Busyness is not Business!!!

Hello YouTube, it's Christian. I am back this week for our Rules of Real Estate. We're on Rule #29, which is one of my personal favorites. Had I applied this earlier, I would have 10x'd my business a long time ago. However, grateful where I'm at today. I hope you listen to this one because this will help you no matter what you're doing. The rule is busyness is not business. They sound very similar, one spelled with a Y, one spelled with an I. However, immensely different. There's only one thing that busyness is good for, and we will get into that metric almost immediately. So, if you haven't yet, like, subscribe, follow us, 'cause we are getting really far through our rules of real estate, and we are almost wrapping the series up. This is one of the big ones. Listen closely. So, business is any business. This is not just for real estate, though we've applied it to multifamily, to short-term rentals, to our property management company, to our education company. It applies no matter what industry you're in. This is business advice. However, if you're watching this channel for real estate, this directly applies, and you definitely need to pay attention because I've seen people lose money not following this metric. So what is the metric of busyness good for? Well, busyness is the amount of activity that you have in relation to the time that you have available. Now, if you are just too busy for other projects, don't take on more projects. Turns out that is a great way to do very poorly on everything. It is better to be great at the things that you are working on than just be terrible at a whole bunch of different opportunities. Now, when Cody and I got started in real estate and in all of our businesses, when we started, it was so hard to find the first opportunities. Getting started is very difficult. That's why a lot of people don't go into business. Getting started is, in fact, the hardest piece. Once you're rolling, These once-in-a-lifetime opportunities come up way more often than you'd imagine, and you get to a point where you have to know when to turn down projects. That's what busyness is good for. When you are at capacity, the first thing you look at is, can I bring in more people? When your whole team's at capacity and you have this amazing opportunity, you're gonna be faced with an option. Do I need to expand my team, and am I in a place to expand my team, or is this once-in-a-lifetime project just not the one to do? In fact, Cody and I passed on a huge one today. We're talking millions of dollars, waterfront, never going to get a chance to buy property at this price again. That being said, way too big of a project while we're also doing resort and our multifamily and our other companies. Now, had this project come up a year from now, might be perfect. But today, too busy. So why is busyness a bad metric for the rest of your business though? I know people who run their business, and I'm not gonna get too specific so I don't actually offend someone, but let's just say their business activities are very mundane, very simple, and very low profit. They have a business that is very close to a hobby. However, it eats a lot of their time. Just because they are busy, they quit their day job, they were tired, they're making less than they were making in their mediocre day job, they're doing something they love. Good for them. Where you don't want to get confused is, hey, I'm doing a good job running my business, or my business is going to thrive because I put in more effort. Now, the key to business is not busyness, it's efficiency. How do you streamline your processes? If you have something that's eating all your time, is it something that needs to eat your time, or can you bring on more members of your team who will thrive in that position who will enjoy that position and who free up your time for more adventures. I'm going to take this to a simple piece of practical application. So, practical application. How do we use this? Okay, so Cody and I started these companies by ourselves. So when we first started, it was just the two of us buying real estate. There was no one else involved. So I've never done this solo, but it was just what two people can do. And it did not take long after we bought our 38-plex where all all of our time was taxed. So within a few months, we brought on Hannah, our director of property management. She now wears a lot more hats in our company. She is the most critical player. I would argue that she's probably more important than Cody or I to any of our businesses. She is our all-star, uh, number one person. She actually owns some of the companies with us. She's not even an employee. She is a co-owner now because that is how critical she was to us. We gave her equity in our projects. We expanded our capacity by offloading the property management day-to-day tasks. All of a sudden, we were able to go from 38 to 100 units. That's a big difference. Doesn't— might not seem like too much, 3x-ing your business, but on a functional level, Cody and I could not self-manage that much. Well, now we expand again. I retired my wife successfully. She had several months off work, and she went, hey, I actually want to work on some of your projects. Well, fortunately We had just picked up a resort and we had a whole bunch of maintenance tasks that needed to be coordinated. We expanded the team again. With the resort came 7 more employees. So each time we do these projects, we get busy, you load up your time, you offload them, and you go, okay, now we have enough people. The other piece to this is systems. There's the only 2 ways to save time functionally in business. It's add new people and delegate, or add systems that streamline your processes. We have a ton of software that does this. Cody and I used to do one-on-one coaching. However, everyone had the same questions. So in lieu of one-on-ones, we recorded an online course, themultifamilystrategy.com. If you want to learn how to play the creative game, check that out. Then our mentorship is done in groups. Now, one, that does save us time, but two, that builds a community. So now the questions in that community are people who've been through the coursework people understand the fundamentals of the creative real estate game, and now you can move forward. That business is now streamlined and it's optimized to the end user. If you were to hop into that, it is so much stronger than our old one-on-one mentorship because we meet more times a week in community, and you're backed up by classes that you can watch any video in real time. Those are systems that save time, optimize the business, and offer a better experience for everyone. We did this in property management by adding employees and software. We use the software called AppFolio. If you have over 50 units that you're managing, you can use this fantastic software managed by our team. Hannah and my wife run that software, and they work very, very hard on it. The combination of people and systems, well, not only do we save a bunch of time, But those systems offer a better experience for us and for the tenants of our buildings. We can streamline a whole lot. That is what running a business is. So how am I defining a business in its simplest essence? Rob Kiyosaki said this, and I think it's in Rich Dad Poor Dad. It might be in Cashflow Quadrant. It might be in both. However, I know I got this from Kiyosaki, but you are running a business when you can step away from your business for a year, step back in, and your business has grown and is farther than where you left it. Does it mean that you're worthless to your business? Absolutely not. You should be involved in each of your businesses. I am not a huge fan of true passive income. I think you should be involved in your projects and you should have some level of busyness. I think it's really, really healthy for you. You should be solving puzzles and growing your teams and leading your teams. However, when you actually have a business and not a job for yourself is if after years running your business you wanted to take a 1-year vacation. You could go, you have the people and the systems in place for your business to not just sustain but to thrive in your absence. That is how I define business. It's people, it's systems. Be an excellent leader, but put other leaders in place so that you don't have to be. That is when you truly have a business. Anything up to that point, you are either a hobby Or you're a business in startup mode, and startup mode is definitely business. However, it comes with a lot of busyness. So if you want to apply these principles, and I wish that I knew this way earlier, I, I was late to the game actually reading the Rich Dad series. Most people who watch this channel have already read that book, so good on you. If you haven't, do it. I'll drop a link below, but there's a link on every video anywhere on finance. Your business is a business, like a mature functioning business, when you can step away from that business. You have the people and systems in place to run it. So you leave for a year, you come back, that business is better and stronger than it was before. That's when you have a business. If you're just struggling with busyness, you probably have inefficiencies. You need to work on finding more people and refining your systems. Apply this and you can rapidly scale your business, be it real estate, property management, education company, uh, whatever industry you're in, apply this. Remember, busyness is not business. All right, like, subscribe. We'll see you guys next Monday for our next rule of real estate.