Unlocking Business Growth: Insights from the LFG Mastermind

Foreign. Welcome back to the show. Today

I want to talk about the LFG mastermind that Ian Horowitz and I host twice a year. We also have monthly group calls and a couple weeks ago we are in Clearwater Beach, Florida for our latest mastermind. And before we kind of get into, I guess my takeaways and my feelings and all that and things that I've learned, want to kind of explain what our group is because we have had quite a few people reach out asking to join, wanting more information.

So our LFG mastermind is, it's, it's, I think it's 18 people right now, including myself and Ian. And it's high level business operations. It's not just self storage. It's definitely not self storage basics. Self storage is a commonality between, I don't know, 50 to 60% of the members, maybe somewhere in there, maybe a little bit more.

But we've got some guys that own restaurants, we've got a guy that owns a large landscaping company, we've got flippers, we've got wholesalers, got a little bit of everything. But the main, the main, I guess common attribute that we all have is we want to grow with our bi, with our businesses and, and personally as well. So we want to scale in some fashion. And yeah, that's basically what our group is. We do have monthly calls.

We also have small groups, kind of accountability groups that get together. Four or five people get together each month. So we're, we're talking to each other at least twice a month and then twice a year for live events. And then we're actually doing, this will be our third kind of guys trip. A few guys are going to Napa Valley and, and Lake Tahoe here actually this weekend as I'm recording this. So. And we've done a golf trip together.

We went to Boston to kind of just hang out, uh, one trip last fall that just are kind of one off events. But guys in our group that just want to get together, travel, see new places and obviously business comes up quite a bit and other things too that you know, we just want improvement or, or maybe even just a sounding board. So that's kind of the gist of lfg. So if anyone has any questions, we do technically have two open spots for the group.

So if you're looking for high level business operations in any fashion, feel free to reach out Again. It's not basics of self storage. It's not basics of any real estate asset class or any asset class. It's not, it's not, it's just, it's operations. It's guys hanging out, eat good food, hang out and, and you know, then scale together.

So I wanted to share kind of my takeaways and things that I've learned. Not gonna share everything just because, you know, this is a, it's a private room. People pay a lot of money to be. Well, I don't say a lot of people pay money to be a part of it for sure. And we do allow one off visitors for our events. So if you're interested in coming to our fall event, please reach out. You don't have to be part of the group for that, but there's a charge for it. But yeah, back to my point, we.

The things that I've learned, I'm not again, I'm not going to share everything. I want to share a few things. But everyone, you know, it's funny talking to guys afterwards. Everyone kind of has their own takeaway to what applies to their business or their life. So even though we're getting the same messages, a lot of us have different takeaways, which is interesting. I'll. I'll say.

And you know, while it is our event, I will say that I'm not a very good note taker and usually pretty lax with that. This one by far the most notes I've ever taken. And we're probably talking, I don't know, 6, 8, 10 pages maybe most notes I've ever taken that event. And that's, that's in large part because this event has changed from the past. In the past we've done mostly hot seats. We have had presenters and we do have presenter each one.

Lindsay Self storage group, they've been presenting but we, we have had mostly hot seats this time I guess we had some mini hot seats in small groups but we had Ian Bishop who we've had on the show before, Revs Rev Ops coach and he kind of put us through a workshop that was absolutely fantastic. He does a great job of delivering the information, making us think, leading the room.

And also, you know, when you're in a room and it's about 20 people, when you're in a room like that, it's good to kind of get a gauge, a feel of the room and he does a great job of that. So, you know, once guys start nodding off or they're playing on their phone like he catches on to that pretty quickly and he transitions really quickly or takes a break or whatever. So he's really good at that, really good at leading the room. Did A great job.

And here's a few things that, that he had us kind of work through. The first and probably most important is having a clear future. Which this isn't anything earth shattering, but I think it's, it's one thing to kind of do at home by yourself. I think it's another thing to do when, when you're at an event like this with other high level achievers. Just the energy from those guys, the. You just kind of think differently.

So I wrote some things down on, on you know, what I would like my future to look like. Whether that's the next month, the next year, five, 10 years, whatever it is. Having a clear future is. Future is, is very important and we've talked about that quite a bit on the show. Having a vision, having a, a clear future where you want to go.

Sometimes it's not all that clear, but you do have, you know, you may have, it may not be as clear on how to get there, but if you can at least get, you know, where you want to go, the end goal, end result, you know, that's obviously a great start and then kind of work backwards from there.

He shared with us a. Which was interesting. Again, this is operations based accountability loop. So it's it and I'm not going to go into it because you know, I don't want to share all the secrets here but basically it's, it's giving kind of your employees a deadline, how high of a priority it is, what the definition of done is and then the, the duration of it.

So that's kind of the four focal points on the accountability loop, which is great and I'm doing my best to implement that into our business and should help not only myself but everyone that, that works with us and for us. And hopefully, you know, the, the end product is better but also everyone's work is, is I guess maximized in a way. Right. More more efficient. So that's kind of what we're looking for and we've been implementing some of those things to go along with that.

Everyone's personality is different and he went through some personality traits, types of employees and he said there's three types of employees for this exercise that he was doing. And there's one, one type is task oriented, the next one is list oriented and the next one or the third one is list creator. So you kind of try to figure out where your employees, each one falls into that and then obviously that can help with, with any type of systems you have.

Can also help you with hiring, firing, but managing Your team and leading your team, you know, just knowing what kind of personality they have. And obviously there's personality tests out there and he, he gave us a couple. We have not done that inside our business, but I think we've got a pretty good idea hopefully that what the people that work for us for what, you know, what they're looking for, what their type of personality is and you just try to adjust from there.

So that was really impactful. Just you know, knowing who you're dealing with, what makes them tick and obviously, you know, goes further into a players. If you've got a players, you want to hire a players and all that stuff. But yeah, the accountability loop was, was really helpful. Another thing was, which was probably hard for a lot of us was writing down the impact that we're having. It actually got easier when we, we'd actually did this in.

We broke out in small groups of, I don't know, seven or eight people and it was easier listening to others first. They, it kind of started slow and then as we talked through it together we all kind of came up with new ways that we're impacting that we didn't realize or maybe we thought it was a super small impact when really it's a bigger impact than what, what what we were thinking.

And a good example of that is, you know, we've got 14 storage facilities and I think, yeah, 13 of those have gates. Guess what? We're given a contractor. Gate contractor. In fact this month in April, we've, they've gone to four sites I believe to work on our gates. So even though that's a, to me that's a low impact we're keeping. We're helping another business grow, we're helping other people stay employed because we're giving them more business.

Now I don't know if that contractor exactly needs more business. They seem to be pretty busy as it is. But that is an impact, right? We're providing, helping to provide more jobs and obviously we've got team members where we provide jobs, but that's kind of a bigger impact. But just looking at, you know, subcontractors that we use, the third party call center that we have, there's all kinds of impacts.

It's not necessarily doesn't have to be, you know, donating a million dollars a year or whatever it is, we all can make an impact and it starts small. And thing that came to mind that was small was just the, the subcontractors that we use. I've got two more here and the last one kind of goes hand in hand with the first thing I brought up with having a clear future. But I'll share with you the one before that.

And that's the relationships in this group of, you know, the guys in this group, I think majority of us have known each other for probably between three and five years, maybe even sick going on six years. And the bond that we have is, is absolutely incredible.

And I think it, I think it gets stronger each event and each time we're around each other because it's, I think we, we realize, you know, when we first met each other, whether it's in storage or something else, we're kind of probably somewhat early in our real estate investing career or entrepreneur career. And since then, you know, it's definitely taken off and, and we've kind of been somewhat on the same trajectory to where it was like, all right, we're all.

When we, when we met for, you know, just for the most of us, majority of us, we were on the path for financial freedom or maybe it just gained it or somewhat recently gained financial freedom five, six years ago. And then that kind of grows into, okay, how do I scale this? And then that grows into where kind of we're at now is we have a full time, we have a full blown business. How do we create SOPs, you know, help create and hire great employees and train them and lead them and all that stuff.

Everything that goes into running a business that we probably didn't think about when we started getting in the real estate investing or whatever it is, the guys that own restaurants or landscape, we didn't think about those things. It was how do I make money, how do I become financially free, how do I scale? And now it's. There's also a mix of guys that are trying to buy back their time. The Dan Martell method, right?

They're still heavily entrenched in their business, working a lot of hours, even if they're not at the office, that, you know as much as, you know, maybe they're not at the office for 40, 50 hours a week, but they're constantly, their brain is constantly churning and, and working on the business even when they're not at the office.

So a lot of us are working on, you know, obviously our business systems operations and then buying back our time, which I'll admit self storage is pretty simple to do that. And actually had someone ask me the other day, someone in the group, how much Dan Martell's buy back your time book has impacted me and what I've implemented and all those things and storage is, is kind of a different animal to where it's super simple to add really basic systems to take yourself out of the business.

So the Dan Martell's book definitely has changed my mindset. It's bought me a few hours here and there but it hasn't completely. It's not like I've got a wholesaling flipping business where I'm in, I'm in a day to day constantly working, constantly grinding. Self storage is different so it's easier to come up with systems that are replicable. It's easier to just easier to somewhat automate. So it's a little bit different.

But that book has definitely changed things And I know there's some guys in the, in the group that you know, some guys have a couple hundred units, rental units again a guy with landscaping business. Some of those guys where I think these systems they probably knew about them. But now reading that book and then being in our group and going through this workshop that we just went through, we'll probably fast track some of those things which is pretty cool.

And, and also watching other guys, buddies of mine going through it and seeing their progressions is pretty cool too. The last thing I'll share here is goes back to having a clear future and, and I think for me that's.

I won't say finding the next big thing but finding and back to the Dan Martell buyback your time.

The team that I've got, the, the systems that, that we've put in place, especially the people on my team, the systems that they've put in place have allowed me to have that, that time freedom and allows me to think more and it allows me to strategize more and, and I've talked about on the show about trying to buy a service business or where am I going to go with, you know, with that or should I stick with self storage.

So for me kind of finding the next big thing and I've been working on that and I think I'm on a pretty good path, clear path for that. I'm not going to share that now but we'll see where that goes. But those were my guess what, six takeaways, five takeaways, main takeaways and again I've got like six to eight pages of notes so definitely had more takeaways but those were probably the most impactful that I wanted to share with you guys.

I don't know how much of these were, were life changing for people but it's also, and I think I've talked about this before, after an event you're charged for like the next, at minimum three to four days. You just have all this energy. You want to go conquer the world. The key is to keep that energy going, keep that motivation going, you know, weeks, months, going forward. And I think that's where a lot of people kind of stop.

They come back after an event, they're charged up, they're like, yeah, I've got these three to five ideas I want to implement in the business. And they start doing them three, four days and then after that it kind of goes awayside because maybe a fire popped up, maybe a real actual fire popped up, but maybe an issue popped up where now they're going to take care of that and they kind of get, you know, just sidetracked from what they were trying to work on.

And that's kind of what this event was all about, was getting out of day to day stuff to where you don't have to have to, you know, put out the fires, the so called fires where you're working on the business, not in the business, and, and how to do that. And this event was kind of more not just to do that, but how to do that, which was pretty cool. So that's really all I've got. Want again, thank everyone for listening. It's pretty cool seeing where, where our viewership is going.

It's really cool actually and I, and I appreciate it. But again, if anyone is interested in LFG Mastermind, feel free to hit us up myself or Ian Horowitz. And again, it is operational focused. If you've got three or four single family rentals, it's probably not a good fit for you. If you've got a small business. Absolutely a fit. If you, if you're scaled and scaling, whether it's real estate, business or anything else, it's probably the time to, to do a group similar to this.

And to me, this group, the LFG Mastermind, is different than any other group that I've seen or been a part of. And, and that, you know, Ian and I, we don't, we don't make money on it. We all the money that, that the members pay goes right back into the events and back into the group. Whether that's paid speakers again, the, the events that we have or anything else. That's what's pretty unique about the group.

It's not a money maker for us and I think that's what separates us from other groups where you see a lot of groups, people are, are in it to make money, which is fine, but I think ours is unique in the fact that Ian and I are part of the group. While we help facilitate and kind of lead in some areas, you know, we are part of the group and we're doing the exercises and we're learning just as much as everyone else and alongside everybody else, which is cool. So really, that's all I've got.

Again, appreciate everyone listening and we'll see you guys next time. Thanks thanks for following subscribing and listening to this episode of the Do More podcast, hosted by John Farling. To learn more or ask questions, go to L4Investing.com.