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 am so excited to be with you again for another podcast, another interview. I’m so excited to be inside of your head, whether you’re out on the road, whether you’re in your car, on your way to one appointment, going to see a property or at the gym or maybe just hanging out in your house, you know, late at night winding down and looking for some new strategies, some new ideas. I’m so excited with all the ratings, the reviews, all the sharing on different social platforms that everybody has been doing around accelerated investors. So I just want to express my gratitude and say thank you for engaging with me on a weekly basis.

Josh: Today I’m here with my good friend Jason Medley. Jason is the CEO and founder of one of the nation’s top real estate mastermind groups called collective Genius. Jason has been involved in, owns over 1300 units of multi-family properties, made over 1500 loans and he was one of the nation’s leading connectors of real estate entrepreneurs through his organization. Collective genius. Jason and I also have a long relationship before his start of Collective Genius and my foray into a multi-family properties and my private equity fund. Jason and I worked together on a lot of different short sales. He was an affiliate of ours. He funded a number of different short sell transactions for me and for my clients and students. I’ve known Jason for man going on, what, 13, 14, maybe 12, 13 years. But we have not spent much time together in the last two or three years. I am in particular excited to be with you today, Jason and reconnect. So how are you my friend?

Jason: I’m good brother. I got a lot to be thankful for. A lot to be grateful for. You know, it’s a, I always say when somebody asks me that question, right, how are you doing? It’s like, hey, when you reach a certain age, you know, you’ve got kids, you’ve got a business, you’ve got a lot of responsibility, you’re always going to have challenges just to better get a better handle on it, you know, and so I’m just like anybody else. I got my, as my mom would say the bag of rocks, but I’m, I’m getting pretty good at carrying them. So yeah, things are good businesses. Amazing. My family is, is happy and healthy and so, you know, everything over top. That’s pretty much a bonus. I wanted to tell you something too real quick. I don’t know if you know this right? We just kind of reconnected by chance here recently, but you and I are actually invested on a bunch of the same deals together with Bratz.

Josh: I’m very, I’m very aware. You bet. Yeah. So Jason runs collective Genius in one of his members is Tim Bratz. Many of you guys have heard me talk about some of the apartment investments we’ve done with Tim. We have over $10 million of my money and other investors money that I work with and apartment deals with Tim and Jack Petrick and a number of different operators. We’ve got a big investment with Tim and Tim is a member of Collective Genius and Jason is also an investor, a passive investor in those deals. So yeah, I’m aware of that. I saw your name and your company on the, the roster of owners, which is always kind of cool to look at. So I wanted to talk to Jason today is we kind of got ready for this interview. Jason’s had the privilege to be exposed and experience an opportunity to meet with and talk with a lot of different real estate investors and very high performers.

Josh: Collective Genius is a mastermind group of some of the nation’s top performing real estate investors in the single family, multi-family, commercial and private lending world. Jason said the opportunity to mentor them to connect them. And Jason, you’ve seen them probably at their best and at their worst, you’ve seen them when they were small and big. You’ve probably seen companies grow and companies you know, cannibalize themselves. You’ve had an amazing experience to connect them and be around them. And you’ve of course probably witness certain traits or certain characteristics of these entrepreneurs and what they’ve done. Before we jump into the traits, just tell our audience a little bit more about Collective Genius and what you’ve built.

Jason: Yeah. You know, the best way that I can define Collective Genius, is a lot of people call it, you know, a mastermind, and that’s probably a term that may be more familiar with. But really to me, it’s a community, right? And what we do is we place high caliber real estate investors on the fast track to scaling your business, building wealth, giving back, which is a huge part of our organization because life is way bigger than just, you know, stacking up a bunch of papers. So, but that’s what we do. We are a very calculated organization. This is not the type of mastermind where it’s like, hey, just come out and we’re going to plop you in a room with other smart people and you know, we’ll hang out for a couple of days and you guys go on about your way and no hope, something really good happens.

Jason: We don’t operate like that. We operate with a very high level of attention. We are physically, every person goes through like a hot seat process and they’re talking about the challenges and what they need help with. We physically document who can help them and we actually force connect those individuals. We don’t leave it up to them to create their own success. We help manifest those connections. We do a lot of killer stuff. We have, you know, we have, we actually have, my second in command. There’s typically are they’re COO’s of their organization. We just, we are committed to, Josh, the best way to sum it up is what you and I were talking about I think before the cameras started rolling, which is, we are ruthlessly and relentlessly and pursuit of relationships that create results for our members.

Jason: You know, one thing that we’re going to talk about today is characteristics of high-level real estate entrepreneurs and one of those characteristics is realizing at some point you can scale your business through, you know, system strategies, resources and then you can scale your business upping, you know up leveling your rolodex. And not that they’re separate from one another, they typically work hand in hand, but that’s what we do when people step into the Collective Genius, they can up level their business, they can scale and grow in the fastest of their business because of the rolodex and the connections that we manifest. You know, just like you said, you committed $10 million of investors money to Tim Bratz’s deals. I’ve raised several million dollars for Tim. I’m personally invested with Tim. I just talked to him yesterday. Hey man I just got a big loan back at materialized. I need to put a need to put a half a million bucks to work, let’s do something. We were on a 10 minute call and I’m going to be sending him the money. So it’s that type of deal flow and connections that you know, make CG.

Josh: And you know, the bigger the deal, the more of the relationships matter when you’re just wholesaling properties or maybe doing two, three, four, five deals a month, you can often do that by yourself or do that with a small team. You can do it through manual direct to seller marketing, through direct mail and through PPC ads and through, you know, billboards and all different kinds of bandit signs. But the really big transactions, the hundred units, the 500 unit deals, the 730 unit deal that we’re in the 216 unit deal, those are all happening through relationships, right? So your organization pursuing relationships is also allowing those investors and those, the members of the CG to do bigger deals. Because usually those bigger deals don’t happen through a direct mail campaign, right? They’re not happening through a billboard. So relationships allow you to do bigger things.

Josh: So any investor that wants to be like, okay, I want to go from residential to multi-family or residential to commercial. It has to be a very intentional process to, like you said, expand the rolodex and expand the relationships, which you’re purposely connecting those people, which is awesome. So tell me a little bit more about CG. How does it operate? Like I know you get people in a room is it like four times a year? How many people are typically there? And then tell me a little bit about some of the members. Like you don’t have to tell them by name, but describe some of their businesses to our audience.

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So the way that CG kind of functions operationally, it sounds like what you’re asking about is we do get together four times a year. We’d go back and forth between Tampa, Florida, and San Diego. Nice waterfront venues. I’m a fan of the view as always, but what we do is we split, we have about 138 members right now and we’ll split them down into six different groups. We run three groups of about 25 folks. Monday, Tuesday we run three groups of about 25 folks in each of those groups. Thursday, Friday, and on Wednesday they all are in the same room together. It’s not a mastermind format, it’s more of an event style structure on Wednesday. And instead of just getting exposure to the 25 or so folks in your mastermind, you’re exposed to everyone else in the organization, right?

Jason: So once you get there, and something that’s cool about our structure is we’re truly looking for the right fit. If you flip off thousand houses a year but are just the taker, you’re not going to be able to buy a Collective Genius membership, right? At the same time, if all you want to do is flip a thousand houses, you don’t care about any other facet of your life, we’re probably not the right fit for you, right? So our model is structured in a way to where we kind of go through a screening process to determine like on the surface if we’re a potential fit and if we are cool, you show up, there’s no pressure. It’s super laid back and we put you through what’s called a hot seat process. And so there’s two components to that process. And basically you have to share a system, a strategy, a resource, something of value with the other people in your room that we often refer to as your board of directors, right?

Jason: Because that’s kind of what that group of 25 or so folks create. And so you’re going to give value to them. And then once you’ve done that, you’re going to shift into discussing what your challenges are, right? And then that’s when that group becomes your board of advisors, if you will. So, you know, let’s say for example, you’ve been buying houses at the courthouse for 10 years, you know, 150 deals a year. You’ve been smashing it and the hedge funds roll up into town and start paying highest and best for everything. Well you’ve got a problem, right. So you might say, okay, look, I’ve got to build a sales organization. I’ve had an operationally based structure for awhile. You know, hey, I’m at the auction, yes or no. Yes, I won the bid, we put it through operation machine rehab, the house.

Jason: And that’s, and so you say, now I’ve got to build a sales organization. Well you might be sitting in a room with a guy like Jason Burn out of Denver who has, I think five acquisitions managers, probably sends 200,000 postcards a month and has a sales team dialed in like high powered assassins, right. So we then say, hey, we’re going to place you, we’re going to get you on the phone and Jason’s actually going to help you. and matter of fact, we do a lot of office visits. So if you guys connect on the phone call, you know and feel like you could maybe drink a beer together, he’ll have you out to his office and you can spend two days there and really dig in and get the systems, the strategies, see how he’s running the business, right?

Josh: And so that’s the intentional connection that you’re talking about. Intentional relationship building. Not just putting them in a room and letting them figure it out, but because you know intimately.

Jason: Your going to get me all excited man.

Josh: What this guy’s good, this guy’s good at, that guy’s good at, this guy’s good at wholesaling and direct mail and sales organizations. That guy’s multi-family raising capital. And you need to know you look, you guys connect here. You go sit down together.

Jason: Yeah, we don’t just say, hey, you should talk to this person. We actually document, okay, you need to build your sales organization. Okay, well that’s sales organization is one side of it, but you got to have the right data on the front side. You need predictive analytics. So we’re going to connect you with so and so on that. And so when we document those needs that you need to fill that hole in your business, we actually physically put them into a document and then within 72 hours of getting back to after the dust settles from the event, our team has made those connections to those individuals via text message or email, we recap what the need was and say, Hey, you guys handled the jump off on the phone and get this thing moving. We call it forced connection because the reality of it is is that most even highly talented entrepreneurs will get up there and talk about their problems. Everything sounds great. All these people are going to help me. They don’t write anything down.

Josh: No phone numbers, no emails, no connection. Then they got to figure out like, hey, I’m at the bar and that guy said something cool, but there’s 25 people in the room. What’s his name? What’s his number? What’s his email like? How do I connect with that guy again?

Jason: Yeah, yeah. We take all of that out of the mix and we facilitate, I almost use the word force. It sounds a little ugly, but that’s what makes it tick. We actually have a slide in our deck and our, our presentation format that says if I could visit someone’s office in the Collective Genius and see how they do X, right? I would love to go do that. Well, they tell us what X is, right? And when they tell us what X is, you know, hey, I’m a, I did 70 turnkey transactions this year in addition to my retail rehabs and I really want to scale that side of the business up. I’d love to go to a turnkey providers office. Okay, cool. We’ll connects you with the Missy McCall’s of the world? The Mark Dillutes of the world, the people that are doing big volume to say, hey, which one of you guys would be willing to host Josh at your office, right. So we are hyper aggressive and that’s why we’ve retained, we retain a lot of our members. They keep coming back because we take a lot of responsibility for creating results.

Josh: Yeah, that’s fantastic. So that’s awesome. I appreciate the background and, it just sounds like, and I’ve been involved in a lot of masterminds and you’re kind of there, you learn a few things and you leave kind of on your own right to reconnect with everybody. So I love the idea of your role sitting in the CEO seat and the chief connector seat to make sure that those connections are made and happen. So if we look at the traits of these elite guys that you’ve mentored, that you’ve been around, that you’ve helped them connect with each other. One of the connections we’ve talked about. So number one is relationships. They’re intentional about building relationships and relationships, not just for the purpose of business and making more money, but for the intention of helping each other, giving value to each other.

Josh: And when you give, you always receive, you give, you always receive. So I imagine trait number one would be they’re intentional about building relationships for both business and family and money and connection and giving value, building relationships on top of that. What other traits have you witnessed in these elite entrepreneurs, these elite real estate investors, that you think you see the same trait over and over again?

Jason: Yeah, I think there are multiple traits, quite honestly. And you know, the guys there and the gals there at the top of the heat, people that we would consider visionary, right? Visionary leaders. There’s, because there’s a difference between a business owner and a visionary leader. Just because you own a business, you got a shingle outside on your door, you know, have paperwork says you own an entity of some sort. Doesn’t necessarily make you a leader or a visionary leader for that matter. And so when I look at a visionary leader, that’s to me that the top of the heap, there are people who, their business has clearly defined core values. They have clearly defined strategic objectives. They know who they are, what they do, specifically, what they stand for, and what they stand against, right?

Jason: Because when you create those borders, when you put those boundaries in place, you create an environment where your team and your customers, they’re either with you or they’re not, right? Because this is who we are, this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is how we operate. And when you reach that spot you determine who your customer is and who your customer isn’t, who you’re going to hire and who you are. Not based upon those defining measures, those core values, those strategic objectives, right? And so I think the clearer your vision is and then the more clearly defined boundaries you put in place in your business. That is a huge characteristics.

Josh: Huge characteristic. I love it. I want to repeat this Jason, just so we don’t lose it because I wrote it down. But clear vision is really the big trait that you’re talking about. But on a subset of that, in a more defined way, you said clearly defined values, objectives clearly defined. They know exactly what they do like as far as what their strategy is. They also know what they stand for and what they stand against, right. So I wanted to repeat that. I caught that. I wanted to, I thought that was a very, very important part of what you said. Defined values, objectives. They know exactly what they do, what they stand for and what they stand against. I heard a quote once, I think it was from Dan Gilbert, I think he, the owner of Quicken Loans, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and he said something along the lines of if our team and our staff know who we are, then they’ll know what to do.

Josh: And you said that in a very similar way with a little bit more depth to it, right. They know who we are. Like if you’re investing in multi-family and that’s all you do as apartments, well then you know, like if a self storage deal comes across or a retail deal or a flip, you’re not even going to look at it, right. That’s because we’re not, we don’t do that. Like it might be an awesome opportunity. We could make $100,000 bucks, but we’re not going to do it. So any other thoughts around that? Because I think that’s a huge piece of it as right there.

Jason: Yeah. I’ve got, what those things do, right? All of those things. bridle, for lack of a better term, they bridle the right. A lot of people are like, man, I’m a visionary, right? I’m a visionary. Everybody wants to be a visionary.

Josh: You don’t call yourself a visionary. Other people call you a visionary. You don’t give yourself the visionary title. It doesn’t work that way.

Jason: Exactly. And the hard, the hard truth of that is unbridled vision is toxic to a business. Unbridled vision is toxic to a business and those things that we just talked about, core values, strategic objectives, knowing who you are, what you stand for, what you stand against, that bridles a vision and points it in a direction, right? That your team in your customers and everyone can get behind versus like, listen, I get a hundred ideas every day.

Josh: Every second right.

Jason: Every, yeah, I mean it’s ridiculous, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to ask yourself, tough question, do I have the team right now to implement these ideas? Are they relative to the targets that we’ve set for 2020 are like, you know, so that that bridling of the vision takes place when you define those things that we just talked about. And although this may sound contrary, I asked you to think about it for a minute. Bridled vision is way better than unbridled, cut it loose, cavalier. Running a sustainable longterm business takes a lot of discipline. If you’re not going to be a flash in the pan.

Josh: No, it takes a lot of discipline, a lot of stick with it for the same thing for a long time. I mean, they say genius is doing something successfully for 10 years, right? How many people are willing to do it for 10 years or go into it thinking I’m going to do this for 10 years and then all of a sudden I’m going to be an overnight success 10 years later, right?

Jason: Well and to parlay off of that, here’s the next big characteristic, right? The people that have longterm sustainable success, not somebody who got into flipping houses or buying apartments when the market was good. And they were being carried by the way, right? But somebody that has longterm sustainable success has ruthless focus. I see so many people, even people, I mean, I’ve got a lot of counsel, right? I’ve been doing this for 10 plus years, 10 years in February actually, and I can tell people sometime, listen, you’re just getting your core business fired up and stabilized and wildly profitable. You’ve got that garden groomed, those roses popping out and you’re going to walk over here and start a CRN or a coaching or whatever, right? You’re just getting your core business to where it’s firing on all cylinders. There are certain things that got to be in place before you can take your eye off of it, right? It’s not that it can’t be done.

Josh: and then even then taking your eye off, it is like, I think we get almost, it’s like a sinful, I don’t know if sinful word, but the, it was my friend Vinnie Fisher that said to me one time, he runs another mastermind for businesses. A lot of ECOMM guys know Vinnie, right? Yeah. Vinnie said to me just because you built one successful business, right? I don’t know why my phone’s going it off here, but I’ve got to shut it down going off. Anyway, he said, I’ve got to remember this because it was so powerful. He said, how can you be so arrogant to think that just because you built one successful business, you can build a second one and do it three times as fast and make three times as much money.

Josh: And his words to say like, that’s why I said simple. It was a very powerful word he used. And it was something along the lines of how can you be so arrogant to think that after five years or 10 years of fighting, scratching, clawing, focus, mobilizing your team, you finally have the successful business that you’re going to not ignore that one. You’re so ignorant to think that you are ignorant and arrogant to think that you can ignore that one and you’re just going to go start this other one and it’s going to be so much more successful, so much faster.

Jason: So here’s the funny part about that, right? You forgot the pain, you forgot the pain. You forgot the late nights. You forgot the anguish. You forgot the suffering that it took. You forgot the sacrifice that it took to get you there. It’s like, you know when you talk to women about having children, it’s like are you guys done, you’re going to keep having babies and it’s like they have another baby because they forgot the pain associated with having the physical pain. I don’t mean that. You take that with a grain of salt, but like you forget that and you’re like, Whoa, I’m just going to jump over here and start this thing up. You know, and it’s a lack of focus. It’s detrimental. I will tell you, I think it’s probably the single biggest downfall for most entrepreneurs is a lack of focus because the harsh reality of it is, is you can have a business up and running and spitting off some money, right?

Jason: Like some really good money and not still really know how to run the business, right. One of the parameters that we have in place at CG is like if you don’t, if you’re not flipping at least 50 houses or have at least 50 units in your rental portfolio, or we’re getting ready to set a parameter in place for multi-family, probably, you know, 400 to 500 doors. The reason that one of the reasons we put that in place is because that’s almost like the break point where it’s like, hey, you might not, if you’re doing 50 deals a year or whatever, you might know how to flip houses or whatever, but you don’t, you’re just getting to a point where you really understand how to run a business.

Josh: I mean, when I started my short-sale business with our mutual friend Greg Clemett, my former business partner, we were doing a hundred short-sale deals a year just purely out of muscle. It was like we didn’t have, we had some systems, but shit, man, we just got there early. We were willing to stay late. We were willing to hustle, focus, market, mobilize our team, but we were so young and immature and everybody looked at us like, holy cow, these guys are doing like $1 million a year in gross revenue. And it was amazing what we were able to accomplish, but we were so young, so immature. Like we have systems. Yeah, we have systems that, no, it wasn’t systems, dude. It was like get your ass to the opposite where 12 hours a day. That was our system and we built some things around it.

Josh: Then we built real flow, the software and then some of the systems actually took shape, right? They took the shape of form of a CRM, but we, you know, we again, back then and even at times now like the focus will change a little bit. Like right now we’re pivoting from single family in our fund almost exclusively into multi-family because of the cashflow, because of the longterm wealth accumulation and you learn things along the way, right? But you don’t learn things. There’s a difference between learning something and making a strategic pivot and having your focus go somewhere because you know that’s where you want to go for the next 3, 5, 10 years. It’s a big difference in that versus every day changing what you’re focusing on because you just have shiny object syndrome every day. Big difference.

Jason: When typically what has to have happen in order to do that is you’ve got to create enough profitability in your business where you can step back, know that that’s going to keep coming in while you elevate up and look out over the horizon to see a different vision for yourself besides just being in the trenches, getting bloodied up again. Right. You typically have to reach a point where you’ve been in the office for enough 12 hour days and you beat your brains out enough to where you can look up and say, next month, I’m pretty confident that X amount of dollars is going to come in if I step back and take a look at my business and that from a strategic standpoint, right.

Jason: That’s another point, right. I love how this conversation is flowing organically. A lot of a lot of entrepreneurs never graduate from that sheer brute force into being strategists, and the result of that is a lot of times one or two single bad decisions can derail everything that you’ve worked so hard to build because you’ve made a decision for the short term that doesn’t fit your longterm vision and you didn’t think about it.

Josh: Killed it. Love that.

Jason: Yeah, you’ve made a decision for the short term that doesn’t fit your longterm vision and those types of decisions can just come in and slice you to the bone and you’re done. You’re out. You know?

Josh: Wow. Yeah, yeah. When we made the decision to jump into the private equity world in 2014 and start raising capital for fix and flips, that at that time made a lot of sense. The market was coming back. Everyone was jumping into real estate. People needed funding. There wasn’t as much private money on the street yet and we knew we could build a business and create consistent cashflow from the private equity. Now really the market’s shifted more. There’s so much private money, there’s so much capital available today. That’s not really the biggest problem and we’re, we’re strategically positioned. We manage over $30 million of private money, my money and other people’s money that’s in our fond and in apartments and in one off deals. I don’t really need to go look for more private money, right?

Josh: And so we’ve got that kind of pillar, if you will, or that part of the stool. Three legged stool, completely done. Like don’t need to raise another nickel, but we’re probably still raising money organically from other people. Right now it’s just about finding deals, finding deals, finding deals. Because that’s where it’s all at. We’ve created enough cashflow to have a certain amount of regular recurring income every single month, every single quarter, every single year or now it’s just about making the best decisions. And what you find from guys that have a ruthless focus, they often will go into a, what I’ve seen Jason is they often go into a year and say I really need to focus on my business. I’m just doing this one thing really, really, really well or do this one much better. They don’t create a whole new business. They just really turn the screws on one part of their company for like six months or a year and dial that in. And then the next year it’s like I want to really focus on optimizing this other part of my business because I’ve got this one totally dialed in. They’re not creating whole new businesses. They’re just really grinding and turning the screws on one part of the business they already have.

Jason: You find a small lever that opens a big door. That’s what you do. You can, because you can begin to identify, you know, it’s kind of like if I were going to give an analogy, right. It’s like if you’re a running back when you’re first in the business, right, they hand you the ball and you got sheer brute force. You just running up the gut, you run into the line, you get like one yard but you’re young, you’re just going to keep doing it. Sheer brute force. Whereas once you establish, once you have a business to a certain level, right. Then when you’re handed the ball you might stutter step once or twice to the left and the right, because you’re looking for the whole.

Josh: Le’veon Bell, once you, Le’veon Bell would run the ball, Le’veon Bell, like when he was with the Steelers, he never just slammed into the line. He would get the ball and he would wait and wait and he was kind of danced at the line. He wasn’t dancing left and right. He looking and looking for where’s the hole going to open.

Jason: Surveying that scene.

Josh: It was awesome. I still love to watch him run. Yeah.

Jason: But that takes patience, right? That takes a lot of patience and wisdom to be able to feel that pressure. Because while you’re standing there looking for the whole, trust me that that pressure is coming around you. That big 320 pound defensive man, he’s, his breath is on you by the time you think, oh wow, there’s the hole, right? So you got to be able to sit in that, sit in that pocket under, feel that pressure and be disciplined enough and patient enough to look for the hole and then go attack the hole.

Josh: That’s fantastic. So there’s a couple things here that we’ve talked about. I’m kind of writing down this list and there’s some of the stuff that we’re talking about it’s just fantastic. Just to quickly go back here with, first thing we talked about was relationship building. Second thing we talked about was clearly defined vision, divine goals, values, objectives, what they do, who they are, what they stand for, what they stand against. Then I wrote down ruthless focus, right? Just 10 years, building the business, turning the screws.

Josh: And then the fourth thing that you said was the pivot from sheer brute force to strategist. I love that one. And the thing we just talked about, the fifth sort of trait is this discipline, this patience the Le’veon Bell analogy, right? The running back analogy, the discipline, the patients to see the hole see an opportunity but to be willing to wait to kind of research it out, make sure it’s the right thing before you make that big decision. Because one decision, like you said as a CEO, your whole team can get mobilized towards that decision, but if it’s the wrong decision, they’re mobilizing in the wrong direction.

Jason: Yeah, well and the longer you’ve been in business, the more seasoned you become those decisions, they can be a singular decision that has massive, massive impact, right. And so I think that in order to develop that patience, what has to happen is in your early career, you discount what it takes to implement things, right? You completely discount. Like if you were going to do a particular project, it might take you a month. All of a sudden when you delegate it to somebody and like four days you’re like, how come that’s not done?

Josh: What’s taking you so long? Come on.

Jason: Yeah. Well I’m going to have to fire you. I’m going to let you go.

Josh: Well, it took you seven years to understand it, the other guy to know it and, you know, 96 hours, come on man. What’s wrong?

Jason: If you’re asking yourself like, how do I develop that patience? You’ve got to first embrace the fact that like you discount what it takes. Like you say, oh, we’re just going to work on one thing this year. That’s because you, if you’re thinking that sounds crazy, like, well, one thing, you’re not going to get anything. And that’s because you don’t understand the depth that which you can go into particular facets of your business.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely.

Jason: You know, like so many people are worried. For example, right now in our space, so many people worry about leads, I need more leads. What if you just gotten ruthlessly and relentlessly focused on conversions, right? What if you looked at your funnel and you attacked the break points, right. First of all, identify them, what are they and then how do, how do we attack those break points, right? Like a lot of people flipping houses, their break point is they put 18 houses under contract that month and nine of them fell out and nine of them closed. That’s a breakpoint. Why are 50% of our deals under contract falling out, right? What if you spent six months just figuring out, the hell with more leads closed, the ones you got right.

Josh: What if you followed up with the ones you have that you didn’t get or the seller backed out. But then the seller is not selling that house to someone else. They’re just sitting on it waiting. They weren’t ready to sell it. You follow up with them. Maybe it’s your followup process. You don’t need more leads. So you said conversion, figuring out why the 50% didn’t close, and then how do you create a system to follow up with those people? Because they’ve already trusted you enough to put the house under contract with you the first time. So why not just keep that relationship going with them, to follow up with them and make sure when they are ready to sell that you’re the one that they talk to as opposed to just like shit that’s gone. Need a new lead. Tougher to convert that new lead cold lead than the one that you already had under contract the first time.

Jason: Yeah. Don’t, you’ve got to really understand your customer, right? It’s a big deal. Most people in selling their house and that type of situation, they’re in distress. They’re embarrassed that you know, like they don’t really know you, right? They don’t really know you, so how do you close that gap in every step of the way, every part of the process to build trust and reinforce every decision they’re making as they move through your fund, right. What if you ask yourself that question, how do we build trust and reinforce each and every decision that they’re making through the funnel? From the time they fill out a lead form from the time they talk to the person that schedules the appointment to the time the salesperson is introduced to them to the time they visit that like identify each of those milestones in your funnel and like how do you improve trust at each and every turn instead of just showing up in your freaking jeans and tee shirts and being like, here’s what’s wrong with your house and why you should sell it to me for nothing, right? I mean be professional.

Josh: This one little niche that Jason’s talking about, this build trust and identify, you know how to improve trust is literally like I talked about a few minutes ago, that’s the one screw that you spend the entire year working on, right? Whereas most people are like, I’m going to, I’m already flipping 10 houses a month. I’m going to go start a ECOMM business or I’m going to start selling supplements. Like, what, why? Why don’t you just focus on taking the business that’s flipping 10 houses a month and focus on doubling that to 20 and you can do that by grabbing one little tiny lever in your business and screw in that for the next three months, six months, turn it, turn it, turn it, and then all of a sudden like, oh my God, we are flipping 1520 houses a month and I’m not working as hard because my team leveled up, my team is better, right.

Jason: This is a great transition to one more key characteristic of the rockstars, right? Typically the way you make those transitions, hey, I’m going to go from 10 to 20 houses. Typically the way you make those transitions is by knowing your numbers, right? Because a lot of times, like for example, the example we just talked about, right? If you’re going to work on identifying the break point in your funnel so you can increase conversion instead of generating more leads, you typically have to be able to figure out what is the break point in my funnel, right?

Jason: So if you don’t know how many leads turn to appointments, how many appointments turned to contracts, how many contracts fall, if you don’t know your numbers through the funnel, right? If you don’t know your metrics and your KPIs, you don’t have the data often to make those strategic decisions, right. It’s kind of like the same back to the football analogy, right? When you stand in there and looking for that hole, right? He’s got a process. data. He’s up, he’s looking, he’s right. You got to be able to do the same thing if you want to find the hole in your business so you can fill it and run through it. You’ve got to know your metrics. You got to know your numbers to some degree.

Josh: Yeah. Kevin O’Leary, when he spoke at one of my events a couple of years ago, he said that out of, they studied all of the successful businesses that had gotten funded on Shark Tank and they all, every single business that got funded had, there was, I think three characteristics that every single one of them had. And one of them was, to your point, Jason, was they knew their numbers inside and out. And Kevin, you know, says in a funny way, if you don’t know your numbers, then you deserve to die and never see you again. Your business deserves to burn in hell and perpetuity, right? Perpetuity, of course he loves perpetuity, but he talked about either if you’re the CEO and they analyze all the businesses that got funded on Shark Tank, either the CEO knew their numbers back and forth. That was one of the characteristics of getting funded.

Josh: Or if they weren’t, if they were the sales guy, the visionary that didn’t know all the numbers, they had a CFO or a COO who knew the numbers inside and out. And if you know these companies that have started, they’re all mom and pops, they’re all bootstrapping it. Every single one that, a multi-millionaire or billionaire investor invested in. If you knew the characteristic was they all knew their numbers, they knew their data. Then wouldn’t you just make that part of your soul and part of your business that I have to know my numbers inside and out. I have to get good data, relevant data, knowing where it’s falling out. Know what’s making us money, what’s not and focus on the things that are truly driving it home. Jason, you know how it is. Marketing is a playground. It’s 20% when we start a new funnel of any kind in any business, 80% of the shit we try doesn’t work.

Jason: Yeah, you’re buying data.

Josh: You’re buying data.

Jason: The first few months you’re buying data. We just launched a new, we’re attacking a break point in our funnel when we just launched it about two weeks ago. We have no idea if it’s going to work or not, and I’ve spent a lot of time, effort, energy, and money into building it and you don’t really have any idea if it’s going to organize until you put it on the street. All of this stuff though, all of this stuff is tied together, right? We talk about being a strategist, but you can’t, it’s difficult to be a strategist if you don’t know your numbers, cause your numbers, your data are what allow you to make strategic decisions.

Jason: Like for example, when I look at 2020 and looking at some of the capital expenditures that we’re staring down as far as improving the business, you’re thinking, okay, are we going to spend that money and my data, my analytics, we have a meeting in December on December 9th in San Diego and I know because of historical analytics, we’re a month out from that meeting and I already know within a 5% variance of what our gross revenue will be and what our net revenue, right?

Jason: Because of historic patterns right now, knowing that, feeling comfortable with what’s going to happen in December, I am now making decisions that might take place in February or March about money. I’m willing to spend it because data tells me we’re going to have a good quarter, right. And so when you know your analytics, you know, your KPIs, those are the things that allow you to be strategic.

Josh: Yeah. Love it. And there’s a big difference. I think we need to acknowledge Jason, myself, some businesses that we’ve run. You can’t just all of a sudden become a strategist and a visionary and know your numbers really on day one. You have to have that on your mind. Like I got to look, on day one if you’re building your business, you’re just getting going. You got to just freaking sprint, man. You’ve got to work hard. You got to work long. You got to put in a lot of time. You’ve got to hire a players for years and years and years and just build, build, build, build. Same thing Kevin O’Leary told me when we were getting ready for our event, he was telling me that the CEO that can build a business to $5 million is truly a CEO that can just do sheer brute force like you and I talked about.

Josh: But after $5 million, all the business that he’s seen growth beyond $5 million is there’s a, there’s a pivot at $5 million where the CEO has to become or has to bring on the visionary and the strategist. If the CEO is only capable of just sheer brute force, then just stay in the sheer brute force stage and just become that ultimate salesperson that’s just hustling, traveling, speaking, do that, but you’ve got to have someone else that to take it beyond $5 million. It’s got to be somebody that can see around corners, see blind spots and then create and say, we’ve got to invest money here in order to fix this blind spot, fix this problem in our business. Fix where the funnel’s leaking and that’s where a business can go from $5 million to $50 million because sheer brute force only gets you to $5 million

Jason: Another killer transition point is the best of the best realize that once they get past a certain point, they’re not flipping houses they’re building a team, right. Your role and responsibility shifts in the beginning from flipping houses or buying a small apartment complex to building the team that does those things. Like you don’t wake up thinking about like materials or paint colors. You wake up thinking about, okay, we’re growing I need to hire, I need to find a project manager.

Josh: And I need to train the shit out of them and make sure they’re good and not judge them in the first two weeks and make sure we invested time and effort and talent for six months or a year and longer to make sure that they stay.

Jason: That’s a critical error.

Josh: Then you’ve got to make sure that nobody steals them when they’re good.

Jason: I’m guilty of it, right? It’s like you have this philosophy when you first start building a team, it’s like, hey, see that MTC right there? Go sit in it. Make me money. Don’t ask too many questions all day long, right. Cool.

Josh: You’re good with that. That’s what I want. You’re good with that?

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Hey, do you think you could leave me alone all day today?

Josh: I just want to go to my office and drink coffee and read the news.

Jason: You have to pour and I don’t have a big team so I’m not over here and I don’t want one, quite honestly. But I am very conscious of the fact that when we add and we add selectively, you do, you have to pour into people, right? And you have to resist that Tinto and gosh, I just hired this person $170,000 grand a year, you know, fit like $15,000 grand a month and it’s going to take up six months. That’s $100,000 hole and you got to get, that goes back to that wisdom, that patience of understanding. Yeah, I’m going to eat a crap sandwich for a little bit, but that, that that way he was going to turn right. And that $100,000 hole while they’re training is going to flip over into $100,00, $200,00 $300,000 profit. And in the process you get to groom someone and impact their life versus just impacting yours..

Josh: Right. Love it Jason. We’ve got to, we’ve kind of got to wrap up. I want to make sure if you’ve got anything else, this is the ton of nuggets, man. Love it. I want to leave room just in case there’s one more thing. If there’s not, we’re good. We can wrap cause I’ve got an amazing amount of good content out of this and I want to spit this back before we wrap up, but any kind of final thoughts or you know, anything else that’s on your mind as far as traits?

Jason: Yeah, I’ll give you one more thing. We’ll make it short and sweet, right? A lot of entrepreneurs in a short period of time because of that grit, that grind that I got the ball and running up the gut, that beating that you take, you lose enthusiasm about your core on your core business commonplace, right? If you get to feeling that way, understand that your core business should be your cash cow. And if you’ve put in enough time and enough grit to where you feel that way, you’re probably in a spot where your cash cow should begin creating your cashflow, right?

Jason: You’ve heard the story with Josh talked about, hey, we were doing a lot of single families, but we’ve transitioned. That’s because he’s got a business firing on all cylinders, pushing out a bunch of money. And now all of that active income’s purpose becomes to create passive, right. And so a lot of times you’re like, oh I don’t like my business. I can’t stand it, I’m tired, I’m beat down, the grind. It’s at that point that you have to look at your core business with a different set of eyes and understand that it’s function in your life has or should change and that it is now feeding the next phase of your business, which is building assets and cashflow.

Josh: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Thanks for dropping that last bomb. Guys so I just want to restate these because there’s a lot of great nuggets that I’ve taken away from this and I want to make sure that we summarize this in a proper way. So number one, we talked about traits of elite entrepreneurs and traits of elite real estate investors is they infactley and ruthlessly build relationships. Number two, they have a clearly defined vision, which includes their values, objectives, who they are, what they do, what they stand for. And what they stand against. Number three, they have a ruthless focus on their core business for years and years and years and are just continuing to turn the screws. Number four, I wrote down, they pivot from sheer brute force to becoming a strategist and that often happens at the end of the sprint phase. We mentioned Kevin O’Leary and the $5 million mark.

Josh: Number five I wrote down if they have discipline and patience to kind of look for the hole that we talked about, the Le’veon Bell analogy. Number six they have a singular decisions. They realize how important the singular decisions are that when you’re the CEO, you’re the strategist, you’re the visionary and you decide to make a very important decision. Everyone else is going to mobilize behind that. You’ve got to realize that that is a very important decision and it can make a massive impact positively or a massive impact negatively. Number seven I wrote down actually number seven I wrote down right here, building trust and identifying milestones and improving trust within your customers and within your employees. Number eight know your numbers.

Josh: And number nine, the best of the best. Realize that there are no longer just building a business and driving for cashflow. Number nine was they realize that they’re building a team, they’re investing in their employees are investing in their employees, leveling up. And finally, number 10 was the pivot or if you’re losing enthusiasm is to pivot your cash cow into passive cashflow. So Jason, I don’t know that we had any of this scripted. It just turned out to be 10 turned out to be a phenomenal, phenomenal discussion man. So thank you. I want to express my gratitude.

Jason: Like dude, I’m over here saying, I want a copy of this right away. I want to put this in my funnel because this is what we do, right? This is what we, this is like your, I know we’re getting to that where is there anything you want to say? And it’s like this is all this stuff we talked about, that’s what we do. When we started this, I said at CG, we take high caliber real estate investors right, put them on the fast track to becoming visionary leaders that scale their business, build wealth and give back and everything we talked about today, like that’s it right there. Those are all the things.

Josh: Jason, do you, did you ever, you ever author a book? Did you ever write a book or did you just create this in your head? That’s it right there. Boom. Take this interview, right. Expand on this, right? I mean, I can see people buying millions of copies of a book around that concept, these 10 principles. So if you ever think about it, man, that’s…

Jason: There’s a great book if you haven’t read it, that encompasses a lot of this and it’s Scaling Up is one book that encompasses a lot of this and then is it Rocket Fuel.

Josh: Rocket fuel and Scaling Up, nice.

Jason: You want to look up EOS, entrepreneurial operating systems that’s a good game changers right there.

Josh: Well, listen, Jason…

Jason: It’ll tell you how to go from flipping houses to run a business.

Josh: Yeah. Scaling Up, Rocket Fuel, EOS. Phenomenal stuff today, Jason. I appreciate it. Our audience is absolutely going to. Love it.

Jason: Thanks for having me.

Jason: Yeah, you know, our audience is real estate investors, entrepreneurs, both active and passive. If any of our audience wants to learn more about Collective genius, join your group, attend a session, where can they get more information?

Jason: Sure. You are welcome to go to ThCollectiveGenius.com. That’s www.TheCollectiveGenius.com. This is for our high caliber investors. We have some minimums in place, but when you go there, we’ll tell you all about it. It’s pretty easy process. It’s laid back. We are not a, we’re here to find people that we can help and that can help, you know, that can help us grow as an organization and we can help you grow as a business person and as a spouse and as a parent and everything else along the way. We’re looking for the right fit. And so we go through a process where we jump on the phone and figure that out. We’ll specifically attack the challenges you want to address and tell you who we can connect you to. And if at the end we like, hey, you guys sound pretty cool and we think you sound pretty cool, you come check us out at our next event and risk-free. We go through the process for three days with each other and at the end if it’s a fit, cool. And if it’s not, that’s okay too. Yeah, super laid back. You know, go check us out.

Josh: Yeah, I love it. TheCollectiveGenius.com there you have it from Jason Medley, the founder and CEO of the Collective Genius. Jason can’t express how grateful I am, how excited I am to pull this together and have so much fun with you today. You bet.

Jason: Yeah, I had a blast, man. Thanks for having me on. I wish everybody listened to much success.

Josh: Absolutely.

Jason: And a killer 2020.

You’ve been listening to Josh Cantwell and the Accelerated Investor Podcast. Leave a comment on our iTunes channel and let us know what you want to learn next, or who you’d like Josh to interview. While you’re there, give us some five star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his companies, the Strategic Real Estate Coach and Freeland Ventures on all social media platforms now and stay up to date on new training and  nvestment opportunities to start your journey toward the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Apply for coaching at JoshCantwellCoaching.com.