His Deal Volume is Inhuman - is he a man or a machine? Josh Janus

If the person doesn't have the life that you want, I'm just not going to listen to you. Truly, I don't really care who you are. If you're in my family, if I've been friends with you forever, if I just met you over the phone, it doesn't matter. But if you have the life that I want, I'm going to listen because you figured out a way to get there. So you probably know how to tell me how to get there from where I'm at.

All right. Welcome to the Owner Meeting Podcast. I'm Christian Osgood, your channel host today, joined by a friend, Josh Janus. This guy is a freak. I met him— I had the privilege to meet him about 2 years ago at an event. He is the most organized young person I've ever met in my life. He has made a ton of people a lot of money through his systems and processes. I've asked him many times how to build a business like his, and I realized I don't have the detail-orientedness to get it done. I'm super excited for him to share some of his, uh, some of his journey here. Josh is an amazing guest. Absolute privilege to have you on. Josh, welcome.

Pod. I appreciate the intro. Yeah, the opportunity to be here as well.

I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan. For those who are not familiar with you yet, share a little bit of your backstory. What does your business look like today and where did you start?

For sure. So I started, you know, 4 years ago DoorDashing, listening to books literally about finance and real estate. I always ran a bunch of small businesses in high school and early college. So I had like I have, you know, $30 grand saved up. How am I going to grow this? How am I going to figure out a way to turn this into financial freedom? I kind of turned to real estate in a way. I wanted to house hack similar to how Christian started, I believe. And I found a bunch of guys on BiggerPockets that were in the market that I was in in Columbus, Ohio. Went to the office. There was like 20 guys that owned multiple houses before the age of 30. And I was like, how is this even possible? Like, I'm going to get a computer science degree, make like $100,000, $150,000. Even if I live dirt cheap, it's going to take me a long time to own a bunch of real estate. So I started cold calling for an agent there in an area to try to find off-market deals, learn the process of calling, talking to owners, understanding their needs, their desires. Found a couple deals. Made some marketing fees that way, stacked up the marketing fees and started to buy my own investments. So my first one was about 2.5 years ago and I just crossed 200 units owned and it's all basically 1 to 4 units. It's in Cleveland, Ohio for the most part, a little bit of Columbus, Ohio. Almost everything is the BRRRR method. So every unit is not livable and I got to put like $20,000 to $80,000 into each unit and then get it rented out. Hopefully 6 months later.

So, so I want to, I want to point this out for those who have followed my personal strategy. I don't like to do a lot of transactions. I do 3 or 4 transactions a year. That's— I'm super picky about what I do. I enjoy value-add projects, but I do, you know, 25 to 50-unit buildings for the most part. So for me to stack 100 units doesn't take that many transactions. Your volume is insane. Doing small multifamily, you know, duplexes, fourplexes. You must be doing so many deals. How do you get that much deal flow? Like, what is the process? This is the— this is the thing, by the way, that blew me away about Josh, your method to have as much volume as you do. It to me is just absolutely crazy. I love the business you built. How did you do this?

I would say on the back end, before we talk strategy and formula, I just have a notepad next to my desk and every little thing that I do, I don't care how small it is, ask a title agent a question about the survey, see if the appraisal's in, you know, talk about, ask when the lease ends, anything like that, I write it all down. And in the beginning it was like 200 things a day. Like it was a lot. And I would look at it and I'd figure out, do I absolutely have to do this right now? Can I give it to a virtual assistant? Can I give it to an in-person assistant? Can I do that task once a week? Can I group it together, do it once a day? Can I just not do it because it isn't making me money? You know, a bunch of those questions basically surrounding delegation. And I just been doing that every day for 4 years and it just continues to allow me to manage more transactions like every month. So I'll tell you, Year 1, I bought $1 million in real estate and I sold about $17 million. Year 2—

How old were you in year 1, by the way, when you started as an agent?

22.

Oh my gosh, dude, there are so many 22-year-olds who can't move anywhere near that volume. It's insane.

I really— a big part of it is like I just try not to do anything that doesn't make me money, like doing showings. Driving around, like that stuff, that stuff is way too repeatable and you don't, you don't need to be doing it. But real quick overview, year 2 sold about $20 to $25 million, bought $5 million, and then this year selling about $30 and bought $15 million. So I've been able to scale the investor side. That's kind of what I've been focused on. And to give you an idea, this year transaction-wise as an agent, selling homes, it's about 150 to 200 transactions. On the investor side, it's 75 purchases and about 30 to 40 sales. So there's, there's always like 30 things in contract to 60 things in contract, literally, between sales, purchases, refinances, and the same thing on the client side. So really, a lot of it comes down to writing everything down in a notepad. Building out a pro— building out a procedure step by step so that a kindergartner can understand it. Give it to your VA, take all those sets of rules and kind of put them in flowcharts. And that's kind of the next level in terms of helping somebody, somebody else understand every step of the way.

But yeah, what blows me away about Josh is it's this, this hyper optimization. You've taken every piece of your time. And, and you've done just through a notepad on your desk, right? Is you just have a notepad and you're just tracking, okay, is this an income-generating task? Is this the highest and best use task for me? Do I have to be involved? Can it be delegated? I, I'm, I'm assuming I have a friend named Brian Lubin. He, he does everything in 3 colors on his calendar. He does, does this make me money now? Is this a task I need to be involved in that can make me money later? What's that in yellow? Or this is just a non-income-generating task that could be delegated to someone and he runs his whole calendar 3 colors. What are the categories that you have on this spreadsheet for tasks that Josh is going to do, chat, tasks that you're going to delegate? How— what bucket do things fall into?

So get real detail-oriented. It's essentially a 5-step process. Number 1, I answer any new email. Well, I don't do this anymore, but I did this a long time. Any new email that comes into my email inbox that is not previously filtered into a box, So I have like 50 email filters. One of them is going to be title companies, lending, insurance, client questions, anything like that. So if an email pops through that isn't filtered, I'm going to look at it, figure out do I have to do it? Should I add it into a filter box somewhere else? Can I ignore it? Whatever the case may be. Because I think those are pretty hard. That could be somebody reaching out and wanting to buy my house. That could be a new buyer. That's what I think is the most important in my system. The second thing is the email filters. So I filtered everything and then I did every box. So I would answer all the lender questions, all the title questions, and then over time I would teach my VAs how to do each box. And now out of the 50 filters, I'm only really doing like 5 of them and they're doing the other 45. And you would think like most of it you'd have to do, but over time you're like, yeah, I really don't actually have to do this. Like really. Then once I'm done with that, the next thing is all of my new texts. So the rule of texting that I essentially follow is if somebody on my team can answer the question, they answer it. If they can't, or the person is asking for my opinion, my take, something idiosyncratic to me, I will answer those things. And if it's something that I can teach my team how to answer, I will gladly do so. And then I'll never have to answer that ever again. I'll use a template, text template, email template, whatever the case may be. And then the next thing is tasks. So every day I need to call like certain sellers, the most important, you know, 2-minute phone call that can make you $50 grand or whatever the case may be. Like those things, securing a contract, like getting somebody on your side in a transaction, keeping something alive. That's what I do next. And then finally, The last step when those things are done is working on the business. So it's a fat to-do list of like 150 things. And I just choose like 5 to do every week. And I'll just work on one of those things. That's what makes you, you know, you told me about the schedule breakdown. Step number 5 is making money later, not now. And everything else is kind of making money now and in the short term.

That's such a good step. Like this is the piece to isolate for everyone. Like if you're like, what are the steps that I would follow in this podcast? That's it. If you can take your schedule to those 5 steps, the amount of efficiency that you have is incredible. Do you, do you do this in the rest of the pieces of your life? Like, are you just a hyper-organized person?

Yeah, like Amazon, everything is ordered weekly, monthly. My, my VA schedule, my, my haircuts, cleaners, like everything. Like I don't really have to do much anymore. I just look at my calendar, my, like my VAs will adjust my calendar, like I kind of just live on autopilot.

Now, if you guys haven't seen Josh, and by the way, Josh, what's your Instagram handle?

Josh Janus, J-A-N-U-S.

There we go. Everyone, check this out. I, on the second time that I saw you at an event, I gave you a hug and I was like, holy crap, this guy is absolutely jacked. I'm imagining that your efficiency goes into physical health as well. Do you have like a really strict routine that you have for working out? Like, is this just every piece of your life is like, I am just like Josh the Automatron?

Yeah. Like I write down all my workouts every single day. I figured that you would have something that looks exactly like this.

Yeah.

Like I literally, I just, I try to operate this way and I work on my annual goals every single Saturday and then I work on my 3-year goals every single Saturday.

Taking this approach. So I want to say this. Josh is unbelievably more organized than I am. I have found personally in my life that I can usually, with my level of organization and work ethic, I can usually do about 2 times what an employee can in a given period of time. And I can also work about twice as many hours. It's not a big deal for me to work a double full-time day, which means my max efficiency where I run with my level of organization, which is nowhere near Josh's, I can do about 4x what a normal person can do. I could do what 4 employees could do, and that is my personal max. Josh can probably do about what 12 people can do. I'm serious. With that level of organization, you have more time in your day. You can go through the task you're working on or high level. You can move through them at a faster speed. You're probably pretty consistently 4 to 6 times as productive as an average person during the day. And knowing you, you probably don't have a problem putting in the hours either.

No. Yeah, I, I would work 12-hour days every day. I did that for 2 years, basically building all this out. Now I probably work about half the amount of time, so still like 60 hours, and then I'll fill the other time in with stuff that I kind of wanted to do instead.

So I guess—

working out, sports, whatever the case may be, like building your life into the business. So that it isn't garbage.

How old are you today?

Uh, 24.

Okay, so you're 24 years old. I need— people need to hear this. If you put in that amount of work on the front end, and a lot of people on this podcast, a lot of entrepreneurs have crazy numbers and they're really young. You put the work in on the front end for the rest of your life. You can continue doing exactly what you're doing. Or you can continue scaling, right? If you just— if you say you did nothing better, you're just like, hey, I got my systems down, I'm good. I'm down with purchasing $15 million a year of real estate and doing like however many hundreds of transactions you do. Of course you're going to scale and get better and better and you're going to get bigger and bigger and the money you're making has to go somewhere. So you'll buy more real estate, right? But if you never scaled, you would be so many different levels of done. If you just did the same thing you did last year, a little bit better the next year and a little bit better the next year. 24 years old. By the time that you are a standard person's retirement age, which I believe is like 60, 65, somewhere in there, that is so many hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate. And your first transactions, your first like $20 million of real estate has been appreciating for like 40 years. That is an insane amount of money, dude.

I know.

That is an insane amount of money. It's hard work, but 12 hours a day, you're doing that work while most people are just getting out of college, just getting their first job, or doing the thing where they're like, hey, I'm young and in my 20s. I'm going to go travel the world and do a bunch of stupid non-income generating stuff. Putting the time in on the front end, you're already more or less set for life if you don't do any more with your systems, you delegate stuff, you can continue to work at your same productivity with all of your systems in place. You're basically done. SOPs. You've gone through, there's a final step at some point in people's business where like you love working, you love putting in the grind, you love growing. At some point, it's nice to have the option to say, hey, what would happen if I stepped out of my business? Would it thrive or would it die? How do you document each process? Cause I'm imagining you have a lot of VAs, you have a lot of team members, you cycle through people. There's a lot of hiring and firing in this business. How do you ensure quality control in that? Like you delegate a task that you don't just have to keep retraining the same task to everyone that goes into the role. How do you document your SOPs and how do you organize once you build the system once so you don't have to build it again and again?

So. In any business, you start out as you're the owner, sort of, but you're really an operator of a high-income paying job over time. That's kind of how you start. The only way I think about it, you create a job where you can make a bunch of money, but you have to work every single hour. And then like step number 2 is like document everything and slowly give people stuff to do and you pay attention to them doing it and make sure that they do it right. So that's kind of where I'm at. And the next step is you take people and you replace yourself where they review everyone doing everything that you told them to do. And then they tell, and then the manager, that's basically a manager role, goes up to you and tells you when something's catastrophically wrong. And hopefully you have systems in places that, that handle every other scenario other than a $50,000 problem or whatever scale that you're at. So, that's like the next step that I'm getting into. So, I did that on the contracting side because I have a project manager. I don't really have it on the realtor side for the most part. And I don't really have an acquisition person. I'm still the one deciding to buy the house. Pretty much though, after my contractor walks the house, I'll tell you, this is very possible, whatever asset I really think. I'll look at a deal. "All right, great. Let's have my contractor walk it." So I tell my VA to set up the walkthrough. My guy will walk it, take pictures. The VA will send me the pictures. I hop on a 10-minute call with my GC. I iron out the scope of work, iron out the project bid. Then as long as the numbers make sense, maybe I send an accountant or whatever. I don't do anything at all in the process until the notary's at my door ready for me to sign papers. So my VAs fill out the loan applications, they schedule with title, they they get all the necessary documentation in because all of that stuff is repeatable. There's a lot more in your business that's repeatable than you think. Even buying one house and then buying another house or whatever the case may be.

When you're building this business, going back to like the beginning, what was, what was the number one thing that you did that made you as successful as you were? Because you started out doing, I mean, you very rapidly started doing a lot of transactions as a broker and that increased your active income. You started doing a lot of the buying at the at the same time. What was like the first thing that— you're super successful now with a whole lot of systems in place. Was there a first thing where you're like, oh, I did this and it made a lot of money, so I kept just pulling that thread and building the business? Where— what was the first breakthrough in your business?

I think it was developing relationships with other agents, wholesalers, cold callers, whatever, that I am somebody who is going to close a deal if you send me a property. And I'm not going to waste your time and tell you that I could sell something that I can't. So I become the first person that many people send the deal to when they find something off market. And I'll tell them right away, I'll buy it or I'll sell it or I'm not going to do anything. And I had to fail a lot in order to actually establish that reputation. Like my first 11 deals fell out of contract because as literally David Greene put it, magically, like I was taking unqualified buyers and unqualified sellers and putting them in a room and they would always leave. And it made a bunch of sense. So over time, I had to like, like understand the characteristics of like, who is a good buyer of this asset class? And then who is a good actual seller of this asset class? And then putting them together.

And that gives you the ability to quickly say yes or no.

Yeah, very quick. Yeah. I'll decide whether I can sell something or buy something in like literally 2 minutes or quicker.

And you know what? A lot of people need to hear this. The speed in which you can confidently answer someone in a solid answer, be it yes or no, builds an incredible amount of confidence in that person. If you bring a deal to me and I go, hey, yeah, I need to look at this over, you know, let me kick it around to my team, we're going to get back to you, and I get back to you 4 days later, I'm not really confident that that's someone who's organized and ready to go. If I can tell you on the phone call, or I can call you back in 15 minutes and say, hey, I talked to my team, we ran some numbers, I'm a go, let's do this. That builds an incredible amount of confidence. The ability to just say yes or no to things is huge. And if you're not there yet, there's usually a piece of information that you don't have. Go out and learn it.

Yeah, I agree.

That's a great skill. We got a quick decision-making, actionable things from Josh. If you can't say yes or no yet to something, figure out what you're missing that allows you to say yes or no, then acquire that skill and then confidently give people answers.

Because you know what, it's going to pop up again probably tomorrow.

Yep.

So if you're ready, you're ready.

Yeah, dude, I freaking love that. You said my favorite thing of all time. Number one task that got you started was meeting with other people, was the relationships, it was the owners. How do you get connected to these people? Because I believe the best way to do anything you want to do is get around the people that you want to do things with. In fact, that's why I run the Owner Meeting Podcast. If you're busy, you're driving to work, I want you to be able to listen to this podcast and be like, I can learn awesome stuff from owners without actually having to go out and meet them. If you're trying to build your own business, you're trying to meet your own people, How do you go about starting those relationships?

In the beginning, I would just cold call guys and, you know, hey, Alex, I see you own this single family. I found some other ones that you own. You know, how did you— how did you get all of these? And they're going to be like, who randomly calls you like this out of the blue and is asking how I own something? And generally these are old dudes. I'm going to stereotype a little bit because you kind of have to explain the point. But it's usually old guys that are well off. They're more well off than their friends. Nobody cares about them, really. Their family heard about their real estate success for the last 20 years. They sort of care, but they're kind of done talking about it. This is something that, like, they're very passionate about. And if you're wanting to learn more and you're engaging with them and you're going to give them the greatest, like, currency that human beings adore, which is attention, they're probably going to respond in a positive manner and give you something back. Not everyone's going to do it, but there's quite a lot of people that will. And I was able to meet some beasts of investors in my market knowing nothing, like driving there like, "Oh, this guy's got 6 houses I found." I didn't understand how to look up LLCs at the time. And he was sitting with his daughter. He's like, "Tuesday at 3:00 PM." I'm like, "All right." This guy doesn't have a job and he's got a massive spreadsheet he's scrolling through and it's like 1,200 units. I'm like, oh boy, there's, there's levels to this stuff, aren't there? And like that guy showed me off of 2 phone calls and I got 20 other stories like that.

And there's always another level. Oh yeah, there's always another level and it's fantastic. And what I've learned is that how you get from one level to the next is not how you get from that level to the next one. There's a different path from each level to the next level. You have to learn from the people We've done the thing that you want to do. Dude, you have stumbled upon early, like much younger than me, the number one currency. This is how you win the game. You move from being an outsider to being an insider. People in real estate know other people who own real estate. They give you all of the connections. It, I kind of look at this like a poker game or maybe even a Monopoly game might be a better example. When I grew up as a kid, my sisters and I would play Monopoly. Someone would get out really early and, you know, someone lends them a property and gives them a little bit of cash and goes like, hey, I don't want the game to be over yet. Like, that would happen all the time. Other players have resources you don't have yet. They also have knowledge you don't have yet. At some point, if everyone knows, likes, and trusts you in your market, someone will deal you in. They will hand you a deal. They will hand you a relationship. They will hand you something. They might be a partner. Down the road. But the people who have done the thing you want to do already have all of the resources that one could need. You get out and you build your team. You also said something that I found extremely true. A lot of these people have friends and family who don't care about their real estate at all. Don't ask them to sell the freaking property. Ask them how they built their portfolio. Start with a relationship with real estate agents like You get paid when you do a transaction. You can call a broker and talk transaction all day long. They'll really appreciate that, especially if you can close a deal. Their job is talking transactions. If you're talking to an owner, transactions only come from relationships. Build the relationship first. That will carry you through the next 15 transactions with them. It's, it's literally the most genius thing. And you learn this at such a young age. This is like incredible to me. Was there one relationship that stood out among the other ones where you're like, man, I met this one guy and it changed everything for me? Or has it just been a collection of a ton of people?

It's just been a collection of a bunch of people. And the rule that you stated earlier on in this, which is like, if the person isn't— I'm going to be even broader. If the person doesn't have the life that you want, I'm just not going to listen to you. Truly, I don't really care who you are. If you're in my family, if I've been friends with you forever, if I just met you over the phone, it doesn't matter. But if you have the life that I want, I'm going to listen because you figured out a way to get there. So you probably know how to tell me how to get there from where I'm at. And like, kind of, I use that rule in many areas of my life. And like a good way that you can extract that rule and apply it to other people is when you're calling, you know, call a guy that has 20 units. And then, you know, you know what, call another guy that has 50. So he's the quote, next level up and just connect them. Maybe you can help facilitate a transaction of the 50 guys selling a bunch of small units to the 20 guy. And then he 1031s into a bigger building. I've done that a handful of times. Like you can be a connector for people at higher levels than you even.

There was a— and you said something really smart here. Do they have the life that you want?

To live.

There's an investor in— I won't name-drop him. He's in the Dallas area. I met him years ago. He has a little over 2,000 units owned in cash. And I met him and he was the weirdest freaking person ever. It was, it was the most uncomfortable interaction. And then he had me drive some of his portfolio. He's like, hey, I'll seller finance 108 units to you. I'm like, that's amazing. We drive out. Buildings are like 20% occupied. The roofs are falling off the buildings. Some of them are just completely condemned. You can, you can have all the money in the world. You can have thousands and thousands of units. Ended up being one of the least valuable connections I've ever made. It's not just have they done the thing you want to do, it's are they living the life you want to live? I'm in his office and he has his sons there who is just kind of a loser. And mid-meeting, he kicks his son out and goes, hey, go grab Daddy a glass of water. And I'm like, this is just weird. Everything about this is weird. I don't want to be like this guy. We left the meeting. I never called him back. He's worth tens of millions of dollars, probably hundreds of millions of dollars. He has a crappy portfolio. He's a slumlord and he's kind of a creepy dude. Not the relationship you want. I've also met someone who owned a couple of duplexes who connected me to some of the best accountants I've ever had. And I loved the way he lived life and I loved the way he paid off his portfolio. Anyone at any level has something to teach you. Better than just meeting the people who've done what you want to do, connect with the people who've lived the life you want to live. I'm stealing that. That is now— I say meet the people who've done what you want to do all the time. That phrase is now gone. Multifamily strategy, I'm changing the course. That is a big difference. Meet people who are living the life that you want to live and then learn the steps that they took to get there because they've already done it.

And like, what's amazing about the internet is you don't actually really have to meet them. They've probably been yabbering about on YouTube and Instagram or wherever, and you can pick up a bunch of stuff. Like, there's a bunch of people that I've never met, but I listen to them all the time because I want to live the life that they live. You can extract principles and behaviors, implement them into your life, and it works because it's worked for them. It's worked for other people.

Yeah, we live in an amazing time. Decades ago, this information wasn't just for free on YouTube. You could not just hop on YouTube University and meet the people who you want to emulate. For someone who's looking for, you know, looking for some of your knowledge, is there one place that you particularly share, coach, train individuals on how to do this? Is that a part of your, of your universe? If people had questions for Josh right now, you can reach out to me.

And if you have specific actionable questions. If you ask me stuff that you can Google in 2 seconds, I'm probably not going to answer. But if you ask me something regarding your framework of your business or something constructive that is high level, we can hop on a Zoom and talk. I've been on hundreds of these. And I'm also working on some education regarding renovating homes, managing contractors, like kind of on the more structural side of rehab real estate, but I'm happy to help.

Remember how Josh sorts his inboxes. If you want a high-level answer, ask a high-level question. Otherwise you're going to get delegated. We all understand this, but if you have a great question for him that is interesting and well-articulated, reach out to Josh. Josh, Josh knows a lot about a lot of this business. He's unbelievably more successful than other people in his age bracket and unbelievably more successful than people in other age brackets. There's a lot of people go their whole life and never have the success that you've had by 24.

I appreciate that. I just, I would focus on just get a little better every day in as many avenues of your business or whatever your goal set are, and you're going to be in places that you never thought that you would be. I did not think I would be here right now, you know, ever.

One thing I ask everyone, and while you've been very successful in a short period of time, the dumbest that you will ever be is at the beginning of your business ventures. That is just a fact. You know the least. Earlier on, most of us have paid some price, either the cost of losing a relationship. It could be a monetary thing. I bought a resort I shouldn't have purchased. There's always something. Is there one lesson that you learned that was personally expensive? We call this the stupid tax, the tax for not knowing what you don't know. Was there one thing that you learned where it's like, boy, if others could avoid this mistake, you could move farther, faster with less money?

So it relates to me hiring contractors, and I probably lost about a quarter million dollars my first 12 months doing the Burr method. So So yeah, I got punched in the mouth like 4 times. I would say you get what you pay for, number 1. Number 2, when you're hiring contractors, always think how can you make yourself the most attractive person for them to work with, right? Regarding how you communicate with them, incentives that you provide, like a bunch of different ways of thinking about because contracting turns into a long-term relationship. Hopefully you don't want to do one house and be done with them. So how are you going to set up your relationship in a way that allows success on your end and their end? And I didn't think about any of this at all. I just went with the cheapest guys, sent a bunch of money, and, uh, yeah, I got cooked.

That is one of the most common things that happen in real estate. My cost of first projects that we did multifamily, I was spending like $20,000 to $23,000 a unit for some of my renovations. Today I can do a higher quality renovation for like $6,000 to $8,000. We were getting absolutely burned. I did not realize we were going over concrete block. The contractor's like, oh, it's going to be— you absolutely want to put drywall over this. It's unbelievably expensive man-hour-wise to hang drywall on concrete. Like it just is, it, it's one of the costs where it's like, it is never worth the return that you get to do that project. It, it's just like, just accept that these are what the walls look like and it's gonna be fine. There's no return there. Some of these things, same thing, quarter million dollars just like overspent cuz I didn't know what I was doing. If you understand what the projects are, you understand the cost and like you said, you become the most attractive person that you possibly can. To work with. What steps do you do to be more attractive to work with for contractors and for other vendors?

So I would, I would say think about like 5 characteristics for contractors.

All right.

So there's like 5 different categories that I would think about regarding the quality in a way of the contractor and the way that I would think about how you interact with them. So like first one's communication. Are you harassing them every day? Are they actually giving you reasonable updates? Do you have a line of communication that is effective, efficient, and respectful on your end and their end? So I don't, you know, when my guys start a house, I'm not going to ask them 2 days later, how's it going? I'm going to ask them like 2 weeks later because it's a $50,000 job and they're not going to be done in 2 days. Pricing is the next one. So I think, I think it's okay to overpay a little bit in the beginning to get your foot in the door with somebody who's really good at the other attributes that I'll list here in a second. Because as you build the relationship, you're going to grow your volume of business with them and you're going to get prices down. Everybody's experienced that quality. You know, I would not sacrifice quality ever. Like, I would not go with somebody that's priced really well, communicates well, but does garbage work. 'cause either the tenant's going to yell at you or you're going to get a bad inspection report and you have to redo everything again. That's about $100,000 of the losses that I occurred in year 1. The next thing is speed. So this is something that I think you got to sacrifice a little bit in the beginning as well because you got to think, all right, if I find somebody priced well, good quality, communicates well, and they happen to be available for my one house right now, Right? That's rare to find all of that. They're probably not going to prioritize my project and they shouldn't. It's a brand new relationship. That's okay. You have to prove yourself. So I would kind of sacrifice the speed aspect in the beginning, build it into your holding costs, just expect it to take a little bit longer. And over time, similar thing to pricing, they're gonna get quicker if you become more of their business. And then the last thing is obviously availability. You need somebody that is ready for your one house right now. And you have to make sure that you're on the same page about when it starts, when to order materials, etc. But those are kind of like the 5 things that I look, look at, because I have 55 full-time people that just work on the houses that I buy. One project manager, 4 GCs, and a whole bunch of subs under them. And this is a way that I think about adding the GCs and Obviously the project manager. Mm-hmm.

And one of the great things about this is you're, you're hyperlocal, right? You know your markets, you're scaling in these markets. As you do more and more transactions, these people work for you longer. Typically your pricing is more consistent and their priority on your projects get higher. This is why I love buying in the areas. I hate jumping market to market to market, getting new contractor teams, managing a contractor, firing that contractor, finding a better one. When you have systems that work, especially as a systems guy like you are, Josh, you build these systems that work, you scale those existing teams. You don't have to go and jump markets all the time and build the same business over and over. Now with your SOPs, you could, but that takes a lot of brain damage. If you have an optimized system, push that system as far as it can go. Keep buying in that area and keep churning that business because it's its own independent silo that's already a well-oiled machine. There's a cost to set up anywhere else you go. One of my good friends, Caleb, he, he's like, I'm going to buy in Texas. Texas is a big state. Texas is not a local market. That is, there's a lot of Texas. You bought McAllen, Laredo, Houston, Stephenville. And he's like, wait a second, I have to get new teams and new PMs and new contractors for every single market all at the same time. Almost impossible to optimize well. You've done a really good job of understanding your market, understanding your time. Optimizing the teams that you have. You have a lot of units and a ton of acquisition. And you said you have 4, 4 GCs that are doing most of that. Yeah, that's a super optimized system. That's not that many people coordinating a ton of work. If you have the right people in the right place in the right markets, right? This is what a good business model looks like, everyone. Like, this is solid fundamentals, well documented, tight teams, people you've worked with for a long period of time, intentional design. I love all of this. I love all of this. This is the right way to build a business.

I'm going to throw out something that I do regarding my contracting that has worked so far. We'll see if it still works in 5 years, but it's a little unconventional. When my guy walks the house, I have a list that every home has to meet all of the standards. If the roof's this old, replace it. Furnace is old, replace it. This flooring, whatever the case may be. I tell him I can spend X amount on this house so he knows how much I can spend and what the end product has to be. And he'll tell me if he can do the project. Some projects he'll make like $20,000. Some projects he'll make $5,000. It's not about that. It's the fact that more projects are going to come on a daily basis all of the time. I'm looking out for you. They're looking out for me. So it's, there's no contract written down. It's pretty clear what needs to be done and I'll tell you how much I can spend. And you know, they say yes, like every time, literally like every single time they're going to say yes. Yeah. And you can do all this remote too. Like I happen to live in Cleveland, but I haven't seen any of my houses in like 3 months.

That's wild.

I've never seen a house that I've bought before I owned it.

Really?

No.

Has that ever come at a cost to you? I've, I've seen it happen a few times where there's stuff that I would have seen in person where I go in person, I'm like, wow, I'm glad I walked that. For you, you do so much volume that would not— I can see why that doesn't fall into highest and best use of time. But has that ever come at a cost where you're like, shoot, had I walked to this, we would have saved money?

Definitely. Yeah. Like I told my contractor, you know, more bedrooms, the better.. And then he was like, all right, let's just remove all the living rooms and family rooms then. So I'd have like weird unit layouts and my property manager's like, we can't get— yes, it's a 4-bedroom, but it's like a kitchen and 4 bedrooms and a bathroom and there's no other rooms. So I got about, you know, 15 units like that that are just weird layouts. So I got to rent it lower. You know, that, that's, that's a cost of doing business the way that I do it. But in my head, I save like whoever, however many hours not driving and walking anything, and I replace that with buying 10 more houses that made way more in the spread of the rent that I'll make if I had paid attention to that. So I'm constantly looking at, you know, like valuing the hour of your time and trying to do literally nothing under it ever.

And it's the value of, hey, the— Josh's ability to do a lot of volume exceeds Josh's ability to optimize each individual project as far as like your physical input on the project. Now, for those who have listened to my channel, I talk about walking every deal. Why do I say that? I'm someone who likes to do 4 transactions a year. Like, that's one transaction a quarter. We're going to optimize the bejesus out of it. I also have deal sizes that are, you know, each deal is several million dollars typically. Walk those. It's worth the time to optimize them. If you're only going to do 4 or 5 deals a year, do freaking amazing deals and do them as perfectly as humanly possible. Josh is doing so much value. Yeah, you kind of blow it on a floor plan on a unit. So what? You're going to do 50 more. Like, it doesn't— it's not a material difference as long as it doesn't happen on every single property. It's— it all comes down to optimizing the time. This is why I wanted to have Josh on. It's just the way that your mind works is amazing in terms of making a ton of money, which I think is why most people listen to this podcast is like, yeah, I would like to make more. You have the most repeatable and scalable model I've ever seen because everything is a system and every single day your business gets a little bit better. Because that's, that's how you function. How do I get a little bit better today? It starts as simply as taking a piece of paper on your desk and writing down and documenting the task that you're actually doing. If you can apply that one step today, the next day you can go, okay, well, do I have to be doing each of these things? And what is the value of each thing I'm doing? And you do that over a few years like Josh has at the age of 24. I'm 32. The amount of more wealthy you're going to be at 32 than I am is unbelievable. Like almost not conceivable. I don't want to think about it too hard because then I'll get jealous. It's amazing how far you're going to get. And it all starts with a piece of paper and a pencil on your desk. Absolutely incredible. Josh, we're going to wrap here. Is there one last piece of advice that you'd give people who are early in their business or even just starting their real estate business? They want to build something like you've built. Is there one last piece of advice for them?

I'd say as you're optimizing your business, whatever scale you're at, it doesn't matter. Try to set goals slightly farther out than where you know that you can get and get good at essentially meeting that gap. And if you are always doing that, you're always going to be further ahead than where you thought that you would be. So if I wanted to buy, if I knew that I could buy 20 houses in the next year and I had all the systems in place to do it, I'm going to set a goal of 25. What microchanges do I have to do in my process to get 5 more? How can I squeeze 5 more out? And then, you know, you get that pay, you get focused on like your pace. So I'm constantly looking at my 30-day pace, 90-day pace, 180-day pace, and just apply that principle.

Josh, thanks for joining us today. For those listening, This is one of my favorite podcasts. I've wanted Josh on for a while. He actually reached out to me. He was like, when are we doing this thing? I was like, uh, immediately. I'm so excited to have you on. I am a per— just personally a huge fan of this guy. So Josh, uh, it means a lot to have you on. If people wanna follow him again, that's Josh Janus on Instagram. Uh, shoot him a message if you guys have a high-level good question for him. This guy optimizes his time. So if you have a question, make sure it's a darn good one. If you've already listened through the whole episode, we interview owners like this every single week so that you can learn from the best of the best playing the game. I think Josh is one of those guys. If you haven't yet, like, subscribe, leave a review on the podcast wherever you're listening. We appreciate you and we'll see you on the next episode.