Cole Ruud-Johnson (00:00):
Today is one of my favorite episodes so far of the off market operator, you guys. Yeah, I've been back from Belize for a couple weeks now and I have been a part of my career where I'm spending a lot of time on hiring and training and building up my team and my infrastructure. And this is all that this episode is about, when to hire, how to hire, how to build a company that you love instead of hate. So if you guys taking 15 minutes out of your day to watch us, I appreciate you. Let's get right into it. People don't fail at real estate because they suck, they fail because there's too many ways to succeed. That's why I suggest you focus on the most important skill and all of real estate, which is finding deals. I'm Cole Johnson and in this podcast I share the exact steps. I've used the source 400 deals by age 24. And this will allow you to do three things, control your deal flow, make unlimited income, and build your empire as an off-market operator.

(00:57):
So today you guys we're touching on something that every single one of you guys listening and myself obviously we learn over time as entrepreneurs. We're not born or raised knowing how to manage people, how to hire people, when to hire people, how to train people, how to onboard people. So this is the episode for you guys. If you feel stuck in your business and you feel like you're struggling, one of the biggest friction points from in the hustler to operator to architect journey, which I call the H HOA journey, every single time you move up that ladder, you're having to hire, train and manage better people and more people. So I'm gonna talk about a lot of concepts today. A lot of this has been stolen from Dan Martel's book, buy Back Your Time, his thesis on hiring is what I've implemented and really internalized for all of my offers and companies and things I have going on where I have other people helping me.

(01:43):
One of the main reasons that I'm at, where I'm at at a young age, 24, turning 25 here in May of this year beyond partnerships, is being able to put people in places to succeed. And so I can worry about what I'm good at. And the first part of that is talking about four quadrants. Okay? So as an entrepreneur, we all have four quadrants we divvy up our time into, so quadrant one is delegation, okay? Delegation tasks are your five, 10, $15 hour, an hour tasks. And this is all taken again from buy back your time. Incredible book. You guys have to check that book out. But these delegation tasks are stuff like real estate specifically, it's pulling data, skip tracing data, talking to the title and escrow company, emails, slack messages, all the little nuanced detail stuff. Those are delegation tasks. You should not be doing any of those if you're running a company.

(02:28):
And the way you know, if you're already at a point that you can do that is you take what you're making in your company, you take your take home pay, okay? Not your like top line, your bottom line, take home pay, divide that by 8,000 and that'll give you your hourly number that you can hire out. So if you're making, you know, let me pull my calculator here. If you're making a hundred grand, I talked about this in a previous episode, but if you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year from your wholesale company and that you divide that by 8,000, that's 12 and a half dollars an hour already that you can afford to hire out all your delegation tasks can be hired out with 12 and a half dollars an hour with overseas talent or even stateside talent in a lot of places, depending on where you are in the country and you're doing business.

(03:04):
Okay? Second quadrant is replacement. Okay? This is stuff most of us need to spend about 20% of time here. This is stuff that drives the company revenue we haven't quite hired ourself out of yet, but it's also stuff we don't really like. It doesn't really light us up, okay? So if you're kind of in your hustler journey and you're doing both dispositions and sales, a replacement for you might be dispositions. If you're crushing at sales and sales is your strong suit and you, but you're also doing dispositions, dispositions is important to your company. It drives revenue, but it's not lighting you up that's in the replacement category, okay? Vice versa, if you're way better at dispositions and you like dispositions and you're doing sales, that would be in your replacement category. So the replacement quadrant is where we spend 20% of our time if we're optimizing this the right way.

(03:45):
And that's all stuff that we could delegate we need to replace ourselves with, but is important to the company. So we need to make sure that's getting done. The next quadrant is that production quadrant. The production quadrant is essentially stuff that lights you up and is high leveraged and makes the company a lot of money. And so if you're the best fricking sales killer in your company, or it's just you and a buddy or you and a partner and you're the sales guy that lights you up, that's where you need to be spending at least 80% of your time. You guys, if you're a marketing guy, if you're a disposition guy, whatever that is, you're um, production quadrant is gonna one, make you the happiest as entrepreneur, make your company the most money and you're naturally what ends up happening. If you don't like doing something, you're gonna stop learning about it eventually.

(04:24):
If you love sales and you're crushing it at sales and it's making your company a bunch of money, you're gonna spend countless hours over and over and over again learning sales. Same for dispo, same for marketing and any business you're doing, this is fix and fix and flip. You guys, if this is development, whatever that is, your production quadrant is stuff that lights you up, fires you up. For me and my company, it's my production quadrant is writing content, creating content, scripting content, hiring people and filling roles, and then consulting and coaching. Those are the things that light me up that bring the company, our companies, a lot of money and that push the ball forward. And so I'm, I'm filling all those other gaps and you know, for you guys as you move up the ladder inside of your wholesale company or fix and flip company or just off market deal sourcing in general, commercial or residential, you guys, real estate entrepreneurs are notorious for not wanting to let go of the vine.

(05:10):
You guys, we don't trust other people. No one can do as good as job as us at our job, which is probably true, but you guys, like Dan says in his book, 80% of what you do, 80% of awesome is really awesome, okay? Because you get stretched too thin. You need to be spending all of your time on high leverage stuff that you enjoy inside of your business. So I'm gonna talk about real quick my journey, my story of progressing through this. So I started with my original partner, Paul, way back in the day back in 2018, cold calling myself. We were both on the phones once we got a few deals in the door and got some revenue in the door. The first mastermind we went to, they talked about this, they talked about making sure you guys are each responsible for a certain part of the business.

(05:48):
And so I took over dispositions, transactions and marketing, which in a startup, off market real estate company wholesaling and flipping that is, you know, one person can take all three of those things. And so I did that for a long time, for years, and Paul took over sales, hiring, management. We had no idea how to hire or manage, but that's what we did. I took over dispositions, transactions and marketing. He took over sales and naturally in the wholesale company, off market company, the kind of ladder of hiring. And this is any company, right? And Dan does talk about this as well, the ladder of hiring. As you start with admin, then you hire fulfillment, then you hire marketing, then you hire sales, then you hire leadership. Okay? And in a real estate company, it's a little different. The first position you wanna hire the quote unquote admin slash fulfillment as transaction coordination, okay?

(06:32):
That is a very easy job to hire in this business. Simple SOPs, simple process. You don't need someone that's a rocket scientist to come in and run your, your transaction department that's talking to title and escrow, that's working with your buyers and your sellers. Once a deal is signed around both the seller and with the buyer and getting that closed, okay? So for you guys listening to this, when you make your first hire, that's gonna alleviate a lot of stress from you as the transaction coordination. That's the admin to the fulfillment, okay? And then of that ladder we have marketing, right? So I think this is a very important thing and none of us most likely are geniuses at marketing. So what I want you guys to either to do is a go hire a fractional cmmo from Upwork that has experience or catalan catalan.com, C a t a l a n t.com.

(07:12):
Go hire a fractional c m o, pay them on a part-time basis to come in and revamp your marketing side. That's your funnel in your machine. Really all you need to worry about is having someone come in and build out a marketing machine so you don't have to worry about when marketing's going out, how to track your marketing, how to forecast, how to split test. That is stuff you wanna hire out either to a full-time marketing person, you can find them on Upwork overseas for five, $10 an hour. They're experienced marketers that are highly educated or get a fractional person to come in on a fractional basis, which means part-time or they step in just when you need them on a contract basis and implement the back into your marketing side. Okay? So now we covered transactions and marketing for me. I hired a buddy, my name Matthew, who was introduced to us by a different company in our market killer transaction person also ran a lot of our marketing.

(07:54):
And for me up that ladder, I did that naturally. But for you guys listening list, that's an every single company I see crush it and off market real estate follows that ladder. So again, we already hit on admin and operations fulfillment, and then we hit on marketing next to sales. Okay? You have disposition, sales and acquisition sales and a wholesale company, off market company, whether you're sourcing commercial, residential development, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You have two sales positions, don't mistake dispositions. It is sales and dispositions is is a much more streamlined process and, um, position to hire out for than acquisitions. Okay? Acquisitions takes a lot more management, a lot more careful with your hire and onboarding process. So we, I I normally recommend to people, they hire out their disposition side first. As you move out this ladder, once you get that hired out, you know, you can pay them 10% of each deal, 5% of each deal on a salary, whatever makes sense to your company.

(08:42):
And that can be a virtual assistant or someone in person. I recommend someone in person stateside for that because they're working with buyers and that has a lot to do with your reputation. Last but not least, sales. And this is the part that most companies never figure out. It's hiring sales reps, managing sales reps. It's very, very, very hard to find that person that wants to lead a sales team in real estate with the amount of turnover there is. That's the number one reason sales company don't scale. And that was a big part of why my first two partners in this business and myself had separated is because that last ladder is the ladder to get over. Now you guys move this ladder, the last step on that ladder is leadership, guys. Leadership is you are replacing the leadership in the company. So you're no longer driving the vision.

(09:19):
You know, Kent Clothier, who's a, who runs the boardroom mastermind, talks about this a lot in his socials and anonymous podcast and whatnot, but that's what we all wanna get. We all wanna get into a leadership kind of owner's box investor role in our company. That's all doable for you guys. And that's the journey I'm taking you on in this podcast is how do you create a business? Because guys, if if this becomes a high paying job, the checks will get old. If you're constantly chasing your, your tail, it's a hard grinded out business. I mean, we're in a, a pipeline business here in real estate, which means that we get fired every transaction. We don't get to rely on referral business like real like brokers do. Why? Because how many people sell their home off market? You know, how many people sell homes in their lifetime?

(09:56):
It's more specifically off market. Like we just don't get the same kind of organic traction in this business. So we're, you know, we're, we're working cold calling, working pay per click, we're working sm s we have to make sure we optimize each deal and we get ourself to a position in our business where we're truly business owners and we can start building an empire. And I talk about that all the time. When you guys get to the architect point of this business, you then you can start building an empire adding on more revenue streams to your empire before you get there. You guys, please don't go start a second business if you have you, if you're at the bottom of that ladder and you have not hired out transactions, you have not hired out marketing, you have not hired out dispositions, you've not hired out acquisitions, you've not gotten yourself to a leader ship position in your company because you can't half build bridges.

(10:35):
You guys, you think you can and every entrepreneur thinks they can. And most of us learn the hard way that half built bridges that gets you absolutely nowhere. And you know that quote that the graveyards filled with entrepreneurs with dreams that never came to life or people that did dreams never came to life. The graveyards filled with a lot of entrepreneurs that never reached their true potential as a business owner because they built half-built bridges their whole life, probably made a lot of money, probably had a lot of fun, still probably led a pretty incredible life, but didn't realize their potential. And you guys listen to this. My goal with this podcast is to help all of you guys out there that are trying to become off-market operators and off-market architects live a life where you fully realize your potential in this game. I'm telling you guys, when you get this down, you never have to work a day again in your life.

(11:19):
Once you know you can source deals, real estate's not going anywhere. You guys, AI is not gonna replace the need for human housing, okay? That's not happening. There's always gonna be people involved in real estate. No one's ever made a dollar in real estate without two people involved in a transaction. Okay? So you guys remember this. As you build these bridges and your wholesale company and you start learning about development and fix and flip and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then until you've worked yourself all the way up that ladder, you don't jump to other things, okay? And that's kinda my tangent today on, uh, hiring and what that looks like in this business. Keep it simple. You guys hire based off your calendar, don't hire based off something you see on Instagram. There's c o you don't need a c o, you don't need a c e o, you don't need a C M O.

(11:56):
What you need, you guys is a higher look at your calendar and then put everything you do on your calendar into quadrants. The exercise I did that really helped me with this that Dan teaches is for two weeks straight, break up your day in a 15 minute increments in regards to every 15 minutes, write down what you're working on and you will see that you're spending probably 80% of your time right now in delegation, probably 20% re in replacement and not nearly enough in production. So if you guys take anything in those episodes, look at your calendar and hire based on your calendar and buy back your time. Also, you guys, if you're listening to this podcast, go read Dan Martel's book, buy Back Your Time, especially if you're in real estate, it'll help you tremendously and you guys don't overcomplicate this thing. People scale way faster than any marketing method, any sales tactics, any disposition tactics. People are what will scale and people are what build your empire as an entrepreneur, specifically on your journey to becoming an off market operator.

(12:52):
Thanks for sticking around me guys. 12, 15 minutes today. It was a short one, but it's, it's a thing a lot of us deal with and struggle with for a long time. The purpose of this podcast, you guys is for me to be able to help you guys learn the lessons that you don't have to learn the hard way. I've hired wrong people, we've gotten sued by employees, I've been down every rabbit hole you can so far in the last six years in this business, I've hiring for a real estate company and I've shared with you in this podcast higher level stuff that I'm doing in my business. It's also tactical to help you, you know, truly excel in hiring and starting to buy back your time, which is super important. And if you guys, I mentioned this podcast, we'll grab Dan's book, buy Back your time.

(13:26):
I'm not affiliated, I just freaking love the book and I think you guys will love it as well. And as always, alike review, sharing your social media means the world to me as I should continue to grow this thing in the off market operator community. And if you guys have any feedback on this episode, please DM me on Instagram or Twitter. I'm super responsive and I would love to hear your feedback on the kind of format we're running these podcasts for and now, and as always, a review on either Spotify, apple, or wherever you listen to your podcast means the world. Until next time, you guys, you're only one deal away.