Ready Fire Aim

Mike: What’s up, everybody. Hey, welcome back to the show. Today, I have my good friends, Josh and Ashley Hines. And I work with my wife. I love these guys because they work so well together, and they really have adopted this kind of culture of just ready, fire, aim. Like, hear something and take action and know you’re going to fail, fail your way through it and become successful at it. And that’s all we’re going to talk about today, so stay tuned.
Professional real estate investors know that it’s not really about the real estate. In fact, real estate is just a vehicle to freedom. A group of over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors from across the country meet several times a year at the Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind to share ideas on how to strengthen each other’s businesses, but also to come together as friends and build more fulfilling lives for all of those around us. On today’s show, we’re going to continue our conversation of fueling our businesses and fueling our lives. I’m glad you’re here.
Hey, guys. Welcome to the show.
Josh: Hi. Thanks for having us.
Ashley: Hi. Thanks.
Josh: You’re going to be talking to us. Thanks so much. Glad to be with you here, Mike.
Mike: Good to have you guys here.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So I’m excited to talk to you guys. You guys are obviously members of the Investor Fuel Mastermind. You guys have, since you joined, you just, you know, added a lot of energy to the group, and we already have a lot of energy in the group as you know, but you guys have been great members. And, you know, obviously, you guys have even won . . . we give away these awards for the biggest giver, people that kind of share their knowledge and just kind of go all out to help other people in the group, and you guys have actually won that three quarters in a row, which is insane. So thanks for being awesome and I know you’re going to deliver a lot of great value today, too.
Josh: Man, it’s just been . . . the time that we’ve already spent together, which has only been like six or seven months knowing you has just been incredible so far and I can’t wait to see where it goes, Mike.
Ashley: For sure.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, you guys are rocking. So, as we kind of get started here, why don’t you tell guys a little bit about your . . . tell our listeners a little about your background, how you got started in real estate and then a little bit about what your business looks like today?
Josh: Sure.
Ashley: So I’ll start. I kind of fell into real estate, thanks to a suggestion from my now husband, Josh. But I started out as a special education teacher and was very unhappy. And one day Josh said, “Hey, I think you should give real estate a try. I think you have a good personality for it.” So seven or eight years later, here I am.
Mike: That’s awesome.
Josh: Yeah, so I pushed her into it because she was doing something she really didn’t like and we were actually only together, like, six months at the time. I mean, I was just like, “Life is too short to be miserable.” And anyway, she started off being someone’s assistant, a rock star realtor, and learned the business, like, super quick, so that was inspiring for me to jump in. And actually, she had to drag me into it.
I had, you know, a regular W2 job and I liked it, but I didn’t love it. And then one day, you know, I was always cold-calling at night, we did a flip, and then fast forward a few years, I was really getting into the weeds of learning lead generation and problem-solving with people. And I had done one wholesale deal plus our flips, and she came comes in knocking on the door, and she says, “What are you doing?” And I said, “I’m on the phone. Like, I’m making calls.” And she’s like, “Well, I mean, with your job. Like, what are you doing with it?” And I said, Well, I’m working during the day and, you know, making calls.” And she’s like, “You should quit.”
And she was pregnant with our second child at the time and so I was like, “Just quit? When?” And she goes, “Tomorrow.” And I said, “Tomorrow?” And she said, “Yeah, do it.” And so I got her blessing and long story short, it took me about three months because I was chicken, and it was the greatest decision ever just to jump in and go work for ourselves. But that’s kind of how we fell into it. I come from a biotech background, so science and sales eventually in that in that field.
Mike: Yeah. It’s interesting. I was talking to somebody last night. I won’t say any names because you know who it is. But somebody else was basically saying, like, you know, their spouse didn’t want them to leave their job. They’re like, “That’s not a real thing, like, you can’t do it,” even though they had done several deals. And they’re like, she needs like years of confirmation that this works and this isn’t just some like fluke or fad, you know? And so, I mean, having your spouse’s support is, like, so critical. If they don’t . . . because what you don’t want to hear is like somebody decides to get in and the other person is, like, waiting to say, “I told you so.” You know?
And like, it’s not just a spouse, it’s anybody in your family. Like, you know, we tend to get weighed down by our friends and family when we jump into stuff like that. And a lot of it is not . . . like, they don’t even know what it is we’re doing. It’s just like, it’s almost like they wouldn’t be willing to take that much risk and the fact that you’re doing it might almost make them feel inferior, like, “Well, you know, I’m not willing to do that, and therefore, you shouldn’t either.” You know, I don’t know. It’s weird.
Josh: Absolutely. I completely agree with you. I feel very fortunate in that aspect where with our families, we started a business before and we’ve always been go-getters, but our family has always respected that, I think. And fortunately, we haven’t had to worry about that, but I know a lot of friends that really get caught up in that same paradigm you’re talking about.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So what’s one of the things that’s kind of driven your success, and we’ve talked a lot about this is that, you know, a lot of people are afraid of failure, and you guys, and I know, because we’ve talked about this, that failure is a steppingstone on the way to success, right? It’s like, how fast can I fail? Like, let me learn these things. I mean, it’s like, use this analogy of, like, when you have a baby, you guys have a couple kids, so you know. Assume you have a baby, like, they fall down constantly when they’re learning to walk, right? That’s failure, but that is how we learn how to walk, right?
Ashley: I think for us, the biggest thing it starts with our mindset, so we see already ourselves as being successful even though we haven’t reached, you know, the pinnacle of that that we want to be at, but we see that every day when we wake up. So really what we’re doing for our business in that time, that’s just getting us a little bit closer to that goal every day.
Mike: Right.
Ashley: And failure in that is only a part of what’s making us get to that level of success because it’s just another rung on the ladder really.
Mike: No doubt.
Josh: And [inaudible 00:06:15] talk about don’t stop two feet from gold, right? Maybe it’s three feet, but he talks about don’t stop when you’re getting close. And most people don’t have the persistence just to keep going. They think, “Oh, this is not working. Let’s give it up.” When in reality, you’re 80% of the way there. So if you just go forward with what you’re already doing with your original plan, you’re going to get there.
And, you know, I think failure is the quickest way to learn. We shouldn’t place catastrophic bets if you don’t know you’re doing yet, right, so the failure shouldn’t be so catastrophic that it’s going to hurt you, right, but you can start with small things. And so for me, I just started out playing very small, finding a few vacant homes and calling them on my cell phone. And when that starts to work, then you pull a bigger list or you pay for a list. When that starts to work, you buy a Mojo Dialer, right? So, for me, I’ve just incrementally moved that up, but I’ve never been afraid to take the action and put it forward and really learn.
Mike: Yeah. And a lot of people are, truthfully, you know, I see, so like, I do a lot of coaching stuff, too, so I talk about this all the time that most people that try to get started in real estate investing fail, but I think 90% of them fail before they’ve ever really given it any energy. Like, they just kind of quit. In their mind, they failed, or in their mind, this doesn’t work anymore. And so they can check the boxes they’ve tried it and it doesn’t work, because that feels safer, but they never really took action. I mean, they never took any massive action, right?
Josh: Absolutely. I definitely agree with you. One of the things that, you know, it’s almost a gift and a curse that in the information age today, there’s so much out there because if you look hard enough, there’s always a reason not to go forward. You can always say, “The economy is going to be bad.” But the reality is, is that the where we are at today in the information age gives us so many advantages, and you can look out and you don’t have to wonder if real estate works, if you can make money in real estate because you can find 10,000 people within one quick Google search that have made money, so you don’t need to ask yourself that question anymore. You know fear holding people back is definitely something big and we’ve learned this year very much to be careful the stories you tell yourself on why you can or you can’t do something. Because the stories that you tell yourself [inaudible 00:08:22].
Mike: Sure. Yeah. [inaudible 00:08:21].
Ashley: Absolutely.
Josh: Yeah. Definitely. It creates a paradigm for your life and you’re going through these motions doing things that you don’t know why, you don’t know who for. But, you know, that’s one thing that we are definitely good at is stepping back and saying, “Is this really what we want to do? Is this getting us the outcome that we want to get?”
Mike: Yep. One of the things that we talked about a little bit up front and my wife and I had this a little bit, too, not everybody does in their relationship where they . . . not every married couple should work together, right?
Ashley: Right.
Josh: I agree.
Mike: But, you know, you guys complement each other, and that’s how my wife, Lindsay, and I are, too, where there are things that I’m really good at. She’s, you know, probably like you Ashley more organized, more methodical, a little more process-oriented, and I’m like, flying by the seat of my pants, like, it’ll all work out if I just talk to enough people or I do enough action, right, more of the sales side of it. So kind of talk about that dynamic with you guys there. And then, people that are listening, you know, if you have a spouse like this, you could learn some things that you might be able to work together well, or if not, you have to find another partner or somebody to supplement the things that you’re not good at. Maybe share your thoughts, Ashley, on your side of the equation there.
Ashley: Absolutely. Well, for sure. So everybody that knows Josh always talks about his energy, right? Josh has this crazy energy and he’s always got all of these great ideas. And you know, he’s super passionate about everything. One of the best examples that I can think of this is when Josh gets really excited about something or when we have, you know, something really awesome going on and he’s communicating it to our team of VAs or, you know, anybody else in our team, sometimes he comes across as just yelling at them.
So one of the things that I have to do, I’m like, “Okay. I get your message, you know, because we just get each other, but I think you should soften your approach and talk about it from this angle.” You know, that’s one example of how we can work together for communication.
But in terms of the business, too, Josh is very much the idea guy, and I am very much the implementer. So, when we have projects or tasks that we want to tackle or ideas that we want to implement in the business, Josh does an excellent job of rounding those out and making it seem attainable, and then I implement the strategies and the process to use that, you know, I know how to do or I learn how to do them to really make things work in our business. So it’s all we have, like, a really good ebb and flow between us.
Mike: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, I agree. I think that something that’s unique about us is that our roles within the company really in the boundaries remain fluid over time. So we examine what we’re currently doing and then looking at what’s getting missed and who should attack that? And we’re always willing to shift responsibilities and duties and that kind of thing. So a lot of people have asked us, “Well, which one of you is CEO and which one is the COO?” We just we don’t feel like we need the title of that yet and we’ve remained a lot more fluid than that. We really, you know, especially since we’ve joined Fuel, we’ve started to plan out our year and then our quarterly plans a lot more. And so going after the one to three biggest rocks or the biggest goals of your quarter and attacking those is really how we best function when we’re looking at the problems we need to solve and the things we need to build.
Mike: Yeah, that’s great. I think one of the challenges and I don’t know if you have this challenge. This is one of the things that I’ve had in my relationship with Lindsay is that sometimes, I don’t want to be restrained. Like, I’m like, “We are going to do this. This is the best thing ever. And you know, it has to get executed or the idea is worthless, right?” So do you guys feel, like, is that a challenge for you? Like, sometimes, you’re like, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this, but we are going to do it,” like, without really any thought to how. I’ve gotten better at that, by the way, but early on, I was like, “Nope, we’re doing it.”
Josh: Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much how we operate ready, fire, aim a lot of times. And we’ve, definitely restrained that in the past year or so to slow down and examine the decision in the scheme of things. But yeah, that would be me like, saying, “We should do this, or we should do this. I have this great new idea. I’ve already talked to this person about it.” And ultimately, Ashley is like slowing me down a little bit. Not slowing me down, but just saying, “Hold on a minute. Let’s [inaudible 00:12:34].”
Mike: Hold the reins a little. Yes.
Josh: Absolutely.
Mike: Yeah.
Josh: But she’s very good at that and over time, I’ve learned to listen to her a lot more that I used to.
Mike: Yeah. Definitely.
Ashley: No. The only detriment between us is that when he gets really passionate about something, a lot of times I’m like, “Yeah, that is a really good idea.” And then we find ourselves executing on something that may or may not make sense for, you know, our goals for the quarter or where we should be in the business and then have to, you know, reverse a little bit and get back on track, but I mean [inaudible 00:13:05].
Mike: Yeah. Do you guys follow . . . one of the things that helped a little bit is, for me, is we started using the Traction model, the EOS model. And so it’s like, hey, so now . . . and I’ve given my team some authority to basically call me out and say, “That sounds awesome, but that’s not on our 90-day plan, so let’s like put that over here in the parking lot and we’ll talk about that at the next quarterly meeting and see if you still are as passionate about it.” Do you guys follow that process or do you have . . . ? Because I found, you know, I fill notebooks full of ideas. I am just all day long writing stuff or thinking of stuff. If I’m on a plane I’m writing for, like, the entire flight just how I’m going to do stuff. And then sometimes, a couple days later, I’m like, “Ah, that’s not that big of a . . . I don’t really want to do that.”
Josh: Definitely, I’m with you. I’m like so my ideas, I kind of do the same thing. I like to fill out notebooks and then I catalog them, right? And I can go back and read about the topic, but yeah. So we follow the Traction model loosely not as closely as we should, but obviously with quarterly rocks and that kind of thing from the top down, we do follow it in that regard.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Good. Good. Well, any guidance you can give people that are listening right now that are maybe not married, but they know . . . ? Because the truth is I’ve never met a real estate investor that, for example, is really good at acquisitions, they’re sales oriented, all that stuff, and they also really enjoy the administrative part of the business and making sure their advertising gets done on time, make sure they’re answering the phones properly. Like, usually, those are two different skill sets.
And so one of the things that happens a lot of times, if people are a one-man or a one-woman band, they just can’t get out of their own way because they’re trying to do everything, and there’s just no way in hell they’re good at every aspect of this business. And then, the other thing is they bring on a partner that is just like them and, you know, they still have not offset that other skill set that’s needed. So any guidance you could give people there?
Josh: I would say that self-awareness is really, really huge. And that’s, like, it’s part of knowing yourself. You have to know what you’re good at and you have to know what you’re not good at inherently. You have to know what you like and what you don’t like.
Mike: Right.
Josh: And I think things changed for us when we both took the DiSC test a long time ago, but then we really started thinking in terms of what’s our day-to-day. Like, what do I like doing? What do I not like doing? And what am I really good at? And then, what’s everything else. And so where that overlaps where when you say, “I like doing this and I’m really good at it.” That’s what you should focus more of your time on. We have to be self-aware to get there first.
So I would really highly recommend that, you know, anyone who wants to try to work with their partner, if you haven’t yet, you need to take some sort of personality test, like, a DiSC or a Kolbe, so you can understand yourself better, but you can also understand how you and your partner fit together and even if that’s possible. But I think when you take the DiSC test, and we’ve taken it several times now, we read the results and were like, ‘Holy crap.” You read one concise sentence and you’re like, “That’s me to T and I’ve never even thought about it that way.”
Mike: It’s kind of scary, isn’t it?
Josh: Yes, it is.
Ashley: It is, but what a powerful tool to utilize because it really tells you so much about your personality and the person, you know, that you’re working with and it really shows you where you should intersect and even how to talk to each other. It really works and it’s really cool.
Mike: Right. Right.
Josh: You start to learn what drives people when you understand the personality types, right? And I think life becomes . . . in dealing with people, certainly, even your kids or your coworkers or whoever it may be, it seriously becomes slightly easier when you can get a read on their personality, what drives them, what things really turn their gears, or what things really are, you know, their motivators.
Mike: Right. Right. One of the things that you said, like, you just commented on self-awareness, and I think it’s so important because there’s a lot of people, you know, inherently the real estate investing industry is full of people that are, like, cheap and trying to make something out of nothing, right? I mean, that’s inherently how in this industry how people get started. Like, they’re trying to hustle. They’re trying to do everything themselves.
And what happens is there’s people that are really good, probably more would identify with an integrator, like, they’re more of the operations, they can put all the pieces together, but they’re not a good salesperson, if you will. They’re trying to do the selling. And it’s just that they’re just going to fail. Like, I mean, it’s just not . . . I mean, I’m not saying they can’t get by, but it’s not their genius zone, right?
Or the other way around. They’re really good at sales, but every time you talk to them, like, “Man, I forgot to order the mail three weeks ago, and now the business is, like, suffering because of it.” It’s one of those things, right? And so I think the problem is, a lot of times, people are they think they have to do everything and the reality is there’s just no way to be successful doing everything yourself in this business, certainly over the long haul, right?
Josh: There’s definitely not. I was just listening to a CarrotCast the other day and Trevor is talking about it in certain marketing channels, it’s he calls them hamster wheel marketing because the second you get off, it doesn’t stop immediately, but those things wind down. And that’s most of the things that most people do most guys do in lead gen, right? But . . . I totally forgot where I was going with that. I just lost my train of thought.
Mike: That was going to be deep whatever it was. That’s cool.
Ashley: Yeah.
Josh: No, I know where I was going. So it’s really, like, it’s the same thing is like going like a mile wide and an inch deep, or going an inch wide and a mile deep. There’s so many things that you can focus on, but real estate is so cool, our industry is so cool because you can really find . . . whatever your personality type is, if you want to do it, there’s a space for you. I mean, there’s so many different things you can be good at in this business, and teaming up with someone to scratch their itch is really one of the best ways.
Mike: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And Ashley, so we were talking before we started here about you’ve taken on some roles in the business that you probably typically wouldn’t do, but you’re doing it because of the belief of, “Hey, we have to learn this how to do it before we outsource it to somebody else.” So I know you’ve taken over some disposition stuff, but without the intention of doing it long-term.
And I think that’s such an important message that sometimes people will just once they convince themselves that I’m going to hire somebody, I’m going to, like, throw money at it, they’re like, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” I mean, like, I don’t know, but figure it out, or go watch a podcast or go figure it out on your own. And it’s not that it can’t happen, but there’s so much that as a business owner, so much value you can add to your business by sitting in that seat before you have somebody else do it. So talk about that a little bit and what your learnings are on that?
Ashley: Absolutely. I think if you want to outsource anything, it’s absolutely imperative to do it yourself for a period of time so you can understand how the process works so you can teach it to the next person. And maybe that’s where a useful part of my background comes into play because I enjoy teaching the skills that I’ve learned in the process I have put together to the next person that’s going to take it over.
So, for instance, after we got back from our first Fuel, we knew that we had to integrate SMS marketing into the business and we hadn’t done it at all. In fact, I was doing zero lead generation. I was working on every other aspect of the business. But he was tied up, so we have this philosophy in our company, “If it is to be, it is to me.” So I took it over and I just implemented the whole process, documented it, and then trained a virtual assistant that we now have running the entire SMS platform.
So, yeah, that’s just one of the things that we did that way. And then, now starting with dispositions. When our business has a need, I mean, we fill it until we have somebody else take it over. We don’t just sit back and say, “Oh, well, I don’t know how to do SMS marketing, or I don’t know anything about dispositions.” The information is out there. You’ve just got to find it, train yourself, and then train someone else.
Mike: Yeah. There’s no way you can hold people accountable if you don’t know how to do it yourself, right?
Ashley: Absolutely.
Mike: I mean, they could be saying, “Well, I’m texting 20 people a day.” And you’re like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And you’re like, “Well, it should be 200, though or whatever, right?”
Ashley: Well, so many people say that it doesn’t work to have a VA do your SMS marketing, but I totally disagree with that because we have such success with the way ours is set up. But it’s also because I put a lot of time and effort into it. It’s a huge marketing channel for our business and I work with our VA that runs it every day, and we talk back and forth all day. I have the responsibility of running the whole system. She’ll ask me one-off questions here and there, and I’m always happy to answer them because it becomes more of a training process.
Mike: Right, right. I think a lot of people fail with virtual assistants because they don’t train them properly, right? I mean, like, sometimes people think, “Well, that $4 or $5 an hour person overseas is somehow superhuman and they could really understand how to do all this.” It’s like somebody in your office wouldn’t know how to do any of that. Why would somebody else if you don’t teach them or they’ve never had exposure to that, right?
Ashley: Absolutely.
Josh: So definitely, I think that’s been one of our strengths in the past year is our ability to screen and hire Vas and have them build on our team. We didn’t have, like, and I went this route kind of out of necessity because I didn’t have a large marketing budget, but I also knew that we needed to do more than just me cold-calling. And so I found, you know, online job boards, and hired people in the Philippines. But instead of just treating them like some outsourced cheap labor, I actually talked to them like they’re in the town over from me.
Mike: Right.
Josh: And we talk, you know, a couple times a week, but we go pretty deep, even into sales tactics and things like that. And I just treat them like a member of my team. And I think that’s gone a long way, but we do work together very closely in building a team culture with them and we don’t treat them like they’re, you know, 4,000 miles away. We treat them like they’re a regular part of our team and I think that [inaudible 00:22:45].
Ashley: We have morning meetings with all of them on video, so we can all see each other’s faces and we talk and they understand the vision that they’re working for, and we have some really great virtual assistants.
Mike: Yeah. I think that’s great. I’ve used virtual assistants for probably like 10 years, maybe a little more than that. And for a long time, I didn’t do what you said. And now, we have town hall meetings and we like do stuff over Zoom and, you know, we really try to help . . . for a long time, I didn’t like it. I’d have a guy that would help with doing follow up. This is going to sound terrible. But, you know, if his follow-up activities would turn into a deal, like, we never went back to him and said, “Hey, good job on that deal.” You know, it was just, like, almost like, “Well, the acquisitions guy is the one that closed it.” It’s like, but we never would have found it if it wasn’t from that person.
So we kind of found, especially whether they’re in the Philippines or even in the U.S., when people are working remotely, if you don’t help them see what their piece is of the big picture, it’s hard to really have any culture, any commitment to your team because they don’t really understand how they fit into the bigger picture, right?
Josh: Yes, indeed. I think that. And what you just said is so true because this is our third month now of paying some commissions to our team now. And I think it’s very important not just the money, the money of course helps, but it’s closing that feedback loop. So letting them know, like, “Hey. We closed this deal. That conversation you had was really good. Look for more conversations like that, or look for more homes in that neighborhood.” So I think that helps right there really with the education and the growth but certainly, the commissions don’t hurt either.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So talk a little bit about your commitment to kind of constantly learning because I’ve noticed that you guys you’ll hear something, like you said, three meetings ago you weren’t doing SMS. Last month, you were presenting on how good your SMS system and process is, right? You guys just like pick it up run with it and you’re just kind of committed to hearing things, learning them, and then perfecting them. Just talk about the importance of that learning loop, I guess.
Josh: So I’ve always just been a really curious person and I just saw that like me and Google get along so well, because I can find anything instantly. And I think that just me being a curious person leads to that. And then, Ashley, when we met, it was just like fire and gas because seriously, there were certain things and she was like, “You can do that yourself? How did you learn it?” And I was like, “I just tried.” Right? And so just putting that force behind it and actually doing something, it builds a little self-confidence and then that continues to grow. So we’ve always had this mindset, “If it is to be, it is to me.”
And I think, on a different perspective, where we are in the world with technology and stuff is so cool. As real estate investors, it’s so cool. We have different platforms and shiny objects all the time, but we also have the ability to use things like slightly differently than anyone else. And I do that in our business. So when we text out people, if I can’t get in touch with them, I’ll text them a link to a YouTube video of me talking about, you know, what I do and why they should care. And so, you know, I think we’ve just always had this attitude of we’re going out there and we’re going to get after it. And really surrounding ourselves with some of the best people that we can find. It just really amplifies that for us, so it’s going to keep going for a while.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So what would you guys mind? You guys are we talked about you are members of Investor Fuel and learning and surrounding yourself with people like you just said. I mean, obviously, we do that as part of Investor Fuel. Would you guys mind sharing just a little testimonial on, I guess you’ve been in the group for three meetings now, so I don’t know what that equates to in terms of number of months. But you’ve been in the group for a little while now and how its impacted your business and, you know, how its impacted, I guess, your life?
Ashley:I think for me, what a total game changer for my mindset, because before, I just didn’t think that women did this and successfully did this. I mean, I wasn’t searching for those answers, but they didn’t fall in my lap, so I didn’t know it existed until I went to Investor Fuel and I saw people get up there and talk about what they do in their business and I thought, “Why am I not doing some of these same things that they’re doing because right now our business doesn’t have it?” So for me, it was a lot of social proof and seeing what other people are doing and how they implement in their business and I just came home and became an execution machine. And I don’t think without Investor Fuel that that necessarily would have happened in the way that it did. But yeah, it’s just been a huge game changer for me personally.
Josh: So I was kind of led to Investor Fuel by several chains that I knew about Investor Fuel for probably, like, six to eight months before we ever took action and hopped on a call. And really just my expectations, I had no idea what to expect, but I could have never expected this. And it’s not even what it’s done for our business, but it’s what it’s done for our life, for our friends, for our mindset. And there’s just something magical when you get together with a mastermind. It doesn’t have to be a formal mastermind, but just getting together with 6, 8, 10 likeminded people who share something in common, whether it’s growth or anything, there’s just something magical that happens the knowledge, the pointers that come from other people. And then, all those people care so much then it’s a crazy mix.
And so I think you guys have done so well in getting the right personalities in the room who happened to be in real estate. So it’s like you don’t care . . .
Ashley: That’s so true.
Josh: You don’t care, Mike is Mike. I mean, you don’t care if someone has done five deals or 500 deals. If they have the right mindset and the right attitude, they can make it happen. So I think those are the people in Fuel not necessarily the people that have done the most deals, but the people that want to do deals, the people that want to grow, that want to share, right? So the mix of people that you’ve put in the room is just second to none for us.
Mike: Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that. It’s a good group. You know, it’s, of course, a lot of people, you know, you have to have you have to qualify it by doing a certain number of deals to get in there, but I do think we have built this culture around giving and sharing. And I think what I like to believe in, you know, we kind of were the catalyst to start it, but I think people like you guys and others that are in the group have found a way that when they come there, they bring the best of each other out. And I can’t really describe it. And as you probably know, it’s a little hard to describe that sometimes. But it’s just like, it’s real, right?
Josh: Ashley was it my first day ever at Fuel, we had our first break. And she’s laughing. I love my wife so much. She’s the greatest. But she’s laughing at me because during the first break, I’m walking around giving people high fives, every single person that I saw with an Investor Fuel badge on, I’m like, “What’s up? What’s up? What’s up?”
Ashley: We had been there like four hours at this point, maybe.
Josh: And she said, “What? Are you trying to be the mayor of this place?? And I said, “No, but I’m playing all out.” And I said, “There’s just no reason for me to leave anything, any part of my personality, or anything at home. Like, I’m going to bring it here and that’s what I came to do.” Just, you know, they are mini vacations for us where we get to learn and grow. It’s the best. It really is.
Mike: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. You guys are hilarious. So, if folks want to . . . thanks for sharing your insights today, I mean, I think, you know, if there’s an underlying message here that people can take away and learn from this is surround yourself with others that can make you better, right? And it could be a spouse, it could be a brother or a sister, some partner, a buddy, or somebody that you don’t even know yet. But it’s a matter of kind of finding that Ying to your Yang that you guys are both driven to support one another, but you appreciate each other’s skill set that, like, you’re better at this than me, and I’m better at this than you, and together it just fits. It’s like peanut butter and jelly, right?
Ashley: Yeah.
Josh: Definitely. Definitely. One thing we do is we always focus on positivity only.
Ashley:Always.
Josh:We always try to keep as much positivity in our life as we can and we try to eliminate as much fear as we can. Those are like the best thing and the worst thing, too, so that helps us keep our mindset right.
Mike: Yeah. Awesome, guys. Hey, if folks want to connect with you, Ashley, where do they go to learn more about you guys or connect on social media or anything like that?
Ashley: Yeah. Absolutely. We’re both on Facebook. Our website is cashflowinbaltimore.com.
Josh: You can find me on Instagram I suppose Josh with Impact.
Mike: Awesome. Awesome.
Josh:Or Facebook.
Mike:We’ll add some notes down below in the show notes for those that want to connect with you guys. So I appreciate you guys a ton.
Ashley: Awesome. We appreciate you [back 00:31:27].
Josh: Yeah and thank you, Mike. We really appreciate you and the whole Investor Fuel organization and I love that you share so much with everyone so we really appreciate that and everything you do for the community.
Ashley: Absolutely.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. You guys, too. You guys are amazing.
So, well, everybody if you’ve listened, I hope you got some value out of this and I hope you enjoyed meeting Josh and Ashley today. If you haven’t subscribed yet on iTunes, Stitcher radio, Google Play, YouTube, anywhere where you could possibly be listening or watching us right now, if you subscribe and give us a positive review, we’d appreciate it. See you on the next episode.
Are you an active real estate investor? If so and you want to latch onto the power of surrounding yourself with over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors all committed to building stronger businesses and living richer, fuller lives, you should jump on a call with us to learn more about Investor Fuel. Simply visit investorfuel.com to get started.