She Downsized her Real Estate Business to Create her Dream Job! Grace Gudenkauf

Hello and welcome back to the Owner Meeting Podcast. I'm Christian Osgood, your channel host, also founder of Multifamily Strategy and way too many other companies. Grace is joining us today who also has quite a few companies. We're going to talk about some of how she's optimized this today. She's made some business changes that I'm actually quite jealous of. She is the co-founder of WIRE, which is Women Invest in Real Estate, which it has been ridiculous to watch that thing grow. I'm obviously not a woman in real estate, my wife is. But I see you everywhere. I feel like if I know a female in real estate, I look through that, like, I'll be talking to them, I'll talk about their business, and then like 5 of their pictures, I'm like, wait, that's Grace again. You are everywhere. You're a BiggerPockets published author. She literally wrote the book on self-managing your rental properties. You have your own investment company, which you've made some dramatic changes to. I am super excited for this episode. Like, I bring on some fun guests. Grace is like a 10 out of 10. This is, this is a dream guest for the channel. So Grace, thank you. Welcome in.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely way overdue. I apologize. That's an oversight on my side and I suck, but we finally got you. So the podcast is now an official podcast. We now count.

Yeah, I'm excited for the topics we're going to dive into. It's fun talking to other higher-level investors and I've done a lot of things, made a lot of mistakes, so I've got things to share.

See, that's the only people I want on the podcast. Everyone knows that Grace has done cool things. If you'd happen to not know Grace, Grace, give us the quick backstory Where did you start? What does your portfolio and business look like today? Give us just like the 30,000-foot view, start to finish.

Yeah, I invest in Eastern Iowa where I was born and raised and lived up until just a few years ago. Everything I own is in a 15-minute radius, but I manage all of that from Tucson, Arizona. Moved here a couple years ago to get away from my portfolio and because my fiancé got a job. Started very DIY investors. So we really had to figure out how to get out of that. I flipped a lot last year. We'll talk about why I'm not doing it anymore. I'm building a couple triplexes, which is super exciting and new for me. And I'm really at a point in my portfolio where I was scrappy. I bought all the real estate, I did all the things, and now I'm trying to make it easy and simple so I can enjoy my life and focus more on WIRE, which is truly what wakes me up every day, gets me out of bed and what I have fun with.

I hear this all the time from entrepreneurs is real estate. Here's the beautiful thing about real estate. Once you kind of get your flow, it's fairly boring, which I don't know about you. I like my money to be boring. Like the, the, the main thing is like, we know how to do it. It's on autopilot. Like we, we manage the rentals, they bring in the money. We occasionally have some drama, we solve the drama. It's a basic business. Almost everyone I know who built net worth and wealth in real estate finds a passion project within real estate. Some of them become developers and contractors, some of them become coaches. Like, I mean, your community is just absolutely phenomenal, but you find something in real estate where you're like, there's other nerds who love this stuff too and they want to. So it's fun watching that become the passion project and watch that company take off. That's again, huge congratulations. That's coming.

Thank you.

You did a million dollars already this year, right? Or is it in 12-month rolling average?

No, we haven't had a million dollar year. We hit our million dollar, the, in revenue, but we'll get to total revenue.

Million dollars. That's such a huge benchmark in any company. Yeah. And it deserves it. Like you have this, this awesome community. I've never heard of anyone who doesn't love it. Thank you. What point in your portfolio did you start the community aspect? How, how far in were you? How did this all come about?

This is actually a great story. And I also want to preface, like, I'm from small town Iowa where if you made $100K, like, I'm not from Seattle where there's tech money and there's a big city. Like $100K is like a lot of money. Like my parents only probably ever made $60, $70K. I don't know. They did very well for themselves because they invested real estate. But so I just want to add that in there, that it's very different when you grow up like that. But I started Wyre actually when I started investing in real estate, but it didn't have a name. I just was like, hey, I'm gonna throw up a Zoom in January of 2021 because I just figured out all this real estate stuff. It's really cool and I have nobody to talk to about it. So if I can throw this up on my Instagram and I found this girl named Amelia who is now my business partner, but I didn't know her at the time. She seemed cool. She was also from Iowa. I was like, there's no way there's two people in the whole state of Iowa my age doing this. So come be on this meetup.. And we thought like our, my mom would show up, her mom and a couple other people and I'd be happy. And like 60 or 70 women showed up to that first meetup and we were like, whoa, what the heck? It was COVID. Keep that in mind.

Okay. I know what's the best time on planet Earth to launch these, but right. How did you market this where 60 or 70 people showed up?

That's still, I mean, that's just my Instagram. Like I literally was like, you have to message me your email and I'll add you to the list. And then everybody would do typos. It was like, the most ridiculous system, but like I was not intending to start a business. I just wanted to make friends. That's all I wanted to do. And it really continued like that once a month for about a year. Still never thought we'd ever make money from it. And then the first time we made money, Amelia looked at me and she goes, we should do a retreat. And I was like, you're crazy. No one is gonna buy a retreat from us. Like, that's ridiculous. She's like, well, I already sold a few tickets, so we, we have to do it. I'm like, oh my God. Okay.

We're doing a retreat. That is, that is, I, I love and hate it when my, my business partner Caleb will do that to me all the time. He's like, I have an idea. I'm like, ah, he's like, well, unfortunately it's already happening.

Right.

And, and away we go. That's so exciting. Oh, what a great partner. Okay. So she, yeah, she's already pre-sold some tickets. You're already committed to hosting this event.

Right.

How did the first event go?

Where was it? First event we sold at cost. Like we both walked away with like $500 and had a weekend with 20 girls in real estate in the mountains in Gatlinburg. And we thought we were rolling it in.

Like we thought we were— that is insane. To post a profit on your first event, by the way. That you sound like $500 isn't much to not lose money on a first event. We kept it simple. Phenomenal.

Well done. That's actually a great point. So many people will throw massive events and it'll cost them, you know, they'll be $200K in the hole for this massive event. So, and I think that's a theme in WIRE is we've always been lean. We've always been profitable. And so after that, you know, we kind of still did it willy-nilly for a year or two, threw a course in there, did some more retreats. Then I'd say about a year ago, we officially launched our Wire community membership. Mm-hmm. Put in a ton of work. We have over 200 investors across the US and that is really our bread and butter. Our retreats are now beyond, like, I can't even describe if you went to that first retreat, what they look like now. You know, private chef, 20 people. We just did our 10th in Zion National Park doing adventures, hiking, ATV.

What great location. Zion, Gatlinburg. Gatlinburg is one of the coolest places in the country. I love Gatlinburg. So, okay, so you're choosing awesome locations, you're running these retreats, people are coming, private chefs. This sounds like a dream business. So you basically get to travel anywhere outdoorsy that you want to go and you get private chefs and you get like, and you make some money doing it.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Isn't that crazy? I think one thing that Amelia and I have done really well is we've made Wyre what we wish we had. And what we wish we had, in fact, is what most women and investors in general, not just women, wish they had, which is a community and a place to learn from people's mistakes and level up and see other people doing bigger things than you. And it's so incredible that we get paid to just hang out with these amazing people, go to these incredible places. Of course, we put a lot of hard work into it. Oh yes. But at the end of the day, definitely a dream job.

Oh, that is so fun. Well, again, huge congratulations on hitting that million-dollar mark. Now, something I found in my business, the worst part was like my first million-dollar year. I found we had so many people in the community. Ours runs a little bit different where it's more mentor. Like we are mentorship first, education second, community third. I'm trying to expand community, but you have 2,000 people in the community. You're mentoring like 70 people at the same time. For like that, that's what my business looked like at around $1 million. I'm like, I have, I lost all of my time freedom. And while it sounds like a lot of income, the marketing costs and the overhead, I didn't run as lean. So when I'm going, I'm like, I make enough where I'm making a lot of money for a lot of time. I'm not making enough to hire the amount of people that I need to get any time back. So that was like, The beginning, half a million dollars, like dream job. It's all perfect. I'm coaching people. It's community. It's beautiful. You get to a million dollars. I felt for me, I'm like, I, this is harder now. I, you have to add systems to become business. Are you finding at the million dollar mark you're running into that? Or did you guys manage to run this as a partnership lean enough where you're like, hey, we actually just did a better job launching our business than Christian did, which would be hopefully the case.

Well, I think, The difference is, is I think we went slower. I think we've gone a lot slower than a lot of people who build these huge communities have. And so we haven't had as big of issues. So it feels really good. Like Tuesdays, I don't work on Wyre. It's my real estate day. I really don't work on weekends. I probably work 20 to 30 hours a week in Wyre, maybe 10, 15 in real estate, but I'm also gone like at least twice a month. So throw those weeks out the window. So I feel that we've really gone slow and steady and been very intentional, which I'm really grateful for. Granted, we prob— we probably could have made way more money by going faster, but Amelia and I always joke that we have too many hobbies to be working full-time.

Well, and I, I think you lose some relatability if, if you, because there, there are a lot of people who, who build large communities or who, who take off. We, when I started my company, we got lucky that like I was partnered with Cody Davis at the very beginning of my career and he got the most watched episode of all time on BiggerPockets. And we had the show on UpFlip also get a million. So I mean, we got like, we started during COVID and we had two multimillion view episodes go like, so it's like there was so much.

You had a lot of growth.

Very, we're like, well, I mean, we, we might as well scale to do it. But what you lose is you lose some relatability. Like if I'm trying to coach someone from, from like when I started, it's like, hey, I got to my first 100 units. Very relatable. It was this slow, steady thing. You come from a place of like, hey, I have 400 or 500 units. All of a sudden it's like, okay, well now I'm like, I have a much bigger business that had like huge podcast and this big marketing spend. And when you're trying to coach someone on step 1 and 2, yeah, I don't have the life that most of my mentees want. I have, zero time freedom, tons of business. I like what you did a lot better. And I think it's more relatable for most people starting this. You can make a ton of money in any business. Limiting your growth is going to give you a tighter-knit community. You're going to stay relatable. You're going to have fun, uh, but you're at the million-dollar mark in your company and you got to have fun the entire way with a partner.

I think that's amazing. Amelia and I are intentional. Yeah. And We, like, for example, you'd say you were mentoring 70 people. We did one-on-one coaching in our community and we only did 4 each because we're very— my worst fear is getting in over my head. So I'm really good at saying no. I don't give a fuck. I'll say no. Like, I don't care.

I will say no. Know when to say no. That's going to save you more money than you can imagine.

Yeah. And so I just think we've been intentional and that's always been prized above high— more money.

Yeah. And that is the correct way to do it. Cuz what you end up with is like, for me to maintain quality, it just means it meets more hours and it means, it means constant input and it means like adding team members, systems, processes, expenses. It's really hard to keep quality up and growth up at the same time. If you just lead with quality, you end up with the best possible group. I know so many people in your group, it is this like tight-knit community of people and it's gonna grow itself. Like if you don't do any outreach. Your people will invite people forever. You have an infinitely growing business. My prediction, you'll outscale me and pretty much everyone else who has a large, like, you know, quote unquote large community because you kept, maybe we might not, we might not catch Pace Morby because he's pretty far out ahead of. Yeah. But for 99% of the groups out there, you're going to pass them cuz you're gonna last long and your mentees and your community will bring in more people to the community. It's a, self-growing business. It's a beautiful model. I think it's the best model out there.

Funny that you say that because we have watched multiple people do 5 times what we've done and then already be done with their business or already shut it down or already pivot it or do whatever. And so of course, when we're watching them have that crazy growth, you're always thinking like, oh my gosh, I wish we were that big. I wish we were doing that. I wish The grass is always greener. And that's why conversations like this, and I appreciate you, Christian, being honest about like, it was hard. I work a lot. I made a lot of money, but I didn't have any time.

Like, those are the things— I still can't tell you one thing about time freedom. Like, nope, don't know. Never had it. I've never had it in my life.

I appreciate you being honest about that because that's what— when so many people see only the good parts and not the downsides. So it's great to always talk with other community owners and business owners to see What is the full picture?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's so fun watching you grow that. Now the main thing, real estate, you're investing in real estate. We're going to get to, we're going to get to some of this. I saw a post recently and I think it's, I think right now as of today, it's like your, your, I think it's your top pinned post on Instagram, but it was that you're selling your portfolio. Now, not all of it. I'm giving away the post. If you slide through, it's like, ah, the hook, I'm selling everything.

I know. I got, that was a good hook.

Yeah. I was like, ah, this is a good hook. You've downsized some of what you've done and you've restrategized, and I think this is going to play right into the way that you built your community of this slow, measured, how do you preserve time and actually build what you're trying to build? What did your portfolio look like before you started selling down and what does the business look like for you today?

Yeah, I want to get into the why, but yeah, my first couple years in real estate, I bought like 20 units in Iowa. And I would do anything to make an extra $200 in cash flow. You know, I was 22, 23 years old that I had quit my engineering job one year in to go all in on this. So like I would do anything to up that cash flow. Lots of strategies. I did keep it all within a 15-minute radius, which has been like a really great thing that I've done.

That's amazing.

But I got to about year 4 in business. I had maybe 30 units and I decided I'm going to start flipping. And I hired in a full-time maintenance person, a full-time project slash property manager, and we flipped like 12 properties in 2024. And so we were, I had great systems to keep everybody in place. And at the end of that year, I thought like, I'm going to keep growing this. I'm going to, you know, I'm good at real estate. This is my thing. Like I got us, I have to keep growing this. And my project slash property manager, after about a year and a half, got his dream job in Salt Lake City for a massive developer and gave me, you know, like a 1-month notice. And the first 2 days after that notice, obviously I was super excited for him, but I was like, oh crap, what am I going to do? We're in the middle of these 5 projects. I'm 1,700 miles away. And it only took about 2 days for me to realize, actually, I don't know why I'm doing this. I don't like flipping. I don't like project management. I'm not good at renovating. Why am I doing this? What am I building this toward? So I decided, all right, I'm going to scale that down, be done. Also, it's so messy, as you know, when you have so many projects, private money lenders mixing around your qual— I was really doing quantity over quality, and I really like to do quality over quantity. And I was like, I just have too much going on. They're taking longer than they should. Things are getting missed. I just don't like this. And so I real— I went from like 12 properties last year. I haven't flipped anything this year. I finished some of the flips in 2025, but I haven't acquired any flips. Moved into building with a partner. I decided I do not— I'm already the head of Wyre with my co-founder Amelia. I can't be the head of this big flipping business. So let me actually— and when my property manager quit, project manager. That week, a guy who— my realtor's husband, who I'd known for like 4 or 5 years, finally decided to quit his job as a police officer. And he's an incredible contractor and very good at what he does. And I was like, wow, this is meant to be. You're going to GC all my stuff that I need to finish. And then we ended up partnering on some properties, building 2 triplexes together, also doing a loft together, did a single family together. And it really helped me stay in my zone of genius, be completely out of the renovation, which I'm not good at. I'm good at running a business, organizing systems. I'm good at running the numbers. So I get to do that. A year ago, I could never have guessed that I would have a partner in real estate. I've always been super anti-partner, like, do not partner. It's a marriage, blah, blah, blah. But like we traded personal financial statements, we wrote out mission statements, we wrote out roles and responsibilities. Like we really went through it with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that it was gonna be a fit.

And that's what you have to do on these. I've found that, because I've had partnerships that have just got, it'd been incredible. I've also had partnerships that have been absolutely terrible. And this is from someone who has, I've, I've 31 partnerships. I send out 115, 116 K-1s for all of the various partners on various projects. It is a pain. And if you have enough partners, someone's going to fight with you at some point. Now I have like a 1% fight rate. And when you have that many people, that still means you're, you're always fighting with someone over something, which is, it's kind of miserable. I like the way that you've structured it where you found a partner and you guys structured the partnership. I'm curious, do you guys have a solid, so, so what is the mission statement and do you have an exit plan in the partnership if things go sideways? Those are the, the two big things that I've found have, when they come up, it's really good to have is where are we headed? And once we get there, What do we do?

Great question. And thankfully I was able to learn from people in Wire of like what happens when you don't have an exit strategy or you don't talk about what you want the future to be. So our mission statement was actually to build and to flip. We have not flipped. Yeah. We got so busy with building, so we really need to revisit that. And eventually we were planning to revisit maybe Opening up a GC firm because again, he's really great at all of that. There's really not a lot of competition in our area. Mm-hmm. And as far as the exit plan, yeah, we signed an operating agreement. I can't remember exactly what it says, but we absolutely went through like, what happens if you decide you don't want to do this? How are you going to communicate that to me? What are those conversations going to look like? Mm-hmm. And I'm a very direct communicator. Like, I want you to be like, dude, I feel like you're not pulling your weight, please. What's going on here? Yeah. And I feel like so far it's been good. Of course it's not gone to plan because we got the builds that are taking longer. Other things came up on our plate. So it's definitely, we need to revisit that and, you know, have some more serious conversations. But I've been pretty happy. I think he's been pretty happy and I never could have guessed I'd be in a real estate partnership.

Isn't that crazy? When it starts to, it starts to forget. Hey, we got the right group, we got the, the right team. You put it together. And I have, so I've had this conversation many times with my YouTube buddies, Deon McNeely, Matt Hawkins, Lumberjack Landlord, Zuber, all of them are all anti-partnership and all of them are like, hey, we don't want to work as hard as you. So maybe, maybe that is the answer. But I have found if you get the right partnerships, it becomes so much more fun. I've partnered in Texas on almost every deal in Texas, actually literally every deal in Texas with Caleb Hommel. And this 22-year-old is just absolutely amazing to work with. He's phenomenal. He pushes me to do projects that I'm like, ah, we can do it, but I don't know if we have the, like, he pushes me to grow like I wanted to when I was 22. And so he keeps my companies expanding in a way where I'm like, if it was up to me, I might actually just do less. And so it's fun looking back and being like, this partnership pushed the companies to a different place and I'm really happy with where we ended up. So I, I am pro partnership, like 100% pro partnership, pro the right partnership. Yes. I, and I, I've shared this many times on the podcast, but one of my best partnerships and worst partnerships was being partnered with Cody Davis, my original business partner. Like when you partner with people who have never had a job, never went to college, never done all the other things, huge fans of just going, I'm a huge fan of going straight into entrepreneurship. However, if you work with someone who's never worked on a team ever, you have your own problems of like, oh, amazing entrepreneur, rounded skillset. No. So as the companies grow, the most expensive and most lucrative partnership? Cody Davis. We talk about this all the time. Cody's still a great friend. We don't partner on deals anymore because the risk reward isn't the same as it was when we were younger. It's too much drama and up and down for me. Caleb, he's like, we buy for cash flow. He's with the program. I'm like, okay, we have the exact same vision, same market, same vision. If we close, our income goes up. I don't want any drama. I don't want any major renovations. I just want Do cash flowing real estate, close, increase income, continue to pay less in tax. That's basically, basically my acquisition strategy now is how much do we need to buy to not pay tax this year? Yeah.

And my partnership with Amelia has been almost 5 years now. Gosh, that's incredible. And it's incredible. I could never do Wyre without her. We'd never be where we are if we didn't have each other. But there's absolutely been hard conversations. There's absolutely been tough heart-to-hearts of like, you know, where are we at and how do we get better and all of this. And it's so amazing to have a partner who can get through that with you and be on the other side where things are better than ever. You're both in your zone of genius. You're— when you're down, the other person is up and can help you get out of that funk and vice versa. Amelia and I are really good at that for each other, of talking each other off the ledge of like, we will both admit, usually I'm the one talking her off a ledge. But we actually have a bookkeeping business with Wyre and the other day she was talking me off the ledge. She was like, this is unusual. Usually it's the other way around. I was like, I know, I know. I just really needed, you know, I was just really down about something and confused and you really helped me through it. And that's what a great partnership can do is that they're there for you. This sounds so cheesy, but it's really true, like through all the hard parts. And then that makes the good stuff even better.

This has been something I've learned, but I'm curious your opinion on this. Is there anything as a true perfect 50/50 partnership? Like, can you have a partnership where both people are equally valuable all the time at every stage of the business?

Probably not.

And it's, I'll have her on the podcast too, so she gets to weigh in on this as well.

I genuinely feel that is an equal partnership between us. But something that's interesting is yesterday we were talking to our coach and she was reminding us like, You guys don't always have to be paid the same, work the same, or have the same responsibilities. If one of you wants to do more than the other, as long as you're on the same page, one of you could be full-time, one of you could be half-time. Like that is not off the table. And that seems so simple, but we were like, oh wow, that's a great point. And there's some things that I like to do that she doesn't that have sparked some of those conversations. But I really do feel very lucky to say that I think we both give very equal value. We both have different strengths, but is it always at every moment equal? Of course not.

And I think that's where I see a lot of partnerships blow up is someone's like, well, I think I, you know, I brought more here or I did more. It's like, I, oh, let me use Cody, my relationship as an example. When we started, Cody Davis was 20 years old and he had 30 units. He'd done 3 deals seller financed in the same market. I had 2 duplexes and an 8-year sales career. I had more business skills. We weren't building a business. We were in acquisition mode. Cody was unbelievably more valuable than me in the beginning of it. Uh, when we started our, uh, coaching program and Cody instantly got a podcast where he gets a million views, front end of our business, Cody just brought more value. As we got into the operations and the details and the focused work and the teamworks and the me, I brought more value and we've had back and forths in the, There's always points where you can look at it and be like, I feel like the partnership's unfair. My biggest rule is as long as both people are giving it 100%, everything 50/50 is fine. Your 100% doesn't have to be the same as mine, and mine does not be the same as yours at every phase of business. What you said is perfect though. If someone wants to do more, there's a beautiful thing that you have in companies called like income that can be split differently. You can do salaries differently.

Compensation. Yeah.

You can rework the equity, which I usually actually think is people jump to the equity too early. I, I think salary is a much easier, it's like, hey, I'm doing more. Can I get paid more? Like, I, I'm doing more job. Can I get paid more for the job? But you have salaries, you have equity, you have all sorts of different types of compensation. It's not that hard to sit down and have a discussion with someone of, this is what I want to do, and if you want to do less, how can we make this work? Or vice versa.

Yeah. And, and be okay with an initial disagreement and working through it. I think as you grow your company, your businesses, and you get into more of that leadership and operations, yeah, you need to have very specific job descriptions, org charts, who reports to who. And when you have all of that laid out and filled in, it could be relatively clear of, okay, looks like, you know, 70% of the day-to-day is this person and 30% of the day-to-day is you. What would that look like to move some of those percentages around or better apply compensation towards the workload? That is absolutely those types of conversations that will move your business forward and probably need to happen in a lot of people's businesses. Yeah.

Partnerships. You have a partnership where you guys are able to just maintain 50/50 and both stay fully engaged. I mean, it's, it's, it's a beautiful thing when you have, I call 'em strategic partnerships as opposed to just like a capital partner. Like you have a, this is a true, we are partners in this venture together. That's, that's so cool that you have that. I think that that will carry you unbelievably far. Losing one of our core businesses, that was really hard. I'm like, this was a two-man operation. Now it's like, when we made the decision to, to part ways on like a, a meta business level, it's like, uh, I, I guess I'm the guy now. That this is a whole different business. Uh, I think that probably now that we're reflecting on it, probably how I lost all my time.

But I also think, 'cause we went slow and steady. Yeah. That anytime we started to deviate or get disconnected, it was so much easier for us to course correct and get back on the same page. 'Cause we weren't overloaded, overrun, overworked. Like we always had the bandwidth to keep our partnership first and foremost.

And that's what it, that's what it takes. So, so beautiful structure on that. And I think this plays into your area of genius. You literally wrote the book on self-managing rentals for BiggerPockets. I mean, you, you, you are actually literally the author for how to do this. Your genius is systems and operations, which I think is playing right into how you run your partnerships, your slow and steady growth. I think you're a fantastic marketer. I also think you understand your business better than most business owners do. That's why your business is what it is.. It doesn't need to be a $10 million business right now. The way you're running it, it's going to carry itself there organically, slowly, steadily. You're going to kill it. When you're running the real estate business, what are the ways that you can optimize? Because you started with flipping, you're doing developing, you have buy and hold, you have a lot of stuff. You've shut down your flipping division. So you, you're making like big strategic decisions. How does one start? If you're not your operational genius, how does one start envisioning what they want? Too many people do one of two things. So I want to try to direct this a certain way. Biggest two problems, they plan so much that they never start. And I think that's like 90% of people. That's the biggest category, hands down. They overplan, which is hard not to do. The other side is they want to say yes to literally everything. And you mentioned earlier, you're good at saying no. How do you actually know where you're headed at all times through business? Because it changes. There's so much going on. I'm really curious because you're, you're, you're coaching me now. I need to know how to do this.

I mean, I think there's two pieces to that question of like, hey, how do you stay optimized and how do you stay intentional? Yes. Being intentional, I think, is having a lot of honest conversations with yourself. I journal here and there. I wouldn't say a lot. Mm-hmm. But I really try to always get back to, okay, I'm overwhelmed. What is it that is feeling easy? What's feeling hard? What am I good at? What am I not good at? And having a lot of honest conversations with you or your business partner when it comes to staying systemized, which is what allows you to be intentional and what allows you to have the time to say, wait, I hate this. I need to take a hard pivot over the next 30 days. Great. I'm glad I have the organization, the systems to do this. I'm going to dumb it so far down for people. They overcomplicate it. It's a lot of micro habits that stack up to staying organized and doing things the same way every single time. For example, one of the most powerful things you can do is time block. And as entrepreneurs, I know everybody's guilty of this. You have, for example, I have a wire email and a real estate email. And I used to fling back and forth those two so fast throughout the day, 100 times. So I was never focused on anything. Now I have very clear days and maybe it's your W-2, maybe you have a W-2. So instead of checking your real estate email 10 times a day, you decide, okay, Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I have 2 solid hours where I do nothing but my real estate work. And you make a list of what are those repetitive things that I need to do every single time. For example, I've trained all my contractors that I pay bills on Tuesdays. Today's Tuesday. What do you think I was doing before this podcast? I went through, I paid my bills the same way. I have a very strict system. You have to email me the bill. It has to have, has to look a very certain way. I pay the bill one of two ways. It's only through my business bill pay or my business bill pay will send a check., and then it goes straight to my bookkeeping system. All of those things make it so easy and so simple. So I'm not running around dreading every bill that comes into my inbox throughout the week. I just plop it in my folder called Bills to Pay. And I know Tuesdays, I only have to dread paying bills once a week. Tuesday mornings, I do it first. So it's done. And it's those little things over and over and over again that create systems that allow you to have that freedom.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. I imagine we're gonna, we're gonna get a bunch of responses to this. Everyone in the, in the comments, let me know if you have not done the bill pay where all the small bills pile up. Cause you're like, oh, what do I owe for what property? As you scale, that was like the number one thing when my wife joined the company. Doom pile of bills. There was a certain amount of them like, okay, we're so busy. Anything under like $200, I'm like, they're gonna charge us like a 9% late fee for, that's cheap enough where I can, if I forget, I'll get back to it later. And so I'm like, it can't hurt me enough to, to, to not pay this on time. And so I had like my important bills and the, like the, I promise we're gonna get to this pile. So when my wife joined the company, she's like, how much do you owe like people in like little things? I'm like, so I'm not a details person, so I don't know the answer to that.

Yeah.

So, and so she came in, she's, she's like, you are aware there's like $15,000 of various like tiny unpaid things. I was like, See, that's, this is news to me. That's a, that, that sounds when you put it in that context, that sounds horrible. Um, and that's where you get people like who are integrators in your, in your companies. But the, it's the little things. We're going to set up a bill pay method and we're always gonna do it the same way. It's gonna go to the same email. And if you are not a great bookkeeper yourself or you don't have the time, I have one person at the end of this funnel who is excellent at this thing. When you're adding staff to your team, you mentioned that you run pretty lean. Where are the places that you guys supplement for the tasks that you don't want to do, don't thrive? You know, like what, what critical roles ended up in your business where you do have employees or other people assisting?

In real estate? Yes. In real estate, it's pretty lean now. It's me, an assistant, and then my business partner. At one point I had, oh, and a maintenance person. At one point I had a full-time maintenance person of a full-time project and property manager, or project manager, a part-time property manager. So 2.5 full-time employees, 2 full-time employees and 1 part-time employee, and then the VA. So I guess another part-time, but that's because I thought I was, you know, going to be closing, selling 1.5 flips a month. And that is not lean at all. Now I'm like, how do I make this as simple and stable as possible? So I only have to work on Tuesdays in real estate. Don't tell the IRS that because because actually I work full-time in real estate.

720 hours all the time. Yeah, that's okay. But I believe Donald Trump still has his real estate professional, and I'm like, I don't think he's running.

No way.

I'm looking at his schedule, I'm like, God, he's claiming golf.

I don't think— that's crazy. My goodness.

Like, where would he find 720 hours? I guess he's doing that between, uh, you know, 1 and 4 AM when he's supposedly sleeping. Oh my goodness.

So you're not alone. That's great. Yeah, but systems, it's these little things the same way over and over and over again. Another way I see people get really overwhelmed in real estate is not tracking their flip or renovation budgets up to date. So for example, on my Tuesdays when I do my bookkeeping, when I have active projects, I have an active Excel sheet. I have a bookkeeper. Wire even has full-blown external bookkeeping services. So if you need a bookkeeper, Go to womeninvestingrealestate.com. You'll find our bookkeeping tab. But I do my own bookkeeping because QuickBooks and your bookkeeper are going to run 30 to 40 days behind. So I actively every single week am updating that. And because I pay my bills at one time, I know exactly how to update that spreadsheet. So I have real-time data on how this flip is doing so that I can make pivots like turning it into a rental because I went over budget and it doesn't make sense to pay a huge realtor's fee and put it on the market and sell it. I'd rather just cash it in as a rental or cutting certain things out of the budget because we've already gone over on X, Y, or Z. And then retroactively looking through those budgets. So maybe every quarter you have a review. So what I did when I flipped is I always had, I had a giant list called Lessons Learned and every teeny little thing that me and my project manager would run into. We'd put it in jot dots on that document. And then after the flip, we would take that whole list and implement it into systems. So for example, maybe one of the lessons learned was we did painted before we did XYZ and we shouldn't have done that because it resulted in them having to come back to paint twice or something. Yeah. So then I would take that and be like, how do I systemize that? Well, let me go to my SOP on how I hire and plan a renovation. Let me add in here that this person always goes first or to double-check XYZ before ABC happens. So now I'm actually putting those little lessons learned back into my SOPs and how I run my business to make sure it never happens again.

And those are the, it's the little things, but everyone I've known who's had a business that ends up being simple for them, it's little things like that. And you said my favorite thing in the world, which is just time blocking. If you run multiple companies or if you have a W-2 and you're doing real estate and scaling side by side, having specific times where this is what I'm working on. Like I have in my schedule these exact same times as when I onboard new mentees. I always do one-on-ones with people who join the program because I think it's important. It's a mentorship. So that's blocked. It's the same time. I know my time's there. I have set times for the podcast where I'm like, this is when I'm in studio podcasting. This is when I still like to do my own edits. One of the only things that I really enjoy doing, I could think about my business. So it's like I have set times where I get to relax and edit the podcast and the video and do— they're always specific. I know what company I'm working on what day. Mondays in the morning, it is property management for 4 straight hours. We don't do anything but property management. You can call me about anything else. I'll just end the call. I'm like, nope, not talking. Nope, not, it's not property management time. Having the discipline to block that, it allows you to do— I'm— it feels like 10 times as much. Like, it is unbelievable how much you get done when you're like, nope, this is what I'm working on at this time.

This is what I do. True focus work from entrepreneurs is rare. And so when you can figure out how to unlock it, make— like, another thing I do is for certain tasks that I hate, I'll pair it with going to a coffee shop. Like, that's a treat. I get to do this. I turn my phone off. I get to, you know, review all my financial statements. In an hour at a coffee shop. So figuring out how to trick yourself, I'm all about tricking yourself or placebo effect or whatever, doesn't matter. Figure out how it works for you and do it. And another trick that I have that's very easy, easily implementable is if you have different businesses, you need to have different Google profiles and different emails for each. For example, my Good Morning Investments profile is yellow because that's the branding. It has different bookmarks, different pages automatically open up. When I'm in my Good Morning Investments Google Chrome. When I open up Wyre, it's purple, it looks different. I have all my other important things bookmarked and I'm never opening that on a non-Wyre day. So if I ever think of something I need to do and this, I just did this this morning, it's keeping yourself accountable to not open up that email and switch tasks. But what I do is I'll email from my real estate to my Wyre, just a reminder., but like, I'm not like, hey, tomorrow I need to reply to so-and-so, but like, do not open it up. It is the tiniest self-discipline and building habits to keep yourself focused, and it will feel so good once you figure out how to unlock that.

Yeah, it was really, you can end up thinking about 5 tasks and doing 80% of 5 of 'em, and you're sitting there a week later and you're like, wow, I haven't actually done anything. I've just like kind of tinkered through all of my businesses. Whereas if you just sat down and finished tasks, now I'm— husbands are probably going to relate to this, getting tasks 95% done, then moving on to the next task. That's like the number one. I'm like, we got up all of the— I finished all the light switches. I just have one more to do. And then 5 months later I'm like, I remember when I almost finished that one. If you could just focus and get it done, it's now done and you can move on to the next thing. And it works the same way in business. If you focus and you're an entrepreneur and you can take all that energy and put it one place. Everything moves forward. When it's done, it's done. And now you're forward and then you move on to the next thing. It is the— that is the single best thing that ever happened to my business. I'm so glad that that is what you said, because I think people need to hear that. It is time blocking. It is color coding things. I love a big color coder. That's really smart. I have like 3 colors. I probably need 10. That is exactly what you need to do, though. It's like, hey, I'm in this mode. I go to this place. The color scheme is that like, I know what I am doing. I know what I'm working on.

Funny enough, I've heard that. It makes you efficient. So you can recognize the color instead of having to read. Like my Google Drive is very color-coded. And so I know exactly where things are. I don't even have to read or look for it. And that is super, super helpful.

Oh, that's actually how I get it. This is exactly what I wanted. I said, I want you to coach me. That's like, I haven't color-coded my Google Drive. That's going to save me everything. I did do the Google, uh, if I, if I'm working on my resort, Robinhood is green. I know my main one is purple. Like I go through, but I'm like, I need to, I need to do a lot more of this. And here's another—

I'm way behind you on this. Here's another hack for time blocking is in the calendar event. I live by my calendar. I think that you, everybody should. Yes. If you're thinking of random things you need to do, or even if it's recurring in the calendar event, literally write out exactly the steps. So for example, maybe you need to pull statements for your bookkeeping. Literally putting in bullet points the whole list of statements. You're not sitting there rethinking, wait, what credit cards do I have? Wait, what bank accounts? What mortgages do I have? Like, stop thinking, write it down. Have one source of truth that you always revisit and that you know is the answer with capitals. There's not multiple lists floating. And so that way, maybe you have a 30-minute admin bucket that's just a bunch of random crap. Just go add to that throughout the week. And then maybe it's on Fridays and, you know, I just need 30 minutes to get through this list of 12 things that if I had tried to do it throughout the week, I, I would lose so much time stopping my task, starting a new one, going back to it, getting distracted. You gotta commit to time blocking your calendar and really making sure that you're not recreating the wheel. That I think is the biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make. Is they don't think that they run a business. So they always are reinventing the wheel. Like when they buy a property, sitting there and thinking, okay, I just closed yesterday. Wait, what do I need to do? Oh shit, I need to turn on the electricity. Oh, I need to get insurance.

Like write that shit down. And then once it's written down, you just follow the template. It's so easy. And I downloaded that into our, in our course. I'm like, this is what you do the day of close every day. Yes. Or every time you close, there's a ton of stuff to do. You're going to forget it unless you go through the checklist. So just do all of these things. When you close, this is what you need to save for your tax documents. You just put it in a folder so when you give it to your tax person, it's not a year-long project. You just have a folder with your stuff. It's a pain in the ass to do. And almost all investors, I'd say almost all entrepreneurs, almost all suck at doing it. Like they, because most of us are somewhat of a visionary. We're excited about the next thing. And so it's like, Yes, we closed. Awesome. I'm so sure I won't forget to take the settlement statement and put it in a folder. And then you get to tax season and you're like, what title company closed this?

Where did I put that? Right. That's the call of shame. I call that the call of shame where you have to call a title company from a year and a half ago and say, do you remember me? I actually need all the paperwork from that property I bought last year. Can you please send it to me?

Like, don't ever, if you have the right systems, you won't ever have to do that. Yes. Okay. Final, final two questions. How do you get good at saying no?

How do you know when to say no? I think it comes down to knowing yourself, knowing what you want, and being not non-influencable. I don't know if that's a word, but I'm not easily influenced. Like I know myself, I know what I want, I know who I am. So that's maybe sounds like a cheesy answer.

No, if you're not like that—

Know yourself.

That's a huge piece of investing. You are a member of your team, and if you don't know how you are, if you don't know where you're going, or what your strengths and weaknesses are, you're gonna put yourself in the wrong positions in your company and it's gonna be miserable. And you're gonna say yes to things you shouldn't say yes to and no to things that you probably shouldn't have said no to.

And if you're not good at that, maybe writing out a vision statement and revisiting it when you're trying to figure out to say no or yes and saying, does this get me to that vision?

Mm-hmm. Okay. No, I love that. That is short, practical advice and it's Perfect. No, no, no additional notes. That is, you need to know yourself. And if you know yourself, you know when you need to say yes or no. And if you're finding yourself, if you're finding it's difficult, you need to either revisit your vision or you need to spend more time thinking about, uh, who am I and where do I slot my company? If, if you don't have clarity on those, yes and no is gonna be really confusing. Mm-hmm. Great advice. Also, Clipping team.

Great clip. Short points.

Are you the clipping team, though? No, I do. I do. I do have a clipping team. I like doing the long edits. I send the raw format to them. I'm like, you guys find the moments. I'll tell you which ones suck. I actually keep a little button here over on the side of my chair. So if I have a great idea, I'll just click the button. It'll timestamp my video so they get it done.

That's Christian's version of being organized.

That's a great system. Yes. Now if you actually looked at it, which I'm not going to move my camera because I'll never get it back in the right position, it is literally taped to the chair. My wife was like, do not zoom out. Your space looks terrible outside of camera. So that's funny. I'm not grace level organized. I'm unesthetically organized. Okay. Final question. The question we ask every time. Most expensive mistake. We call it the stupid tax because When you're young, you're the dumbest you'll ever be. The first time you do it, you learn a whole lot of things through trial and error that you cannot learn just by taking the mentorship, just by— you learn by doing. So could be a personal relationship, could be time lost, could be straight up our favorite one, how do we save people money? But what is the most expensive mistake have you— that you have made in the last 5 years of your business?

I lost a $70,000 city grant that was pretty easy to get for a really dumb mistake that I did. Ooh, okay. Long story short, the triplex that I bought was on a lot with an existing house, and when I bought it, it came with a ton of code violations. I sat on that for a very long time not knowing what to do, cuz I never thought I would build, thought I could save it. And they basically gave me a deadline saying, if you don't have this house demoed by this date, we're taking you to court. You're gonna get sued. I was like, no problem, I'll get it demoed. Where I made a mistake is I got it demoed in time and I didn't show up to court because my unintelligent self thought there's no house there. How could I possibly get sued over fines? I told the city inspector, hey, it's demo, blah, blah, blah. I didn't tell the attorneys. I didn't show up to court. So I lost the court case, got like a $3,500 fine. They're actually, this is a $73,500 mistake. Yeah. So I got not only a $3,500 fine. Yeah. I got successfully sued by the city over something that I fixed because I just was not thinking. Yeah. And then for that grant I was supposed to get, they basically said, we can't give you this grant. We just sued you. Like, that's not gonna go over well with city council. So I lost the grant. And I remember I cried after that phone call because I was just so mad at myself of like, dude, how are you that dumb? And I just told myself, as long as I get the next one, this will have been worth it. And I am building another property and we got, we are so close to getting, we got the first approval for the grant, another $70,000. It needs to get signed and sign an agreement at next city council. Which should be, we don't know why we're not expecting any reason why it won't be signed. So that's the light at the end of the tunnel is I lost the first one, but it was worth it cuz I figured out hopefully how to get the second one.

$73,000. See, oh, and right at the start of this podcast, great, great way to tie this all together. Right at the beginning, you had talked about what a big deal $60,000 was in Iowa and making $100,000. You had a $70,000 mistake. That was basically like when you started, that was like the annual salary. Like, yeah, that's a year of money in Iowa, in Seattle. That's like, you're homeless, but nothing. I was going to reasons Christian moved to Dallas way, way up there on the list. But like, that was like, that's a year of financial freedom lost over like I didn't show up to a meeting.

I didn't think. Yeah. I just didn't think hard enough there.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

That, so outside of yes, always show up to your court cases. How does one know what to, there's, there's a million things happening, especially if you're doing like development or demo. How does one avoid that mistake moving forward? Like, like what, what systems do you have in place to make sure that you never miss another $70,000?

Court hearing. That was just a case of me dragging my feet and not knowing what was happening and having too many things on my plate. 'Cause I had no freaking clue how to demo and build a house. I thought demo was gonna cost 10 grand. I didn't realize that demo is actually redoing all the utilities, excavating it, grading it, hauling everything away, asbestos testing. Like there's so many things I just did not know. So I don't know, really think that I probably did about as best as I could knowing that it was just all so new to me. But having, probably having really clear priorities, making sure you know exactly what your workload is and never slacking off on things. I just waited a little too long to get things going and it caught up to me in the end.

Yes. And another idea, if, if you happen to be a woman who is investing in real estate, there's a group called WIRE where you can actually learn from the mistakes of people so that you can take Grace's mistake and like hundreds of other people's mistakes and not make them yourself. So Grace is, is, is so good at growing organically. She just doesn't self-promote cuz she's, uh, she's epic and awesome. So I'm gonna do it for her. Enjoy. Check out Wire. That community is awesome. People love it. And I think the most effective way that you can avoid making some of the same mistakes is you get around people who have done the thing that you want to do so they can tell you what to do. They can tell you like, hey, you're probably gonna spend more than $10,000 demoing a a property.

Yeah. They'll help you.

It's probably gonna be 50. Yep. It's probably gonna be 50 or depending on what market you are, could even be a heck of a lot more depending on what you're demoing.

Yeah.

You should talk to people who have done the thing that you want to do. And if Grace has done some of the things that you want to do, Grace, how would someone get ahold of you or your team most efficiently?

Yeah. The easiest way is on Instagram @grace.investing, or if you wanna check out WIRE, wire.community, and wire has two I's.

There we go. We'll put those below in the show notes as well. So if you're watching on YouTube or anywhere, we stream to like literally anything that could be streamed to, absolutely click the link, check that out. I am a mega fan of Grace and everything she does. I love the way that you run your business. I think it's the most sustainable business practice. Cannot praise you enough. So thank you for gracing us with your time, Grace. And we, that was way too corny. A team don't cut that, but we probably should. Everyone, thank you for listening today and putting up with me. Grace is a huge treat to have on the podcast. We will see you guys all on the next episode.

Thank you.