Focus for Success in Real Estate Investing

Mike: Hey, it’s Mike Hambright with FlipNerd.com. Welcome back for another exciting, incredible interview. Today I’m with my friend Jason Medley. But I interview successful real estate investing pros and entrepreneurs on the show and I’m glad to have you back. Also, we’re about to launch a new podcast. It’s called the Ask a Real Estate Nerd Podcast. So, if you go to FlipNerd.com/Ask, you can leave a voicemail for a question or actually you can even just put something out on Twitter, #FlipNerd, ask a question and we’ll go ahead and get those questions answered for you from our expert. So, again, today I’m joined by Jason Medley. He’s a good friend of mine. Many of you know Jason from his past life as a lender, Jason “The Money Man” Medley. He’s recreated himself a little bit here. He was a large transactional lender that funded a lot of deals. But that was a different time and a different place and Jason is the founder of The Collective Genius. It’s a mastermind group that’s made of many of the most successful real estate investing experts in America. I’m actually proud to be part of that group. It’s a fantastic group. We’ll let Jason talk a little bit about that today. One of the things I appreciate most about Jason is his attention to the importance of working on something that you enjoy and making sure that you’re focused on living your best life. I think for a lot of real estate investors, we’re so focused on making money and doing big stuff that a lot of times life just kind of gets in the way. That’s not how it should be. Today we’re going to talk about focus and its importance on your success. Before we get started though, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors. RealtyMogul.com is an online marketplace for real estate investing, connecting borrowers and capital from accredited and institutional investors. Get a rehab loan fast and close in as little as 10 days with rates starting as low as 9%. For more information, call 888-296-1697. B2R Finance makes loans tailored specifically for rental investors. They can help you unlock equity from existing property so you can get cash to grow your rental portfolio. That’s huge and it opens up lots of opportunities previously not available to rental investors. Need a loan? Call 855-819-4412 or visit B2RFinance.com today. National Real Estate Insurance Group is the nation’s leading provider of insurance to the residential real estate investor market. From individual properties to large scale investors, National Real Estate Insurance Group is ready to serve you.
We’d also like to think Crestar Funding, MidAtlantic IRA and Renters Warehouse. Please note, the views and opinions expressed by the individuals in this program do not necessarily reflect those of FlipNerd.com or any of its partners, advertisers or affiliates. Please consult professionals before making any investment or tax decisions as real estate investing can be risky. Hey, Jason, welcome to the show, my friend. Jason: Hey, Mike. Honored to be here. Mike: Yeah. Good to see you. Jason: Looking forward to rocking this thing out. Mike: Yeah. So, I’m excited to talk about this. When I joined the mastermind, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this personally before, when I joined the mastermind, I assume, “Hey, there are some high fliers in here,” and I didn’t really know what to expect. I’ll be honest, I thought a lot of stuff in real estate investing, there’s a lot of chest-thumping going on about how big and awesome you are, whether you are big or awesome or not, right? And I kind of expected some of that. But I’ll say, I was really surprised by how humble everybody is. There are some powerhouse people that, quite frankly, nobody would know because they’ve got their head down and they’re just killing it in their markets. But what I’ve really appreciated about the group and about you is kind of the Zen side of being a small business owner and like saying, “Why are you working so hard? Is there a way for you to make that much money or even more by doing less?” and a lot of focus on the importance of life. So, I’m excited for you to share that with us today because I know I’ve gotten a lot of value out of our talks in the past. Jason: Yeah. I’m honored to be here. Mike and I were just talking about everything that he’s doing. Super exciting platform with FlipNerd. The thing I think that I love most about what he’s doing is he is coming at it from a place of giving, right? A lot of times when you are listening to a podcast or you’re on a webinar or reading an email, whatever it may be, a lot of times the promoter or the key person or the guru, the teacher, the educator, it’s take, take, take. Mike has approached it in entirely different way, which is really give, give, give. I think that’s probably why you come and give it to CG, The Collective Genius has resonated with you because that’s kind of the way that when we start out into meetings, we kind of have the rules of engagement and that’s what I always say. If you come in from a place to give, give, give, the scales will tip in your favor so you can receive, receive, receive. But that’s important, though. When you put up a bunch of high fliers in a room, I’d say it’s probably safe to say in some form or fashion, whether it’s flipping houses, holding houses, lending money, I’d say it’s safe to say most people in that room are doing north of 75 transactions a year all the way up to probably close to 800. So, you put that type of group in the room, it’s important that everybody kind of checks their ego at the door because if not, the purpose of why we’re there is really kind of completely diluted. We are there to help each other. It’s, I think, really one of the biggest reasons that most come is that when you reach a level, when you’re playing at that high of a level, a lot of times you’re the big fish in that market and you don’t really have anybody to bounce ideas off of or anybody to share, “Hey, here’s how you continue to do more or here’s how you continue to do less,” which is a lot of times what we also focus on at CG. Can you make the same amount of money or more money by actually working less and are you kind of keeping priorities straight? So, I think that’s one of the reasons why we kind of resonate with each other. Mike: Yeah. Thank you. Well, thanks again for being here. We couldn’t do this without great guests like you. Before we get too deep in this talking about focus and getting people to think about why they work so hard because I think people just forget about what their goals are and they just think about unit volume and stuff that maybe doesn’t matter as much. But give us your background. Talk a little bit about how you got started in real estate investing and how that led into being the head honcho at The Collective Genius. Kind of give us your bio a little bit. Jason: Sure. I got started back in 2000 in real estate finance. I’ve been a corporate guy for the majority of my life. And then I was going through some health struggles, pretty intense health struggles at that point in my life and had been out of work for about three months. When it came time for me to go back, they wanted me to run and I was barely ready to crawl. So, about that time when I was forced to kind of make that decision, “What am I going to do? Am I going to go back to work or am I physically capable of doing so?” I was refinancing my home and this young buck shows up at my door in a black on black 911 Carrera Turbo and I was like, “Did you get that doing mortgages?” And at the time, that kind of stuff was important to me. My priorities have definitely shifted since then. He said, “Yeah.”
So, I got intrigued by it. That was during a refinance boom, if you will. I asked him if he knew anybody was hiring and before you knew it, I started doing mortgages and working for somebody and decided not to go back to the corporate world. At the time, you had to have your license for a year in Florida before you could work on your own. I think I had it about 365 days before I started my own mortgage brokerage on a retail level. That went really well. I thought I was really cool. We were doing a lot of business. Then the market crashed. I realized that I was not near as good. I was a good mortgage broker but I was a terrible marketer because when you have economic booms or periods where your business or your product is in such demand, it’s kind of like shooting fish in a barrel rather than hunting. Mike: Yeah. Jason: If there’s no more fish in the barrel and you don’t know how to hunt, you have a problem. Mike: That’s right. Jason: So, the business crashed. That created stress at home. Marriage crashed. I went through the divorce. No marriage. No business. Things weren’t so hot. But it was probably one of the most truthful and trying times in my life. I credit a lot of it to where I am today. So, try to take a look at, “Okay, I am smart. I am intelligent. I do have a certain skillset. Where can I apply that stuff given my circumstances,” which were kind of the crash of the housing bust, per se. Mike: So, what year would this have been, Jason?
Jason: This would have been probably ’07-ish, I think. Mike: Okay. Yeah. Jason: So, I started digging around spending many evenings on the computer every night researching and looking for opportunity. I went through a period where I started handling the short sale process for realtors. You gather most of the same documents that you do for a mortgage. I like to make people happy. I found that in that process, no matter what you did, I could not make anybody happy. It’s just a brutal process. It takes forever. There’s tons of back and forth. Short sales take a long time and nobody likes to wait. I was just like, “This is not for me. I don’t want to be in an environment every day where people aren’t happy with me even when I’m doing my best.”
Mike: Right. Jason: So, I started actually getting into investing and short sales. I did that for a reason. At the time, you didn’t need money to do it. I didn’t have any. So, that seemed like a natural fit. And then that is also what created the actual opportunity for me, that when I started out, you could use your end buyer’s money when you flipped the property. What does that mean? That means if you bought a property for $200,000 and you were going to resell that property the same day for $250,000 and make the spread, you could use their $250,000 to actually fund your $200,000 purchase. So, I started down that path, got a few deals under my belt, making some money, getting back on my feet. Life is good. And then the brakes got pumped again because I got a call right about the time I was doing my biggest deal ever at that time. I think it was a $405,000 or $402,000 purchase price reselling to a Canadian buyer all cash, $495,000 on a takeout price, nice little spread in there for me after all the commissions and everything were paid, about a $40,000 check. Two days prior to closing, my title agent called me and said, “Jason, you need to actually bring us $402,000.” And I said, “Barb, that’s a problem. We’ve got a problem here.” She’s like, “No, honey, you’ve got a problem.” I didn’t have $400,000. Mike: Yeah. Jason: So, I made a call to a friend of mine, a very close friend of mine who had way more than $402,000 and asked him if I could borrow it for a couple of hours. He asked me how much I would pay him for it. I said, “I’ll pay you two points,” which is basically about $8,000. He said, “You’re going to borrow $402,000 from me and you’re going to pay me back $410,000 later in the day?” I was like, “Yeah.” He was like, “Okay, sign me up.”
So, after that transaction was finished, he came to me like, “Can we make a business out of this?” This was right about the time where everybody was scrambling to figure out, “I’ve been working my business this way without needing money. Now I’ve got to actually bring those funds. What are we going to do?” I knew if it had become a problem for me, it had become a problem for everybody who was doing that type of investing at the time. That created the birth of iVisionary Financial Solutions. I think that was maybe back in ’08 or so, ’08 or ’09. Mike: This was transactional funding. So, for those listening, there was a time when if you were going to essentially assign or wholesale a deal, they would allow if you were buying it from somebody and you were going to resell it right away, they would allow it and the buyer to fund… you would wait until that person’s funds come in and then they would allow that to fund. There are really kind of two transactions. There are two closings. They would allow the second closing to fund the first closing. All the title companies stopped doing that around that time, right?
Jason: Yeah. Exactly. So, at the time when it first happened to me I thought it was world-ending. But it actually turned out to create a very, very fun and profitable opportunity for about four years. So, yes, we did start a business out of that. I jumped on a plane, started traveling the country, hanging out with guys like Mike who have an audience of investors and began to create partnerships where I said, “Hey, you teach folks how to do these transactions and we’ll provide the funding.” So, it was called transactional funding because it was underwritten based upon the transaction itself, not you the investor, right?
Mike: Right. Jason: It didn’t matter if you had a horrible credit score or didn’t have a job or any of that stuff. If you were buying for $10 in the morning and selling for $15 in the afternoon, all we really cared about was that that person with the $15 came to closing and closed the transaction, right?
Mike: Right. Jason: It wasn’t really based around your ability to repay the loan. So, fun and profitable business for about four years and then the rules changed again. Mike: Yeah. Jason: Lenders began to say that you had to hold property. “Hey, we’re going to sell you this short sell at a discount, but you’ve got to actually hold it for 30 days.” They would place those restrictions on the deed restrictions themselves, on the title. So, that began to very slowly put the stranglehold on that business. But the beautiful part about it was before that happened, I, like Mike, had started an education business per se and through that education I had an audience just like you guys who are listening now. In addition to it I had become connected with a lot of talented investors because we were actually providing the money for them. So, prior to that business slowly fading away I started what is now The Collective Genius. That’s, again, the mastermind that Mike is part of. It’s a group of extremely high-level folks from across the country. There are about 90 members. We get together each quarter. It’s really a way for the folks on top to continue to stay on top. The market is constantly and frequently changing. So, these folks need a voice. Like I said earlier in the podcast, you reach a certain level and then when you get to the top, you’re like, “Now who are my mentors? Who are my voices? Where’s my board of directors?”
If you’re doing 150 or 200 transactions a year and most of the investors in your market are doing 15, you have an entirely different set of problems than the folks doing 15, so you can’t necessarily relate or they can’t help you. You can only help them, right? So, there we are. That’s where we’re at. Mike: Yeah. That’s fantastic. And no matter how much volume you do, it’s important to, I know we’re going to talk a little bit about focus here and staying focused. But it’s really important especially in real estate investing and anybody that serves real estate investors, to be ready to pivot when that change comes because it always comes, right?
Jason: It always comes. That’s the nature of the beast. That really determines who stays and who goes, right? It separates the wheat from the chaff. When the market changes, can you adjust your model to continue making money?
Mike: Yeah. And there are people that do two things. I’d love to hear your opinion on this. There are some people that say, “I’m going to diversify and I’m going to have a whole bunch of different things going on,” which is the opposite of focus, “So that if any one of them dries up or the market changes, then the other ones will kind of prop me up. So, I have multiple irons in the fire, if you will,” which you probably would agree is not necessarily a bad thing. But at the same time, if you are so distracted from being focused that you’re not good at anything, then that’s not good either. So, explain the importance of focus and how you can diversify and be focused at the same time. Jason: First and foremost, I’m definitely not opposed in any circumstances to multiple streams of income. Mike: Yeah. Jason: But I think the key… I don’t think, I know through a lot of hard knocks and experience the key before you create multiple streams of income is to have one, one that is solid, that is continually month in and month out providing for you and providing for your family and is maybe systematized and has enough momentum to where you can recognize that, “Okay, I’m going to go over here for a while and create this new source of income. But I’ve got a little machine over here cooking that’s cooking while I’ve got my eyes elsewhere for a minute, right?
Mike: Yeah. Jason: I’m a proponent of having several streams of income. But I think the key is to have one that is, for lack of a better term, your foundation that creates and fosters the other. So, I think the mistake that a lot of folks get into is when they hear that, they go down the process of trying to create two, three, four, five, ten different new streams of income at the same time, right?
Mike: Yeah. Jason: So, if I were to… what’s something I’ve got on my desk here? Here’s a power cord, right? If I tell you to hold this in your hand, how hard is that? It’s not very hard. If I handed you five of them and told you to juggle them all at the same time, you’d have a hot mess on the floor, right?
Mike: Yeah. Jason: So, the key is to have that one thing in your hand before you go and try to add one a bunch of other… until you master one, how are you going to master five at the same time?
Mike: Yeah. I agree. Jason: So, I’m certainly not opposed to multiple streams of income or doing several things, but the key is you have to have one core foundational business that supports those things. Mike: Yeah. That’s great. Jason: When you are a talented entrepreneur, that can be difficult because you look at all the, “I can do that. I can do that. I can do that.” The key is can you do them all with excellence all at the same time?
Mike: Right. Jason: The answer is typically no. So, you’ve got to kind of add them on sequentially. Mike: I think one of the challenges for a lot of real estate investors is they tend to be, you just used the word, “I can do that,” and I think for a lot of us, there are things that you can do. I know we’re around the same age. I know in our talks in the past, you hit this point where you have kids. You start to say, “Man, I’m not getting any younger.”
And you start to think about, “Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff I can do, but what is it that I want to do? What can I be good at? What can I create systems around so that I’m not the bottleneck on everything?” I think a lot of real estate investors struggle with that because there are a lot of lone wolfs that are used to being the doers themselves, right?
Jason: Exactly. I think in reality, I would like to actually recommend a book. Mike: Yeah. Jason: I’ve got it at the house. It’s on my nightstand. I’m going through it for the second time. It’s called “The ONE Thing.” It’s by Gary Keller, the father of Keller Williams, if you will. Mike: Yeah. It’s a good book. Jason: It really talks about focus. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. And how you can look at your business and figure out, there is one thing that’s going to take you to the next level, right?
I had a strategist here last week for two days to help me systematize my business, kind of strengthen that foundation before I take it to the next level. We came up with all these projects. There were like six projects that could make an impact on my business, that could move the needle. So much stuff doesn’t move the needle. It might make you feel good. It might be cool. But it doesn’t move the needle in your business. So, come up with these six projects and you’re like, “Oh, that’s great. It’s going to be awesome.” And then you say, “Wait a minute. What’s the one of those six?” So, you continue to cut, cut, cut and refine and refine and refine until you figure out, “What is the one thing that’s going to really move the needle in my business?”
It is difficult to focus on… I used to do ten things marginally. I do one thing right now with excellence. I think I do. One thing with excellence. Since I’ve made that shift, everything in my life is much better. I have much more free time and I make a lot more money. If you listen closely to those two things, I have much more free time and I make a lot more money, that translates into I’m working less and making more. That’s because of saying, “Okay, I’m going to stop doing ten things marginally and I’m going to do one thing with complete excellence.”
Sometimes that’s a challenging call to make. Some of those things, some of those branches on the tree that you’re going to prune, they’re part of your identity. So, when you say, “I’m not going to do that anymore,” we talked about ego a little bit. It’s like, “Oh wait a minute. I was The Money Man, if I don’t do that anymore, I’m not The Money Man anymore.” So, there are some tough decisions to make sometimes. So, anybody that’s listening right now, to really look at your business, looking at things like, “Is this moving the needle? Am I doing too many things at once?” You’re over here working on this website and it’s going to be up and beautiful and then you have no idea how you’re going to get traffic to it. Probably neither of them mean a whole lot. All that really matters in real estate is every day you’re talking to buyers, sellers and looking for money. If you’re not doing those at a fundamental level, it doesn’t matter how pretty your website is going to be. Mike: Right. Well, Jason, give some actionable guidance for people that this is kind of resonating with. They’re like, “Yeah, I really need to get focused. I’ve got too much going on.” And they need to go sit down somewhere and think about this themselves because they don’t necessarily have anyone to talk to about it or at least not to start. Where do they get started? How do you do that?
Jason: Yeah. I think if I was going to give some guidance, I would ask you to probably sit down and figure out what is your core business. At the heart of it, what is your core business? CG is a perfect example, Collective Genius. We’ve got guys in real estate. They lend money. They have education businesses. They have an audience like you do, Mike. They have all these moving parts. So, really kind of fundamentally take it down and look at, “What is your core business?” And it’s pretty important that you like that. “What is your core business and do you like it or do you love it?” So, once you whittle it down to that, sometimes an easier way to figure that out is where does the majority of your money come from?
Mike: You really should say profit too because there are a lot people that do a lot of unprofitable revenue-generating things, right?
Jason: You’re right. That is a better refinement. Where does all the profit come from? So, I would sit down and figure that out. Then, what I would do is kind of put things through a filter as you begin to look at them. Here’s the thing, once you begin to gain traction in business, you wind up in an environment where more opportunity and different opportunity begins to come your way. So, I would kind of put that opportunity in a filter. First of all, I would tell you that once you have your core business, 99% of the time the answer to new opportunity is no. Most people will have a knee-jerk reaction to that. But 99% of the time, the answer to a new opportunity is no when it deviates from your core business. Mike: Yeah. Jason: When it deviates from your core business. So, that would be one filter. When you’re looking at anything… is it a distraction from your core business? Is it where the profit is coming from? Is it where the profit can come from? And then I would probably look at it, put another filter on that and say, “Okay, here’s this new opportunity.”
A perfect example would be, “Okay, I’m going to go spend all this time and build this beautiful website. I don’t really know how the traffic is going to get there yet, but it’s going to be really pretty. If I were to just get one more deal each month that nets me $25,000, where should I kind of initially be spending my time? How long will it be before that website begins to spit out that $25,000, which is $300,000 a year?”
So, kind of look at this and figure out… sometimes I’ll get an opportunity and I’ll say, “If I go and do this, I’m going to make an extra $200,000 this year.” I always take that and compare it to… membership in CG right now is $20,000. I look it and say, “With the amount of blood, sweat and tears that it would take, how does that compare side by side to me getting 10 additional CG members? How much blood sweat and tears does that take versus going and kind of starting something that requires me to get a little dirty, a little grimy?” When I put them up side by side, this has momentum. It’s organic. It’s breathing. It’s living. Usually there is no comparison. Mike: Yeah. I’ve talked to a lot of people like that in the past too. They want to get started in coaching or doing things. I was like, “How much do you think you’re going to make from that? How long is it going to take?” It turns out they might be able to buy three or four more houses a year and be better off. And they already have systems in place to do that. They don’t have to recreate a new business. That’s a very common scenario, what you’re saying there. Jason: Say you’re doing two deals a month, which can be a very handsome living. If you do two rehabs and net $30,000, that’s over $700,000 in revenue a year. So, you brought home $700,000 in revenue a year. That’s nothing to sneeze at. But my point is that you say, “Okay, now I’m going to start this coaching business. That’s going to take me 25 hours a week for the next year to really get up going.” So, what if you took those 25 hours a week that you’re going to go put over here, which you’re taking from your rehab business and applied it to your rehab business?
Mike: Yeah. It’s your opportunity cost. Jason: So, you’ve doubled, okay, now you’re doing four deals a month. Now you’re doing $1.4 million, $1.5 million a year. How long is it going to take you to make that type of revenue from a coaching perspective and will your current existing business on the rehab side suffer?
Here’s something that will be great. I think a lot of people will recognize this. That’s an itch that needs to be scratched on the creative side a lot of times. “I’m going to go create this coaching business. I’ve got some deals under my belt. I’m going to coach now.” A lot of times, you may be suffering a little boredom from your existing business and you want to go and create again, so you go, “Okay, I’ve got this creative itch I’ve got to scratch.”
So, one of the things I’ve learn to do when I recognize that is so, “Okay, I’m recognizing that creative itch that needs to be scratched and my eyes, instead of being focused, how do I bring them back over here on my core business and how do I get creative in my core business?”
Mike: Right. Jason: Last year, it might have been the meeting you joined or maybe been before that. I’m not sure. The last time I had a creative itch to scratch is when we started The Generous Genius, like what we did in December when we had the charity events. Those come out of me wanting to get distracted and go in different directions and say, “I’ve got to harness that creativity inside of my existing business.”
Mike: Yeah. That exact scenario kind of happened to me. After doing 60-70 deals a year, like you said, it gets lonely. I think one of the first places I started is I started this thing called Rehab Live, where I basically just started inviting people in my market to come watch us rehab a house. What we did is we just met at the house three times. We’d meet right when we bought it, halfway through and then when we’re done. There are tons of questions and energy flowing like, “Why did you make that decision? Why did you do that? How much did that end up costing? This is what your budget was. Where did you end up?” and just for people to kind of experience that. It was a great outlet for me to kind of scratch that itch of being creative and meeting other people, kind of the social part of it. So, I would say for me and I think for a lot of other people, that kind of thing that comes out that says, “I want to teach people,” it can start easy with something that you’re already doing. I was already going to check on houses and I just made that part of my process. “Hey, I’m going to drive across town and check on my contractor about halfway through.” So, I’m just going to make it part of my process. While I’m there, I’m going to take an extra hour and a half and I’m going to talk to some people. Jason: I actually have this written down. We kind of jumped on a call today. Mike: Did I not just read what you told me to say?
Jason: That’s the key. We jumped on a call today and kind of were talking about some different topics and chose this. I wasn’t overly rehearsed and prepared. One of the things that you just said is key. When you’re putting things through that evaluation process, you used the word leverage, right? When you look at new opportunity or new angles for your business, if there’s no leverage off your existing platform, usually you’re going to end up with a problem. Mike: Yeah. Jason: You’ve already worked hard. You’ve already created leverage. You have momentum. Things are moving. You’re making money. So, to create something new, Rehab Live, that’s not a lot of extra work and not a lot of extra blood, sweat and tears. So, if you’re looking at new opportunity, new things to do, that’s a question that you must ask yourself. Is there leverage involved? If I were to go and go to start a bar or a restaurant myself, I’ve got no leverage. Mike: Right. Jason: It’s totally independent from running a mastermind for real estate investors. Mike: Right. Jason: There is zero leverage. There’s another way to look at that. This is the way that I tend to look at things. This is my baby, right? Collective Genius is my baby. It’s my earned income. Then there is passive income. So, when I look at making investments, I will look and say, “Whoa, that is not for me because I don’t have any leverage there. I’d be starting out blood, sweat and tears. Been there. Done it. Don’t want to get back in the mix of that. Is there someone else who is excellent at that and they have ten successful restaurants, they want to open a new concept and they’re looking for investors?”
Now you’re taking the money that you’ve made and your active income and using someone else’s leverage, they have leverage. I don’t. I’m not going to go start a new restaurant or bar. But they have leverage. They are already successful. Let me take some money and create passive income by leveraging someone else’s leverage. Mike: Yeah. Jason: Rather than getting into a concept where I have none. Mike: Right. Absolutely. Jason: That is a critical filter to look at. Mike: Yeah. Jason: For sure. Mike: And I think it’s a great way… there are a lot of people that we know, a lot of real estate investors that that’s why there’s so much JV stuff. That’s one way to do it. If you say, hey, you’ve got some creative itch that you need to scratch. Is there somebody else that you know that’s in that space that could use a little bit of extra help that already has some track record there that you can work with together rather than go start it from scratch because they probably already have some traction and you don’t have to start from scratch?
Jason: Exactly. There’s no blood, sweat and tears. Mike: Right. Jason: If you can do something, create an ancillary form of income and there’s no blood, sweat and tears, it’s leveragable from your existing business, it doesn’t require a lot of effort, by all means go for it. But those opportunities typically come once you’ve created a single business that is feeding you consistently. Mike: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Jason, I know we talked a little bit about focus. I know the reason why you talk about this, just because we’re personal friends, is to really, there’s a lot of discussion inside of your mastermind and it really creates a lot of, no pun intended, focus on making sure you’re kind of living your best life. You’re doing things. Nobody got into real estate investing to say, “Man, I’m going to work 80 hours a week and I’m never going to see my family. Somehow even though I’m making a ton of money, if I don’t make money one month, I’m out of business.” A lot of people end up there. They’re just working so hard that they forget why they work so hard. So, we’re kind of running a little bit long on time here. But maybe take a couple minutes and just kind of give people your thoughts on how to make sure that you’re living your best life. Jason: Well, first of all, before we get into this conversation, I’ll say I think there’s a season for everything. What that means is if you can figure how to become successful in business without a grind and a process, somewhere, it’s usually in the beginning, I’m all ears. There’s a season for everything. It requires work.
But most importantly, if you don’t have a vision, the vision of what you want life to look like, not your business, not just your business, but your life as a mother, as a father, as a community leader, as a giver, as a lifestyle, if you don’t know what you want your life to look like and why, then you can get stuck in that grind forever and ever, those 80 hours a week.
When I was younger, I used to pride myself on that. I was like, “I work 80 hours a week. I’ll work you under the table.” Now, I’m in a completely different place in my life because my vision has changed, by hanging around people who have helped me understand this. When somebody says that now, I’m like, “That is terrible. You’re working 80 hours a week. That sucks.”
Mike: Yeah. Jason: But that’s because of a mind shift, a mental mind shift that was made by hanging around the right people who are saying, “Hey, you’ve got to understand why you’re doing that.” Are you constantly working to create the divide between working less and making more? Is the money increasing and the time involved decreasing? Is that gap becoming bigger and bigger? If you don’t wake up focused on that, if you don’t wake up knowing why… I don’t like working hard. I want to spend time with my little girl. Honestly, we’re doing this right now and we started at 11:30. It’s the first thing I’ve done all day. I went to the gym today. When I came home, I hung out with my wife and my little girl. I’ve got a 17-month old at the house. Daddy took Ava for a walk. This is the first thing I’ve done all day. And I like it like that. But it didn’t start out that way. But there has to be a focus on it, right? I would rather do those things than work 10 or 12 hours a day. You’ve got to know why. Why are you working so hard? When you’re younger, that’s difficult to put in perspective. I’m going to be 44. So, when you’re in your 20s and maybe even your early 30s, you want things and big houses and fancy cars and all that jazz. I get it. I like and appreciate nice things. But I think the sooner, at the earliest age possible, you can begin to understand why are you doing this? I can assure you that it will not be for those things. That doesn’t mean you can’t have nice things. I’ve got nice things. I love nice things. But your priorities will evolve and change once you get a family. Life is about the experience. It isn’t about working 12-14 hour days. Mike: I hear that. I hear that. Awesome, my friend. For those that want to learn more about The Collective Genius or anything else you’ve got going on, where do they go?
Jason: Just go to TheCollectiveGenius.com. You can go there and kind of check it out. It’s a letter that kind of describes what CG is about, the caliber of person that’s there. Again, it’s all text. If you prefer to watch a video, there’s an eight-minute video that you can watch at Collective Genius Mastermind. A bunch of my members are on that page kind of talking about their experience with the group. So, again, if you prefer to view the video, you can go to CollectiveGeniusMastermind.com or TheCollectiveGenius.com. Mike: Awesome. We’ll add some links down below. Jason, great to see you, my friend. Thanks for your time today. Appreciate you. Jason: I appreciate you too, man. I know today’s topic may not have been that sexy, but it’s high level stuff. Mike: It’s important. Jason: It is. It can be a very transitional place in your business if you grasp what we talked about today. Mike: Awesome. Thanks, buddy. We’ll see you. Jason: All right. Thank you, Mike. Mike: Are you a member of FlipNerd.com, the most robust real estate investing platform in existence where you can find off-market wholesale deals and great vendors literally in your market? You can get access to advice from experts and learn about local clubs and events right in your backyard. If not, please visit FlipNerd.com and register for a free account. You can register in less than a minute. It’s pretty much the coolest site that’s ever existed in the real estate investing industry. So, get on over to FlipNerd.com.