Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and your investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.
Josh: Hey, welcome back to Accelerated Investor, I’m so excited to be with you. I’m just really honored that you’re with us today. Whether you’re at the gym, whether you’re on a walk, whether you’re out in the car, maybe driving out to an income property or going to meet with a private investor. Want to thank you for taking the time to be with Austin. I’m so grateful and honored that we can be part of your journey as a real estate investor, as a, you know, as a family person trying to build a portfolio, take care of what’s important to you. Your, you know, your financial freedom, your personal, achievement, whatever that is and what’s important to you. I’m excited to be part of that journey today. I’m with my good friend, Jack Petrick. Jack, what is going on? How are you today, bud?
Jack: Doing well, buddy. Yourself?
Josh: I’m doing awesome. I’m awesome. And Jack and I wanted to schedule this up, Jack’s been on our podcast several times before he spoken on stages with me at my live events. I funded a number of Jack’s deals. We’re partners on a number of different apartment deals. Um, and Jack and I are pretty tight friends. My son Dominic and Jack’s now middle son Cole is a really close friends and my daughter’s Giuliani and Alesandra under a really tight with Jack’s oldest daughter Emma. New revelation, Jack just had a baby. Jack’s wife just had a baby Logan who was born. What Jack, about three weeks ago?
Jack: Three weeks ago? Yeah, three weeks and one day,
Josh: Three weeks in one day. So congratulations.
Jack: Thank you.
Josh: How is Logan doing? How’s the family with the new addition?
Jack: Doing it really well? He’s sleeping, eating, doing his thing and he’s been a really good baby, so it’s been a long struggle and I’ve been very blessed.
Josh: Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. And we’ll talk a little bit about that. What Jack and I were discussing before we turned on the microphones here and started recording. We were talking about balance. We were talking about, you know, being a family man, we’re talking about achieving our personal financial goals and you know, being men and pounding our chests and having egos where we want to kind of go out and kill what we eat and take care of our wife and kids. And at the same time, you know, kind of balancing out what is it that our family wants, what does our wife want as far as connectivity and engagement with the family and how are we making that all work? How are we balancing out our, you know, our personal goals for achievement, for feeling like we’re getting a pat on the back and our egos are getting stroked a little bit.
Josh: And also at the same time knowing that we’re not just going to hustle our faces off working 60, 70, 80 hours a week to hopefully have financial freedom 10 years from now when, you know, Jack’s been through a number of different challenges in his life. I’ve been through a number of different challenges including cancer. And we know that we don’t want to wait til we’re 65 to lead our ultimate life. We want to leave that life today and have time, have freedom, have independence, have engagement and connectivity to our families and time to spend with them while we’re also trying to achieve our big hairy goals that we’ve set out.
Josh: So Jack, tell me a little bit about just the last three weeks. You know, what has it been like with the new addition? You guys are probably sleeping less. You know, you’ve got a new baby to take care of. There’s new challenges, there’s interruptions to your schedule. So, you know, while you’re building this, you know, huge apartment portfolio, you guys also have you’re a nurse practitioner business with your wife. Just how has it been the last three weeks? Is it total chaos? Are you managing okay?
Jack: It’s obviously, it’s been a really good to be completely honest and transparent about that. I mean, part of it is, you know, Logan’s been an amazing baby, but the other part of it, the bigger part of it has been, it’s been a lot of years of building our team out and working with them, building and mentoring them and it’s just really has allowed us to be able to obtain additional freedom, time freedom, not just financial, but time freedom. So I definitely have to say our team, having eight players on our team and the time we’ve spent in developing them and mentoring them and the dedication that they have for us, it’s just been an amazing part and you know, those puzzle pieces coming together.
Josh: Awesome. So let’s, let’s do a little bit deeper dive on that because if you think about, and for our audience, just to kind of set this up again, Jack’s wife Rachel owns and runs a nurse practitioner business that she’s in pretty much full time. They have a number of nurse practitioners that go visit assisted living facilities and nursing homes and they own and run that business. Jack is a firefighter who’s retired from the firehouse because of his pursuit for multifamily and Jack, you now own how many units? Give me the latest update.
Jack: So we’re closing on two buildings with, actually one buildings and be closing today a 24 unit and then 123 unit. So by the time that wraps up this month, we’ll be at about a little over 650 units.
Josh: So, okay, awesome. So somebody who’s listening and things like holy shit, you know, and 650 units, he’s probably really super busy. His wife owns a nurse practitioner business, with nurse practitioners all over the city, you know, meeting with patients and discharging people from, you know, rehab facilities and physical nursing home type of thing. You guys are probably super busy, but then at the same time, you tell me, Hey, the last three weeks has been awesome. Not only did we have a baby, but we have time to spend with them and we’re not ripping our hair out. And that’s because you built up your team.
Josh: So Jack, what specifically would you say are the things that you did over maybe the last year to five years? To kind of get to the point today where you’re not, you don’t have any hair left, but if you did have hair that you weren’t, you wouldn’t be pulling your hair out. So what are some specific actions that you took? You said you mentioned your team. What actually did you actually do specifically to mentor your team and to build them up so you could have some of this time freedom?
Jack: Absolutely. So, you know, I give credit where it’s due, you know, you definitely were a big part of that. And I remember from a lot of previous masterminds that we had been to, I’m talking about A versus C players and just growing up in booth striving business. I didn’t know any better from when we started from day one. I just did everything myself and I would look at every action, every task that I can take on myself and would say no, when in fact it was at the cost of time. So I was looking at having a higher value on saving money versus saving time. So once I started seeing that and trying to make that transition, we brought a bunch of people on and made a bunch of mistakes, failed forward.
Jack: You know, hearing what say that, you know, it’s so hard to find people these days and there’s truth that, but if were easy, everybody would do it. So it wasn’t easy. It was failing forward. It was hiring a lot of the wrong people, it was the wrong compensation. And oftentimes when we bring somebody on at a very lower end and the pay scale, typically they’re costing us quadruple that and mistakes, errors, time loss and just not having the progression in your business that you need. And I just had experienced that firsthand for a long time before I saw really the value and then once experience of having eight players on the team.
Josh: So Jack, give me an example of like a position, maybe it was an operations manager, maybe it was a leasing agent, maybe it was a construction manager. Maybe it was a contractor that was a C player and kind of what you paid them. Again, it doesn’t have to be exact or specific, but in a range, what did you pay them? And then what did they kind of screw up that costs money. And then now maybe you have an A player in that same seat, that same position and roughly like what their comp looks like or generally what that looks like and what are they doing that’s different that makes things easier. So you can again have this balance that we’re all pursuing.
Jack: Sure. There are lots of examples in our business from our NP business to our apartments. But just I guess the focus on the apartments, you know, it would be easy to say like someone that we would hire for turning over apartments to doing repairs from doing demo. You know, like entry grade level can be $10, $12 an hour with no tools or minimal tools. Somebody that is looking for a position where we we’re looking to bring somebody in and try to mentor them. It’s not the, we’re just trying to be cheap. We’re trying to bring them in and give them the experience, give me opportunity and build them up within the company and we’ll bring in somebody that has the tools, the experience where babysitting isn’t involved in required.
Jack: You know, that person might be running $17, $18 or North of $20 an hour. And the lower end of the scale, we just experienced so many issues of delays work, not getting done demoing out products and materials that were supposed to stay in the property. So now we’re, I remember I sent somebody down to terror to demo basement out and it was waterproofed and there was this paneling up for the waterproofing, they tore that out. Like it’s repairable without bustling the concrete out in place it. So just when we look at what we pay somebody, it’s not just a dollar per hour, it’s what they’re not getting done. It’s what’s getting messed up. It’s what we can’t move forward with and can’t grow the business because we’re constantly being held back and showed back.
Josh: Got it. Now I know Erin has been a key, you know, person in your life, as an assistant initially kind of helping take care of your kids, helping around the house. And she’s leveled up over the last several years to almost a chief operating officer, if you will. And she’s really done an amazing job of kind of keeping things together. So just describe Erin and what she does, what her role is and how she’s kind of helped things kind of be the glue for your organization.
Jack: Absolutely. So Erin, just some quick background. She started off babysitting press a couple of days a week and just had a lot of ambition and it would just saw that she was capable of so much more. So I initially offered for her to come in and start taking over and my real estate side and we really had no plan, of where that was going to lead to. You know, oftentimes bring in somebody in a more of like the assistant level and then seeing what they’re capable of and taking the initiative, taking the drive, taking over responsibility. You know, we saw that out of her, so she came in, we offered her to, you know, add some additional hours. And initially she was pretty concerned. Like, I have no idea what I’m doing. I got so much to learn, I’m like, it’s fine.
Jack: We’ll just take it day by day. And now she runs an enormous part of our company. When we’re closing these super complex, very involved, very detailed, multi-family loans and refinances and onboarding all of our tenants into our software. Like she just owns it and takes it and runs with it to the finish line. It’s been an absolute blessing. And having people like Erin, Caleb, Stephanie, and you know, the, I don’t know, we probably don’t have time to name everybody, so I’m not trying to exclude anybody here, but these key members in our company have just been so critical to the growth of this company. I just thought I could not do it without them.
Jack: So what, is there anything specific that you did with Erin? Like did you sit with her a certain amount of hours a week or a certain amount of hours a month and physically train her, mentor her, like demonstrate and show her how to load things to the software, create videos for her. When you said you mentored, you know, mentoring your a players and helping people kind of level up their game and feel like they’re part of the team is there like a mentoring process that you use or a certain strategy that you have or certain amount of time you spend with them to make it work?
Jack: Sure. And honestly it’s honestly a case by case basis. You know, everybody comes in at a different level and for me it’s been, you know, I obviously training and discussions and mentoring and the one on one, but it’s also being there in the time of need during their questions or challenges showing up to job sites, seeing where they’re at, offering suggestions and just, it’s just being involved. I think it’s just a big part of it because every day, every week presents a different challenge and different opportunity. An when those specific circumstances that just provides an opportunity to pass along. The other thing that I get to say is like, I allow my team to make mistakes. You know, often there’s this mindset of like, I can’t give up control because they won’t do it as well as I do.
Jack: They’re going to make mistakes. Well, mistakes are the only way that we learn, you know? So I definitely try to catch the big mistakes that are going to have a big financial impact in our business, but all the ones I want to give people the grace to be able to think on their own and be able to make that decision. Otherwise, if they have to come to me and every single decision that has to get made, that’s not delegation. You know, when I was a firefighter, I worked under a lot of different lieutenants, a lot of different captains that I saw a lot of different management styles, the advantages and disadvantages. And basically, I’m not saying that mine’s perfect, it’s not, but I try to pick and choose from those different learning experiences of what I felt was a better way to run a business, but keep morale to motivate individuals to allow them to have that freedom to start making those decisions without getting punished when mistakes are made. That’s the only way that I learn myself.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. I found when a decision is made and they make a mistake, it’s not the, maybe the same decision I would’ve made. And we think wow, I would’ve never done that. It cost the company money. Simply asking the question of, help me understand. What were you thinking? Like, help me understand. What was your thought process when you made that decision, what was on your mind? What were you trying to accomplish or what were you trying to avoid when you made that decision? And oftentimes they’ll say, well, based on my experience or based on what I was trained on, I was trying to avoid this because people are trying to usually do things, do the right thing. They often make mistakes with the intention of they’re trying to do the right thing, but they just, you know, didn’t have all the information or maybe were trained the wrong way.
Josh: I often find it’s my fault when someone else makes a mistake because I didn’t train them the right way and they don’t have all the information they need. Maybe the situation we’ve never, you know, we’ve encountered it before, so if we just ask them that, it becomes an opportunity where they said, yeah, well I was thinking about this, I was trying to avoid that or I thought we could make more money by doing it this way. You realize that A players always have the best intention so it’s not worth, you know, killing them over why did you do it this way and you cost us this kind of money. Like there’s no, there’s no learning in that. Once you know, you have an A player on your team, the goal is to keep leveling them up and mistakes are part of the learning process.
Jack: For sure. When you said there was, it was an amazing point. And one of the things that I’ve also have talked to my team members is one, they have a problem, what are three solutions this problem? Is that I really like them to engage and go deeper as to what are the solutions. And then typically one of those are typically going to be the right decision, but it’s also starting to turn the thinking process of bringing solutions to the problems, not just what the problem presents itself to be.
Josh: Yeah. I was, it’s interesting talking about mentoring adults. I was going through some training videos. I’m getting a certification to coach volleyball, right? You know, my audience knows I love volleyball. It’s my favorite sport, but it’s also the sport I have the least amount of experience in. I played high school baseball, football, basketball, played college football, and now here I’m at 43 years old and all I want to do is coach volleyball. But what was interesting in the training videos they were talking about, look, you don’t want to be a kid’s last coach, right? Because if a kid is playing, let’s say soccer or baseball or cheerleading or volleyball and you’re their last coach, that means they quit on your watch. It’s the last experience they have is quitting because of an experience they had with you. Maybe it wasn’t you, but maybe they weren’t accepted by the other kids on the team.
Josh: Maybe it wasn’t directly your coaching, but maybe they were, you know, striking out a lot and maybe they had a chance to win a game and they missed the game winning free throw. You know, it could be the experience of being on the court or the field or it could be the experience they had with the other kids. Maybe they didn’t feel like they were accepted, they weren’t part of the team, they weren’t part of the crew. Maybe kids were mean to them. Maybe they didn’t feel like as a coach, you spent any time helping develop them. And I started thinking this lesson about children, I started thinking, isn’t it exactly the same as adults? So when you’re a CEO, when you’re a mentor, when you’re a leader and somebody quits, maybe they just totally get out of the position. They’re like, you know, I used to love being a leasing agent, but now I quit.
Josh: This sucks. It’s awful. It’s a probably, again, for those same reasons, they didn’t feel like they were part of the team. They didn’t feel like they were leveling up their learning, they weren’t making any progress, they weren’t making any more money. And it’s no different really as a CEO than being a coach to little kids, you know? And I started thinking like, well, what can we do then to make sure that people always feel like they’re part of the team? To make sure that people always feel like they’re leveling up their progress. And really those are the two things. If they feel like they’re part of the team and they feel like they’re making progress, then they feel like they’re going to stick with that organization. So how do you do that? Some of the things that we do right is we have regular weekly meetings with our team, but to be part of the team, everybody on the team needs to know what the longterm vision is for the company, right?
Josh: What are we trying to accomplish every year or on a longterm basis so we can break it down to a daily basis? That’s number one. Number two is you’ve got to do things within the organization to get your team to interact outside of work or outside of just the grind of work that you know, it can be, you know, having a lunch at the office where people are just not really necessarily just talking about work, talking about their, their lives, don’t during meetings, talking about personal things as opposed to just jumping right into business. Simply asking people, how are you, how was your weekend? What did you do? Did you do anything fun, right? As opposed to, Hey, you know, what are you doing for your week? What’s your goals for business, right? Those kinds of things and making sure you give the, your team an opportunity for them to spend time with each other so they feel like they’re part of a greater team.
Josh: I thought it was interesting also in this training video, Jack and pass this along to you and our audience. It was interesting the way they talked about kids, boys versus girls, right? And I was blown away by this. I thought I’d pass this along to you and our audience. What they said about boys and men is men will compete with their teammates in order to right, go to battle as a team. Like they will battle against each other to bond together in order to win the game. So they say men battle to bond, right? Women bond to battle, right? So women on her team are, and I think again, kids like aren’t we the same now at 43 as we were when we were 7 years old or 10 years old, right? Girls, women bond to battle. Meaning women want to be connected, they want to talk, they want to be engaged.
Josh: They want to know that they have each other’s backs. They want to know that they’re part of a greater team. They bond in order to go to battle together to win on the field to win in business. Men, generally when they’re young, and we’re pretty much the same at 40 when we were, when we were 10 years old, we often will compete with each other and that competition is what makes us bond, right? So the competition of like who has a bigger business, who owns more units, who’s more successful? That’s why men, when they get into mastermind groups, they’re always sort of puffing their chest and talking about how great their businesses, and they bond that way, right? Because they’re kind of competing with each other, like who wants to build a bigger company? Same thing with employees inside of a business. Often sometimes the women just, they want to feel connected.
Josh: They want to feel like they’re part of a team. I find some of the men on my team are much more salespeople. They’re more solo preneurs within our organization wanting to do things on their own because they want to compete. They want to compete with themselves, they want to compete with other people. So it’s interesting to hear this analogy, you know, for 10 year olds and 11 year olds and 12 year olds, which is the kids I coach and how I thought, man, you know, a lot of my team that’s, you know, all adults, they’re really not much different, right. So being connected to the team, is there anything else that you do within your organization besides mentoring them? Letting them make mistakes to keep your team feel like they’re all connected. Like there’s glue there between the organization.
Jack: Interesting enough, we just took our, all of our property managers out to dinner last night. We went to Pair W those aren’t from Cleveland. It’s a upscale restaurant, it’s a park right over the cliff, Lake Gary, it was really nice events. So it was a really nice event to bring everybody together, paid for dinner. Just everybody had a chance. They had some better one on one time in a non work setting. But and we’re also going to be doing the same thing for the remainder of our crews. Just trying to keep them in our project managers and just make it a little bit smaller events. I don’t, I think we’d fill the whole restaurant up if you brought everybody out. But I think another thing that’s something that I value and I try to express to my team is appreciation. Thank you for what you’ve done , we appreciate you work we appreciate your effort.
Jack: I just think that I noticed that it could be very discouraging in the past for my experiences and plus other coworkers that I’ve had at the first department. Where do you really put your effort and heart into a situation and then you’re just criticize or torn down because of the one mistake that was made when the other 99 things went well. I feel like that’s a really big morale piece and I’ve seen it many times when, going back in as my experience as a firefighter when there was an incident. And that just that one incident took that employee and totally turned them completely negative against that administration or that job, that position was just like, screw it. And, you know, there are times that, you know, discipline is necessary for situations depending on what the event is.
Jack: But how we relay that information I think has a great impact on what happens with the morale of that employee, when an employee gets their morale really kicked down, it’s going to cost you so much in productivity and you really don’t know what additional down the road damage that’s going to be bringing into your organization. Are they going to looking to take key members, your team to another company? Are they going to start looking for another job and start providing those other opportunities to the team members? It’s just hard to quantify what that dollar amount is when you damage those relationships. And it’s just something we would try not to do.
Josh: Yeah, Jack as you’re mentioning that I was, for some reason my mind was just floating off and I was thinking about morale. I was thinking about when I was a senior in high school, I played football at Pattawa Franciscan high school and the coach, the head coach had a reputation of being, you know, a very strict disciplinary and nobody liked to play for him. His name was Tom Cohuth. And a lot of people thought, you know, man, he’s really a jerk. He’s very mean. He’s a big disciplinarian. Like he’s really tough to connect to. But for some reason with my class going into my senior year, we did something called success camp where we actually went to the school in August before double session started and we actually slept over in the gym.
Josh: So you imagine like 80 boys sleeping over in the gym. Like we walked in when we were checking in, they had to check our bags, they had to make sure we didn’t have any like, you know, stuff that goof around with. They went through all of our stuff. They basically let us have like a toothbrush, a small little bit toothpaste and a soap bar and that was it. Everything else got confiscated, got taken away because they didn’t want us monkeying around in the school. But what happened was for basically that evening and the next morning, we talked about what goals we had as a team. We wanted to win our division. We wanted to win our conference. We wanted to compete for a state championship. We went through an exercise of coming up with like a motto for the team. We went through an exercise of nominating team captains. We went through an exercise of, you know, seniors mentoring sophomores, right.
Josh: Because you knew the sophomores were coming in and it was kind of like a big brother, a little brother, a situation where the older kids, the juniors and seniors would be assigned to a sophomore and a lot of kids would mess around and sort of, you know, not necessarily bully, but you know, we would joke around with the sophomores, but the sophomores felt like, look, the seniors care about us. Like they might be goofing around with us and cracking on us a little bit, but the sophomores felt connected and all of a sudden when we started double sessions and got into that football season, like I would have run through a brick wall for coach Cohuth, right. Even though my brother who played for coach Cohuth four years prior, nobody in my brother’s class could stand the guy. Like they thought he didn’t care.
Josh: They thought like he ran practices too hard. They thought like it was, you know, he disciplined them with too much sprints and drills and all different kinds of just made them tired. For me and my class, we would have ran through a brick wall for this guy, right? So my question is, as a mentor, as a CEO, what are we doing to create an environment where our staff feels like they’ll run through a brick wall for that guy, right? What are we doing to create a bond goals, a situation where the environment is so successful and everybody feels like they’re making progress, that they’ll run through a wall for the organization, they’ll work late, they’ll stay up, they’ll try new things.
Josh: That’s the difference I think between, for whatever reason, my brother’s class with the same coach four years prior and then our class. I think the difference honestly, was success camp because coach Cohuth wasn’t any nicer to us, right? He wasn’t any, he was still a jerk to us. He still made us run, you know, 40 yard dashes and , you know, laps around the gym and laps around the track. We still had to do all that stuff, but we felt like he cared about us. So we would run through a brick wall for that guy. Really an amazing analogy. So Jack, one of the thing I wanted to talk to you about was, was balance, right? Now that you’ve been in this business, you’ve had times when you’ve had to sprint, you’ve had times when you’ve been able to take time off.
Josh: You’ve had times when you’d gone to Florida for a month in the middle of the winter and you’ve had times when things were really shitty and when times when things were really good. So after all these years of, of working together, me and you and you building your own businesses, what are some things you’re doing right now leading into 2020 not only grow your businesses but have balance? To grow your businesses, but being engaged father to, you know, grow your businesses but be a connected husband is there any thing you do on a daily, weekly basis to make sure that’s part of your routine?
Jack: Absolutely. So that’s an area of my life there’s always, it’s an area of constant improvement. I’m never going to say that I’m like there and dialed in, because it’s an area that I still, I still struggle with to be perfectly honest. But I have to say that one of the biggest things that’s been helpful is just saying no more often and focusing. When we initially met years ago, we were involved in like, it was a firefighter we we’re building my wife’s NP business, we were taking on a nether NP business that My Care Clinic, we were doing some MLM stuff, we were doing a whole bunch of stuff and trying to like cut the grass and everything else at the same time. And I think the biggest thing for me that’s really has helped is just saying no, simplifying the schedule, focusing on one business and just delegating those things that are things that I either don’t want to do, I can’t do or I really shouldn’t be doing.
Jack: And that’s, it’s been a really big help is when I get too much on my plate personally and I have to try to put 10 pounds on a five pound bag, which that’s quite a bit. But it just takes my stress to the next level. That’s what I’m noticing, it’s one of my triggers. I’m getting short, I’m getting impatient. I’m just, it just, just too much to do and I still run like that, but I really have tried to make an effort to try to minimize and pull back on that and try to delegate what I can. And it’s hard, but it’s something that there’s some things that I will enjoy doing that and just had to let go.
Josh: Yeah. Many of my friends that are successful, and you’ve heard this concept, there are lots of different seminars and podcasts. They kind of have a time in their, when they can feel like they can sprint, where they have a lot of energy. For some people it’s first thing in the morning. For some people it’s late at night and they have a certain amount of energy that kind of is an opportunity that they don’t want to spoil. So do you find within your day there’s a maybe a strategy or a routine that works for you? Whether it’s working later into the evening when the kids are sleeping, whether it’s getting up early, whether it’s working out in the middle of the day. A lot of people have different daily routine hacks that work for them that help them keep like an optimal amount of energy and they have certain times in the day where they can focus better and other times in the day where they just don’t have as much energy. How does that work for you?
Jack: Sure. For me personally, I would say like afternoon and even going into the early evening is the timeline I have more focus and more energy. It seems like for me personally, once I get up, that’s when all the phone calls and everything hits and it’s just a lot of chaos at some point to get clean up with and the ones things are settling out then it seems to be the time that I get to be able to have some more time. I get to say like another thing for me is we go down to Florida for three weeks, in the fall and three weeks in the spring time and for me it’s really critical to also have those times where I just completely separate from physically being at these properties that we’re managing and wanting to be able to have the time to think about what systems, process improvements, what staff numbers, where do we have to redeploy, where do we have to rehire, where we have to reposition in order to kind of reset those goals and be able to have just to be away from everything.
Jack: And we’re buying a lot of apartments. There’s a lot of time and a lot of value of being at those, at those job sites with my project managers with our contractors, with our property managers, with the crews, just to see and identify the issues and kind of redirect things a bit. There’s also value to occasionally back away and just look at it from a higher level and to have a different perspective on what’s going on and where our time has been spent and utilized.
Josh: Yeah, that’s awesome man. So on a bigger scale, like all of us have I once listened to an amazing audio with a guy named Dr. Ned Hallowell and he talked about, he’s one of the world’s foremost experts in ADD and ADHD. And he talked about even for people with ADD and ADHD, we all have a morning burst. For some people it’s in the evening like for you, you said it’s in the afternoon, early evening you have this burst and that’s some time you have to protect, not jumping into emails, not jumping into problems. Like if you have that burst, whether it’s two or three hours, that needs to be when you’re doing your optimal work, when you’re focused on the highest and best use of your time.
Josh: And I love the fact for you, Jack. The other thing I think that you’ve done, I don’t know if you’ve done this on purpose or not, but when you go away for three weeks at a time, sure as shit that month or two months before you leave, you’re dialing things in, are you not? Like you’re making sure that when you’re going to be gone for three weeks, you’re like, I got to make sure this gets done and this gets done and this gets dialed in because on Tuesday, February 28th or whatever that day is, we are leaving, we’re driving, we’re going out of town. And you’re kind of working up against that deadline. So how has having that deadline helped you stay focused?
Jack: Oh, it’s been huge because it’s dealing, like you said, when we pull out for three weeks, like you’re not there. Like if it’s not done, it’s not going to be right. So absolutely creates a sense of urgency and to be more specific about that or closing 123 unit property, it’s an amazing deal. We’ve got 42 units that are vacant and that that revenue us is about $39,000 a month. So you better believe right now we’re setting our system process, order sheets, flat rates, where’s the dumpster going? And just building all those logistics out right now. So when I pull out of town, we’re probably going to be closing down in Florida on the property, which will be cool, it’s happened a few times, but that way my team has a direction, guidance and some of the specifics so we could just get moving and rolling at it. Some of those decisions that have to meet and half to made a night and I’m trying to get that cleared up. I’m trying to communicate, I’m trying to mentor the team to get geared up as far as what the vision is, what our direction is so that as we’re down there, we’re just on the same page on that.
Josh: Yeah. That’s awesome man. I love the idea of having those deadlines couple of times a year, maybe four times a year. Just taking time off and getting away and not just taking a day off. Because if you take a day off, you don’t have to prepare for that. But if you take three weeks off, right, you got to prepare for that. Team’s got to get ready. And frankly, my team even tells me sometimes when I’m gone for three weeks they get even more done because they know that there are specific sort of marching orders, specific goals while we’re gone. We’ve gotten prepared and then now they just know for the next three weeks we’ve got to do this, this and this. And because I’m a typical CEO, entrepreneur, I’m always thinking of new things. Well for those three weeks I’m not thinking of anything new.
Josh: I’m not distracting them with some new project or some new thing for them to work on. They can just execute what they are already good at. So a lot of benefits to taking time off in that way. So Jack, listen, we’ve got to wrap up. Thanks so much for happen on the accelerated investor podcast. I know a lot of our audience will want to connect with you, maybe do deals with you, maybe become a private investor for you, maybe joint venture with you on a future deal or just pick your brain about multifamily or how to have balance in your life. What’s a good place for people to connect with you?
Jack: So my website is Petrick Property Group. Just my last name, P E T R I C K, PetrickPropertyGroup.com. We’re on Facebook too, if that’s an easier way, instead of giving my email address. But, yeah, if someone has a questions or wants to connect or any of the other action items we talked about, we’d love to connect. It’s been an amazing journey. I’d say one of the biggest things that I’ll never forget when we were at one of your events, we’re talking about having a W2 income and you know, we had, I was making $70,000 ish a year. We were had amazing health care benefits, had a pension, had a bunch of time off. It was a great career and so oftentimes we look at that job like it’s a life jacket when in fact it’s an anchor around our neck and the amount of progress and growth that I’ve had in the last year and a half would have never been possible without making that switch.
Jack: It took a lot of guts that took a lot of decision making and there wasn’t always perfect clearly at the moment too, but it’s just something that you said at one of your events that I just ended, I forgot about it and then just when I was on the fence with that decision, I always would think back about that and that was a really big piece as far as making that jump. But I absolutely, I’m so thankful we did. I cannot imagine going another 20 years looking back to that decision point, had I not made that decision?
Josh: That is awesome, Jack. Well listen man, I’m so grateful for our friendship and grateful that our kids are for great friends and our wives. You’ve really had a huge impact on my life as well. Man. It’s been, it’s been a fun road and I might even see some time this weekend. Maybe we will be over at your house in a few hours or tomorrow. So, but thanks for taking a few moments this morning to share with our audience, man I really appreciate it.
Jack: I appreciate that. Thanks so much.
Josh: Alright brother. We’ll talk to you soon.
Jack: Thank you.
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I’ve had Jack Petrick on the Accelerated Investor podcast before. I’ve also worked with him on real estate deals and spoken together with him on stage. We are good friends.
The last time he was on the show, we covered his multi-family real estate investments, but in this episode, we move on from that discussion and focus more on his vision for the future and his desire to achieve a more fulfilling and balanced family life.
We both have a shared mission to achieve financial freedom and prepared to hustle 80 hours a week to achieve our financial goals. At the same time, however, we are at a stage in life where we want to start experiencing some of the fruits of our labor. Those of you who listen to the podcast regularly know that I’ve had a battle with cancer. Jack has had his struggle too. For this reason, financial freedom can’t always be five years away. We need to telescope the future and achieve freedom today.
The trick, according to Jack is to build teams, a tool he uses to free up more time. In the past, he hired people low down on the pay scale but they would make mistakes, wiping out any savings he made in wages. Today, he’s learned that there’s no substitute for quality. If you want it, you have to pay for it.
What’s more, the strategy is working!
Both of us recognize the importance of managing time effectively. Jack now delegates more and more, allowing him to find time to relax, takes time off work and de-stress when he needs to.
Working smarter is the key to the whole process. Each of us has a time of day when we work the best. For some, it’s the morning, for others, the afternoon. For Jack, it’s the evening: that’s when he’s at his best. Where possible, he tries to focus on working during those hours, freeing up the rest of his time to focus on other things.
It is, however, easier said than done!
What’s Inside:
- Find out how to manage the arrival of a new child in the context of a hectic work schedule
- Learn how Jack made in his multi-family real estate investing business
- Find out how Jack built up his team so that he now has time to spend with his family
- Jack shows that your approach to disciplining team members is important
- Balance is important to both of us: Jack opens up about how he manages his work time versus his family time
Mentioned in this episode
Jack’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com › jack.petrick.16
Jack’s multi-family website: https://www.petrickpropertygroup.com › who-we-are
Strategic Real Estate Coach
Josh Cantwell Coaching
Freeland Lending