RG 176 – From Jail Cell to Real Estate Entrepreneur: Scaling Down to Profit Up with Michael Green
Michael is a house flipper and the host of the Flip Factor podcast. The key to flipping is being open to investing in personal growth and seeing potential in something thats a little broken down, including seeing it in yourself. Michael has flipped over 1100 houses in 10 years and is most happy when he’s helping others to achieve financial freedom. Michael was an entrepreneur from day 1 but much of what he did wasn’t strictly legal because he grew up in a rough area and had terrible role models. When he left school he got into selling flooring and then when he was 30 he met someone who was flipping a house and invited him to come to a free seminar. He made $8k on a wholesale deal within 6 weeks and was hooked. He spent the next few years making money but never really working in top gear, but after a while this easy-going attitude wasn’t garnering the same results.
The market shifted from a buyers to a sellers market and suddenly lots of people were doing the same thing which increased competition. This meant that Michael had to level up and put more energy into buying the right properties, so he went from signing one in very 23 leads to one in every eight. He had a business partner during this time that he did his first 600 deals with and they worked together for 7 years. Over this time they scaled up from 10 properties a year, to 20 and then 30 until they hit 150 and found that the profits weren’t increasing with the same rate of new deals. At this point Michael read The One Thing by Gary Keller and learnt about scaling down to profit up. The number of deals was feeding his ego but he learnt that doing more wasn’t the same as making more.
At this point he and his partner went separate ways and Michael cut the number of deals by half so now he’s got spare time. Now, instead of doing bigger homes he’s putting more effort into the small number of deals so that things during rehab don’t fall through the cracks. This means that the properties are so perfect and lovely that people buy them emotionally rather than logically. On average he spends $5-7k doing up a house and then this adds between $10-20k each time.
Top tips
- Most important habit – get all the hard stuff done in the morning
- Most influential person – His coach – father figure
- Most important tool – Excel sheets
- Most influential failure – Firing people to slow and giving people trust they haven’t earned