No don't go in there, Daddy's working.
Jonathan: Yes, yes, y'all. It is another edition of the Daddy's Working Podcast. If you were listening last week, then you heard part one of the interview, and I left you hanging. Gosh, I'm such a tease. But we're here, and we're ready to rock and roll, so let's dive back into part two of the interview.
I love the idea of rituals. I love, love, love… especially the morning routine, although I've changed my morning routine quite a bit lately with the 75 Hard deal forcing me to do different things. But so you made this transition. Right? And I did this when I started in real estate. I bought the deal. I worked in the deal. I marketed the deal. Sold the deal. I was trapped. It was like I created a job for myself. So how do you work your way out of that? You've got to realize you're in a trap. How do you keep removing yourself from that? [0:01:09.1]
Joe: That's a great question. So, Judge Graham, who both you and I know really well, does a really good job of explaining the difference between - I never seen anybody put it into words like this, which I really enjoy. He talks about a lifestyle business and an enterprise business. Right? A lot of people have lifestyle businesses. A lifestyle business is essentially you can be successful but it's really, really hard to scale a business like this because you're the owner and you're the operator and without you, your business will not grow. Without you, your clients will not be served. Without you coming to work every day, revenue will not be made. Right? An enterprise business is where the business is serving you, where your team is operating virtually without you. You still have to be the visionary. You still have to work on your business. You still have to be a leader, but for all intents and purposes, you don’t have to be present. Right? [0:02:00.4]
And the way we talk about this in my masterminds is you have to work on your business, but working on your business is still work. I think this is one of the challenges that a lot of leaders and a lot of business owners have is they take working on your business as I'm just going to go on vacation and my business is going to start cutting me a paycheck every single month, which could happen if you get to a point where you can either hire a partner or CEO or somebody to literally take you out of the picture, which for most people, that's either not attainable or it's not a place where they want to get - let's be honest. Right? They just want an enterprise business where they can be involved, but they don’t have to physically be there all the time. Being a leader that works on your business at that level, that takes work and that takes being able to step outside, having the 30,000 foot view, and then not interrupting, not getting involved and creating problems. Because one of the biggest challenges is once you become that leader and you become the coach - I used this analogy the other day, just because we happened to be near my hometown, which is outside of Philadelphia - Doug Peterson played for the Philadelphia Eagles for a long time and now he's the coach of the Eagles. [0:03:09.9]
You don’t see him jumping in and throwing the football. Like he can't be the quarterback and be an amazing coach and Doug arguably is starting to change the game of football a little bit. In the last year or two years ago, when they won the Super Bowl, he is pushing the pace of the game. He's going no huddle. He's throwing the defense off. He's going forward on fourth down. If they're within two yards and two feet on the fourth down, they're going forth. You know, they're changing the whole way the offense plays the game, and he's doing that because he's got that on the business approach. He's got the 30,000 foot look on the game. He wasn’t creating that when he was the quarterback. If he had those ideas when he was the quarterback, they weren’t being implemented. Now, he can do that. Now he can look at game from a whole different view and he can say, how do I really create effect? How do I really create change on this game? Well, hey - here's some ideas I have. He's not getting in the pocket and doing this. [0:04:00.4]
He's standing on the sidelines and doing this. That's what a leader that's working on the business has to do. They have to be able to stand on the sidelines and not be able to jump in the game. Now, they might be able to get in practice and show people how to throw the ball every once in a while, but they're not getting in the game. And the biggest challenge I think a lot of leaders have is when they're trying to become that enterprise business, they're inside creating, they're throwing monkey wrenches in the business all the time and they're creating their own problems. We talk about people who love to put out fires, a lot of times they're secret arsonists. Right? They're in there like, I'm going to put out a fire, I'm going to put out a fire, but they're behind the scenes and they're spreading fire. They have their blow torches on and they're just, they're starting fires all day long. So how do you create that balance where you're being a great coach, but you're in there creating more chaos? And that's a really tough balance.
Jonathan: Where do you get that idea because I think most people will go into business, and I think this comes from Emit - they'll go into business - what they'll do is they'll create a job for themselves, like I did in my real estate business - that's why the first one failed. How do you realize that you need that 30,000 foot perspective so that you can be away from it and make the calls without throwing those monkey wrenches or starting those fires? [0:05:09.9]
Joe: I mean the challenges, because I see it, because I coach a lot of people in this space - the challenge is visionaries are idea people. Everyone gets an idea in the shower and then they want to come in the office and they want to say, "I've got an idea. Let's do this." And depending on how big your team is, if you only have a few people, it's easy to spin real quick and change directions and say, okay, we can implement that, but if you start having 10, 15, 20 people in your organization, it's not easy to turn that ship. Generally, it's not going to turn on a dime. So we start having these ideas and the next thing you know, your business gets really unwieldy. It's really hard to create opportunity and start to have all these ideas being processed and implemented when really you're focused on one thing. Maybe you're great at sales. Right? Maybe you have an impressive sales team that sells real estate, for example. Maybe you're a retail sales force and the next thing you know, you're like, hey, we can sell real estate - why can't we sell photocopiers? [0:06:02.2]
Maybe I'll just bring a photocopier center in here and we'll start selling photocopiers. And then your team is like, well, yeah, we can do that. Why don’t we get on the phone and start selling photocopiers? You start throwing these monkey wrenches in and the team starts getting confused. Whereas if you just keep them really laser focused at what they're great at, some of the best teams that are out there that are doing things that are high level, stay hyper focused and they're not paying attention to what's going on next to them. They're not paying attention to the other guy. They're just getting really, really dialed on what they do really, really well, and they're not coming up with umpteen ideas every single day and trying to implement new focuses and new things every single meeting.
Jonathan: So, distractions. That's it. Staying away from the distractions and the shiny objects. I got you, brother. So let's talk a little bit about it. You keep saying it, and I know our listeners have heard it, the daddies out there here, but I always like to get different perspectives - you talk about, and I think this came from Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, the idea of masterminds. What is this mastermind thing? What does that mean to you and how do you use it? [0:07:02.3]
Joe: The idea came to me, I've known about masterminds for years. I joined one, which you and I are in, five years ago, almost six years ago now, and it was game changing for me. I was in a space at that time where I didn't know what I didn't know. I still don’t know what I don’t know. You know. I think we're always growing. We're always learning, but I couldn’t find people in my little sphere, the people around me, I didn't know where to reach. I didn't know who to turn to in my local area and ironically, I found our mentor on social media. I reached out to him. I was having some problems with some different things, and at that point, I was still kind of like a one-man show. I was an island, you know. I thought I could handle everything myself. In fact, I call it my Superman Story because back then, I was running a rehab business. I was a full time realtor and I had rental properties. I had all these different businesses going on and I had a 3-year-old. I had a newborn. I had my wife. I had a small family and I was working 100 hours a week. [0:08:01.1]
I had one assistant. I was burning both ends of the candle. I was making what seemed to be decent money. I was making good money. Everybody thought I was successful. I would wake up in the morning. I would put on a suit and tie because back then, everyone dressed up and I would get all dressed up. I would go to the office and I would be a realtor until lunch. I would prospect. I would set listing appointments. I would set up buyer appointments. I would, you know, do my realtor thing and then I would come home around lunchtime and I would get changed real quick and throw on my tee shirt and jeans and I would run to the job sites and I would be working on schedules. I would be working on scopes of work. I would be running to Home Depot, picking out tile, picking out colors, picking out toilets, driving them to the job sites, dealing with some contractors. I would have a check book in my pocket in case they needed to get paid. I'd be paying them seven days a week, whatever they needed to keep moving. And I was juggling. I was juggling 12 different plates and I was… I wouldn't admit it at the time because I thought I was the man, you know, but and my ego wouldn’t allow me to admit it, but if I kept going at that rate, if I kept going the way I was going, I'd probably be dead by now. I would have had a stroke. My stress level was through the roof. [0:09:02.9]
It didn't matter how much money I made. I never had any money. I was constantly taking… cash was coming in as fast as it was going out. And I was building but I never had anything. I was so stressed out. I was so frustrated. I never got to see my kids. I was literally watching my kids grow up and I would come home at whatever time at night and they would already be in bed. It was one of the most miserable points in my life and when I first got into a real mastermind, because I had bought every course in the world at that point. I had gone to every $500 seminar. I had gone to the Rich Dad seminar. I had gone to every, all those things but I had never gone to a real mastermind. I had never gone to a real event where there were business owners, there were people who really pushed me. They really asked deep questions that got me thinking, that challenged me. Because we had all been in those rooms where there's 150 people in a hotel and no one is actually asking you to do the work. They're just giving you a workbook and they're saying follow along, and write in your book. So when I first met Mark, he said, pay me $5000 and come out to Columbus. And I was like, oh my God, like, pay me $5000 and come out … I'm not paying you $5000, but something deep, my gut told me to say yes. [0:10:07.1]
I don't know why. I had been following him for a while in social media. I just kind of believed him. He seemed like, you know, an honest guy. I said yes before even I figured out where the $5000 was coming from. And I'm the kind of guy to do what I say I'm going to do. So I said yes, and then I was like, oh crap… and I dug it up. I wired him the money. I went to Columbus and I sat in the room with 15 people and I looked around and I was like, my God - these guys are super successful. Some of these guys have 30, $40,000,000 businesses - this is a legit room, and these guys beat me up. They made me feel uncomfortable. They challenged me. They made me think. They made me…pushed me to a different level, and that's when I knew, like, this is my home; this is where I gotta be. And within probably, I want to say less than four or five months, I had come back. I had made a decision that something has to change. I thought about actually getting rid of, like closing down my retail brokerage and mentor and I like talked about it and we decided instead that my assistant had a license so we said, you know what - what's the worst that could happen - let's just give her the retail business and see what happens. [0:11:07.5]
So we broke it up. We gave her the retail business. I negotiated a deal because she was on a salary and negotiated a deal to give her a little bit of a commission, keep her salary in play, and I'm just going to go full time into the rehab space and do flips. And that's what we did. Twelve months later, she had done more sales than I did the 12 months previous to that. I did three times as many flips as I did previous to that, and we knocked it out of the park. I mean, we destroyed it. And I think within … well, I can tell you - within three or four years, I went from one employee to almost 45, 50 employees and then since then, we're back down to 26. I've made every mistake there is to make about hiring people and firing people and everywhere in between.
Jonathan: You went way up in hiring. Was that one of the mistakes?
Joe: Huge. Absolutely. There's a challenge people have when they come to try to build teams and they sit in front of me and one of the biggest challenges that people have is they're petrified of hiring people. Right? The second biggest challenge is that they hire too fast. [0:12:02.3]
Once they get a little bit of a taste of it, they're like, oh my God, this is great - I'm going to keep hiring people. And I made both. I made both mistakes in my life. So again, it's one of those happy balance things. You have to learn when it's the right time to hire, but the number one challenge is knowing, especially when you're starting to make money and you're starting to get to that point like one of the first learning curves for me was you got to hire. Human capital is the most important leverage that you can involved in and when you can invest in people, they will pay you back 100 fold, but the teams you build and the legacy that you're going to leave because the people you're building along the way, is worth so much more than the money you're going to make. But you have to build teams in order to make money. I used to think I was an island. I used to think I could just build this thing as big as I can and I'm going to keep it at one or two assistants around and they're going to help me. It just doesn’t work that way. If you want to get to a certain point where you can scale, you need to have some employees and so, you know, I built it up. I built it way too fast. I wouldn't say I built it too fast, but I built it too big and you know, I had to scale back. We got to a really clean team that's very, very effective and very, very efficient and we found our sweet spot. [0:13:03.8]
Jonathan: So you mentioned a word that I find interesting there - legacy. What does that mean to you?
Joe: Yeah. It's a great word because you know, my podcast is called the Legacy Blueprint. Right? So to me, legacy is not just something we leave behind. It's something we're always building along the way. So you got to live a legacy. Like for those of us that have kids, I think it's so important - it's not just about your kids - obviously, it's about your kids, but it's about what you do. It's so impactful, what's the terminology - it's not do as I say, but as I do or whatever - but like you know when your kids come up to you and they say like I want to do something it's because they're watching you do it. Right? Your kids do not learn because you tell them to do something. They only learn when they watch you do it. Right? And when they watch you do something. So when you're living a legacy, people follow. People understand it. People get it. When you do it every day, you're putting it into action. When you're actually building something worth following, people will follow that. [0:14:00.4]
That's why, again, on social media, you can be fake all you want, but eventually it's going to crumble. If you're real and you build something real and you create real opportunity for people, that's going to last - up, down, sideways - I don’t care what the economy does - when you build and create a real legacy and you're living a real legacy and you're being truthful with yourself and the people around you, that's going to create something that lasts. So we're just trying to build real legacy. We're trying to build real impact for other people and create real opportunity. So I'm trying to find equity partnerships with people. I'm trying to build real opportunity for people and create real wealth for people on our team, helping them invest, helping them learn how to create wealth for their family, investments for their family and so forth. So it's not just a place where they can come have a job from 9 to 5 and then check out. It's more of a culture. It's more of a long term place for them.
Jonathan: So let's talk about this. You went to this mastermind, and I didn't know you had been in there so long, so that's amazing and that makes me feel good about my choice in joining. But then you decide to create your own and so why did you decide to create your own and what is it doing for you and for the people now? [0:15:07.1]
Joe: Yeah. So, I mean, a: I decided to create my own because of what I had learned and you know, I think Russell Bronson wrote this in one of his books, I think it was Expert Secrets but he talks about this in content, right, like when you put out content, you teach other people things. Like, you and I and everyone listening to this has a moral obligation to share what we have learned. Right? It's our moral duty and moral obligation. When you have knowledge, to leave it and pass it on to others. So I have had this belief now for years, and I don't know where it comes from, that as we learn things, one of the legacy pieces I want to live is I want there to be some kid who is doing something extraordinary, 100 years from now and he's doing it because his grandfather listened to a podcast that I taught. Right? And the kid doesn’t need to know who I am. The kid doesn’t need to know that you and I had this conversation today. [0:16:02.3]
Like it just has to be that we created this energy. We created this opportunity for that family and to me, that's legacy. That's what we're creating. We're here putting out a great message that can help somebody lead, like I call it the F5 method, you have the family, faith, fitness and finances. Right? But how can we expand upon that so that people actually live that fulfilled life? Like to me, that's what it's all about. It's helping people grow to that next level. I know the impact that the mastermind made to me. I know, like Mark and I joke about it all the time, like the whole goal for me is that we're sitting on a porch, smoking cigars in a rocking chair, we're in our 80s, like I'll be in this mastermind the rest of my life, and I don’t care what the cost is - it's the thing that I want to develop for what I call the Inner Circle Family. Right? Which is my mastermind. Like I want to develop an amazing group of people that I can create a real impact with and I can help them build their teams because the more that they can build their team, the more opportunity that they can create, the more equity they can create, the more jobs they're going to create, the more money they're going to create for all those people - it's just going to continue to snowball out. So again, that's what I believe the moral obligation is for all of us. [0:17:14.8]
Jonathan: Dude, you don’t even know this, and I mentioned it on the show before, but I started The Podcast Factory with that very idea - the mentors that had helped me, that had taught me so much, to bring them to more people, so little by little we were improving lives, one listener at a time and here we are, millions of downloads later, I know we're changing lives. So that's why we're obviously in the same mastermind. That's why we're talking. So tell us a little bit about Legacy Blueprint, brother. That's available on anywhere that you can find podcasts. Tell me a little bit about the show.
Joe: Yeah. I mean, it's ironically very similar to this, man. I mean, it's a bunch of high level entrepreneurs, chatting about life and how they interact with their business and their family and they create, you know, I think balance is a bit of a myth. I think it's hard to achieve, but I like to focus on the five Fs - right? [0:18:03.0]
Like, you're always going to be a little bit shy in one, but still being able to kind of the omnipresent about them being in existence. So how do we build a legacy? How do we leave a legacy? How do we live a legacy while we're kind of focusing on the five Fs - faith, family, fitness, friends and finances. That's kind of what the show is all about, but in the style of being able to spread the knowledge well. I don’t think a lot of people understand that I spend hours a week, you spend hours a week on doing this kind of stuff. We don’t make a dollar doing this. This is about spreading knowledge. This is what it's all about.
Jonathan: Yeah - paying it forward, man. I didn't even know you had the five Fs. You added friends in there. Nice, nice. Nice. That's so cool. That's so cool. So look, we're coming up on our time and I imagine that maybe there's something that I missed or something that you wanted to talk about or something that you thought we would talk about that we didn't. So what's on your mind, brother?
Joe: No, man. I think we have covered it. It was an awesome interview. I mean, you know, I just think if people are listening like my big thing that I always like to share is just, is don’t be introverted when it comes to your knowledge. [0:19:08.4]
Put it out there. Make sure that people understand that you have a gift, that you have a gift worth sharing, whether that gift is like you're an amazing skateboarder or you're an amazing cake baker or you're an amazing basket weaver - I don’t care what it is - there's something in you that needs to be shared. So, don’t hold it in.
Jonathan: Yeah. You're being a greedy little pig if you keep it to yourself.
Joe: That's right. That's right.
Jonathan: The name of the show, one more time, so our listeners know.
Joe: My show is called the Legacy Blueprint.
Jonathan: Legacy Blueprint. Just look for it on iTunes, anywhere you listen to podcasts. Joe, amazing. Thank you for taking time out of your vacation to rap with us. Truly, truly grateful and we will talk again soon, brother. Thank you.
Joe: Absolutely.
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