Mindset Shift from Solo to Scale - Trystan Trenberth

Sam well thank you so much guys. I'm obviously not from these parts. I'm from Southeast Texas, the closest bit to the border. Obviously I'm from the UK originally. Got here in 2005. I had a foreclosure in 2009 so I had some real estate experience back then. I joined the real estate world three plus years ago. Started out with the book that had been on my shelf for two or three years, Rich Dad, Poor dad, which many of you probably did and wished I hadn't left it on the shelf so long. Followed that with Cash Flow Quadrant and having done some Google searches, Google knew that I was looking for Rich Dad Poor dad so put me in touch with Elite Legacy Education which used to be Rich Dad Education until probably a year or two when that license expired to use that name. And I worked with Jason palace doing the two day blueprint which he did here in Phoenix quite some time ago now. I just come originally from a hotel management background, then into it for 20 plus years and finally broke free of the 9 to 5 situation and not look back since. So I had the pleasure of meeting Marie at one of my meetups a couple of months ago. We met through a friend of mine or friend of ours, Helena Donahoe, who for those of you who are in Phoenix or doing deals in Phoenix, you really need to get hold of American Title Services Agency, the greatest group of people, particularly if you're doing creative deals. Eileen Brown has been doing creative and is one of the most experienced creative in the process itself of creative finance and being able to pull through a deal that may have little or no chance of surviving with another title company. She'll pull out experience ideas and she'll get the deal done for you. So you know Helena Donahoe. There's Gayla Thompson as well. Please reach out to them, let them know that Maria and I sent you. But yeah, without further ado, I wanted to thank JJ for inviting me onto the show today or the webcast to share with you guys. I've met a few friends from your community. Chuck Billy is one of our well known members in the sub 2 community who's straddling both communities. Chris Podkwer, who you probably know, Marie, probably from Fortune Builders. I think I probably know some other Fortune Builders. I can't think of their names offhand but I think there are some great communities out there. The Kingdom is another great community that I've heard great things about. I've met several of those guys. So it's a pleasure to sort of join your community. And I think like JJ was saying earlier on, this is absolutely a business of relationships. And if we can't communicate with one another and collaborate with one another, we're probably dead in the water in the business. And it kind of leads me into the topic that I wanted to touch on today. So I joined sub 2 in the first week. I think it was first few days of its inception last year and about the end of April, early May when Pace launched it. Pace Morby is a guy who is kind of known as Sub2Guy. I joined his Facebook group, the Creative Financing Group, Pace Morbi in January last year where there are about 300 members. The impact that he's had on the real estate community at large is just absolutely unbelievable. That same group that had 300 people in January last year has grown to 28,000 at this point. And just see the growth, the collaboration, the communication between people has been nothing short of inspiring. I'm fortunate to be here in Phoenix where we have a number of very well known investors such as Sean, Terry Jamil, Brent Daniels, Pace, just to name a few. And it really seems to be one of those hubs of where real estate investors base themselves. Florida's another one. There are a few in Vegas, but I think as far as I'm aware, as a central point, Phoenix is one of those places. Steve Trang being another guy. Collaboration really is the key to making this business work. And the topic that I wanted to speak on today is the mindset shift from being a solopreneur into becoming an entrepreneur in the biggest sense of things. And I'm not sure how many of you have read the Cash Flow Quadrant by Kiyosaki. There's four sectors to this model. So the cash flow quadrant is employee, self employed, business owner and investor. And I'm not going to harp on about Kiyosaki too much longer, but this key principle is really the foundation of what I wanted to share with you guys today. So as an employee, we exchange our time for the dollar. Okay. Or British pound if we're over there. Obviously we know the limitations of this. We can run a business at the same time as being a W2 employee and we can be very successful at that. There are a lot of investors that can balance running a business and being an employee of another business as well. And this really is a great way to start. Myself being in a W2 job, I wasn't passionate about this W2 job. I wanted to do a business, but I just wasn't really in the mindset to be able to balance the two. I had some expectations on me in my day job, which really I wasn't fulfilling, if I'm very honest, at least to my own standards. But I also wanted to be doing this business thing as well and having to fulfill a lot of what was going on here. I couldn't spend enough time doing what I wanted to do to build a business. I was very fortunate to be made redundant in January. I smiled through that interview once I knew there was a severance package which then put me into this category very quickly overnight. So this right here put me on the spot where it's sink or swim really. I am the business and suddenly I was in charge of acquisitions dispositions. I had a VA that was working for me and still works for me now, making cold calls at this point. When I was made redundant, I then switched him to be my lead manager because I had a number of leads in my system. I didn't need inbound leads anymore. I needed follow up. And I'm not sure I know dawn will attest to this. With Pace's Community, we've already talked about collaboration squatting up. JJ mentioned that already. My lead source went from outbound to purely inbound. And it was a JV platform that I decided to work from. I talk a lot, I talk to a lot of people. I love relationships, I love speaking with people. And with the experience that I've been fortunate to gain during my time in real estate, I had a very secure knowledge of creative financing in a growing number of areas. Now creative finance is quite often known as sub to or subject to, which is the true spelling seller finance. Those are sort of two of the main, main areas which creative finance is known for. But there's a whole host of other ways that creative finance can be done. So I went to this completely joint venture model and what became very clear is a lot of people trusted me. A lot of people knew that I had some experience that they could gain from. And there's the expression, would you have 50%? Would you rather have 50% of something or 100% of nothing? And this works both ways. This is double edged sword. So those people that have got leads coming in and I can close a deal, they're maybe not confident enough to close a deal or it's not a wholesale deal. They're familiar with wholesale, but not necessarily the creative finance side of things. I would take the lead and try and convert it to a creative finance deal. Obviously not all of those deals are going to be creative deals. But the level of trust that I seem to have built with the community is that I now have 250 plus active leads in my system which are not necessarily just follow up leads, but they're pretty active leads that need work. So my lead manager is working with me. But the main mindset shift that I had to have was I can take a few more leads. It wasn't thinking specifically I can take a few more, I can take a few more. But this snowball started at the top of the mountain and started coming down and the snowball got bigger and bigger and it got to a point where am I really serving these people that are putting their trust in me for these creative leads now? When you're motivated by your own needs and your own lifestyle. I've got two kids, they're 14 and 16 years old. Kids don't listen to us, but they see what they learn from what they see from us. So I began thinking that I need some help here. I need to not wear the top hat, the baseball cap. I need to stop wearing acquisitions as well as dispo and transaction coordination and every other hat that a business has. It's very easy to get caught up, as I can tell you from experience is you just get in your world. This is your business, you are the business, you're self employed. And in the Robert Kiyosaki book Cash Flow Quadrant, he talks about the self employed business person is in some ways too paranoid to let somebody else come into the business, to start doing some of the functions that you have that you know, need to be done in the business because it's an inconvenience to stop and train somebody else or they don't know it as well as you do or it's specialized and you need to stop and train somebody or in some cases you just don't trust other people. And you know, I think in most cases speaking myself, there's an element of truth in all of those different areas. So I had to get my head together and decide what am I special? What are my unique skills? And I'm not watching the chat guys at the moment. I'm not sure if people are asking questions, but I will come back later on do some of those. I had to decide what are my gifts, what am I specialized in doing? And I need to really focus on those things. There's a book which is called who Not How. It's by a guy called Benjamin Hardy. He also did a book called Personality isn't Permanent. So Personality isn't Permanent and I've read a lot of books. And I'll be careful not to just talk about books during my my talk here today. So Benjamin Hardy is a guy who has written a few different books, and Dan Sullivan is the guy that came up with the concept of who, not how. Now, by looking at a business and deciding what our unique skills are, we can assess the business to see where we should be putting our time. My friend Templeton calls it red time and green time. The green time is the stuff that you excel at and you're going to be most efficient doing. And the red time is jobs that should be outsourced and offloaded to somebody else, delegated potentially. Now, reading this book was a real groundbreaking move. It explains in huge detail how so many people, including myself, until this sort of groundbreaking moment was we can try and do so many things. We're skilled at things and we can do things to a degree. But until we release that control, relinquish that wish to do everything. And actually it's almost like a giving in, a handing over the reins and saying, not that you're failing, that you can't do things, but I need to bring in more help. I need to slow down to speed up. That's another expression that you'll probably hear in many places. To speed up, you need to slow down and see what you've got, where you need to be and who you need to be working with to accomplish your goals. So I am now working with an integrator, another book, which I said I wouldn't mention too many more books, but really self development is so important in our space and every space in this world. We can only be as successful as we're able to willing to develop ourselves. And there are weeks when I don't necessarily listen to a book while I'm in the car or walking the dog, but pretty often you'll find me listening to a book at any given time because it's so important just to take in other concepts, other perspectives of what you can be looking at within yourself to help your business and to help others. And it's not that we can be the hero to ourselves and do every job ourselves, but we need to be a hero to others. Somebody that doesn't have leads, that's good. Closer they can come and work. In my business as an acquisition person and we can provide value for them by providing qualified leads. We can give them opportunity to earn a living, to learn about the business from other people's experience. I can learn from them about how they operate on a call with a seller, an integrator they're specialized in taking not necessarily the backseat in the business, but maybe the quieter seat. If you look at Walt Disney or Roy Disney, not many people know about Roy Disney. Roy was Walt's brother, who was the accountant, the integrator, who took the business ideas or the visionary ideas from Walt and made them into the business where they were achievable. He put the processes together, he put the budgets together and made sure they stayed within the constraints and the guardrails of what they needed to do to make sure the business was successful instead of becoming a failure. Another example is Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Another visionary integrator pair, Ray Kroc and I can't remember the other gentleman's name from McDonald's. Not every business is so clearly defined in this way, but it really comes down to breaking your business down into specialist areas. Once you bring on somebody to take on the thing that is taking the most time, that is least efficient for you, that's when you start going to be able to scale. You're going to be able to build your business to a level where you take the thing that slows you down most and give it to somebody that's efficient and works well with that, that are going to be fulfilled by doing those things. You'll probably find many investors in your town, in the Fortune Builders network, outside of the network, who are struggling with the things that you have pleasure in doing and that you excel at doing. And it's really important in those conversations with people not to just find out how many flips they've done, you know, how much private money they've got available to them. But those are all very important questions at one level. On the other level, the book the Go Giver is just huge in looking at the world in a different way. What value can we provide for other people? How can we provide more value to somebody else than we're being paid to provide? Exceeding and going beyond what's expected of you is huge. And looking at it from the perspective of having conversations with people at networking events, what are you struggling with, J.J. dawn, what are you missing in your business? Not that you're the hero, you're the savior of their business. JJ is a connector. Jj, I'm sure, asks these questions and says, hey, you know, you're talking about meeting the other day about something that you were struggling with or something you needed in your business. I talked to this guy. He wants to talk to you about this. And he's got this skill. He's got a friend or he's got a product, he's got something to help you. J.J. is always looking at this. I've seen the posts that he makes in the sub 2 group and I recently joined his Mastermind group with you guys. And the Go Give a book has five different lessons in it and the connector is one of those. Jj, you have to have read that book, am I right? It's on my list. I'm currently working through. Oh my goodness. I've got a list of about 30 books right now. Right now I'm finishing up thinking Grow Rich. Excellent. Yeah, that is a really great book. I started reading it on paper and I struggled to get through it and I managed to get it on Audible and it's definitely a dry book, but it's definitely a very, very valuable book. And the guy was very masterful in the way that he interviewed the people that he spoke to and just kind of found out about the connecting mechanism himself in doing that. So scaling, we'll get back to the topic. So when do you know it's the right time to scale? Well, ideally you want to scale before you hit a point where you're losing business or potentially losing opportunities due to the fact that you are not being able to fulfill all of the work that you need to do. However, this also brings about which are the deals that are most important, which are going to be most impactful on the seller, which are going to be most impactful on you. And generally in a lot of cases when you're solving a bigger problem, there's a bigger reward at the end of that problem being sold. That isn't always a proportional or ratio based outcome, but it really is very much related. I'm not saying you should drop deals, but ask for help, go and talk to somebody that you trust. That's another reason why you always have conversations and discovery conversations. Other people, what do you do in your business? What do you specialize in? What do you enjoy doing most? It's not to say that they may be looking for an opportunity because they're short of ideas, they're short of leads, they're short of something in their business where you can collaborate with each other. Dawn and all of these guys in sub 2 will tell you that collaboration is huge. We have a group where we've got 23, 2400 people in sub two now and you know the company that New Reach education that runs sub 2 and astro flipping and Zach keeps Flip to Flipping foundation are very good at making sure that community minded people join the mentorship. There are people that don't necessarily fit the profile of what we're looking to build in our community. And they're very good at keeping those boundaries that we invite the right people to join. And we have an environment where we can be very open and very free in what we're sharing about deals. There are a number of closers in the organization, including myself, who are willing to do JVs with people. And a number of us are solely bringing inbound leads, doing JVs with people and not doing any outbound marketing. It's lucrative and it's very rewarding for both parties to be able to work together and learn together. And it's just that earn learn idea. Why should we just get paid nothing for learning something? A number of mentorships and masterminds even ask you to pay them a royalty on the first four or five or ten deals that you do to the mentor. Even though they're not even involved in your deal, they expect to get something from you. Where Pace, he has been incredible in the last year of providing opportunities for people to do their first deal. And by doing so he's encouraged people to work together and collaborate, which allows people to set themselves up. And there's a concept called the conveyor belt which he talked about where I've actually got a thing up here from where the leads come in. There's follow up there is, you know, the comping, there's getting under contract, opening, escrow, negotiating, sales, etc. It allows people to build in to some system where they can find their place. It may not be their long term place, but it gets them to experience maybe an area of specialist area. They get to learn that skill. Does that fit them? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But they kind of learn about that skill and they can plug themselves into different places in that conveyor belt with a number of other people. It might be that out of the six stages of the conveyor belt, two people are covering all six of those areas. Might be that three people are covering two each. But it allows people to get into that mentality where they're working together instead of staying in that one silo where they're trying to do everything and getting overwhelmed. I felt overwhelmed for some time. Not just being in Pace's program, but also being just in real estate itself, realizing how much needed to be done without most people realizing. Pace was already building us into a platform where we were collaborative and we were being able to put ourselves into a system where we were already scaling before we actually started our own Business. So not coming from that background, that was huge for me to get into seeing a business which had been broken down into areas of skill where you could understand, where you may see yourself and understand and gain from the skills. So from the perspective of moving from one person to five or six people in a business, VAs are extremely important. Whether you've got virtual assistants in South America that are maybe Spanish speakers that are very helpful for working with leads that are Spanish speakers. A lot of Hispanic communities in North America, the Philippines is another place where resources are available. And these people are just so loyal, they're so kind, they're so dedicated to you. And some people, some investors have sort of treated them as a, as a service, not part of the business and not part of the family. But when you, when you elevate them to part of your business, they're a valued team member instead of just an employee or a resource that's kind of a. An outside person helping you out in the business. Once you change that mindset too, that is a game changer for your business because they will strive for you, they'll be loyal to you and putting the time in with them to expand their vocabulary. I know there's a French lady on the call here. I spent a few weeks in France on a French exchange in my early teens. And you know, I'm going to embarrass myself here with pronunciation, but come on to belchew. What's your name? Khelaja too. What's your age? I can speak a few. Let's see them as scripted expressions in French. So when you look at, when you look at a cold calling script. Hi, I'm calling to see if you want to sell your house is in a second language. Remember, these people are speaking in a second language. Once you take them outside of a script, they have so much more space to grow. If you give them a script, they're going to stay on that script. They're going to sound very robotic in your business. But if you give them the opportunity to grow, they will obviously grow their vocabulary. They'll be more confident in the language. They'll be confident going outside of the script. We must really treat all of our team members, whether they're on whatever continent they're in. We've got people in sub 2 that are in Israel, South Africa. One was in Switzerland for about eight months. She's just moved back to Pennsylvania where family live. We got people all around the world in sub two. And you know, we've got people operating as a team with people overseas. So it's not limited to our town or our shores. I'm collaborating with my integrator who lives in Baltimore. I've got another team member in Miami. There's another behind New Jersey. Just network, network, network. Guys. It's so important to know who's around you because you never know what's going to come onto your, onto your, on your radar as an opportunity. I think that there's something to be said for business owners that take time to make decisions, particularly hiring. You take time to hire somebody, but you're very quick to fire them if they don't fit the bill because you can't have slack in your business. Same with decisions and marketing. You've got to take time to assess what it is you're looking to do, but you've also got to give it a length of time to be able to see its course. And that's where having multiple people in your business takes away the shiny object syndrome from people. There's a lot of groups in real estate, which is, oh, what's that new SMS system that came out? What's that new dialer, what's this? Who's using this? And people are dodging and bopping between things. You need stability. You need multiple points of view and experience in your business. And another reason to scale your business to have a very balanced view on what's going on. They say you can go a lot, you can go somewhere very fast alone, but you can go a long way together. And I think that's where I'll probably draw align on where I go with scaling, you know, doing things together. You may not be as quick or as nimble, but you'll get a lot further together with, you know, better experience together and building, building those, those bridges and those experiences. Sam.