Epic Real Estate Investing - Success - The Fourth Level of Real Estate Investing | 422

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

Matt Theriault and Epic Real Estate are proud to present The Six Levels of Real Estate Investing! Today, Matt shares the fourth level of real estate investing: success. Tune in to learn the traits of investors on the fourth level, which parts of your business need the most attention at this point, and specific steps you can take to make it on to the fifth level of real estate investing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Rockstar, today's episode brought to you by the professionals over at Lighthouse Advocates, where they've been rescuing businesses in the nick of time for more than 20 years. If you need help with marketing strategy or wealth strategy or tax planning or CFO services, business innovation, bookkeeping, payroll services, project management, just about anything to do with your small business, Lighthouse Advocates team of professionals is your resource to whatever the rough seas of life are thrown at your business. They'll bring you safely into shore.

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Now on with today's show. This is Terio Media. Yo. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash boat. We got cash more. Yeah, welcome to the epic real estate investing show. Yeah, did a little too much there, I think. This is where we meet here each and every week to share tips, strategies, advice, and wisdom from some of the greatest minds the business of real estate has to offer.

If you haven't done so already, please click the subscribe button for the show so you never miss an episode. We've got some big things on the way. If you like what we've done up to this point, you're going to love what we got coming. And then make your way over to Instagram to follow us at Epic Real Estate. And when you're there, make sure you turn the notifications on. If you look up in the right hand corner, you see three little dots. Just click there and a little drop-down menu. You turn those notifications on as I'll be giving away the best of the best books from our guests that have appeared on our Thought Leader Thursday episodes.

And I'll be doing these book giveaways multiple times a week all summer long. and you know what they say. A formal education will make you a living and self-education will make you a fortune. So I'm doing what I can to help contribute to your fortune. And there's no catcher, by the way. I went, and I didn't even get the books for free. I went to Amazon.

I bought them all on my own, so this is all on my dime. I'm not even going to ask you to pay for shipping or anything like that. I just want to send you the book. And I want to empower and impact what you got going on right now and help you build your fortune. But I don't have unlimited quantities of these books. I didn't buy all of the books. I just got a bunch of them.

So that's why you want to turn on your notification. So when I post one of those posts on Instagram, you're going to be the first to know. And you can go right over there. And you can claim yours. All righty. So it's going to be first come first serve. All righty. So let's what else.

So there's a few free tickets left for the upcoming Epic Intensive in Boston. The free ones. We got a lot of tickets left for the event. We've actually got a bigger room. So we're going to be able to accommodate more people. But if you want one of the free tickets, if you'd like to join us, make your way over to epicintensive.com for all the details and grab one of those free tickets before we slap a big price tag on them. All righty. Got a great show for you today. As we continue our way up the six levels of real estate investing, removing the cliche out of going to the next level. You know, you hear that so frequently, hey, I need to take it to the next level. I'm moving to the next level. Hey, we've got to raise this up to the next level. And it's such a cliche and no one really knows what that means. But I'm helping you move. up. I'm giving you literally action steps to take literal action steps and to do's to move you to the next level, regardless of which level you're on right now.

So last week, we went over everything that you're experiencing and feeling in the third levels, the stability phase of your business. And then we went over the vulnerabilities that you have there, what you've got to be cautious of and where those booby traps are in that phase. and then what there is to actually do about it to protect you from those vulnerabilities, to protect you from those traps so you can maintain your progress and get to today's phase. The next phase. This is the fourth level of real estate investing. The success phase.

Now the success phase, you're in this phase. If you're making, I don't know, $20,000 to $50,000 a month, means you're probably doing four to six deals a month and you're working a lot. Yeah, you're working overtime. And what's happening right now for you is, you know, things are going well. You're noticing your cash reserves, those are starting to grow a little bit. Your systems have noticeably improved and business is running more efficiently. You've probably got an employee or two by now, but you're still probably working more hours than you ever have.

And, you know, your lead generation is working. You've got more leads than you can respond to on your own. You probably have a rental property or two by now as well. And then because of the money that you're making, you're starting to think of your tax liability. Those are starting to become a real concern because now you're making real money and there's a lot more of it that Uncle Sam can come and take away from you. So those are starting to be a concern. But you've become the market expert. You know your stuff and you know your market and the credibility in your relationships. Those are starting to lead to access to cash. You're doing well in those strategic relationships that you've built and you're becoming a credible person, a person of value there. And

that's starting to lead to access to cash people want that money is attracted to where you are right now and as you're looking at this as much money as you are making you are a little bit surprised of how much you're actually keeping likely not as much as you'd like or not as much as you would imagine once you hit this income level there's not as much left over as you thought there would be and uh your friends and your family you're probably probably see probably noticing that uh they're thinking you're much richer than you actually are certainly you've got somebody in the bank but you've got a lot of responsibilities you got some overhead and and a lot of that stuff just uh and it has to be paid by somebody and you're the one making the big bucks right now so you're paying it um it's getting a little

bit tough because of those dynamics it gets a little tough to find anyone that can relate to you right you you've got these big numbers and these big checks and this money that's flowing in your bank account but you've got an elevated sense of uh responsibility and you've got people that you're thinking about. You've got business to run. You got vendors to pay. And there's not a whole lot of people in your circle, if any, that can relate and are experiencing those same types of challenges.

So that's what's happening. And what you're feeling, I mean, you've got these mixed emotions. It's always a mixed emotion thing. You've got this feeling of accomplishment, right? You've got you're feeling really, I don't know, you're starting to feel a little bit invincible. You're starting to drink your own Kool-Aid. You're proud.

You're realizing that, though, that you can't work much more than you already are. So you're kind of wondering, you know, how do I get to the next level? I can't do any more than I'm doing right now. And so you've got this sense of probably, probably you've got the sense of overwhelm. You're not sure what to do to get to the next level without totally imploding. You have to sleep sometime, right? So if you feel that 80 to 100% of what I just shared with you describes you to only like, it doesn't have to be 100% but if just 80% describes you in your situation, I just want you

know that you're to be acknowledged and admired for you, for you're entering the 1%. You've entered the 1%. You're doing what 99% of the population is or has been unable to do. You are achieving financial independence. you are financially independent. You don't need anybody else for your existence financially. You're positioning yourself to significantly accelerate your journey to financial freedom. That's amazing.

And you did that. And you need to be acknowledged for that. And you need to be admired for that. And ultimately, what's happening right now is you are making a difference for your family. You've changed the course of your family's financial future. And that takes a really amazing time. powerful person to do. That's who you are. All right. So awesome. Congrats for being here. Now, where you're vulnerable, all right? So here's where you're vulnerable. You're a little bit in

danger of abdicating and losing control, right? Delegating is good. Abdicating is bad. Delegating is you give somebody else or assign somebody else a task or responsibility to carry out on your behalf. but abdicating is you give it to them and you just walk the other way and hope for the best that they do it right and you don't monitor them you don't help them you don't assist you don't manage that situation so when you hit this sense of overwhelm abdicating can be a real danger and this is going to this is going to be a vulnerability for you for a while because you're you're so overwhelmed you're like can please can someone else just please just do this part and once you assign it to that person you feel like it's taken care of and you go on about your business and totally forget about it

because you feel like it's taken care of. Like you've scratched that off your to-do list. That's abdicating and you can lose control and that can come to bite you in the butt really, really badly. Because you're overwhelmed and you're growing and you've reached this level of success, you're in a little bit of danger of over-hiring. And when you're over-hire, you inflate your overhead

and you're making more, making more, making more, but your expenses are rising right along with it. All righty. So it's almost like just being broke at a higher level. There's a danger here of doing that. There's a danger of because you're overwhelmed and because, and this can be fueled by your overwhelm or just your desire to grow and to go to that X level and move faster is you can hire too fast. And you can hire too fast and fail to invest enough time in training your team. And that can be a recipe for disaster well.

I mean, the abdicating and the overhiring and inflating the overhead and hiring too fast and then not investing enough time in your team, all of those kind of go hand. in hand and they can be uh they can pull you back they can actually really slow you down so be cautious of that and then um kind of mentioned this already but that you're vulnerable to friends and family can't relate to your challenges right so when you don't have anybody to turn to you can start guessing and that can be dangerous um you've got little to no tax planning uh you're not being proactive about it you're vulnerable there the volume of business that you're doing and the volume of revenue that you're creating, that volume is creating complexity in your business. It's becoming more complex when it should be getting more simple.

And the other part of it is if you have all this working up, working up in your space, now you're seeing everything as an opportunity. You've got some money. You feel accomplished. And now there's this thing over there. I could go take advantage of that. I could go take advantage of this. And you're just really tempted to go wide before and going deep with what's already

working. You're complicating things just by looking at those opportunities. And you see everything as an opportunity. I could do this. I could do that because I've done this already. So of course I could do it. All right. So what happens is with your focus, when it gets diluted,

it's almost impossible to get to the next level. So what there is to do, focus. Focus is a big one. But some specific things I want you to focus on. I want you to focus on leveraged sales, right? You've got these leads coming. Your lead generation is working, but there's too many leads for you to really respond to on your own.

So I want you to focus on leveraging the sales. You've leveraged your lead generation. Now you need to leverage the conversion of those leads. You want to hire someone to convert your leads to contracts. You need an acquisition person or maybe even an acquisition team, right, depending on your lead generation volume. But at this point, it's time to put someone in that place for you. It's time for some sophisticated tax planning. All right, you're making some money.

And now it's, you know, if you've been using turbo tax or going to H&R block, it's time to step that up. okay, because you're paying way too much. You might save money on the actual tax planning, but you're paying a whole lot more than you have to to the government. It's time to look for a professional network or a mastermind to join. It's really important for you to be more intentional about who you spend your professional and personal time with, right? Because you're experiencing a whole new world that your current network or your previous network,

your family and your friends and your associates when you got started, they're not going to be able to assist you. not going to be able to relate. So you've got to be really intentional about who you spend your professional and personal time with. So look for a professional network, a real estate investing group, or a real estate investing mastermind, something like that to surround yourself with people that can identify with what you're going through and someone that can offer assistance when you need it. You want to stay focused on what's working. Stay focused on the stuff that's working for you and do more of it. Dig in. Resist the temptation to disperse your focus. Resist that temptation to go wide.

go deeper with what is working. Okay? It feels like I need to do this and I need to do that. I need to do this, but resist that. Stay focused on what is working, going deeper and get better at it. I want you to create more and refine your existing SOPs, your standard operating procedures. I want this stage right here.

It's all about focusing on doing less to make more, really to get to the next level from success to up to scale. It's all about, it's not about adding things. It's about subtracting things. It's about doing less to make more. And if you don't narrow your focus, it's almost impossible to get to that next level. I want you to hire a personal assistant for your personal stuff, like your dry cleaning, your grocery shopping, your travel arrangements, your house cleaning. We just hired a cook.

And it's just like it's been so liberating. But hire a personal assistant at this level for your personal stuff. That's going to have such a huge impact because right now you are managing a business. You're managing some employees. You're managing your clients and your customers. And those personal things, they can add an additional stress on you. Or they just don't flat out get done. And you don't want your personal life to start suffering because their professional life is succeeding.

Okay. So hire a personal system. Now right now it's really important to firmly make it your intent to hold everything. Every single property, it is your intent to hold it. and then you'll flip quickly what doesn't fit your portfolio's criteria. All righty? And you don't have to hold everything, but it should be your intent. Every time the phone rings, oh, I'm going to add another one,

my investment portfolio right now. That should be the intent. And then once you find out, hey, this is not going to be a good fit for my portfolio, then flip it quickly, okay? If it doesn't fit your portfolio's criteria, flip it. You want to start leveraging your credibility within your relationships to get access, to cash, to get access to private money. You want to start building that access up.

You want to start having that at the ready. And it's time to keep your eyes and your ears open for a manager that essentially replaces your day-to-day activity so you can shift to working more on the business rather than in it. Right? You've built this ship. Your responsibility now is to steer it to the next level. Right. It's time for you to get out of the engine room.

So keep your eyes and ear. open. It might not happen in this phase. It might happen in the next phase. But now it's time to start keeping your eyes and ears open for that person that's going to essentially replace you. You're going to create redundancy in your business of you. You're going to try to replace yourself. But it's going to take a unique person, a special person. And so you might not be able to do it in this phase, but it's time for you to start looking for that person. At least have an idea of what you're looking for, right? You're going to look for full-time rock stars for your team members now. not just people that can get the job done.

You want to look for rock stars. I mean, you may have to check your ego here as well and be open to that. There are people out there that are better than you are at certain things. And those are the people that you want. Even if you pay them more than what you're paying yourself. I have two employees that I pay more than I pay myself. And I am receiving the benefit of that. They're happy.

We're progressing. or moving forward. So consider that you may have to do that. I've made all of my best hires, if you're thinking of hiring. I went to Indeed. I've got my last several employees from Indeed.com. And you're going to have a lot to choose from. So be very detailed in your job description

and create some sort of process to send people through before you ever even speak to them. And here's why, because you're going to get a ton of responses. It's amazing how many people, there are out there looking for work. And equally, it's amazing on how many people that are out there looking for work will get stopped by the smallest little task that you ask them to do prior to the interview process. So you can eliminate all of those people.

You don't have to go through all of the people. And you actually don't want to either, but you can get rid of all the tire kickers. Get rid of all the time wasters. And one of the things that we do when people apply is that we just have a list of 10 activities to do, 10 action steps to take. And a lot of those action steps are in there. They're going to tell us certain things. Are they technologically inclined? Are they up to with current events?

Do they have a sense of humor even? Do they have any sort of resourcefulness or ingenuity? What else? How are their communication skills? and how are they at following directions. So all those types of things, and we kind of came up with a little list of those things. And boy, that thins the herd really, really quickly.

It's amazing how many people out there looking for a job or dying for their job. And you ask them to go to this website, print out a document, fill it out, and send it back to us. And they're like, oh, no, hey, that's too much for you to ask me to do for free. Are you kidding me? Anyway, let me get off my soapboxer. But anyway, indie.com has been very, very effective for us.

And then you want to start now assessing your current business entity, assessing your asset protection, assessing your legal structure. Are you set up correctly to grow? And you want to put attention on your business and your legal foundation. You want to look at your trademarks. If you have any, you want to look at insurance, make sure you got enough, make sure that you're not overpaying. You want to look at the contracts that you're using. You really want to start looking at because you're building something. You've built something now that's, you know, you don't want to lose.

So you want to start looking at kind of how you can protect that in your business and legal foundation. You want to shift your focus now to impacting your team. You want to impact your team. To get success, it was, you know, to get to this point, it was all about how do you make yourself better. So going from success to the next level, to the scale level, which we'll talk about next week, going from success to scale, that's all about how do you make your team better. Up to this point is how do you make yourself better? Moving forward is how do you make your team better? And you need to start considering and thinking about investing in the training of the capabilities of your team, investing in their training, investing in honing their skills, and that's to benefit you.

That's what's going to move you to the next level. You can't do this all by yourself. You really have reached a level where, you know, you're going to need eight more hours a day to work, but you're probably already sleeping those eight hours, and you're not going to get forward by yourself. So you've got to make an investment in your team. And so you can focus on your unique ability. to focus on your strengths, to focus on your talents, to focus on your genius, to focus on the

things that you like to do, the things that you're good at. And then at this point, I want you to give yourself a raise. It's time for a raise. I want you to give yourself a raise, and I want you to start automating deductions to savings and taxes. Have a separate account for savings, a separate account for taxes, and start just automating those deductions so they happen automatically. And some key questions to ask yourself for some additional insights and actions at this level.

Ask yourself, is your business model right now is it exists? Is it driving consistent growth? Is it driving sustainable income? Is there anything there for you to do? Another question to ask yourself, do you have the right people doing the right things? You might have great people. You might have great team members, but are they doing the right things, the things that they like to do, the things that they're good at?

Are you happy with everyone on your team? If you were, if you had to fire everybody today, who would you rehire back in the morning? And who would you not? And if you wouldn't rehire them back, how so? Why not? Another question is, how can you spend more time in your genius and unique ability? Your unique ability. How can you spend more time there?

Ask yourself, what's your greatest opportunity for inner expansion? What are you avoiding looking inside of yourself or your business? where are you avoiding looking inside there? What is some stuff like I know I need that needs my attention but I don't even want to look at it right now. I have one of those things right now. It just made me think of it. I got to attend to that.

I'm going to do that right after I've done recording this. But we all have these things that we want to avoid that we don't like to deal with. They're uncomfortable. It's awkward and, you know, where is one of those things in your business? Or maybe there's multiple things. Or maybe it's inside of yourself, right? And then based off your answers to all of these key questions,

what are some actions that you could take based off of the these new insights. All right. So I gave you a list of actions to take. I gave you a list of questions there to ask yourself to maybe inspire some additional actions that are specific and personal to you. Take all of those to heart, okay? Recommended resources.

Book purchase. Actually got two books that you should, that you should purchase. One is Profit First by Michael Misha Lowitz. Or Mika Lewitz. That's what if it's Mika or Misha, but Mika Lowitz. it's profit first, much easier to search. But go there. You know, some of the more impactful books

that I've read over my life that have got me to where I am today professionally. One was Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. Love the book. I've read it several times. I was reading it every year for a while. Haven't read it. It's probably time for me to pick it back up.

My copy is so tattered and torn. I think I'll buy a new copy right now. And I'll do that. And then that one, obviously Rich Dad poured at it. Just kind of opened my eyes up to entire the world of passive income and how to create it and just kind of gave me a formula of like what does it take to escape the rat race?

That was impactful. Impactful. The other one is the slight edge by Jeff Olson. I think that's probably the secret to my success if there were such thing as a secret. It's a really quick read. The slight edge. And then the dip was really good by Seth God,

another really small book. That'll put some perspective on what you're going through right now, regardless of which level you're on. and then so this book profit first so i just named you the three or four most impactful books but this book profit first is probably the first one a long time like this is one that i'll always mention from this point forward and it's just making sure that while you are growing you are making money you're not growing and growing and growing for the sake of growth and you're not any better off financially for it after you've done such massive growth profit first get that book next

book. He was a guest here on the show, Brian Elwood. He wrote a small little book on how to fire yourself from the acquisition side of your business. And the book is called Fire Yourself. And we'll be giving that book away on Instagram or just go to Amazon and pick yourself up a copy. But that's one of the things that you're to do in this phase is you've got to start looking at leverage sales to hire people and start building an acquisition team. So Brian's got a great book on that. And then TaxHacker. Go to Taxhacker.com for your tax action. blueprint. If you've been putting it off, if you've been procrastinating, your tax planning, your tax strategy like most Americans do, now it's time to go. No excuses. If you're at this level,

you're making this type of money, you've got to go. All right, so go to tax hacker.com, request your tax action blueprint. And then as far as looking for masterminds, I invite you to look into Epic Inner Circle Mastermind. You can go to RIIAAS.com, fill out that application there, to share a little bit of information about yourself and we'll get you the details on that. But you've got to really start being intentional about who you're spending your time with at this point. You've got to be able to spend time with people that can relate to what you are going through and who have been there, who've done that, and who can help you get to the next spot that

you need to go to to combust through your roadblocks, to bust through those barriers, to bust through those challenges that you're experiencing to eliminate all those vulnerabilities we talked about. All right, so you can go to reaise, rei-a-ease.com and get some more info on that. All righty. So that's it for the success level, the fourth phase. We'll get to the fifth phase next week. And yeah, that's it for today.

So if you'd like to continue this journey, keep listening. I'll be here next week and we'll go over the fifth phase of scaling. If you'd like to go fast, go to R-E-I-Aase.com. God bless to your success. I'm Matt Terrio, living the dream. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow.

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