Christian Osgood spent four years in corporate sales at CoStar Group, earning well but hitting the "post-close blues" each month: big paycheck, then back to zero. He left to build a scalable business with systems and teams that work without him, moving into mentorship, property management, and real estate investing for passive income.
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Hello YouTube, it's Christian Osgood and I'm back this week without Cody because this segment is another installment of Corporate vs. Entrepreneur. This is a topic we haven't touched on in a while, but specifically today is what it was like for me working the 9-to-5 job and why I decided to go the entrepreneur investor route out of what someone would call corporate success. Cody's never had a W-2 job, so it didn't make a whole lot of sense to include him in this particular segment. However, I'm sure he'll be back later in the week. Goals for this: I want to communicate clearly the benefits of having a sales job and what's really good about working for huge companies. I had a great time doing it, so I want to cover the good. I want to cover why it wasn't fulfilling and ultimately why I left, and I want to compare and contrast the differences between being an entrepreneur and investor and working for a big company with lots of amenities. So here we go. I've had a few sales jobs through my career, and I've actually loved every company that I've worked for. That said, the largest employer that I had by far was a company called the CoStar Group. They own Apartments.com. If you ever see the Jeff Goldblum commercials, the best place to find a place. LoopNet, they own company called 10X that's been getting a lot more ad space, and their core data product just called CoStar. Uh, I was blessed to get to choose which products I wanted to sell between advertising and data, and that company was the biggest in both spaces by far in their space. Excellent products, excellent systems, excellent support, excellent management, a very well-built company. So the good parts about that, as a sales rep, you can make a lot of money, and they have all the systems in place for you to do that. You don't have to come up with your own contracts, you don't have to come up with your own prospecting methods. You have to work hard at it, but it's all there and systematized. It's right in front of you. You can sit down at your desk, find a reason to call, and you can sell ad space online on any of their platforms. Or you can sell data. It's really awesome and it's quite lucrative. Where I started feeling stuck, and for those in sales you may or may not feel the same, on your best month it feels so good and you get this great big paycheck at the end of the month and it's amazing. And then the sun goes down and it comes back up the next day and you're back at zero. And I just, I call it the post-close blues. You wake up on the next day of the month and it's like, oh no, I am back at zero. I have to do that all over again. And you can do that for a while. You can go again and again and again. And for me, I lasted about 4 years of that. And I got to the point where every time I had an amazing month, the next month felt just that much worse and that much worse and that much worse. I got tired of starting at zero. And that's really why I started looking outside of the corporate route. It's awesome to have a company that can hire celebrities. I mean, Jeff Goldblum was in Jurassic Park, and here I am standing next to him. That's really cool, and that's a great resource to drive traffic my way. Turns out I can't afford to hire people like that right now. I don't have that funnel. That being said, I would rather work harder and move forward every single month, and that's where I really got attracted to starting a business and investing. Important distinction, quick sidebar, I view a business as different than a hobby. I don't want to be self-employed because that means I have to work to make money. My boss is just me. Which I can kind of be a hard boss sometimes. I don't want that. I view a business as something that when run right, you can put the right people in place and the right systems in place, where once your business is stable, you can step outside of your business and it will keep functioning with or without your input, and it will keep growing with or without your input because you put the right people and the right systems together. If you have a job that, I mean, say you're an electrician, wires aren't going to wire themselves, but if you own a company full of electricians, they can do the job with or without you once your systems are stable. If that helps color that at all, you can be a broker or you can own a brokerage. Just make sure you don't confuse the two. For me, a business is something that scales and grows. I can put the right people behind and we can create a mission and move multiple people towards that goal. For Cody and I, that looked like starting our mentorship program, our property management, and taking any and all proceeds from that and rolling that into real estate investment. Every time we make the right hire in one of my companies, things run a little smoother, a little easier, and we can grow a little faster. It feels great to put excellent people in the right spot. A cool thing that I found is as an employee, I'm trading time for money, and as a sales rep, you're definitely— I mean, you can choose how much that's worth, but you're continually selling time for money. When I hire an employee, I'm buying another 8 hours to my day. Hire a team of 8 employees, I can get 80 hours of work done. Before I put input in, before Cody puts input in. You can actually use the income from your business to buy more time. Imagine what you can accomplish with 100 employees and an 800-hour workday. I find that really exciting. We can now start scaling beyond just me. Now onto the investment side, we're buying real estate. We don't buy real estate that doesn't cash flow, which means every single time I sign for a piece of real estate, I make the sale, I don't get end-of-month blues. That will pay me next month, next year, next decade. If I don't sell that asset, I can pass that on to my kids. It can pay them for the rest of their life. I found that even though you can have a lot of success and a lot of excitement working a 9-to-5 job, nothing beats moving forward every single month. The amount of control you can have over your vision and the amount of just energy that you can create with the right team and the right systems. You can build something that is larger than you, that will outlive you, and can provide for your family and buy your time back. And for me, that's how I ended in the entrepreneur position. Corporate life is fun, it's exciting, you're around great people, you can afford great systems, For me personally, nothing beats the freedom of knowing that I am farther today than I was yesterday, than I was last month, than I was last year, and that I can continually do that for the rest of my life. And when, if and when, I want to step out of that, or if and when I want to take my family on a vacation, I know that I can come back to something that is farther along than it was when I left it, with or without me. And that's a beautiful thing. So, hope this was helpful and not just a rant. If you liked it, feel free to hit the thumbs up button. Please comment any questions you have on any of my experience, both in sales or outside of sales. I've done the corporate route and I've done the entrepreneur route, and we will answer 5 questions from the comments every week. We'll be selecting the top 5, and on Wednesdays we're gonna release a response video. If you feel like you have a great question, feel free to post in the comments, like and subscribe, and follow us for more.
