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Life by Design is a podcast that shares the experiences and tools to help couples align their wealth goals and reclaim their time, enabling them to experience freedom, abundance, and a life by design.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We support couples in achieving their wealth goals by sharing our journey of overcoming barriers to build our financial empire.
Brian Persson: [00:00:20] With our extensive personal experience and increasing demand from couples seeking alignment to invest confidently in real estate, we created the Riches, Relationships and Real Estate program to help you achieve your goals.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:33] Today's topic is setting goals for success. So why have goals? It's so you can strive towards something and have something to measure against.
Brian Persson: [00:00:45] Mhm. It's like if you were on a map and you didn't know where you were and you didn't know where you were going, that would be the same thing as not having a goal. But if you have a goal, then you can locate yourself on the map, you can locate where you're going, and then you'll also know exactly how much materials or gas or money or whatever it might take to get to where the other destination is. Otherwise, you're just wandering around aimlessly.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:15] Yeah. It's like you're risking living life by default.
Brian Persson: [00:01:18] Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of people have goals, air quotes, goals. But the goals are really just kind of hopes, dreams, maybe a little bit of intention or some skills that they have and they're moving towards something, but it's not really defined. And that's a life by default. It's kind of happening to you instead of you happening to life, you being intentional about your life.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:46] Yes. And so takeaway number one is to start with the end in mind.
Brian Persson: [00:01:52] What was your start, initially?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:56] I, when I got the first set of keys on our first rental property, I decided I wanted to buy a new property every two years.
Brian Persson: [00:02:04] Yeah, yeah. And the initial start was just I think real estate is a good idea.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:09] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:02:09] And I want to buy real estate. So your end goal at the beginning of it all was just to buy real estate. That was literally the end goal. But there was nothing very tangible about it other than the fact that you wanted to buy real estate. So how do you start with the end in mind when you don't really even know what the end is?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:32] Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:02:33] So over the years, we had to get clearer about it. And the second clarification that you had on real estate was, again, what was it?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:41] One property every two years.
Brian Persson: [00:02:44] Yeah. And now we're aiming for 25 suited properties and 12.5 million net worth and potentially 12,500 monthly income, although given property prices and rental rates, that's probably going to be a lot more over the years.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:01] Yeah, that's passive income.
Brian Persson: [00:03:04] Passive income, yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:04] Just from the real estate portfolio.
Brian Persson: [00:03:06] Yeah. So that's our end. And by having that end and knowing where we're going, just like you were on the map, you can measure exactly how many kilometers you are or how many dollars you need to invest in real estate, and you can actually work your way back through the, for us, the 25 properties back down to like, what does it look like for you to start at zero properties and how do you build that up?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:34] Yeah, absolutely. And if you know your end goal and your timeline, you know how many you need to buy a year. If you know how many need to buy a year, you need to know how much money you need to have down for an investment or your joint venture partners for the investment side. What you need to have aligned to have your mortgages to be able to qualify. So it's just getting a plan that you can put in place based on what your end goal is. Now we refer, of course, a lot to real estate because that's our end goal, that's our game. But I mean, even when we partnered for a large company legacy, we knew out of the gate the end goal there was to sell it. This wasn't a company we were investing in and building to work in and maintain long-term. It was meant to be a shorter-term project, shorter-term being like a more like five years. Like build it, make it big, and sell it.
Brian Persson: [00:04:26] Yeah, it was supposed to be shorter term. It is taking a little bit longer as most business does. I think that's a habit of every business owner out there is to plan for less time than it actually takes. But in this particular case, there was actually a few different end goals for that company. There was we wanted to get the experience of being in a company and investing in a company as sort of private capital investors or angel investors. The people who we were investing with were also very, very well known in the real estate space here in Canada. And one of the goals was actually to get the experience in coaching and sort of shoulder rubbing of some very high-profile people that we knew. So like, for example, it was a very easy way for us to get into that circle and be partners with Tony Robbins' right-hand man, Richard Dolan. And so we were able to get in and get that experience quick. So way beyond just kind of selling the company, we had a lot of different goals inside of that. And we all, we knew it as we were starting to invest into the company.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:36] Yeah. And that allowed us to expand our network globally. I mean, while we were here in Canada, of course, one of our major partners back in 2020 through legacy was Grant Cardone, who of course is the largest sales trainer in the United States. And by partnering with him, we expanded our network because we worked with him across 18 to 20 countries, and we grew our knowledge on different countries and their acumen and how they invest and how they learn and how they build business, but also our network. So now when we reach out, we have a global reach.
Brian Persson: [00:06:17] Yeah. And years later, we're still talking to some of these high performers all across the world. They still support us. We try to support them. And I think what you got to understand is for goals, especially sometimes when you think about real estate or business goals, it's all about the dollar. You know, how many dollars is it going to get me? How much wealth is it going to get me? But there's, I think we went into it knowing that there was a lot of intangible benefits to what we were doing. And you got to look for those intangible benefits. Sometimes, like in our initial real estate career, we just jumped on things, right? And sometimes they didn't align with our goals and we didn't really know that. But the experience that we got by just jumping on it and getting into it, and rather than sort of sitting there and observing it until we figured it was perfect or some great scenario came up, really gave us a lot more experience than just the metric or the dollar of the goal that we were maybe aiming for.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:20] Yeah, absolutely. So rolling into our second takeaway, which is to make your goals SMART. I know this is quite a popular term. It's all over the internet, easy to look up, but make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Based.
Brian Persson: [00:07:38] Mhm. There's a few other definitions for SMART out there but I encourage you to go look it up. They're all relatively the same or the same kind of flavor. But to break that down without being smart about your goals, you end up having a goal of, I want to invest in real estate. And although that's great, like you definitely should have that goal, it's really not specific enough for you to create some excitement and create some action on because you can go and say, spend $5,000 with me in my private capital license, and congratulations, you're investing in real estate, but is $5,000 going to retire you the way that you want? Right? So you have to get more specific about your goals than just I want to invest in real estate. Otherwise, you're floundering around on that map not really knowing where you're going.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:35] Yeah. And so just to help our audience a little more, we did go a little more specific into the SMART goals as examples. So SMART, being specific. So you're saying I want to buy real estate. That's so broad versus where we broke it down is 'I want to buy 25 homes with basement suites in Sherwood Park'. We're very clear.
Brian Persson: [00:08:56] Yeah. Very specific. And part of the reason why we did that is we started with the end in mind. The number that those 25 homes gives us is the number that we want to have in passive income. So we actually created the passive income goal first. And then we said, okay what, like let's reverse-engineer this. And what do we actually need to realistically get that passive income goal.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:23] Yeah. And then so for measurable, the second one, I want lots of money. Well, we all want lots of money. That's not a goal, right?
Brian Persson: [00:09:34] There's no measuring.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:34] No. Versus 'I want 12.5 million in net worth and $500 per property per month in cash flow'. Again, it's specific, but it's measurable. We can measure how much we're making per property and how much we're making as the portfolio as a whole.
Brian Persson: [00:09:51] Yeah. And what it's going to do as you define your SMART goal more and more, is it's going to help you create yes and no decisions quite a bit easier. So for example, if you have a property that comes along, or we have a property that comes along, and it doesn't match the $500 a month cash flow metric, maybe it's only $150 a month - which is still great, like you need cash flow in your property - but it's not what our goal is, so we can more easily say no to that property instead of having shiny object syndrome and going, oh hey, look at cash flow is $150 and you know, there's more potential in it. Well, it's not, it doesn't match our goal. So maybe we got a double, like take another look at this and see if it really is going to fit into our total goal.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:42] Yes. And the third one, achievable. So for example, I want 150 suited properties in Sherwood Park.
Brian Persson: [00:10:49] Not possible.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:50] Not even possible.
Brian Persson: [00:10:52] And the reason is because at last count, I think there was only about 100 of them.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:56] Exactly. So unless we're creating 50 on top of the 100 that are currently here, it's just not achievable. Versus the 25 that we want.
Brian Persson: [00:11:06] Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of people come at these goals like that, where, you know, I want to be a billionaire. Well, that's fantastic. But like, do you, does that billion dollars really match everything that you're aiming for inside of your goals, or is there another number that is perhaps much more achievable and checks off all the boxes that you want?
Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:30] Yeah, and a pie-in-the-sky number, like say you want to be a billionaire when you haven't even made the millionaire status, it's so far out of reach that it can just kind of paralyze you to even figure out how to get that far.
Brian Persson: [00:11:44] That was, and that's a hard thing to do because you want to like, especially if you're driven, you really want to like bat it out of the park. And we had that problem when we first started getting into some of the networks that we're in, is that we're sitting there with people who have $300 million companies and $4 billion real estate portfolios. And all this, you know, acumen behind them. And we're thinking, hey, we want that. But like, we hadn't really even, like, our business was not even anywhere close to that.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:18] We had a couple condos.
Brian Persson: [00:12:19] Yeah. Yeah. And our and our business as well was just not at that level, anywhere close. And so to start dreaming about like a private jet and--
Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:29] -- yeah, yeah--
Brian Persson: [00:12:30] -- and things like that were, actually threw us for quite a loop because it was so far beyond where we were that it was not even achievable for us at that stage. And we had to, like, literally deconstruct ourselves back to the point where it's like, okay, where are we really now? And like, what is the next goal we can get to? And then what is the next goal we can get to? And then at some point in the future, yes, there might be a private jet, but like let's take steps one, two and three, you know, until we can get to that stage.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:03] Absolutely. Yeah. So number four on the SMART goals is relevant.
Brian Persson: [00:13:09] And relevant might be something like 'I want to be rich' because we love real estate.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:14] I want to be rich. Yeah, we all do. Sure. Versus you know, more relevant would be, for us, is we love real estate. We like the Sherwood Park area. The tenant profile is really good. The ease of real estate here is significantly better than other locations because we've had in multiple locations, different rental properties. But this, for us, leads to less time management and less stress, which is part of our bigger goals.
Brian Persson: [00:13:38] Yeah, and it's something we teach inside of our program as well, because it's not all about the money sometimes. You know, the money is not worth it if you can't sleep at night. And we have this thing that we teach called the 'sleep at night factor'. I'm sure we've talked about it on this podcast and many other places, but it helps the couple or the person get through what they really want and how they can achieve it in a way that is going to allow them to sleep at night. And for us, Sherwood Park makes us very comfortable when it comes to real estate.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:12] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:14:12] It, you know, condos in a downtown area do not make us comfortable. The tenant profile is totally different. The things you got to experience as a real estate investor are totally different. It doesn't make us comfortable at all. I worried a lot for properties that were a fifth of the price of the properties we're buying right now. My stress level was higher for that. So it didn't make any sense.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:39] Yeah, I mean we've been investing in real estate for over 15 years, but only 8 in Sherwood Park. The last 8 in Sherwood Park. And so we've tried and tested it. We know what works for us and what doesn't. And that's when we started really shifting our real estate portfolio to remove the other locations that weren't serving us and our bigger goals and our values.
Brian Persson: [00:15:00] Yeah, because they were, as we just said, they were not relevant to what we were aiming for in our goals.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:07] Yeah. And so along with the SMART goals, make sure you have big goals and break them down into smaller goals like you were saying. So they're bite-sized. They're easy to achieve. They don't seem like a mountain that you're never going to be able to climb. But it works towards your bigger goals. It works towards that bigger mountain that you want to achieve.
Brian Persson: [00:15:26] Yeah. And practice, practice, practice. It took us a long time to even have that concept of like breaking down things into smaller goals. You know, we, again, we were in these rooms with all these really, really high profile people and we were just like, well, we want that. And you can't even figure out how to start because you have no steps in between. And so if you can break it down into the smaller goals, then you can ask more intelligent questions to people like who have done it before. And you can figure out the different levels that you need to be at in order to like, keep stepping yourself forward.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:02] Absolutely. All right. Moving on to takeaway number three is to take action. Take action and revise your goals and plans as you go. Of course, we always talk about working with your partner, your spouse. Include them in your goals, of course, and revise them at least once a year or more. I mean, we revisit our goals, smaller goals I should say, probably quarterly, maybe even weekly. Yeah, I mean, our yearly goals, not as frequently, but definitely minimum yearly. Actually, I'd say twice yearly, because usually in the summer we go through everything again and just we make sure are we still aligned with our goals? Are those still the goals we want? That's the big thing because it can change depending on life circumstances. Is that what we still want? Yes. Great. Are we on the path to get there with the smaller goals? If not, why not? What do we correct? What do we tweak? Is there something we just no longer fits? What do we remove? And it also keeps you on top of kind of where you're going, but shows you that you're also getting there because we're like, oh, okay, we've done this, this, and this and we're moving forward. And then of course, we learned this one a few years ago, I think, and we never used to do it, but we're big fans of it now is to celebrate your wins, no matter how big or small your win is, celebrate it.
Brian Persson: [00:17:17] Yeah. You got to celebrate your wins. I think you see a lot of business owners, or I see a lot of business owners anyway, kind of running around and they never, ever stop to celebrate anything. So if you, if we buy a property, you know, we go out for dinner. If we make a deal, then we do something, like there's always a little bit of a celebration there as well.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:39] Oh, absolutely. When we just sold a condo here like a month ago, WIN. Right? It's a celebration of just part of your past, of what you've built up, the money we made on it, all the decisions and education we learned from it because it was one of our very first, was your first property ever. But that was a win, selling it, because our whole part of our goal was to get rid of all the condos in our property and just focus on suited houses. So again, it was a, it wasn't a super small goal, but it was a small piece to our bigger plan of 25 suited properties in Sherwood Park.
Brian Persson: [00:18:14] Yeah, yeah. And just under that takeaway of take action, like, we had no idea that this was going to be the path that we were going to take towards real estate. I'm sure if we could rewind the last 20 years, you know, we would have got there much faster. But hindsight is 20/20. And I think the thing I'm getting at is if you don't take action, then you're just not going to get anywhere at all.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:39] Yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:18:40] So I'm much, much more comfortable just doing something and getting somewhere than sitting on my butt not really knowing what I should be doing, or over-analyzing things, or trying to look for perfect scenarios. It's much, much better to take action. We've always come out ahead. We've always come out with more experience. We've always come out bigger, better people. And us, then, can go and take on the next goal even better than the last one.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:12] Absolutely, and celebrate that. So, for example, if you have, you put an offer on a property that you really want and there's multiple bids and you don't win it, still celebrate. Celebrate a) you took action.
Brian Persson: [00:19:25] Yeah. It's your first property.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:26] Towards your goal. Even if it's not your first, if it's your 10th, it's your 20th, celebrate the fact that you didn't get that property, because if you didn't, it wasn't meant for you. It wasn't meant to be in your portfolio. That's okay. And then just keep looking. Take action for that next property and just keep plugging away, and you'll have a lot more to celebrate later.
Brian Persson: [00:19:44] Yeah you will.