Cole Ruud-Johnson (00:00):
You guys are gonna love this show. This show I deep dive on. You know, how to get more output for your input into your business. It's not as tactical as some shows, but it gives you a concept you can implement today to make more money, get more leverage, and enjoy your business more. So without further ado, let's get right into the episode. 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 in all of real estate, which is finding deals. I'm Cole Johnson and in this podcast I share the exact steps I've used as source 400 deals by age 24. This will allow you to do three things, control your deal flow, make unlimited income, and build your empire as an off-market operator.

(00:48):
One of the biggest things you need to think about leveraging, understanding and real estate, especially cuz there's so many different verticals, is focus. Focus is a superpower. You guys. We're not taught how to focus. We're taught, you know, in elementary school and middle school and high school, we go from class to class subject to subject and constantly switching our brains. But what I've found when I get my biggest advances in life, in business and my real estate company over the years and other companies is when I have extreme focus and what focus is at the end of the day, it's being able to put your brain on one bottleneck and one issue in your company and ruthlessly attacking that until it's resolved. And that's where I think a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in their real estate business is they they get to this place where they're, uh, constantly chasing the next thing, the next vertical, the next business model, the next magical software.

(01:36):
And I talk about that a lot. But this show is specifically, I've talked about this in some other shows, but this show is specifically all about where you put your focus. The reality of the situation is no one that I've talked to in this business honestly and truly can sit there at the end of the day with themselves and say, I'm a hundred percent focused on what I need to be doing, which is choosing one bottleneck and attack and attacking that. Um, and that's how you move the needle in this business. So I'm gonna take this back you guys to what I call the hoa, right? This hustler operator architect, and I'm gonna use an example, tell you guys at each level of that hustler, operator architect at each level of that pyramid where your focus needs to go. So baseline at h Hustler, every single place in your hustler operator to architect journey, there's gonna be a different thing to focus on.

(02:25):
And that's what I think a bunch of people get wrong is they think what got them to, from, from hustler to operator or operator to architect or to a hustler stage, you're gonna take them to the next level in their business. Meaning they think that, you know, that the same hustle that got them their first two deals by driving for dollars and door knocking and cold calling themselves, they think that's gonna get them to five deals a month. And then when I get to five deals a month, they think at the operator stage that stuff's gonna get them to architects. So I'm gonna go through kind of what your focus needs to be at each level in this pyramid. If you don't want to burn out and you want to continuously scale, which means make more money, scale isn't do a bunch more deals, guys, scale isn't make more money.

(02:58):
And the way you do that is with proper focus and the right systems and bottlenecks in your business. And that's how you truly get get scale. So going back to the bottom, the pyramid guys, when you're in the hustler stage, right? We all go through this, right? We're driving for dollars, we're cold calling, we're sending postcards ourselves when we write ourselves, we're knocking on doors, we're going to meetups, uh, real estate meetups to shaking hands and telling people what we're about and what we do. At the end of the day, the stage is amazing. Every single person has to go through this. Every single person that I know personally, mentors and business partners that have brushed it in real estate in their business, they all go through a hustler phase, right? It's stressful. You wanna pull your hair out, you don't know if you're gonna make it.

(03:32):
Every day's a grind. You're constantly chasing down, you know, your next check to pay your bills for the next month. And that's the reality most people have to go through when they get into real estate. A lot of people do. And I had to go through that phase where I was cold calling every single day by myself to get my first deal or two. And every single person starts their entrepreneurial journey like that. Well the problem is though is they go, Hey, this got me to one to two deals. Hey, this got me to a hundred, 200 grand and they never start focusing on what'll get them to the operator stage, right? When you're at the hustler stage and you wanna get to the operator stage, your bottleneck isn't people yet. Your bottleneck is putting systems and processes in place so you can be more efficient and spend more time doing what's working.

(04:10):
So instead of driving for dollars all day, you're buying a list of properties, putting them in a skip tracer and then putting them in a dial air taxi system and you're getting leverage. So what leverage is you guys, it's how much output can you get for your input? And so I'm gonna talk about a few things here when you're at the hustler stage that you can start focusing on. Cause most of my audience is most of you guys at DM e you're between that zero to $500,000 year range and revenue, that's a very much a hustler stage where you're 1, 2, 3 man show trying to figure it out, trying to move the needle forward. So the the number one thing guys that I can tell you bill's leverage in a company is documenting your company. Meaning if you spend an hour a day or 30 minutes, even 30 minutes a day writing down the processes and what you do in the day-to-day in your business, that's infinite leverage, right?

(04:52):
If I write down a process or an SOP or playbook one time on something, every single person that ever works in my company can read that forever. That's infinite leverage. It doesn't feel like leverage in the moment, but that's infinite leverage. And so I wanna look at stuff that gives me, um, when you're going from hustler to operator stuff that gives you a higher return on your input, which is your time and money, right? So instead of you driving for dollars, you're hiring a cold caller. Instead of you sending postcards, you're sending 'em through a company. Instead of you doing data and skip tracing, you're hiring a three to $4 an hour virtual assistant. So we're starting to find ways to leverage more resources we do have, which is time and money to get a more output for input. Um, another example for this is content, right?

(05:28):
If you make a training video for your company or you make a video about your company or you start posting on social media in the right way, it doesn't take you extra effort per person that watches that video. If you make this, you make the video and whether 10 people watch it or 10 million people watch it, it doesn't take you more time, energy, and effort and you produce it once you get it out. And that's infinite leverage. And so you might be creating a video you can send to sellers, a video you can send to buyer. It's a video you can train your team on. But video and content is a high, uh, relative to output that the input's very low on time. And once you get back with that, me making these podcasts, right? Whether one person listens to this or 10 people listens to this, I don't have to put in more input, right?

(06:07):
I input my time one time to record this. And the output is whether you listen or you Anna a thousand other people listen to the show and download it. That doesn't affect uh, that is not more e effort by me. And so you wanna look at those things as how can you multiply the outputs based on your input? And that's what get tool from the hospital to operator stage. You don't have to be perfect. You don't need the best c r m, you don't need the best list stacker, you don't need the best anything. You just need to start understanding leverage and start piecing that together. Bringing in a virtual assistant. You know, going from cold, calling yourself to hiring a cold car, going from texting yourself to hiring a texting service, going from postcard yourself to hiring a mail house. That's what gets you guys, and I'm gonna kind of stick on this for the show cuz most of you guys are in this hustler box.

(06:49):
That's what gets you guys from hustler to operator. Nothing else is truly going to really move the needle for you guys. When you're going from high solar to operator, you have to figure out how to start getting leverage. The ultimate leverage is people, right? So that ultimately the more people we can bring in our, our organization, the more it's gonna grow and you're gonna more, more output on your input, right? If you're, if you're doing sales calls yourself, awesome, you're gonna get output on that. But if you have a team, you train and you have 10 sales guys or five sales guys or three sales guys, you're gonna get much more output for your input. And it's not about a perfection you guys, it's about slowly getting ourselves more and more leverage and buying back our time and our business. And I've talked about this in front a few shows, but when you do go to buy back your time, you guys and you wanna be looking at your calendar when you're hiring to grow your business, don't hire on what you think you need.

(07:32):
Hire based on what you're spending your time on in your calendar. And so if you look at your calendar and you have, you know, four hours a day going to something that's not really your highest and best use, it could be de it's in the delegation zone. Delegate that thing, okay? You guys don't wanna be wasting your time as an entrepreneur cuz the superpower you do have is focus. You don't wanna be wasting your time doing five, 10, even $20 an hour tasks as you scale your business. Cause your job is to, is to get more and more leverage the next piece of leverage, right? That's low input, high output is software, right? Automation, AI software, right? The highest version of leverage right now is ai, right? Like you, you look like agent G P T. Now you give it a simple command and it goes and does it for you.

(08:08):
So software leverage is incredibly valuable, incredibly valuable. It can get you to a place that you know, you, you can truly with. With the CRMs that are out there, the podium, the sales forces, follow up bosses, the investor fus, there's so much automation that can go into pipeline, follow up, nurture campaigns, drip sequences, communication, streamlining between phone, SMS and email follow ups. There's so much automation that can go in now in the back end of a business, that's a lot of leverage too. But normally when people make the jump from hospital to operator, they focus a little bit on the software side, but they're not all in trying to automate everything, right? Cause it's not the goal. Our goal is to get leverage, um, and detect the immediate bottleneck. What software can do for you is it's not gonna get you from zero to five on a scale of 10, right?

(08:52):
The hustler stage, you go from zero to two, you start getting deals. Uh, when you start, you bring in a va, you get a decent crm, you hire a cold caller, you start buying leads that might take you from a two to a five, right? But at, at five software, when you implement software and automation and all that kind of stuff, it's not gonna take you from a five to a 10. It's gonna take you from a five to a 6.5 and then to make that final hurdles when you need real people, right? You need leaders and salespeople and people to come into your organization and help you crush it. So there's no like right and wrong way to do this. But most people I see that successfully make that jump from hustler to operator and don't fall back. Cause a lot of people that go from hustler to operator, they get the operator for a while and then after a month they go back to hustler one, they're not prepared enough to manage even a virtual assistant cuz you know, even a virtual assistant, you guys still has to be treated like an employee.

(09:36):
You still have to give them training, you still have to have check-ins, you still have to, um, care about them. You still have to build culture. You still have to treat them like part of your team if you want them to perform at the highest level. So a lot of people get to operate and end up falling back because they're not quite ready for that. It's like the people that get a hundred million dollars, right? And they get to a point where they're not the person that can handle a hundred million dollars yet. That's why athletes go broke, rappers go broke, lottery winners go broke. It's cuz they're not the person that can handle that yet. And so you might not be the person that can handle the operator role the first time you get there, but that's okay. You learn a couple skills, you back doing deals yourself, you go back up there again, eventually you'll, you'll figure that out and you'll be sitting up there in that operator's zone permanently.

(10:13):
And so the goal is to become the person that's behind the scenes of an operator of that, of that phase of your business, right? You wanna become the person otherwise you, you'll not be able to stick there. Same for architect on that point. Like my, one of my favorite quotes is everyone wants a hundred million dollars, but most people should be very thankful they have not gotten a hundred million yet cuz they wouldn't be able to process that. Or they don't have the infrastructure for that. And that's why, you know, the people that gradually over time build wealth and build income, keep it, um, a lot of the time, right? Some still lose it, but they keep it because they're slowly are becoming the person along the way, going through the bumps and the lawsuits and the trial and the air and the hardening that get gets you to become that person that can, um, sustain that kind of money, liquidity and abundance.

(10:52):
So I, I really want you guys to focus on, if you're listening to this episode today, on this Thursday, I really want you guys to focus on just focusing ruthlessly you guys on the bottleneck that's keeping you from going from hustler to operator. Even if you never get past the operator, you can sustain that for a decade, two decades. You can build wealth as an operator, as a hustler. It's, you can make money, you can get rich, but it's very hard to build wealth cuz you're constantly ahead in the game and it's hard to see the forest from the trees. And that's, that's a real thing in business. It's hard to really work on your business if you're always working in your business. And my goal for all of you guys is for you guys to get to a place where you can work on your business. Well, obviously there's always times you have to jump back in and be of assistance to your business. But if I could leave you guys with one thing today, it would be choose one thing that's truly in your way, right? That's more leads, better conversion, better operations, and start working your way from a hustler to an operator by getting more leverage and more output for your input into your business and being a conscious business owner. And that's the one thing I'm gonna leave you with today.

(11:54):
I love that one. You guys, that was one of my favorite ones to record. Just the fact that it's something that I'm exploring a lot right now and a concept that I'm, it's helping me a lot in my companies and my, my understanding of how to be a productive entrepreneur and, and real estate business owner and and other business owners. So for you guys that are in that hustler stage, really take this to heart and start thinking and being conscious of how you can start getting more leverage for your time and your money that you are spending on your business and getting multiples of return on, on your time and multiples of return on your money. Uh, it's super powerful. Once you understand that concept and you see it in practice, you will get addicted and you'll want to do that forever. So as always, please share this on your story.

(12:28):
Leave me a review here, gimme a rating, follow this on Apple podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen to content like this, then please shoot me a DM if you have any feedback. Guys, I love, I'm truly responsive to it and I love integrating that end of the show as an into the improvement of the show. Cause I plan on doing this for years and continuing to grow it. And to do that I need continuous feedback and I'm, uh, humbled by a lot of the message I've gotten from you guys, have been very kind and gracious with your words. And, uh, look forward to continuing to connect with more of you guys. So you guys always, until next time, you're only one deal away.