Core Values for Real Estate Investors

What’s up, freedom fighters? Hey, welcome back to another episode of the “Real Estate Investing Secrets” show. Today, I’m going to talk to you about core values and why they’re important to you really as an entrepreneur, I was going to say a real estate investor, but for any entrepreneur with a small business, you really need to understand what your core values are.
Welcome to “Real Estate Investing Secrets.” We’re all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better, more fulfilling lives, but most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else and chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions, and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you, and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality. My name is Mike Hambright from flipnerd.com, and your questions get answered here on the “Real Estate Investing Secrets” show.
What’s up, everybody? Hey, I want to talk to you today about core values. Core values, sounds simple, sounds a little academic, right? But I want to go a little bit deeper on this because it’s something that really has changed our business quite a bit over the past year and a half, and I was just reminded by, oddly enough, my son going back to school today. So I want to share that with you a little bit, and honestly, why it’s made my business stronger, but more importantly, why it has allowed me to enjoy what I do more, more than in the past, better than in the past because I think about who I’m interacting with and whether they fit into my core values.
My businesses that are doing well right now for some of you who know, we have several different businesses that we do, the things that I enjoy the most are the ones that are most aligned with my core values, where the people that I interact with are my customers, are members of whatever it might be, are more aligned with my core values. And I’ll come back to what our core values are in just a second. We haven’t posted. I’m pointing . . . not that you had had any idea what I’m doing now, I’m pointing to entry of our office here where we actually have them printed on the wall. We have a sign of them printed on the wall, which I’ve been in business for 11 years now. We just did that a year ago. And so I’ll kind of come back to that.
But what made me think of this is last week was our Investor Fuel mastermind, our quarterly mastermind. And we had about 150 people with us out in San Diego. And my team and I just loved those weeks. Like from a business standpoint, we’re super busy serving others. And big events like that are, you know, they’re draining to pull off, but it energizes me so much and my team, so much and I was like, “Man, how is that?” because there’s smaller things that I do that are a lot less effort and they seem to drain me more.
And so I was thinking about that. It was kind of in the back of my mind, and my son just started school, today’s his first day of school. We actually moved him to a new school. And without getting into a tremendous amount of details, I have this sheet here of his school, and they literally publish . . . this is a new school, and I guess the school has been there for a couple of years now. It’s a relatively new school, but they publish their foundation, they call them their foundational values.
And my wife and I were sitting down and going over these with my son. We really want him to take control of his life and take personal responsibility. And I was like, “These values, while some of them are said a little bit differently, are the exact same thing I have printed in my office.” In summary, they’re 90% exactly the same. And it just hit me, “Oh, wow, last week at Investor Fuel, that is why . . . ” Because a lot of people are like, “Man, how do you do this for a whole week?” You know, some of the people that are members, they’re like, “I’ve just been here for two days and I’m drained. How do you do this for five days?” And I’m like, “You know what? It’s a lot of effort. It is draining. We’re on the whole time. We’re there to serve other people.”
In fact, my whole life in business is serving other people now, but I get so energized when I’m there. Even at the end of the week, everybody’s leaving, and I am on fire, and it’s because those are my people. And the reasons those are my people is because we have the same values.
And so I was going to read you my son, the core values that he has at his school, but the truth is, it’s better for me to just kind of tell you what our core values are as a company, and me personally, right? My team is aligned around this, and our customers are aligned around this. And whenever we have customers, or members, or anybody that we serve that doesn’t have these values, it drains me more. And it’s a conflict with what we do.
It doesn’t mean that sometimes we don’t have to serve that customer. If we have a coaching student that doesn’t have these values, sometimes they get in and, you know, we just know that that’s going to be more difficult to deal with, or we talk to them about, you know, how we feel, honestly, because it’s important.
And the reason I’m telling you this lesson is because if you are not doing this right now, you need to, you need to. Now, I’m not saying before we had our values published, I keep pointing out to, for those of you that are watching the video, pointing out to our lobby here is, you know, it’s only been a year or so since we’ve had them printed on a sign and had it mounted on the wall out there. It doesn’t mean that I never had values, right?
I mean, if you don’t have them published, it doesn’t mean you have no values. But going through the exercise and really thinking about what is important to you, what are you trying to accomplish in life, what are the things that you care most about in life and business and who you work with? And the process all started about 18 months ago or so. We went through an EOS implementation with Gary Harper, who’s a good friend of mine, and Susan Harper. And a part of that process, if you read the book, “Traction,” is determining what your values are, right? And so it really caused me to kind of sit down, and I know what I care about, I know what I’m passionate about, but the exercise caused me to really think about as I’m building the goals for my company, and my business, and my life, what matters to me? What do I want to accomplish and why do I want to accomplish that? How can I serve other people? Kind of came back down to core values.
And so for us sitting down and coming up with a huge list and then saying, “Well, that one is kid of similar to that one, let’s combine them and let’s flush it out a little bit as to what that means.” So I’ll tell you my core values. I’m going to start to go over those and explain to you a little bit more about why these matter. So our first one, we have published five core values, and some of these were kind of consult. We had like 8 or 10 that we felt passionately about, we kind of consolidated them. The first one is giving and caring. And so I’m in business, but if you don’t give a damn about who you’re working with, you don’t care about other people, it’s a shallow goal, it’s a shallow goal.
What I’ve realized over the years is when I first started my business, it was about money, like, we had to make money. I lost my job, my wife had quit her job to have our son, and we were just burning through savings, trying to get our business started. So we were kind of in survival mode. We had to build our business up and money was the number one priority. And it’s not that we didn’t care about people then, but that was just wasn’t top of mind, like, I’m trying to get this going. So you might be at that stage where you’re starting.
But the truth is as we learned early on, and obviously, you shouldn’t have this ingrained in who you are as a person if this matters to you. It may not just have presented itself exactly in this way yet, but we always cared about people. Like I realized right up front as a real estate investor that if I’m not helping other people solve their problem, then I can’t win. If they can’t win, I can’t win. There’s no way for me to buy somebody’s house and win and they lost. It’s never happened.
I bought hundreds of hundreds of houses. And do they wish they could’ve gotten more? Yes. Do I wish I could have bought it for less? Yes, 100% of the time. Right? But we were satisfied, I cared about them, I put their needs first and was able to help them solve their problem. And in the process, by the way, I helped thousands more people solve their problems by giving them advice and counseling them or sharing my thoughts or ideas with them, and I never bought the house. So I think that give first mentality is really important in your business.
So the first one, giving and caring. So we give and we care. We actually care about people, right? That doesn’t have to be cliché, that can be how you live your life. And I can promise you, and I didn’t always understand this, but the more you give, the more you receive. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s so true. So giving and caring.
Let’s move on to the next one, goal-driven and motivated. So this is an important one, and this ties into the next one too, which is personal accountability. So I’ll come back to that.
It’s too easy in today’s world to fall into victim mode, right? If you’re not motivated to live a better life and not be average, or not be normal, or typical. Normal, god that’s a terrible word, isn’t it? Like average is a terrible word. Like if you’re just okay being like everybody else and it’s not that you’re better, it’s that you just aspire to make a bigger impact and do more.
We have so much opportunity all around us, like, that’s one of the biggest challenges that I have in life in business right now is I have so much opportunity around me that it’s hard to say no sometimes, right? And I’m no different than you. I don’t care who you are right now. You have more opportunity around you than you know what to do with. The problem is that you might not identify it yet.
I saw this quote yesterday, it was on one of our FlipNerd images. And I don’t have it in front of me right now, but it effectively referenced that if you don’t realize how much opportunity is around you, you just might not have your eyes open yet, right? So there’s opportunity everywhere.
I was talking about the optimist versus the pessimist. The pessimist sees the problem, the optimist sees the opportunity in the problems to solve those things. And so goal-driven and motivated is very important. If people are just trying to get by, and they think that’s as good as it gets, and they don’t try or aspire for anything more than I struggle with that.
As an entrepreneur, I’ve worked very, very hard to get where I’m at. I still work hard. We take huge risks sometimes. As entrepreneurs, some of the most successful people I know, they tend to just go all in. Like, I’ll risk way more than I should or I would than the average person would, right? And I don’t perceive it as risk. I perceive it as a risk to not push hard and take those risks. The risk of not doing it is a bigger risk to me and that’s because I’m motivated and inspired to leave a bigger impact and do more for society and those around me.
The third one of our core values, personal accountability. Again, back to the victimhood, everybody in America is a victim these days. And that seems to be the new normal is somebody owes me something, and I hate it. As a father of a 12-year-old, we don’t deal with that, but we try to instill those things in our son of being personally accountable.
And the fact is, is the first foundational value that he had when I was reading this to him is they call it responsibility. I say personal accountability, and they further describe it as take responsibility for your own life. No one will ever be as concerned about your success as you. That sums it up. That’s exactly right. That is personal accountability.
So I will tell you that nobody in life owes you anything just because . . . it doesn’t matter where you were born at, it doesn’t matter the color of your skin, it doesn’t matter how much money your parents had, 0 or $1 billion, that doesn’t matter. Nobody owes you anything. You are responsible for determining your destiny, right? And that seems to be forgotten too often these days, and I hate it.
Now, again, back to why I was so inspired, and I’ll come back to . . . well, let me just kind of tell you the next two goals before I jump into that. The next one is honesty and integrity. You should do everything you can. You should always be honest, and you should have a high level of integrity, like, surprise people with how honest and how much integrity you have in your business, that you’ll go above and beyond to make sure that nobody ever questions your integrity, out of your way. Be the person that nobody ever questions, “I don’t know about that guy.” There’s way too many of them in this industry, a ton of them. It’s bad. They give our industry a bad name, they give you and me a bad name sometimes, right? Be different. Don’t be that person.
And then the last one is loyalty. So loyalty goes a long way. Many of these are tied together, right? But be loyal, be loyal to your friends, be loyal to your customer, be loyal to those around you, and you’ll get it back 10 fold.
So, again, our core values, giving and caring, goal-driven and motivated, personal responsibility, honesty and integrity, and loyalty. And I won’t belabor the point that a lot of these things were also mentioned in my son’s foundational values. My wife and I got so pumped yesterday for his new school. We already have kind of fallen in love with the school. I think it’s going to be a great fit for my son. But when we saw this printed, and we were able to talk to him about what each of these things mean, and we just kind of discussed it as a family, got me super inspired for him, got me super inspired for humanity because, you know, with a lot of kids these days, like, you feel like they are ungrateful for what they have or ungrateful for the opportunities they have.
So got me inspired for him at school. It got me thinking about myself and my business and how these core values are just what my core values are said another way. And then kind of bringing it back, made me think about what we do at Investor Fuel. And last week why I was so energized it’s because the people that I’ve surrounded myself with, the people that when we talk to them about joining Investor Fuel, we talk about these things, we give first, we care about other people. We’re all hard workers. You can’t be doing 50 deals or more a year and not believe in personal responsibility because nobody gave you that, right? There might be a few exceptions, but for the most part, we’re talking to people that worked really hard to get there, and they had to do it with other people.
And so that’s why it’s such a good fit. And, you know, we have our coaching program too, our FlipNerd coaching program. I gel really well with people that meet these values. Now, sometimes we have people that come into our program that aren’t willing to work as hard and don’t take personal accountability, and they leave the program and say, “Well, this question was never answered for me.” It’s like you never asked it. I don’t see that anywhere.
And so sometimes we deal with people that feel like just because they write a check that everything is easy. I make a decision to do it, therefore it’s easy. It’s no different than buying a membership at the gym just because you have it on your key chain, doesn’t guarantee you anything. You got to do the work, right?
So if you have not defined your core values, I’d encourage you read the book “Traction,” you do a little research, there’s a number of ways to define that. But just think back or think about and start to kind of take some notes about the things that matter to you most.
And if you could describe that in one word, what that would be? What does that word? It kind of forces you to do some internal thinking, and also in your business, it’s going to cause you to do some external thinking. Who do I want to work with? Right?
So anyway, it’s top of mind. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on that when I started to read my son’s core values, just made me think about how important that is. And don’t just put it on your wall. I said we’ve got it on our wall out here. We believe it. We actually spent a fair bit of time bantering around. And one other thing that I’ll share with you as a business owner, in the past, I’ve defined these things and I tell somebody to put it on a sign and put it on the wall and it came from me.
But as a business owner, you know, when we went through this process, I did it with my entire team. We talked about these words. These are the people that fight for me and I fight for them every day. And we work together, and this really had to be a team effort. So if you’re running a small business, and you tend to define everything and push it upon the people that you work with, it’s not going to be as powerful if you develop that together. Now, it can be working with your spouse, or brother, or sister, or the other employees, include everybody in that because it’s a team effort.
So anyway, I can ramble on this subject for a long time. If you haven’t defined your core values yet, you should do it. It is a powerful exercise, and it’ll get you to start thinking about what you are willing to do and what you’re not willing to do, and who you want to work with and who you’re not willing to work with even more importantly.
So I hope you got some insights out of this. If you haven’t yet, I’d love if you share this video, think somebody needs to hear it. If you haven’t subscribed to our podcast yet, if you can, you can do that on Stitcher Radio, iTunes, of course, YouTube. Our YouTube channel actually gets a tremendous, I hardly ever talk about it, but we get a tremendous amount of action on our YouTube channel, the FlipNerd YouTube channel. And we’d love it if you subscribe to us anywhere where you might watch this or listen to that. Of course, you can listen to and watch everything on flipnerd.com. We have thousands of real estate investor training videos and interviews out there to help you. So appreciate your time. Have a great day. See you on the next episode.
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