You're Overcomplicating This (I Promise)

Cole Ruud-Johnson (00:00): Welcome to another episode of the Off Market Operator. Guys, today's show as we approach, you know, actually we just passed halfway point of the year. I'm talking about all things simplifying your business, simplifying your life, and moving the needle this week. So you guys starting your week this week, listening to this on Monday, let's actually move the needle forward this week. Let's stop procrastinating and spending time on step is not meaningful. Let's grow our companies this week and push towards where we need to get to. So without further ado, let's get right into the show. People don't fail at real estate because they suck, they fail because there's too many ways to succeed. That's why I suggest you focus on the most important skills and all of real estate, which is finding deals. I'm Cole Johnson and in this podcast I share the exact steps I've used to source 400 deals by age 24. And this will allow you to do three things, control your deal flow, make unlimited income, and build your empire as an off market operator. (00:54): Welcome guys. I think this will be the best show that we've ever recorded here at Off Market Operator. It is, you know, getting to the middle of June here. The area is, you know, halfway over two quarters end of the year, market's done a bunch of funky things. When this episode, really what I'm doing and what I'm focusing on is explaining to you guys why I think every single person overcomplicates not just business, not just people, not just hiring real estate specifically and how it's applicable to your business. And I'm gonna give you very actionable items that you can take and implement into your company right now that'll help you scale up in a way you can't imagine. We all get into real estate, you guys, with big hopes, big dreams. Uh, we see people online talking about syndicating big buildings, doing a bunch of multi-family, making millions of dollars, doing development, fixing and flip wholesaling, all the different things. (01:36): And most of these people aren't smarter than us. They don't have a better work ethic. Some do, right? Some people have a different work ethic, which I'll get into in a second. But most people are not stronger, faster, quicker than you. They just have been in the game long enough and they've learned simple concepts. They've implemented to themselves, their framework. Every single person that I know that's uber successful has a similar framework of how they think about business and people. And I'm gonna get into all of that today and today's show. First thing I wanna talk about you guys is work ethic and the hustle culture that's come out around Instagram and Twitter and just our culture, especially the entrepreneurship culture of, you know, 1214 hour days, 16 hour days, no sleep nonstop. I'm gonna talk about my beliefs around that. What I've done to improve my workflow and my overall day-to-day when it comes to my businesses. (02:15): And really guys, the first point on that is understanding what, you know, leveraged work. And I've talked about this a lot on the show because there's a difference between the guy working 14 hours a day and the coal mine and the guy doing knowledge-based work on the computer or talking to seller or talking to buyers or building systems and processes or building content for their team. There's different levels of productivity, different levels of work. And so your goal shouldn't be the hardest working person. That's not be your goal anymore. Now, if you're a knowledge-based worker, you, you're never gonna be the hardest working person. Let me explain that more in depth. So if I, if I was like out working work the most hours in the day, what entrepreneurs end up doing is they start focusing on stuff that doesn't move the needle. And there's a paradox, I forget the name of the law right now. (02:51): There's one of those weird like little law things. That's a task we completed for the most part. And the timeline and the length it'll take to complete a task depends on how long you give yourself. So if you give yourself eight hours in a day to complete one task, you're gonna procrastinate, you're gonna be on your phone, you're gonna be going to the coffee shop, you're gonna be checking email when it's gonna take a whole eight hours to that task. If you block off one hour to do that task with no distractions, you'll probably get that task done in one hour. And so the first thing is, is how many days can you get into your day? What I mean by that is most people, the 80 20 rule, right? 20% of what they do actually is what moves the needle forward. 80% just whatever, uh, winking off not actually moving the needle forward at all. (03:27): So how do you move the needle forward in your business? How do we get that 20% to be more to the 80% and flip flop that the first thing is, it's what I'd like to ask myself is how many days can I fit in each day? Meaning instead of giving myself, you know, 20 different tasks to do in one day when I know one's gonna get done, I'm gonna give myself three priorities that day and I'm gonna give myself as much time as I need to do each one of those activities, right? Cause the big mistake that people make guys, and, and especially I'm in this business, is they, they try to do too many things. They end up doing everything fast, they end up not delegating it well, and they end up having to go back and do it again. The price of not doing something right the first time outweighs the price of just taking a week to do one project completely right, and be dialed in. (04:05): Um, I found that to be very true with my companies myself. So the first thing guys, when we talk about work ethic, okay, your job isn't to work the longest hours, the hardest hours you have to you, I'm not saying you don't grind, you do have to grind. I have nights where I'm up till 2:00 AM working on that project. That's the reality. There is deadlines, there is teams, there is money, there's bills to pay, everyone has rent and or mortgage. That's the reality of life. But again, we should be spending our time on high leverage activities, right? Prospecting, talking to sellers on the phone all day as an agent or an investor as much higher leverage than sending emails and going to coffee shops to meet random people. Okay? So you just really wanna dial in. And the number one thing I see vi very successful people do is they protect their time more than they protect their bank account. (04:44): Everyone's protecting their bank account, right? Everyone washes where every single dollar goes to all their res recurring subscriptions. You guys need to pay attention to the recurring subscriptions you have on your life in terms of time. Like, where is your time going every single day on a recurring basis? Pay attention to that. That's what successful people do. When you look at a successful person's calendar, it's much more simple than you think. Well, they know exactly what they're doing every single time of the day. And the second piece on that is what I call the theme of days. And so the second thing I think to keep your life simple is to theme days. So if you're wearing all the hats in your business, you want to theme your days. So you're, you make sure that you, you're not, you're not doing too much context and task switching, task switching kills, work ethic, kills productivity. (05:21): You don't wanna be wearing 5, 6, 7 different hats in the same day. What I reckon you're doing is if you're, say for example, you're wholesaling and you are, you're doing acquisitions, you're doing dispositions, you're doing transactions, you're doing marketing, you have a different day of the week or different part of the day allotted to that task, right? So you're gonna be talking to sellers. So you're talking to sellers from 8:00 AM to 12 to 12:00 PM If you're then doing TC work, say you're doing TC work from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM and you break up your day and a way where you can, you can focus on give your brain one thing to focus on without doing a bunch of task coaching. Cause that'll kill your productivity. So beyond work out the guys, that's something everyone gets wrong. We're not top focused guys from the day we're born, our brains are conditioned nine to five, right? (05:56): Bell rings, the beginning of bell rings until you're outta school for the day. Same thing in college. You get out in the real world, you have to be there at nine out at five. And no one talks about actual focus, actual productivity. And not only that, but for same for your team. You guys have to learn this yourself so you can pass these things onto your team of how to be productive and how to be focused, how to make sure they're working on the highest leverage work. Cause the reality is, you guys, when you make your 40 thing to-do list for this week, there's only one thing that's the most important on that list. When you really sit there and you really start checking things off and looking at it, you'll find one thing that's truly the most important and highest leverage that's actually gonna move the ball forward. (06:26): If you're an agent, instead of checking your email and slack and showing up to random trainings all day, that can be actually sitting down for four hours a day in prospecting that's gonna actually move the needle or hiring a cold caller. Or you know, what, what's actually gonna make the rest of the work insignificant? And for me, that usually comes down to people, right? That's hiring, training, managing recruiting processes and systems. So improving a process, creating or outlining a process, uh, implementing a pro a system, creating a system or giving someone a, a project to create a system or content like contents, both for my team internally and externally. Cuz you create a piece of content once, like I create this podcast one time and people consume it forever, even if it's 10 people a week, I don't really care. It's 10 more people that wouldn't be seeing my content and they're gonna see that every single week. (07:08): That's evergreen. So you wanna look at, you know, those three things where I trying to spend my time. And to be honest with you, when you put the math on it, I was actually talking to my coaching group about this last week. When you're talking about talking to sellers, it's an incredibly high output, low input task because let's say a hundred conversations, good conversation with a seller equates to a $20,000 assignment fee. $30,000, $50,000 assignment. Fiche, I had a buddy, mine's got a $300,000 assignment fee last week. Really look at time and in relation to output, if I'm putting the time in to talk to a hundred people, okay, let's say to talk to a hundred, I have to call, uh, whatever it's, I have to call 300 have a hundred conversations. So let's say I can make 50 dials a day myself, okay? So in a week, if I work Monday through Saturday, I can make 300 dials. (07:49): I can make 300 dials myself. I'm calling eight hours a day for that week. Say it takes two weeks, whatever that is. When you do the math on it, say I'm working at eight hour day, I'm working a 48 hour work week, including Saturdays. So 96 hours in those two weeks, when you do the math on it, a $50,000 fee, I'm making $520 an hour, even a $25,000 fee, which is pretty average is two 60. So is that high leverage on your time? Yes. I'd say make a $500, two $50 hour task. $200 an hour task is high leverage on your time is messing with data and skip tracing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all kind, all the kinds of stuff you can easily delegate. No, that's not worth your time. And the next thing I wanna talk about you guys is delegation's a muscle. (08:29): So delegation isn't something that you just understand naturally. You have to delegate over and over and over again and you'll start to get a feel for the people that fit the processes that fit how you scale someone up, how you onboard someone properly. That's all the stuff that comes with reps. And that's the people that I see that they're most successful with hiring. They have a process and a system in their strategic with it, but at the same time, they're very, very, very dialed in on understanding that it's just a reputation game, right? I've hired a lot of people, guys. I have a very, very, very core team where I'd stacked very good core team that I'd stack up against anyone's company from my executive assistant to coo to operations manager across our companies. But at the end of the day, it's a muscle you build. (09:06): And so the delegation muscle, as you get reps in and you build that combined with focusing your time on high leverage, things will change your life. And, and you really wanna simplify you guys, I can tell you this, like complexity truly kills companies, okay? Simple scales and, and slow is smooth, okay? Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. What I mean by that, you pick one important thing, you, you work on just that and you complete it the first time you complete it, right? And that's done forever. That's smooth. And smooth is fast. You're not constantly having to go back and redo work. That's incredibly important. And if you guys are doing that, you'll see tremendous growth in your business right away. So you guys that are getting up tomorrow and listening to this episode, you don't know what to focus on this week. Focus on stuff that's high leverage, right? (09:43): Talking to buyers, talking to seller, getting leads in the door, and, uh, being dialed in on that side, that's incredibly important for you guys to get to where you wanna go. Okay? Second thing I'm gonna talk about to get you guys first time, I, I can't again do describe how important it's to dial in on the first thing that I just said there. But the next thing I want you guys to focus on and really truly understand is detaching your personal identity from your business. Okay? So many entrepreneurs, and I cheat it all the time, they make a mistake up, they have a good month to get five deals closed, the happiest person on earth slow month, and they suck, right? They think they suck, they hate themselves, they get imposter syndrome, they get depressed, they start drinking, smoking, whatever. You guys have to understand and truly internalize that you have to separate emotion and your personal life from your company. (10:23): That your company is at its own entity functions. No matter what, how you're feeling and what you're doing. You have KPI set that you're going to hit. You have to separate the two. If you're having a bad day, it should not affect your business. You're having a good day. It should not affect your business. You have a set of things that have to get done for that business every single day, no matter what's going on and your personal life, right? Just like when you have a kid, a baby, it doesn't matter when you're sick, happy, sad, whatever that baby has needs, your business, has needs, no matter how you're feeling with our emotions or you got a good month, bad month, show up the next day and stop over complicating it. You guys just stop over complicating the business. This business, any business, it's about showing up, doing how to leverage activities and separating emotion from business. (11:00): Good stuff is going to happen. Good stuff is absolutely a thousand percent of the time going to happen if you take those two things and you put them into practice and you put them into practice the right way. So those are the two things I wanna hit on today, you guys in depth to start the week. Again, really diving in on things you can implement right now to improve your productivity, improve your work ethic, and then understanding how to detach your business and make sure you get what you've done for your business. That's the only way through. The only way through is getting things need to be done for your company and yourself and where you want to go. (11:30): That'll wrap today's episode up you guys. Again, not real estate specific this week, but something that's been on my mind that I've been, again, it's, it's an iteration of project I'm working on with myself every single week reflecting, um, and I can't talk about enough how important this stuff is, even more than the real estate stuff. Just understanding focus, understanding how to grow a business, how to hire, how to delegate, all stuff. That's invaluable. And I talk about it a lot on the show cause it's my thesis on business. So as always, you guys share a comment across any platform that you guys listen to. This show on means, the world, Spotify, apple Podcast, wherever you guys listen, truly appreciate it. Until next time, as always, you are only one. Feel away.