DGS 186: Playing The Game When Growing Your Property Management Business

Almost everyone loves a good game with high risk and high rewards. Owning a business is the ULTIMATE high-risk, high-reward game. If you are currently avoiding taking risks, you are avoiding playing the game… this means also avoiding the rewards!

Today, property management growth expert, Jason Hull explores the idea of playing the game when growing your property management business… finding hope and faith to play the game, taking risks, and finding rewards. 

You’ll Learn…

[01:11] Business is a Game + Why Change is Necessary

[07:12] Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway

[10:21] How and Why YOU are in Control of the Game

[11:30] Why we Ask our Clients to Do Uncomfortable Things

[13:40] Lessons Learned from Our Live Events

[16:17] A Program Designed to Help You WIN the Game

Tweetables

“If your goals don’t scare you a little bit, they’re not big enough.”

“It actually gets easier the bigger you get and the more doors you have if you do it the right way.”

“Business is the ultimate game.”

“Every good thing that’s ever come to you in your entire life came as a result of change.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

TalkRoute Referral Link

Transcript

[00:00:00] Life is a high-risk, high-reward type of game, and if you’re not playing the game, you’re avoiding playing the game, then you’re avoiding risk, which means you’re also avoiding getting the rewards, and if you want to grow your business, you need to be willing to take those risks.

[00:00:12] All right, welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you’re interested in growing in business and life, and you’re open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it. You think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

[00:00:48] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. 

[00:01:11] All right. So what we’re gonna be talking about today is: play the game. This is the conversation topic that I talked with my coaching clients today. When we’re kids, we enjoy playing games, right? Maybe you played video games. Maybe you played board games. There’s games like Monopoly that have been around forever, and why are these games popular? Monopoly is a popular game because it’s a game that has high risk and high reward. You can land on one square and lose almost everything, right? And you can build up a square in which somebody can land on something and you can gain everything, right? So high risk, high reward. That is how the game of life is played. Life is a high risk, high reward type of game, and if you’re not playing the game, you’re you’re avoiding playing the game, then you’re avoiding risk, which means you’re also avoiding getting the rewards, and if you want to grow your business, you need to be willing to take those risks because that’s what kind of makes entrepreneurs stand out as different. That’s what makes you different. Most people on the planet want safety certainty. That’s a higher priority. You cannot have a maximum level of safety certainty and run a business.

[00:02:26] You have to be willing to step into some risk. You have to be willing to try stuff. You have to be willing to fail sometimes. Now one of my favorite mantras that I love to say when I’m experiencing what feels like failure is I love to say and tell myself that I’m either going to win or I’m going to learn. There’s no failure, right? You either win or you learn. The only way I fail is if I quit, if I give up. That’s the only way I fail. If I’m unwilling to quit, I can’t fail. I will eventually figure it out. It might be hard. It might take me a while, but if I’m unwilling to give up, if I’m unwilling to quit, I can’t fail. I’m just going to keep learning. Right. The reason I talked about this with clients today is because, in entrepreneurism, in growing your business, you have to make changes. And so I asked my clients today. I said, “Hey, what is your perception of change? What phrases and things do you think are associated with the word change? What do other people think about the word change? And I said, “Comment in the chat,” and we got words like ‘uncertain’ and, you know, ‘ fear’ and ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘necessary’ and stuff like that. And so I wanted to reframe that and I said, “What I would like you to do is to reframe change and realize that every single good thing that’s come to you in your life, every single good thing came as result of some sort of change. So a lot of times our brain wants to focus that change can be uncomfortable, painful, all these difficult things, but all of the good things that you’ve had, maybe you found your ultimate life, partner, spouse, whatever, maybe you had kids and that was a big deal to you and you love them. Like maybe you accomplished and earned a degree, or maybe you had some big goal that you hit, or maybe you’ve built an empire or a business, right? These things are things that took risk, but they also, they had a reward and they involved change. Every good thing that’s ever come to you in your entire life came as a result of change.

[00:04:34] And so there’s levels to this game that we play in life and in business, and business is the ultimate game. It’s the game that has endless levels. Like you just keep leveling up, and in property management, there are specific levels– I talked about at the conference that we just put on– specific levels that you go through at certain door ranges and certain challenges that exist at those door ranges, and I’ve talked about this a bit on previous episodes going through each of the major stages that I notice. And at each of these stages, there’s these milestones, these challenges, these things that you have to overcome, these things you have to stop doing and give up and things that you have to start doing and adopt. It’s always change, and if you are unwilling to change, if you put a cap on future growth right now in your mind, which means right now, you say, “I only want to get to 200 doors,” or, “I only want to get to 300 doors,” and you’re doing that because of fear, because of fear of pain, you are telling your unconscious mind, “You better avoid getting to that because that is my pain threshold. That’s where pain will exist.” So your unconscious mind or your subconscious will sabotage and make your life more challenging and help you make bad decisions so that you do not get to that point because that’s your maximum level of discomfort or pain is what you’re thinking in the back of your mind.

[00:05:54] I want you to recognize and realize that on the other side of pain, fear, discomfort is all of the good stuff. If you grow a business to, say, a thousand doors or greater, and you do it in a healthy way, you can have the ultimate business. You can have the ultimate level of freedom. You can have the ultimate level of fulfillment in life. You can have the ultimate level of contribution and feel like you’re making a difference. You can have the ultimate level of support. It actually gets easier the bigger you get and the more doors you have if you do it the right way because you have more resources, you have more finances, you have more money available to hire team members, get systems, to offload. You don’t have to be doing anything in your business that you don’t want to be doing at that level. And so business actually gets better. It gets better, but yes, there’s some painful spots that people give up on. I see a lot of people get stuck at 50, 60 units. I see a lot of people not be able to break that a hundred or barrier, and I see a lot get stuck in that 200 to 400 door category, and they’re just maxed out on discomfort. They don’t know how to get out of that. And so what I want you to understand is anything you’re going to do ever is going to involve some change and you’re going to feel afraid to do it because we all start at level one.

[00:07:10] We all start at ‘level suck.’ That’s where we all start, and you’re going to start with fear. What I want you to recognize with fear is that when you feel fear but you know it’s the right thing that you should be doing, you do it anyway. You feel the fear and do it anyway. You don’t wait until the fear goes away. You don’t try and kill all the fear. That’s what courage is. That’s what bravery is. You just do it. And so if you are in a state of fear, all you need to have is hope. You need to transmute that to hope. You need to focus on the goal that you want, the outcome that you want, something positive that you want and create some hope. And then you’re going to take action. And if you take action, you’ll move towards that next stage out of fear to faith, the opposite and the way that we get to faith, the way that we have faith in something is evidence. This is where we know, like I have faith that this light switch right here on the wall back here, if I go and turn on the one on the right, it will turn on the light above me. I have knowledge that that will happen. I already know. I already have evidence. Faith in your self, faith in your business, these are created through evidence. You need evidence. If you don’t have the evidence, you need to create the evidence, and how do you do that? By having hope and by taking action. So you move from fear to faith through hope. You just got to hope for better things and take massive action. 

[00:08:30] Taking action alone is what kills that doubt and fear monster, so it kills it, and once you have enough evidence, the doubt and fear die. They can’t exist at the same time. You cannot know that you are a closer and know that you can manage a rental property and know that you’re really great at what you do and know that you can get people results and know that you can solve their problem and also fear that you won’t be able to, or be afraid that it’s not going to work out, right? Once you have enough evidence, you know and so the fear’s gone. So if you wanna kill the fear, you have to be willing to feel it though. If you’re not willing to feel the fear and do it anyway, you won’t progress. And so some of us, we kind of lost our edge, like we’re a little bit numb. We’re a little bit bored. And if you’re playing monopoly, and it’s a hard game, you don’t want to play right away. It’s a long game. You need recovery, you need to rest a bit, but if you really enjoy the game because there’s high risk and high reward, it’s a lot of fun, surprises happen, adventure. These positive pre-frames for change that my clients came up with today were things like, you know, ‘adventure’ and learning and growth and all these positive things. Those are all things that come with change, and I really believe in our soul, who we are, the things that we learn, the wisdom that we adopt, the knowledge we take in that stays with us, I think forever.

[00:10:04] That stays with us, regardless of whatever your beliefs are, I believe it stays with us forever, me personally, and it changes who you are. You become a new person with new ideas and new beliefs. because at your core, that’s who I believe you are. You know, you are the observer that carries these beliefs. You’re not your body. You’re the person that is in the body, utilizing the body. That’s a vehicle. You’re not your feelings. You’re not fear. These are vehicles. These are things that you can experience, but they’re not you, you’re not fear. These are things you can experience. You can experience things through your physical body. You can experience things through your emotional body. You can experience things through your mental body, right? Through ideas, mental– you’re also not your thoughts. You might have great thoughts. You might have horrible thoughts. You’re not your thoughts necessarily. You’re the person behind, the observer. You’re the person in control, the creator. You’re the person that thinks the thoughts, feels the feelings, and experiences the body. Right? You also, aren’t your intuition. These flashes of insight and intuition, that’s maybe higher than your mental body. You experience intuition. You leverage and utilize intuition. You connect to the universe or source or God or whatever you’re into, right, through your intuition. 

[00:11:20] And so I want you to recognize that, if you want to move through fear, you move through it through exposure. You just got to do it. Feel the fear. Do it anyway. And we ask our clients to do uncomfortable things. Like we’re just saying, “Hey, your branding sucks. You need to change it. Like you look like a real estate company and that’s costing you probably half the deals and leads you could be getting. We could probably double you really quickly, you know, the amount of deals and leads, you’re getting just by getting real estate out of your branding. You have a leaky website. You need to change that.”

[00:11:49] “Oh, but I like it. We just paid money for it. We did this like–“

[00:11:53] “Yeah, but it’s costing you money, right now Right? You need to change that. Maybe you need to change your sales process. Maybe you need to change your pricing.” almost everybody needs to change their pricing that comes to us.

[00:12:04] “You need to clean up your pricing. Stop just being that 10% or 8% company or that flat fee of $99 company. There’s better pricing, right? There’s better models. You’re leaving money on the table. It’s not just about charging, more it’s about having a better, psychologically more effective pricing model. So you can close more deals at a higher price point more easily,” which is what one of our clients said just happened to him as he went through our pricing secrets training. So we want to clean up all these leaks. There’s lots of other leaks, but it takes you being willing to step off the cliff. It takes you being willing to take that leap of faith, to jump, not knowing if it’s going to work out. You have to try stuff and you need to take risk. The good news is we have lots of clients that have tried this stuff. It’s proven. We know it works. So we’re asking you to take risks that deep down, you know, is the right thing to do, and there’s evidence already to help your faith.

[00:12:57] You don’t know personally, but there’s others that’ll say, “Hey, this worked for me. This works. Try it out. Do it. It’s scary, but I did it and it worked out.” And so be willing to feel the fear, be willing to take action and make sure that you have a good support system around you to help you out. And we would love to be that support system for you here at DoorGrow. You can reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. So if you take a look at your business and you feel like you’ve been stuck for a while, maybe you just need to set a bigger goal. You lack hope. You’re not excited anymore. If your goals don’t scare you a little bit, they’re not big enough. You need to look at your goals and go, “Man, who would I have to become in order to have that? I’m gonna have to change.”

[00:13:40] I went to a friend’s conference a week or so ago, and he had 1200 people at this event. He coaches auto repair shop owners, and he coaches a niche industry similar to what I do, and he’s ahead of, of where I’m at in the game. He’s at a higher level in the game, but me seeing that helped my faith. It helped me know, ‘Hey, that’s possible.’ he said from stage, he said, “Five years earlier I had 19 people at my first event.” He had 1200 at that event. It was massive. He had 19 people at his first event five years ago. Well, we just did our first event in a while in quite a while. My very first event was in 2018 DoorGrow Live we did in 2018. I was totally scared to do it. It was a big, audacious, crazy thing, and we bit off more than we could chew honestly. I call it my $2 million mistake. You can go back and listen to my previous podcast episode where I talk about that, but we had 150 attendees. This conference we did just for mainly our clients. It was pretty much all just our clients, and we had like 45 there. It was awesome. A lot more conservative, a lot lower budget. We didn’t spend $150,000 like we did on the previous event. We spent… I don’t know what we spent yet. The numbers aren’t all in, but it’s way less. And hopefully my team stuck to their budget, so we’ll see, but yeah, it went great.

[00:14:57] It was a lot more comfortable and we’re going to grow. So we weren’t at 19. What my buddy, Aaron told me at his first event, he said he had 19, but he delayed the event because he was embarrassed about how many registrants he got. It was too few. Delayed the event, still only got 19 that showed up. So we’re ahead of where Aaron was then, so I will see where we’re at in five years, but it helped my faith. And is it scary to start doing these events and to commit to doing these events? And, you know, COVID could hit again, or monkeypox or avian flu or, you know, stuff could come up, right? Stuff could happen, but I hope. I have hope that we will do great things. I have hope that we can change this industry. I have hope that we can make a difference in a lot of business owners’ lives, and being at that conference, the one I just put on, our DoorGrow Live that we just did, helped my faith because we heard from lots of clients, we got feedback, we got testimonials, people got value, and I now have evidence. I now have evidence that this is a good thing that this can be good and that we can make a difference. I have more evidence and I want all of you to experience the maximum level of fulfillment in your business, freedom in your business, contribution in your business, and support.

[00:16:17] And so go back and listen to my previous podcast episode if you haven’t. That one I talked about our Rapid Revamp program and Built to Sell. Built to sell your business in three to five years, for a seven figure exit. It’s totally possible. I actually had somebody speak at my conference that sold his business that he built in three to five years from the ground up, and he sold it for seven figure exit. He’s still running the company as part of the buyout that he just sold and he’s got like 1300 units, something like that as well. So, really awesome because I didn’t tell him what to speak about. I didn’t tell him what to share, and he got up and said, “This is what it takes, and these are the levels,” and it mimicked all the stuff that I teach, and there was so much synergy and my clients were just like, “Jason’s actually telling the truth. Some of the ones that were a little skeptical, some of the ones that are like,” Does Jason know what he’s doing?” It was really a beautiful thing to see. So that helped our clients’ faith, seeing somebody that had done it. So I brought him in like, “I’m not gonna tell you what to talk about. Just share your journey, share what it takes,” and he talked about, ironically, he talked about branding, he talked about culture, he talked about all these leaks that we solve in our Rapid Revamp program, which was really exciting. 

[00:17:31] So, we have an event coming up in October. We highly recommend that you come and be part of that. If you’re debating whether or not DoorGrow’s legit, or you should work with DoorGrow, highly recommend you check out our event. It’s going to be in Vegas. You can check out the details at doorgrowlive.com and we hope to see there. So, that’s it for today. Feel the fear, do it anyway, get out there, create some goals, have some hope, and get the evidence that you need to prove to yourself that it’s true. And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

[00:18:03] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow! 

[00:18:29] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

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