From Engineer to Real Estate Mogul: Jason Roberts' Scaling Secrets

Hello and welcome back to the Owner Meeting Podcast. I'm Christian Osgood, your channel host. Today I'm joined with Jason Roberts. I am super excited for this episode. He has done a lot of different flavors of real estate. I'm going to have a ton of questions on which ones are his favorite, how he scaled the business, how he succeeded in multiple models. There's a lot to learn here. So if you're tuning in for the first time, you chose a good episode. Jason, welcome to the channel.

Christian, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited to have you. Okay, let's start. So let's give everyone some context. What does your business look like today? And then we're going to work backwards, but today, what does your collection of businesses look like?

Yeah, we've got 4 different verticals, kind of all complementary to each other, right? Our bread and butter is fix and flip properties at a pretty high net margin. And we've kind of branched off from there to build a wholesaling business for deal flow. We've started our own luxury-based and investment-based real estate brokerage here in Colorado. We have this fix and flip business that does roughly 20 or so properties a year. And then we also run a mentorship course teaching other people how to fix and flip and how to start building their net worth.

Oh, that's fantastic verticals. And a lot of those are actual like active real estate income, which is a really great angle. That's why I'm going to have a lot of questions in here. Which one of those did you build first?

We started with fix and flips. I never intended to be in real estate. My parents were in real estate and got taken out in 2007, 2008. And so it was something that was far on the shelf for me. I was an engineer who was designing race cars, driving race cars. And was working as an engineer in Colorado, started saving, you know, got financially literate, started saving $500 a month and, you know, thought that we were well off. We were making like 6 figures a year doing that and kind of realized like, oh, how do I retire when I'm not 75 years old?

I don't know. A good question to ask. That's where most of us start, like, wait a second. Yeah.

This mutual fund thing seems like it might take 30 years or so to make happen, right?

Yes. And if anyone knows, you have market timing for like, hey, what if exactly when you want to retire is not where the market is? 100%. So there, there's a lot of problems with the conventional model. So, okay, you had that realization. How did that get you into a fix and flip?

Well, engineering brain kind of kicked in, right? Like I looked at gold and mutual funds and crypto and all sorts of investment strategies. And then started looking at real estate, started looking at value-add and started to understand like, oh, I can structure this with $0 of my own money. It's an asset class that everybody knows and likes and understands to some degree. And I can go make $120 grand a year or $120K in like 3 months, 4 months doing this. Like that was a big light bulb moment for me because now we can generate very high dollar figures in a very short period of time. And really change the direction of our finances to invest in other things from there.

That makes a lot of sense. Now, one of the hardest deals that you'll do in your career is the first deal for most people. You have no track record. You haven't proven to yourself that you can raise capital if you are raising capital. There's a lot of unknowns. How did the first deal come about?

So I got my real estate license right about the same time I decided to fix and flip, and that was purely out of economic interest. Hey, we can actually get paid to pick up a property and we can save the money on selling it. So it was a big swing for us. And when I joined a brokerage, I joined a very small investment-based brokerage. It was a gentleman named Sean there and he co-owned this brokerage with a general contractor and all they did was fix and flip. And this was in 2020, 2021, and they're doing like 50 a year plus, right? So they kind of, I targeted them specifically because they could teach me that trade. I had no interest in being a retail agent. You know, and so they started teaching me what it looks like, what the process looked like, how they went about it, how they sourced deals. And, you know, found a deal essentially through them or with them or on my own, but they vetted that process, used one of the co-owners as our contractor on that project, and was able to have family members help put money down towards, you know, that initial fix and flip. We did use hard money on that, so we needed to come up with about $80K. To do it. But again, once that value proposition is understood in terms of ROI, we split 50/50 and it was like, that was a pretty easy sell to raise that money.

Oh yeah. Well, and one of the nice things that I think a lot of people don't realize, because there's a lot of horror stories and this is why people stay away from the fix and flip model is like, oh, well, first one goes wrong. I borrowed this hard money, it comes due. This is, you know, a recipe for disaster. Banks are usually going to be, or any private lender, or they're going to be the most critical when you're a new operator. So typically if you're working with a reputable lender, they're really going to do everything they can to not let you do a deal that's not going to work. It's something that I found. One of my early deals was a duplex that it was, it wasn't a fix and flip, it was a fix and hold, but same concept. I closed it with hard money. We then went and refi. So it was like the, the classic BRRRR method fix hold strategy came together. The lender really, really, really, really, really pushed to make sure like, hey, you've never done this project. How do we know it's going to work? We need to see every piece of your business plan. You really have to sell them on the thing. So one thing that I always note for people, there's actually, if you go the hard money route, as long as you use a reputable lender, there's less risk than you think there is because they really, do not want to lose money on you.

Yeah, I think it's a really good point. We play devil's advocate with that all the time. Like sometimes there's hoops to jump through with a hard money lender and that's a pain in the butt, but then also there's a lot of protections in there. Like when you ask for a draw and they send out a third-party inspector, you can use that to your advantage. When your contractor says, hey, listen, I've done 60% of the project, I need paid for 60% of the project, and the hard money lender sends out a, a photographer to make sure it all matches up and they're like, no, You've only done 30% of the project. You can use them as the bad guy and say, hey, WTF, Mr. Contractor, like I've paid you for 60. Like we never want to wind up upside down. So it's good to, it's good to have these third-party checks in process because they don't want to lose money either.

Yes. And it, and it, it feels counterintuitive, but it is better to have these checks and balances the newer you are. When you've done it 100 times and you're raising private capital from your own network, which is usually the natural evolution. Solution of this where it's like, okay, I can cut out the lender, I'll start raising capital. You should have done this a bunch of times before you go in, or at least, you know, at least successfully done it before you start going like, oh yeah, I know everything that's going to happen and all these deals are going to run smoothly. So the difficulties that you will face doing your first deal, I think they're all to your advantage. They'll all make you a better investor across the board. Firmly believe that.

Yeah, 100%. You've got to learn somehow. And no matter, teaching or learning you do, right? Like you've gotta experience it. Like I, I had to sue my contractor on my first flip and he was my employer. He was one of the co-owners of that brokerage because nothing was happening. So there's always something that's gonna pop up. And you know, when I was doing those early phase projects, we learned a ton about risk management. We learned a ton about systemization and making sure that these problems never can occur again. So how do you set up systems to where, hey, we're never going to get behind on our schedule, or, you know, we're never going to get upside down on payments, or how do we vet individuals and put proper contracts in place? And so there's just a learning curve that comes with all of that, and you just got to get started somewhere, right? The key is, can you set up go/no-go criteria or different exit strategies to protect yourself in case things do go sideways on one of those first projects, right? Can you still recover? Can you exit? Can you not lose money? How did you buy that property? Like what was that criteria like so that you're at least mitigating the downside?

Yes. Which is very critical.

Okay.

Let's fast forward just a little bit. So you do that first deal. How do you start scaling that into a business? So another place where a lot of people get stuck, they do a flip and they become that like mom and pop, one flip a year. Investor, you scaled this into a full-on business. What was the next few steps that got you from, hey, I've done a flip to this is a business in and of itself?

Yeah, Christian, I love this question because I think so many approach this like an HGTV show and their husband's going to demo it and do the work and like we're swinging the hammer ourselves. And man, there's so many ways where you can find labor cheap enough to where it's almost going to be cheaper if you hire somebody else to do it. So I think step number one is You gotta look at this as a top-down organization. It's a business. It's your business. You gotta run it like a business, right? So for us, in terms of scaling, there's a few bottlenecks that you're gonna run into. One is deal flow. You know, are you getting enough deals to support what you need on the flip side? Are you getting pricing good enough with contractors? And those two things come hand in hand. How do I get the best pricing from contractors? Well, I gotta give 'em volume over time. Right? And that, that only comes with deal flow. So as I scale up, I can get better pricing and I can get, you know, people that trust me more and we can start figuring out and ironing out the kinks. You know, another portion of that is just bandwidth and project management. Are you going to hire an internal in-team project manager that you can trust implicitly because they're on salary, or are you going to rely on a contractor? So I think having this perspective of like, hey, What are the bottlenecks? Another one of that would be private money. You know, how much private money do you need to go out and fund these operations in a cost-effective but also in a low-risk environment to where you're not stretched thin and, you know, putting yourself dangerously leveraged, right? So understanding those 4 or so bottlenecks and designing your business around those bottlenecks, really, really key. We jumped in from 1 flip to 4 or 5 flips right at a time. This was kind of like, again, it was another aha moment. I was in sales for a long time. I was with Fortune 500 companies and the products I was selling were really hard to sell. It was like pushing a rope. It was like we didn't have product market fit. I came back, we went to a Thanksgiving after doing our first flip and I didn't know half the people at this extended family Thanksgiving and was just chatting up a bunch of them and was super excited about what we were doing. And I left that family Thanksgiving with $400 grand. Like to go do investment properties with. And it was like another aha moment of, oh, there's product market fit here. We're offering something that is extremely valuable to these investors because otherwise they're just getting 7% return on their money. You know, when the, in mutual funds or in the stock market, whereas the way we structure it, if they keep their money rolling with us, they're getting like 52% return on their money. Year over year. So it became very easy to scale the capital portion.

Do you know what you said something in there that I actually, I was just thinking about this, that it is really interesting. You were an employee and successful as an employee prior to building this. And something that I have seen a lot is a lot of people who find any small business, real estate flipping, wholesale, like anything in our space, A lot of the people attracted to it are people who actually are not super successful in their careers. And what ends up happening is they're like, oh, I think I'm going to do well in business by myself. They end up not being successful in business because they don't approach it like a business. The best, in my opinion, the best entrepreneurs, the most successful ones typically were already successful outside of being an entrepreneur. It's very rare that someone just, I have a friend Caleb who did it and he's like, he's like one in a thousand. It's very hard just to go straight in like, hey, I'm just going to be good at running businesses. I'm going to see business like a business. I love the entry point of, you know how to attack a business and it, a lot of it seems like it stemmed from, I've had this job, I've succeeded in this project, I've worked with other people. So you're engineering out of a context of you worked for companies successfully. I think it's an indicator of success that people ignore. You should be able to work well with others if you want to build a company. You're going to end up creating a job for almost everyone. You better be good at working in a job if you want to be a successful entrepreneur.

100%.

It is not, you're not sitting back and just collect checks.

I started my company at 27, which was a lifelong dream for me, was to own my own business. And I look back and I would not have been successful had I not built skills that I felt like were super important. And it sounds cliché, right? Like everybody builds skills, it's generic, who cares, right? But the things that I think mattered a lot were, it was learning how to think and then learning how to build systems. And when you start out, it's just going to be you. Like, and so while the systems might not be super important immediately, if you understand that, hey, I've got to design my way. Into this to where I'm not putting in a ton of my time or, um, this mistake can't happen more than once. That's my big thing. Mistake happens, it goes on a list. We design a system to where it cannot happen again. That, and that's just continuous improvement. But if you can learn sales, if you can learn, um, basic math to do like real analysis, that's like actually going to serve you well. And you can learn to consistently improve yourself. Then I think you can do well as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, because you'll first do it for yourself, make a, try to get the margins up and make a ton of money to do it for yourself to where you're making 3, 4, 500 grand a year just as a single operator. And now, okay, what am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? How can I scale this in a way to where I don't have to work like a dog for 20 years, you know, in this scenario?, right? So that's step by step kind of how I approached it. But I agree. I think if you're, I mean, it sounds simple, right? If you're failing at what you're doing now, what makes you think you're going to succeed when the stakes are higher and it's your own business?

It seems to be a common belief though. I hear it very, very often. I know you also are in the coaching and mentorship space. I know we'll touch on that, but I hear it a lot with people who are trying to enter real estate. It's like, hey, I hate this job. I haven't had success here. I'm struggling here. And so I've decided real estate's the answer. And that is my, like, that is the number one way where I will absolutely, my coaching to that person would be like, go find a job that stacks some skills and succeed in that job and then come back and do this. I do not want to coach someone who is not going to be successful or who hasn't already stacked a series of skills where they're likely to succeed. 100%. And so that's a fantastic lesson.

I coach people all the time not to quit their job as they start real estate because you never want to put yourself in a position. Listen, flips are going to, they're amazing. Like again, we're averaging $120K net profit per deal, but they pay you once every 4 months and they have overhead costs, right? So if you quit your job and things don't go well, you have nothing to fall back and rely on. Nothing's stable. And then you're making decisions from a financially poor foundation where you have to sell something to survive. Yes. Right. Whereas if you are stable, you're in your job, you have all of your bills accounted for and taken care of, and that's not going to change, then you can go be profitable on the side. And if you do fix and flips well, one fix and flip can be 7 hours a week, you know, on the side of your job. So I think there's a lot of ways to ease into this. Until you say, okay, yep, I can be successful here.

And it doesn't take, like you said, it doesn't take 20 years. It also doesn't take, for most people, 12 months. Like for, for most people getting into it, when you're, when you are focused, it's a 3 to 5 year runway of building the business to where it's sustainable to the point where you can consistently say, hey, I have recurring income consistently where I can responsibly leave a job. Now I've had students who've done it in a year, but it's few and far between. I've seen people do it in one deal. It's also not common. That's probably not going to be you. I would never go into it saying like, oh, I'm just going to go find the deal. That's good. You said it exactly right. If you leave your job too early, what ends up happening? And your second point is my favorite of all reasons not to do this. Your decision-making is now put through the filter of I have to make this work. That is where people start doing deals they shouldn't have done. They try to make things work that shouldn't have worked. You get sloppy underwriting, you make bad decisions. That's where businesses fail. Having that mindset of, hey, I don't need to do this deal, but I'm intentionally trying to build a business in a sustainable way so I can build it once and not lose it. The job will really help you keep that context. So I am a huge, I advocate for the exact same thing. I am one who left too early, so I cannot coach that from practical experience. 2020 hit, I was an outside sales rep. You couldn't go outside in Washington State for 2 years. I was like, screw it, I'm out. Just because it worked for me does not mean that it's a good idea or it'll work for you. Past success does not dictate future results. You will not— it was not the best idea. It was more stressful. Just because it worked doesn't mean it was the best way to do it. And certainly if you can keep a job and continue to succeed there, give it 2, again, 2.5 to 3.5 years. That for most people is that 3 to 5 year window is where you really get the legs under your business where you're like, hey, this is outperforming my job. If you're not there yet, stick it out.

Yeah. And that's the switching mechanism, right? This is outperforming my job. I did one fix and flip, we made $80K. I started kind of wholesaling on the side just to get my own deal flow for fix and flips and then selling. And it became to a point where it was like, man, it just doesn't make sense to keep the W-2 job anymore because the economics aren't there. Like if I'm making $400 grand a year in real estate, I'm literally throwing money out the door sitting at my W-2. Right. So that became the switching mechanism. And it's so counterintuitive to pop culture, right? Of like, who's going to carry the boat and no plan B and go all in. And it's like, your decision-making is going to be terrible if you do that, right? Because again, the stress is now on. And if it's any consolation, I coach tons of high net worth individuals that are making $500 grand a year at their W-2 job, and not one of them has quit their W-2 job until they start earning that money on the side. And now this is a way out of their golden handcuffs to work for themselves in a parallel environment that gives them a lot more freedom, but they're, they're wise enough to have that runway.

And that's a great way to do the architecture for this. If you're setting up your, your goal for like, hey, when do I leave my job? When do you consistently make equal to or greater than your existing income? So instead of going in saying like, hey, I want to make $100 million in real estate, you just go like, hey, if you're someone who, let's say you earn $10,000 a month. This is just an example. You're $120,000 a year job. If you're trying to replace that, make decisions around, does this deal get me closer or further from a recurring $10,000 per month in income and only make your decisions around that goal until you hit that goal. And then you can set new goals, but replace your income. If it's $20,000, same engineering, you in a 6 cap market, though cap rates have changed a little bit, but you find a 6 cap market, that's $4 million of equity is $20,000 a month making 8%. If I'm doing my mental math right. Yes. So if your average return in cash flow is like 8%, you need to create $4 million of equity. You can do that through active income. You can do that through pa— like you can buy and hold, fix and flip, wholesale. There's a lot of ways to build money, but you need to have $4 million of net worth deployed. Come up with that plan, or you need to find returns that are twice 8%. So if you're like, hey, my average cash flow is 16%, you need $2 million of equity., but do the math and engineer your business so you're making decisions around the business that you're trying to build first.

Don't— it's, it's a super interesting point that you brought up that I don't think most people believe in themselves enough to, to think this way, but because what we're essentially saying is, hey, with 10% of my time or 30% of my time, right? We'll call it 30, you know, weekends and, you know, 6 o'clock to 9 o'clock, whatever it is. How do I replace my annual salary with 25, 30% of my time? Like, that's not realistic. It, it is. This is a high enough margin business. Very. This is a high enough margin business to where if you build the skill sets to succeed in this, you will far exceed your annual salary with 25% of your time here. And then it's very clear, that's your signal. Let's go all in.

Yes. Well, that's the beautiful thing with any business. So for me, it's a little easier to illustrate with buy and hold because it continues to pay you forever. But you close a deal, your income goes up, it stays up. So it, think of it kind of like a video game. And I, I will relate this to all of the other business models that you're in as as well, but kind of like you get to save your progress. So while your job is a fixed income and you hopefully progress through your career and it will go up in jumps or may go down if you lose a job, you get to save your progress in your business. In a fix and flip or a wholesaling business, you have your lead gen, you have your staffing, you have your models. They scale. You don't move backwards in huge steps. So as you grow, Even if you're only putting 10 to 25% of your time towards it, it will just continue to grow. So eventually it will outtake your job if you're running it responsibly and optimizing for cash flow. It, it just scales. The amount of time you put into it will dictate how fast it scales, but you just keep moving forward until it hits critical mass. That's, that's essentially how any business works. Agreed. So if you like board games or video games, good news, real estate kind of plays the same way. So, okay. You do the fix and flip model. You've done wholesaling, you've done multiple companies. I'm going to ask you a question that I was asked early, and this actually kind of defined a lot of my decisions around which companies I did. If one of those is successful, so you're doing well in flipping, wholesaling was a way to get more stable income. I understand those two. You then get multiple divisions. So now you have, you mentioned 4 companies. How do you determine which companies are taking away from others or is the right move? How do you determine, yes, we should do this, or are we going somewhere that's taking away from another business? Because what I see entrepreneurs do is if you're excellent, you vertically integrate fantastically in a measured way and you get a collection of companies that all feed each other. Most entrepreneurs will get start a company syndrome and you'll have a whole portfolio that is a distraction from the main thing. So how do you determine which is the right path to take and which things move you forward, not laterally?

It's a really great question. I don't know that I have the perfect answer for this because it's something that I've struggled with. I think we've recently, recently come to good conclusions here, right? Where fix and flipping was an amazing business model and is an amazing business model, but was supercharged from 2011 to 2022, right? And then from 2022 until 2026, you've got to be much wiser as you approach that strategy. It can still be a great strategy. We started, you know, building other we'll call 'em methods of income, right? Yeah, they're different business verticals, but they're all complimentary. They're all very high margin and they all play to the strengths of our core business, which is investing. So that's where the wholesaling came out of this was, hey, that pays us every 2 weeks rather than once every 4 months. There's no risk to it. It helps us with our deal flow in our main business. You know, it's just a win-win-win. And we learn a lot about marketing and the market and all of these other kind of benefits along with it. So, so long as you can staff that appropriately and it's got the ROI there that it's not dragging this other business down, then it's worth it. Okay. What about the other two? Is it worth staffing up a real estate brokerage to 100 people? You know, among all of this, most people would probably say no. Those are really low margin businesses. Like really low margin businesses. Like you'd be surprised to hear like a RE/MAX net margin in real estate. It's like 1%, 2%. Like it's not, it's not good. But it takes a lot of effort and really it starts coming down to you're going to hire a lot more staff that is non-commission-based for me personally. Right. And so all of the staff and individuals and people that we've brought on have always been basically 100% commission. And so that's been the big switching mechanism for me is like, hey, can we go into these adjacent markets that are high margin, that are only costing me overhead when we transact, when we do deals, therefore they're not additional risk. You know, 2 months ago, 3 months ago, we had about $120K of overhead every month in just standard operating costs for our business. We've cut that now to about $45,000 in costs. And it's because we got away from what we're talking about.

Wow. That must feel unbelievably different.

We're a lean machine now.

Yeah. You saved about a, I mean, that has to be somewhere in and around the average household income in operating costs instantly. That's huge, huge savings per month. That's like the annual earnings of a household every single month saved in expenses. What was the change to bring the overhead down by that? Because that's super dramatic.

Yeah, I think some of it was, a lot of it was marketing costs in divisions of the business that were still newly developing, right? So you've kind of got this infantile setup that's going to take a lot of money and a lot of runway. Some of it is some of our portfolio costs where we weren't turning a profit on some of the portfolio. Some of it was staffing, you know, so it was a combination of things. It wasn't one. Silver bullet. But we brought in a COO who was very close to me, a lot of gray hairs, a lot of wisdom, somebody that I can trust to kind of help with that. And so, you know, you ask the question, hey, how do you determine which ones are distraction and which ones are not? One, I would say a mentor or some, somebody that you can bring in with a lot of wisdom has been very, very helpful for me personally. You know, and then two, you just gotta focus on the high ROI activities and just, Scale the crap out of that. I think sometimes, like you said, entrepreneurs have their ego in it and they just want to open 12 businesses because they think they can and then they suck at all of them. Right. Um, yes. For me, the mentorship—

common of all entrepreneurial outcomes.

Yeah. For me, the last vertical for us is the mentorship program. And that came out of like a, I went from $100K to $400K a year and I'm not doing anything special. Like there's no magic. Yes. There's no, it's not complicated. I don't need to be a software engineer. I don't need to be Elon Musk to to make this happen. Like this is one of the oldest asset classes in the book. If you understand systems, you can build this income for yourself. So I just wanted to give back with the mentorship program. So that maybe wasn't even a wise business decision overall, but it does tie into all of our other verticals because now if we have excess deal flow, we can sell the excess deal flow into the mentorship program and those things like that.

It's one of the things that I'm really grateful for with AI is that it's made information free. Which in my opinion has made mentorships more valuable because now you've cut down on the learning curve, but the practical how to do it, the blueprint and the experience you can't replicate. So everyone, in my opinion, by the end of the year, all those online courses that were so popular during COVID So during, oh, I just said the word. So we'll see if we get the, we'll check how the views do on this episode now. The, we'll see if that's still in effect. Uh, but in, uh, the 2019, 2020, 2021, in that, in that realm, you saw a million online gurus start a course because everyone is at home watching YouTube. So you had just like $1,700 courses. And now you said the exact words that I, I, I would hope that you would say is mentorship, which is different than, hey, watch my course, grab my content. Now that information is free. Having people who have done what you are trying to do is premium value. Uh, so I'm really, I, you've done the exact thing, right? You've gone through struggles in business. You've figured out a lot of things that work. You've built a business that is $400,000 is, would be life-changing for a lot of people. So you've done the thing that is relatively unique that a lot of people would like to scale to, and now you're going back and teaching from there. That is what I think is going to be the most valuable over the next several years. So I think as a business person, you chose the right vertical because you did it in order. You built the businesses, you did the systems, you have the experience. Market timing-wise, I don't think it could be a better time to have an actual mentorship, which is awesome. What is, uh, if you don't mind me asking, what structure did you choose for the mentorship?

High level. Yes. So we have kind of 3 levels. We have an entry course, gives you the tools, gets you access to the community. We have kind of our bread and butter online course that we've recorded over 24 hours worth of content for and have 36 different tools in. And again, now you get access to a premium version of our community. Um, and, and you get monthly coaching and those sorts of things in there. That's the national version because again, we can't be everywhere at once. Um, our time is limited and, um, yeah, this scales to just about any market in the US if you're wise with how you, uh, vet your contract labor, like this is a doable strategy. But then the third tier of this, which is kind of what I think I really appreciate your comments on is we've got a fast-track coaching version of this that is live. It's in small groups. It is taught via Zoom like we're doing right now. And, you know, we've been doing this in the state of Colorado for 3 years now. And we're, I think that's what sets us apart. We are so hands-on. I want our mentees and our students to succeed. Succeed so badly that we are teaching you the 14 weeks worth of content. Then we are going out and we are finding you the deal and helping you acquire the deal. Then we're helping you with the contractors. We're helping you with the project management. We're helping you with the design, and then we're there to list it on the backend. And so you have our full support, you know, from start to finish in a very intricate manner. And that Fast Track Coaching approaches this business from top down. So that is now designed to transition from, you know, our middle tier or standard tier, which is how do you make six-figure net profits flipping homes to how do you become a seven-figure earning earner, building a fix and flip business, scaling the fix and flip business, getting rid of the bottlenecks in this phase with our hands-on support in that environment. So that's the structure that we've, you know, deployed with this. And it's funny, maybe it wasn't a wise business quote unquote decision, but it's, I've gotten some of my best friends out of this mentorship course. We've gotten all of our employees have come out of this mentorship course. They've stuck with us that long because they like the content that much.

I have a theory having scaled this business before, I have a theory that over the next couple years, your top-tier product will become your flagship product. I would not be surprised when I hear the 3 of them and all of them, I'm sure have fantastic value. The direct, the ability to have a, not all the way done for you, but done with you almost to the extent of done for you. I think that is the future of courses and I think that's where the most value is. So if anyone's listening to this podcast, I'm like, hey, this is, these are the types of things that I want to learn. Highly recommend you check it out. And if you do anything, I'd look at, I would look at your top tier thing because I think that's going to become your main thing. It's just so valuable having the actual tangible experience. I think that's what most people who want to build a business are really looking for. And frankly, that's what I pay for when I I look for mentors or when I attend any sort of mastermind mentorship program retreat, I'm looking to be in the room with the people who have built the business at the next level of where I'm trying to go. But fantastic. I like the way that you're doing it. I also like the multi-tiered approach that is, that should serve you well. I think that plugs in nicely with what you're doing. And then yeah, is it the one thing That all course creators and mentorships learned, they take a lot of time. If you run them right, they're gonna be your most time intensive. That being said, they're also the most rewarding and they're also the most fun and they can be the most lucrative depending on how you position and network. So I like the vertical and I like that, that is something that I'm really happy that you said that where it is. Mentorship, and that is part of the program that people can opt to actually work with you on their portfolio. I think that's hugely valuable. Hugely valuable. Question that we always ask, the stupid tax. So not saying that you are stupid, but I'm saying you were definitely the dumbest that you've ever been before you started compared to where you're at now because you haven't learned all the things that you've learned. Uh, the farther back you go, the, the dumber you were. That's just how it works being a human. So the highest stupid tax you paid, the most expensive mistake monetarily or personally? Could be just burned a friendship, burned a— there's, there's, I've heard a ton of them. But what's the most expensive mistake that you made early learning how to be who you are today?

Yeah, I think there's two. I think this is repeated time and time and time again with new investors, new fix and flippers. It's something that we've worked to address tirelessly in our mentorship course, Um, number one was trusting contractors, um, to just do their job, right? And this, this, if you're a contractor, I love you. Trust me, this is not harsh on you. Um, but this is not an industry where you can say, hey, listen, this is a professional and I hired them to do this job and it's going to get done on time and on budget. It just doesn't happen. Um, you have to be actively involved in project management and you have to have contracts that provide fair, like fair structure so that everybody's on the same page as a team, but also have penalties and teeth in that contract for being late. For example, on that very first fix and flip project that I told you about, the owner of my business was my contractor and we got into this project and he's doing it for us and 4 weeks go by and nothing has happened in 4 weeks and I'm getting cranky. I'm calling him, I'm trying to get in touch with him and doing whatever. It's just around Thanksgiving. We go on Thanksgiving break. He comes back and I, we come back from Thanksgiving and it's finally demoed and some progress is being made. Another 4 weeks goes by, nothing is happening. It's been 8 weeks and the home has been demoed and that is it. And it's supposed to be an 8-week project from start to finish. And we learned very quickly, like I had to sue him. I had to issue a demand letter. I had to get him on the right track to get him to finish this project out. But we learned very quickly that like, hey, I didn't have a contract in place. And even if I did have a contract in place, if I don't have a penalty for you being late, like a dollar per day beyond a reasonable timeline, I have no ability to motivate you to move forwards. If you think you're not gonna make money on this project as a contractor, all I have is the please, would you, maybe, could you possibly show up today? And you have no leverage, right? To whereas when they're 2, 3 weeks late, you say, okay, listen, we're 2, 3 weeks late. How is a team gonna rectify this? Because right now this is the amount that we're holding back from the contract, and that's going to motivate them to perform as they promised they were going to perform. So that was a monster lesson for us. We have a very strict set of contracts that we put in place with all of our GCs and our subs. That one was probably about a $40,000 swing in the profitability of that project. We still made $80K on that project. We were very blessed to get out of that very first project successfully. The second one was a project that I just shouldn't have bought. I bought it incorrectly. It's in the middle of 3 neighborhoods in Denver that are all prime neighborhoods. University Hills, Virginia Village, Holly Hills. Holly Hills was voted the number 1 place to live in all of Denver and potentially in the nation. And so I was like, sweet, I can't lose. But this happened to have a very, very specific subdivision, specific pocket. And in that pocket, although I am surrounded by Primo subdivisions on all sides, it was a different school district. Every home in that subdivision was built in the 1950s, whereas these other were built in the '70s and '80s. And the highest comp in my little pocket was about $250,000 less than everywhere else. And so I thought I was going to be selling for $870,000. The highest comp in my subdivision was $580,000. And I did— no, we did not sell for $580,000. We sold for like $720,000 or somewhere in that neighborhood. We still crushed the comps in our particular neighborhood and pushed the price up quite a bit. But that was a $100,000 loss, an $80,000 loss, like flat loss. Not, hey, I broke even, or it was, you know, less profitable. No, we lost $80,000, you know, on that deal. So that's the number one mistake I see a lot of newbies make. Is comping properties incorrectly or buying properties incorrectly. And that one, that one was an easy mistake to make.

And that's why I'm such a huge advocate of the direct coaching, because that is something where someone with experience can look at it, give you direct feedback. Those are the mistakes where, you know, you see a mentorship and they, I don't know your pricing, but for a lot of these you paid $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 depending on what the program is. And he's like, hey, you're going to learn something there. Like if you're going to, if you're, if you already decided you're going to buy a deal regardless, it's saving that $80,000 mistake. Early in my career, I made a mistake that cost me about $1.4 million. If I could save you $1.4 million, or if Jason can save you $80,000 on a transaction, that's in my opinion, that's the value of mentorship. And that's why I asked the stupid tax question. Like if you're, listening to this podcast, get tidbits from every episode of what not to do. Save yourselves tens, twenties, thirties, hundreds, million dollars, depending on how large the mistake is. Don't make the same mistakes that we make. Yeah, no, that's fantastic lessons and they're all avoided by working with people who've done what you want to do. If you can get the right mentor and the right people on your team, you're going to cut those costs down dramatically.

Yeah, 1,000%. If you're going to spend $10K on a mentorship and it makes you $120K in 6 months, was it worth it? Of course. And if it can avoid you making that $40,000 to $80,000 mistake, because we've made them along the way, I'd rather you not take your lumps. Like, you know, maybe you're not as profitable as you want to be on the first project because you're learning. But that safeguard is huge.

Yeah. I absolutely 100% agree. 100% agree. Well, guys, this is a wrap for this episode, but I will link below in the description if you guys want to follow up with Jason. You guys are curious about the course, the mentorship, you have questions from this episode. Jason, what's the best way for people to reach you?

People can just go directly to betterblueprintacademy.com, and that's where we house everything from our educational arm. Otherwise, Better Blueprint Realty has all of our businesses kind of wrapped into one.

Oh, that's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, everyone. This is another episode of the Owner Meeting Podcast. If you enjoyed this and want other practical advice for your business, like, follow, subscribe to the channel, and we'll see you guys on the next episode.