Think First and Drop the Ego – Leveling Up Strategies with Marck de Lautour

Episode 87: Think First and Drop the Ego – Leveling Up Strategies with Marck de Lautour

THE PROFIT FIRST FOR REI PODCAST

May 12, 2022

David Richter

Summary:

Time is such a finite thing. So when you trade time for dollars, you cap your income. As it should be pretty clear by now, there can be a serious problem when you barter your time for money. And with us today is someone who is a master in creating generational wealth and passive income. 

Marck de Lautour will shift your mindset as he lays down the benefits of real estate investing and how to keep your money rolling without you!

Key Takeaways:

[1:31] Where is Mark from?

[3:59] Would he put a high value on the education that he perceived along the way in his real estate investing journey?

[8:54] The story of how he became a full turnkey provider?

[10:41] The mindset of creating a team that will help you in your business?

[12:14] The mind-shift for him was analyzing that he needed to pay high wages and high compensation.

[14:22] If you don’t want to scale your business, you don’t have to

[17:04] There are no secrets to success, only executive 

[17:47] What early lessons did he learn about money?

[18:46] Understanding trading time for dollars vs. owning something 

[21:34] The value of your compensation will be equal to the problems that you solve in life

[29:11] Think of where you want to go. The destination is important, and enjoy the journey.

Quotes:

[6:09] “It’s easier to do than to think. But it’s harder to think and plan and strategize.”

[11:29] ”When you reach the point where you’re trying to scale and grow, you can get good, but it’s really how to get great and remove you from the process.”

[14:39] “When you’re doing big deals throughout the year, you have to scale up and go through the pain.

[29:42] “The strength of the entrepreneur becomes the organization’s weakness.”

Links: 

Profit First Real Estate Investing by David Richter-https://simplecfo.wpengine.com/profit-first-david-richter/ 

The Legend of the Monk and Merchant by Terry Fellber-https://www.amazon.com/Legend-Monk-Merchant-Principles-Successful/dp/0529120801 

Mark’s LinkedIn-https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-de-lautour-012154203?originalSubdomain=nz

Tired of living deal to deal? 

If you are a real estate investor or business owner who is tired of living deal to deal, and want to double your profits, head over here to book your no-obligation discovery call with me. Either myself or someone from my team will hop on a short call with you to get clear on your business goals, remove any obstacles holding you back, and map out a game plan to help you finally start keeping more of the money you work so hard to make. – David

Transcript:

Marck de Lautour:

There are no secrets, only execution. That’s why masterminds work because there’s really no secrets, right? It’s just about who’s going to go execute on what they actually learn. So to that point, if you can get people that can execute on what the vision is, you’re going to have great success.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Profit First REI podcast, where real estate investors master financial management, eradicate entrepreneurial poverty, and learn to be profitable from day one. Now for your host, David Richter.

David Richter:

Hey everyone, it is David Richter here again with the Profit First REI podcast. Super excited today because we have Mark de Lautour here. He is an incredible investor that is providing a massive amount of opportunity and I think transforming a lot of lives across different industries. He’s in real estate investing, but has done high volumes, still does high volumes and does a lot of things and touching a lot of lives. I think you’re going to have a special treat here today learning about what he’s done, what he is doing and the different ways that he’s impacting. So, Mark, thanks for being on the show today.

Marck de Lautour:

Oh, Dave thrilled. Thank you for having me, mate.

David Richter:

Yeah. Thank you. So Mark, you have been in the turnkey space, you’ve done a lot of different things and you’re now in multifamily lending and you’ve done new construction. So we’ll get into all of that, but can you tell me, first of all, everyone’s going to be asking, where are you from? Because of course, they have probably love the accent. So Mark, where are you from so everyone can know where you hail from?

Marck de Lautour:

Yeah, I’m from a little island nation in the Pacific called New Zealand. Born and raised, came over here for university and was fortunate enough to have an athletic scholarship that paid for my undergrad. Stayed on and got my MBA at University of Missouri and have lived in Kansas City since 1995. So wow, crazy. I’ve actually lived in America now longer than lived in New Zealand.

David Richter:

Huh. That’s incredible. Love that and loved the journey that you took to get here then. Also, let’s lead into that. What got you started in real estate? Did that start around the same time or how long have you been doing real estate?

Marck de Lautour:

Yeah. As I was going through my career path, I guess you would call it. Well, no, not even career path. As I was coming out of college, my student life cycle, I was getting my MBA and I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, which I know impacted you greatly as well.

David Richter:

Yes.

Marck de Lautour:

I just realized that the stock market, which I had guys who were investing in the stock market. My father had kind of introduced me to it in New Zealand with a New Zealand stock exchange. I never really grasped how I could control it. I always felt like an outsider looking in, and real estate, however I could touch it and feel it and understand a little more about it. So I was leaning that way, and then I read that book obviously by Robert Kiosaki, and it really just kind of was a simple measure of what I was trying to grapple with in my own mind.

So I didn’t immediately do anything, but I answered a … I didn’t go jump out and buy something immediately because I was given my MBA and still a broke college student, but I went down and paid $5,000 on a credit card, money I did not have at the time, to go down and get a lesson from a guy called Larry Holder, the wealth builders academy down in Springfield, Missouri. I took a buddy of mine down there and we just learned how to buy foreclosures on the courthouse steps. So that was kind of my niche or my entry into the market as I learned how to buy distressed assets on the courthouse steps. For the next 10 years, just poured my heart and soul into that and just really bought just a lot of volume on the courthouse steps and then slowly grew into other things after that.

David Richter:

Awesome. So we’ll go into those other things, but I want to highlight one thing there is that you went out and bought that education, like you said, when you said I didn’t have the money to do that. So would you put a high value on the education you’ve received along the way during your real estate investing journey just on that growth, and the masterminds or things like that?

Marck de Lautour:

Yeah. David, look. I look back at that room and there’s probably about 50 people in the room. Here’s a really good marketer. I can’t say digital market because it’s pre-internet.

David Richter:

Right.

Marck de Lautour:

But he caught my attention on an ad. I went to a hotel. He closed me in the hotel room, in the conference room and obviously got me going down to his facility down in Springfield, Missouri, where he had about 50 people at the conference. So I would just love to look back now and see how many people have done what I’ve done in real estate. I hope they have. I don’t remember who was in the room. Certainly don’t have a list, but yeah, I’m pretty proud of the steps I’ve made to grow from that. Just taking that one seed, that how do you buy a house on the courthouse steps?

He taught a little bit different things. He talked about property management, leasing, and tenancy and all those different things. But what I gleaned from it, I then turned into a business.

David Richter:

Okay.

Marck de Lautour:

So yeah, the answer to your question is placed a huge … I always try to invest in myself. In fact, I have people that will say “Mark, I’ve got 10,000 or $15,000. I want to go buy a property.” And I say, “Look, before you start scaling and growing into that, have you got the knowledge, have you invested, do you have a mentor? Do you know what you’re doing?” I would rather have them take that $10,000, invest it in a mentor program or someone that can teach them what to do well, and that would greatly … they would have an exponential return rather than just trying to buy one property and going through the school of hard knocks.

David Richter:

Right. Yeah, that is so good, because it is. We think that’s the answer sometimes to go and do something in real estate or go out and do something, which a lot of the times that is a great answer, but knowing someone who’s been there and can get you to avoid some of the mistakes that you can make is huge. You’re still a part of a lot of networks and education and whatnot, and you still take a high dollar amount for investing in yourself. I don’t think-

Marck de Lautour:

For sure. Yeah, no, we spend about a hundred grand a year on our thinking habits. I always say it’s easier to do than to think. Some people just run out and just try and do, do do, and try and figure it out. But it’s harder to sit back and think and plan and strategize. I think part of my investment in the collective genius and freedom founders and Kahoona boardroom, the masterminds that I’m a part of, part of that is just setting aside time in the same way that you set aside a profit first model. You set aside time to pay yourself first. I set aside time every week to think and every quarter to meet with those that mentor me to make sure that I’m on point.

David Richter:

I love that. I love that you say that you have a dollar amount that you invest in your thinking and in that thinking process. So I love that. That’s a great way of looking at it from just not, oh, I’m going to another mastermind to learn how to do something. No, I’m learning how to think and avoid pitfalls and avoid things that I shouldn’t be doing and learning other opportunities as well. So, then tell us, that’s where you started in real estate. Where did you end up and what are you doing today in real estate?

Marck de Lautour:

Sure. So in 2008, when the market just tanked, the way I pivoted was actually … I know you talk in your book about OPM and other people’s money. The banks just shriveled up. If you remember at that time, it was very, very difficult for people that had even been in business for a long time, with a good track record to get loans. Banks just were like, nope, real estate is tanking. We’re not taking any chances right now, at least for six to 12 months. They had to pause and reset. And quite frankly, they were suddenly like, oh my gosh, we have all this real estate on the books. We’re foreclosing all the time. We have to deal with real estate themselves. So the banks were kind of reassessing where they were at, and it was a time for me to think, how am I going to kind of plow my way out of this?

My response was, I’ve always had people that were saying, “Hey, Mark, I know you’re buying all these houses for yourself. If there ever is a time when you have a deal that either you can’t afford or you don’t have the current capital for, or you just want to give to someone else, I’d love to know about it.” Because a lot of the times when you’re at … again, this is back when I was very young, so I’d be buying houses on the same street as my friends were living on at the time, just in middle America, in middle America, Kansas City at the time. So I’d be talking to them about, “Hey, that house that you bought for 150,000, I got one down the street for 75,000.” They’re like, “How did you do that?”

I’m like, “Well, it’s the courthouse steps. I go and show up,” and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I pivoted to basically doing it for them. So I didn’t have any money at the time and I didn’t have the ability to borrow. So I went to them and told them, “Hey, I’ll buy it in your name. You put up the capital, I’ll rehab it for you. Just pay me a fee on the way. I’ll get it tentative for you and I’ll maintain and charge you a property management fee. Then if you have need to sell it, I’m a licensed broker. I can help you along the way as well. So kind of just clipping the ticket and turned into what is now termed a full turnkey provider. Obviously, didn’t even know it at the time, but slowly and surely developed into that model of just doing it for other people.

What I learned then, David, was that people were referring … I’ve never advertised my services. People were always referring me in and I suddenly was … I talked to them about the why, like why am I so interesting to you? Why is it intriguing? They’re like, well, I love real estate, but I don’t want to hassle with it. I hate the stock market. It’s volatile, but there’s no other way. When you sign up for my job, it was just the 401k and I just signed up and I got to do it. So I quickly learned, as I talked to high income, high net worth individuals, that although they would like to be in real estate, they didn’t really have the time or knowledge of how to do it.

So I figured if I could solve those two problems and kind of take the mistakes and the headaches out of real estate, not having to worry about those late night calls, not having to worry about financing or title or inspections or appraisals, and just do everything for the individual that I thought I might have a business. So that’s where I pivoted and we’ve now done, 12, 1300 turnkey assets in the Kansas City region. And now we’re expanding into other markets for that turnkey operation.

David Richter:

Wow. That’s awesome. Yeah, I know you’re doing a high volume of that and now you’re doing some other things as well, too, with the operations. Also, I’ve heard … if you’re listening right now, I’ve heard Mark speak as well, and he’s a systems operations machine. He places a lot of emphasis on that, has high valued individuals in the team too, as well, and puts a high dollar amount on them because of how important their roles are inside the business and how they’re driving the business to be able to run like an actual business. So do you want to talk about that a little bit? Just the mindset of creating that team and creating it to be such a high value team that helps you and gets you to the high volume and just running like a true business?

Marck de Lautour:

Yeah. I appreciate the compliment. It’s something that unfortunately I did not kind of plan for and think my way into, David. I actually got just punched in the face over and over and realized I had to kind of adapt and change the way I was doing things because, as Jim Collins says, most small business or entrepreneurs kind of have that genius with a thousand helpers type mentality where they just think every decision needs to be coming and funneled through the entrepreneur. That’s where I was. Every decision, it was top down decision making, a classic bottleneck and a funnel. You reach a point when you try and scale and grow that you can get good, but it’s really hard to get great and remove yourself from the process. So we were very good, but we just struggled.

The challenge is when you finally realized that, and I realized that in 2017 … once you realize it, the unfortunate thing is that the same people that got you to where you were are not the ones to level up. A lot of times, are not the ones to level up and get you to the next level, because now you’re saying, Hey, I know that I was asking you to just do, but now I’m asking you to think. If you don’t pay thinkers and if you’re not paying for high quality thinkers, you’re not going to get productivity out of your employees. So the mind shift for me was analyzing and acknowledging the fact that I would need to pay high wages and high compensation. If I was truly trying to not exit from the business, but just at least remove myself from the bottleneck of decision making, that I would have to hire really, really strong talent.

I believe truly that the less the business relies on you, the more valuable your business is worth. So it was a matter of trying to hire talented individuals that would come in and really elevate my business. So that’s what I’ve committed to since that time period is hiring talent and not skimping on that. So we have a massive labor line item that scares me every time I look at it as a big chunk. We pay around three million dollars a year to our employees, but that’s wonderful, because that’s what drives our engine.

You can’t do things on your own. So the high talent that … the high cost of driving to the next level is talent, and you’ve got to invest in the talent to get you to level up. I don’t know if I answered your question entirely, but it was a mind shift for me that realized, okay, it’s not about just picking a number. I want to get a transaction coordinator. Well, I’m going to pay $40,000. But what if the perfect person walks in and she’s amazing. She’s just super talented and you need to pay her 60. What should you do? Well, I can tell you what I did.

David Richter:

Awesome. Well, it sounds like you hired her.

Marck de Lautour:

Correct.

David Richter:

You went out there and did what it took to hire that individual, which I love this because I feel like … I don’t know. You might disagree, but in the real estate world, we try to get the cheapest talent all the time. It’s always the cheapest talent, a virtual assistant, or like, no, I have the $40,000 to spend and that’s all that it’s going to … We look at those line items as expenses and not as investments. Would you say that’s pretty accurate with a lot of the places that-

Marck de Lautour:

Yeah. I think the real estate industry is very … it has a low barrier to entry, which is great. More millionaires made in real estate than any other industry. That’s wonderful, and it’s not for everyone. Look, if you don’t want to scale your business, you don’t have to. That’s a choice I made that was a very intentional choice. I could have scaled back and just kind of rested and done things smaller, but there’s a point of getting from doing just 80 deals a year to doing three or 400 deals a year. You have to just scale up and go through the pain. So it was painful and I’m not proud of it, but we turned over nearly 100% of the staff because, once you bring on a COO, the one thing as a CEO or the business owner, that I’ve now transitioned to the role of CEO, but as a business owner, pretty losable accountability, that it was not my strong suit.

I’m not good at holding people accountable, so I needed to bring someone on board that would be extremely good at holding people accountable. So when I hired Chris Johns, our COO, it ruffled some feathers because he wouldn’t tolerate mediocrity and he expected greatness and he came out of a … still working with some massive corporations and that’s the stuff that in corporate, you don’t get away with. You don’t get away with just mailing it in and doing lousy work and expecting someone else to pick up the slack. You’re just terminated. There’s just no ifs ands or butts.

We weren’t brutal. We certainly tried to work with people and allow them to level up, but over time, you just realized that the people that got me here were not going to get me to that next level. So really hard. Again, not proud of it. I wish I had have realized it sooner, that talent was the answer to most of the questions, kind of the who, not how. It’s not how can I push this through and get to the next level. It’s who can I surround myself with that will allow a company to thrive and succeed without being a burden on myself.

David Richter:

Yeah. That is so good. I think if you are listening to this podcast, you should rewind the last seven to eight minutes here, and just really have that sink in about how important the talent is, how important having those key people in place, and making sure that you have those key people. Like you said, Mark, there are things that we lack as entrepreneurs and someone has to fill in those things for us, if we want to get to that next level. That is a personal decision.

Marck de Lautour:

No doubt. It was a transformation of myself, first and foremost. So I had to realize what are my limitations? What do I suck at? What am I good at? Where could I be helpful in the organization? Sometimes you would look down as a business owner and say, if you were the CEO, would you hire yourself again? If the answer is no, you better get to work right and start overlaying some accountability there. But I truly believe, David, that there are no secrets, only execution. That’s why masterminds work is because there’s really no secrets. It’s just about who’s going to go execute on what they actually learn. So to that point, if you can get people that can execute on what the vision is, you’re going to have great success.

David Richter:

Yeah. That is so good. I wish we could just park there all day and just talk, because I’ve met Chris, your COO and he is incredible. It is these types of people that we need to surround ourselves with in order to get us where we need to be. But thank you for that. That was a huge value there. So let’s talk a little bit about the money side of things since there’s a Profit First REI podcast. Let’s go into that a little bit. So what early lessons did you learn about money and how does that compare to how you think about money today?

Marck de Lautour:

Can I give you a story before I go there?

David Richter:

Let’s do it. Story time.

Marck de Lautour:

Okay. Story time. This is actually … so I’ll go back to my own childhood in a minute, but it immediately brought to mind a conversation that I had with, at the time, my 10 year old son. It just goes to show the education and how important it is with your children. But my wife’s a nurse. She’s a rescue flight helicopter nurse. So she used to work at one of those helicopters at the time that would fly in, save someone’s life, shut down the highway, pick them up, keep them alive and fly them to hospital. So pretty cool work. We were driving home from baseball practice and my son kind of out of nowhere, she said, “Dad, so when mom’s not at work, she doesn’t make any money, right? I said, “Yeah, that’s right.”

He’s like, “But when you’re not at your business, does your business still make money?” And I said, “Yes”. You could see these cogs turning immediately, like understanding trading time for dollars versus owning something. With the old saying, you don’t get rich from what you earn, you get rich from what you own. I was a moment for me that I realized how young a brain can get impacted by decisions. I kind of look back at my early career and there was a time when I had … I went to a private boarding school in New Zealand in high school. So very, very affluent. We were kind of middle income, New Zealand. My parents sacrificed a lot to get me through a very prestigious education.

But a lot of my friends along the way were very, very high, like top 10 richest in New Zealand kind of parents. I would oftentimes would be at their parties and I’d just see one of the dads kind of, “Hey dad, we’re going down to the tennis courts. Can we have some money for some snacks or something?” The dad would pull up just this wad of hundreds and I’d kind of be like, whoa. It just kind of blew my mind. I remember being an impressionable kid, seeing just all this money in cash, and I’m thinking, what does that guy do? And how’s it different than what my dad does or someone else’s dad does or whatever? Again, we were not hurting for anything. I had a wonderful childhood.

Just that impacted me from a young age. I think when you start thinking about money and talking about money, I think children are influenced at a young age, either proactively or just through their natural surroundings. So I think I was influenced. I had a lot of very, very, very wealthy friends. Money has never been a factor of my decision making, but it’s certainly a scorecard that I pay attention to. I think that it motivates because I love to give back. I love to give to our church and to the Generous Genius and to other philanthropies, and those that are broke don’t have that same blessing to be able to do that. So I’m not … one of my favorite books that I think marries up capitalism and Christianity quite well is the Legend of the Monk and the Merchant. I don’t know if you’ve read that book, but would highly recommend it.

That was a great book that I kind of, as I was growing, starting to actually make some money in real estate and kind of wrestling with, oh my gosh, am I deserving of this? What does God want from my life and how can I give back? But when you provide a valuable service, when you provide … when you take something ugly and make it beautiful, like we do with the houses, when you take someone who wants to get out of the stock market and provide them with an opportunity to invest in all kinds of real estate offerings, there’s value there. What I think I learned from my upbringing was that the value of your pay or compensation would be equal to the problems that you solved in life, right?

The bigger the problem you solve, the more money you will be compensated. For example, I think if I would take out my phone right now, I could go down, click Profit First for real estate investing by David Richter, click a button and it’d be on my doorstep tomorrow. That’s amazing and that solves a pretty major problem, because I didn’t want to drive in the freezing snow or whatever out to go to Amazon. It may or may not have the book and … I said Amazon. Gosh, I mean Barnes and Noble, but now I can just click a button and Amazon have it delivered to my door. That’s a pretty amazing thing that Bezos figured out. I think that’s why he’s been compensated trillions of dollars.

David Richter:

Yeah, no, I love that. That is so true, just that mindset, that mentality. I love what you said about your son there, that story of how he’s getting that at 10 years old, passing that on to the next generation of like, okay, the wheels are turning. He’s getting thinking time of being able to think about, okay, there is a difference between making money and earning it, and then owning something that creates that money no matter where or what I’m doing. So absolutely love that because one of the things that I ask usually, selfishly for myself, because I have a four year old daughter, is what lessons about money do you want to pass on to your children? So it sounds like own, not earn. What other lessons would you want to pass on?

Marck de Lautour:

So again, I prefer to defer to others that have already come up with a genius. There’s a great book that’s called The Lessons Self-made Millionaires Give to Their Children or something along those lines. They’re just one page lessons that you can read almost as bedtime stories. It talks about the difference between say a school teacher, and understanding that school teachers are great and they provide a valuable service, but they have never been a business owner. So the way they think about money is different and will not provide financial education to you. I have taken the approach rightly or wrongly that it’ll remain to be seen as our children grow and develop their own character traits and their own business practices and how they grow up. But I have a 15 year old and a 13 year old and I talk to them openly about money.

We certainly don’t brag or talk about what I earn or anything like that, but we talk openly and have open conversations about giving and tithing and employees and having to hire and fire and what you pay people and how you value hiring talent. All these conversations I just have had at an early age. Now my daughter could care less. At 13 she’s free spirit. So it certainly is in one ear out the other, but I think she’s still probably listening. But my son is absolutely all ears and very entrepreneurial. Yeah, it’ll be exciting to see what he does with his life.

David Richter:

Yeah, that is awesome. I love that and I love that recommendation. So we’ll have to find that book, put it in the link, because that sounds like an incredible book of just one page-

Marck de Lautour:

It is awesome. I’ll make sure I get that link to you for sure.

David Richter:

Awesome. Absolutely love that. Then as far as Profit First goes and the whole system, it sounds like you’ve set up bank accounts and you’ve got control over your finances and that’s helped to separate that money and making sure that you’ve got control of what you need, because I’m thinking as you scaled up, that might have gone through several iterations of where you were when you first began buying on the courthouse steps to now doing thousands of deals that you’ve done in your lifetime now. How was that progression of managing the money side of your business?

Marck de Lautour:

Absolutely, it’s been a progression. So obviously as an entrepreneur doing it myself, I had a lot of bank accounts at a very early age and I don’t know quite why. Well, as a turnkey provider, probably it started there when I literally had to set up bank accounts for all the different investors because I was working with investors from all over the world. So I’d set them up with an LLC, set them up with a bank account, then I’d have an escrow account that would kind of come in and hold their funds. I just wanted clear delineation from my operating account, from their account or their money. So if we were going to go buy a house and their name and it needed to be in the escrow account first, I didn’t want to come into my operating and have that cloud my financial.

So I’ve always been big about just having clear lines and delineations. I also didn’t want to just be that guy that looked at a bank account and said, I’m rich, and then look there the next day and say, I broke. Bank accounts have very little to do with the amount of money you’re actually making, as you well know, but also they’re free. They’ll open up as many bank accounts as you want. So I’ve always used that very, very liberally. But yes, there are absolutely progressions in the business. I’m actually really excited. I hadn’t even told you this. So December one, which is now just a couple of weeks away, we’re actually bringing on … We had a fractional CFO. We’re actually kind of moving him to the controller seat and bringing on a very high level CFO that’s worked with major, major, big time corporations. He’s actually fundraised $150 million for his last company. It’s a really big coo, big feather in SPD’s cap because he will really …

Again, kind of next level. We are really good, but now we’re going to be great at finance. As you grow and expand and are buying tens of millions of dollars of real estate every year, you’ve got to treat it like a big business. I’m thrilled, but again, that’s not me and that’s not what I want to get bogged down in. So I think once you reach a point, get a bookkeeper. I think the transition for me was probably secretary that kind of handle a little bit of the books. Then once you scale to seven employees or so, then you get a full-time bookkeeper. Then we had the controller and the bookkeeping service. Now we’re leveling up to go from fractional CFO to a full-time in-house CFO, which I’m really excited about.

David Richter:

That is awesome. That is a great progression. If you want to build a world class business, you have to have world class team members and you have to have the world class mentality. I think you’re getting a good snapshot here of, if you are wanting to scale, this is how you do it. You do it with clear financials, you do it with great team members and you do it with an owner who knows to get out of his own way to level up and to have thinking time, to be able to think and do the high level activities that you need to do. So this has been absolutely incredible. So Mark, just two final questions. The first one, what other advice, general advice would you go on to give to the real estate investors listening on this podcast?

Marck de Lautour:

So for real estate investors, primarily I would say, just think about where you want to go. So we chase deals all the time, right? We’re always trying to get in the living room, trying to get the appointment, trying to get the contract to close, get the thing rehabbed, get the things sold. I think you’ve got to slow down and think, where do I want to get to and start building your organizational. We have a current organizational chart and then we have a three year and a five year org chart. It’s amazing how quickly you live into the three year org chart when you start thinking about it. We even have it with open seats there. So we’ll say title, and then we don’t have names on it, but we have … might be an open seat.

Well, it’s amazing how many referrals you’ll get if you just tell people, yeah, I’m hiring electrician. Do we have an electrician on staff now? No, we have a lot of maintenance guys. But I know that if I found the right electrician that was tired of the grind of his own business, he could come on board and we could bill out his time and we could give him a great wage, and we could bill out his time and make a little bit of profit on that and reduce our expense for owners. That would be a win-win. So we put electrician on there. Same thing with painter and HVAC guy and all those kind of things. So think about where you want to go. The destination is important. Enjoy the journey for sure. But think about the destination. Then my second part would be, think who, not how. It’s egotistical to think that you can do everything yourself.

Great. You have an understanding of the business. That’s wonderful. Now pick something that you don’t want to do and you can delegate it … or that you suck at and you delegate out. One of the truths in our business, and this is even true to the point I just made about hiring a CFO. The strength of the entrepreneur becomes the weakness of the organization. Let me repeat that. The strength of the entrepreneur becomes the weakness of the organization. Why is that? It’s because you outsource all the things that you are not good at, or you don’t like to do. You always hold on to that one thing that you’re pretty good at as though, oh, you’re going to be the one that goes to the living room or you’re going to be the one that closes all the deals or meets with your investors or fundraises money, whatever that might be … the sooner you remove.

So if you choose to elevate and become a business owner, just remember that those things that you’re good at, you will have to find a replacement for you, even in those categories. So dropping the ego, I think that’s one thing I learned at the collective genius. Jason Medley really preaches this hard, is drop your ego at the door and just look for the best people around. I think that’s something that I’ve, over the last few years, at least, leveled up in that category.

David Richter:

That is incredible. Yep. I love that. The strength of the entrepreneur becomes the weakness of the organization. That’s one to write down. You need to write that down right now, stick that on your wall and look at it every single day and know that it’s usually you that you’ve got to get yourself out of the way. Love that advice. There’s been a ton of value provided here on the podcast. So last question I always like to ask is how can the listeners provide value back to you? What are you looking for? Are there connections or website that you’ve pinged people to? You’ve got a podcast as well that you also have up and running. Where would you like to direct the listeners?

Marck de Lautour:

Yeah, that’s a big push. We’ve actually just hired in the last six months, a social media manager. He is telling me all the time to please put the word out to follow us on Instagram at Mark de Lautour, and then Mistake Free Real estate is our YouTube channel and podcast. If you can hit us up, like, hit the notification button, the like bell, would love to get more followers to the Mistake Free Real estate podcasts. That would be a huge help. We’re also on YouTube, mistakefreerealestate.com.

David Richter:

Awesome. There you go. That’s how you can get in touch with him, see his content. As you can see here, you’re going to get world class content from listening and following Mark, so please do that. Mark, thank you so much for being on today. It was incredible. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your journey in real estate.

Marck de Lautour:

David. Thank you. Let me just also plug your book. It’s so impactful. I think anyone who’s an entrepreneur and starting off, I can see the steps that I did long ago kind of paying out in your book. I think it’s such a clear path. If I had you a book a long time ago to read, right after Rich Dad Poor Dad, that would’ve been impactful. So congratulations. It’s a big lift. I know how hard it is to write a book and publish it. Congratulations, and would encourage anyone out there, go dive in. It’s wisdom.

David Richter:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Mark. I really appreciate that, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Profit First REI podcast.

Thank you so much for listening to today’s show. If you found this episode valuable, could you do me a quick favor? Could you give us an honest rating within iTunes. And be honest. You could say whether you liked it or not. Obviously with iTunes, the more reviews and ratings we have, the better it is for other people that are searching for a profit first and a podcast. So we’d love to be ranked on there and that’s thanks to your help. So we would really appreciate that, if you would like to go give us a rating.

Also, if you’re looking to connect with us further, I would highly recommend checking out our Facebook group Profit First for Real Estate Investors. That’s literally what it’s called. So you can type in Profit First For Real Estate Investors, and you’ll be able to find our Facebook group right there. So come join active real estate investors who are supporting each other and growing their businesses and profits together. That’s what that group is all about. The link should be in the description below. If you’re interested in working with us and implementing Profit First in your real estate business, we offer coaching and guidance.

So if you want to work with someone who’s actually Profit First certified and who works right now currently with real estate businesses, you can actually go start your application process by going to simpleCFOsolutions.com/apply, or just go right to simpleCFOsolutions.com, and there’s an applied button right on there if you want to actually start your Profit First journey with someone who can actually walk you through those step by step and help you know and grow your cashflow. Thanks again for joining us for another episode of the Profit First REI podcast. See you next episode.