Lessons to Help You Transition From W2 to Real Estate

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Hey. What's going on, guys? Kind of a little bit of a different collecting keys episode for you today because this is the episode for Christmas Eve. And in the past years, the Christmas Eve episode has been our second least kind of, like, listened to and downloaded episode and day of the year, second only behind Christmas. And so instead of, like, dragging out Dan and Dylan to come and record a show that probably not a huge number of people are gonna listen to compared to the other episodes, I just decided I'd do something a little bit different. And so this one, you have me today, Mike DeHaan, just kinda doing a quick little almost Friday focused kind of show for you just to kind of help wrap up the year. And so if you listen to the episode next week that's coming out December 31, Dan and Dylan and I, we kinda dive into our like, little bit of, like, an annual wrap up. We talk about KPIs, how our business did, talk about some of our wins and losses for the year, and the kind of stuff that we have planned for next year. And so in this one, as you're gonna be hearing from us next week, I kind of wanted to talk about scale members and some of the challenges and lessons that they had this year, as as well as some of the wins that they had so that you can hear some perspective from other people in the industry that aren't just the same three guys that you listen to on a weekly basis. And so what I did with this is in our Slack channel for scale, I basically just asked a general question for people to share their lessons that they learned for the year as well as some of their big wins.

Mike DeHaan: [1:30] And I've just sort of compiled a summary of a handful of them so that we can, you know, kinda hear, like, what people are sort of going through right now and and what other operators have learned over the past year. First, let's start with lessons. And you probably guessed this, that a lot of people said similar things. And one of the most common lessons that so many people said that they learned was the value around community. Right? And not just community as in, like, joining scale and meeting community members there, although that was very important for a lot of people, but also their local real estate investment community. Because when you're a real estate investor, it's very easy to kinda get into this mindset where you have a head down, you're kinda doing deals, and people have a little bit of a scarcity mindset. Or what happens is they kind of network constantly, and they don't do any work. And so, you know, it kinda puts you in a weird spot. But one of the biggest lessons that a ton of people said was the value in finding a strong community that is driven towards the same things and kind of has, you know, similar, I would say, ambitions and goals and nurture those relationships.

Mike DeHaan: [2:33] And focusing on that allowed people to make significantly more money. And I'm not saying it's just as like a a scale plug or promotion or whatever, but this was something that is very common amongst the entrepreneurial community in general, is that you really start to learn that the old saying that your network really is your net worth is so true. And it's kind of a hard thing to understand until you really experience it yourself. Right? Because it's not just about, like, being around people and kind of learning and, like, kinda what can you get from being around people. But when you become somebody that has some momentum in your life and your business, when you are able to bring as much value as you want to receive back, the net of value that received by everybody tends to be a lot more than just like, you know, two plus two or one plus one rather. All of a sudden, it becomes like one plus one equals five. You start doing more deals with more people. They go and tell their friends. They start bringing you into the circle with other successful people that they know. And all of a sudden, the network effect expanded very, very quickly. And once you are have the ability to create value for people and you kind of understand how to nurture that, it's amazing how much you can grow and how unbelievably fast it can catapult your current business adventures as well as your future ones. So that was one of the biggest lessons that was most repeated there. The second most common lesson that people had revolved specifically around consistency, And this existed in sort of various different ways that people brought up, but it was around things like doing consistent marketing, doing consistent sales, understanding how to, like, work consistently and manage systems consistently was huge. Learning how to make consistent income by wholesaling versus just doing buying and holding or flipping, which tends to have a lot trickier of a cash conversion cycle.

Mike DeHaan: [4:21] And frankly, it all came down to the fact that they many people learned that you have to do the boring stuff. Right? And acknowledging that the things that you typically have to do are boring. And if you are coming from a phase where you're always trying to make things exciting or always having to be really excited every day in order to work hard, you're probably not gonna get it anywhere. Right? So doing stuff once you're proficient at it usually isn't that fun. It's just like, I don't know, going just a good example. Like, if you have been let's say you you have a puzzle. Right? And you always do the exact same puzzle every single day. Eventually, you're gonna know how to do the puzzle, and it's gonna be really boring. Right? That's not very fun to do anymore. Same thing happens with business. Once you kinda know how to do the marketing, you know how to run the sales team, you know how to analyze properties, do the pipe, all sort of stuff, it's really not that exciting anymore, to be honest. It's actually pretty freaking dull, but that is how you make money. It's all about knowing how to be more efficient with your time, knowing how to recognize opportunities better, knowing how to generally reduce risk because you make less mistakes. Those are the things that are so, so important. And we had a ton of people in scale that learned that this year because for the first time ever, because they had that community that was the first piece, were held accountable doing the same thing. They were able to learn from what other people were doing, and they had the group to keep them moving forward and doing the same thing over and over and over again.

Mike DeHaan: [5:46] And lo and behold, a lot of them ended up making a lot more money. Right? So very important lesson there. Alright. Now for the wins. And we have some awesome ones that I was super excited about. So first off, some of the biggest wins, and these are the ones that honestly made me the most excited, were all the members that we had that were finally able to leave their w twos, thanks to their real estate businesses growing this year. And I think for pretty much every entrepreneur, everyone that starts a business, this is ultimately kind of the goal. There's very few people that I've met people in my life, there's not many of them, that, like, never have a w two. You know, they're just like entrepreneurs from when they're 16, and they start cutting grass, they make some money, and then they grow a landscaping company. And then that's, like, what they do, and then they sell it, and they do something else. Those are like unicorns. I have met so few of those people in my life. Most people, they come into, you know, real estate especially because it's always pitched as this, like, you get passive cash flow, generate wealth. They have a job that they might not even hate. They just, like, don't wanna have to give their time to some corporation. And they're like, I want to use this avenue, this real estate business process to get out of my job and take back my time, make more money, do all these things. And we had a bunch of people this year in scale that were able to leave their w twos. And it's just like from all kinds of things too. Aside people were, like, just leaving, you know, minimum wage barista kind of jobs.

Mike DeHaan: [7:03] But we had dudes like Alex who were licensed physical therapists, and they were able to walk away from that and focus heavily on their real estate business. They had guys like Shane, who is one of our almost OG members at this point, just the core of our community. And he left his job as a lineman, making multi 6 figures. If you don't know what alignment is, they're the ones that, like, fix the power lines. Those dudes make, like, big money, and that is, like, a very respected job and an identity. And he was able to walk away from that and go all in on being a real estate guy in his market here in Central Washington, which is amazing. The guys like Brandon, who had, like, the cushy ass job at Cisco, making 250 k a year. And the funny thing is is he didn't even necessarily replace that income, but he just got the confidence to be like, I know how to make money. And I've been wise with my spending habits over the last number of years, so I've saved up a good chunk, and I'm just gonna take the leap and figure it out because I now believe in myself. That is huge. Right? And then outside of those people, like, ones that were able to leave, we also had a bunch of people that didn't leave their w two jobs, but they made more money this year than after w two. Right? And that's pretty much the next best thing. Like, why they don't leave at this point?

Mike DeHaan: [8:13] I don't know. It's not my business. They got kids. They need insurance. Their wife won't let them, whatever it is. But there's so much potential in this business, guys. And seeing that all come together is really, really cool. And then, you know, outside of those wins, we just had people that had super healthy deals in general. I mean, we had lots of people that posted things like getting their first $50,000 fee, buying larger apartment complexes at discounts, hitting 7 figure net worths, all kind of stuff that the average person's never gonna do if they're not seriously pursuing business. Right? And it's just so amazing to think that even in 2024, when everyone thinks like the market sucks, You have so many people out there complaining about how stuff isn't affordable, how they're not able to buy houses, how the American dream is dead. We have this little group of people in the scale community that are out there crushing it, making things happen. It's very awesome to see many community members getting things put together and getting after it so hard. So and then going into this next year with scale, it's been on, like, a steady growth pace over the last little bit. It's been fun. We're up to, like, 80 ish members, I think. And it's it's like just a interesting thing to try and grow this kind of business, because ultimately scale is a business. It's how we monetize collecting keys. Believe it or not, we've been doing this show for over three years, and it does cost money to run it. We have a producer that we pay money.

Mike DeHaan: [9:36] We have staff that helps put a lot of these things together and scales, you know, how we what we push people towards so that we can make money with this, and it is worth our time. And even though it is fun to help people, things do kinda have to make financial sense because I do have other stuff I can focus on. And it's like this past year, you guys probably all saw you saw we did a decent push into, like, running ads. I was all over social media and Instagram trying to, like, do multiple posts a day and all sort of stuff. And big thing I kinda realized was that, like, I just hated it. Like, it's just not me. And the more I got involved in those space with other people, the more I kinda realized people are full of shit, and I don't wanna be one of those people. And so with scale going into this next year, our focus is gonna be on just trying to bring in as many, like, I would say, good members that we can that really, like, fit the quote, unquote vibe of Dan and I in who we are collecting keys and the other members. Because the folks that are in there, they're a little bit contrarian with the real estate world because folks in there, they aren't they're not, like, hopping around between different stuff. They don't know all the gurus.

Mike DeHaan: [10:41] They're not don't care about what Jerry Norton and fucking Joe Schmo, whoever are doing. Right? But they are grinders that are focused on growing their businesses. They're trying to do it very well. They're trying to do it in an ethical way. It's also sustainable. And as I've talked to more people, that's incredibly hard thing to find. Because so many people are always trying to pursue differently, get rich quick schemes or, you know, just trying to find who's gonna be the next hot thing that they're gonna latch on to. It's gonna take them to the next level, which is always bullshit, by the way. And so our goal with it's gonna be to focus on kinda keeping that soul, getting people, like, referrals and and folks like that in that are more, I would say, like, suggested by friends to be in the group instead of trying to, like, run all these large campaigns. Because, ultimately, if someone needs to be persuaded into joining by seeing some, like, ad and going through this funnel and, like, doing all this other bullshit like that, that just isn't the kind of person that we want. And we did that for years. Spent a lot of money doing it. Didn't like it. We did get growth from it, but it just wasn't what we wanted to do.

Mike DeHaan: [11:44] And so we're gonna be kind of refocusing a little bit. And then ultimately, Dan and I are gonna be focusing on honestly what we do best, which is finding more deals and really growing our local real estate company here and putting together more content around us being involved in the business and less kinda like bigger picture stuff. So hopefully that's something that you wanna hear. If not, I don't know. Let me know. If that's if you're like, that's absolutely not what we want, then shoot me a DM at Mike underscore Invest in Instagram and be like, yeah. Don't do that. Just go back to whatever the hell else we've been doing for the past year. Alright, guys. I'm way off track there. I had a whole thing written out, and I kind of abandoned it halfway through. But if scale sounds like it's something that might be for you, if you've listening to this show, you probably fit the vibe if you managed to get through that disaster. So go to check out go to collectingkeys.com/scale, and grab a time with me, and we can see if you're a good fit. Otherwise, Merry Christmas, everyone. Peace.