agents today.
So the dirty secret, my opinion, subjectively speaking in real estate sales, is that most
agents are terrible.
And I don't think it's that big of a secret because you hardly ever find a person
who says, my agent crushed it.
Even the best agents, you're frustrated the whole time.
Just it's hard to be good at it.
People don't understand what the industry is like as a real estate agent.
It's not really architected or engineered to be.
beneficial for both parties. So it turns into a much more adversarial relationship with the
investors or the clients and the real estate agents that it should be. So the book sold was written
just to teach agents what I wish that my, what I had a broker that would have told me. No one tells
you how to start a business, how to work a database, what scripts to use, what your job is. They
don't tell you how to use the MLS. They don't explain anything. Let me tell you how to open a lockbox.
You got to figure it all out. So sold is written just for the new agents who aren't making money and don't
know why. That's just to get you profitable. Skill was written for the agent who knows how to be an
agent but wants to become elite. They want to be a top producer. They want to make good money. No one
becomes an agent to just make average money. You just keep your W-2 job if that was the case.
So skill is all about excelling at your job, delivering a really good listing presentation, having a
buyer's presentation, how to talk to clients, understanding what I call the sales funnel, which is the
five steps of taking a person and leading them down a process of becoming a lead and then a client
and then an escrow and then a closing and the actual work you're doing in between every step
to just give some direction and doing really well. And then scale was written for the person who
wants to take a job they've become very good at and turn it into a business. And at that point,
you can either turn it into semi-passive income, much like owning investment property. You own a business
and other people are doing the work and you are managing that business or scale it huge.
Now that I'm not having actually write the contracts and talk on the phone to the buyers,
I can open up expansion teams in different parts of the country.
And that was probably the most fun book to write because the principles in this apply to
not just real estate agents, but to business owners everywhere, including real estate investors.
Yeah, I'm excited.
We're going to dive into your writing process a little bit.
I actually ask you a little bit of the nuts and bolts of what it's like to be such a prolific writer.
But before we get into all that, I do want to ask, you know, I know, I know, I know,
that you are a man of many businesses, you're the Renaissance man of real estate, you've got a brokerage,
you've got an agent team. The book may seem like it's framed for agents, but knowing you and how
you are so prolific with your metaphors, I just wanted to ask, how are we going to tie this
to investors who don't care about scaling their agent business, right? There are other people that
this applies to, I'd imagine, right? Yes, it's absolutely true. And the reality here is I only
learned how to create a real estate agent team out of a job using the principles that I had done
with my portfolio. So long before I had ever created a real estate agent business, I had created
an investment portfolio that is a form of owning a business. It's being a real estate investors,
being a business person. You are gaining assets that produce income. You're trying to control
expenses. Instead of looking for clients, you're looking for properties. You're constantly
leveraging the workout and trying to find a better team. You're looking for better. You're looking for
better property managers. You're looking for better lenders. You're looking for better loan
opportunities. You're looking for better locations to invest in, for better agents to help you,
for better handymen. So much of our lives, like for you focusing in short-term rentals,
is controlling expenses and controlling the customer experience and trying to systemize the
things that come up a lot without handing complete control over to another human being that can
run it into the ground without you seeing it. It is a, you could call it a game, you could call it a
challenge. There's different words to use there. But it's a pattern that pops up
in any form of business. If you're Alex Hermosi and you're starting gyms, if you're Rob Obasolo
and you're buying short-term rental properties or running courses to teach people how to do it,
or you're David Green starting a mortgage company or buying my own rental properties, these patterns
reappear over and over and over. And the books are written to help the people who are just
starting to get into this to recognize the pattern when it first comes and get a head start
on creating a process to systemize these challenges that come up so that you can run a profitable
business. Yeah, I think one of the things.
things I've learned over the past couple years is that without systems, scaling is effectively
impossible. Or I guess scaling efficiently cannot be done without systems, right? That's absolutely
true. If you don't understand how to implement systems and then the next step is actually make the
step forward to fail at it. No one starts a system and immediately has the perfect system on the first try.
Nothing in life works that way. But yet that stops a lot of people from doing it because they know they can
do it better themselves. And if they do it with someone else, if you don't do that, you never get
to the point where you can own more than a handful of rental property. So take you as a short-term
rental investor. I'm a short-term rental investor. Actually, this is a really good analogy. If you're
someone who starts off like you did, Rob, and you're managing them yourself, okay, full-time,
you quit your job, you don't have a family, the ideal situation. How many of those suckers
can you effectively manage at one time in a portfolio? Five to 15. Right, there you go.
Yeah. Depending on how the area, how demanding the guest is, and how good you are, right? But even
then if it's just you, even 15, if you have no help, no admin help, you just have software
in you, it'd be very difficult to manage 15 short-term rentals, coordinating all the cleaners yourself,
not having any form of administrative support.
To do a good job, you're probably capped somewhere at that, like, yeah, five, a stud could
maybe do 15, right?
So you cannot scale if you do things yourself.
When I bought mine, I had watched the process that you were going through and that other people
had went through and I just said, I'm never going to manage these. I'm going to hire a property
manager right off the bat to deal with this type of stuff. And I put a strategy together to accumulate
them in a way that I could rely on property management to run it effectively. You can't just leverage
any property to a property manager and trust they're going to do a good job. The location, the asset
type, the type of tenant that's going to be visiting the property manager themselves, they all go
into this. So I was able to buy about, I have 12 functioning short-term rentals right now that
I forget exist most of the time, unless I'm talking to the bookkeeper and looking at the numbers
right out the gate versus the process that someone else who doesn't understand business scaling
would have to go through would maybe take years of managing it themselves, trying to get someone
else involved, failing, trying again, buying too many, selling a couple off. It's this very
slow process to get to the point where they, what they want is financial freedom and a big portfolio.
Yeah, yeah. Well, let's like just dive into a system really fast because I think we say this
word a lot. We say systems, processes, and automations quite a bit on the podcast. And I think a lot of
people probably just who there's like two types of people, right? They're really organized type A person.
And then there's like the creative like everything floats in the ether kind of thing.
So for me, when I hear system, I get, I'm like, I freeze up because I'm like, oh, but it's really not
that complicated of a concept. Right. So what exactly is a system as you as you define it?
Systems made up of two pieces. And I talk about this in scale. And everyone gets the first one and
then they mess up on the second piece.
This is why people have a hard time with systems.
The first thing that makes up a system is an order of tasks or a checklist of things that need
to be done.
It's that simple.
So if I'm selling a house, a system would be a list of all the tasks involved and getting
a listing first, I guess it would start with getting the listing presentation ready for the
client.
And then once the listing agreement is signed, there's a process of getting the house ready
for the market.
And then once it's on the market, there's a series of tasks for keeping the seller
updated and marketing the property to buyers. And then when it goes into escrow, there is a series of
tasks involved with completing all the paperwork, negotiating and bringing it to close. Okay,
so there's like four steps to the system of selling a house. And every single thing in business
has a series of repeatable steps. If you owned a restaurant, I could outline for you the system
involved with what the cooks are doing to cook the food, who's ordering the food. The waiters have
a process of how they're supposed to put the order in and make sure it goes to the table and bring
the customer, their check. It's a series of tasks that are repeated all the time. The second piece
to a system is what everyone gets wrong. Most of us understand we need to write out all the tasks that
are involved in the job. The second part is having a person they can execute it with skill.
What I see is people make the task and they hand it to an admin who doesn't have skill in that
area and it all falls apart and they say, yeah, systems don't work. When you're the person doing it,
you're usually doing it well, which is why if you have a series of tasks and you then follow them,
you're your own system. In order to scale, you have to take those two pieces and you have to bring
other people in to do the job. And that's what I found the challenge in business has been.
I'm very good at outlying a series of operations that need to be done. I'm very good at anticipating
where things will go wrong and even putting training in place to prepare. But it doesn't matter
if I don't find a person who's good at accomplishing those tasks, you actually still have to be good
at things in life if you want to be successful. And that's the second part of a system.
Yeah, man, you really know that on the head. I mean, it really, it's two things, right? It's delegation
of the, of this kind of written out system you talked about, but it's also some level of management
is still needed to that person because a lot of the times people tend to empower employees too
much at the very beginning and they sort of leave, they come back, and then they get mad that the
employee failed, but there was no oversight to make sure that the system was perfected.
Yeah, and that the person who was working through the system understood the importance of it.
So let's say for you, you own an Airbnb, you're managing it yourself, and you get a customer
who's unhappy because the hot water isn't coming out of the shower, okay?
You're not just thinking your job is to get the hot water turned on.
That's how a person who's not taking responsibility thinks.
a person who is taking responsibility thinks my job is to make the client happy so they leave a good
review and they come back and a part of that is getting the hot water turned on but that my responsibility
is to not just solve a problem or check a box it is to achieve a result and that's the best way
I can describe what responsibility within business looks like if you take the approach of my job is
to accomplish a result to find a cash-loving property to add equity to a property to a property
to keep a guest happy to increase rents.
You take a much different approach than when you're just working off a series of checklist
where the client calls and says the hot water's not working,
well, you call the handyman, they go out there, they fix a thing,
you check the box, you tap yourself on the back and you say,
hey, I did my job, but you don't ever talk to the client,
you don't apologize, you don't see how they're feeling, you don't dig in,
and then they leave a one-star review.
And the employee says, well, not my fault, not my problem, it's not my house, right?
I did my job.
That is what's hard about scaling is you have to have, it's funny, a system in place to check the people that are working your system.
And you have to make sure that their heart is in the right place so that they are perceiving their responsibilities with the same level of responsibility that you as the owner would have.
Yeah.
So effectively, you're basically saying you want your employees to not look at things so binary, right?
So black and white.
There has to be a little bit of, I guess, compassion or empathy for the employer or for the, you know, the owner of that business.
to make sure, I don't know, that your vision is being executed correctly, right?
Yeah, they have to care.
They have to give a crap.
Would be another way to put it because the client doesn't, the person visiting your Airbnb
isn't going to think, well, this was an amazing experience except for the hot water.
And that's only chalked up due to one employee that works at the company.
I'm not going to punish the owner by leaving a one star review because of one bad apple.
All they know is they're not happy and they want to let everybody else know don't stay in
this place because you might have a similar experience.
And a lot of the advice I'm writing about in books like scale is for the person working in a company that wants to get ahead that wants to own their own business someday or wants to make more money within that business.
And they don't understand the power of responsibility.
Every business owner out there has given us a hallelujah, amen, as they're listening to this, right?
And every person who's an employee might be baffled or confused.
So many human beings have come under this delusion that avoiding responsibility is winning.
and I don't know that our industry as real estate investors has done much to help.
It might have even been, it might hurt it because a lot of the time real estate investing
gets sold as the alternative to hard work, the alternative to working for the man and being
a slave for someone else.
And it paints this picture that if you get out of that world and you come into this one,
you just buy a couple houses and you're done.
You can do whatever you want.
It's actually the opposite.
Responsibility increases when you take over the asset that you've invested your money into.
It is more pressure.
that is on you to perform better at this job.
And the best way that people can prepare
for making more wealth themselves
is to take on additional responsibility where they're at.
It's kind of like adding more weight to the bar
when you're working out, building up your strength,
learning how the systems work,
not just what your job is to do,
but why your boss put that system in place,
what problem they're trying to solve,
understanding that will equip you way better
when you start building your own portfolio,
you start buying your own houses,
you gotta take the call from the unhappy,
guest and you realize, oh, there's more to this than just getting that water turned back on.
Sure, yeah. Well, I think that begs a really important question, right? And obviously,
knowing your strengths are important, but knowing your weaknesses is probably even more
important. So how do you evaluate that as someone that's like looking to scale in the real
estate business? Understanding your weaknesses is the biggest thing. So your weaknesses,
not only will, we tend to look at that and think, well, that's where I'm going to make mistakes.
And that is true, but that's not the most dangerous thing in a weakness. You are, your subconscious
is very aware of your weaknesses, even if your conscious isn't. And so what happens is we will
avoid putting ourselves in situations that we know will expose a weakness, even if putting ourselves
in that situation might be very profitable. So if you're a human being who knows, I haven't really
done enough research on this topic like I should have and you're invited to speak in a meetup,
that might be very beneficial to your business. You're going to get all the eyeballs on you. You're
going to opportunity to teach the people what you do. Let's say that you're a loan officer.
That's the chance you could pick up some clients that you could close loans for and
money. But you're not paying attention to what's going on in the market. You're just checking boxes
for someone else working a system they made and you're not actually making an effort to learn
how the whole process works. You will have an insecurity that comes from your weakness of not
having enough knowledge. And what will happen is you will decline the invitation to speak at the
meetup and you won't ever realize how much money you lost by not taking action. We always noticed
the money that we lose that was already ours. Something goes wrong. You got to fork over a guest
another five grand, it sucks, you hate that. But you never realized the money that you could have
made had you taken more action or been more decisive or had more confidence. That's where your
weaknesses are really hurting you. So understanding what they are being honest with yourself and then
finding other people or other software or other systems to accommodate those will sort of allow you
to take the steps that you need to take to scale and make more money. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
So one of the big, I guess pillars or one of the big topics and fundamental philosophies of scale
is the purpose of leverage. I know that that's obviously important, right? If you want to scale,
if you want to get to millions of dollars in real estate in your portfolio, leverage is going to be a
very necessary thing. So talk about a little bit, what does that mean? What is leverage? And how does
leverage fit into the grand scheme of real estate? Well, if you think about just using a lever to pry something
open. It's really a, what's the word I'm looking for, like a physics type of a concept. You take a really
long bar and that can be used to generate more energy than if you just try to use your hand to pry it open.
If you think about the pirates of the Caribbean quote with Johnny Depp, the leverage, leverage,
and they use it to do things that normally one person couldn't do. There's different ways that you can
utilize that same concept in your business. The one we talk about all the time is kind of become
synonymous with the word leverage is money. I'm going to buy a $500,000 property, but I'm only going to
use $100,000 of my money or my strength. I'm going to use $400,000 of the bank's money or the bank
strength. And there, the leverage of the bank allows me to buy a property five times bigger than what
I could have bought on my own. The same thing is true of human capital. You get administrative
assistance. You get property managers. You get real estate agents that are working with you and
growing your business, you get handymen, you do contractors. If you had to do every single thing
involved in buying real estate just on its own, no one would ever buy a house. We'd have to learn
how to read title reports. We'd have to learn how to secure financing on our own. We'd have to
know all the rules and regulations and paperwork involved in a transaction. We would have to be able
to inspect a house on our own. You see where I'm going like no one could ever buy a property if you
had to do everything yourself. So you're already using leverage when you're you're you're
you buy. When you become a business owner, you are basically, when you're scaling, you are getting
intentional about learning how to be better at using other people, other software, or other
money to do things you could not have done on your own. Okay. So it sounds like the way you're breaking
it down is leverage is two things effectively, right? There's leveraging money, which is, like you said,
taking $100,000 and using that to get a $500,000 loan with the bank. You're using other people's money
to help you scale your portfolio that way.
And on the second part, what it sounds like is you're really leveraging time, right?
That's what it comes down to.
You as a single operator cannot physically do everything that it takes to run a 5-10-unit
portfolio, but you can leverage other people's time to help you leverage sort of an infinite
amount, right?
You can use other people's competence to help you do things.
So if I use a home inspector, I'm not just getting the time back of inspecting a home.
I'm saving years and years and years of experience that I would need to be able to do
what that person does. You can leverage other people's skill set, right? I might have,
you have a phone call for me instead of me because you can get to the end result faster.
You can leverage other people's knowledge. That's what we're doing on this podcast. People
are listening to us and learning things that they would normally have had to lose money to learn,
but by listening to us, they're saving themselves the money, the pain, the time, the heartache
of having to do it themselves. So we are all leveraging all the time. Like it's nonstop, right?
I'm leveraging the convenience that Google creates and allowing me to search for things quicker
or store things in the Google Drive.
Scaling is just about recognizing we're already doing it and becoming better and more purposeful
about ways you can do it more efficiently.
So it kind of goes back to the strengths and weakness thing, right?
Because you understand what you're good at.
So what you're good at is going to give you the most leverage whenever you're using your
strengths to sort of, I guess, run towards your goal.
And if you're really weak at something, right?
If your weaknesses are, let's say, like you said, your skill set may not be needed on the phone call,
but you bring someone else's skill set on there to get you to that end goal,
then you know that it's important to leverage someone's competence.
So really it seems like strengths and weakness, identification is a pretty pivotal moment for you, right?
Yes, that's a great point.
Some of the tools I use for that that I talk about in the book and in other places are the disc profile.
So that's a personality assessment trait that will help you identify what people tend to value
in communication because what I found is what you communicate is what you value and it's almost
always your strength. We don't communicate in areas of our weakness. We communicate in areas of strength.
So when I can identify somebody else's mental makeup via the use of a tool like disk, I give myself
a huge advantage in knowing what area of my business they would be better in. There's certain
profiles that work better for sales or for management or for analysis or for driving a project
forward. That's just a tool that can be used as you're trying to understand what strengths and weaknesses are
with different people. And the wise investors out there that are trying to grow a big portfolio,
they're already doing this even if they don't recognize it. Yeah, definitely. So it sounds effectively
like systems, identifying weaknesses and strengths, leverage. They all sort of tie in to the end result
that we're all trying to get to, right, which is success. And I know that one of the big things you
talk about in the book is that there's sort of, there's three dimensions of success, right? So
walk us through that concept and what does that mean for the everyday investor?
So this was something I had to learn the hard way. I became a real estate agent and my immediate
frustration was there's no one to teach me how to do this job. I actually had my license,
went to the office, met with people, came in and had a question on like how do you run a,
we called a comparative market analysis, just like how do you look at what the act of pending
and sold properties are? Nobody would help me. And I was so disenfranchised. I spent like six to eight
months after that, never going in the office again. I was just pissed. Like what this is no point.
My broker sucks. Nobody's supporting me here. I finally had a cop friend who came to me and said,
hey, do you want to sell my house? And I had told him I would. And I almost felt obligated to go take
this listing, which as an agent is like the best thing ever. We fight like mad to get listings.
That's anyone listening. Please come to me if you want to sell your house. So I had to call a friend
and have him show me how to use the MLS to even run a CMA to figure out what I should sell
his house for. And it was not a good experience for me. And then once I learned that, now I had to learn
how to negotiate. Like I remember on that first deal, I made this really big mistake where I got the buyers
to waive their appraisal contingency, but they still had an inspection contingency. And then the
appraisal came in low. And I was really new. And so I just thought like, well, they have to pay what
they said they were going to pay for. They don't have an appraisal contingency. But the agent made
something up about poop in the backyard from the dog as the reason they were backing out of the
deal, but then told me, hey, buddy, you don't know what you're doing. We have an inspection contingency.
We're going to use that to back out. And I was like, oh, that's evil. You're lying, right?
But I just was naive. I didn't understand how the game got played. So I went through this process
of having to learn a lot of things the hard way. I first started reaching out to my database of people
in my life that I hadn't talked to for six or seven years. And my first conversation was,
I'm a real estate agent now. Bad mistake. That's like, you know, when your friend that you haven't
seen since high school wants to talk with you about a multi-level marketing opportunity, you're
immediately just like, oh, I don't want to talk to you. I don't like you anymore. So I went through
this process of learning. This is the first dimension of success. If you just consider a spectrum with
zero on one end and a hundred on the other with a hundred symbolizing perfection, all of us
are in some capacity learning how to be good at our job. It's knowledge and the execution of that
knowledge. So learning how to be a good basketball player, learning how to be a good snowboarder,
learning jujitsu, learning how to be a good barista, whatever it is you're doing, there's people
that go to work every day and give a half-hearted effort and don't really move along that
spectrum very far so they don't make more money. And there's people to go to work every single
day and push it as far as they can trying to get to 100. So for you, Rob, I don't know because we
never talked about it, but I would be willing to bet when you were a copywriter or you were in
advertising, you showed up every day trying to learn from the people that were good at it, trying
to gain as much knowledge as you could from the mentors that crushed it there, really giving
your best effort.
Like if you're in the gym, you're working out to failure every single day because you want
to get stronger.
And you got better and better and better and better at the job and gain more skills.
The first dimension of success is just committing to the process of being good at what you
do.
Yeah, it seems like there's also a little bit of, uh, it's sort of like this funny juxtaposition
of success as,
Yeah, learning how to do your job, but a really big part of learning how to do your job is failure, right?
It is the failures that make us successful. And so that was a big part of my advertising career where
I would always see the rock stars at the agency and I would go and sit next to them and,
hey, what's up? What are you guys talking about? You guys got any ideas? Can I share my ideas?
And they always say in advertising to fail big, right? So it is a very awkward and very uncomfortable thing
to walk into a room and present a really crazy idea that you know will never get accepted.
but you still do it anyways just to gain a little respect with the peers in the room that you put
it out there, right? And it's through that that you kind of get better. Yeah, through failing,
you get feedback, which is something in the next book I'm writing about. I talk about the feedback
learning cycle where the quicker that you put something into process or you start something,
there's a process, then you get feedback on how it went. The quicker you can get to feedback,
the quicker you can adjust the first two steps. And you actually improve how quickly you can learn
by proactively putting yourself in a position like you just mentioned, right? That's a part of,
so these are all like stuff I write about in books that are about, hey, you want to be better
and get more money. It starts by getting better at your job. That's like money doesn't just come
to you. You're not owed it. No one's going to go find a great deal and hand it to you because
they feel bad for you. That's not the way the world works. You want to get better at learning.
Well, what I realized as an agent was I got to a point where I had, I was selling probably 40 houses a
and I could not do anymore.
It was like barely hanging on
to be able to sell 40 houses a year.
And I realized I had to get other people to help me,
but I didn't realize that that was a completely new process
where I would be starting over at zero.
So I talked about the second dimension of success is leverage.
And leverage is all about developing the skill
of creating systems and managing other people
to get them accomplished.
I knew I needed to use people.
What I didn't understand is I had,
is I had hit the hypothetical 100 on the learned dimension. So now I have to go in a new dimension.
I'm going up. If you imagine Mario running across the screen left to right. That's the first dimension.
Now he can jump. That's the second one. But no one told me I'd be starting at zero that I would
hire people and fail and hire people and fail and hire people and pour and pour into them and continue to
fail. It'd be similar to if you were running a rental property and you were managing it yourself
and you got to the five short-term rentals
and you couldn't do anymore.
And so you just hired someone and said,
hey, here's what you do.
And they ran it into the ground
and you just thought, oh, leverage doesn't work.
It's because you don't understand
that there is a skill to leverage also.
You start at zero and you have to build up to 100
on this new dimension.
Nobody tells you that.
So a lot of people get to that point and they quit.
They're like, well, I tried it.
It didn't work.
Not for me.
I'm just going to quit.
But you didn't quit when you were learning.
You made tons of mistakes when you were learning.
You just expected that that was part of the process.
of moving along that dimension.
You have to go and humble yourself from you at 100 to starting over at zero and making a lot
of mistakes as you learn the skills of leverage, the second dimension.
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Now, you mentioned that you capped out at like 40 properties as an agent, right?
And understandable, right? We only have a finite amount of time. But as an investor,
is there a cap there as well on how many properties you could buy? Is there any kind of bottleneck on that end as well?
There is. And that's why the government created the 1031 like kind exchange, because I had a similar thing happened to
in my investing portfolio. I was using the Burr method in northern Florida, and I was acquiring
properties, like sometimes at the point of four to five a month. And I was able to get that done
with the construction crew I had and the agent that was finding me the deals. And I had a bank in place
that had a line of credit where I could fund these. And I knew how to analyze the deal to make
and buy them right so that I was pulling 100% of my equity pretty much out of these deals.
I had a property manager company to manage them. But when I hit about 50 single family rentals,
there came a point of diminishing returns.
Every day it was some email of something that went wrong with one of these 50 properties
or several of them.
The cash flow on single family houses is not what you hear people talk about.
It's maybe, you know, like 300 a month, 350 a month on most of these, but then it just
takes one bad tenant having to be evicted that two years of cash flow can immediately be gone.
So you're not making nearly as every time you think you're getting ahead, something goes wrong
and breaks.
and it comes back and I realize like I'm not getting the cash flow that I want out of this.
And the properties are not appreciating as much as they would be in other parts of the country.
And it's not fun because every day I'm coming in and I got to solve some new problem.
Property managers can take some of the sting out, maybe 10 or 15, but when you get to 50,
you're still making decisions and following up and all of a sudden now I didn't want to own the portfolio.
So I sold those homes and I reinvested, like I probably sold half of my portfolio,
reinvested it into half as much real estate that cost four times as much. That's a great example
of using leverage in capital as well as leverage in a business to get out of a situation that was
not able to scale any further and into a new one, these short-term rentals that I mentioned earlier,
that are much easier to manage. Yeah. Well, it's kind of funny. You're talking about,
yeah, it's leverage, or I guess your bottleneck here on the real estate side, capital is a part
of it, but there's also just the actual organization and operations.
that can that can really cap you out too. Yeah. And so at a certain point, I'll probably keep
scaling up on short-term rentals. And maybe when I get 50 of those, they're going to sell in 1031
into some mega properties or an apartment complex. But yes, you hit this ceiling at every, whether
you're investing, whether you're a real estate agent, whether you have a pool cleaning business or an
auto repair shop, there is a limit to every single person where you hit a ceiling and you can't
go any further. And the principle that repeats over and over and over is you now need to learn a new
skill. You cannot keep doing the same thing you've been doing and keep getting good at fixing cars or
repairing them or cleaning pools. You have to learn a new skill in leverage to get into the second
dimension. And the people that do that get ridiculously exponentially better returns. You make a lot more
money when you can have six or seven people out there doing the work that you were only able to do
yourself as you manage them, but there is a ceiling that you hit in leverage as well. Yeah,
leverage is hard. This is a tough one. This is, I finally unlocked it for myself, but I think the trap
that people tend to get into is with leverage. You're talking about leveraging other people a lot of
the time, right? And so what it means to have other people on your team is one really big thing.
You got to pay for them. You got to pay for their time. You got to employ them. And that means when
you're first getting ready to scale and you're kind of, you're turning that corner like I am right now,
you're going to make less money by hiring those people. But as soon as those systems are in place and
everything starts churning, you'll actually make a lot more money in the long run because they will
be able to effectively do everything that you could never do by yourself, right? Yeah,
but the point I just want to highlight, that's how we tell people. That is how it works when it
works. The process of getting there is not as simple as we made it sound describing it. And it never is.
when we tell people, here's how you analyze a property.
And they're like, cool, I got the calculator.
I got the information.
Let me just go out there and analyze properties.
And they do it for three months and they can't find a cash flowing property.
Well, that's the reality is it's hard to execute on the information that's being given unless you figure out a skill.
You learn an area where properties are more likely to work.
You figure out how to add value to a property, add rental units to it that will make a duplex into maybe three or four units instead of two.
Now, right?
Like that's a skill that you figure out that now opens up doors and allows you to scale faster.
So leverage is the key, but you're going to start over at zero.
It's okay.
You just have to have humility and know, just like I sucked when I was learning how to do it.
I'm going to suck at leveraging how to do it as well.
But if I stick with it, I will learn this just like I learned how to do it myself.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
That's a very beautiful way to put it.
And I think it is important to say like, easier said than done.
You know, you got to sort of fail at this, right?
You've got to learn the job of leveraging to do that well as well, right?
So it all kind of ties together.
So we've got learn how to do your job, leverage, which is maxing out and sort of using other
people to help you scale your operations.
And then we've got the last one here, which is lead.
Tell us about that.
Lead is the third dimension that you have to learn if you want to scale a business.
So if you look at learn is running left to right on a spectrum on a plane.
And then leverage is going up and down.
Lead would be going like further out.
It's literally like the third dimension of a cube.
And leading is probably even harder than leverage.
It's the hardest of all of them.
Because leaders have to anticipate things where other people can just respond or react
to something going wrong.
Leaders have to literally influence the emotions and the psychological state of the people
that are working for them.
That becomes their job.
So you know what this is like, Rob.
You'll have a person who's very good.
They're trained in what you need them to do.
You've learned leverage.
you've executed it. You have a person on your team that's handling, let's say, all the customer
complaints or they're analyzing the deals that you might want to buy. You've gone through all the
growing pains of teaching them how to do it. You finally hit a rhythm and now they say, hey, I think
I want to go start my own business. Hey, I think that I want to start a family. Hey, I just don't feel like
my heart's not in this. I was listening to Simon Sinek and he was telling me that there's more
to life than just a job. And now I want to know like, what are you offering me to give me purpose
in life. That's the type of thing leaders have to now deal with. Or when I've got several different
people that are all doing the same thing, but this one's doing it better and making more money and this
one isn't making as much money, but they don't think that they're not as good. How do I keep
everyone happy and working on what they're doing? It's very difficult. You need to learn psychological
skills. You're going to be taking on problems that no one in the company wants. So the only problems
that make it to the leader are the ones that every single other person has looked at and said,
Nope, I don't want any part of that.
I'm passing that one along, okay?
Like, if you're a UFC fighter, you are only fighting the toughest people in the world.
You don't get easy ones anymore.
And leadership is a dimension that a lot of people never get into because they've already
started over after learn.
They've gotten leverage down and now they've got to do it again.
That third dimension is huge and so they just don't want to.
The problem is if you don't learn lead, you never get to scale.
You will always be managing the people that you have leverage.
you will have a high-paying enterprise that is probably doing very well financially,
but you are still very much involved in.
When you get to leadership, you actually are able to influence large amounts of people
over shorter amounts of time.
You can scale to something like what Chick-fil-A has,
or you can scale to something like what Ken McElroy has with his real estate portfolio.
You can get really good at whatever it is you're doing and do it en masse if you can learn the
skill of leadership.
David, you make me a better man, my friend.
And this is really, I love this. I really, really, really do because it's three things, the three dimensions of success. Learn how to do your job, leverage, lead. It's so simple. But as you explain it, it's so funny how I can see all the fundamental cracks of my business. I'm like, oh, that is because I'm trying to do it all at once. But it really is starting over from the top. And I think the reason it's hard to ascend to that next dimension or like getting to lead is exactly what you said, which is humility, which is like, why do I need to start over?
I've already cut my teeth on this. I've already perfected my skills. Why do I have to go back to the very
beginning and sort of suck again, right? So I really appreciate that. This makes a lot of sense.
So help us contextualize this because I can see how this makes sense from a practical business
standpoint. But what would it look like for a wholesaler to implement the three dimensions of success?
So the first thing they have to do is learn how do I find motivated sellers? Because you're not going
to get a wholesale deal in a contract. If you don't have a seller that needs a quick sale or they're willing to
sell for less than market value because there's so many people involved in needing a profit
that the margin has to be really big for there to be enough to go around. Once you finally find
out how to get the sellers, now you got to learn a new skill. You got to learn how to talk to them.
You got to have a really good mouthpiece. Like Pace Morby's well known for this. We just interviewed
Brett Daniels, uh, Jamil Damgey. You'll notice all three of those guys got a silver tongue.
They know how to make you feel good. They are very, very, very skilled communicators, okay?
The typical wholesale that's like, I have no money, so this is the strategy I'm going to use, doesn't have communication skills.
They're not going to do well in the business.
So that's a thing that has to be learned.
Once you've got those two things, now you have to learn how to create a funnel where deals keep coming in and you keep putting them in contract and you find an end buyer to give them to.
So you have to have the skill of building up a buyer's list.
You're probably going to need to be able to explain to your buyers what the ARV is and you're probably going to have to solve some of their problems.
You're going to need construction, handyman crews, different referrals, lenders that will work on
properties that don't qualify for conventional financing.
You probably have to accumulate all these pieces to hand to your end buyers so that they're
going to be willing to work with you to close the deal.
Then you've got to learn how much money to spend on whatever your marketing efforts are
and how to read a P&L to make sure that you are selling for more than you're spending.
Okay, that's a lot of crap that a person has to get good at to just be a good wholesaler.
The leverage side would come in where now you are teaching other people how to,
to have the conversation with the sellers at close to 80% of as good as you did, which is hard.
It was hard to learn how to talk to sellers.
Now you got to convince an employee who doesn't have an ownership in the business and maybe
just wants a job.
They don't want a business like you.
How to be good at doing that to be effective.
Now you've got to teach other people the marketing techniques that you've used and hold them
accountable to making sure they're getting the phone ringing as much.
You have to leverage off the pieces of that business that you got good at.
you got to train a bunch of other people to be as close to as good of it as you were.
But if you can do that, you can probably be wholesaling a couple hundred deals a year instead
of 10 to 12.
And then the last piece would be leadership.
For a wholesaler that wants to get into leadership, they now can franchise their model and say,
I'm going to teach, like, this is a, what was that?
We buy ugly homes.
Like, I think that's one of those, right?
They turned their model of marketing and getting properties under contract that were
ugly into something that you could now pay them to be a part of this group and they get a chunk
of your profits, but they can do this across the country. Or you can take your wholesaling
technique that works in Houston, Texas, where you've crushed it, and you can go to Miami,
Florida, or New York, or Southern California, and you can use the same systems, but adapt them
to another market so you can have five wholesaling enterprises all with a bunch of leverage in each one.
That's like a practical application of how these three dimensions would work in a normal
business.
Love it, dude. I want to ask you how it applies to a flipper because it's really cool to just hear you break it down so quickly like that. But I know we're getting to the end of time. Not the end of all time. The end of the time on the podcast. Anyways, before we end here, I actually did want to ask you about your fish cleaning versus fish catching analogy because I remember when you told me this, you kind of melted my mind a little bit about it because it's just kind of like a really cool way to sort of sum up what business is and basically how.
one scales, right? So walk us through that and how it applies to scaling your business.
So this is a mystery to people that just have had jobs. They've never owned a business because
to them all tasks are the same. Okay, like getting a sale, completing the sale, administrative
work, sweeping the floor. It's all just stuff that has to get done and they go through it
with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But when you own a business, you start to see very clearly,
oh, there's actually two completely different parts here. There is a component of catching a fish,
getting it out of the water and into the boat that involves a set of skills,
knowing what lures to use.
This is sales and this is marketing, okay?
The skill of setting the hook, that's sales, like being able to close.
Then once it's closed, the ability to reel it in and get it in the boat without the
hook coming out or the line breaking, that's like your follow up once you, once you've
got a verbal commitment.
And then getting it out of the boat and into the live well.
Okay, now like the money's in the bank.
Once you've done that, or maybe not the money's in the bank, but the contract has
been signed, right? Now you have to go clean this fish and turn it into a filet that can be sold on the
open market because nobody wants to just go buy raw fish. Okay, they want a dinner. They don't
want to buy a fish. So when you own the business and it's just you doing the job, you're doing all
of that. You're gassing up the boat. You're spending your capital to buy the boat. You're launching it.
You're trying to figure out where the fish are. You're figuring out your own bait. You're trying
to get the fish to bite. You're setting the hook. You're getting it in the boat. You catch a couple
of them. Now you stop fishing. You got to go all the way back to the dock. Launch your
boat, get out, clean these four fish, figure out some way to get them to market, get your money
for the fish, and then go all the way back and start catching fish again. The key to business is
understanding there are certain tasks that you do that are inherently more valuable than others.
So if you look at this fishing example, catching a fish is by far the most lucrative thing
you can do. Cleaning the fish, gassing up the boat, sending the fish off to the market,
that is something that is easier to leverage because it's less valuable. So if you have you
had a fish cleaning business. The goal would be to learn how to be as good of a fisherman as you
could to where you're catching so many fish that you couldn't keep up with it. The first position
you hire for is fish cleaning, which is what I call operations. You split it into sales and
operations. Sales is getting a fish in the boat. Operations is getting that fish clean and turned
into revenue. Your first hires are on the administrative side. They're on operations for any business.
It doesn't matter what it is. You hire people to do the easier task and they get paid less money
because those tasks are less challenging and don't require as much skill.
As your fish cleaner has now has so many fish to clean, they can't keep up.
Maybe you hire a second one and you give them two different tasks.
Okay, your job is cut off the head and the tail.
Your job is to fillet.
And you sort of create this assembly line, which is what Henry Ford figured out on the
operation side to be efficient.
And then you also simultaneously want to scale out your sales side.
So there's you fishing, but what if you brought another fisherman with you?
and they fished on the back of the boat and you fished on the front of the boat and you could
theoretically catch twice as much fish and you gave them maybe 25% of the total catch or something,
right? So they have some incentive here to try to be good at catching fish also. But that's
the person's going to make more than the fish cleaner. And there's a couple lessons there.
If you're trying to get really good at operations and fish cleaning, don't expect to be really
wealthy. It doesn't mean that it's bad. Like not everybody in the world cares about wealth. We need
fish cleaners in the world. But if you're listening to this podcast, you're trying to figure out how do I
get out of the place I'm at, how do I get more money? It's learning how to catch the fish. It's learning how to
find the deal. It's learning how to put it in contract and own it. It's not learning how to be a good
manager or a good bookkeeper or a really good, you know, like just, I don't know, I can't think of
another example of what happens in real estate, but not all jobs are the same. But you do create an
org chart as you get better and better at catching fish. And then the more people that come in,
the more specific those jobs actually become.
Yeah, I mean, that really is.
There's a reason that sales and the people that bring in the money to the organization
tend to make really the most, right?
They tend to be the most compensated, right?
Because they're the ones catching the big fish.
So thanks for breaking that down.
And that ultimately brings us back to the very reason that you titled the book scale for fish scales.
That's it.
I knew, I knew.
I knew there was a reason,
Well, before we go, I want to do a very fast author deep dive and ask you three questions,
fire round style. And I just want you to answer them very quickly for everybody at home. Is that cool?
Yes.
Okay. Starting with question number one. Who are your book heroes?
J. Pappazan, Gary Keller, Cal Newport, and John Eldridge. They all write so succinct and so solid
that every time I read my own books, I'm like, you suck because you're not nearly as good as them.
With each book I write, I become a little better at being succinct and clear.
And I think my writing style now is remarkably better than when I wrote long distance investing
in Burr. But I compare myself to the best of the best of the best that I can find to always be
trying to grow in my, like on the learned scale, I'm still learning how to be a better author.
Well, if it helps, when I read your books, I actually do feel like it's you narrating,
narrating the word. So you've got that down. I think that's the most important trait right there.
So you're saying I'm just as long winded when I talk as I am when I write.
That's what you said. You're extrapolating that from what I said.
I appreciate that. Go clean a fish. What is your favorite writing food or beverage?
All right. So writing is actually incredibly difficult. It's easy to write a book. It's very hard to write a good book. And so it is very important to be caffeinated for me when I'm writing if I want to stay, maintain the levels of focus that you have to continue to try to articulate points in a clean way that is persuasive and actually conveys nutrients or knowledge. So I started drinking. These are much.
better than just a normal energy drink. They're these sparkling ice plus caffeine. Of course,
the people that are health nuts out there are going to be screaming. That's still not healthy.
I know it's not, but I can't stop and go to Starbucks in the middle of writing. That's like an hour
of time wasted. I have to have something in the fridge here in my office. So I'll drink those
to stay. I'll just kind of sip on them all throughout the day. I don't hammer it all at one time.
I will often eat corn nuts. I've got these right here because there's not too much sugar and not
too many calories in those things. But if I have to stop riding to go get food, it is very hard
to get back into it. It's kind of like when you stop running to tie your shoe and the last thing
you want to do is start running again. Or whenever there's like a stoplight and you have to stop
and so you're just jog in place, just waiting for it to turn green. Yes. And everyone's just like,
we get it, bro. You run. Just chill. All right. Lastly, what is your process? Run, right?
Cry? Repeat? Yeah, something similar to that, man. My riding process,
I've done this enough times now that I've created a system for it, right?
And now I'm much faster at writing most books.
This one I'm working on after scale has just been a humdinger.
It's a very difficult book to write, but I think it's going to be the best book I've ever.
It's going to help more people than anything.
I'm really excited about it.
But the process is basically I brain dump every single thing that I think should be in the book
onto a Google document.
So for scale, I'm thinking about everything that a person would need to turn a job into a business.
and then everything that a real estate agent would need to know to do that well.
And a lot of it is not just the information of what they should do.
It's actually highlighting the enemies that are going to make it hard to do it.
Because telling people what to do is not hard.
You could tell someone how to go get a short-term rental.
It's very simple.
The execution of getting it is completely different, right?
Because there's things that pop up over and over and over that prevent us from succeeding.
It's not hard to know how to have a six-pack.
It's hard to eat the right food.
It's like that stuff is what you're really trying to master when you're trying to get good.
So I will dump all of it out.
I will then go through this big old list of stuff, and I will group it into categories.
Like, okay, all these concepts are kind of the same.
Let's create that.
And I create these buckets or categories that are all somewhat related.
I then take those and I turn them into chapters.
I then look at all the chapters I have and say, is anything missing?
And once I decide there's nothing missing, I put them in the order that I think will have
the strongest emotional impact.
So you don't want to start the book off right away telling people how to set the hook on a fish.
You got to have them understand.
The idea is that there's fish catching and that there's fish cleaning is the difference.
Once I've got the chapters in place, I then break it into all the sub points that I want to make in that chapter.
I'm actually pretty, pretty thorough with my outline.
And by the time I have an outline, I basically have a book.
It's then very easy to just go through my outline.
I don't hit writer's block if I've done it well.
And I just use, like turn every little sub point into a paragraph or two.
Wow.
Well, a peek behind the green curtain.
As a reminder, everybody, if you go to bigger,
pockets.com slash scale. You can pre-order the book right now and use promo code scale 724 for 10%
off at checkout. Remember, that's scale 724, and that is the amount of scales that are on a fish.
That's how we got to that promo. Scale 724. That's pretty funny. And if you have a real estate agent
in your life that you want to help, these books can be a lifesaver for them because they're struggling
and they just don't know it. It's very frustrating to try the job. There's a lack of mentors. There's a
lack of direction. These books were written to be, you know, the mentor I didn't have, as well as
all the information I've used teaching David Green Team agents how to do their jobs, accumulated for
other agents. If you buy all three of the books in this series, we're also offering a one-month
free membership into my wealth-building mastermind. So that is worth way more than the cost of the
three books. That's a crazy deal. That's a crazy good deal. So go over to biggerpockets.com
slash scale and use promo code scale 724. David, before we get you out of here, is there, where can people
find out about you on the internet? Where can people connect and do all that good stuff?
They can find me at David Green 24. I'd also, if you're kind of on the fence about the book,
I would recommend that you just go to Amazon and read some of the reviews of my other books,
see what people think about other things. Or they can follow me on YouTube also at YouTube.com
slash at David Green 24. You've got me much deeper into the YouTube world, Rob, and I appreciate you for that.
Hey, hey, happy to be here. Where can people find out about you? Oh, you can find me at Rob Built on YouTube or on
Instagram. But honestly, I think if you heard this podcast today and you were like me where you're sort of,
your mind was melting and you're like, have a more clear understanding of how to scale. Do me a big favor. Go leave
a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download your podcasts so that our podcast can be
served up to millions more people to help them scale their real estate businesses. Do that for me.
And it would mean the world to me and Dave. Amen. Well, awesome. Well, I,
I'm not even going to try the call sign.
So do you have a call sign?
Can you close us out?
I know I'll fail miserably.
All right.
This is David Green for Rob, my favorite fish, Abasolo.
I'm glad I caught you, brother.
Signing out.
Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast.
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