Leadership in Real Estate Investing

Mike: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to the show. Really excited to have my buddy Stratton brown here today, young guy, we just found out how much older I actually am than him. We’re gonna be talking about leadership. He’s wise beyond his years. He’s built some amazing businesses. You can too. If you watch this show, welcome to real estate investing secrets, we’re all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live.

More fulfilling lives, but most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else to 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.

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. Hey Stratton. What’s going on?

Stratton: Not much, man. Thank you so much for having me on it means a lot.

[00:01:00] Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. I, I’m not going to mention the age thing anymore cause I’m already feeling like an old dude. Anyway. So, uh, anyway, you, you you’re wise beyond your years, excited to have you here and specifically, you know, we, a lot of people maybe don’t know this, but before every show, I always, we spent some time hanging out and talking a little bit.

And you specifically wanted to talk about leadership, which, uh, it shows your wisdom for a young guy that let’s talk about leadership. Something that might be sexier. Sometimes that’s not sexy if you do it right. You can get the sexy. Right. But, um, you know, anyway, I’m glad we’re gonna talk about that. It’s it’s great.

You built some amazing stuff. And I think a lot of us as real estate investors have a difficult time moving from solo preneur or husband and wife team or small team into a real business. And I think the main reason. The very things we’re gonna talk about today. The ability to lead and inspire people for sure is, is a huge skill.

And it’s probably a skill that a lot of people are losing. I think it’s been easy to kind [00:02:00] of lose that over the past few years where everybody’s working from home and losing jobs. And they’ll just a lot of chaos in the market. It’s been particularly hard to be a leader or to even learn those skills in the past couple of years.

So excited to talk about it today.

Stratton: I know it’s not sexy, but it’s the number one skill that’ll help you get to a billion dollars. And the reason I say that is you can’t scale without leadership, right? Like what Google did is they brought in all of the brightest minds. They led them very well and like, Hey, come work for us.

And then if I can get all the smartest people work for me, they’re going to make a lot of money. I’m gonna make a lot of my. Right. So like, I, I see it as a number one skill, like, and like the three pillars, as far as sales, marketing, leadership, that’s what you need to actually truly scale a company and then obviously ops and everything else.

But those leadership to me is number one.

Mike: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, Hey, before we dive into that topic a little bit more for folks that maybe aren’t familiar with yet, tell us a little bit about your background, how you, how how’d you even get into real estate investing. [00:03:00]

Stratton: So I played football at Fresno state.

Uh, it was all conference my senior year, like 17th in the country. And tackles you couldn’t can I cuss on here? Moderately? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I don’t. I just, you never know. So you couldn’t tell me shit, right? I was partying my ass off and I got, I was having a good time. And then I’m hearing all these statistics about all these people going broke when they go in the NFL.

And I was like, all right, strap. So we better educate ourselves on how to invest our money and we need to protect ourselves from ourselves because if we go the NFL, I do not see this partying. Changing right. If I’m going to be there, I want to have a good time. I’m still the hardest worker, but I still enjoy myself.

I think of Michael Jordan, as far as that goes. And so I’m reading all these books. I go to Seattle, I try out it AB absolutely nothing comes from it. I’m legitimately more broke than when I got there. Nothing really came from it. But then I was going all these meetups after. And I’m going to all these meetups.

And I met my first mentor, Alan folio. He just [00:04:00] got back on Instagram. I think it was the show up investor. The man changed my life and I went to one of these meetups and ours was like talking to him about stuff. And I was thinking about starting a home inspection business. And so I was like, yeah, like, do you need any help?

Like your home inspections? He was like, well, you know, he’s he was like, Three years ago, I was making 20 grand a year. Now I make $200,000 a month and he starts showing me pictures of checks and he was like an eye on 60 rentals. I want a substantially large portfolio in Indiana and I’m gonna buy. I was like, oh wow, that’s cool.

And that was the first time I’d ever heard anybody utter any of those words. Right. Right. And so, although

Mike: I’d never hired a single home inspector one time ever.

Stratton: And so I go home. Let’s start. Most of the home inspection business, do a mock inspection on a rental that I’m living in. Say, I hate it. And I call them up my bro, what do you do? And I ended up working for them. And from there, I ended up running a lot of his day-to-day handle a lot of his marketing [00:05:00] acquisitions.

Then eventually I broke off on my own. And so that’s how I got started into the real estate space.

Mike: That’s awesome, man. Um, it’s kinda funny how, you know, I’ve interviewed, we’ve done over 1500 podcasts on the flip nerd, uh, network here. And, uh, everybody has a different story. You know, there’s no like common story.

It’s very rare. I can, I can, I can’t even name the people, but a couple of times people got into real estate cause their, their parents or their father was a real estate investor or something as well. Like that’s super rare. And I think it’s maybe that’ll become more common. For like our kids and stuff like that, maybe.

Right. But I feel like it’s been so rare that I hear that usually it’s corporate America stories like yours, or you’re going on the path to play professional football, like lots of stuff. That’s just unusual, you know? And, uh, that’s what makes us exciting is there’s opportunity here for everybody, no matter where you came from.

Stratton: 100%. Yeah.

Mike: [00:06:00] Cool, man. So we’re gonna talk about leadership today and, um, you know, you and I were talking a little bit ahead of time about the difference between leadership. I mean, there’s people that are charismatic, right? There’s people that can stay in front of a room and talk to people, maybe talk from stage or whatever that doesn’t necessarily make them the best leader of people.

Like they might inspire people. But I, I, honestly, if I’m being open here, I was probably talking about myself a little bit more, like not saying that I’m curious magic or anything, but I’m more comfortable standing on stage talking to a room full of people that hopefully I inspire than I am managing a bunch of people because it’s just not my forte, but I value the importance of being able to lead people in an organization.

It’s the only way. It’s not a mistake. That for me, the biggest companies that I run now, I’m not the average versus I’m not managing most of them. I had to partner with somebody that could handle those operations and managing most of the people because that’s not my skillset, my house flipping business.

Although we did very well and made lots of money, flipping houses and all that stuff, [00:07:00] I really didn’t manage many people. It was just exactly teams under five people for the most part. Right. And, and a bunch of contractors and stuff like that. But, um, I really value that skill and I wish I had. At your age, my friend, uh, back to the age thing, but let’s talk about some of the components of leadership.

I know you wanted to talk a little bit about the ability to delegate, which actually is kind of interesting the way I just said, I kind of just positioned, um, leadership as the ability to manage people. The first one is delegate that to somebody else. Yeah.

Stratton: I mean, and you want to delegate for a couple of different reasons.

Like, when I just think about people psychologically, I want them to feel like they’re growing in our company, number one, and then I want to give them faith that they can solve problems on their own. And I’m going to give them all the tools that they need to. But then when we’re delegating, it’s really easy to, I don’t want to like cut people off at the knees for lack of better words to like, Hey, yeah, just go do this.

And then you rip it right back from like, oh, you messed it up. You [00:08:00] suck. Right toward, that’s not real leadership. And then again, it’s not leadership before it’s going to give it to them. Never verify it, never check it. And then your business was collapses because like, oh, I I’m a delegator. I’m a deli. I’m good at delegating.

All you do is just hand shit off and then nothing really gets done and nobody knows what to do. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: Talk about, um, from a delegation standpoint, like what do you delegate? Like we’ve, we’ve had, you know, I’ve had plenty of discussion people over the years. I’ve been through lots of consulting and stuff like that, about what you give away first for folks that are.

For the average person listening to this, they’re not going to say, Hey, I found one person and I’m going to give it all to them. Right. It’s usually the things that you aren’t good at and you don’t enjoy doing so. Can I talk a little bit about what do you delegate first and as the ultimate goal to truly delegate everything or is it to keep the things that you enjoy?

Um,

Stratton: I’d say the ultimate goal is being Warren Buffett. In my honest opinion, to where I invest in companies, instead of me having to do all the jobs, Warren buffet made [00:09:00] 60 million, the CEO of Coke made 6 million and that was just off of Coke stock. Right, right. Sorry. What was that question again?

Mike: What is this, like?

What do you, first thing, what do you delegate first? And then, you know, should, should everybody have that same goal as you? I mean, everybody has different goals, right? So you can’t see where somebody’s school should be, but is it to, I think that’s a personal thing. Right? Is, do you delegate everything ultimately or do you keep your hand in the pie somehow, but let’s talk about what to do first.

Like what do you delegate first for folks that are listening to this and they know they’re too busy. Um, they really should get some help with something like where do they go first?

Stratton: I’d say administrative stuff and stuff that doesn’t make your company money is a big thing. And then anything that feels heavy, like I love to a dude like his, uh, what is it?

He has like some energy audit. I encourage you to go to Trevor’s lead magnet and take that freaking energy audit. Cause it’s going to [00:10:00] tell you a lot of the things that you do. Good at things you don’t like doing things that are heavy because they’re just going to push it off and it’s not going to get done anyways.

What’s delegate those things and then administrative stuff, especially at the beginning. The only thing that really matters is revenue and driving. Just closing deals like wholesaling real estate is a sales organization. That is what matters the most. And that’s what we need to be completely fair. So for real estate investors, I’d tell you, like for sure let’s delegate all the administrative stuff you can at the beginning.

As soon as you close your first deal, I would hire on virtual assistants to do your cold calling and texting for you. There’s not really much to do as far as direct mail. You can hire someone to get them sent out, but you want to get that done immediately just to multiply your time. Because with a lot of cold calling and texting, we’re just buying back hours to get more feelers out there.

Right. And people don’t quite see it that way, but as we start doing that, then we can get more lead flow, multiply ourselves even more. You’re going to [00:11:00] train those people up again. We’re not just going to delegate it and say, Hey, go make cold calls. Because I did that when I first got started on my own, I was like, where the hell are my leads?

You guys have been calling for three weeks and I never listened to a single one of their phone calls. Right. But then you just, sometimes you don’t know, like I looked at their resume and said, virtual assistant who’s experienced in cold calling. I was like, oh, this is gonna be.

Mike: That is a problem. A lot of people that delegate is they assume, you know, I think, um, we talked a little bit, you and I talked a little bit here recently about integrators and visionaries and people that are kind of operations minded.

Like it’s easy for us to throw something over the fence to somebody and think that they’re going to figure it out. And, and I, and I have, you know, some almost real-time examples of people that, that work for me that it’s like, I didn’t realize it. It took a little too long to realize that it’s like, If I tell them exactly what to do, and we create a process for that.

And we go through it once. They’ll do it forever. But when I just said, Hey, I need you to create a process and kind of make sure all these things are happening. They’re not the right person to do that. And I think for a lot of [00:12:00] us as visionaries, more visionary type people, which I know you are too. It’s easy to just throw something over the fence and think.

They’ll figure it out, but even if they can there’s, if there’s a difference between people that can create a process and people that can follow a process, as well as what I’m saying. Right. And so there’s a lot more people that can follow a laid out process. Then they go create a process for that. Cause a lot of it just lives up here in our minds.

Right?

Stratton: Exactly. And so we were talking about this earlier and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done when we’re talking to people, hiring on new people, your business is a startup and you need to prep. The people here are hiring on. And if you tell them, Hey, we’re going to need you to create new things for us.

We’re going to have certain systems and I expect you to handle other things that are accordingly. You’re going to get a different type of energy than if you’re working at a regular corporate job. Everything’s built out. One of the great things you get to by working with us is you get to help build the company along with us.

And then that gives them a lot more buy-in in your company as well. Like when it’s part of their baby. That’s amazing. [00:13:00] And that’s how I somewhat. Of, I, Hey, you are going to be doing this and we’re letting us know in the interview when we’re talking to ’em, what’s this process looking like, have you built this out yet?

Instead of just taking that person and throwing them into the fire and like, Hey, what’s, what’s going on? Because people generally know if they want to and they can accomplish those things. Right.

Mike: And you need to hire for that too. Right? If you, you know, not taking anything away from a Jimmy John’s or subway sandwich maker, but you don’t have to figure it.

You don’t have to build processes. If you’re that person, you just have to be able to have somebody tell you I want lettuce on there and actually be able to do it, which isn’t that hard. That’s why those folks are making minimum wage. Right. So not saying anything away from anybody, but when you’re interviewing someone.

Um, don’t if you, if you interview them, right, and you use, we use predictive index to, uh, do a personality profile on folks. And we also do the cognitive test, which helps. Um, determined their ability to [00:14:00] solve problems on their own. Because as a business owner, you know, I don’t need anybody to bring me more problems.

I need somebody to help me solve them. So if you, if you hire people that aren’t good at solving problems, um, or building processes and they can, all they, all they can do is follow it. Then don’t expect them to figure out how to build a process or to solve problems outside of the box, because. They didn’t have that skillset.

And you knew it when you hired them. If you projected through the proper

Stratton: lens and it’s not, I mean, sometimes you either have to move them or you have to let them go and it’s nothing personal, but like, it’s the best for both of you. Like they’re doing something that they don’t enjoy in the first place.

And then there’s somewhat dragging down the overall vibe of everything else because they feel frustrated. It’s not clicking for them. It’s not in their unique ability. I love unique ability. 2.0, the book that’ll help you out of.

Mike: So let’s talk about, I know one of the things that you try to do is, uh, is make sure that people that are inside your business, um, have a lot of opportunity to make money, right?

And there’s some people that, that [00:15:00] own companies that say, well, you know, this is what this person should make. And we can talk about a raise in a year. Um, I know you do things a little bit differently, so kind of tell us what you do and let’s talk.

Stratton: And it goes into ways like last year, I think we paid out like $77,000 in one of our companies alone and just bonuses, just the different people.

This isn’t even like, including their base salaries and everything else of just random bonuses and different incentives. And then it’s communicating the vision with your people, because like you were talking about Mike, I dude, I don’t need any more money. Like, do I love money? Yes. But do I need any more?

No. And so like what opportunities can we create and what other revenue can we build with this company that we have our amazing gift of make money out of thin air as an entrepreneur. What else can we do to create these things? So now this person can absolutely change their life and their family’s lives moving forward.

And that’s when it comes to like visionary leadership, we really got to step in, show them the vision of bay. This is where we’re going. This is how it’s going to change your life. This is how [00:16:00] you’re going to make more money. And that’s how you’re going to have more opportunity. That’s the biggest thing.

That’s why I’m always. I’m harping on like sales and top line revenue growth so much just so we can, people will leave if they’re not growing. Right. Right. Like, you’ll lose the best. Because they were going to go somewhere away that you talked about in our interview, like bro, I was at this awesome startup.

We had awesome growth year over year. It was exciting. It was fun. I felt like I was growing. I felt like I was doing a lot. So we got to show people that’s actually happening and give them the opportunity in your company.

Mike: Can you talk a little bit about like from a bonus standpoint and putting, putting financial incentives in place, I’ve seen people really screw that up.

I probably screwed it up a few times myself. How do align that to the company’s goals? Like it’s easy in a wholesale business. It’s probably easier in a wholesale business. If you align people’s compensation. Well, when the company wins, whenever we do a deal, if you help get the deal, if you help generate the deal, like there’s ways to tie it to that, but not every business is quite that easy.

So maybe talk a little bit about, um, [00:17:00] how to align those financial incentives to, uh, the company wins or loses and making sure you’re not misaligned.

Stratton: So for one, I got Cielo gets a couple of percentage points of just profit share. I mean, Hey, if we are hitting these goals, you get paid and it for. I’m probably messing it up the same way you’d have.

Right. And if anything, like, did we hit this metric? It’s really managing by the KPIs and are we exceeding the KPIs? And then you can go into different types of you don’t have to pay out bonuses. Um, you can give them like free wifi or whatever it is, but are you hitting your KPIs and are you exceeding them?

Are we hunting better? Do we have less customer service? Issues are we generating the amount of leads we want to get? They’re actually good leads, but whatever things that’s tied to KPIs are the easiest way to set it. Because again, if it’s just like, Hey, good shit, here’s a bonus. Like there is no correlation that they can lean into that they know that need to [00:18:00] keep doing that action over and over again, to get what the.

I have found KPI as being the easiest way to just attach it to yeah.

Mike: And you’re right. We we’ve had this issue recently and one of my businesses is having KPIs at too high of a level where people couldn’t really impact that. Like there’s some people that come in and just like, I don’t have a role in that.

Like, it sounds like if the company wins, I win too, but what do I go do differently? And I think it’s really important to have the KPIs around things that everybody, each person in your company that’s bonus, like what they can control. Right. Otherwise, if they feel like they have no role in it, then. The bonus isn’t having its intended impact, which is to, which is basically to change behaviors.

Right.

Stratton: And I would say the hardest thing to do when it comes to like administrative roles, those are really hard, but then they get good bonuses just during Christmas time or on their birthday. Right? Like to where we still take care of our people in that way, because there isn’t a whole lot that they can pull a lever on.

To make sure the company does well. Like you, you do your job. The company does well, if you’re not doing [00:19:00] your job well, honestly, while you’re probably gone because the company is not doing well when those administrative roles

Mike: and not everybody’s incentive instead of my money to you and for guys like you and me, like sometimes we’re like what, you know, but those other people that care about other things, that’s important to kind of understand what makes people tick.

Like what. What gets them jazzed about being there. And sometimes it’s not money. Like for most sales oriented people it’s money. You mostly, but for a lot of other roles, it’s being a part of something it’s, you know, winning and other ways. Right. I feel in that impact or whatever. Talk a little about the importance of that in your team.

Stratton: So I looked up paid time off, honestly, by giving them paid time off, help paying for benefits, paying for wifi. Hey, you know what? I know it was a hard week. Here’s a couple hundred bucks go splurge. Like we know you’ve even had a lot happen. Like we pay for families funerals. Like we do a lot of different things that we, that at least they know we care about them.

And we use that [00:20:00] to where if we’re going to take care of them, then they’re going to take care of us still. Yeah, well that, that’s the way.

Mike: Yeah, no, that’s that, that is, and it’s, it’s hard to do as a business owner. So especially if you’re a business owner that back to the first thing we talked about is delegates.

Sometimes you want to push stuff down and then sometimes we lose sight of who’s even working for us sometimes in what, and certainly, you know, No, that you might know who they are, but you might not know what makes them tick or that something just happened in their family. And so that’s one of the challenges of the growing organization is to still have your finger on the pulse of who’s there.

Right. But that, that ultimately comes down to probably follow your part of your culture to get other leaders in the organization to kind of boil those things up because they recognize them. Right?

Stratton: Yeah. I don’t like, so I probably lead a team of six per company. Yeah, I don’t want to really lead anymore.

I’m a pretty strong personality too. I’m straightforward. And they get the way I talk to where other people might cry. Like when we’re having like a business to business conversation about what the fuck is going on here. Like, well, this happened, this happened, this happened. [00:21:00] And then they know exactly how to respond directly for me to understand that.

Okay, good. And then. Offset with whatever’s going on, but not with them, right? Yep. That one’s really hard making them tick. I found, I want to build really, really deep relationships. We do a lot of different one-on-ones if our company wasn’t a hundred percent virtual, we’d be doing like a lot more trips.

Right. I think that’s the biggest thing that, especially not all the investors have gone virtual is how do we get to know to make them tick? I just call my peoples sporadically. I started and I just started doing it more because it used to be like, whenever I’d call them, like some shit hit the fan. And I was like, what is going on here?

Right. So like now I, I just tried to answer. Yeah. They’re afraid to answer. It gives them anxiety, like, oh my God, why is he calling me? So now I just, I try and call people sporadically, like, Hey, what’s going on? How’s your dad doing? How are your kids doing? And just finding out whatever it is, right to where I want to get to know them personally.

And then we encourage everyone in our company if they are [00:22:00] leading a team and just talk to your people, the more that they know, we care, the more they’ll care we’ll know. And that’s like a football quote. Right. But the more we love them, the harder we can be on them. Like, I can use all of these different things, but you have to get to know them more to find out like what makes them tick.

That is the easiest way. And just random meetings. Again, sending them random gifts. We’re really big with gifts. What else? I just think talking to people is the easiest way and I’m good at people. I have like a certain tactic of like ad this is exactly how he found out what makes people tick. I made our, everyone in our company, like some of your goals, what are you trying to accomplish?

Like, what do you want to wear? We had a real on Facebook go viral because one of our girls down in Mexico, one of our department heads was like, well, really the only thing I really want. And just so I’d say, ask them what they want. Like, what do you want? Well, one thing I wanted to send my son. Okay, how much did it cost?

She was like 500 bucks a month. I was like, sweet. You got a $500 a month bonus started today. Like, it’s never going away. You use that for your kids [00:23:00] school, but a lot of times it’s just asking them what exactly they’re looking for, what they’re trying to achieve. And what’s. And obviously she’s an amazing aspect of our company.

Not everybody gets treated that way, but like I just asked her, like, what do you want, generally, we talked to other people. What, what do you want, what are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals? One of the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me, a dude in our company in the Philippines bought a Raptor, no lie.

I’ve seen pictures. He bought a Raptor, but that was what he wanted. I don’t know. But he got a Raptor, right. Helping those people, like we had to like send over letters saying that yes, we are employing him and everything else, but finding out whatever it is, like some people like video games, whatever those things are.

Mike: That’s cool. And I think in the process, people learn more about your style too, right? Like if you, if you’re not around, if you’re not that present and they don’t know that you have. That you’re a little intense on your management style maybe, right. Or that you’re like a little more in your face then they’re, they’re caught off guard by that.

But if they get [00:24:00] to know who you are and they’re like, just tolerate it, like, yeah. He’s, it’s, he’s all bark and no bite, you know, maybe like don’t, I mean,

Stratton: at least not right. Like they’re not worried about it. And they just know, okay, no, this is our conversation, but they know, again, the biggest thing I always want, all of our people know is that I love them.

Like, I love you. I want the best possible for you. I that’s why we’re doing this. We want the best possible for all of our clients. We want the best possible for all of our families. And we take the fact that you feed your family by working for us very seriously, and we want to help make sure you can create the best life possible.

Mike: Yeah, it’s tough, man. Cause I think these days there’s, um, you know, we’re, I was on your show recently. We were talking about parenting and all these things, and it’s kind of a weird time to be a parent. It’s a weird time to be anything right now. Like people are feel, I think everybody’s connected on social media, but nobody’s really connected.

And you know, it looks like we have thousands of friends, but really we go home. We feel like we don’t have any friends. I’m just this weird thing. Right. And I think a lot of [00:25:00] people have turned their. Work life into their life. Like from a friend standpoint, just that culture that you put out of, like where your second family, um, can carry a lot of weight for a lot of people, because a lot of people don’t have a very good first family, you know, or first family life, whatever.

So that culture is really important. And maybe share a little bit about, obviously you just talked about, you know, about caring about people, but what are some important parts of your culture that folks that are listening can learn from?

Stratton: Um, so I think core values are the only way. That you could truly scale a company when you, especially like when you get to companies with lots of employees, because your leadership is it’ll get diluted over time.

Right. And if you don’t have a certain set of values that everybody operates on, it’s really easy for things just to go straight. And so the easiest way I found a set culture is a set core values. So ours or strive for excellence care, 360 family fun. And that that’s what we operate on. And then. Hmm, but with that, it helps us build a culture [00:26:00] of doing all of those things over and over again.

And then consistently the culture piece of everybody like loving where they work. It is the random phone calls I’m telling you are massive or the little just gestures of, Hey, I know it’s been a hard week and all this is going on. Here’s somebody, Hey, go do this, go do that. Paying for funerals like that, at least lets them know that you love them and care.

But that’s all majority of people really want. Yeah. People leave managers, they don’t really leave pay.

Mike: Yeah. I agree with that. How do you, how do you, uh, I mean, it’s easy for people to have core values and. Get it on a printout, put it on the wall and have it kind of out there. How do you, especially with a virtual team, you know, how do you, and this, one of the things that we’ve struggled with, we have one of our businesses.

We have, you know, almost a hundred employees now, completely virtual. And so, um, there’s some things that we’ve started to do way more of, to kind of help build that culture and help spread our core values. [00:27:00] But talk a little about how you do that, especially in a virtual company, how do you continue to remind people and have them really absorb that is not just like.

Some guy that I worked for just said this, but I was, I was on Tik TOK looking at something else when he said it

Stratton: as stupid as this sounds. And I know, because I used to think core values were the dumbest thing ever. Right. Cause I grew up in sports and I was like, these aren’t core values as I got cool, whatever did we suck?

Right. Like to where, like they’re saying all these things, but then highlighting people when they show those things and like giving them spotlight, giving them praise. Is the easiest way. I’d tell you to do things like, so we have like a magician of the month that is just based on everyone else in the company and voting like where you awesome or not like, did you abide by everyone in our company and all of those core values, and then they can get paid extra with that too.

And I don’t care if they’re acting that way because they get a bonus. They’re still acting that way. So I got the result that we needed so that I [00:28:00] love that using that.

Mike: That’s cool. There’s somebody that I, uh, no, this was, this was, this is hard to do virtually, but they have this, uh, big like WWF belt that if they have, if they put out the call, if they basically they’ve got their culture, their core values, essentially, it’s actually Ryan, Ryan Stewman.

Okay, Ryan Stewman is, but, um, and, and their company, they have like their core values built basically. And if somebody exudes that, then they win for the week. And then that person has to identify somebody in the office and did a great job of living up to the company’s core values the next week. And then they have to pass it off.

So it’s kind of a cool, that’s a cool thing. That’s harder to do. Got to find a virtual WWF belt just doesn’t have the same. Right. What would we

Stratton: do? Yeah. Make them sign it on zoom and wear like a special magician hat or whatever. I don’t know something that’s cool, but I just think the highlight of them and then having other people internally.

Yeah,

Mike: that’s the cool [00:29:00] part because it forces other people to watch out for living up to that level. And it forces you to say, man, I want to win that. I want to win that sometime soon. Right. I’m going to do the things I need to do. So just the recognition, right? A lot of people just don’t feel recognized.

Um, these days I feel like people are just, a lot of people are just in a hole right now. You know,

Stratton: it’s a recognition is big and you got to do it by. Right. So you always say recognize in public reprimand in private and as stupid as this sounds as a rule, you don’t ever want to cuss anybody out in a meeting.

I got really like, I like have that, and I’m not saying cosmetic, like have that like intentional conversation behind closed doors, because again, you have egos. And again, I came from sports tore, nobody was safe, right? Like if you mess up on their coaches, just on your ass, like ripping you in front of you.

Right. But then the way you make them feel good as you re you reprimand them in private, but then you praise them in private and you praise them in public. Right. So you say, Hey, [00:30:00] great job. You killed it right here. Amazing job. And then you in front of the team you’d Hey, great job right here. We know that.

’cause you never know what people want more. Right? Do they want the recognition of overall everybody else where they want the recognition from the leader? Let’s do both. You can never tell people good job enough. You can never tell people that you love them enough. You can never tell people you care about them enough.

’cause thinking about all the things we have to say over and over and over again in order for it to stick. Right. Because majority of the time, they’re just drown it out, thinking about the tech talk or whatever else. Like we got to hammer these. This is like, what goes into our vision of your company?

You’re just saying the same shit over and over again. I Gary, these Instagram account.

Mike: Um, cool, man. So let’s talk a little bit about, uh, call magician. So I know you run a service for, um, folks that want kind of done for you. Cold calling. Tell us a little bit more. I, I, I won’t do as good of a job talking about it as you on my friends. So tell us a bit more about how you help real estate investors.

Stratton: So, and the reason I started this thing is because I met a [00:31:00] guy and he screwed me up, reflects this grant. Like didn’t give us any KPIs and I just trusted him. Right. And so. What would we set out to create was the number one cold calling in my virtual assistant company in the real estate space. And so all of our sales coaches internally are trained by Steve Trang.

I don’t know anybody else who pays. Steve-O a lot of money just to coach our coaches. So our people are amazing on the phone. That’s number one, and then daily reports. We can help them with skip trace. We help them in absolutely every aspect. And then we are in seven different countries at this point. And so we source people who are the best around the world.

That that is our goal. We want them to deliver quality leads. We want them to be the best. And then if anybody ever goes three days without a lead, we credit them a day. That’s how serious we take it. Like, no, we want you to get quality leads. And if you don’t get a lead in three days, like, well, Hey, next day is free.

Right. We prepare for it. That’s how committed we are to delivering a [00:32:00] result to help you grow your company.

Mike: That’s awesome. So you said cold calling. And do you, do you, um, as a service, you provide administrative VA’s as well, or the

Stratton: administrative we provide administrative VA’s VA’s to help you with texting days to help you with buyers and cold calling, we can.

We can help the whole shop pretty much. We started off with cold calling and then now we’re opening up the other ones too, where you might as well help you guys out with everything in your business, because I’ve seen people not striving for excellence in the space. Let’s just say that. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: That’s awesome, man.

Yeah, we have one of our companies. I think, you know, we have 75 virtual assistants, like we’ve, I’ve been using virtual assistants for a long time. Uh, my business partner, Jason Lewis uses. Like the king of VAs, at least in his business out outsourcing stuff. And so we believe in it really, it is. It’s just, it’s a way, like if you, I don’t think, I think all of us want to build big businesses, but we don’t necessarily want to have big organizations.

Right. And not necessarily [00:33:00] here. And it’s hard to hire people really around the world right now. I mean, I know even virtual staff is getting quite a bit harder, but certainly in America right now, it’s hard to find good people. Um, and it’s even the fine, not great people. Sometimes you still have to pay more than what they’re probably worth, but that’s what the market commands right now.

And so for those that aspire to have, you know, not necessarily have a huge office with a ton of people in it. Um, it’s great. And it’s honestly, it’s even for high level talent. Like sometimes if you’re in, like I’m in Dallas, Texas, like it might be a really hard for me to hire a C-level person here. Um, They’re easier to find in Omaha, Nebraska, and then their physical job opportunities are just limited there.

But if you’re willing to hire them and allow them to work virtually you can find talent anywhere. Right? If you, if you hear it on the walls of geography, it doesn’t matter where they’re at.

Stratton: I think, I mean, you can find amazing virtual talent. Better than in the United States. So I’ll use two examples.

First off, the [00:34:00] girl who runs our company, who’s our COO managed over a thousand people at a lower cup before. COVID, it’s gonna take me a lot of, it’s going to take me a lot of cash to find that over here, right? The bang for the buck. And she is absolutely amazing. You guys will probably, if you work with us, her name’s Glen, I’m sure you’ll talk to her at a point in time.

And then another one of our sales coaches who’s in Egypt has a master’s degree in bioengineering. Again, I can’t hire people that talented and for a lot of what we’re doing, you don’t need to have, it could all be virtual. I got majority of people I know in the space are moving to virtual. If they’re not 100% virtual, the only thing that isn’t is sales.

Yeah. Yeah. Like in all reality, like everything else can be.

Offshore.

Mike: Yeah. And for real estate investors, the truth is, is a massive part of our business. Especially if you’ve been around for a while, a lot of it’s administrative, right? There’s so many administrative tasks, um, or calls that are, or, or tasks that are call based or these, that [00:35:00] SMS, those can be done from anywhere.

You don’t have to. It’s not like those folks have to be anywhere in particular. Right? Exactly. If folks want to learn more about your VA service call magicians, where do they go?

Stratton: Go to call magicians.com. Okay. Say you found out about us from FlipNerd

and that that’s the place to go. You can set up a call. Cool, man, that’d be the easiest place to go. Awesome.

Mike: Good stuff. Any, anything else, uh, that we didn’t touch on today in terms of leadership or anything else that we missed? I mean, we could probably have another hold on the show now, but anything that we kind of talked about that we didn’t cover or that we should have covered, but then

Stratton: when I say I love you.

They like truly like, love and care about your people more as far as your customers and your employees. And I promise you everything will go better.

Mike: That’s awesome. That’s good stuff, man. Appreciate you being here.

Stratton: Oh yeah. Thanks for having me on Instagram at strata. Daddy, daddy, Strat [00:36:00] daddy, let me write that

Mike: down.

Cool man. Well, I really appreciate you being here, sharing some great insights on leadership today. And folks, if you’re looking for a virtual assistants, I mean, they can change your life because a lot of us, you know, you can obviously save money on the cost of the tasks. A lot of us as real estate investors are frugal, or we’re trying to find ways to save money for sure.

But most importantly, you can really magnify your effort by scaling up and having some folks do a bunch of tasks that quite Frank. Any of you listening to this call probably don’t want to do so. Uh, you should focus on what you’re good at and outsource the rest for sure. So check out, call magicians for sure.

To let them know if the parents aren’t ya Stratton. Thanks again, my friend.

Stratton: Alright, thanks so much for having me on my yep. And

Mike: everybody. Thanks for following along here. We’re about eight and a half years into the FlipNerd, uh, podcasts here for, for those of you that are listening to it, you know, we’ve been a little loose on putting out consistent shows that is about to change.

We’ve got some amazing things going on, so stay tuned. What we’re about to do at flipper. And of course, we also have the investor fuel show where [00:37:00] I interview members of my mastermind. That one is actually pretty active. So we’ve got a lot of different shows that are running right now, and many more that are coming.

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