How to Set and Evaluate Goals | REIal Talk Podcast | EP. 9

Hey, everybody. Flip and Danny here, co founders of the Freedom Real Estate Group family of companies.

And this is our podcast, Real Talk, which is real talk for real estate investors. And we are on episode nine, number nine. I need a fist bump, man. We have done it every single week, nine weeks in a row so far. So far. So we hope that you're enjoying them. And thank you for joining us for episode number nine, where we are going to be talking about goals.

Score.

That's good, actually. So we're trying to line up our vlog series. If you watch those that are about, you know, four to 10 minutes, we tried to do a three to five, and we're failing. So it's more like four to 10, you know, that we're trying to squeeze into. So we recently did one in my office about goals. Yeah. We were standing right in front of the vision board where it had the goal set. There some pictures of the things that we wanted to achieve related to those goals. So today in the podcast, we just kind of want to talk about that a little bit more and dive in deep on not just some of our goals and how we set them, why we set them, but also how we apply that to our team. So that's what we're going to start with. And we, as usual, have a little bit of an outline so we don't forget where we're going, and we kind of stay on a good path here for you guys. So, Flip, the first thing that I'm going to ask you is why do we set goals?

So we have direction. We always need to have direction, and the goals help us keep. Because, I mean, sometimes where. I always call it a sprinkler. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. And that goals will align, that, you know, will keep us from doing the sprinkler and keep us on the path, because we have a mission, and that is to get this goal.

Yes.

And to stay on path and whatever other cliche I can say.

Well, let me ask you this, because before we started recording, I had asked you what are our goals? Because I just wanted your opinion to give me some more ideas of what we wanted to talk about and share your answer. What you told me.

Well, it's a lot of times it's. It's. It's your why, you know, why are you doing what you're doing? You know, and in order to like, our why is to take care of Our family.

Right.

And so that's our why. Well, in order to do that, we have to do that. You know, to do that, we have to do this.

Yeah.

You know, we have to build this so that way we can do our why. So the goals, they might not be directly related to your why, but they are indirectly related to your why. Because you are trying to get these goals, you're trying to achieve these goals, so that way you can take care of your why or do your why or whatever your why is.

And one of the things you said was it really shows people's passion, right. If you know somebody's goals, you understand their passion a little bit better.

Right. So if your passion, you know, say you're, you know, you want to go out running, you know, and I, today I want to run 100 yards and tomorrow let's run 100 yards again. You know, that's not your passion.

Right.

You know, if you're like, today I want to learn, I want to run 100 yards and tomorrow I want to see if I can do 200 yards, you know, and then by next week I'm doing a mile. You know, you see their passion and. But if your goal is like whatever, you know, that's not, obviously it's not a passion, you're probably not going to be focusing too hard on that goal.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to explain it. So I'm gonna apply it to us. We have a passion for passive income financial freedom, being able to take care of our families. And in relation to me being able to take care of you because my friend, you and your cars need its own bank account and you've just started. But it is fun, right? We need to have fun. Like life, it's short, you know, we only get to live it once. And so I want you to be able to buy anything and everything that you want, which means we need financial freedom, we need that passive income so that we've got the safety of, hey, we've got these rent checks coming in every single month whether, you know, and.

One of my favorite quotes from a actually non living person, one of the greatest movies, Shawshank Redemption, Red says, in that movie, get busy living or get busy dining.

That's right. Yes, yes. And then that translates to, why did we, why did we do all this? Because we could have just went and bought every single house that we're buying and selling. We could have bought and just held. Right? But our passion is helping others. It is helping build a team of a players that we want to work with, and we want to have fun with, and we want to help them have success in their life. Because if we surround ourselves with the right people, then the extension of what we want to do in life, which includes giving back and helping other people, they get to do it, too. And now we're helping other investors because we're doing what they can't. They're a doctor, they're a lawyer, They're a. They're a professional in some regard with money, and they don't have the time to learn everything that we've done. So we go and find the house, rehab the house, tenant the house, sell it to somebody else, even though we could keep it. Because part of our passion is not just us, our family. It is building an amazing team, helping them grow, helping them give back in the ways that they want to, and then helping our investors grow who can't do what we do because we had the time to do it. So. So I love that example. That's why I wanted to start the podcast in that way. I was like, man, I didn't even really think about how looking at somebody's goals and what they're doing shows what they're truly passionate about. So that was good insight, Flipper.

That's just my take.

Yeah. Yeah, it's good. All right. So the next thing is how to set them. So I kind of joked at the very beginning that a lot of people overthink setting goals, and we were just like, I don't know, hundred, let's do 100 deals. How's that? Because at the very, very beginning, you have no idea what you're capable of. And it could be possible. You only do 2 or 10. But if you strive for 100 and if you reverse engineer, which we're going to talk about how to get to 100, you suddenly are thinking in a brand new way, in a bigger way. And if you had set 2, you probably would have hit 2. If you would have hit set 10, maybe you would have hit 5. But if you go for 100, what happens when you hit 50? You're like, holy crap, how do we do that? And it's because you set something not knowing what you could achieve, and you let your brain start marinating on the rest and how to get there. And I'm not gonna hit that one right there yet. I want you to.

Well, like, you were like. Like, how many. How many deals we gonna do? Well, we're doing 100. It's a nice round number.

Yeah.

And a couple years ago, we did what was it? 72. And so we're like, oh, we're so close. We've got this. And so we're like, we are doing 100 this year. And we went gangbusters into that year, which was 2020. And then this thing called Covid hit and it just, it was the, you know.

Nobody put that in their business plan.

Nobody saw that coming. Well, I don't know about nobody, but we didn't see it come. And so, you know, that killed us, but it didn't stop us. You know, we still fought through it. We didn't shut. We didn't shut down. We didn't put anyone on furlough. We kept everyone, you know, everyone working. We, we, we plowed through it and we didn't get 100, but we didn't stop. And then this year we're on, on pace because again, we didn't hit it. So it's going to be this year.

Yep.

And now we're actually on pace, if not better, that to do that hundred this year because we didn't stop. And like you talked about reverse engineering. We figured it out. If we need to do this, we need to do this. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later with one of the other companies. But we figured that out and we know that if the pipeline is always full, we're going to sell everything we've got anyway. And so we're going to get to that hundred this year.

Yeah, for sure. So for three years in a row. Row, our goal has been 100. Right. Because we randomly hit. Created this goal. What do you want? I don't know, 100. We don't have a ton of data to say what we can do or can't do. So we're just going to randomly give ourselves a number and every single year we're gonna look at the data and try and go, okay, this is how many. And it was 2019. We did 72. So in 2020, we really did have a good plan. I mean, it was good and we really thought we were going to achieve our goal. But business plan didn't contain Covid. We didn't know all the things that were going to. There was a lot of stress involved of how do we keep the team? Should we keep the team? Cause other people are laying people off at other companies just like us. And it freaked us out, at least me. I don't know how you were doing, but it was all right. But it was tough and it was trying to. We had to change a few sellers didn't want us coming into houses anymore, so we had to take a whole lot of pictures or bid sight unseen and base the closing on a final inspection. There was lots of things that we had to change, and so we reevaluated, and we're going to talk about that too, is how do you look at these benchmarks and how and when do you decide that you're going to reset or do something like that? So hundred. 120. 21, baby, you're going to bypass this hundred, finally. So that's, you know, I think our biggest lesson was don't overthink it.

Right? Exactly.

Just choose a number, choose a goal and go after it. And so what if you don't hit them? That's the next bullet point. What happens if you don't hit them?

Well, some people get so discouraged, you know, like, I didn't hit my goals. Why, why, why, why do I even do this? You know? No, that's not the. No, it's. It's okay. I didn't hit this goal. Well, the why is important. It's just not so dramatic, you know, why didn't I hit this goal? What happened that didn't. That I didn't, you know, what caused me to not hit my goals and figuring that out and being able to evaluate. Because we figured that out. We said, oh, well, we want to do 100, 100 properties. We didn't get it. Why, you know, and then we fixed that, we realigned it. Why didn't we get it this year? And, well, it took us two weeks just to see one property wearing gloves and masks. You know, ridiculous.

Yeah.

So, but, so. And now we don't. We're not forecasting that again this year, but it's figuring out why, you know, what went. What went wrong, you know, what went right. That's always important as well. And trying to figure it out to make a better assessment of your goals for the. For the next year or the next quarter.

So I glad. I'm glad that you brought up the. Don't get, like, really down on yourself, because I would say that used to be me. Like, if we didn't hit the goal, I am a achiever. If I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it, and I'm not going to give up until I get it done. So not hitting a goal pisses me off like freaking crazy. And I do feel like a failure and the whole thing sucks. But I learned, hey, I randomly put this out there at 100, so why are you getting so pissed off at yourself? So it became a learning lesson of, okay, let me just use that noggin that's inside this hard head of mine and figure out, how do we do it better next year? And then how do we do it? So it no longer became something that I'm not achieving. I did the very best I could and we got to 72, man, and I did it with other amazing people. That is part of my passion and dream and everything that I want to do. So I'm glad that you brought that up because I used to be that person. And now, I guess the better you get at setting goals, it's still disappointing. I'm not going to say it's not disappointing. I would rather be in a room cheering on the entire team because we hit it. You know, we killed it. And so I think what we've learned from that is stretch goals. As we get better setting these goals, we're going to set a realistic goal, but then we're going to hit the stretch. And perhaps in our first years, if we would have known that, then it would have been, hey, let's choose X for this first goal, and then let's do a stretch goal. And so the achievers can go, I did it. And they don't constantly feel like they're failing because they're not getting across this finish line over here. But the achievers also have this way up here. And so they're really planning to hit the stretch goal. That's what. And it makes it easier to actually hit the real goal. Right. Because you're planning for way past that finish line.

Right, Exactly.

So, yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up.

Yeah. Sometimes I think you write down your goals and chuck them, and chuck them as far as you can throw them. And let's see if we can get that.

It's not necessarily a lie. I just go big.

Yep, that's right.

Okay.

Go big or what?

Or go home, baby.

No, Go big or go bigger.

That's right. Who says that? Grant Cardone. All right. Best type of goals I actually had. Flip, Google this real quick. Because we understand it just needs to be measurable. That's all I think about when I'm thinking about goals. It has to be measurable. So in the next X number of weeks, I want to do X number of goals by this deadline or deal. Sorry? By this deadline. That, to me, is measurable. I gave it a number. I gave it a deadline. So now I can reverse engineer. How do I do that many in this specific amount of time. So that's what I think of. But smart is something that people talk about all the time. Make sure your goals are smart. And each letter stands for something. And the letters are specific is for the S measurable for M, attainable for A, relevant for R, and then time based for T. So if we are going to talk about what we just said, 100 deals in a year. So it's specific. Right, because we chose 100. Yep. It's measurable. Because if we hit 99, well, we didn't make 100. It's attainable. We feel like it's attainable. That's the hard thing. When you're first starting out, you don't know what's attaining. You just have to throw something out there. So that one's hard to achieve unless you've got data in order to understand what is achievable. Relevant. It's relevant to us because we're passionate about deals and this is what makes us money and this is what we want to be doing. And time based, we did gave it. Give it that deadline. So just measurable is the word that I think of all the time. But I think the phrase smart and how they laid that out and explained it was really, really powerful.

Exactly.

Anything that you want to add to that?

No, no, it's. It's. You think about it where you're like, you know, duh. It needs to be your goal. Needs to be that, you know, you can't say, I want to. I want to look good tomorrow. Is that measurable?

Really good every day.

Yikes. You know, so, you know. Yes. All those letters actually, you know, that's perfect. But you don't want your goals to be outside of any of those.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. Okay. Next one is how to reverse engineer goals in order to achieve them. And I know that we have this example here, so I don't want to use that one. Do you have an example that we can talk about? That is a way to. This is my goal. Now I'm gonna. How do I. How do I reverse engineer to get there?

Well, yeah, exactly. The. The doing the 100 deals. So we knew we wanted to do 100 deals. Then when we got to 72, we're like, okay, what. What did. What didn't go right for us to get that, you know, and like, oh, okay, we didn't have enough properties in rehab. Rehab's taking too long. Okay, let's. Let's work on rehab. It wasn't buying the properties or selling the properties. It was the rehab of the properties that was taking too long. And so, you know, so not. Let's focus on the rehab, you know, so it was focusing on the right part of our. Of our machine to make sure that we can get to that goal and we can achieve that goal. And so that's what we did in 20. We really focused on the rehab section, and now we've got it working. Now we're cooking right along. And then we're like, oh, great, now we got the rehab working and we got the sales working. Now we need to get the acquisitions working. Now we don't have enough properties. And so then we focused on the acquisitions. Now the acquisitions is working, the rehabs working and the sales working.

Boom.

We got the Ferrari fired up. Not that I own a Ferrari yet.

The keyboard there is yet.

But anyway. But so we reverse engineered it. We knew this worked, this worked, this didn't. Let's focus on this.

Yes.

And so that way we knew what. What was the part or what were the pieces. Parts of the goal to get to the goal. And now we figured that out and so it's just reverse engineering.

Yeah. Okay, so since I'm not going to give away the C4. Oh, example. Right. Let's take like a random example. I think everybody in their life at some point in time wants to lose weight. Right. That's a goal is to lose weight, but that's not measurable.

Right.

You have to say, I want to lose 10 pounds in two months. Now it's measurable. Right. It's specific. It's measurable. I feel like £10 in two months is attainable. It's relevant to the fact that I want to feel better, look better, be healthier. And it's time based because we said two months. So things that have to do with health and losing weight are what you put in your pie hole. Right. And the amount of exercise really that you do. So calorie expenditure. Right. Those two things are probably the two things that affect us the most when it comes to losing weight.

Right, right.

Is there anything else that you could think of that you would put in there?

Sleep.

Sleep is good. Yeah, that's true. That's. That's a definite health factor. Okay.

Those are your major ones.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So we just talked about three things randomly about how to lose weight, and it's food, exercise, sleep. So to reverse engineer I want to lose 10 pounds in two months turns into, okay, I want to go to bed at X time and get up at X time, because that gives me My sleep. Right. So maybe the goal is Monday through Friday, here's my bedtime, here's my wake up time. And it's consistent. Right. Give yourself a break. Maybe on the weekends. Up to you. Everybody's a little bit different, right. Some of us are hardcore. I try to be hardcore and realize, hey, I'm human. Okay? So that's one thing that allows us to reverse engineer. So for the next two months, I just said five days a week, I'm gonna do X right, for sleep to achieve that one. Exercise. You exercise a lot. So give me an example of what you would do, lose 10 pounds in two months. What type of exercise schedule would you put in place to start this?

Well, one thing, the Apple watch was very convenient because it's got a app, you know, it's got the fitness rings on there. Yeah. So I always want to make sure that I fill my rings, you know, or I close my rings or whatever they call it. And so I want to make sure that I'm doing something if it's going for. Because your fitness, your exercise ring is based upon your heart rate. So you can't just like, you know, walk around the office all day and expect that to be called fitness right now. It's not bad for you.

Yeah.

You know, but it's not the level that you need to be to burn fat. You need to have that heart rate up to a certain level. And so, you know, doing jumping jacks, actually going for a faster walk, you know, or going for a jog or whatever, just getting, getting that type of exercise to burn those calories, but that on a consistent basis, you know, not, not stopping and, you know, I mean, yes, you need to rest, but I exercise every day. You know, you don't lose, you don't use it, you're gonna lose it.

Yeah.

And so, so that's, that's what I do.

Yeah, that's good. I just read a Facebook post from a friend of ours that's in our mastermind, real estate investor as well. And for 100 days, he committed to every single day. I'm gonna walk for 45 minutes. That's it. That was his one thing. He also said, I'm gonna eat better. But he still allows himself to have a treat here and there. It wasn't strict, but that was part of his goal to get. For 100 days, he just had a goal that he would, he wanted to move more. I don't know if that was his specific goal, but over the course of 100 days, he never missed a walk. A 45 minute walk ever. And he had a calendar and he was circling, circling. And for him to see a day that's not going to be circled, like he couldn't, like it's one of those OCD things. I would be like, ah, gotta go walk for 45 minutes. And so that's what he did. And he, and he circled it and he just reported that he lost £20 over 100 days. And I don't even know that that was his goal, right. I don't know that losing weight was his goal. I don't know if it was exercise, but he set a goal and said, this is what I'm going to do. That's how he reverse engineered, you know, this, this process. So I thought that was really fantastic to be able to give an example. And then I think the food thing matters, but it has to be something that is, I'm gonna say, attainable because a lot of people are gonna say, I'm gonna go on a keto diet. And I can't keep it up. I know keto diet. We've done it a lot of times.

They last for four days. I need a sandwich.

Yes. Give me carbs. I need bread. So you have to figure out what you can achieve. And maybe it's, you know, smaller meals throughout the day, maybe it's intermittent fasting, whatever it is. So all this was is, I think everybody's been on a journey to lose weight at some time in their life. And it was a way for us to show you how to reverse engineer a goal. So you just take something simple and then you figure out, how am I going to get there and how am I going to measure it? And then over the course of this time, you kind of check off, did I do it? Did I not? And at the end, depending on where you got, you can go look at those check marks and go, well, I sort of sucked at keeping myself accountable. I didn't eat right. And you start understanding why I didn't hit it. And that's how you get better, right, at setting goals going forward. All right, so let's talk about how to bring your team into goal setting. So if you're listening to the podcast and you actually have a team like we do, then you want to teach them how to do it as well. So what we did was we bought 12 week year and we gave it to all of our team members and had them read it. And what 12 week year is in a nutshell is taking your annual planning and shoving it into 12 weeks so they're telling you, you are Gonna set these 12 weeks up, and these are your goals. Don't pretend like you're gonna hit your annual goal. Don't even think about it. Because what you're gonna do is you've got this hundred deals in a year, and you've got this long space of time, over 12 months, and you're gonna start getting to the finish line and start going, oh, crap. Mm. Oh, crap. Oh, crap. We're supposed to be at 100, and suddenly, you know, we're only at 30, and we're entering into quarter four because we weren't measuring and paying attention to shorter timeframes.

Right.

So they take your year goal, and then you put it into quarterly, essentially. So the first very 12 weeks, in order to hit 100, what did we have to do in quarter one, what do we have to do in quarter two, quarter three, quarter four? And that way, every single quarter, you were evaluating and going, okay, did we get there? Because same thing might be true in that this 12 weeks, you might wait till the eighth week and go, oh, crap. But at least you're sprinting for four weeks of that 12 to get to where you want to be. And if you do that four times a year, you have a much better ability to get to the finish line. Right. So we had our team create scorecards. So you want to talk about scorecards?

Yeah. So it's. So before talking about the scorecards, I mean, you did a podcast on this or a video or what. I'm not even sure what we called it. This was, gosh, almost 10 years ago as well, about the small bites of the elephant.

Yeah.

You know, and so don't think about, you know, when you're looking at the elephant, you have to eat the elephant. Don't think of, I got to eat it all in one bite. You know, just do little bites, and eventually all those little bites, you'll end up eating the elephant. Well, so we took the year goal. Now we just shortened it down to 12 weeks. Well, then we. We implemented scorecards. You can talk about what's on the scorecards, but the scorecards are weekly scorecards. So now we've got it down to a week. And so each week we fill out the scorecards, and the what's on the scorecard is all applicable to your quarterly goals, which are all applicable to your yearly goals. So it's. Again, it's. The scorecard says, that's why I want to talk about the bite size. Yes, it's the bite size of your yearly Goal. Because now you got it down to the nibble. So it's. But then you can talk about what's on the scorecard more. So. But it's again also from the 12 week year.

Yes. Yeah. So it is that small bite. So if we're going to take the year goal, then we're going to push it to 12 weeks four through four times in the year, then we're gonna say every single week I have to do this. So that whole reverse engineer, it was walk a day for 45 minutes and every single day you had to check it off on your scorecard. And at the end of the week, you had to hold yourself accountable and you had to give yourself drag your bar to 100%. That's how we do it. So we use podio. So we dragged our bar to. What's our percentage level? Did we do it? Was it 50%? Was it 100? And then we even went to the extent of building teams so that we can kind of all, you know, cheer each other on. And we had a challenge or like this team is beating this and one time it was guys against girls. And I can't even remember who win. Who won. I assume it was the women because we're cooler.

But sure, for the sake of this podcast, okay.

But that's a perfect example of how we're reverse engineering it and how we're bringing the team into it so that they can have fun and they can see how these type of measurements allow us to hit the goals that we're all trying to hit. Because if we hit the goals we're all trying to hit, it means we as a company continue to grow, people continue to stay employed, people continue to get raises, people continue to be on track to be a part of a profit sharing program that we're rolling out. And, you know, we all rise, right? What is it? All tides raise all ships. I don't even know the saying. I'm the worst at, like remembering sayings. But together as a team is the idea is that we're all raising each other up. We're all doing this as a team, helping hold each other accountable. Because together we can all achieve and get to the finish line. Exactly. And more hands, you know, in there to help achieve that is, I think, part of the goal and part of the why we're so close, you know, and why we push each other so much. So the 12 week year, we talked about scorecards, we talked about team. So I'm gonna check that one off. All right. Accountability and resets. So We've told you about how we do the 12 week year and how our team is now accountable and they have their own team. So we make it fun, we challenge each other. So what happens after quarter one? And this has happened to us, right? And quarter one, we're like, we tanked. It was horrible. So we talk about it and we go, why did we tank? And we actually, in our quarterly meetings, we'll say, what happened? Great. What are the culture items that you enjoy the most? What happened bad? What did we learn from? What are things that you would like to add to the culture so that we can continue to, you know, be this family of companies and family of team members that gets to enjoy what we do every day, enjoy the people that we work with. So we have all of these conversations right in our, in our quarterly meeting. And a lot of that is digging into the goals and why we didn't hit them. So that's where it kind of gets a little bit of, you know, vulnerable and extreme ownership of just didn't do enough of this and didn't even realize we needed to do that much of that in order to get this. Because sometimes you're starting with no data or very little data, so you don't know what it takes. Sometimes Covid hits and you don't realize that's going to happen. And you've got to change the whole game and what you're doing at all. Sometimes you have turnover. Like there's all these things that could be why we didn't get where we were and that accountability reset is okay. This is why it happened. So what do we think? Do we even have a chance of now hitting this annual goal? If we do, how do we fix what happened in quarter one going into quarter two? Because we're going to hold ourselves accountable at the end of quarter two to ask all these same questions. And a lot of that, I think at the very beginning was rehab, right? Figuring how to get on budget and on time because those delays didn't allow us to sell properties. And if we couldn't sell properties, we're not going to hit 100 deals a year. So it was really improving that process and continually building up that team and learning what do we fix in order to do this and that. And so, you know, what are your thoughts on our quarterly meetings and what we learn and how we choose to reset or.

Well, I think the reset's also like a realignment. Yeah, it's, you know, because we, at the end of the quarter, we're like, okay, for the Year, we want to be at X, so that means we need to be a quarter of the way there, right?

Yeah.

And we're not even close. Okay, let's realign this goal. Let's fix this. So that way, next quarter, our goals are now not the same as they were for the first quarter, but it's different because. Let's. Let's realign because there's some things that, you know, it's one thing when you're. You know, the diet thing, that's all you. You know, you're upon.

You're.

You're accountable for everything, 100% in control. But when it's. When you're trying to achieve a goal and your only job is to sell, if you don't have the items to sell, how can you be held accountable for not reaching your goal? You know, you're like, I sold everything I had.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

But I didn't have enough to sell.

Yeah.

And so that's when you need to realign everything, because you need everyone to work together to get to that goal. But if one person's holding the other person back, you don't want that person just getting mad at the other person. You know, it's like, hey, let's work together. Let's figure this out.

Yeah.

So that's. I don't really call it reset. It's just realigning our goals as a team. Because, I mean, the rehab team does have goals that. But, you know, they can't. They can't rehab 25 properties if the acquisitions team doesn't buy 25 properties, you know, and the acquisitions team is the only one that really has their. They're responsible for them, but if they don't buy it, they can't. They can't fix it, and they can't sell it. And so everyone's relied on the chain. The acquisitions team is it. Well, you know, they need leads, you know, and they can't sell. They can't buy properties if they don't have leads. And so it's always something.

Yeah.

You know, so it's making sure that everyone's working together and just realigning everything as a whole.

Yeah. I think that you hit a really good gold nugget that wasn't even on our piece of paper to remember to talk about.

I'm sorry.

And that is that you have to be in control of your outcome. Right. So the hundred deals was a team goal. Right. But it can't be the salesperson's goal because he can't be responsible for Selling hundred deals. If acquisitions doesn't buy, if rehab doesn't rehab. So his goal would be more effective to say, I am going to build a buyer's list of a hundred people this year that want turnkey properties so that we can sell every deal within 24 hours.

Right.

Something that I can control this. I can jump on bigger pockets. I can jump on podcasts. I can. I can do a whole lot of things to get 100 buyers over the course of a year that will help control how fast we sell these properties. Properties as soon as they're available. But I can't control under deals because that's not in my control because there's a pipeline of other things that need to happen.

Exactly.

Gold nugget, baby. Thank you for. Won't let it happen again for saying that. All right. Getting better and setting achievable goals through data. This is what we're going to use. The C4.

Oh, yeah. C4OH is cash for Ohio Houses. This is our acquisitions team. And we basically got it down to how many leads came in, how many appointments are set, how many appointments were kept, how many offers were made, how many contracts were done, and how many closings. And so each one, there's a. There's a direct proportion all the way down the line. So if we figured out that, hey, we got 40 leads in, and that got us 20 appointments, and then out of the 20 appointments, 15 actually showed up. We were able to make 10 offers, and we had five contracts go out, but we only had two closings. There's just an enormous amount of reasons that any of those things could happen or even be worse numbers or even be better numbers. But once we figured out what those numbers are, and so say all those numbers equal two closings for that week. Well, if we need to have four closings a week, well, that means we need to have 80 leads in. And so it's just. We just. And you figure it out right away, because then if we have 80 leads in now, we're gonna have 40 appointments. And whatever the math is for the rest of that. Don't even remember the numbers, but that's what we figured out. And it's not something you can figure out day one. That takes months to figure out that data to really nail it down, because you can have one week where, yeah, you got 10 appointments, you had 10 leads came in, and all 10 were appointments. All 10 showed up. We made 10 offers, but only two contracts sent out. And we didn't have any closings, you.

Know, because the title Issues or whatever.

Whatever. Exactly. You know, so every week is different, and so you need a myriad of weeks to even be able to get the. The strongest data that you need. And so now we're at the point where we understand where that data is. And so now we're just flooding them with leads to get as many appointments set up so that way we can buy as many appointments properties as possible.

Yes. And I think that's why we are turning a corner here in 2021, number one, because of the people that we hired. Oh, you know, the whole who, not how concept we talked about in other podcasts. Getting great team members in place with the right training. Yes. So doing that was one thing, but then understanding our numbers was another. So I was just meeting with Packer the other day, and we were going through. He's like, yeah, so this is what happened here. We bought this many. We did this many. This many. And so if we do this many offers, and he just walked me through, and I just. I was blown away that for the very first time, I'm meeting with him. One of the leaders that you actually, you know, he's your direct report. You're his direct report. So you helped, you know, build this company and you head up this company. And one of the core leaders in there, like, knows our numbers and knows exactly when it needs to happen. And he's the one, you know, then managing the team and making it all happen and holding them accountable to their scorecards and our weekly metrics in order to get. And we're on track to do the most deals we'll ever do, including wholesaling, because we buy, like, 95% of every single deal. Yeah. Every single deal that we find. It's so rare that we even wholesale a property. And perhaps there's times where we just buy 100%, and we're probably gonna end up buying more than we ever have before, simply because they're available at our fingertips. Right.

Right there. Hundred.

Yes. Yeah. 100 deals. That's right. So we're even buying an Airbnb, and we never would have even guessed, but it came through. We're like, whoa. Like that. Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. So it's really, really amazing how with that data, you have to start somewhere, so you're not going to have the data when you start. So you got to guess and you got to throw a number out there, and you're going to see what happens. But as you collect that data, doing a good job of tracking that data means everything to your ability to now do what you just said and be able to reverse engineer everything, to be able to say what we should, what we need to do in order to hit this goal. So now I believe any one of us could go to his office and say, we want to do 200 deals next year, what is it going to take? And he can just run the numbers and say, we need this many leads. And that's the starting point. Because that many leads is going to tell us on average it gives us this, gives us this, gives us this. And it goes right down that train. Right. I love that. I love getting smarter and smarter in business. Okay. Personal versus professional goals. So I, I put this on here strictly because I am just, I love business. I'm so passionate about business now right now I'm very, very burnt out. We're both very burnt out. We're going on a two week break in order to just kind of give ourselves a reset, personally. But typically I don't, I'm not focused on the personal. I just love business. I love what we're doing so much that I'm always focused on professional goals. But this year you said, when I was creating my vision board, you said, I challenge you to put four personal pictures up there on the board. So talk to us about importance of making those personal goals because honestly, it makes the professional rewards worth it. Right. Because you're paying for all this stuff and you're really good at personal goals and I'm not. So.

Right. Well, that's what I was going to say. This is like. And this is going to date me completely. And so. But the, the old Osmond show. Donny Marie show.

Yeah.

What was the song? Do you remember the song?

No.

I'm a little country. I'm a little bit country. I'm a little bit rock and roll. You're a little bit professional. I'm a lot personal. And so your goals were, if I didn't force you to put personal goals on your, on your vision board, it would be all professional, top to bottom. Mine would be all personal with maybe one professional on the bottom.

Make enough money to do all this.

Exactly, exactly. But it takes that, you know, you got to have the, you have to have the, the yin and yang. You gotta have, you gotta have this to have this.

Yeah.

You know, and, and I know I pushed you a little further to get those personal goals up there. And, and, and you're seeing that and I see that you're seeing that. And I have the professional goals too. I just play it off as if I Don't. But you need to have that. That good. I'm trying to think of the right word, but you need to have that good mix.

Balance.

Balance. Yeah, exactly. Of personal, professional. Maybe a little bit more in the professional. But then as, as we get further and further into this company, it's going to go more heavy professional to heavy personal. And it's going to, it's going to shift a little.

Yeah.

Over the next few years. But that's, but that's just because of where we're at and where we, what we want to do, what our professional goals are. Once, you know, if our professional goal was to have 40 team members and, and a 15,000 square foot office done. So now let's focus on personal. Yeah, but that's not, that's not our end. Go, end game. So we're still focusing a lot on professional and some not. Not a little and not 50%, but we're still focusing on personal.

Yeah, I agree. Good. All right, so the last thing I have on here is vision. So what does vision have to do with goal setting? And I just wrote down our 1, 3, 10. And when I first heard of this, it was in a mastermind event. And they said, you really need to have a 1, 3, 10. And I'm like, what's a 1, 3, 10? Well, it's your one year goals, your three year goals and your 10 year goals.

Right.

And I'm like, 10 year goals?

How do you even know what's gonna.

Happen in 10 years?

Talk about stretch goals.

So it was a challenge. We did it together a year and a half ago, I believe, and we rolled it out and it was very, very difficult. And every team member that was a key player in the organization got to contribute to what that looked like. But it was very, very difficult to wrap your head around three years, let alone 10 years. It's like, I have no idea. I'm going to do exactly what I did when I said 100. I'm gonna go, I don't know. We're gonna have 50 team members. We're gonna have this. We're gonna have this. I have no freaking idea. Right. And so I was just talking to the business consultant that we hired that's helping us and we were talking about, I said, I actually have 1, 3, 10. I just need to revise it because it's a year and a half old and I'm planning to revise it anyway. Before we have a coach come in to talk us, talk to us about, you know, what is your vision? What does it look like. And so we can see the missing pieces that we have for clarity as a company. And he said. He said one through ten. I said, yeah, one year goal, Three year goal. Ten years. Ten years. He's like, it's like the pie in the sky. Who knows what's gonna happen in the 10 years? And he's absolutely right. Because I could look at that 10 year now and be like, no, it's changed now. It's changed. And so I think revisiting it every single year and passing out to the team. And I know you're going to tell a story which I want you to share. I think it's really impactful. But the other thing that I'll add was it was a good exercise to really say, where am I? Like, I can. I know what my 12 months looks like, but really, where am I trying to go? Because it helps you put yourself down that path. Right. We're going to go north, Right? Right. But then in a year we might go, oh, north. Right. That's not really the direction I want to go. I want to shift, you know, just a little bit and go northwest instead. And so you're able to do that because you actually took the time to develop something, even if it's not truly where you're going to land. And that's where I really kind of want you to jump in. And then giving that to the team was a game changer. The fact that they got to see what the vision was past one year and got to see where. What do we want to do here. They were able to capture the vision of, hey, they're going to do big things here. I want to be a part of this. I want to grow in this because I can see myself here. But as they get to 20 team members and 30 team members, that means, where am I? I'm now a leader to some of these people, and I keep on growing with this company and continue to be more successful because I enjoy who I'm working with and what I'm doing. So people caught that vision that I think was really important, but it has everything to do with goals and understanding where it is you want to go and how do you get there. And then, okay, talk about that story that you brought up right before we started recording.

Yeah. And so. But I want to add something before we even even get to that part. But I mean, you know, the 1, 3, and 10, I like. I like redoing the one year every year, you know, because even, I mean, four years ago, you and I were Working in our house, selling properties, doing properties. We had our goals of how many properties we wanted to do. And, and at the end of that year, we're like, okay, I think we need to hire somebody, you know, so just four years ago, we didn't have any employees at all working out of our house. And now four years later, now we've got 40 employees and we've got 15,000 square foot office. You know, so it's. That's just in four years. Yeah, but what I was saying about the 10 year goal, I mean, how ludicrous is this? I mean, 10 years ago, Danny and I were just fresh out of learning real estate investing. We've been doing it for a couple years. Her and I are using our scanner and our photocopier at our house to, on bright colored paper to print these things that say, hi, we were just in your neighborhood and we're looking to buy a couple houses. Let us know if you know, you know, whatever. And then our phone number, and we're rolling them up and we're walking the neighborhoods, putting them on the doors. That was. That was 10 years ago. Yep, 10 years ago that was. I mean, oh, my gosh. If you would have told us 10 years ago where we'd be now, I be like, what? You're crazy.

It's crazy. We didn't even have the vision for this back then at all. But I think it's a practice and bigger thinking. Right? Because now that you gave that example, because I totally. My memory sucks. So you said that before the podcast started, and I was like, you got to tell that story here at the very end. Because I forgot that's where we were. And I remember walking those streets with you. And that's what we did. And that's how we got started. And it was a good marketing technique. So, hey, investors, if you're looking for houses, go buy bright colored paper, write on it with a black Sharpie, because nobody will know it's not handwritten in the first place. Go copy it, and then go roll it up and put in the doors. Because it's a bright orange, a bright yellow, a bright green, and they're gonna see it, so they're gonna pull it off and go, what the heck is this? And then, you know, hopefully they call you about their house or a neighbor's house.

Oh, and here's another gold nugget. I have to share this. Hutto, Texas, 10 years ago, we're walking the neighborhood and this lady comes out and goes right at Danny. And I'm Just like, oh, no, this is gonna get ugly. And she comes right at Danny. She goes, what are you doing? And Danny goes, oh, we're on a raising values campaign, and we're looking to buy a couple of properties to raise the values in the neighborhood. And then he goes, oh, they're gonna sell over there. And I think they want to sell over there. And I'm like, raising value campaign. It was brilliant. Just off the tip of your tongue. And it was awesome. So write that down.

I was about to get chewed up and spit out. That lady was mad. Think of something. But, yeah, so that was. It's amazing where we've gotten. And we never would have had this vision because we didn't know how to have this vision. So it's trained us to think better, bigger, because back then we weren't thinking this. So what aren't we thinking about right now that we could be doing in 10 more years? That we have no idea. And in 10 years, we're going to do a podcast going, we had no idea we'd be doing this. It's crazy, and it's awesome to think about, but it's tells you how big you should be kind of expanding your brain on what you want to do.

And just so you know, when that happened and the lady came running out to her, I was the. The man and I went to save Danny, but I ran the other way instead. I was, you know, I was like, trouble.

Run, run, run, run, run. Danny's got it. You're so funny. I don't. I don't think we have anything else. Anything you think we missed.

I think that covers goals for the day.

Yeah, it does. So thanks for joining us. If you're listening to this podcast, we really appreciate you just taking part in our nonsense and yapping back and forth, but this is podcast number nine. Number nine, Real Talk, which is real talk for real estate investors. And we appreciate you joining us. And we always like to end our podcasts and vlogs, everything that we do with Invest smart, live happy. Bye, everybody.

Bye.