RG 348 – The Importance of Investing in the Right People with Jerry Green

We often talk about building a successful business, but what exactly goes into it? Jerry Green, a seasoned real estate investor, joins us on this episode to shed some light on what we need to know.

Jerry Green is the CEO of Real Estate Solutions Unlimited, Inc., and has been in the real estate business for almost three decades. Jerry started building his business in 1994. Despite going through bankruptcy and the tragic loss of his wife, Jerry persevered and bounced back. Today, Jerry leads one of the most successful firms in Southwest Ohio and helps others find financial freedom through investing.

We are honored to have Jerry on the show to share his story of overcoming major difficulties and coming out on top. Besides discussing his experiences, Jerry provides valuable insights into running a business, including finding the right people, building an effective production line, and so much more.

Interested in becoming an Investor with Reed? Click here to join his Investor email list.

What does it take to keep a business running like a well-oiled machine? Why is hiring the right people so important? And what do you need to prioritize while going towards your goal? Join us on this week’s episode to find out.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Building an effective production line can give you more time for your other passions.
• The right person costs you nothing.
• Break down your “rock” into manageable goals and assign them to the right people.
• Build habits that calm you down before you start your day.
• Keep track of your numbers, understand them, and learn how they affect your business.

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-green-a288186/
https://www.reswebuy.com/
https://www.thejerrygreen.com/jg

Be Bold, Be Brave and Go Give Life a Crack!

Remember to join my Investor Database for the latest Investment Offerings!

Reed Goossens (00:00):

Good day Good day guys. Now, before we dive into today’s show, I want you to let you know that some of you may be aware that over the past eight years, I have built a substantial multi-family real estate portfolio here in the US worth over half a billion dollars. And in that time, my passive investors have received fantastic double-digit returns. And now you too can invest directly into my deals for as little as $50,000. So if you’re an interested investor, head over to reedgoossens.com to find out more. That’s reedgoossens.com. Now, back into the show,

Jerry Green (00:40):

We’ll say, Hey, I, you know, you can make, you know, a million dollars a year, whatever, in real estate. And, but, but how do you really do that? How do you really get there? Right? And I think that’s such a missing gap a lot of times. So one of the things we do with a lot of our students is do that. We go through and we actually show them these four pillars, and we make ’em do it. And then we say, okay, now let’s reverse engineer that. How did we really get there? What does that KPI look like? What is, you know, what, what, you know, what is the actions that we’re gonna have to take to receive this particular result?

Speaker 3 (01:22):

Welcome to investing in the US, a podcast for real estate investors, business owners, and aspiring entrepreneurs looking to break into the US market. Join Reed as he interviews go-getters, risk-takers, and the best in the business about their journey towards financial freedom and the sheer joy of creating something from nothing,

Reed Goossens (01:42):

Good day Good day. a Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another cracking edition of investing in the US Podcast from Los Angeles. I’m your host, reed goossens. Good as always, Debbie with us on the show now. I’m glad that you’ve all tuned into it. Learn from my incredible guests and each and every one of them are the cream of the crop here in the United States when it comes to real estate investing, business, investing in entrepreneurship. Each show I try and tease out their incredible stories of how they have successfully created their businesses here in the us. How they’ve created financial freedom, massive amounts of cash flow, and ultimately create extraordinary lives for themselves and their families. Life by design, as I like to say. Hopefully these guests will inspire all of my cracking listeners, which are you guys to get off the couch and go and take massive amounts of action.

Reed Goossens (02:29):

If these guys can do it, so can you. Now, as you know, I’m all about sharing the knowledge with my loyal listeners, which is you guys, and there’s absolutely no BS on this show, just straight into the nuts and bolts. Now, if you do like this show, the easiest way to give back is to give us a review on iTunes, and you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter by searching at Reed Goossens. You can find the show wherever you podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play. But you can also find these episodes up on my YouTube channel. So head over to reedgoossens.com, click on the video link, and, and it’ll take you to the video recordings of these podcasts where you can see my ugly mug, but the beautiful faces of my guests each and every week. All right, enough outta me. Let’s get cracking in into today’s show.

Speaker 4 (03:17):

Today,

Reed Goossens (03:17):

The show, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jerry Green. Now get this, Jerry started his real estate investment career way back in 1994. After going through a big bankruptcy, he began by wholesaling properties, then he merged into fix and flipping. And since that time, he has completed over 3000 deals, including fix and flips, multi-family rentals and commercial real estate properties. Now, he’s also realized there’s a big difference between just being a real estate investor and actually running a profitable real estate investment business. And after multiple failure, millions of dollars lost and mistakes made, and through a personal tragedy, which I’m sure we’re gonna find a lot more about, that he was able to truly build a scalable business and he was able to remove himself in the operations. At the same time, he now works and spends a lot of time teaching others about removing themselves from the day-to-day. And that’s what he’s most passionate, passionate about. And I’m really excited and pumped to have him on the show today to share his incredible wealth of knowledge. Been going since 1994. But enough outta me. Let’s get him out here. Good day. Jerry, welcome to the show. Hey, do today, mate.

Jerry Green (04:16):

Okay, great. Thank you Reed. Appreciate it, my man

Reed Goossens (04:19):

Mate. Well, to be here, it’s good to, it’s good to connect with other folks that, you know, as I was, I was saying a little bit in the green room, you know, about just removing yourself from the day to day. A lot of, oh yes, people who listen, who listen to this show, people who you talk to day in, day out are sole entrepreneurs. They, they stumbled into the real estate business cause they want more. And so I’m just gonna sort of bookend that and we’ll, we’ll get back into this conversation, but that’s sort of what the conversation’s gonna be about today for all my listeners out there. But before we get into those meat and potatoes, mate, cause I’m really excited to, to talk about that. It gives me juices talking about that sort of stuff. Can you rewind the clock and tell me how you made your first ever a dollar as a kid?

Jerry Green (04:55):

Oh, first dollar as a kid, , I, I remember, um, actually this is, and this kind of dates me on things, but it was working, uh, a paper out delivering papers. And I’m not sure if a lot of users on here or viewers on here will remember that, but anybody that’s a little older knows what I’m talking about. But people used to get newspapers delivered to their home, right? And that was one of the first things I ever did to make money like that.

Reed Goossens (05:25):

Awesome, awesome stuff. Well, walk us through the journey, right? I mentioned 1994, you started this, this is, this is, you know, you, I don’t think I was in, I must have been in year five in 1994. like you grade five. So how did you get started? Was there a life before real estate? Yeah. You know, that, that, that, that, that, that sort of got you to the point where you said, I’ve had enough of this and I wanna get into involved in real estate investing.

Jerry Green (05:47):

Absolutely. So Reed, I, you know, I take this back, you know, 29 years now, which is hard to believe, but it’s, yeah, it’s snap by just like that. But I think about this and, you know, going back in there, and I was living in, uh, Springfield, Ohio at that time. Currently I live actually in a Dayton, Ohio area. Um, just a small community called Germantown, which is a little over an hour away from that. But I lived over in Springfield at that time. I was actually, well, um, as I, I had, I’ve been working in electrical contracting business with my father. And prior to that I was actually in the US Air Force for a period of time. Got out and decided, hey, I want to get him business with my dad. He had a business already established. So I jumped into that with him and we really just started growing that a little bit more.

Jerry Green (06:33):

And we, you knew, and we were small mom to pop operation, we’d done a lot of work for general contractors. We’d done a lot of work for homeowners, but big percentage of work was for like, small commercial work. So we’d done a lot of work for like, they say, these GCs. And one day it was on a Sunday night, I still remember the so well, I had a call come in at home and you gotta remember back then we didn’t have the cell phones. This was the good old wall phones, right? . So phone rings, I’ll walk over answer the phone. And a gentleman I know who owned this con uh, construction company, called me up and he said, Hey Jerry, I I’m calling you tonight on Sunday to let you know we are closing our doors to our company. And I wanted to give you an advanced notice.

Jerry Green (07:20):

I go, oh my God. You know, it’s like, when are you closing? And he says, tomorrow morning, . So he wanted to gimme advanced notice, so he closes doors. But the problem was he owed us a big chunk of money and he came back in the night and he owed us, it was probably close to 65, $70,000. And he just told us that he wasn’t gonna be able to pay us on that. From that read, I, I try to make things happen, but we just, a very small business, we were not able to recover from that. So next thing you know, we weren’t put in a possession. I had to file bankruptcy and really tried to figure out what to do next. Well, during that whole time all this was going on, I also was starting to get some interest in real estate. And the reason I started doing that was there was actually a TV commercial that was playing about a seminar being held in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Jerry Green (08:14):

And back then, only way you would find out that stuff is either television or newspaper. That was it. So I made a commitment to go to that three day training, and this is a gentleman named, uh, Charles Gibbons. Very few people have heard of him and he’s since passed away, but he kind of built out a pretty good organization. So I went to that, um, event and listened to him tell me about different ways they make money in real estate buying and holding, fixed and flipping. And one thing that caught my ear was this, uh, cool thing called the signing contracts. And I thought, wow, how this is, sounds really neat cuz I knew it could be creating money right now. And, and you gotta remember, I was in position, I had no work, I had no job, I had business had failed. So I was like, I had to do something for my family.

Jerry Green (09:00):

So what I did is I got in a position where I came back from that training, I said, man, I’m gonna make this happen. And I actually end up borrowing, uh, the credit cards for my mom and dad. And I end up hiring a mentor from that event, Reed. And it cost me 10,000 bucks and I had to figure out how to make it happen. So I ended up start doing that. And then next thing you know, what I started really focusing on was, uh, what I call, you know, I, I like to call it chunk money, money coming in chunks very quickly because I had something to call monthly bills, which a lot of viewers here there, he, uh, uh, very well know what I mean on that. You gotta, you gotta take care of today’s obligations. So I started hammering on wholesaling. We, we started doing deals here.

Jerry Green (09:42):

We pick up 1500 bucks. And next thing I know I said, well, if I can do that, can I do 2,500? And this continued to grow. So I built this little machine up of wholesaling properties. Well, next thing I know, I was in a position, I thought, wow, you know, if I’m wholesaling these, why couldn’t I rehab these? Why couldn’t I go ahead and do that? You know, and think about it, my whole background was, and in doing a lot of fix and flips. Anyways, so what I did on that, I, I basically decided, well, I’m gonna get into the rehab business. I built up a little money from wholesaling, but not much. And so I thought, well, how am I gonna get the capital? So basically I just went out there and started talking to people. And I actually went to, I’ll never forget this.

Jerry Green (10:25):

I went to a little meeting, it was over by the Dayton International Airport and went into this little investor meeting. I got up in front of the room, literally with a flip chart. And I get up and I’ll say, look, I know how to find the deals. I know how to do all this other stuff or rehab ’em. I know how to market ’em, get ’em sold. I need capital. So basically what I want you to do is fund my deal and then shut up and, uh, and wait for a bigger check. So , and that’s pretty well away. It came down to, and that’s how I got my first private lender. It was right from there. So that started that and I started building that side of things. It was actually a, a physician that was one of my first investors like that. And I continued to grow that side of things and built this machine up of, uh, fixing and flipping.

Jerry Green (11:10):

And I continued to grow that and doing some wholesaling as well. And then started buying some properties, a hold, uh, in that time period. But I really was doing a lot of fix and flip during that time, read. And then this was, um, a period of time where I was moving into the late nineties and it was just rolling into the year 2000. Um, wife and I, at that time, we were living in Springfield, we were working out of our home and we, you know, we were like really pump, we were written up in the local paper, you know, and we were kind of like on, on top of the world. And we went from bankruptcy to the point where at that time we were building a brand new home. So it was really cool. A lot of things were happening. And then we found out that we were having a baby, baby and we were super pumped.

Jerry Green (11:54):

And we were like, okay, we’re gonna have a baby together. And, and then with, and oh, it was about six months or so into her pregnancy, we noticed some, um, you know, she started having some problems and we, we started making several trips to the emergency room and we’re like, you know, what’s going on? And within a very about, oh, about two or three times going there, they said, you know, we’re gonna admit her. And then within probably a couple days since we’re gonna induce labor. And this was several months early. So my son was born, uh, and he was born, you know, like I say, a little premature, but they adopted her. I’ll know, never forget it. He says, I think your son’s gonna be fine. He says, I’m really concerned about your wife. And he says, I’m gonna take her down for a scan.

Jerry Green (12:39):

Cuz they couldn’t do the CT scan while the baby was still in. So immediately took her down for a CT scan. And within about two hours after the, our son was born, they came back up and let us know that they found a massive tumor in my wife’s kidneys At that moment in time, within about two hours of my son being born reading. Unbelievable. Wow. And it was just, you think about it, we here, we were up here and then boom like this in a couple hours. And this, you know, the fast forward a little bit, guys, we, we started doing mal mos of tests and within a several days we found out that it was malignant cancer. It was, um, it was called Wilms tumor, which is generally found in kids by age five. And they said the tumor was like the size of a football.

Jerry Green (13:27):

And it was just like, yeah, it was a miracle. My son was even born, they said, and it was, it was just unbelievable. And then fast forward a little bit more, we ended up going through a major surgery that she had to have done over in Columbus. And she actually was treated at a children’s hospital because it was a childhood cancer, even though she was an adult patient. And the surgery was something we thought would be three or four hours, ended up being 14 hours long. The tumor had protrude in a lot of different areas. And, um, they did get it all, but they also had to remove her kidneys completely. So at that moment in time, she was completely dependent on dialysis. And so we were like, oh my God, what are we gonna do it? And, you know, they thought, well, we can get her outta the hospital, hopefully in two or three weeks.

Jerry Green (14:15):

And Reed, it was a complication, started, uh, setting in place and I ended up, uh, she actually ended up being in a hospital for four months straight. And I ended up moving out of her brand new home. And I lived in the Ronald McDonald House in Columbus to take care of her. During that time. We did get her home. Finally, we were there through clear through the, uh, the following year. And we were there at the Christmas and everything else got home. She was bedridden. It was, you know, my focus was really dialysis three times a week and radiation treatments the other days. And that’s what I was doing, taking care of her like that. And within, uh, about a month or so after being home, we had another, uh, CT scan done and, you know, uh, with, you know, we just wanted to make sure everything was clear.

Jerry Green (15:08):

And then they told us that the cancer had reoccurred mm-hmm. . And it was in multiple areas. And, uh, they told us to call in hospice. And, um, my, my first wife passed away 10 months after my little boy was born mm-hmm. . And we’d been married, um, for over 12 years, dated in high school. And, uh, you know, it was like she worked with me in the business, uh, you know, the life partner. So, you know, and it was this complete, you know, just tragedy in my life to where I had to refigure out how to function even again. You know? And Reed, I think one of the big things, the reasons I like to share this with people is I think sometimes, you know, people listen to us, tell ’em about different things and they, and they, and they put us on a pedestal sometimes, you know how that goes.

Jerry Green (15:55):

And, and it’s like, you know, people, people out there should understand. We go through things too. And, you know, and I started from this point, I went through a bankruptcy, went through personal tragedy, losing my wife to the point of raising a newborn baby, you know, for a couple years on my own. Tried to figure out even how to function, plus had the business. So it, it was a lot. And I had, I ended up remarrying, uh, and moved, uh, over the Dayton area where I live now, to my, to my wife now. And, uh, she had, uh, kids and we ended up, you know, bringing our kids together and have one together. And now we got the Brady Bunch going on. So, you know, and, but what happened then, Reed, I went to this big focus of, you know, after that, after I really got functioning, it took me on this about two years to that point.

Jerry Green (16:42):

And then I really started rebuilding the whole real estate thing again. You know, I continued to have it going. And I’ll tell you what kept me going and supporting me during that time was the properties that I had built up. Cuz you think about a lot of people that would lose their job for two years, they’d be financially ruined. So, so I had a, you know, I, I was able to maintain things and keep, you know, things going from my family. But I ended up, you know, after two years really started rebuilding. And I started building this big massive rehab machine up. And then I, I got to this point where I built this huge thing up and I had multiple pro project managers working for me. And then, you know, you would think after all I’ve been through that I still wouldn’t screw up, but guess what?

Jerry Green (17:27):

I still, everybody makes mistakes, right? All the time. And that’s how we grow. So I get this thing, and I built this big machine up, this rehab machine, and then one day I realized, you know what? I hate this thing. I just hated it because it was, it, it this big all I built this big, I built this business that was all about me. Everything was me. I was making decisions on everything. I was making decisions on layouts. I was making decisions, said I buy this property. What are the numbers? everything was about me marketing all that. And then I realized that I had to change something. What happened on this was I got to the point where one day I just was thinking about this and I said, I basically took a sheet of paper and I drew the line right down the center of this piece of paper.

Jerry Green (18:12):

On one side I wrote real estate, and the other side I wrote business. And I started thinking about this. I said, you know what I’ve noticed, not only, not only for myself, but a lot of people I know, they spend their whole life in the real estate game a lot of times being what I call a deal chaser. And that’s all they do is they’re just caught up into that game of things and it totally consumes them, and they really never get out of that trap. I said, how can I, instead of focusing on just being in real estate, how can I focus on the other side of the paper and how can I build a business? But more importantly, how can I build a company that allows me to be able to build things where I have the proper operating system, proper processes, people in place where it can, I can build this thing.

Jerry Green (19:04):

And then real estate becomes nothing more than a product, just like in other business. And I can build this machine where I can turn around and remove myself from the day-to-day operation. Well, fast forward all these years later, that’s when I’ve been able to do Reed and I’ve built this thing up now where I have a lady that runs things for me. She’s my coo, o o she’s been with me for 10 years now, and she runs the day-to-day operations. And it puts me in a position, I only spend an average about two to three hours a week actually in the real estate side of things evolved in that actively, you know, and it’s more on a meeting basis from a high level, and they run the day-to-day. And we still are average and upwards of 18, 20 deals a month that we’re bringing into the, uh, system all the time. We’re still wholesale now, we’re still buying and holding, and we’re just continue to run that, but it’s become a production line. And now I can truly operate this as a c e o of things. And it’s allowed me also to do something I have a big passion towards. And that is helping others from training others to be, to change their lives and build this into a real business.

Reed Goossens (20:20):

For those of you who are interested in staying up to date with all the latest happenings in my business, or to learn more about passively investing directly into my multi-family value add deals, then head over to reedgoossens.com And sign up for my monthly newsletter. By signing up, you’ll automatically be notified about my new up and coming investment opportunities. You’ll be able to stay up to date with all the latest real estate news here in the United States and much, much more. So head over to reedgoossens.com and sign up today, now back into the show.

Speaker 4 (20:56):

Well,

Reed Goossens (20:57):

Thank, thank you for sharing and being so vulnerable and all that, that it sounds like you’ve gone through incredible, you know, loss of tragedy and, um, you know, it’s, it’s funny you mentioned, uh, the Ronald McDonald house. I, uh, so my younger sister, when I was 11 years old, she passed away from a brain tumor. Wow. Wow. And we spent, we spent a bunch of time in the Ronald McDonald House and it’s, it’s, they, they do such great work, a blessing. And they, you know, just particularly around children’s, you know, hospitals and kids and families that need are in need of, you know, just shelter. Right. You know, when they’re going through a life altering event like cancer. Right. You can’t ever predict when it’s gonna come. And, um, for, you know, also with, you know, sharing tragedy on tragedy, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. It’s not like to do one another, but it’s just more to share back with you is, is, yeah.

Reed Goossens (21:42):

Uh, back in 2017, my my mom actually passed away from, uh, uterus cancer. And so I, you know, I I I, I, I feel you, man. When, when you go through these things and, and it makes you, you know, it obviously it makes you question stuff, makes you question life, but it also, you know, puts things into perspective that life is very short and, you know, what are you here to do? Is it, are you here to work on the business or in the business? Or are you here to sort of enjoy family and, and other pillars that you want you, you know, that you do enjoy? So, um, you know, tragedy’s hard. You, you don’t, you don’t ever move on from it. You just sort of, someone told me you build life around it, right? Yes. It’s always gonna be with you. You carried around with you, but you don’t have to let it burden you, but you can, it’s still, it’s still there, you know?

Reed Goossens (22:23):

And, and it always grounds you in a way that people who haven’t gone through it, it’s, it’s just, you know, it’s hard to, it, it’s hard to assimilate with those people who haven’t gone through it. So really, a hundred percent from, from one, one mate back to another, I, you know, I, you know, tragedy is, is a huge thing that, uh, it’s tough, but it’s, you know, life is life and you’ve gotta be able to keep moving and keep, you know, not never forget them, but, but, um, so my condolences to you, my friend, and, and you know, I could, I could only imagine how, you know, incredibly painful. That would’ve been, you know, back in the day, so, well, thank you. Yeah. But with that being said, let’s get into that meat and potatoes of what you were talking about before. You know, the working on the business, a lot of, and including myself, you know, I’m, I’m the CEO of my own company at RSN Property Group.

Reed Goossens (23:07):

We’re in a real estate investment firm that, you know, buys multi-family product. But I’ve just started bringing on certain employees, ceo CEOs and stuff like that, and head of acquisitions and, um, you know, I’ve realized how much it’s so important to go and invest in people, right. And to, and to invest in, you know, I’ve had couple, I’ve some, some good sales with some deals recently. And you can go and hold the money away, or you can go and reinvest in good talent to try and make the, the ship, you know, run. And it was funny, I was, I was interviewing Brandon Turner on this show a couple of, probably about a year ago now, and he was talking about the idea of a bicycle, right? You’re on a bicycle, you get off that bicycle, that bicycle doesn’t go anywhere, right? And when it’s just a one, when you’re a one man van or one gal band, you’re on a tricycle, oh, sorry, a, a tandem, you might maybe about to stop pedaling, but if you both get off the, the bicycle doesn’t, doesn’t do anything.

Reed Goossens (24:01):

And then you slowly build up the idea of getting into a, a car and then from a car into a train, and then for a train into a, you know, a, a private jet. And, and as that analogy grows, you, you, you create more seats around you, and those seats are important. And who’s, and your job as the CEO is to try and put the, the right bum in that right seat. And it’s such a, it’s literally like a game of chess to try and get the, the, the balance just right. So, with that analogy, how much have you seen your business grow once now that you’ve started to take, not necessarily a backseat, but just a different seat in the vehicle and letting go of the vine so you can allow the business to flourish without you?

Jerry Green (24:38):

That’s a great question, Reed. I know that, well, as I mentioned, I guess that you looking at things with my current coo, Ashley, she’s been with me 10 years, so everybody understands she started as an assistant. Mm-hmm. , and, you know, so a lot of times the people right underneath your nose are sometimes the best candidates. So, you know, cuz she was set, uh, she was in a position to be really in every seat within the organization. So we groomed that side of things. But I think it was, it was interesting when we moved her into that position, I was, you know, I was so scared about that read, you know, it freaked me out because one, I was like the money side of things, but the other side, it’s your baby, right? You’re letting this go. But the interesting thing, the first year that we’d done that, we’ve seen an increase in revenues of over 40%.

Reed Goossens (25:31):

Wow.

Jerry Green (25:32):

And I was like, holy cow. So what did that tell you? It’s, it, it basically, it was very clear to me that guess who was the bottleneck, right? Mm-hmm. , I was the bottleneck. And really, if you look at it, all you guys listening to this, remember where, where’s the bottleneck in any bottle at the top . So, right. And that’s the thing that I learned from that. So it was, it was a major lesson. And I think that we have to look at, when you, when you talk about the people component, it, you have to look at people in a way of, it’s an investment, like you said. I mean, we invest in marketing, but so many people are, uh, uh, you know, entrepreneurs are afraid to invest in actual people. Mm. But the thing that I wanna, I want everybody to know this and write this down, if you’re listening to this, that the right person cost you nothing, the right person cost you nothing.

Reed Goossens (26:30):

I completely agree with that. I completely agree with that. What do you, what advice, or looking back on, you mentioned the bottleneck, what did you learn from Stepping Aside that might have been something that you were deficient in in terms of your leadership roles or terms of parts of the business that you thought you had under control, but maybe you actually didn’t?

Jerry Green (26:54):

I think one of the big things I learned was, first of all, that my mind were totally different than a lot of other people on my team. Mm-hmm. the way I, my my mind would work because I had to start finding out that my mind worked more as the, what we look at as more the visionary. Yep. I was looking at the bigger picture on things, Reed, and I was thinking on that. But, but the problem was I would try to communicate that bigger picture to my team and I didn’t know how to do it properly. Because what I would do is I would look at, you know, here I am at a, and I would go from A to Z and skip all the parts in between . So classic,

Reed Goossens (27:38):

Classic entrepreneur role, right? You are, you are already there mentally and say, why doesn’t everyone else keep up?

Jerry Green (27:44):

And I was doing that and I thought, why is the team struggling with this? Or I would go, you know, a lot of times read, I would go to a training and I would pick up all the stuff and I’d listen to things for three days and I’d come back to my team, I call ’em all together and I’d do this major data dump and like in 30 minutes or 60 minutes on them, and I’d go, go implement it. And they would, when I found out later is they’re like scratching their head to go, we’re still trying to implement what you did last time on this . So, you know, the last data don’t. So the big thing I realized is my mind worked totally different. And I realized that out of that, there was nothing wrong with that. That’s just the way I work. But I, what I realized is that where I was, where I really struggled was taking and connecting all the dots and, you know, I, I could do it in my mind, I could lay out, I could train show people to doing that, but actually implementing that was the big thing. Mm-hmm. . So that integration, that’s what I was missing. And I thought, well wonder if we look at somebody coming in to be that integrator? And that’s what changed the game right there.

Reed Goossens (28:53):

It sounds like you’re using very similar language to the book that I love. And it’s two, two copies are sitting up, you know, reach for it right now if people are watching on YouTube, uh, EEO Attract E os. So yes, I actually just had a, a, uh, one of my first ever days, uh, with some, we’ve got some new team members and really I’ve grown in the last two years and actually have team members these days, brought them out here to LA for a big, they’re all remote, but brought ’em out out here and did a massive implementation session and assigning rocks. And if you don’t know what rocks are for those listeners out there, go grab your, get your hands on one on the book of Vos and understand what a rock is. But what a rock essentially does is break down into achievable chunks that you can assign people on your team to get to that big audacious goal.

Reed Goossens (29:39):

You’ve gotta bring it down into these rocks and do it in quarterly basis to then have folks essentially target, right. And know you can’t have really any more than one to three rocks because you don’t wanna bombard people. And to your point of like having your minds running in a million miles an hour, it can pick up the accounting, you can pick up the marketing, you can pick up the acquisitions, you can pick up the construction and like boom, boom, boom, what you, you already know where it needs to be. But for the folks who are sort of running the day-to-day, it needs to be broken down into its chunks, into consumable pieces so they, so people can keep going towards, you know, essentially a rock or a target, and then you reevaluate those rocks and targets every year or every six months and give them, you give people new ones once they achieve that.

Reed Goossens (30:20):

So it’s very important. It’s a really interesting technique in something that I know you and I haven’t come up with that idea. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not, you know, it’s not, uh, it’s not rocket science, but when you, when you are running at, at a, at a million miles an hour in terms of, you know, as, as we are the visionaries of our own businesses, it’s trying to slow down, take a breath, and then break it into its chunks so other people can consume it. Cause one, I I do remember my first ever time I had a va, a virtual assistant, which I’m sure you have in your business as well. And I remembered thinking to myself, I gave them a task, right? And he failed at that task. And I said, why, you know, I got frustrated. Why the hell did he fail at this task?

Reed Goossens (30:58):

You know, what, what the hell, why does he, what does he, what does he know? And it came down to my explanation of the task. And that’s when I implemented Loom and videos and I, I find Loom, if you dunno what Loom is, check it out. It’s a great screen sharing way of video recording what you need done in like, you know, five to 10 minutes. And once I became clear of my instructions and I, it was a reflection on me as the, the leader, it then became easy to communicate in a, in a way in which to communicate. So my people are below me. And, and in the early infancy I had VAs. Now I don’t have VAs, but I do have some, but it’s grown into, you know, chief of investment officers and assistance. But it’s the way in which you communicate to get across the point in an effect in effective way, which I think you mentioned before was one of the things I wrote down here was it was visionary and communication and, and it was a communication piece that it seemed like you struggled with. But I also had gone through that same journey and realized it was a reflection on me, not necessarily a reflection on the person doing the

Jerry Green (31:55):

Task. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it’s so important. It’s funny on that because, you know, Reed, I remember at one time, and this was, uh, years ago, we thought, okay, we got this dialed in and we hired, uh, a lady to come in and actually was, uh, she actually coached the coaches for, uh, Tony Robbins mm-hmm. . She came in and worked with us, and she went through the whole company and interviewed everybody individually. And she came back and when she reviewed everything in a summary, she said, well, the number one thing was they still feel there’s a lack of clarity. I thought, oh my God, are you kidding me? And I was blown away on that. So what I realized as your, as your point, it’s so important to create that clarity for them to make sure they really understand us. Because, you know, I, I, it’s, the thing is, is we come in and, you know, and, and one of the thing we do now that we’re really big on is we actually do a, uh, a two-day systems and operations training right here in our office in Ohio.

Jerry Green (32:53):

We have investors from all around the country come in and we show ’em exactly how to build their, take their real estate business and build it into a real company and learn all the things we’ve done in our different departments. But what I started learning on that was, you know, I, and I started looking at this, I said, you know, really, I mean if you think about this, this, it’s like a, uh, overall, it’s like an assembly line, okay? And we look at that and we start understanding that along the assembly line, there’s stations along those assembly lines. What’s, it’s, and you think about it, if you’re manufacturing vehicles and you run along the assembly line, you know, we have the same thing happen within our real estate business, whether we’re buying to hold fixed and flip whatever it is. And we have to make sure all those stations are manned properly.

Jerry Green (33:41):

We have to make sure everybody has clarity on those stations because if not, you know, they can put the wrong part on or something like that. And, and then we get a completely, uh, you know, really inferior product at the end. Well, we, we can do the same thing in our business so easily. And that’s where so many people struggle on this. So I really look at this as this overall assembly line approach. How can we create that type environment, but doing it through real estate? And by doing that, the cool thing about it is we realize that you can dial this up or dial it down, whatever you wanna do, you can take it to that level, but it’s understanding that this truly is a business. And you’ve gotta get that mindset right out of the gate. And the sooner you can get that, the sooner you’re gonna be able to scale this. And it just, it, it’ll change your world. It’ll, it’ll completely change everything as you know yourself too, Reed, as you’re adding more and more of this to your business currently.

Reed Goossens (34:38):

Yep. No, one of the things that I think is tangible at it, I forgot who, who mentioned this, but they talk, um, I do this every year. I try and do this chart. Um, so there’s, there’s, it’s a combination. I’m gonna talk about two things. One’s called 24 Assets by Dan Priestley. It’s a book, if you haven’t read it, please read it. It’s no matter what the business is, it, it, it, it takes stock of the assets you have in the business. Everything from contracts to systems to documentation, and it just go, makes you, you know, stop and realize what, what, what what you have in the business today and what you need to work on, right? The other thing, I I, I, and I didn’t make this up myself, but I, I copied it from someone, I forget who I copied it from. And it’s essentially, it’s a, it’s a, it’s an x x and Y access.

Reed Goossens (35:20):

And I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, Jerry X being, uh, the, sorry, the y axis being, um, moves the needle in the business and the, the x access, meaning enjoyment personally wise, right? Mm-hmm. . And what you end up doing is create four quadrants. So the top, think of a, think of a graph, like the top right hand corner is black time, right? High moves the business in a, in a, in a big way, but you also personally enjoy it closer to the X access, uh, to the y axis is it moves the business, but you least enjoy it, right? And we call that the blue time. And I would, you know, put that the assembly line in that sort of box right below, like, right, right near the, the lowest, you know, use of your time where it’s, you don’t like it and it doesn’t move the business a lot.

Reed Goossens (36:03):

It might be some administration stuff, maybe it’s accounting’s important, but it’s not necessarily, might not necess you love to do it. So, and then you’ve got that spread time and then you’ve got the green time, which maybe necessarily might move the business a lot, but it really high and personal enjoyment. So things that I like to do, surfing, right, going, exercising, meditating, that helps me as a leader. It may not necessarily move the business well, it will, but it also helps me have, have the right mindset. So there’s black time, blue time, red time, green time. I don’t know if you do anything like that. But what I, what I found from doing that exercise is actually you’re then creating roles and responsibilities and potentially positions in each of those boxes and quadrants, because particularly in the blue and the red time, because there, there may not be low value in as a visionary that you may necessarily like, Hey, I don’t like this part of the business. I, I need to go and identify that and then go and hire someone for it. Any any thoughts or comments on that?

Jerry Green (36:55):

No, I love that. I, I, I’ve, I’ve heard of that. I’ve, uh, I haven’t applied that, but I some similar techniques to that. But I’d love that side of things. I think that’s vitally important. And we, we look at, you know, something else that’s really helped us a lot too is, and, and some of you, uh, looking at this and maybe you’re in the position where you’re just starting to grow your business. I, I always look at, I kind of break it down to like four pillars. And I, and I keep it real simple when it comes to this. Number one, I look at the first pillar, I look at a revenue goal for your business because a lot of people say, well, I can’t, you know, I, I wanna do this for charity. I wanna do this nonprofit. And I, regardless, you gotta have money to operate .

Jerry Green (37:40):

So, so, you know, we all know that. So number one, understand your revenue goal. Number two, take some time. The second pillar of that is on this, is to reverse engineer that number. What does that really look like? Cuz you see a lot of things, you know, Reed, we’ve both been around this a while, where people go out there and they’ll say, Hey, I, you know, you can make, you know, a million dollars a year, whatever in real estate. And, but, but how do you really do that? How do you really get there? Right? And I think that’s such a missing gap a lot of times. So one of the things we do with a lot of our students is do that. We go through and we actually show them these four pillars and we make ’em do it. And then we say, okay, now let’s reverse engineer that.

Jerry Green (38:21):

How do we really get there? What does that kp look like? What is, you know, what what, you know, what is the actions that we’re gonna have to take to receive this particular result? And we designed something too that, um, and actually I learned this from, a friend of mine took a company to over 300 million a year in revenue. It was, it wasn’t in real estate, it was outside real estate. But one thing he designed was what we call success formulas for every single team member and every single team member understood exactly what their numbers were, but more importantly, how it affected everybody’s else’s numbers and the overall target for the company. So very important to understand that. So we created a one page success formula worksheet that we use, and all our team members use this, and I, and I have my students do this too.

Jerry Green (39:11):

So that’s the second pillar. Then we look at the third pillar, which has been, uh, pretty cool to watch. A lot of people, you know, never really think about this, is we make ’em all lay out an accountability chart. Even if it’s a position where some of ’em come in and go, I’m a solopreneur, I’m just doing everything. But when’s the last time you really looked at what all you’re doing, what you know, what are you really do? Because you, you know how it is re we all get in the routine and we’re doing all this, and then we’re running so quick on the hamster wheel, we don’t get a chance to look at this stuff. So we lay it all in accountability chart. Then we start realizing kind of like we’re looking and say, well, I don’t really like doing this, right? And kind of the blues, the reds and all that.

Jerry Green (39:53):

And we start laying that out and then it becomes really clear to them. So that’s the third pillar that we lay out. And then the fourth pillar is we actually implement tracking slash KPIs in place. And what we’ve noticed when people do this and we hold them to this, it will literally, we can take somebody’s company and completely transform it. Where, you know, it’s like I’ve had a lot of students that I work with, I, we work with them over like a 12 month period of time and we’ll take ’em where they’re a solopreneur and, uh, we have some guys outta Canada went from solopreneur and by the end of 12 months they were at 12, uh, employees and approaching 4 million in revenue. And, and it’s all about understanding that if you build this right, we can build a production process that creates repeatable, oh, you know, we do repeatable actions and it creates repeatable results and we can know we can scale that.

Jerry Green (40:53):

And so that’s one of the things we look at as that four pillars, everybody to get clear on that because then we can identify what’s going on. And then, you know, now we got, if you think about it, we’ve got the data component. We’ve got, you know, true targets. We understand how to get to those targets and we understand what the team looks like, even if the, you’re a solopreneur and we start understanding what are the things we need to take off your plate, the ones you hate to do, right. Or you’re not good at.

Reed Goossens (41:22):

No, it’s, that’s exactly right. And I’d love how you have come to the point where you’ve broken down into the four pillars and it’s very similar to the Gant chart that I was looking at. But, but I, I think a lot of people would, would benefit from maybe telling, um, where people could go to, to find out more about some of the trainings that you, you, you offer.

Jerry Green (41:39):

Yeah, absolutely. Reed so one of the best places to go, guys, it’s just, uh, one, just go to my website. It’s, uh, thejerrygreen.com Okay? Real simple. Thejerrygreen.com. You can go there, check out my website. I have, uh, events going on. Like I say, we got one coming up in April and we do about four or five of those a year that are in our office. It’s a two day, what we call our real estate systems and operations training. And it doesn’t matter if you’re fixed and flipping buying the holding, uh, we’ve had people from doing land to multi-family, everything. And we come in and we, we have a lot of times, uh, COOs come in or people that are wanting to build teams and we, we show them how we’ve created a real business system with the real estate side. And also you guys can follow me on, uh, social media, you know, it’s, uh, just look up Jerry Green out of, um, Dayton, Ohio area, Germantown, Ohio, and look at that. Or on Instagram at, uh, Doug Jerry Green. So, pretty simple. Love

Reed Goossens (42:37):

It. Yeah, love it my friend. Look, I could talk to you for hours about this cause it’s something that as an, as a former engineer, like my, my mind goes to breaking things apart, , and then, and then putting it back together again. Um, but at the end of every show, like to dive into the top five investing tips, you ready to get into it? Yeah,

Jerry Green (42:51):

Let’s do it, man,

Reed Goossens (42:52):

Mate, question number one is what’s the daily habit you practice to, to keep on track towards your goals?

Jerry Green (42:58):

Ooh, daily habit of, uh, let’s see. Okay, so it’s supposed to be a lightning round. So , I, I I would say the biggest thing, uh, that really helps me is actually meditation.

Reed Goossens (43:08):

Mm-hmm. Yep. I would a hundred percent agree with that. Meditation is completely, it allows you to slow down at the beginning of the day before you turn on your phone. Yeah. Before I turn on the emails and have other people’s problems bombard you, you can just take a little bit of a moment to, it takes time and patience and, and, and practice to get it, well, to get it to the point where you, you’re doing it, but I notice that, I dunno if you are the same way, if I don’t do it of a morning, my day’s off like’s something about,

Jerry Green (43:33):

Yeah. It just calms me down. And, uh, I always, there’s a great book fight in with, I, I’ve studied on that, called Slowing down to the Speed of Life. Mm-hmm. , so

Reed Goossens (43:43):

Awesome, awesome stuff. All right, well, question number two is, who’s been the most influential person in your career to date?

Jerry Green (43:50):

I would say Robert Allen.

Reed Goossens (43:52):

Robert Allen. Gotcha. Question number three is, in your business, what’s the most influential tool? Now when I say tool, it could be a physical tool, like a phone or a journal, or it could be a piece of software that you just can’t run the business without. What is it?

Jerry Green (44:08):

Tool-wise? I would say that, uh, I would look at our dashboard on our crm because I,

Reed Goossens (44:14):

What CRM do

Jerry Green (44:15):

Use, uh, we just, we just use, um, uh, podium. That’s all we, we’ve customized it and we use it that way. And, but what I look off of is, I, I, I look at everything on the dashboard read, it’s all about the dashboard,

Reed Goossens (44:28):

All about the dashboard, all about, you know, driving that car, driving that airplane, driving that train, you know, as we mentioned before. So getting into that dashboard. Uh, question number four is in one sentence, what’s been the biggest failure in your career and what’d you learn from that failure?

Jerry Green (44:41):

Well, biggest failure, I think one of the biggest failures that I look at to this date was not in the beginning stages of not knowing my numbers, not knowing my numbers. And it’s come to the point, Reed, where now I have daily KPIs that are provided for me. So it’s understanding those numbers and how they really affect your business. Does it cost me probably close to about 2 million mistakes on that?

Reed Goossens (45:21):

Yeah. If you, what’s saying, if you don’t tracking it, if you, if you know, if it ain’t measured, you can’t track it. And if you can’t track it, you don’t know the performance of how the business is going. So I completely love that. Last question, mate. You’ve already said this, but where can people reach you to continue the conversation that would be in your sphere? Where do they go? Just remind the listeners again.

Jerry Green (45:36):

Yeah, so the guy who’s number one, you can reach me at thejerrygreen.com Okay. Just, uh, through my website there you can find about events e and if you wanna reach out to me, just reach out to me on social media. Um, you can follow me on Jerry Green on Facebook, uh, and Ray than Dayton, Ohio area. Uh, usually I pop right up or on Instagram at, uh, Jerry Green. I’d be glad to answer any questions, help you out any way I can.

Reed Goossens (46:01):

Awesome stuff, my friend. Look, I wanna thank you so much for jumping on the show today. I just wanna reflect a few things I took away from today’s show. First and foremost, thank you for being so vulnerable with the loss early in your life. And as we mentioned earlier, like people have gone through tragedy and it’s, it’s helped shape the way and the, the humans that they are today, and obviously losing significant others in their life is, you know, you don’t wish that upon anyone. Um, but, but it, but it is a challenge that life does throw at us and we have to, you know, speak about it, but also acknowledge that it, that that how you work through it in those times of grief. And, and, and we spoke, we spoke about building, you know, your life around that you don’t ever lose the tragedy, you only lose the grief.

Reed Goossens (46:36):

You just build the life around it. So thank you for very much for, for just being vulnerable. Um, the, the other thing I really took away from today’s show is obviously, you know, the, the visionary and, and, and setting up your four pillars, the revenue goal, the success formulas, the accountability chart, and then the tracking of the KPIs. I think they’re extremely important for a lot of people to understand as they build businesses, as they listen to this show. To be a business owner doesn’t mean you need to be in the business and running it from day to day and being the bottleneck. It’s about setting up these systems and stepping back to understand, to allow the business to move forward. And I think you, you realize that with, with the, with that lady who, who joined you, you know, 10 years ago as an assistant, she, we worked her way up. So again, thank you so much for jumping on today. Show. Did I leave anything out there,

Jerry Green (47:18):

Rita? No, I, I just, I appreciate, uh, the time to be able to share and uh, I just, you know, the main thing I will share with any viewers is, look guys, the only way that you’re gonna make a difference on this is I, I, I think the key thing is one awareness and then the second thing is to take massive action on this. That’s the only way it’s gonna change. It’s not gonna change any other way, is you gotta take the massive action and you just gotta accept it where you’re at. And if you want to, uh, make this into a real company, you can take it to any level you want.

Reed Goossens (47:49):

I completely agree. Look mate, thank you again so much for jumping on the show. Enjoy the rest of your week and we’ll chat very, very

Jerry Green (47:54):

Soon. Thanks buddy. Appreciate it.

Reed Goossens (47:56):

Well, there you have it now, the cracking episode jam pack with some incredible advice from Jerry if you are interested to learn more about him. Head over to thejerrygreen.com or follow him on Instagram or Facebook, all over social media. He’s got a lot of cracking tools and advice and training tips that you can use in your everyday business to get yourself out of that business, right? Because that’s what we’re all about here. We’re not trying to create ourselves another job. We’re trying to actually grow a sustainable business that’s gonna be around even if we’re here or not. So I wanna thank you all for taking some time outta your dad to tune in, to continue to grow your financial iq. The easiest way to give back to this show, if you do like this show, is to give it a five star review on iTunes, and we’re gonna do it all again next week’s. Remember, be bold, be brave, and go give life a crack.