Joe:   What's up, everybody? Joe here. Have you ever been just a little frustrated that you're stuck at some kind of level in your wholesaling business, whether it's houses or land, and you're like, man, I'm doing all the right stuff. I'm sending the marketing. I'm doing them talking to sellers, I'm making offers, but you just can't get past 1 or 2 deals a month. Maybe you're capped at, you know, ten, 20 grand a month, which is awesome. I mean, it used to when you were first getting started, like, man, if I could just make five grand while you're doing that, but you're stuck and you just can't break past this, like, invisible barrier. Well, in this podcast, we're going to be interviewing a friend of mine, Mike Hambright from Investor Fuel. And we're going to be talking about how to install operating systems in your business. That can literally triple. And I can say that very confidently, because I've seen this in my own business. I've seen Mike do this in his, you can literally triple your leads, your revenue, your profits by just implementing real, simple systems. We're going to be talking about that on this podcast. So I'm glad you're here. Listen, if you're watching this right now on YouTube, do me a huge, huge favor. Comment down below. If you've got just say hi, tell me where you're from. If you've got any questions, type them down below. I like to see what you're thinking and see what you're feeling about this type of content and topics and stuff like that. Say hi, tell us where you're from. Give us a thumbs up too if you like this video. Okay, one more thing too. I want to let you know that as I'm recording this right now, I am going to be doing a challenge next week. And even if you're watching this later, you can still go here to get some information about it, maybe see the replays of it. But we're going to be going out and making 100 offers, and I'm going to be doing this with you. I'm not just teaching this and showing you what to do and how to do it. I'm going to be making 100 offers next week. This is a five day challenge. It's completely free. And yeah, this is one way to triple your business. Just start making more offer. So go to Joe mccall.com/offers right now starting next week. Even if you're watching this later this is going to change your life. This is going because like if you're not making offers you're not making money. And it's the I say this all the time. Your speed income in this business is directly proportional to the number of offers that you make. And I'm sure we'll talk about that with Mike today. But this is what it's all about. And some of you are like, okay, Joe. Yeah, I don't want to triple this. I just want to do my first deal. Well, this is how you do it. Go to Joe mccall.com/offers. It's completely free. And you're going to join me on this crazy challenge of making 100 offers in one week. You don't have to talk to sellers. We're not going to be spending a ton of money on PPC or cold calling or bunch of direct mail. We're just keeping it really, really simple. Anybody can do this and it's going to be a lot of fun. I hope to see you there. Are you ready to bring Mike on, Mike Hambright. How are you doing Mike?

Mike:   Good to see you Joe. Always good to see you, buddy.

Joe:   Good to see you too. Mike from Investor Fuel, we go way back. I remember watching you on the podcast FlipNerd. Yeah. And, use do you still do that podcast?

Mike:   So it's evolved just like, you know, it's evolved, right. To where we had a several different podcasts for a while. We were doing REI Classroom and some different things. You and I are very similar in the, in the sense that we're like casting a lot of lines in the water over the years. Right. So but we primarily focus on the Investor Fuel podcast these days. So a few years back, I kind of put my efforts into interviewing members of my mastermind under the Investor Angle podcast, and even that's gotten a little bit inconsistent. But yeah, I mean, you know, this when I started the FlipNerd podcast, you and I met probably shortly thereafter after that. And that was I think it's like 12 years ago. I had to go back and do the math.

Joe:   We're getting started. Yeah, I started my podcast in 2011. You started yours shortly after 2012.

Mike:   Yeah, because I remember and I've said this many times, like when I start, you know, there's hundreds of, real estate podcasts now, maybe thousands, I don't know, but when I started it, I don't know that you and I. I don't know that I knew you. Maybe I knew of you, but I didn't know you. Because back then, there wasn't. There weren't tools like this. There really wasn't one. We're going to, like, date ourselves here, right? But there wasn't really that active with social media at all. And so podcasting was kind of new, but there were only six podcasts, prior to me starting mine. And you were one of them.

Joe:   Five, six, seven of them.

Mike:   Yeah. Jason Hartman, I think even back then had like 15 podcasters and then but anyway, there weren't that many and it's kind of grown from there.

Joe:   Do you remember when you started your podcast, were you worried that you kind of missed the wave? That was it was too late.

Mike:   I yeah, I've thought that over time, like as it's still kind of meaningful. But you know, the way that I've always done my podcast is like, I, I know there's benefit from doing it, from having content out there. Obviously we're doing that right now. But I, I guess kind of early on I said, look, I'm going to just hang out with this guests and get to know them better. Like I'm going to network in public, basically. And so whatever happens, happens. But my goal is really just to spend time with Joe today and get to know him better, you know.

Joe:   Yeah. So what you remember in 2011 thinking, man, that I missed the podcasting boat, you know? Yeah, I thought podcasts were kind of dead and I was too late to it. But anyway, glad you're here, Mike. I want to talk about tripling people's businesses. Tell us real quickly about your story. You came, you had a huge business and you kind of shuttered it down. So and then you grew back up again. Talk about that a little bit.

Mike:   Yeah. Well, I so I started, I basically I'm, refer myself as a corporate refugee. So I did a bunch of stuff down the corporate path and kind of got fired from my dream job and then went to another company that was a startup that was flying high. And then 18 months after I was there, they filed for bankruptcy. And it was just this kind of realization of like, I need to take my destiny, my financial future, into my own hands. And at the time, my wife had, left her job to have my son, who just turned 17. But at the time, he at the time that I left my last corporate job, he was two months old. And shortly thereafter I got into real estate investing. So at the time I went from like two people that had good kind of corporate jobs, making good money and no real responsibilities to a wife that quit her job as a baby. And then I lost my job and we had no income. So I was like, what are we going to do here? And I'd always been interested in real estate investing and just had never done anything about it. I mean, I went to some bootcamps and REIA clubs locally in Dallas, some of the Dallas market and things like that, but it always had an excuse. I didn't have time or I didn't have money, but I, I always had an excuse. Right. And then there came a point. I was like, look, I got to do something. We have to make this work. And for me, that was summer 2008 when I got started in, real estate investing. And we kind of went we went big from day one. I mean, I guess part of it was, you know, I've said in the past kind of tongue in cheek, that my wife and I met in grad school. We went to a top 20 MBA program when I was in corporate America. They sent me to some Ivy League schools, some fancy education. I was like, I don't need any of that, and you don't. However, I think that it allowed me to think bigger from the beginning is like not just being around bigger organizations. Probably helped us from the beginning because from day one, we got an office, we had an admin. We kind of got heavy on marketing pretty quickly. When.

Joe:   You started, you joined a franchise, didn't you, at the time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was that right out of the gate you started? It was.

Mike:   After trying to figure it out for a few months, and we just like we were. Yeah, we didn't know. Right? We like contacting realtors and looking at houses on the MLS. We were primarily looking at stuff to keep as rentals, but in hindsight, like we needed today money. Not, as you know, rentals, no matter what anybody thinks. I mean they don't cashflow that well. Even if you say you want to have 2 or $300 a month and cash flow, I mean, I can tell you this, I have a lot of net worth on paper for my rentals. But like, I got you know, I've gone through two make readies in the past month that I don't even remember. One of them was like 40 grand, like a turnover from a rental. Right. And so it's like 200 bucks a month that it's your cash flow over like the next ten years. But fortunately, truthfully, on that rental, we had the same tenants for like ten years. And so it just turns that after ten years it needs a major rehab.

Joe:   Yeah. I used to say, all the time you can't eat equities.

Mike:   That's right. Right. Yeah. It's you know like and the truth is I have we have a lot of net worth in our rental. Most of my rentals we bought from. Oh not most of them. I have a, about 40 rentals in Dallas and 22,009 to 2000, 12 or 13. And so, I mean, I bought them with a mentor, pretty good guy that has thousands of rentals, actually, that basically said, don't ever count on appreciation. It's all about cash flow. And the reality is, I'm here to tell you 15, 16 years later that they've never cash flowed that well. But the, appreciation has been insane. But we've never you know, I know this isn't what you asked me, but we've never refinance. We've got a lot of equity, you know, like, in hindsight, should I refinance some at 3.5%? Like, maybe. But it's nice having, you know, eight figures and net worth from rentals. And of course, again, it's all on paper right now, but that's the retired part of the retirement planning.

Joe:   We have a mutual friend who's, one of his favorite sayings is refi til you die. Yeah, and I can't stand that. Yeah, yeah. I think it was a big mistake. So I would never ask him about that because he would he would beat me down in that argument and win it every time. Because you can't argue against the spreadsheet. You know, the numbers don't make sense. But it's yeah, that's okay. That's not what we're talking about. You got into a franchise back then, and I'm sure you probably learned a lot of what you're doing now, today, from the systems and the processes that you were forced to kind of join into at that time. Did that? Yeah. That franchise, did it help you influence you at all with that kind of process and system?

Mike:   Well, without that, we could have we could have a whole, conversation on that. But yeah, I would say that I thought I was buying into a business in a box, but the box was fairly empty. I mean, so I would say no, I mean, I think our corporate backgrounds and having a wife that's super detail oriented very much. Well, you know, what I call an implementer or an integrator is kind of what forced us to realize that we needed to have people, processes and systems in place.

Joe:   So it's really it's really your wife who's behind all this?

Mike:   Yeah. She used to refer. And, you know, my wife Lindsey, she used to refer to herself as, the woman behind the curtain. And then and started to change it to, the puppet master. And I was like, wait a minute, what does that make me? Yeah. But no, I think she's largely out of the business, but she's still involved. In fact, she's here in the office today. But, you know, I think just her influence on me of like, at some point when you work with your spouse and you're not the detail or you don't want. They are. It's like it's going to you're going to keep bumping heads unless you figure out how to like, not throw all my crap over to the fence for her to solve my problems. And so I've just gotten better at it over the years because I had to if I wanted to stay married, you know?

Joe:   Good for you. Wow. Good for you. Yeah. All right. So you grew a large business. You got out of that franchise, you kept on growing, and you've done a lot of different things since then. But yeah, talk about what are these processes that you put into place that you in your own business. Let's take somebody let's say we're talking right now, Mike, to somebody who's, you know, maybe does want to deal a month, 1 or 2 deals a month, but they want to scale and they're getting frustrated. That seems like it's too hard or they're just hitting their head against a brick wall. Yeah. What they what is systems. How can that help them? Does that make sense?

Mike:   Well yeah I think, you know, there's a few things here. I'll start with this. Very few people like a lot of people that get into real estate. As you know, Joe, we were the same thing. We wanted freedom of some level. Usually early on we thought it was financial freedom, which I think once you hit that level and you're like, I'm doing well enough to never have to go back to work in corporate America again. And we probably both have said some variation of there never taken me back. I'm unemployable, or maybe even they can't afford me or whatever. Right? Like you're never going back. You know, you get to a point where you realize what you really want is time, freedom. You want to control your life. Right? And I think that there's a lot of folks that, are in this business that are doing better than they were when they worked for somebody else. So like when they had a W2 job, but they're very much stuck in a situation where they have a job, like they might work for themselves, but it's a job too, where if you wanted to take a vacation, the business is going to suffer. God forbid you have some of your family get sick, your business is going to suffer. And so I think that that's this kind of chasm of like people that have are self-employed in this business. And they might the business card might say they're the CEO or they might refer to themselves as the owner, but they're also the operator. Right. And I think, that's where a lot of real estate investors get stuck is they have a good business. They're still hustling. And as our buddy Tom Krol likes to say, hustle should be a season, not a lifestyle. Right. And I think a lot of people are stuck in that hustle where if they don't go work hard today, they're not going to make money today. And so then you realize I said, like, okay, I need people, processes and systems to get me to that next level. And then of course, you have the whole thing of like, well, is it the chicken and egg? Like, do I make enough money and then go hire somebody? Or if I don't go hire people to help with this, can I even get to where my goals are? And so it's a tough thing, right? You got to be willing to invest in your business. And I'm guilty of for many years saying I once I get to a point and I can afford to hire somebody for that role, then I'll do it. But the reality is, is you probably never will get there unless you find somebody to do it. Because when you're self-employed, the problem is, is none of us are good at everything. And as a small business, you're kind of if you stay small, you're forced to get good at everything. But you, you can fool yourself all you want. You're not as good as you think you are at multitasking, and there's a bunch of stuff you're doing in the business that you're just not good at. And the reason you're doing it is you're too cheap to hire somebody else to do it, right? Yeah. I mean, the one year or 15 people, you have an org chart that says, do you need us? Do you have a sales and marketing department? You have a finance and accounting department, you have a business operations arm. You have H.R. You still have all those. It's just that your name is on every one of those seats on the org chart.

Joe:   Yeah. The CEO stands for Chief Everything Officer. Yeah. And it's true. Like what got you here won't get you there. Yeah there's different. There's everybody has a different there. Right. For me I remember being scared to death to hire a virtual assistant to do my marketing. Right. I read the four hour workweek. I said, all right, I'm going to try it. But I didn't want to hire somebody from another country. I hired somebody from Indiana, and that was amazing.

Mike:   That's kind of another country. I'm the Texan. Everything I do outside of Texas is international for me.

Joe:   So, you know, I will say this real quick off script here. If we ever had a civil war in the United States, I am driving nonstop for one way to Texas, and I'm moving to Texas. Yeah, and I'm going to live there. Okay. Anyway. And I hope we don't. God, I hope we don't that well.

Mike:   You know, you and our buddies, but, you know, we bought a bunch of land and we just kind of built a ranch in East Texas. So.

Joe:   Yeah. And I know where you live it. Oh, okay. But anyway, I remember, okay, I was scared to death to hire a virtual assistant, and I did it. It changed everything for me. And then fast forward about, I don't know, maybe eight years. No. Fast forward six years. My business has really grown. But I was hitting that that ceiling. And then, somebody told me you need to hire a local based executive assistant and us based, like, why? And that freaked me out because that was going to be 3 or 4 times more expensive than a virtual assistant in the Philippines. And by this time, I had 3 or 4 virtual assistants from the Philippines. That guy is friend of mine said, do this. And so I did. And you know what? My business, my productivity, my revenue tripled after hiring a US based assistant. And she just forced me or helped me systemize what I was doing, take what I wasn't good at, and did it herself or found somebody else to do it. But she managed that stuff and I was able to. Focus on what I'm good at. So where does this how does this start? You know, I don't. Everybody's in a different place. But like, where do you start with this kind of stuff if you want to scale?

Mike:   I think, and the other thing that probably happened for you is that person in our businesses, there tend to be a lot of administrative burden type tasks, right? A lot of paperwork. I mean, even though there were there's been this like tech boom, like there's still stuff that's really paper heavy or in our business, closing, closing dockside and closing docks, all those things. And you know that person, if they can free up your time to be a notary and notarize stuff for you. So you want to go somewhere to get it notarized, and you don't have to, like, go chase people as much. You're like, I'm gonna have somebody else go chase them. You essentially, you know, essentially, you've bought back your time. Like the goal is as you build a more profitable business. And again, it's a chicken and egg situation. Like what comes first, the property people. It has to be the people. You have to be willing to invest in that. But you're basically saying like, let's say that you're used to making $100,000 a year and you're like, in order for me to get to 200,000, I really need to make 400,000 and spend another 200,000 hiring people to do my job. So we're making more money. But I'm using part of my, my, I just refer to your profits are like dry powder, right? Like I'm going to use that to go buy back my time and have people do the stuff that I shouldn't be doing and I'm not very good at. Or maybe you're good at it, but you hate it, or maybe you're terrible at it and you also hate it, you know?

Joe:   Well, this reminds me too, of why when I did this, it forced me to get out of the way. Because, okay, now I got this lady is working for. And she's still working for me today. Her name is Dana. She's awesome. She was in Saint Louis at the time. Now she lives in Florida. But, I remember like, oh my gosh, what am I going to have her do? But it forced me to really just and it was very crude. It was elementary, but I saw it. All right. So for example, in a deal, these are all the things I have to do. And I don't have to do this and this and this and this and this. Shortly after this, I overheard a friend of mine in a similar in a in an office space next to where I was. He said, let's make a list of everything we have to do and then ask ourselves a real simple question how do we do none of this? And that was his process of creating systems. List everything you have to do and say, how can I do none of this? How can I get somebody else to do this all for me? Yeah. So for me, I started asking those bigger and better questions, which helped a lot with this whole process. Would you agree with that?

Mike:   Yeah, for sure. I think it's got to be, you know, I think, our buddy Russell Brunson's kind of talk about the big domino, like, what's I have all these issues to do and like. And I just actually saw that you've probably seen this video or a variant of it before, the, the other day where this guy had, like a 100 pound dominoes, basically just like a big piece of cement. And they had a bunch of other dominoes, they're all smaller. And then the smallest one, he literally used tweezers and kind of put this domino down, and it knocked over a little bit bigger one a little bit. They're going in there like ten of them. And it's like this little domino. They had to use tweezers by the fact that I put this structure in place. And I knocked that down and knocked down all my other problems essentially right out. And so it's the same thing. It's like, who can I hire? And, you know, we're kind of dropping names and books and stuff. Here is the book who not how. It's like oil. What do I hire that's gonna go figure this all out it and stuff that you're gonna be able to just walk away. You got to put some, you have to help them kind of get ramped up. But a lot of times we are one person away from transformation in our business, and we just have to find out who that person is or. And, you know.

Joe:   What really helped me too at the same time was thinking, because I was overwhelmed, thinking I had to create all these processes myself and I had to write everything down, do all this training and all that. But when I figured out, you know what, I could hire somebody to create the processes and systems for me, right? And I can hire somebody that can manage the people that are doing it. For me, that was game changer for me. Yeah. And I didn't have to figure it out. I just I said, listen, this is what I'm trying to do. This is kind of how I do it. I want you to document this and create the processes and whatever you can do or don't want to do, hire somebody else to do it for you. And so the way we kind of do it is we have virtual assistants now that do the, the manual data entry work. And I have my main executive assistants, I have two of them that manage the team. It is so much better that way.

Mike:   Yeah. Yeah. I think that's one of the realizations that I've had is I have a couple of large organizations now. One of them, we've got like 70 employees and but I'm not I'm not a great manager. So I just I got to find like a strong number two. And I think some of us as entrepreneurs are that way because we're just like, we just are willing to jump in and do whatever it takes. We're like, run into the fire, right? And so but what you realize is, you know what? I've realized that certainly over the years is like, nobody cares about my business as much as I do. And so if I'm, you know, this kind of thinking of this, this with a Saturday night, Saturday Night Live skit back in the day, I'm like, this IT guy, you know, and they're like, how do I do this? And he would kind of come up. He's like, move! And he's like, you just sit down and like, do it, you know? And. He was like, never show anybody. I was like, I'll just do it. And I think some of us as entrepreneurs are guilty of that because that's how we did it. Early on, it was like, I'll just I figure everything out. But you realize I've kind of given this analogy before. Like, if I bought a McDonald's franchise, probably nobody would get those fries as golden brown as me. But I'm the owner. Like, I can't be frying fries, so I gotta find somebody else who can do it almost as good or good enough, you know?

Joe:   So would you say it start. I mean, we're again we're talking to the sole entrepreneur right now, just doing 1 or 2 deals a month on their own. Yeah. Does it start with hiring an executive assistant full time?

Mike:   I think it's one of two roles and it depends on your skill set. So if you're really good at acquisitions, like sales, then it's probably an executive assistant, an admin to handle a lot of the administrative stuff. If you're not good at that and you're kind of more detail oriented, if you have if that's your profile, then you should probably handle some of the administrative stuff, make sure the leads are coming in or whatever, and have somebody to handle sales for you. So if you're it's not as clear as like an introvert and an extrovert, but if you're if you're more on the introvert side and you just like, hey, talking to people, then yeah, you got to find somebody else to talk to the people. You know.

Joe:   That's really good. Yeah. For me, I was more not wanting to talk to sellers and be that front while I was good at the marketing and generating the leads and. Yeah, you know, all that. So I partnered with local wholesalers. I found wholesalers that were already doing deals. They just wanted to be in their truck, driving around town, looking at deals, talking to sellers, belly button, a belly button. They wanted to be out in the field looking at the properties. They had, the money, they had the buyers. They knew how to negotiate. They were way better than I was. And so I said, listen. And I knew these guys. I had trusted them. They had integrity. And they're I knew they were doing a lot of deals. I said, why don't I do the marketing? I'll prescreen the leads with my team of VAs and stuff and give you the leads. You work them. We'll manage them all in one CRM where we can all see everything. Yeah, and we'll split the profits. Yeah. And like, these guys were like, that's amazing because they didn't want to be behind the computer. They didn't want to be updating, you know, all of their post-it notes and stuff like that and keeping track of their stuff. So when I said, all right, let's do this. And I showed them how to like, we use Voxer to voice message the notes from your conversations with the seller. And I told them, listen, just Voxer your notes to my VAs will update the CRM, we'll send the offers, we'll do the follow up. You just be the one. We send you a lead, you call them. It's okay. I've done. Yeah. 100 new deals like that.

Mike:   Right. That's another way to build your team, right? Is, a JV or a collaboration to you, which, you know, you and I both are big on, collaboration. So it's another way to skin the cat of, like, what am I not good at? And who else could do it for me? And so it could be an employee, or it could be in some cases at a JV or even a partnership, you know.

Joe:   Yeah. Okay. So I want to talk about your Investor Fuel OS, your fuel operating system. This is really good. And I want to give you a plug right now for your investor fuel line that's coming up October 7th, eighth and ninth in Dallas. Right.

Mike:   Yeah. It's and technically it's in Grapevine, which is kind of right. Where do you if if you're not from the area you don't know where DFW airport is actually in Grapevine? For the most part. So it's. Yeah, just a few miles outside of DFW airport.

Joe:   But I'm going to be speaking. I just found out I have a six hour, presentation time slot.

Mike:   Yeah. We're bringing you out of retirement. You asked to speak more, and I was like, well, Joe, I've got an event coming up here. So. Yeah. Investor Fuel Live, I think. I think this is our seventh year of doing this. And for me, it's I have my Investor Fuel mastermind, which we have, you know, lots of members all around the country, but the investor few alive is a way for us to showcase some of my mastermind members. Mostly it's mostly, people that are in my mastermind that are speaking and sharing their knowledge. And it's, you know, it's not a pitch fast, it's not hypey, it's just it's operators that are sharing their best knowledge. And so every once in a while, I bring in a few outside speakers to say, you're coming, Joe. Pace is going to be there. We got Rafael Cortez, a few other, people that you know, we know Tom Krol's coming. Yeah, yeah. So we've got some great folks that are coming to share knowledge, and we I think the tickets are like 80% off still right now. I think that's got about the end, actually. But it's just a great event. And honestly, tons of people that have come before have said like this little is the best event I've ever been to because it's not a lot of fluff. It's just like Joe is going to get up for a period time getting up and they're just going to like, share. I'm going to go deep on, a thing that's going to move the needle for you. And it's and we have about we typically have 18 to 20 different speakers that are just getting up and sharing their best advice. And then we, you know, network throughout as well. So it's a great event. And it's coming up soon. We're excited to have you there.

Joe:   Yeah. I'm not I don't have anything to sell, but I have a few ideas of what I'm going to be talking about. I, I love going to these kinds of masterminds. And I've said this for many, many years, you guys, if you're not in a mastermind, you need to join one. And if you can't join one, then create one. Get around other people that are doing what you want to do. It's very isolating to be doing this investor stuff on your own. You know, about five years ago, I started a little mastermind in Saint Louis with just Saint Louis wholesalers, and we got together once a month. And these were we're competing against the same deal. Right. But we still every month we'd get 5 to 10 other wholesalers together. And it was amazing. We did this for about three years, and I just stopped doing it because I was traveling too much. I got busy, but you know, we would share what's working now. We would talk about like somebody would have a lead or a deal that they couldn't. They didn't have a buyer for somebody else there at that mastermind had a buyer for somebody had a deal. They needed private money. This guy knew some lender. We would. We collaborated and you would think, oh, competition is not good, right? You get scared of that. The whole group elevated and we would all do more deals together because we were working together. And that's what I love about masterminds like Investor Fuel, because you're going to learn what's working now today, because the market is shifting and the market is changing, the cheese is moving and you need to know where it's going to go. So why not hang out with other people that are seeing the trends and seeing what's happening and where things are going, right.

Mike:   Yeah, I think I was just talking about this or because I think there's really two things that there's a lot of we offer a lot of things. And having been, running investor fuel, actually, coming up this fall is our seven year anniversary is it's gone from kind of, intangible, like I'm going to be around a bunch of people to having a bunch of tangible benefits, like 100% financing through a couple of national lenders that only do this with inside of our group. And we have some amazing benefits from Home Depot and some other people that, like, pay for the membership many times over for a lot of investors, actually. So some tangible stuff. But I think it comes down to really two big things. One is when you convince a lot of high level people to share their best knowledge, somebody that does high ticket items like we do in real estate, it's like you could take one little nugget and it could be worth easily six figures a year for you just by learning this little thing. Like, I never thought about that or in all the times. It's kind of obvious stuff. It's like, oh my God, it's right in my face. I just never thought about that before. And I want to start doing that. And then being around people that are like, not just tell you, it's like, hey, let's, let's put together a lunch or let's schedule a call for next week. I'm going to give you my process map. I'm gonna show you exactly how we do it, you know? And the second is, and this is probably one of the more powerful things is getting around people that are already doing what you want to do, and it gives you the confidence that it's possible, because it's really easy for us to be back in our own market or working out of our house or whatever, and just questioning whether you're capable of even doing that. And when you start to surround yourself with people that are doing it, a high level thing when you realize you're not taking anything away from people in my mastermind or people that are influencers, the industry or all these people is like, you know, there are a lot of like people that we hang out with, Joe, that are like, that didn't go through, tough path to figure that out. Like they worked hard. They're not like, naturally just brilliant. Like they just figured it out. Right. And once you. So my point is, is like, you know, if that guy can do it, I can do it too. And it's not people that are like, that guy so smart know he's got a PhD and worked at NASA. It's like, no, these are just a bunch of people that just worked hard and figured it out and therefore you can too, you know?

Joe:   Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about the Investor Fuel OS. By the way, those of you listening on the audio podcast right now, the link, if you want more information on this event is Joe mccall.com/fuel, Joe mccall.com/fuel. It'll take you there. You'll see all the speakers against big speakers are going to be there. It's going to be very educational. You're going to learn and network with a bunch of people. You don't have to be a member of the mastermind to come, but just come and hang out. You're going to you're just going to get a ton of value out of it. Right? Joe mccall.com/fuel. So let's talk about the Investor Fuel OS. And by the way I googled it Investor Fuel OS. And there is a chat GPT have you have you seen this. No Investor Fuel OS. Now I don't know what it is but it's like it's from a guy named Dustin G, I won't say his last name, but it says there's buttons here to start at phase one. Explain the Investor Fuel OS. And, it's a structured business development program designed to help companies clarify their foundations, assess their current situation and set clear goals, execute a strategic plan to achieve those goals. It talks about foundations, understanding, evaluate and launch. Oh my gosh, this is really cool.

Mike:   That's not us though. It sounds like we have somebody that has something similar. Or. Similar or similar name at least. But yeah, I think you know, the operating system. So if you think for those are for those that are familiar with iOS, you know, yeah, what we realize is it, it's just too generic of a system for real estate investors. And so we've created the fuel OS, which kind of show you a little guy. And this is our workbook, guys, but 100 pages, called the Fuel OS here, and it's. Yeah, it's a it's a business operating system for real estate investors. And essentially it's gives you guidelines on setting your KPIs, annual and quarterly goal planning, how to set up a typical meeting structure for your team so that it can operate and operate with more structure than what the average, certainly average real estate investor business is used to, where they're just kind of flying by the seat of their pants. Whatever happens, happens. So you're tracking goals, setting goals out, you know, as far as you want to. A lot of these systems are asking you for a ten year plan, like a lot of us can't plan ten days out. So I like to go like 2 to 3 years out of like, high level. What do you want the real meat is. What is your annual goal? And then backing into quarterly goals in a down to a kind of a weekly? What needs to happen in order to hit the monthly goal, which needs to meet the quarterly goal, which is meet the annual goals. So it's essentially, you know, it's also like some elements of the 12 week year of where you just compress your goals into when you plan out for a year and you're like, I want to do 50 deals this year. What happens is you're not on track for 11 months, and then all of a sudden you're like, I got a month to figure this out. And so I basically allows you to set goals and KPIs by day or by week, even to say this needs to happen every day or every week, or I'm off track from the beginning and it allows you to essentially say, hey, if I'm off track and week one and week two, like, let's start pulling levers and making stuff happen so we get back on track.

Joe:   Well, the thing I love about the shorter time frame two is it allows you to start over quicker. Yeah. So if you mess up, you can start over again. Instead of waiting an entire year, you start to just start over again in three months. Right. And your business, there's a lot of things you can't plan for and think about in the future that will happen.

Mike:   Yeah, absolutely.

Joe:   This is a manual you had. Is there a way we can get that, Mike?

Mike:   Well, Joe, you and I have talked about we haven't shared it outside of our organization, but you and I have talked about maybe doing a version of this for your community sometime later in the year, like an annual planning session. So we probably talk a little more about that, but I'd love to find a way to do something with, your community to help them kind of plan their year ahead. Because, as they say, you know, failing to plan is planning to fail, right?

Joe:   Yes. And have you heard of the phrase piss? Is that it? No. Sorry, but the word piss is in it. PPPP. Have you heard of this now? Prior planning prevents piss poor performance.

Mike:   Okay.

Joe:   All right, let's expand. All right. Sorry about that. Gross. But. Yeah, so it's good. I forgot about that. We need to talk about that. I want to put that inside my inner circle membership community there because this is so important. Understanding just a simple framework. This isn't complicated. Like, I have that book over there, traction. I'm looking at it right now, and, it just overwhelms me. I'm like, oh, yeah, I should. I read maybe it's 30 pages into it and I put it down. I was like, I got too many things going on. I'm just this stresses me out. I'm not this guy that wants to figure that out. But I love what you're doing here because you've simplified it. This is kind of like the abridged version for real estate investors, right?

Mike:   Yeah, and it's very specific on a real estate about your business from lead marketing and legion to sales and acquisitions to dispo. It's very specific. Right. And I you know, I think, you know, one of the things that that a lot of people throw the word around, CLO like, other than, you know, there's it's fairly common for a real estate investing business, even if they have five employees that that they might hire a CFO. And it's like, well, you know, we kind of glorify the title sometimes in a really small business. But back to your earlier question. If you're just doing a deal or two a month, even, like, can you use a system like this? Like, well, yeah, but you're probably going to have back to that executive assistant if you have an admin like that's a detail oriented person, like let them help keep you organized. If you're like me and you're more of a visionary, that's all over the place. It's like, find somebody on your team or hire somebody, your team that is like an even an admin or executive assistant can be essentially the implementer for this initially. And then as you grow, you might have a director of operations and maybe eventually a CEO. All right. You just have to be that person, this detail oriented, that's going to, track how the KPIs are performing every week so that, you know, whether you're on track or off track, because a lot of us, if left alone, we're like, yeah, we'll figure it out. Yeah, we'll get there. Oh, we still got plenty of time. I'm not going to pull together my numbers this week. I'm just too busy and you know, you need somebody that's like, now we're doing it like clockwork. We're going to follow the system.

Joe:   Okay. So for somebody who doesn't have this manual yet or, you know, had there's no idea, I don't know when I'm going to be releasing it yet to my community. So give us give us something that we can take away and, and maybe actually implement today that comes out.

Mike:   Shooting from the hip here, Joe. But I got a thought. Here, let me pull up a portion of this I want to talk about. I think it's, essentially rating yourself kind of by function in your business and starting to find, where your weak at. So, and really identify and it's kind of being honest with yourself is as to how your business is performing. So we have kind of an annual performance by department. Nobody's going to really be able to see this very well. But these are rates yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 for sales or acquisitions. So how would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. So for here I have that your souls. This would be a ten. Your sales goals are clearly defined and your team is self-sufficient and executing the plan every day. You have the right sales team in place and have a plan for continuous sales training to keep your team operating at the peak of their abilities. So if he's rated yourself at ten, he'd be in great shape. And if you read yourself like a four or you don't even have a team, maybe you rate yourself, how you how you ranked yourself against that. But by every department in your business, you kind of rank yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, and then you go. Figure out how to improve. Right. And so yeah, you know, we might have things on here like we have dispo and transaction coordination are things that you would rate yourself on. But if you're not doing enough deal volume where you really need to put all your efforts into is sales and marketing activities to bring deals in the first place, right? Because if you could have amazing processes for how you transaction what your TC process looks like, you, how many deals coming in, it doesn't matter. Right? So I think it's doing an assessment of kind of every department in your business, if you will. And again, even if you're really small, all these departments exist. It's just that you're the manager of that department as well as the others. And so that ultimately factors into goal planning. So what do I want to achieve in terms of I mean ultimately it has to have number signs on it. Right? Like dollars dollar signs, all not just units because you can't put the units in the bank. So, what do you want to make in a year you can back into with if you let's just hypothetically say that you wanted to make $240,000 a year in gross profit, and your average gross profit is 20 grand. It's like, okay, well, you need to do or let's just say it's ten grand. You need the need to do 24 deals at ten grand a pop, and that's two a month. And, you know, you just kind of essentially back into a how much marketing or how many leads do I need to be able to do two deals a month and you just effectively back into it and wrap KPIs around it. It's like, okay, well, if I only do two deals a month, how many leads do I need to get a month? How many do I need to get a week? How are we going to get a day? So if you're like halfway through the week and you have no leads yet, then you have a plan to go start pulling levers or twisting knobs or doing whatever you have to do to get the phone ringing, because that's you're off track, essentially. And then it's really just putting in place a series of meetings of meeting types that you whether you have a weekly team meeting to go over your KPIs, a quarterly goal planning, meeting in a review session, an annual planning, etc. to make sure that you've got the right structure in place to run your business effectively. Now, a lot of us have maybe no meetings, but we really have lots of in there. Like the whole you got a second meeting or you just answer in slack all day long or whatever it is. And so, you know, you might say, I don't want to be in meetings all day, but you're probably on call answering a bunch of questions anyway. And so what I've kind of found is by having a structure in place, you get rid of all those, like, hey, you got a second meetings because it's because then what you say is like, no, I don't, but we haven't read more. All right. So let's just cover it there okay.

Joe:   That's a great point because I'm like listening to this thinking, man, I am the least structured guy in the world. I hate structure, it freaks me out. So man, I'm not going to I don't want to install any systems in my business. I don't want to read this book called traction and learn about the EOS. Like, oh God gives me the hives. So what do you do that? But because, you know, you got to if you want to scale, you need these processes and systems. And what do you do?

Mike:   Well, as the as the company owner, Joe. So I like you like again, you need to have an executive assistant or a director of operations or somebody that's running the whole thing, because that's one of the things that I realize is as the owner of the business I have, I'm wearing a million hats. I got a lot of things going on. If I'm going to attend that meeting at some point, if the meeting can run well without you, you might not. It's better. It might be better that you're not there. As the owner and I still do 1 or 2 deals a month and you're going to be you're still going to be wearing a lot of hats for a little while, just the reality of it. But one of the things that I realized is, you're tracking KPIs in your business, like metrics of what are going on, and if I have to do it personally, if I have to do go poll numbers before a meeting, for the meeting to happen, that's a problem. And so as the owner of the business, whether it's a virtual assistant or an executive assistant or some combination of those, you want your team to pull those hours together where you can just show up to the meeting and be able to kind of give guidance and check on things. But if you're responsible for doing meeting prep, let's be honest, for a lot of us, it's just not going to happen because you're wearing a lot of hats.

Joe:   One of the things that's helped me a little bit and I'm not perfect at this, but I really try hard to do this, is I let my team know when we have these meetings, they have to be short, and I want you to bring me decisions that I have to make. Like, I like what we try to start the meetings with. What are the 1 or 2 major decisions that we need to make today in this meeting, and that focuses it on, okay, what are the most important things? What are the most important decisions to make? And for me also, I found that I'm better on these meetings when I'm on my phone walking around in my backyard. If I'm at a computer, I'm getting distracted. I'm thinking about 100 different things, but if I'm just listening to my team and they know me well enough to know, my attention span is pretty short. And so it helps them a lot because they come to the table with, all right, we need these decisions today, Joe. And then they bring it to me. And that's so important. And having a team and understanding your strengths and weaknesses right.

Mike:   Yeah. Even the meetings though they have structure. So we provide kind of an agenda of like the first five minutes you do this and you've got ten minutes to do that and you need somebody managing the meeting. That's a time keeper. And what I've kind of realized is, I just need to not talk like an unless something like, because I'll pontificate and next thing you know, we're, we're.

Joe:   Oh. It's horrible. Yeah. Let's do this. I got a great idea. We should do this and this and this. It'll be easy. What are you guys worried about? Just do this little thing here and let's do this new promotion. Let's do this new marketing campaign.

Mike:   Yep, yep.

Joe:   Okay, so, I want to talk about one more thing real quick here, and we'll wrap it up. Now let's talk about managing cashflow and understanding your numbers. This is a big thing I see a lot of people struggling with right. As they start growing their business. Sometimes they get a bit ahead of themselves and they build this huge team and they don't have the revenue coming in. And it's not until the end of the year when they look at back and they say, oh my gosh, we made $500,000 this year and I'm broke as a joke, or I didn't plan for taxes or before everyone got paid but me. How do you avoid as you're growing your beard? I know one guy, who said he wants to write a book and he wants to title the book. Should I scale my business or slit my wrists? I that's not funny, actually. Sorry, but, like. So how do you avoid that? Like, how do you how do you manage the numbers. So you're growing and scaling smartly. Does that make sense?

Mike:   Yeah, I think you know, I, we like my wife is essentially we have a CFO now, through our buddy Tim, by the way. So they've taken over for my wife, who has been our CFO for all these years. And, you know, I would say they're I'm a big fan of the profit first type model. We don't follow that exactly. We use a variant of that. But I think, you know, probably from our corporate background, like some of the things that we learn too, is. So my wife used to be a bankruptcy and turnaround consultant for businesses, and it always was. It was very little and it was one of the largest companies in the time.

Joe:   I'm learning. But I'm learning so much about you on this interview like no one knows each other for a long answer.

Mike: It's not me. I'm not even the pretty face. I'm just. I'm the puppet, you know? I don't know, but, you know, she worked for a company that they say they were bankruptcy and turnaround consulting, but really, it was a liquidation company that there weren't a whole lot of turnarounds that were mostly liquidations. But it was always through poor cash management. So I think she's instilled stuff in us and we're both fairly conservative and in nature. So, you know, if you're listening to this and you're not in a place to do this, like you just aspire to get to this point, but you should have you don't want to co-mingle in a real estate investing business. You don't want to co-mingle there's kind of I would recommend having three bank accounts eliminate or follow profit. First, you've got your business operations account which is paying for your staff, marketing all those things. You have a property account. If you're assigning, it's not as important, but if you're rehabbing, you know you want to keep you don't want to be deciding between should I market or should I finish this? Rehab like that needs to be on a separate account, especially if you're borrowing money. God forbid, like that, you should. You don't want to co-mingle property activities with, operating funds. Now don't do that. And then the third is a reserve account. And so the reserve you just don't touch until you, have overcome, you know, depends on the business a little bit, especially if you're if you're rehabbing a lot, you might be a little more intensive, like your, your profit cycle. Cycle times are much longer, but you generally want to have, you know, 3 to 4 months of operating capital that's just sitting there so that if you have a bad month, all of a sudden you don't have to say, hey, we can't advertise this month because we had a bad month last month. And then next thing you know, you're going to have more bad months because you're not putting new leads in the pipeline. And so that reserve only is tapped two times one once. If you're running low and you need to kind of fund the business, or second, if you have more than the 3 or 4 months and you want to take a distribution off the table. So some of it is just keeping it that organized and keeping, money in different pockets so that you're not co-mingling everything and forcing yourself into making bad decisions. And, you know. Back to that person that's making two, doing a deal or two a month, like don't go do one big juicy deal and decide to, you know, go get a gold tooth or something. It's like, okay, you know. Yeah, yeah, sure. The truth is, is if you're at 1 or 2 deals a month even, and you want to grow to 3 or 4 or $5 a month, like you should still live like you're poor, like put that money back into your business to grow it up to the level that can then allow you to live the lifestyle that you want to live. But, well, don't make that decision too early.

Joe:   It starts with knowing your numbers. Yeah, I was in a mastermind before you started yours, and you might have been in this meeting, but this gentleman said he came from a corporate background where all these mavericks, you know, just we're doing a bunch of deals and this is awesome. And he's like, none of you guys know your numbers. Like I've asked you in private in these meetings, like, show me your numbers and you're like, oh, it's out there somewhere. I just kind of, you know, what your hits. He's. And he came down on all of us. And I remember it so vividly because I was like, oh my gosh. He said, if you don't know your numbers, you don't have a real business. Stop playing games. Yeah. I was like, I got I don't know my numbers. I mean, I I'll have to sit down and pull them together and it'll take me a couple hours. But like that and I remember there's, you could have heard a pin drop and these were all what we would thought were active. I mean, like, really, really good investors. So, you know, wholesaling a lot of deals. I had a lot of doors, but we didn't know our numbers. At least most of us didn't. Right. Yeah. And that is so important. You've got to know your numbers. Absolutely true. All right. Good, Mike. I'm looking forward to diving deeper into the investor. Well, the fuel OS. I'm sorry for bringing up this. Whoever this dingaling was.

Mike:   Yeah, I you read it, I was like, I don't know that guy. That sounds familiar or not.

Joe:   Sorry about that. Don't go there. Don't go look at that. I have no idea what that's all about.

Mike:   Well, honestly, we don't have anything public facing unless something's leaked out. You know, right now, it's more of an internal for our members and, and maybe, maybe you and I will do something together here, too. Joe.

Joe:   There's talk about that. I'm excited about that. And I'm excited about your big event coming up. This is an annual, conference that you do in Dallas, October 7th to ninth. Joe mccall.com/fuel. Right now. The tickets are discounted. Joe mccall.com/fuel. Pace Morby Is going to be there. Tom Krol is going to be there. Mike of course will be there. A bunch of really big active investors will be there. I'll be there speaking. And I was joking before I have six hours. I don't I probably just have 30 or 45 minutes. But I'm going to be sharing some of my best stuff on like more of a high level operational thing, not deal specific on how to do deals. All because everybody there is doing deals. But this is going to be more high level, like how to think and bigger and how to scale without going crazy.

Mike:   You know what's funny about this event is, we've got some. Yeah, obviously, you know, the names you just mentioned, you, Tom Krol, Pace, guys like that and everybody knows which is cool to pull people in. And I've had some pride over the years. I like it. The last of it, I had, two people that are in my mastermind that had never spoken before that were nervous as hell to get on stage. One of them had done over 2500 wholesale deals, and one of them had done over 5000 picks and flips. And California. I was like, you guys are like, well, rock star. The rock stars are rock stars. And like, well, what am I supposed to talk about? Yeah, they were like, nervous about it. So we pride ourselves on having you know, it's not it's not. There might be some people that you don't know that are speaking. They're like, I promise you, they've been vetted out and they're all like amazing operators and they have great knowledge to share.

Joe:   And that's why when you offered to have me come and speak or you offer that to me, I without hesitation said yes. Yeah, because I just want to go there. Listen to these guys because some of these investors that you would never heard of, they don't have YouTube channels, Instagram things, they don't do podcasts. And they're like, these guys are killing it. They just don't like talking about it. But they're going to be there sharing what they do. And they don't have a program to sell.

Mike:   Oh, not at all. Yeah, yeah.

Joe:   Awesome Joe mccall.com/fuel. Go check it out. Thank you. Mike. Any parting words. Final things you want to say.

Mike:   You know I appreciate the opportunity. I think, you know, I guess one little thing I'll share here is it's interesting, depending where people are in the business, I really this is a this is a relatively difficult, difficult time in our economy. Right. Yeah. But I think you and I have been around long enough to. We know where there's people that are crushing it right now. And a lot of what differentiates those from that are crushing it from those that are is just what happens between your years up here. Right? There's a lot of mindset stuff. And so I just saw this video this morning and it was a teacher. It was like, it was a experiment she handed out. It was I can't think what you call it. Were you, get a get a word and you can read jumble. I didn't do an anagram. I think you're jumble it and do something else. And she did this thing where there were, like, four rows. I don't know, let's just say four rows of, like, six people. So they're 12 and 12, and they hand it out. And I didn't even know what was going on when I first watched it. But on the right side of the room, they gave three words as they anagram and they said, unscramble them. Go to the first one. Now go to the second one. Now go to the third one and on the other side of the room, same thing. And then at the end she asked, okay, well who who's done with the first three words? And the left, the left side, the right side of the room, like pretty much all raise their hand in the left side like none of them raise their hands. One person did, and then they did a second round, and the rest of the room's all done really fast on the left side of the room. And then on the third one, a couple more on the left side raise their hand. But you know I can't. There was a phrase, as she called it, but essentially they gave the left side of the room way harder words, and they didn't tell anybody that. And on the third one they gave everybody the same words, but not nearly as many people on the left side completed it. And the point is, is they knew that they were behind. Like, you start to get this bias towards, I can't do this. I'm not smart enough or this or whatever. And this whole thing happened in like three minutes, you know, and it was this bias that you gave yourself. I'm like, I'm not good at this, or I'm not smart enough or this or whatever, but they were different words and they didn't know that till the end. And on the third one, they were all the same words, but they had given up from the first two rounds. They could they started to feel like they couldn't compete or they weren't worthy. And it just, you know, it was an interesting exercise in telling you, like, we're all worthy of this. You just have to be willing to put in the work and not give up so quickly, essentially. So that, I think that it's a it's an interesting time in our and I see it with my across my businesses because I support hundreds of professional real estate investors, some people that are struggling right now and some that are having their best year or best quarter ever. And I know a lot of it is mindset type stuff. Right. And so one more reason to get around a lot of people, because we just we all lift each other up.

Joe:   Do you have a link to that video? You can text me later.

Mike:   Let me see if like if I, I don't know I. I think I saved it. It was like a Facebook story and I think I saved that. If I did, I'll shoot you a text.

Joe:   I'll put it in the YouTube description or comments on my YouTube channel. But yeah, that's cool. Cool, awesome. There's a lot of good texts that have been coming in here on the YouTubes too, and I'm sorry I've not been putting them up, but this has been great content. Thank you. Salem and Michael and Jim and John. Appreciate you guys giving me some feedback here. All right Mike, thank you so much. Appreciate you. And we'll see you guys later. Go to Joe mccall.com/fuel. And I'll see you guys at this conference October 7th to ninth.

Mike:   Bye bye. Take care.