Going From Solopreneur To A Team, The Benevolent Capitalism of Mr. Beast, And Finding Passion In Opportunities

Speaker 1: [0:02] Welcome to the Collecting Keys Real Estate Investing Podcast with your host, Mike DeHaan and Dan Austin. From wins, losses, horror stories, and tactics for optimizing your business, Mike and Dan take a real uncensored deep dive into the ins and outs of running a full time real estate investment and wholesaling business.

Mike DeHaan: [0:24] What is going on, guys? Welcome to the Collecting Keys Real Estate Investing Podcast Mike and Dan Show, where I, Mike DeHaan, and my cohost, Dan Austin, talk real estate, business, pop culture, everything in between. I don't know. Whatever floats her boat for the week, but we try to give you some tidbits of business knowledge in here thrown in.

Dan Austin: [0:46] Try to make it valuable, but you never know. You never know what's gonna come out of our mouth.

Mike DeHaan: [0:50] Yeah. Exactly. Sort of sort of let it go. Typically, we we record this as like a like, our intro to our own internal business meeting that we have. So it gives us the opportunity to get whatever nonsense we wanna talk about out of the way while also still being productive. So, anyways, thanks for joining us today. We are in the middle of January, and we had a deal come back to go. Well, first off, our first week of January was bananas. If you listened last week, we got 10 signed around, and then we got another one last week. We just had one signed around last week, but it was one of my favorites to date because it was the perfect example of team members doing things right when it all came together. Mhmm. Because we had a seller that was, like, about to go into foreclosure, and, you know, it was kinda getting into a phase where he was looking like he was gonna be in big trouble. And then one of our sales guys followed up with him. And, basically, like, had missed a deal in the past. We had signed with another investor. One of our guys followed up with him on the closing date of when that was supposed to close and said, hey. How'd the closing go? Just checking on building report. And lo and behold, the deal had fallen through. So we were able to swoop in and not only get a pretty sick deal, but also save the guy from going into tax foreclosure and kind of losing everything.

Mike DeHaan: [2:06] So was a great win win all around. It's gonna be a super sick deal. So I'm excited about that.

Dan Austin: [2:10] It was like a a story of solving problems from what I understand. So, basically, you're right. The follow-up I mean, I don't know how many times we have to say this. Follow-up is so important because not every time you follow-up are you gonna get a deal. So it doesn't feel like it, but then if you do it consistently, you do get deals. Yeah. Anyhow yeah. It was another piece of it was solving the guy's problem because the guy was literally going into foreclosure the next day. He had to pay his taxes to the county the next day. And essentially, like, if he didn't do that, he would lose the house. We wouldn't have gotten a deal. So recognizing that pain and that issue and saying, hey, what if I pay your taxes for you? Exactly. Right? And he's like, okay, we can do that because then and then we offered him a price. Well, lo and behold, in that same time period, he actually came back and said, I found money. I can pay my taxes. I can't accept your offers too low. Okay. Well, we only offered you that because we had to take the risk of spending x amount of thousands of dollars on your house without knowing what was gonna happen, and so then, at that point, it was like, okay, let's negotiate an offer that works for you.

Dan Austin: [3:14] So it's just like finding that pain point, helping him solve the problem, and being there for the seller all along the way on top of the the whole follow-up win. It is kind of a cool little deal.

Mike DeHaan: [3:23] Exactly. And now that seller, instead of losing his house, he's gonna be walking away with, like, 6 figures plus on the perch on the sale of his property. So, you know, ants still a distressed property. I mean, he's the kind of landlord that can't pay $5 in property taxes. So you can imagine what the rental property looks like. Right? You know, it's just exactly what you picture there.

Dan Austin: [3:45] I like when those kind of deals come together because it's what we say. Like, everything we always preach, that's the example of why we preach it.

Mike DeHaan: [3:51] Exactly. Yeah. And just process is working, team members doing what they wanna do, and and, you know, investor win aside, it is as, like, a business owner, one of those things that just gets you super pumped up because it's, like, sweet. Like, even though we are constantly in this state of kinda, like, disarray and trying to figure out how to make stuff more efficient, Every now and then, you get a little reminder that maybe your stuff isn't as messed up as you thought it was. So that was a big win from last week. And then aside from that, we've just had a bunch of ups and downs that we've been working on. Our texting system, as we started to scale in these different markets, we had to, like, apply for basically this, like, corporate level of, like, the the texting platform that we use. And this is I hate freaking tech companies, man. Like, the worst customer service exists in tech companies. I don't know why. Like, they're all extremely profitable. They make huge amount of money, but they just put zero of those dollars into the customer service. And I say they're not profitable. They all produce a huge amount of revenue. They are famously unprofitable, but they put none of the money towards customer service.

Mike DeHaan: [4:56] It doesn't matter if you're working like, looking at, like, you know, Instagram or

Dan Austin: [4:59] Microsoft or whatever. The customer service always sucks. And with the They have ping pong tables

Mike DeHaan: [5:04] in their office. Right. Yeah. Exactly. They have all the things that we don't care about. They have, like what? What were they taking out of the Twitter studio? They have, like, a it was, a $17,000 meat slicer.

Dan Austin: [5:14] It's like cool. Latte machines and shit that you don't care about. Meanwhile, they're just sitting there playing ping pong talking

Mike DeHaan: [5:20] about how cool it would

Dan Austin: [5:20] be to to create a chatbot to talk to the customers because how they don't know how to do it.

Mike DeHaan: [5:25] Yeah. Exactly. So then you, like, need to go through this customer service process to be able to get the volume allowance that we need to be able to text in all of our markets. And, you know, we go through there's an automated process, and they're like, cool. Thanks so much. This will be approved in forty eight hours. That was now almost two full weeks ago. And I don't know. They'd bay basically, things they should offer.

Dan Austin: [5:46] Teach you when go to, like, learn how to start a business class. Like, oh, by the way, somebody might shut down a revenue source for you because they're lazy.

Mike DeHaan: [5:54] Yeah. Honestly, or just because they have their own bullshit.

Dan Austin: [5:57] Yeah. Exactly. Somebody else's systems could screw your company. You could do everything right, and then for two weeks, you're not gonna get any leads because we just don't do our job right.

Mike DeHaan: [6:06] Yeah. I mean and, like, if I had a little bit of warning, we could have at least timed, like, our direct mail and stuff so that it would Right. Fill in this gap time. But instead, what happens is, you know, our direct mail seems is falling, you know, shortly after that all sort of happened. So we have, like, this really awkward gap, and it's just unnecessarily quiet because we had an un unbeknownst thing. But, I mean, I think it's a good business lesson regardless of what it is to always have Mhmm. Contingencies for every part of your business. You know, like, whether that's contingent customer source, that's a contingent platform that you use for marketing, you know, that I was like, don't know contingency is the right word. Redundancy is actually the only going for. You want, like, some sort of, like, backup plan, whether it's in your staff. You know? Like, if you have, like if your entire business relies on one key staff member, what happens if that person quits or they face the earth? They get hit by a bus, whatever? Then if you don't have a backup, you're fucked. I mean, that's a big reason that we started wholesaling outside of our local market was because it was like, we need a backup plan for if this mark starts to get weird, which it has a little bit.

Dan Austin: [7:12] It has, but we're able to still keep producing. Yeah. I've talked to a couple different people now that just lost their ass. Yeah. Like, Apple changed its privacy policies. Right? Because they were no no longer able to target people specifically because their entire business, all their lead gen was on social media. Mhmm. Right? There's no redundant no redundant lead gen for them. And that's probably okay because there might be some businesses where that's it. That's the only way you can get lead gen or the best way you can get lead gen or the cheapest way, but you have to recognize that when that if that changes and goes away, you're screwed if you don't have redundancy.

Mike DeHaan: [7:43] Yeah. I remember that was a huge thing, like, seven, ten years ago when there was all these people that it was, like, the beginning of influencers that were making legitimate money on social media. Mhmm. And you would have these people that had built these huge platforms on, like, Instagram or Facebook or whatever, and then they would yeah. Exactly. They would change the algorithm. Mhmm. And literally, they would go from making, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to nothing overnight.

Dan Austin: [8:07] Immediately. And if you're a guy like MrBeast, you know, obviously, that didn't happen to him, but if you he famously spends most of his profits on his next video. And so, like, if you're spending a like, say, you have $2,000,000 saved up in cash, and you're like a 20 year old doing cool videos, and the next thing you know, you spent all that, and you go to drop that video, and, like, you get 12 views. You're like, oh, shit. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [8:26] Right. I know. Honestly.

Dan Austin: [8:28] It's a risk. It's a risk.

Mike DeHaan: [8:29] Yeah. Have you ever watched any of his videos? He actually does, like, some Oh, yeah. Good, like, legitimately entertaining stuff. And the way that he throws around money, it's funny. Like, I don't know how I feel about it. Like, I understand, like, the shtick

Dan Austin: [8:41] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [8:42] That he does where he's, like, giving it away and all sorts of things. But I I also, like, get this thing of it's, like, dystopian future where you have, like, this super rich guy who's like, I'm gonna make all of these people do dumb shit, and I'm just gonna throw wads of cash at

Dan Austin: [8:55] them. Right.

Mike DeHaan: [8:56] Yeah. And sure, like, he does it from a benevolent sort of position, but still it's kind of a weird zone to be in, I feel like.

Dan Austin: [9:04] I think if you follow him, which most, like, I guess you would call him Gen Zers now and maybe some millennials follow him from the beginning where he didn't have that. Like, I see how you're like, oh, that's not a big deal. But, like, if you're just stepping into, like, his his world right now, you're like, that is kinda weird. Like, the video, the big one where he had the guy in the house, like, you stay here x amount of days, you can't do this. But then he's, like, cutting the house in half and just doing things just to wreck this dude's day. I was just like, oh, man. Jeez.

Mike DeHaan: [9:32] Yeah. Yeah. Or I saw this other one where they had it was, like, a 100 parents and a 100 kids, and they had them in, like, these giant rooms next to each other. And, basically, they they were they were in there for, like, several days. It was, like, as, like, a hundred hours or something crazy. And what they the whole competition was, like, the group that lasted the longest was gonna get, like, $500,000. That was gonna be split amongst all of the people that were in there. Right? So, basically, you kinda, like, wanted people to leave, but, like, you wanted to, like, have the most because, like, if people didn't you know, if your team had the most, you won, but you wanna have less in there as possible.

Dan Austin: [10:05] That is a mind fuck. Yes. Holy smokes.

Mike DeHaan: [10:08] So it was kinda interesting. But then, like, as he's going through it, he would just start doing shit like,

Dan Austin: [10:12] oh, yeah. I'll give you $5,000 if

Mike DeHaan: [10:14] you leave right now. He'll be like, done. They would just, like, walk out. But I'm like, like, just I don't know, man. It's it's like a it's like the king playing with, like, all of his jesters and his peasants, and he's just, like, throwing it around for his own entertainment. But, like, you know, it means a lot to those people, and it isn't good fun, but it's I don't know. It just

Dan Austin: [10:33] seems That me when you talk about because I know exactly what you're talking about. Like, I've seen him do that where they had to, like, keep their hand or their feet on something, and he was just walking around giving people money if they would quit. It reminds me it's like this is another like a devious position. Reminds me when I in the army and we were in the ranger training and we just got it. We were just getting our asses kicked for a few weeks like out in the field, rain, everything. It was just miserable. We just we're all wet. We just got back from, like we did, a six mile run-in the morning out in the woods, like, with all your gear on. And we came back. We had to do, like, a road march, like, where you're rocking with, like, I don't know, 50 pounds on your back while your shit Rocked, like, several miles, and then we got back there, and we knew it was, like, our last day. And they're like, alright. Get your shit. We're walking back to the barracks, which was, like, 20 something miles away. And, like, dudes were broken off. Like, their feet like, my feet I just remember they're, hamburger meat, like, mosquito bites all over your body chafing. Like, you're just miserable at this point. And like, but if you wanna quit, come over here. We'll get you some, like, we'll get you some hot cocoa, and you can ride the bus back if you quit. And like, a ton of dudes raised their hand. Like, the guy next to me is like, I'm gonna quit.

Dan Austin: [11:39] I was like, dude, don't do Don't quit. And then he quit, and he just walked over there, then the buses pulled up, and they're like, everybody on the bus, and we all rode back.

Mike DeHaan: [11:46] I was like, that's so devious, but that's like the same kind of like he's doing the

Dan Austin: [11:51] same thing. It's kinda funny, actually. Yeah. I mean, if I was in those ranger instructors' boots, that would have been fun to do, but also kinda wreck people's lives. But you're trying to build mental mental toughness, I guess, in the army. He mister beast is just trying to fuck with people.

Mike DeHaan: [12:04] Yeah. For money. Yes. He's doing he's doing it for profit, which he like I said, he does give back to people. But, yeah, like I said, the the sort of, I don't know, mindset of that is is funny to me, especially too because, like, his I mean, maybe this is why it works is, you know, a lot of the Gen Z viewership, at least this is my gen you know, my millennial sort of view. I feel like a lot of them lean towards, like, anti capitalist, like, socialist tendencies. So maybe they're like, oh, it's like a rich guy that is, you know, giving back all his money. I'm like, yeah. But understand, he's still worth hundreds of millions of pro form

Dan Austin: [12:36] a basis, he's probably a billionaire for what he can produce and what he will produce.

Mike DeHaan: [12:41] Yeah. He's not he's not far away. But there was that, and he's smart too. There well, he got offered an insane amount of money. I think it was a billion dollars or several billion dollars for his YouTube channel. And he was like he passed on it and basically said, like, with the branding that I have, if I have a 100 control in the other entities I'm gonna be able to grow with this, I'm gonna be able to make so much more money than that. And this is, like, you know, the foresight of what is he? 24? 25.

Dan Austin: [13:08] Guts on this guy. I would have been like, sweet peace. $5,000, I'm out. You can have my YouTube channel.

Mike DeHaan: [13:14] Yeah. I I would have done it for the less than that, you know. But anyway, so that's tangent. But I was just thinking. I was like, how do we get out of this hole?

Dan Austin: [13:21] How do we pivot, Mike? What are we gonna do now?

Mike DeHaan: [13:24] I know. I would pivot back to business. We're in trouble. Yeah. So so other stuff we got going on in the business right now that we're we're hard at work after our business coach chewed our last last week. Yeah. In a very productive way. Like, basically, he came out. So we we start we hired this business coach at the beginning of the year, Steve Rozenberg. You're actually gonna hear a interview with him over the next, like it's not in the next month or so because we did a podcast. We connected with him. But we started working at the beginning of the year, and he came in and started picking apart our business, gave a bunch of homework. And then we had, like, our first, I would say, like, follow-up call with him after he gave us our initial round of homework. And, basically, came back, and he's like, what are you guys doing?

Dan Austin: [14:03] Well, first of all, he's like, well, you're gonna have to redo that one. Like, you guys didn't even do that right. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [14:11] Yeah. And the thing that sucks is, like, I felt pretty good about stuff that we sent him.

Dan Austin: [14:15] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [14:15] But then, you know but this is why you hire him. Right? Just to challenge challenge you and to help you sort of grow. And the his general viewpoint is that every business should be built in a way to make it sellable, even if you have no intention to exit, because that's what you need to do to make it so that you're not like a slave to your business. It's have it so that, you know, staff and third parties and go back can come in, get integrated, and not have to, you know, try to figure out what's in your head.

Dan Austin: [14:43] Which is really hard to do, though. Like, that in itself is hard. Not like, oh, I can't let go of the process. That's part of it. But part of it is is how do you find time to stop doing revenue generating activities to do these system systematizing SOP activities? It's really hard. You're working double time.

Mike DeHaan: [15:01] Yeah. Well, it's especially hard when you've done what we've done, what we've just kinda, like, shot from the hip and then crazy stuff for the last three years. Right?

Dan Austin: [15:10] Yeah. We're always making money, so we're like, yeah. Screw it. Like, let's just keep doing that.

Mike DeHaan: [15:13] Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we we've we've basically already, like, built the roof, and now we're trying to build the foundation after the roof is already up. You know? It's just super challenging.

Dan Austin: [15:21] We've got a bunch of sticks holding each corner up. We're like, oh, shit. Concrete trucks here?

Mike DeHaan: [15:26] Yeah. But yeah. But it's been a it's been a heavy sort of shift of of mindset. And, that yeah, that call we had with him, I can't remember the last time that I felt that uncomfortable by something that I knew was extremely productive. You know? It kinda takes me back to

Dan Austin: [15:39] I didn't feel uncomfortable at all. That's funny how you were how you felt uncomfortable. I didn't feel uncomfortable. I was just like, oh, this yep. Okay. Got it.

Mike DeHaan: [15:46] Bro, you had this look on your face during the the call that, like it reminded me of, like, when we were in college, and we both realized that we had just, like, screwed up horribly on, like, a test or, like, an assignment or something. And you were just like, oh, god. Yeah. But I but I wasn't like, oh, man. I feel terrible. I was just like, yeah. This is how you get your ass kicked. I don't know. Semantics. But either way, so we've been working on that super heavily, building that out. And it's been fun too with our staff because, like, a lot of our staff has been with us. I don't wanna say during, like, the shit show during just, like, the all over the place way. And now getting them kind of on board with having some more structure and that sort of stuff. I always had this assumption that when you, you know, you try to, like, wrangle in the crew and you try to, like, keep it a little more structured that people would kind of revolt against that. And surprisingly, the complete opposite. The opposite. They're like, thank god. We're finally gonna have some structure to our job. Wait.

Dan Austin: [16:45] Yeah. Some systems, some, like, how to's, some some, like, goals, some, you know, ways to build and and grow. Yeah. It'll be good.

Mike DeHaan: [16:53] Yeah. Yeah. It'll it'll be really good, so I'm excited. And, you know, as we've gone through a lot of this too, it it spurred some some different questions. So one of the things that we've been doing with our our group coaching program, our master program, the instant investor program, has been giving our members the opportunity to request, like, different forms of content, whether, like, know, long form content that they wanna dive into more so than just on one of our twice a week group calls that we do. Like, they wanna, like, hear some more long form stuff, whether it's through the podcast, a YouTube video, new course material, whatever. And as you've been going through this, you know, explain to them the prospect and their business coach, the questions come up a couple times of, you know, going past that one person business and, you know, scaling up into, like, where you have staff and you have these other people that are involved, kinda like when to do that and how about to approach it and things that we wish we had known back when we start started that. And first off, I guess the the one thing I'll say is if you're a one man show right now, that just just a very, very base level, if you're a one man show right now, the number one tip that I can give you is every single repetitive task that you do, whether it's, like, ordering marketing material, it's analyzing deals, do all that sort of stuff, just, like, record yourself doing it with, like, a Loom video, just talking to yourself Mhmm. About, like, what exactly you're doing, and then just save that, and you'll be, like, 90% of the way there to, like, being able to bring on

Dan Austin: [18:18] staff. Key there. Yep. The big key there is taking the time to do that. And then a lot of that repetitive stuff can be done by a virtual employee or a local admin or something that you want or whatever that position is. But that's the that's the challenging part. If doing it as or before everything turns into a spider web of of a mess of, like, who does what.

Mike DeHaan: [18:36] Yeah. And I I think that the problem that occurs is they go out, they find the, you know, in house employee, the virtual employee, whatever, and they say, cool. Now I need to build a standard operating procedure. I need to build a guide for them to do what they need to do. And that sucks because it feels like you're not productive. Whereas, when you are in the early phases, if you go about, you know, being proactive of recording and documenting what you're doing on a day

Dan Austin: [18:59] to day basis while working

Mike DeHaan: [19:00] on your business by yourself, it doesn't even to be perfect. Like, literally, just, like, get a Loom recording and just do whatever you would normally be doing and just talk about it. That's gonna be more productive than you trying to now do it from, like, a I don't know. Like, why you're also trying to manage this person that you just brought on. Right? And it Yes. It sounds it sounds kind of silly maybe, but, like, honestly, if you do that when you're starting out and you're getting ready to bring that person, like, your life will be so much easier. And it will reduce an incredible amount of work and headache when you bring that person into the fold.

Dan Austin: [19:32] Yep. And that assumes you want to move out of the solopreneur role, which I would highly recommend a minimum as a solopreneur. You always have virtual in this business. At least one virtual employee, like a VA that's you're paying someone from The Philippines or somewhere wherever to do those tasks that you're talking. So much of it is repeatable and repeatable that you can pass off to people.

Mike DeHaan: [19:53] Yeah. Well, I would say that being a true solar solopreneur doesn't make sense in any business. I mean, like No. You know, even even if you're I forgot. I don't know. You're into an OnlyFans. Like Yeah. You know, like, it is literally all me. Bookkeeping. Exact. Honestly, if someone has to do your bookkeeping, someone has to go and schedule your post, someone has to go and, like, I don't know, engage with people that reach out to you.

Dan Austin: [20:15] Bag up your bathwater that you're gonna mail out to people.

Mike DeHaan: [20:19] Or or, like, on that note, okay, what you know will be the most time consuming part of that, think, about repetitive tasks? Imagine printing off all those shipping labels or just, like, processing the addresses. Right. If you're gonna do that yourself, it's gonna take forever if you're selling, like, 50 of those. But, like Absolutely. But you can get a VA to go and do all that for, like, $5 an hour, and it'll free up your time. It'll give you the opportunity to do everything else. But, like, seriously, whether, you know, you're an you're an artist, you're in real estate, you know, you're selling widgets, whatever, there's going to be repetitive tasks in business, and you should absolutely outsource that. Even if you're, like, determined to be a solopreneur, just find, like, a part time VA who can work for you ten hours a week, twenty hours a week, and just do the stuff that you honestly don't like to do and stop lying to yourself for like you do it like that.

Dan Austin: [21:05] 100%. So then the question becomes and this this kind of dovetails off off of our conversation last week, which was like the contentment versus ambition. But at what point do you make that decision to go beyond you? Maybe that's to hire your acquisition manager. Maybe that's to hire your disposition manager. Because you can do very well. We've interviewed people on this podcast that do very well with just them and a partner, them and a spouse, or just them. I mean, we're talking couple $100,000 a year in profits.

Mike DeHaan: [21:38] Yeah. I mean, well, that like, that's what's that's easily possible with you and a staff and a staff member. I mean, we interviewed someone earlier today, and we have several people that are gonna be on this show here over the next couple of months that do multi 7 figures as them and a spouse, and that's

Dan Austin: [21:55] And partner them and a spouse.

Mike DeHaan: [21:56] Yeah. Exactly. That'd And that's

Dan Austin: [21:57] what I mean is, like so there's this, like the question still comes, like, do you need to and should you, in this business line, scale up beyond that? Like, what's the win? Because one thing I will say about those folks is they're definitely busy.

Mike DeHaan: [22:10] They're extremely busy. And so I guess here here's how I viewed it. So need to look at bringing people. I mean, first off, everyone always says, like, find out what your why is. Right? That's kinda like Mhmm. That answer since we do okay. I didn't like that answer when I was still trying to figure it out because I'm like, my why's fucking make money? Like, that's that's my why at this moment because I don't have the freedom to have, like, an actual cause. Right? Honestly. Yeah. So I would say that if you have a part of your business that is, you know, is a weakness so for us, when we started and we decided to bring in our first staff, I went to a mastermind and with our business coach, our our wholesaling coach at the time, and he was like, I think that you guys just suck at sales. You need to outsource that if you wanna be successful. So we went and we outsourced that, and lo and behold, our business took off because we found someone that filled the weakness that we had. So I would say that's the first thing you look at is if you have a weakness that is restricting your growth with the current scale that you're already doing or the scale of where you wanna go, look at bringing on staff to fill that gap. Mhmm. Second thing is if you have parts of your business that you are constantly putting off, you are not doing, that you are falling behind on because you hate them, or you're falling you're falling behind because you don't have time, then it is time to look at bringing someone on to manage those things. Like, necessary parts of your business. Like you said, bookkeeping Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [23:27] Things like data management. Right? A lot of people is you know mean? In our in our instant investor program, that's one of the biggest things that they hate is they hate the data portion because they come from a sales background. Right? Like social media posts Lead management. Yeah. Lead management, you know, managing social media, managing your website, all these things that do nothing but take time but need to be done on a weekly or monthly basis. If you find that you get to those things and you're just like, oh my god. I wanna do anything except this, then you should probably find someone to do those things.

Dan Austin: [23:58] That's fascinating. And that it reminds me your your first point about things that you might suck at in hiring somebody. It reminds me of the conversation we were having yesterday about Richard Bronson

Mike DeHaan: [24:07] Mhmm.

Dan Austin: [24:07] And how he basically started Virgin Records, and he didn't really he doesn't even like music or care for music. And he just hires people that were he hired people that are really good at records, really good at producing music, all that sort of stuff. But he he knew that, and you had an interesting take. I can't remember what you the quote was that you quoted him on, you should you should do that. Because that to me is fascinating. It was it is a very good example of a very, very productive, a very successful person saying, you don't have to be good at it. You just have to find the right people to surround yourself with it.

Mike DeHaan: [24:37] Yeah. So so what I what I talked about yesterday when when we were chatting about that was Richard Branson, he did a an interview with Tim Ferriss. It was years ago now I listen to this. But it's funny. He talked about that Virgin Records thing, and this was actually before I left my w two. But this was something that really stuck with me, this whole way that he was a visionary around all the businesses that he went. And he's heavily relied on staff and experts and building teams around every endeavor he's done. Even Virgin Records when he first launched it when he was, you know, super young. And he's famous for not really being that into music, but he had this huge record company. Right? And what he said is that, like, in in this interview with Tim Ferriss, go go look back to about 2018. He was like, it's too many people they try to build, like, businesses around their, like, literal interests. Right? So they're like, I like music passion. Exactly. They're passion. Like, I like music. I wanna be a musician. Whereas he said, he liked business. He liked, like, different aspects of that. He liked networking and sales and, like, extroverted person. Those are things that he liked. And he took that interest and applied it towards a demand.

Dan Austin: [25:43] Mhmm. Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [25:43] Right? Which was music and records. So he recognized there was demand for that, and he said, well, I can take my interest in networking with high profile people and, like, sort of building this brand and, like, the actual design and the theory of it, which was what he liked, and applied it towards Virgin Records because there was a huge demand for it. Yeah. And that can be said kind of with, like, everything. Right? Like, you know, if you're I don't know. Let's say that you love to draw. Instead of make 100% say, like, I'm going to be like a custom artist who just, like, does all these genres all the time. What if you can apply that towards, you know, like, different, like, brand or, a story or, like, an Internet profile or things like that that has a little bit more of a demand? You know, comedic videos that are gonna people are gonna care about more more so than just, like, you know, your doodles that you do on, like, a notepad. Right? Like Yep. Just has to spin it a little bit, which takes a little bit of internal thought and definitely isn't an easy thing to figure out. But I remember that. And and that's I mean, even, like, for me personally, I didn't have an interest in real estate when I got into this business. Yeah. What I liked was the system like, going through the system building process. Like, when I originally quit my w two, my goal was to get into startups and, like, tech and these sort of things. And I ended up being a real estate investor, which is pretty different, but the systemization of it is not far removed from, like, a tech business.

Mike DeHaan: [27:05] If you look on the back end, it's very data heavy. You know, there's a lot of time working with, like, customer facing stuff, a lot of problem solving, and those are the aspects that I like that translated over to the real estate business, and that seemed to be where the demand and the opportunity was for myself.

Dan Austin: [27:18] Yeah. Absolutely. I think you and I are in agreement on this, like, real estate. I mean, although it is cool to drive down the road, like, oh, I own that, or I flipped that, or I did that. Like, there's, like, that like, that's kinda cool because it's just, like, anything that you produce is kinda fun to look at and share with people. But real estate itself is asked, so, like, doesn't get me super excited. But there is an opportunity and has been opportunity for us to do things that do make us passionate, like entrepreneurship and systematizing and building a business that produces money for us, and, you know, which also produces adventures and other things for us. And the thing I love about this this whole conversation is just the proof in the pudding that as you look to scale, if you don't aren't good at stuff, you can bring in experts, and there are experts that do wanna be employees. Mhmm. That's hands down. That don't wanna be entrepreneurs, and so you can find those experts to help you scale your business and help you solve problems.

Mike DeHaan: [28:08] Yeah. I mean, exactly. There's there's people that love every aspect of every business. And one of the things too is if you have, like, a tiny bit of business success, you can bring people on and, you know, especially overseas people for less money than you'd think. Mhmm. And I don't mean that in a way of, like, oh, don't pay people. But just overall, reasonable staff costs, if you have a successful business, aren't crazy. So, like, you know, let's say let's say you get a business up to where you're making $100,000 a year regularly. If you go and you find someone that gonna cost you $60,000 a year, sure, you're gonna now have to make $40,000 a year, assuming no overhead. This is a fantasy business that you just, like, make profit on. But does that $60,000 a year person give you the freedom to now go make another $100,000 a year? Right? And that's kinda what you have to look at it.

Dan Austin: [28:57] That's the goal. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [28:58] Yeah. And one of the exercises that we had to do with with our business coaches, we had to go through and we were plotting out our business and, like, basically, our end game, and then we had to reverse engineer what our staff and our team and everything had to look like. And I'm looking for the actual document here, but I think we ended up having it was, like, it was, like, 26 staff members or 27 staff members, which is a lot of people.

Dan Austin: [29:21] Yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [29:22] With people that we were paying, like, very well in a lot of these roles, and our total staff cost, I think, was, like, 1,400,000. Right?

Dan Austin: [29:30] Yeah. It was still pretty low on an annual basis. I mean, there were some virtual, like, employees that, you know, you're paying $5 an hour within that staff cost, but there's a lot of, like, local and on-site US based employees in that as well because you need for some of those roles, we need to just, you know, high achievers that are local to The US.

Mike DeHaan: [29:50] Yeah. Exactly. So then you think if you're a small operation that's making I mean, the the reason I I point this out too is we know several people that are two man shows or two person shows or three person shows that they'll be, you know, the couple in the VA, and they're making multi 7 figures. And they literally say, like, I don't think we have the finances to bring somebody on. Because I think that the problem is is people sort of think about it, and they're like, okay. I mean, if they inflated their lifestyle, that's on them. Right? That's their own problem.

Dan Austin: [30:18] Yeah. That's their problem. Yep.

Mike DeHaan: [30:19] But I think a lot of people, what they do is they're like, okay. So I need to pay a special $120,000 a year. Like, I can't afford that. It's like, well, yeah, you can't afford that if you had to pay them, like, this month, like, the whole year, but realize that it goes out. Do that. That's not how it works. You it's not

Dan Austin: [30:32] how earn and make money and yeah. Exactly. No. And it's a challenge too. I and I've gone through that, like, mentally before of, how are we gonna pay this employee if we bring them on? And you're right. That is a risk, and that does suck that if you hire somebody and it happens, if you hired somebody and you're like, sorry, didn't work out the way I wanted to, we can't pay you, see you, and that person's uprooted their life or changed jobs or whatever, that that is part of it, and so that's why you work your ass off to make sure that that doesn't happen. You you and I famously hired our first acquisition manager with not enough money to cover any of our costs associated with that and or marketing at that point in time, but we knew we had to do that. We had to take massive action and get that person in there so that we could produce enough revenue to live another day. And lo and behold, we're still here, and we never have missed payroll yet. And there's been multiple times where we're like, oh, it's gonna be tight this month when we bring this person on. Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [31:24] Oh, yeah. Even right now, as we're growing, we're rolling over finances. And, you know, you and I have had some discussion about bringing over, a growth expert and that sort of stuff. And we're like, well, technically, if we bring that person out, we're gonna be in the negative, like, you know, pretty little decent sum of money depending on how many deals close and things like that. But, like, our our sort of base minimum and our staff cost and everything else in the in the middle will put us at a negative cost. And it's like, well, do you wanna carry that? And it's like, I mean, if that person allows us to make 10 x that over the next couple of months, absolutely, it makes sense.

Dan Austin: [31:54] Yep. It's just like spending marketing. Right? Like, when we when we go and drop another batch of mail, like, we know it should and will produce some level of income, but it doesn't happen right when you spend the money. And so I also like to correlate this conversation to investing. So you're used to as as somebody who probably listened to this podcast, you're used to the idea of investing in an asset like real estate. There's also an asset called your business. And so if you're operating a business, sometimes you have to put money into that business. Like, we've done that when we've started up businesses or we've had to do capital calls for certain things. And at this point in time, it's like, okay. It's not, you know, if, it's when that money comes back to us. And so you're investing in that, and sometimes it takes a while to come back to you. Other times, it's like a freaking home run, and and it's a rocket ship. You don't always know the results. But as you get experience, you kinda learn to gauge that, and you learn that it's an investment, and you're not flushing money down the toilet when you're hiring and paying for staff that are inevitably going to scale your business.

Mike DeHaan: [32:51] Yeah. And I think that's the key point is, like I said, understanding that's an investment is a difficult mindset shift that is honestly extremely hard to make until you have proof of concept. Mhmm. You know? And and we see that with, you some know, of our students. We saw that with ourself. I mean, even we bring on new roles, it's always like, well, does this person actually make sense? And, you know, like I said, it does not always. Like, we have had people that have joined our team for one month, and then we've been like, honestly, this role is not effective or this person's not effective. Like, we need to, you know, review that. And that's never a fun situation, but that's the reality of it. Right? And big companies do that. Small companies do that. And that's kinda how it works. So yep. Anyways alright. So I guess to rehash stuff, going from that one man team or woman show, that one man or woman show to scaling up from there, when exactly you should do that, first off, sort of look at your goals and, you know, see, like, if you do you think that you would be able to go a little bit quicker if you had some additional help? That's that's a big thing. Second thing would be to analyze your weaknesses and see if you have major gaps that could be more easily filled by an expert in that rather than trying to learn it yourself.

Mike DeHaan: [34:03] I think that this is especially true when it comes to things like, you know, sales or marketing or these things that are, like, kinda natural skill sets that some people have and some people don't. Like, you know, if you're an introverted person, don't try to teach yourself hard sales. Like, sure, you would probably benefit from it, but it's gonna take you for freaking ever, and you're always gonna hate it even if you do get good at it. Yep. So fill those gaps. And then the third thing will be if you have parts of your business that are taking a lot of your time that you regularly find yourself pushing off that you don't wanna do anymore, bring on people to do those things. You know? Like like, we all have do stuff we don't have to do, but if it is making it so your business is no longer enjoyable for you, then you should find someone to come and do that stuff. Because, you know, even if you're making a little bit of success, you probably can pay a VA $5 an hour. So $800 a month full time.

Dan Austin: [34:49] Cool. That's it? $800 a month? Yep. That's what So cheap. Or you could pay double that if you go get a staffing agency, and then they will give you the exact same employee that you would have hired for half that.

Mike DeHaan: [35:00] I know. Right?

Dan Austin: [35:00] It's a whole another conversation. But Good news. Not to sidetrack us too much, but no. I I can't agree more with those points, and I don't know what the old adage is, but it's like, you know, you could go, like, what is it? You can get to where you're going a lot faster if you go alone, but you can go a lot further together. And so bringing those people on, whether they're partners or employees, you can tend to get to go a lot further together. And ultimately, it does feel like you're slowing down by hiring people, and it might might actually slow you down for a minute while you get them ready to go, but you can go so much further with them. So that's just my opinion. Does it mean you have to leave your solopreneur gig? Hell no. If your if your life if your quality of life is great, say you're working twenty hours a week and that's all you wanna work, you're making a $150,000 a year from your business, you enjoy doing each element of it, and you can put up with some of the some of the grind because it's easy, that's fine too. It's a personal choice.

Mike DeHaan: [35:53] It is. Exactly. It's a personal choice. And, also, too, I will say, if you are that person and you're not making $50,000 a year, but you're happy on $50,000 a year that you're making or 35, then you do you. Like, you know, not not everyone has to be swinging for the fences either. It all comes down to to what you're willing to do. Like, I I remember meeting someone here in Spokane a while back. Yeah. It was him. It was a guy that was, like, in his, like, seventies. He had a son that, you know, he was, like, in his fifties. They flipped two houses a year, and the money that they made on their houses was what they made for the year, and that was what they did. So they would make, you know, 60 to $120,000 a year. They split that. It would take them, you know, a couple months' worth of work to do each one, and then they would spend the rest of time up at the lake, he said, and that was what they did. So I love it. Good for them. Yeah. So exactly. Simple lifestyle. But, anyways alright, guys. Well, thanks so much for listening. Hopefully, you enjoyed the rambling of two real estate idiots for thirty five minutes. One thing I wanted to say because I recently got an Instagram post a comment from somebody that said, I didn't realize that you had a group coaching program, and they wanted some more information about it, which we we kinda, like, pushed it a little bit a while back, and then we stopped because we were trying to be less salesy. But I'm putting this out here.

Mike DeHaan: [37:08] We have a group coaching program, if you'd be interested, where we give you the full soup to nuts of how we built our business. We have a mastermind community that's run through Slack. We have two group calls a week, and we are looking at bringing experts to do talks. And then our members get first, I guess, like, ability to request content, long form, short form, all that sort of stuff, they get to participate in the show a little bit too. If you go to collectingkeyspodcast.com and you go and you click on the become an instant investor in the top right, it will give you the breakdown of all the stuff that we offer. So I promise I'm not gonna start plugging that all the time and be that guy. But someone said they didn't even know. Means That I gotta talk about it at least a little bit more. Friendly. A friendly reminder. It's a friendly reminder. Yeah. So go to collectingkeyspodcast.com and click on the become an instant investor, little blue button in the top right, and that'll take you to the full list of stuff that we offer. Anyways, guys, hopefully, you enjoy this. Please go and share with anyone who might find it entertaining or interesting or is looking to scale beyond that solopreneur into, you know, the multi person business or not.

Mike DeHaan: [38:10] Either way, you kinda do you. And if you leave us a five star review, ready to listen to podcasts, and you send me a screenshot on my Instagram at Mike underscore Invest, I'll send you a free T shirt. I actually got two more of those today. I have five T shirts I gotta send out on Friday.

Dan Austin: [38:25] Nice, man. You gotta hire someone to do that. I do,

Mike DeHaan: [38:28] though, honestly. And then I was also like, shit. I'm gonna run out of large T shirts because all men are the same size. All men are larges? Yeah. Exactly. Anyways, guys, send me a DM of your five star review where I listen to your podcast. I'll happily send you a collecting keys shirt. And besides that, guys, thanks for listening, and we'll talk to y'all next week.

Dan Austin: [38:46] See you.

Speaker 1: [38:47] Thanks for listening. Please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and check us out at collectingkeyspodcast.com for tips and guides on starting your own real estate investment and wholesaling business.