Shakin' Hands
Welcome to 'Shakin' Hands,' the podcast where entrepreneurship meets fascinating stories from the most intriguing minds today. From proven business practices to groundbreaking ideas that challenge the status quo, Shakin' Hands' is not just about the handshake that seals a deal but about the shared experiences and values that unite us all. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner, or someone who loves a good story about overcoming odds, Shakin' Hands' promises to deliver compelling content that shakes up the conventional and celebrates the extraordinary.
Tune in to Shakin' Hands' where leaders, thinkers, and doers come to share, inspire, and, most importantly, connect. Let's shake hands with the world, one story at a time.
Host: Jack Moran
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Shakin' Hands
Ep. 35 | Value Beyond the Deal - Jason Wang
Jason Wang, owner of Sonder Home Team and Sonder Capital, joins Shakin's Hands to talk about his journey from realtor to real estate investor. They explore building wealth through equity and creative deal structuring, with Jason emphasizing mindset shifts and the value of authentic relationships. He also shares the "lighthouse" approach to inspiring others by leading through action.
Jason Wang
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Welcome to Shaking Hands, where we provide the platform for entrepreneurs and thought leaders to share their stories in order to hopefully influence others to get out of the rat race and chase their own dreams. If you have any recommendations for guests or questions that you want to be asked, please don't hesitate to reach out. Anyways, if you enjoy the podcast, please like, comment, subscribe and share in order to keep the podcast growing. Otherwise, I'm your host, Jack Baron and this is Shaking Hands. So what's the deal with, what do you got going on right now? So right now the main thing that we're focused on is our real estate sales team. And then our real estate investing company. So previously, I was just doing residential real estate, built up a big brokerage. You know, we had 48 real estate agents. We're doing a lot of business. But I was always trying to figure out how to take off the realtor hat and put on the investor hat. And in order to make a bigger impact on our people and our company. And so where we're focused right now is really on building out the investment side of things, flipping real estate, buying multifamily land development and at the same time teaching our real estate agents on the team how to get involved in those deals, not just as a realtor brokering a transaction, but actually by providing different values in order to either get equity in the deal or to get other upside down rather than just, say, earning a commission. It's that kind of creative deal. Structures. Yeah. When we do creative deal structure. But even on the the noncreative side of let's say we're doing the flip. Well, okay, how can you get a little piece of equity in the flip? Or if we're doing a BR where we're buying it and renovating it to refinance it, how do you get a piece of that equity in the deal? Whether it's through maybe you're underwriting the deals, maybe you're finding the deal, maybe you're sourcing capital for the deals. Like there's a lot of different ways to get involved in investment, real estate. And so that's what we're really focused on is teaching our team like, hey, don't just be commission minded. How do I earn my commission? By doing a deal? But how do I actually get equity and build wealth long term so that one day, you know, when you're 40, 56 years old, you're not still having to go out and pound the pavement every day to pay the bills, but you've actually built wealth along the way. Yeah, I definitely want to pick your brain on some of those, like, models. Like that's cool. First though, like, first of all, what's the name of your business? So we have Sonder home team. That's the real estate team. And then we have Saundra Capital. That's the investment company. Okay. Sweet. And how long have you been doing this work? I've been doing real estate for going on, seven years now, so I got started June 2018. Did just traditional realtor for the first 3 or 4 years, started building a team, and I launched a brokerage with some partners. Then that split up and then now, building it on my own. Yeah. So talk about that transition from, like, just being a broker into, like, doing your own thing. So the, the biggest part of the transition was, you know, you're going from being a sales person, high performing sales person to actually being a leader, a business owner. Right. You've you've stepped into a whole new level of personal growth. Because being a realtor or selling solar or any of the other sales jobs. Right. It's pretty straightforward. I mean, you pound the pavement, you practice your skills, you go out and you close deals, right? But when you transition from being a salesperson to saying, a business owner or a team leader, now you have so many other things that were never taught at least to me, of how do you lead someone? How do you hire people? How do you train people? How do you onboard people? How do you manage the, the KPIs and the metrics for a group of people, not just yourself? There's so much more to it. So the transition is still happening. So whether you're sure sales will be happening for a long time, but it's just a new level of revenue really resonates with people for their value systems. Through marketing your job outside of your number one job, it's still the same doing your job. And I think a lot of I'd like to get into some things that go from being a salesperson to a business owner, and they now get lost in all the other things that need to get done, and they start driving revenue so well, I can't lead generator, I can't drive revenue because I got to focus on this thing, or I gotta focus on hiring this person. I gotta focus on this. But the most important lesson I learned is that, you know, you got to make sure you wake up every day and figure out how to make the cash register ring, how to go out and find business and create business, because that's what is going to keep the lights on. And that's what's going to allow you to afford to actually build the business. So when it comes to driving revenue in real estate, you know, obviously not. It's not going to be the same as my business in my industry. Where are the areas that you need to invest the most time in order to drive revenue? Is it digital? Is it, you know, out cold outreach? Is it just focusing on inbound leads like like what have you found. So you have two options really. You can either drive revenue with time or you can drive revenue with money. Right. So it really is going to depend on where where is your starting point. Do you have access to two 300,$400,000 or, you know, are you kind of bootstrapping it and you don't have a bunch of capital to use? Right. And or maybe it's a mix of both. Right. But for a lot of people that might be watching this, they probably don't have 200 grand, nor are they willing to go spend the 200 grand. That's the other key. Even if they have it, most people are scared to spend the money. So we're going to look at the time aspect of how to drive revenue. It's relationships. It's talking to people. It's whether you're talking to people on social media. And you know, when you post a video and put it on social, you're talking to people. Whether you slide in their DMs, send them a LinkedIn message, you're sending them emails, you're making phone calls to them. You're going up and down King Street introducing yourself to people right. Knocking on doors. The the ultimate form to me of driving revenue. I think whether it's real estate or even anything else, it's going to be the relationships. It's going to be being what we call active. In your approach versus passive live passive meaning you put a sign in the ground, or you put a billboard up and you wait for people to call you. You're in the passive approach. There's nothing wrong with it, but usually you don't have as much control over it and it costs money. To do the passive approach, you have to run an ad and then wait for people to sign up for it versus when you're active, you can control your activities every day and actually go predictably. Find new business, create new business, you know, nurture relationships, whatever it may be. So how are you? I don't think we've ever talked about this on the podcast. I think this is something that's important. And I, I'm curious to hear your take on it. How do you identify? So if you're actively doing sales, how do you identify opportunities like say you do walk into a business owners office? And you've never met that person before? How do you bridge that gap between like, you know, just starting that relationship and move that into a transaction? Yeah, I think it's focusing on the human, not focusing on the transaction, not focusing on what are you trying to get out of it, not focusing on, you know, how do I make money? It's like focusing on who is this person. You know what is their life, what's going on in their life, what are their goals? What are they trying to accomplish? Right. Understanding what their overall situation is. So whenever I'm meeting somebody, whether it's for a real estate sale, for investment, anything at all, I always want to find out, like, who is this person? What are they about? What's going on in their life? And then at some point in time, I'll find an area where I can help them. And usually it's outside of the thing that helps me. And then that's always my goal. And it's a little bit more of a longer term play of just say like, how do I go find a sale today? Right? But I think as you elevate as a business person, you realize that, you know, the relationship is what's really valuable. So my goal is to find out, like what's going on in this person's life and how can I add value to them, how can I help them? And then from there, you know, I believe that if you do that enough times, the the goodwill that spread, the impact that you've made of being a giver and looking out for other people, at some point people will start to find ways to help you. And so I always tell people like help other people without trying to help yourself necessarily, and soon enough you'll find people going, hey, what can I do to help you? What? Jason, what can I do to help you? You know, you've helped me out. Like, they'll they'll be looking for ways to help you. And I think that's the ultimate level of sales of, like, I need to go help myself. I need to go close a deal today to the point where I've got this army of people that I've made, I've added value to that are all looking for ways to now be of service to me and to give back to me. So you're doing like a needs assessment approach? Yeah. What would that needs assessment look like in real estate. Like what are the types of questions that you'd be asking the client to identify that opportunity? Yeah. So in like a real estate sale. Right. It's more of a basic sale. And in my opinion, it's you're finding out like, you know, what's their situation. What do they like about their situation? What do they not like about their situation. What's their ideal situation. What's the thing that's standing in the way of the ideal situation? What's their timeline? What are the external factors in their life? What are their what's their financial situation like? Right. Once again, finding out the whole picture of things. It's more of a consultative selling versus just like, oh, do you want to buy or sell a house? Okay, cool. Let's go help you buy a house or let's sell your house. It's more of like, okay, what's the full situation here? What are you trying to achieve? What's standing in the way? What are your financial options here. Like what's going on? And then let's create a path for you to be able to actually accomplish that. And I think, like you know, we've all seen the sales person that spent so much time talking and pitching that. And if they're not listening, they're not picking up what I call the black swan, that one piece of information that's going to make the person make the change. So, you know, that is a very high level approach. What do you think the key is to building relationships with? The key principles of a good relationship. So the key principles of a good relationship, number one is transparency and vulnerability. You can't have a relationship if you're not vulnerable, like, if you're not willing to share things, even if the other party is sharing something, if the other person is sharing vulnerable things with you, or being transparent with you or telling you about their life, and you're not reciprocating that that person has more of a relationship with you than you do with them. And so what I've learned over the years of even personal development is that true relationships come from being able to be vulnerable with people being able to be transparent, because until you are, you're actually like, there's actually a wall between because the person's in relationship with somebody that they don't know, right? So whatever facade you might put on for the world, whatever, whatever you kind of show the world, is what people might think. They're in relationship with you, but it's not a real relationship until there's transparency and vulnerability at some level. And then the next stage of of, nurturing and building relationships, I would say, is finding ways to serve them and to be there for them in the way that they want somebody to be there for them or want to to serve them. And so a lot of I think building great relationships is actually going out of your own way when somebody needs you, if they want to talk, if they need help, whatever it is, being able to go, okay, this is inconvenient for me. It's not I'd rather go do this thing, but I'm going to do this thing because I care about you and because I care about where you're going or what's going on in your life. So I would say those are the two things for me that would be at the core of building a relationship is transparency, vulnerability. And then actually going out of your way to serve the other person and take care of them, whichever way it is that they want to be, you know, taken care of. And it's kind of counterintuitive, right? Like it seems so apparent when you've experienced the success of, like, you know, acting that way and it's just like the right thing to do. But a lot of people, it is counterintuitive in business, like they want to be self-serving. Yeah. You said you've done a lot of personal growth. Where do you see people that, you know, maybe new people that enter your team or people that you see doing business? Where do you think there's the most room for growth? And people? It's always in the mindset. It's always in the mindset. We just did a training. We do our team trainings every Thursday where we all get together and go through a training and, what I did on this last team training is I actually went back to when I was 18 years old, and then when I was 21 years old, 22 years old, and found my old journals where I was tracking what I was doing, what I was going through, and I took like 15 journal entries where it I showed what I was doing every minute of the day, what I was going through, where my head was at, and the initial focus of the training was to dissect the activities that I was doing that made me successful. But what I realized very quickly when I was going through that with them, that it wasn't the activities that I did that made me successful, it was my mindset growth at the time that allowed me to do those activities in a certain way, consistently for, a long enough period of time to achieve success. And so then rather than just diving down like, okay, I made this many contacts, I practice this, I learned this. We really focused on where my mind was changing from 18 to 22 years old and how I was developing my mindset, how I was improving my mindset, and the things that I was doing to actually have a very strong and productive mindset. What's a bad mindset that you commonly see and then what is the ideal mindset? The at the most basic form, I would say it comes down to a fixed versus growth mindset. So one of the first, you know, personal development books I read was, mindset by Carol DeWitt. And she breaks down that there's people with fixed mindsets, there's people with growth mindset. A fixed mindset says this is just the way that I am. This is what I'm good at. This is what I'm not good at. These are my weaknesses. These are my strengths. This is who I am. It just is what it is. I can't do anything about it. I wish I was better, but nothing I can do. Whereas a growth mindset says, hey, this might be who I am today, or my level of, strengths or weaknesses today, but I have control over that and I can change that with the right mindset and with the right disciplines and with the right practices. And so I think at the most simple level of generalizing people, a lot of people have fixed mindsets where maybe they go start something and if they're not good at it right away, they think, oh, I'm just not good at this. Maybe I should go find something I'm good at when the reality is, sure, you might be a little bit more naturally talented at one thing versus the other, but in general, you're probably going to suck at almost everything new that you go and do. And I think a lot of people aren't mentally prepared for that or don't have the expectations of like, I am going to suck when I start this. It is going to take a while for me to get good at it. But that's the process is you're supposed to suck in the beginning of anything that's worthwhile doing. And so a lot of people though, they just have the fixed mindset of like, let me go try to get into real estate, see if I'm good at it. They don't listen to a coach. They don't follow a course. Like, let me just see if I'm I'm good at this. And that's almost always a recipe for failure. Have you ever heard of, Urban Meyer's book Above the Line? I've heard of it. I've not dug into it, so I like his mindset framework. I use this a lot at my company. He has two mindsets, you know, to break down, similar to the one you said he has above the line behavior and below the line behavior. So, you know, above the line people are going to be the more successful people. Below the line. People are the you know, people who are okay with mediocrity is what he would say. And the the way that he signifies or signals that someone has below the line behavior is he calls it BCD. People who blame complain and defend. So they're externalizing, that blame. They're not taking the owner. They're the responsibility internally and therefore they're not growing. And when you have that mindset, which is a very common mindset, and you're externalizing that blame, you really don't have control of your outcomes. So he has a formula. It's event plus response equals outcome. So you don't have control of the event that happens like some adversity that gets presented to you in your life. The below the line behavior behavior would be your response would be to blame that event, you know, complain about that event, or defend, you know, your position or like whatever. And then you don't have control of that outcome. But if your response is to be above the line and to take it into your own control and say, hey, what could I have done better? How can I change to change the, to react to that event? Then you're putting that outcome in your control. Yeah, I love that. And it reminds me of when I was 18 and in those journals I was mentioning, I shared where I was, I want to try. I think it was the pivotal point where I became a, I went from being a below the line person to above the line person on that day, and it was through assessing where I was at, all the excuses I had been making, all the reasons why I wasn't, you know, achieving at the level that I wanted to. And I heard a, I heard a quote talking about the captain of a ship that went out to sea and it was crazy storm, crazy waters. And it was just insane out there. Right. And, you know, on one hand, you have the captain who doesn't make it back safely, right? He ends up getting picked up. The ship's destroyed, all the all the is destroyed. And he blames that on the seas. Right. And then you have the other captain who made it back to the harbor and goes, man, the waves were absolutely insane out there today. But I held it together. I did what I needed to do and and by the grace of God, I made it back here today. Right. And that was a point where I decided, like, okay, I'm going to be the captain of my ship, that no matter what, no matter how great the excuses are, like, I'm never going to blame things on external happenings. I'm going to take ownership of my life as being the captain, and I'm going to actually make it where I want to go, regardless of what's happening out there. And that was I share that because I think a lot of people out there might be watching this and in the fixed mindset go, oh shit, maybe I am below the line, but they won't have enough belief in themselves to change that. They won't. They'll have the fixed mindset of, oh fuck, that's just who I am. I'm just meant to be mediocre. And so I'm here to share that. Like, I was below the line, you know, I was a 100% a below the line, you know, thinker blamed external blamed every external thing. And then one day it flipped for me and I just decided, like, I'm not going to make excuses anymore. I'm not going to blame external events. I'm not going to blame my upbringing. I'm not going to blame my financial situation. I'm not going to blame the fact that I didn't graduate high school or didn't go to college, or any of the all the reasons I could have blamed for not becoming my best self and achieving my potential. I just said, I'm just going to take extreme ownership of this and take control of my life. So for anybody out there watching this, I think it's really important to understand. Like, you can change those things, like who you are today does not have to be who you are in 12 months. It just takes looking inward, writing down the things, looking in the mirror honestly with yourself, and then making a decision to attack those weaknesses and make a change. Yeah, that's really interesting. You repeat it and you repeat it a couple times. I decided, and I think that this is an area that I'm very interested in and I don't have the answers to yet, is like, I know as a leader, you know, when I'm working with people, my job is to get them to make a decision of like how they want to live and like what choices they want to make. But what I haven't come up with the answer yet is how do you get how do you catalyze that decision in yourself or with others from someone to to go from that below the line behavior to the above the line behavior, like that's a principle that I'm interested in both to be able to help others. But also how can someone do it for themselves, like because there's a lot of people that are like, I want to be like this, but they haven't made that decision to change. So I'll, I'll share a couple of kind of, one liners that I've learned over the years that have helped me through leadership. The first one is that our job is not to in our businesses, our job is not to develop talent, right. Our job is to find talent and and get them to work with us to take their talent to the next level. And then it's like, well, what about all I want to help all the people who aren't talented become talented? Well, you don't hire those people. You become the lighthouse, not the tugboat. The tugboat, which which is what you might be doing or what I was doing is we're going out and we're trying to, like, rescue people and convince them that they should change. And tell them why they should make decisions better, why they should live their life differently. And we're out being a tugboat when we should just be a lighthouse, which is what we're doing right here, where we're not actually like trying to force people through this podcast to make a decision. We're not trying to, like, handhold them through that convincing of like, this is what you should want for your life and this is how you should improve in doing this. Now we're just having a conversation, being a lighthouse. People lead by example. Yeah, people will watch this and then they will if they want to, they will come to the lighthouse. But we're not going to go out into the the choppy waters and try to save every person that's out there because we can't. Right. So it's better to be the lighthouse, let people come to you when they're ready, right, to make that change. And then that's when you can help them take it to the next level. But I had to learn that lesson because, man, when I was starting out and I'm being a young team leader and trying to develop people and it's like, yeah, you gotta you're trying to convince people to do things better. You're trying to convince them to want more for their lives. You're trying to convince people to think bigger, whatever it is. And what I just learned is like, the only way to do it is to inspire people like you. There's no like, there's no sense in trying to make somebody want something for themselves that they don't have a burning desire to have that or to change that. So you just have to do the things like post these podcast, right, and let people see it. And then once they have the burning desire, then it's like, all right, let's work. Let's, let's actually take this to a new level. Yeah, that's a really powerful metaphor. Like, I've definitely been guilty. And still to this day I'm guilty of doing that. And it is very draining and can be demotivating when you can't catalyze that change. It's like an uphill battle. So that's a really good point. So you talked about like you were doing a bunch of journaling. Is that something that you would say is like a good habit to get into? And then I want to go after that into like what are good early habits to develop, to be successful or to be an entrepreneur? Yeah, I think journaling was one of the most important things that I started doing. My coach had me do it and was very strict about it. Why is that important? Because journaling can give you a lot of the answers of the problems you'll face down the road, and the reason is that the problems that you'll face down the road a lot of times in business, in life, will be patterns and there will be hints through your journals. Right? And so a lot of times what people do is they keep everything in their heads, and so they can't actually pay attention to the patterns of their life or the external influences or their activities and how their activities influence their business or their career or their relationships. Right. So by journaling, you get all the stuff that's in your head, you get it on paper, then you can observe it and you can start to understand it and track it, which then will allow you to down the road. Let's say you're you're growing, you're growing, you're growing, you're growing. And then you start to go down right in one area of your life. Well, then look at your journal from the days where you were growing, and then look at your journal from when things are going down and find the missing pieces. And almost always there will be something you started doing that you weren't doing before. There might be a relationship, there might be an activity, whatever it is or there was something you were doing before that you stopped doing because you started having success. And maybe you said, oh, I don't need to go do this, these hard activities anymore because I've got the results, not realizing that, well, you have your results from your past activities, right? Or maybe your sales are down and you've stopped working out right. So whenever I'm facing problems in my life, I aggressively hunt down the solution to the problem. A lot of people, they have problems in their lives and they'll spend like three minutes crying about it and then they're like, fuck, I'll just deal with it versus with me. Like when I have an actual problem. Like I need to figure out, like, why am I having this problem in my life, in my business, whatever it is. And when you're tracking with your journals, usually you can you can effectively solve your own problems just by observing. Yeah, that's I've never heard that take on it before, like you're doing basically like a data compilation for yourself. So you can analyze trends in yourself to make decisions on yourself. That's pretty cool. What is the, what is the actual practice of journaling? I know, like people struggle with like, okay, I got a journal. What do I write? Do you have like a process or a framework that you use utilize? I think the simplest way to break it down to give somebody a framework would be like, what did you do today? Who did you interact with today? What did you learn today? What did you do well, today? And what did you not do well today? And if you can keep it that simple every day, you'll have a pretty good snapshot of of what's going on in your life. And if you're not able to analyze it, then it gives you something to bring to other people, like your mentors or people that you trust in your life to give you advice or guidance and say, here's what I've been up to. These are the people I hang out with. These are the activities that I do. This is what I'm doing. Well, this is what I'm not doing well, right? This is what I'm doing on a daily, day to day basis. Can you help me figure out why I don't have the life that I want, or why I'm having the problems that I'm having? And then once again, it just gives you something very actionable to look at, observe, find patterns and start to to solve the problems in your life. Yeah, it's a really cool framework, like super good insights. And definitely that's something that I should implore. What other rituals do you. Adopt? Try to find a filler word there. I don't even know if implores or word is it. But, Anyway, what other rituals do you do? You use? Like journaling, that you find to be beneficial and other people might utilize the, the number. I would say the number one thing and that I've done over the last couple of years is the cold plunges and oh, really integrating cold plunges. No really into my life. Yeah. They, they help with so many different aspects. My energy throughout the day is higher. My discipline throughout the day is higher. My overall outlook of my life, my business, everything that's going on is typically better and improved. My discipline, I mean, it's helped me in so many different ways, even just from the standpoint of every day. I remember when I first heard that Tony Robbins does some every day, and I was like, there's that guy's psycho. Like how the hell do you get out of bed every day and go into a cold plunge? That's insanity. And so I started with, like, cold showers and then periodically cold plunges. And then, about a year ago, I was going through a pretty, pretty tough time in my life. And I committed to doing them every single day, no matter what. And when I started doing them every single day, that just allowed me to strengthen the part of the mind that doesn't want to do the hard thing. That will give you the long term benefits, right? So every day when I do the cold plunge, it's just as difficult as it was the day before. I don't want to do it just as much as the day before. Like it's the last thing that I want to do. It's very uncomfortable and it sucks while I'm doing it, but it's 3 to 5 minutes of deep, uncomfortable, pain for an amazing rest of my day and potentially the rest of my life as I keep doing them right. And so just strengthen that part of the mind that allows me to do the things that I don't necessarily want to do that will positively impact my life. It's like a discomfort tolerance workout, and we obviously have so much discomfort that we encounter, and entrepreneurship. And that's what makes or breaks a lot of people. Some people succumb to that discomfort and turn back because they can't handle it. Yeah. So it's interesting that there are like workouts to get better at dealing with those situations. Now is such a fundamental piece of, you know, being successful in accomplishing your goals. Is there any other rituals or anything like that that you can think of? Journaling, cold, plunging? Do you do any like affirmations or anything like that? No. When I was coming up, I did affirmations. And, and I think our affirmations kind of help in the beginning when you're building confidence and you're, you're, you know, in the beginning you have to have pretty much delusional confidence. You have to create it because you don't have any actual reason why you're so, you know, why you should go out and like, do take this risk and do all this stuff. You have no real like backing until you've done years of work and you have like actual confidence of like actually just I know what I'm doing and I know how to do it. And I now feel comfortable in the uncertainty or the things that I don't know and that I'm going to be able to handle them. Right. And so in the beginning I did affirmations, and I think those helped keep, keep me going and and building my mindset of who I was. But I think that, you know, once you get to a certain stage of kind of knowing who you are, you're affirmed there. Yeah, there's there's no like, I no longer need to convince myself of who I am, right? Right. Yeah. That's interesting. Look on it. When you. So let's back pilot a little bit. You said that you, it was a little bit different jumping from being just like a sales gladiator to leading your own team, starting your own business outside of. We talked about driving revenue. What are some other, like, key components to having a successful business and like things that you think are like a priority of your focus within the business? I think for me, you know, things are changing with AI systems, processes and, and, and all that stuff. But I would say still right now, like people are the most important thing, in a business, you know, if it's just you, you you really don't have a business, you're still self-image, Floyd, in my opinion. And so people are the most important thing to me. And that was one of the most difficult challenges for me was learning the the people side of things from a hiring standpoint and how to find talent, how to interview people, how to recruit people, how to get them onboarded and performing well. And so I think a lot of it boils down to the people component. And that's something that I've been really, really focused on over the last three years of how to be a good leader, not a boss, and how to, you know, create, a workplace where people are on a mission and people are working as a collective toward a common goal, and they're excited to be there. They're excited to perform their job and overcome the problems, and they're excited to see their coworkers. And that's been really important to me of just facilitating that community of people who are all very talented and have a good place to work. And it's not a toxic culture, because I think that most people out there, you know, like we've talked about escaping the rat race, right? But the reality is not everybody's going to escape the rat race, nor are they capable of handling what it takes to escape the rat race. And so for me, it's always been because I am very pro escaped the rat race. Right? I'm very pro helping people jump in entrepreneurship. And so for me, building a team, I've had to decide like, okay, for the people that come on board that aren't ever going to be entrepreneurs, period. No matter what, how do I create something where they have a similar level of fulfillment and autonomy, and ability to control their income control their time control, their results? Within the security of a company on a mission, with, with a collective group, and they don't have the same issues. That causes a lot of people to want to say, leave a job and go out on their own. Because I think that's, a big problem is not that, you know, working at W2 job is bad, but that most W2 jobs, the bosses suck, the compensation sucks, right? The schedule sucks, everything sucks about it. And so my a lot of my growth has been on how do I make it not suck? How do I, you know, make it where it's like, this really is awesome. And people can have flexibility and freedom to a degree where they're not locked in a 9 to 5, you know, corporate soul sucking job. And we've had to kind of like explain this on the podcast and like our mission, like not being that you have to be an entrepreneur and start your own business to be happy. It's like more like there's so many people out there that are legitimately just doing something that's not making a happy. There's I mean, I always said there's hunters and gatherers in the world, it's okay to be a gatherer, like, you don't have to be an entrepreneur. You can be fulfilled by working for someone else. But it's just important to understand, like what it is that is your purpose. And then chasing that purpose and that might be working for, you know, as a real estate agent at your company or, you know, as an erosion specialist at my company, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that's not what we're trying to, like, push on shaking hands is that you have to go start your own business. It's just like identifying like what is your true calling and then chasing that calling. But I, I want to unpack a couple things that you had said there. You started out with like recruiting, the importance of the focus on recruiting. And then, it transitioned into culture. Which culture has a big impact on recruiting? But let's start with recruiting first. What do you this is something, again, that I've dealt with as being, a difficult challenge to solve within building a company. What do you think the key principles are to team building in a startup? And recruiting good talent. The key principles I want to say I'm an expert recruiter. I've recruited a lot of people and I've developed a lot of people. But I'd still buy a face, so I'm probably not an expert. I'm definitely not an expert of recruiting. I think the the main thing is being very clear on what you want and in, in your business. Right. And so you have to ask yourself, like, do I want quantity or do I want quality, you know, do I want people who just show up at a certain time, leave at a certain time. And, and our relationship is during our one on ones at work. Or do I want to have more of people that, you know, we spend time with and there's more of a family culture, right. Because what ultimately it's your choice. But I think you do have to make a choice. Otherwise it's going to be a mess. And so what we've what we've worked on is identifying the type of people that we want that fit into the culture, and then being okay with turning down really talented people that don't fit into the culture. Because I think one person, especially if they're really talented, but if they don't fit into the culture, a lot of times can damage the group as a whole. And so I always look at what I'm doing kind of like, a sports team, right? It's it's you got to be good at your job. But the most important thing for somebody when they come on to a sports team is do they make the rest of the team better, right? Yeah. And so I think for a lot of people that might be wanting to recruit or build or, you know, attract talent, you got to decide what kind of people you want, what kind of culture that you want to have, how you want it to look, what your expectations are going to be of people, and then don't be afraid to. In fact, you, you you need to tell people the truth of what it's like when they come in. And that was a mistake that I made early in my years, was trying to sell people into my company, and then them coming in and being like, wow, you sold it really good. But there's a lot of like, things you left out here, and it's a little messy here and it's messy here. So now when I bring somebody in, I'm overly transparent. I'm like, I'm overly transparent about what we're going to expect. I'm overly transparent about my flaws as a leader that I'm working on. I'm overly transparent about the messes in the business that are happening, that way. When they come in, usually they're like, oh, it's not as bad as you've made it out to be. Okay, cool. But also, you know, I'm also testing for, you know, scaring people away. Like, I'd rather if somebody's going to be scared by the business, I don't want to waste my time trying to convince them to come in, and then they're going to leave, right? I rather just tell them the truth about, hey, here's where we're at. This is what we're going through. This is how it works. You know, this is the good, the bad, the ugly. Right? And then if they still want to come in now, I know that I have somebody, you know, that's that's going to be a good fit and what we've got going on. Yeah. So these are two super important lessons that I've both encountered. And you know, kind of the CliffsNotes that I'm getting is like taking the time to define that profile. Yeah. And then also setting up clear expectations with people. And you're going to save yourself a lot of time and heartache by doing that from the beginning set of them, figuring out down the road as you're starting to grow your business and it gets bigger, how do you manage your time so that you can manage the scale of the business? With time being a limited resource, I know you talked about KPIs before. Oh yeah. As you so I'm big on delegation, so I. I look at the different ways to get the highest output of my time. So for example, if I'm say coaching salespeople, right, rather than coaching one of them at a time on their sales skills, I'm going to coach them all together. Right? When I'm looking at activities that need to be done and things that need to be done, initiatives that need to be built out, I no longer look at them in the sense of how do I do this? I look at them in the sense of who's the best person to do this. So then my job simply becomes identifying who's the best person to grow this business or grow this area of the business. And then how do I attract that person, bring them in, and then effectively lead that person. Interesting. What do you think is the biggest piece of information that you know now that you wish you knew when you first embarked on this journey and starting your own business? It's so many. I mean, I just it's like it was it's been a lot of years of of eating shit, you know. Well, what's maybe what's the most recent that you've had. I think, I think it would have been on the, the leadership side of things. I think if I could have learned the importance of developing myself as a leader sooner and being better at hiring the right people and leading them, then I would have been so much further along and better off and I just, I had to spend so many years learning the leadership side of things and still am learning it, and learn how to hire an an assistant or, you know, an operations person or a marketer, or like I would just go out and hire anybody that would say yes to wanting to help me when I was like 20, 21 years old and be frustrated why it didn't work and why they didn't do the job, or how did I didn't know how to train them. I didn't know any of that. And so now that I'm looking back at it and I think about this a lot of like, okay, where can I help? Most entrepreneurs, especially new entrepreneurs, is, you know, now that I've failed so many times, I almost have a roadmap of like, okay, here's all the steps to follow. You know, here's all the things you need to learn. Here's all the things you need to practice in order to be a better leader that's capable of attracting people and developing them and and being a good leader for them. So we talked a lot about like. We talked a lot about like broad approaches to entrepreneurship and being successful at entrepreneurship. And sometimes I get more industry specific with people, based on, you know, what insights could be valuable to our audience. And I think that there's a lot of people that are interested in the real estate field. So I want to get into a little bit of industry specifics. My first question is like, for someone who is looking to get into real estate, at an early stage, at an infant stage, what are some easy opportunities in the real estate market that someone could start to participate in this business? I know, like, you know, I've heard of like wholesaling models and, and, those models. But I want to hear what your, insights are from what I've identified as the path to the most success. Predictably, with the least amount of risk. And I've seen it time and time again is the what's called like, say, or follow up specialist role. So a lot of the people that either I've developed or that I've seen develop into really, really successful either real estate agents, investors, whatever it may be, they started in an inside sales agent or follow up specialist role. And and the reason why this allows them to become so successful is because the most important thing in real estate, especially early on in the first couple of years, is being able to go find people who want to do business. And the the most predictable way to do that is by making outbound phone calls, right? You're developing your sales skills, you're developing your tenacity, your ability to overcome objections. Right. It's and it allows you to talk to the most amount of people. And so, in in those roles, your job is pretty much to either make cold calls or to follow up with old leads and then hand them off to somebody who can actually facilitate the deal. And so you get paid. Usually you get paid in this role, small base, small commission, but you're effectively getting paid to learn the most important skill in the game, which is being able to find deals. Like if you can find deals, you will always be okay financially. You don't need to know how to finance the deals. You don't even need to know how to sell the deals. You don't need to know anything else. If you know how to find deals, you'll be you will be more than okay in the real estate business, because there's plenty of other people out there who know how to do every other part of the puzzle. But making finding the deals is the hard work, right? Which means it's the most valuable thing. So finding money is easy. You know, putting together deals is easy. Selling deals is easy, but finding deals is probably the most difficult part, which makes it one of the most valuable, pieces of the puzzle in the real estate game. So what is that process for someone who is developing business? Like? What do they need to do? They pick up the phone, they reach out to exp people and and what is their objective on that phone call? Their objective is simply to identify an opportunity, identify a yes, I'd be open to selling in this time frame, this reason, for this reason and for this price. And and even if you're super new, like, I've got guys that I've developed where as soon as they of they, they were almost incapable of having a full conversation because they just didn't they didn't have developed social skills anything. It was like so somebody said, yeah, I'd be open to it. Boom. Phone gets handed off to somebody who is capable of the conversation, and then they take over, and then that person is able to watch how that conversation is done and go, okay. Then they feel more comfortable and as time goes on, they get better at that conversation, better at that conversation, until they can then be the one to to actually facilitate the deal in the seedling stage of a person's development as a lead generator. What are the fundamentals, fundamental skills that you would teach to have success as a good cold caller? Like what are the like? What is that intro level course? The intro level course is probably not what people would think, but it's it's attitude. It's mindset and attitude. You know, I've found that in anything that you do, let's say you have two people, you have person and you have person B person A is that person, you know, of that all the time. You're like, why are you so happy? Like they walk in the room smiling. They're they're excited. You know, they just they're happy all the time. And then there's the other person who's like, fuck, I don't want to do this, but I'm going to do this right. And if you have both of those people and each of them talk to 100 people, the person who's excited to be there, the person who has figured out how to have a good mindset and turned a hard job into play into a game, is going to get way more results than the person who has a bad attitude. So what I always try to teach people is like how to have a good attitude, doing things that sometimes you don't want to do and that comes from like re contextualization of your activity. So what I've learned how to do that helped me over the years was recontextualize my job. I would say, okay, this is my job, but how do I turn this into a game? How do I turn this into giving? How do I turn this into a contribution? How do I turn this into something that allows me to be excited to do it and not feeling like it's work? And that's when you can turn work into play. And we and whoever's playing and having the most fun, they're going to get the most results. The guy that's angry, having to do something or like, damn, I just want to go home. Oh my gosh, how many more do I have to make? Like, nobody wants to talk to you. Nobody's going to, you know, you're calling somebody and you sound and and even if you don't sound it, they can feel when you don't want to talk to them, right? So why would they ever want to talk to you? I always tell people the key to getting people to want to talk to you is you have to want to talk to them. Like, even if you don't like somebody and they approach you all excited to talk to you, you're more apt to to want to talk to them, right? Because you they can tell that you like to talk to them. So your job as a person in sales or making phone calls is to get the person on the other line to feel like you actually, genuinely want to be there. You're excited to be there. You're not just doing your job, you're actually filled with passion and excitement and the ability to help somebody. So give a concrete example, and I'm going to give this podcast to my sales guys because like, these are super important insights, but give a concrete example of a strategy that you would use to turn making 50 calls a day into a game rather than something that sucks. Okay, so you've got 50 contacts a day, right? It's turning it into a game. You know, what I might do is I might turn it into, a challenge. I might turn it into, like, this idea that, you know, how how did I do it when I was in the beginning, when I was because I was making, like, 100 converse. I was having 100 conversations a day, every day. So how I turned it into a game in the beginning was I would watch a Floyd Mayweather motivation tape before my prospecting sessions, and then I would literally look at my cubicle and pretend that it was a boxing ring. And I convinced myself, and this is why I, like they say, like being in sales to be like a, like a multi multi six figure or seven figure earner in sales, you have to be kind of like a psychopath, right? You have to be willing to play the mind games like with yourself, control your emotions right. So I turned my cubicle into a boxing ring in my mind, and I just pretended that my 100 contact goal was like getting to the 12th round, right? And that every time I would walk away from the desk to go get a drink or it was a bathroom break or whatever it was, was like me stepping out of the ring. So I would just convince myself, like, I'm in the ring, I'm here, I'm in this fight. Like I'm going to win this match. Like if if I was in a boxing ring, would I stop to scroll on social media? Would I stop to take a phone call from my girlfriend? Would I stop to do any of the other things that we do to distract ourselves? Or would I be 100% locked in on taking that other guy out? And then when I would get a phone call, if I set an appointment, that was me, like landing a punch or that was me, you know, knocking the guy down, whatever it was. And I would just play run that game and pretend that that's who I was in that moment of time. Right. And so, you know, it's just like or you put turn it into points or you turn it into, and there's so many different ways, but you have to find the key to this is you have to find what resonates with you. Yeah, right. You have to find that thing. And this is where, as a leader, I remember, what's his name is, is a really big entrepreneur, but his wife was talking to him. Sara Blakely, husband. She was figuring out. She was like, why is he suck at communicating? And then she used a sports analogy. She's like, so communications like tennis. Like I hit the ball to you. And then in tennis, you have to hit the ball back to me. So when we're talking like, I'm going to talk to you, but like in tennis, you have to hit the ball back, which means talk back to me. When she made the sports analogy to him because he's really being a sports, it clicked for him. He's like, oh, I got it. And then he became a good communicator, right? So when if you're a salesperson watching this, like you kind of spend time figuring out like what resonates with you and, and then draw analogies to what you're doing every day. So for me, those analogies were always sports analogies. Like, I would compare myself to Floyd Mayweather or, you know, Tom Brady or any of the guys that inspired me. Right? I would just draw analogies to what they were doing, to what I was doing and pretending that I was playing the sport of my own. Yeah, I recently had this lesson with with Jose, we both know, and he has been stressing to me two years, like he always puts an emphasis on how we live through metaphors and the importance of metaphors, and it never really resonated to me why it was so important. But it is. It's like that key to communication. Like you can't speak to someone in your own terms. You have to put it into terms. Although you're communicating a foreign message, you have to connect to that foreign message to something that you both understand. Yeah. In order to translate it like that information, know, what? And this is kind of like one of my my final questions for you, but what is your definition of success? I would say I don't have a set definition. I have a few different definitions. So one of the definitions of success for me is being able to do whatever I want, whenever I want, with whoever I want, and helping the people around me be able to do the same. So like that's one definition of success for me. The the other definition of success for me is when my entire life, relationships, health and fitness, spiritual, fun, hobbies, things like that, and income making is integrated, integrated to the point where I'm experiencing fulfillment at a certain level and all of those areas not being lopsided. So not being like, oh man, I've, I've made a whole bunch of money. But my relationships, soccer, my relationships are good and I'm making a bunch of money, but my health is really poor, right. Or, you know, I'm making all this money and I have a six pack, but my spiritual kid is just bankrupt, you know, like, it's it's to me, success is having being really well-rounded. And in all the key areas, and having them aligned and integrated together. Yeah. Super interesting. I think that's a repetitive theme. Is the freedom piece. Like we hear that time and time again with people we have on their show that they go down this journey of entrepreneurship to get that freedom in control in their life. But the second principle, like having that congruence and alignment and not like having to go to work and not being a drag, having it all being aligned, everything that you're doing aligned with that quality of life that you want to be doing every single day. So super, super awesome. I think you gave a ton of great insights today. I know I learned a lot, so I appreciate you coming on. It was a lot of fun. If people want to reach out to you and find you, connect with you are interested in, your services. Where can I track you down? Best places. Instagram right now. Jason Wang dot exp, GSO and Wangwang again exp. And, just like I'm here today, very passionate about helping people and, you know, answering questions. And so, if anybody ever needs help or just wants, ask a quick question, you know, send me a DM. Happy to see any way that I can help. Fantastic. I appreciate you coming on. Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me, sir.
