How Do You Find Time For The Land Business When Starting Out?

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and on this week's roundtable, we get the usual suspects. Bearland, Aaron Bearland. Aaron Williams. How are you?

I am doing great. How are you?

Great. Glad to see you. On the podcast we've got the most feared woman in the country, the terrorist hunter, Mimi Schmidt. Mimi, how are you?

I'm great. Cold, great. You?

I'm good, I'm good. I'm not cold. Because I was actually really kind of mindful of where I would settle down in what part of the country. And I thought, you know what, why suffer? But that way, you know it's going to get reversed. Like me was like, well, let's talk in summer when it's 120. Mark, I see it, I see it. It's okay. It's all good. We got the technician, Eric Peterson. Eric, how are you?

I'm good. You know, you introduced Bear Land Aaron. I didn't hear any growls or roars today. I think he must be in hibernation.

He's.

Yeah, he's knowingly just. Yep, that's right.

There you go. Yeah, there it is.

There it is. And of course, I love it when you call me Big Papa Tate Litchfield Tate.

How are you doing? All right? Can't complain.

All right, fantastic. You know him, you love him. The brain, the professor, Scott Todd from Scott todd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, if you're automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings, posting domination.com forward/the land geek, Scott Todd. How are you, Mark?

I'm great.

How are you? I'm great, I'm great. So tomorrow starts the first January flight school, is that right? It does, yeah.

Starts tomorrow. We've got fun, fun times ahead of us. Mailing and marketing is coming. So if you're listening to this, well, you're already a week behind, so make sure you're mailing and marketing. But it'll be a fun time.

Yeah, if you've got the toolkit right now, you're a little overwhelmed. You're not sure. Schedule call with a zen master, Mike Zaino, or the nightcap meister, Scott Bossman, and learn more about flight school. Just go to thelandgeek.com training alright, so this week's topic is a topic I think everyone at some point struggles with. And it's one that, you know, we talk about probably not often enough, and that is finding time for the business. So when I first started, I was doing this part time. I was working full time as an investment banker. I'd have to get up super early. I'd stay up super late, and I got my mailing and my marketing done, and then eventually was able to go full time. Today, I think there's a lot more advantages than when I started because we have so much software, so much automation, we have so much delegation. That being said, that also adds layers of work. And so bear land. Aaron, let's just start with you. How did you find time to start working on the business and then how has it transitioned to a more efficient operation?

Well, at first had another company and I had an employee doing a lot of work, but I was having to do a lot of oversight and management of that person and, you know, the business itself. So it was hard a little bit because you get torn away in the middle of things and, you know, let things drop and that sort of thing. So you have to be really focused. The problem is I'm not very disciplined, focused kind of person. And just to be honest, so it's very difficult, you know, and eventually got to the point where I had to decide, you know, what. What did I want to do? Did I want to do that other thing or did I want to do this? And I decided I wanted to do this. So then, you know, I had a lot more time to focus on it. But, you know, there's still that problem of once you do transition over to that side of it, then you have to worry about, you know, what are your most valuable tasks, what are the things that you need to do. But then you stop to squeeze those things in there until you can outsource them. Like, you know, doing a contract, setting things up in Geek Day, setting things up on simplify and getting all that done and mailing deeds and. And all those things. So I think the biggest thing is you have to kind of get in a habit of what you do each day. Like, the first thing I do is I print my mailings, you know, and then the next thing supposed to be, or is supposed to be, you know, my Craigslist ads, that sort of thing. If you can get yourself a schedule, then you get better at those things and you can kind of jam through them and have more time for other tasks in the day.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I don't know about you guys, I did have a visceral reaction when you did say, I'm not a focused, disciplined person, because I'd like to challenge that. The fact that you show up for the roundtables every week. That takes focus, that takes discipline. You've been working the business now several years. That takes focus, that takes discipline. I'd almost challenge you to say that thought pattern is kind of out of date now. And I'm not sure if there's any negative consequences day to day in your life, but I could see the energy going down if that tape is sort of playing in the back of your head and you could beat yourself up over it. Like, I know when I beat myself up, I want to grab a cupcake and then go, you know, watch like a Netflix show and just, you know, try to, you know, make myself feel better, even if it's not reality. Right. So that story that you're telling yourself probably needs to get challenged. I don't know if that helps.

Hey, that does help. That's a very good point. And I'm glad you brought it to my attention. I will definitely work on that.

Yeah, absolutely. Eric Peterson, the technician finding time. When you first started, you were working full time as a graphic designer, correct?

Right.

So that must have been challenging.

It was. I mean, the one benefit I had, I did work. Excuse me, I did work from home, so that did help a little bit. But, you know, I really had to be disciplined in my day job to keep doing that work and accomplish what I needed to accomplish. And then I had to come back at night and after the kids went to bed, I'd come back in my office and do a couple hours worth of work and continue to try and push the business forward. It wasn't easy. I didn't always want to do it, but at the same time, I saw the possibilities of this business and knew that if I was diligent with it, you know, that I could grow it into something that could support me and my family. So I think that the hard thing for a lot of people in finding that time is, you know, all these tasks pile up from, you know, the obvious ones of mailing and marketing to, I mean, it's just everything, right, like setting up Craigslist accounts or, you know, how do I prepare this deed? I haven't. I haven't had this situation before. So those. Those tasks just keep piling up and piling up. But at the same time, you've always got to be emailing and marketing. So it gets overwhelming. And if you can't find a way to start building some systems and processes for that, it's going to get very hard to keep up with. So that's why we stress so much about building processes in your business and outsourcing what you can. So last night in office hours, we were talking about a similar kind of question and, you know, we kind of discussed this idea of, yeah, you do have to understand how to do a task before you can outsource it. But sometimes you don't have to understand it in its entirety. If you know enough to train someone to get started and you can answer their questions along the way so they can help you get that task done, that might be just enough to take that one off your plate and move on to the next.

I love it. I love it. So as of today, if we fast forward right now, like, you know, you are still working from home, you got the two kids, you're married, how are you now? You know, how much time are you spending on the business? And is there any sort of internal conflict where, you know, life can get in the way? And then you're like, okay, when am I going to find time to get the fundamentals of the business done?

So I think today my time is more spent on continuing to build more systems and processes, continuing to work more VAs into my business. So it's more spent on the business than in the business. But one of the major differences now is that I do have the freedom to, you know, leave work early or, you know, go run an errand in the middle of the day or whatever it is. You know, get to my son's basketball games and things like that. Because, you know, I can work on this business whenever and wherever I want. So I do have a lot of flexibility from that standpoint.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love that, you know, we all on this roundtable have those three W's. We work when we want, where we want and with whom we want. And that's really, you know, quite a luxury in business and life. Let's go to terrorist hunter Mimi Schmidt. We could argue that you've had the biggest challenge in finding time. If you've listened to Mimi's podcast and her story. I think at the peak she was managing 150 people, working on finding the terrorists and doing all these things. It was a big, big life, big, big job, kids, family. And then, you know, we're saying, okay, now find time and energy to work on this business. So, Mimi, how did you, how did you do it when you had so much sort of pressure, like just business, like just job pressure.

My job was out of state. The commute was hour and a half each way. My husband, you guys know, he worked, he has two full time jobs. He Works seven days a week. And so what struck me, you said something at boot camp in San Antonio that struck me how you just become obsessed with it. The folks that have stuck with it that are doing well, you just kind of get obsessed with it. And my husband makes fun of me or he comments. Mimi, you work harder than I do and I have two full time jobs. I say, but I love it. I'm having so much fun doing it. And I'm here at home now. Right. So I can stop and drive my daughter to school if I want to. So I do think, like Eric said in Bear Land, you have to have discipline, schedule, habits. Right. So I would do it at night when I was exhausted because that work was kind of working for me from, you know, when my kids were doing their homework or they were, everyone was watching tv. That was a great time for me to be working on my business because I wasn't really missing quality time with them. Right. You got to think about how your family works and how you can fit time in where it fits with their schedules. And then since Dave was flying on the weekends, I could work on the weekends a lot. Like, I'd take my iPad to my daughter's soccer games and she'd be running around. She wanted to make sure I was watching her. So every once in a while, yay, Go Natalie.

Right.

And then otherwise I was running Facebook sales over the weekend on my iPad and her practices. Right. Do it in the car. On road trips, if I'm the passenger in the car, I have my iPad and I'm doing stuff. And so I don't have a lot of just time that I'm just, that is, that is stagnant. Right. Just sit still time. Right. I would use those times riding in the car practices weekends. And then I had to come up with an exit strategy. I got to a point where if my business was really going to go and I was going to make it the number one priority, I had to come up with an strategy to get out of my full time job. Because otherwise the full time job has a tendency to remain the priority. So I think that's important too for people to think about and plan. And now that I'm home, it's just that habitual schedule because my business truly does best when I have the momentum builds. When I have a standard schedule and I'm following it, I see results. When I don't do a deal of the week and go do something else, then that hurts my leads and then affects my business.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, I encourage Everyone to listen to the podcast with Mimi because really you'll find yourself like, you know, beating yourself up, having any type of excuse. Because if Mimi can do this business, you know, with all that she was running and doing, there's everyone has the time to do it. The big Papa Tay Litchfield, your situation is a little unique.

I know. I was gonna say I'm probably like the worst person to ask this question because, you know, the traditional corporate job was not for me and I knew that immediately. But once I made the decision to kind of dive headfirst into this, it was full gas, 100%, put in a lot of sweat equity and, and to build the business that I'm running. And to this day, I still put in solid time in the business. It might not be hours and hours and 15 hour days any longer, but when I do work, it's very focused. It's very, you know, I put up the do not disturb light kind of thing and I want to have total silence and just go to my office and really make some forward progress. And I spend a majority of my time managing other people, making sure they're doing things the way that I want them to and they're living up to my expectation. And that's the ideal situation, right?

Yeah, absolutely. What would be your advice to somebody in sort of a similar situation as you? Maybe they have a full time job, but they also have a baby at home and they've got to sort of juggle family and work. And then I've got to find time for this land business.

You know, it's going to take time. And I think that's probably one of the things that we maybe skim over, is that you're building a brand new business. Do not expect this to be 100% perfect or operational after 12 months. 12 months time is nothing, especially in the world of business. I mean, 12 months, a lot of companies would tell you that it's a wash. So prepare to get organized, right? You've got to sit down and you've got to figure out, hey, I can squeeze in 15 minutes here, I can squeeze in 20 minutes. During my lunch break, Scott talks about he was taking phone calls during lunch right when he was trying to get out of his previous job. Every single minute of every day was kind of scheduled for me. And if you're starting off, I tell you, you need to sit down, come up with your day to day plan and say, no matter what, I don't care how good this Netflix movie is or Netflix series is, I can't Afford to binge watch right now. Right. There's no time for that. We didn't even. I mean, when I was getting started, I never watched any tv, never watched any Netflix shows, because any free time I had, I said, you know what, Netflix doesn't make me money, but Craigslist does. Going to spend more time on that. And you're just going to have to get laser focused and move those feet. Always be moving your feet. Making forward progress.

Yeah, absolutely. I've got a buddy who's also an entrepreneur. He's like, you know, it's either you work now or you're going to work later, but either way you're working, so you might as well get it done now so that when you're older and you don't have as much energy, you can enjoy it more. Scott Todd. Yeah, go ahead.

I was gonna say one other thing about this business is you might only be working an hour or two on it at a time, but the business, it stays with you. This isn't a traditional job where you clock out, you go home, and the day's over for you. Right. Mimi has told me stories where she's up to 11 at night, answering questions on Facebook or, or responding to leads or when somebody's ready to buy. You got to take that phone call. I was in a hockey game last night and somebody's trying to make a down payment. It's like, I'll call you an intermission because, you know, that's what I do. But the business is 247 in this kind of work. And that's what makes it beautiful. I mean, you can do it anywhere. You can do it at any time. You can do it on a cell phone, you can run it on an iPad in the car, you can do whatever. So you're your own boss and you got to break out of that. I think that old mentality of the 9 to 5 work day.

Yeah, absolutely. And Scott Todd, I mean, you know, we like to celebrate Mimi all the time and all her accomplishments and how, you know, tough it was doing, you know, in the midst of, like, making us all safer. But your corporate job was no picnic either. How many people were you managing?

My team was a global team. I had like 150 people around the globe. And at one point I had like, in terms of direct reports, I think I had like 20 something direct reports. But near the end, it kind of got down to a more manageable number, less than 10. And, you know, I think there's a lot of good advice on this podcast like, this is.

This is.

To me, I think it's a really good podcast to go back and re listen to. But I think that what it comes down to at the end of the day, honestly, is do you have the burning desire to change?

Right?

Like, do you have the burning desire to change your course? Because, look, if you're comfortable and, like, you're okay with your job and you're okay, you like the money, but you're okay with it, and, like, yeah, it's whatever, well, then changing and investing time in this business is going to be kind of a difficult challenge for you because of the fact that you don't have that burning desire. Because that's really what it takes to change. Is that burning desire to change something in your life. If you're sitting there going, geez, man, I cannot stand this place one more day. I got to get out. It's not. I can't do it, right? It's driving me nutty. Well, if that's the case, now you have the burning desire to change, and now all of a sudden, you know what you're doing is now you're. Now you're going to find the time. Now you're going to go out, you're going to wake up, you're going to be like, man, I got to really micromanage my time. And honestly, that's what I did was I micromanaged my time. You know, I got a lunch break, right? So instead of going to lunch, like, I would go to lunch, but I would start walking out of the building. Guess what? Had a. I had a boatload of people to Shark Han. So as I'm walking out to my car, I'm on the phone, dude, hey, I'm calling you back. Calling back. I'm driving to. I'm driving to a restaurant. Like, not even the restaurant. I went. I would go to a grocery store, Publix, here in Florida, and I'd get a.

Get.

Get a sandwich. And so I know you guys are thinking Panera Bread, but I'm not. I know it wasn't Panera bread.

I was get a sandwich.

I'd walk back to the car, sit down in the car. I'd be making phone calls. I talk to people in the store while I'm ordering my sandwich. In fact, I didn't even stand in line to get the sandwich because I ordered it online. Like, that's the micromanagement. I would order the sandwich, get in the car, walk to the car, get in the car, drive there, pick up the food, sit in the car and make phone calls. So I would dedicate like an hour right there.

Boom.

And then in the afternoon, I might take a 15 minute walk just to get out of the office a little bit. I was productive. I wasn't chit chatting with coworkers. I was a man on a mission. I would get home, I'd eat dinner, and then I would start the next piece of the day, whatever that was. And it was broken out, like, this is what I'm going to do. There was never a time where I sat at the computer and said, wow, what am I going to do? It was micromanaged because I had that burning desire to get out. And I think that when you do that and when you have that military precision time control, I mean, we all have the same amount of time per day, you know, as each other. There's no competitive advantage, like, oh, well, someone's got more time than the other. We all have the same amount of time. It's how you choose to use it. You know, I. There was TV shows I wanted to watch that I gave up, gave up watching TV because, you know, I'm like, I'm not going to focus on TV right now. I'm going to focus on this because I can always go back and watch it again later. I don't need to watch it now. So where are your choices? What are your priorities? If you're saying you don't have enough time, I challenge you. Like, then you either don't have a burning desire to change or you're not using your time wisely.

Yeah, I mean, you know, while you're talking, you know, that cliche popped in my head. I mean, you hear a lot for people that work out, no pain, no gain. But really, no psychic pain, no gain. Like, you've got to really want to change your life. And even just this sort of underlying belly of comfort can derail you when things get tough because you're like, well, you know, your mind will kind of start playing tricks on you. Like, it's not that bad. I'll get to it. You know, there's no burning sort of. There's, you know, there's no land emergency. No one's forcing you to get those ads out, you know, during those golden hours. And it's, it's true. And I think we've all felt that that burning desire at some point for, you know, me was getting out of investment banking for Tate. He never wanted to, like, have a resume for Eric, you know, it was definitely, I think if it wasn't for you Eric, like just freedom from freelancing or.

Yeah, just having control of my own time, not having a boss to answer to, Just, you know, all those kinds of things.

Right. Barelyn. Aaron, how about for you? What was your burning desire?

It was not being filthy every day with the industrial process of what my company did. You know, I would come back filthy, like a coal miner, you know, the 30s, black. And I just couldn't handle it anymore.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Mimi, what was your brain desire was to spend more time with the kids.

I wanted a life. I had no life. I spent my whole life just flying by the seat of my pants trying to keep up. I was failing at being a wife, mother, sister, daughter.

Yeah.

And Scott, we all know your burning desire was to protect your family. You. You saw the writing on the wall and you had to do something. So, you know, we've all had that sort of internal motivation that. And some external pain that was working on us. So I guess the last question then that, you know, the listener should think about is, if I don't have that pain, how do I, you know, sort of manufacture it? Do I set goals? Do I, you know, have accountability? Where another person sort of pushing me, like, you need to create this environment for yourself if it's not already in place, that you're gonna just, you know, not go to bed until these things are done. And kind of set that in motion. I'm kind of thinking of that book, the Power of Habits. Is it? Charles Duhigg talks a lot about that, which leads us, by the way, see that segue to our tip of the week by the technician himself, Eric Peterson. Eric, what do you got for us? A website, a resource, a book, something actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives.

All right, so back by popular demand, here we go. This one is a direct tie to our content from today's podcast. Actually, it is the book called Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins. And basically, I mean, it's the story of his life, but I mean, his whole thing is kind of mental toughness and just really just willing himself to do whatever it was he wanted to accomplish. His story is pretty unbelievable if you take the time to listen or read the book. Actually, listening to the book is pretty interesting because it's reading the book, but there's also some interviews in there, so it's a different perspective on an audiobook as well. But I'd highly recommend it. It's. It's really great.

All right, can't Hurt me, David Goggins. It's a great tip. I already bought. I haven't started it yet, but I'm going to because I don't want to show up at Scottsdale Boot Camp and have to face Eric and be like, oh, yeah, I haven't listened to it yet. And then he'll be like, well, remember that podcast on the roundtable about finding time? And then I'm gonna go into a whole shame spiral. It's not gonna be fun.

So you just need to get it on Blinkist. Then you have no excuse.

But I think when it's a really good book, whom I respect recommends, I don't want to Blinkist it. I think. I think there are some business books that. Blinkist is great. I actually downloaded a new app. Let me see. I forget what it's called. It's similar to Blinkist, but it's like more like kind of quotes. It's Snip Snippets. Did you like. You don't like snippets. You like Blinkets more?

No, I like Snippets. I've been using it, too.

Okay, so Snippets and Blinkist.

There you go.

But Snippets is free, right? And Blinkist charges for, like, the audio or whatever. So there's another tip that's a free tip. There it is. Well, I thought this. This round table podcast was. Was really great. And again, I want to thank the listeners and just remind them the only way we're gonna get, you know, everyone to come back to the roundtable, because the first thing they asked me are, you know, how many new downloads did we get this week? If you subscribe, rate, and review the podcast, send us a screenshot of that review to support helangateek.com as a thank you, we're gonna send you our $97 passive income launch kit course for free. So please do that. All right, are we ready to do this? 1, 1, 2, 3. Let freedom ring. It's always a little awkward, isn't it?

We're trying our hardest. We're trying our hardest, everybody. It's a lot harder than you think. I mean, I'm sure the listeners are hearing this and they're like, they probably end it right before we do this. They don't know how hard it is.

I think it went better at boot camp.

It did. It did go better at boot camp. So, yeah, for those of you who are listening this little bonus part, go to the landgeek.com Boot Camp and we're ready for Scottsdale We've already got a bunch of people re registered, so that room is gonna fill up fast. For sure. All right, Scott, Todd, are you on your way to Wawa?

Maybe.

Yeah.

Maybe fly to Georgetown today.

Not flying to Georgetown.

That place was amazing.

I don't know. All right, everybody. All right, See you later next week. Thanks.