PODCAST

Stop Wearing Every Hat! with Joe Pardo

Mitch Stephen|By July 30, 2019

Episode 306: Stop Wearing Every Hat! with Joe Pardo

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REIS 306 | Systematizing Your Business

Are you someone who always seem to be pulled in too many directions? If you’re a super doer and multitasker who, every time the phone rings, stops what you’re doing and starts doing something else, this is an episode you don’t want to miss. Business owner Joe Pardo joins us straight out of New Jersey to talk about straightening out your offices and getting somebody on the team besides yourself so you can have a life and quit wearing all these hats. Stop being so reactionary and burnt out as Joe teaches how you can systematize your business by focusing on your team, your offer, and your process.

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I’ve got somebody straight out of New Jersey, an award-winning business owner. He’s Super Joe Pardo. We’re going to talk about straightening out your offices, getting somebody on the team besides yourself so you can have a life and quit wearing all these hats and quit reacting. Every time the phone rings, you stop what you’re doing and start doing something else. I was that guy for many years. I was completely reactionary, trying to piss on the next fire that started. There was one popping up every fifteen minutes. It was a horrible way to live. You’re a super doer and multitasker. You do it until you can’t do it anymore. You look at the mirror one day and go, “How stupid is this?” Then you finally get some help.

Before we talk to Joe, I’ve got to give homage to TaxFreeFuture.com. Please go to TaxFreeFuture.com and watch the 37 videos that you won’t believe what your financial advisors are not telling you. We’re going to tell you what they’re not telling you. We’re going to tell you why they’re not telling you. Go to TaxFreeFuture.com and get yourself some knowledge about tax-free and tax-deferred investing because if you’re not doing it, you’re leaving one of the greatest weapons in the financial building planet on the table untouched. You’ve got to jump in and see it. Joe, it’s nice to have you. I’m all fired up. This is a subject near and dear to my heart.

How are you feeling?

I am fired up. People don’t walk and say, “I need to systematize my office,” but I hear it in every conversation. People are overwhelmed. They’re wearing their butts out. When it’s bad is when you’re wearing your butt out and you’re not making any money. Part of it is because there’s probably too little of you being pulled in too many directions. You’re going to talk to us about the team, the offer and the process. You’ve helped other people straighten things out before. That will be an offer down the way. Let’s get to some real content here and see if we can help some people from this show. We’ll go until it’s not fun anymore.

There’s no such thing as too long, just too boring. It’s your show so you need to own the fact that it’s as long as you need it to make it.

Tell us a little bit about your background quickly. Tell everyone where you’re from.

I’m from South Jersey. We’re outside of good old Philadelphia. I grew up in a family business that turned into a $100 million empire of five different businesses, all related back to trucking. It’s truck parts, truck repair, brokerage of freight, tracking the actual broom-brooms of the trucks and property management. I grew up from the age of six working in the warehouse, getting up to work on the counter, meeting the customers, going through in sales to working on the IT end of it, working on the servers, working on the process with all the different internal office management and all the way to the top with the marketing and inventory management, everything. I’ve seen it all from the largest independently owned truck parts supplier on the East Coast at the time that was sold in 2015. I left the company in 2014 to do my own thing. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I started a podcast one month later at driving a fistfight with my dad because it got so bad. I couldn’t deal with it anymore, I had to get out.

You need to sometimes take a step back and realize that the world doesn’t have to center around you. Share on X

Working with families is bad. I’ve got a family-run business too. It takes a long time to get the pecking order established. I drug my wife into entrepreneurialism by the back of her hair like a cavewoman. She was kicking and screaming, “When are you going to get a job?” I was making more every month than she made in a year. I couldn’t understand like, “What’s broken in this person? She wants me to get a job. I made $30,000 this month. What job do you want me to get?” I got a high school degree. I had a job for fifteen years. No one wants to pay me over $20 an hour.

As responsible and resourceful as I was, I wasn’t valued by that segment of the world. I was disposable and making them money. Every time I figured out how to make them more money, they did not give me any of it. I needed help. I called my wife’s boss and told her she was quitting in two weeks because she wouldn’t do it. Do you think I caused some problems around my house? Do you think family and business was fun at my house? She was making about $36,000 a year. She was making this guy a fortune. She was in a temporary placement business. She was placed on all these people. She was good at it, like a head hunter. I called the boss and said, “I want to give you a notice that my wife is going to be quitting in two weeks.” He started laughing and he goes, “Does she know?”

I said, “No, I just want to make sure you’re okay with two weeks. If you need a little longer, you’ve been good to us, I’ll give you however long you want. I want to know how long it is because she’s going to be giving her notice soon.” He started laughing and goes, “Do you think she’s going to agree with this?” I said, “I don’t think so, but this is what’s happening.” He says, “Why are you doing this?” I said, “Because you know how responsible she is. I know how responsible she is. She can make me all the money she’s making you. That’s why she’s leaving.” He says, “I get it 100%. I don’t blame you.” That was my first help. It was my wife. It’s not a good idea. Don’t do it. When you put your family in the business, you all can’t go on vacation together without the whole business being shut down. That was the biggest problem. The other thing is you’re around each other enough. Sometimes you need to go to work for eight hours and get away from each other.

You’ve got to learn how to take vacations separately sometimes. My wife and I do that from time to time.

I’ve been married for a couple of years. It has worked, but I’ve got a lot of black eyes in the process. You quit the trucking company. What’s next?

I started up a podcast. It was called the Dreamers Podcast at the time. I was interviewing people, inspiring people to help figure out what I want. Unlike you, I only had a high school diploma. I started going back to school. I started off the podcast and went five days a week at one point for three months with the show. I got a big back catalog. I slowed it down a little bit. I started turning out some books over the next couple of years and did a bunch of speaking gigs. At the time, I was more focused on dreaming and what you wanted to be and that stuff. As time went on, I found I enjoyed business. It’s in my roots and my blood. I want to be able to shape my show in that direction. The show became Dreamers Podcast Business Lessons From Those Who Live Their Dreams. That’s where the focus went. Eventually, I got nominated for Business Podcast of the Year in 2017 from Podcast Awards.

I was talking to a good friend of mine. She’s like, “I love your show. I love you. If I saw your show outside of knowing you, I probably wouldn’t click on it because it doesn’t speak to me.” I was like, “It’s time to change the show.” We ended up winning the award. I didn’t think I was going to win. I was nominated, won the award, changes the show to Business with Super Joe Pardo. Since the end of 2017, it’s been that way. I wrote my fourth book, which is called Sales Won’t Save Your Business. It’s been so much fun getting to do something that I enjoy, which is helping business owners focus on their team to offer their process and having everything in line with what I enjoy the most.

Sales Won’t Save Your Business: Focus on the TOP (Team, Offer and Process)

That’s quite an accomplishment. Out of all the podcasts in the world, how many are there? Are there 425,000?

It’s something like that.

You’ve got the team to offer the process. Let’s start with the team. Let’s bite into some meat here.

The team starts with you. There’s no I in team, but there is a me. It’s getting yourself in a place where you can enable yourself to empower others. Instead of saying, “I’m going to do this myself because I can,” it’s, “Let me go through and figure out how I can empower others to get the job done, how I can empower myself.” I’m not tearing other people down when they don’t inevitably do exactly what I wanted them to do or exactly how I wanted it to be done. It starts with empowering yourself, to open your mind and open to what you’re available to.

I’m excited about the show because everybody needs this. I was one of those guys who thought that the business I was in was not one of those businesses you could systematize, which was the stupidest mind screw ever. I screwed my mind badly. Just because I couldn’t figure it out, I blamed it on the industry or the business I had that it wasn’t conducive to do it. It was the dumbest thing in the world. They push a BMW out of a factory one every four seconds. Building a BMW has got to be more complicated than flipping a house. This is stupidest this thing I ever thought to myself. I mind screwed myself on it. Come to find out my business was systematize-able, I had to believe it could be. I had to want it bad enough. You’re going to fall down. I was out. If I’ve done it for fifteen years, I’m going to fall down. I’m dead exhausted. I don’t care if I ever see another house again in my life. I can’t do it anymore.

I was a bad salesman, “I’m calling about that house for rent.” “Where did it say for rent?” I was like, “This guy is calling on my sign.” It’s a For Sale sign and he pisses me off because he wants to know if this is for rent. I was becoming the worst sales guy in the world. The bottom line is I said I’m going to quit. I quit a $1 million a year business. I said, “I’m done. I can’t do it.” I started lying awake at night, “Am I going to walk away from $1 million a year? Can’t you sell half of it? Can I get eight people, a total of $500,000 and it will run and I could keep at least half?” I thought I’ve got to try one more time. This time, I’m not going to do it by myself. I’m going to hire someone. I ended up going to a mastermind that had 40 people in my business. Half of them had already systematized and could vacation all over the world all year long. That was the first step was believing.

You need to sometimes take a step back and realize that the world doesn’t have to center around you. You can break the things down into smaller pieces so that you can part out some of them. That burnout affected you. It affected me, that’s why I walked away. It can consume you. When you start looking at, “If I hire these people, I need to manage them.” Sometimes, just because we know how to do the thing that gets us the money doesn’t mean we can do the thing that can empower other people to get us the money and make it all continue to roll. It’s a whole other skillset.

When hiring people, find that person who not only can do the task but is willing to hang in there for more than two months. Share on X

You may suck at being a great house flipper and a trainer of people to run your business, which I do. This is my idea of training, “Hi, secretary. How are you doing? This is the first day on the job. There’s your desk. There’s your phone. See you later.” That’s how I train.

That’s very off-putting. It might be hard for you to find that right person who can punch back and say, “You hit me in the face with all this stuff and walked away without giving me any training or like, “Here’s how we do this. Here’s why we do things. Here’s a handbook, a manual.”” You have to find that person who not only can do that task but is willing to punch back to hang in there for more than two months.

This is what happened to me. I would get someone who had what it took to figure out something on their own, but they were more like entrepreneurs. They can adapt so fast. They wouldn’t be at my job for long because they would either figure out what I was doing or they would start their own business or something. I was getting these people that wouldn’t stay. The good ones wouldn’t stay because I was getting the wrong kind. I like to hire people that don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in their body. I test them for that. I like my acquisition people and my salesman to be big moneymakers. I like the money to be important to them. I love for them to be missed managers of their private money. That’s one requirement. They need to not handle their private money very well. The other one is they can’t have an entrepreneurial bone in their body. Other than that, I’m looking for all the good stuff. I was testing for responsibility, honesty, neatness, cleanliness, being organized and all the good stuff. I needed these two flaws in them so they would stay. It worked.

It’s finding somebody who likes to vacation more than they care about the money. It’s the person that wants to work for their vacation, their cruises or whatever it is that they enjoy. They’re at the right stage in life where they don’t need more. That’s a great way, looking for those couple of flaws, as well as looking for people that are like, “I just want a paycheck. I don’t want to have headaches.”

“I don’t want to manage anybody. I don’t want to be responsible.”

“I’m out of here.” They’re maybe staying at 6:00 once in a while, doing a little bit late stuff. For the most part it’s, “I want my vacations. I want to enjoy life outside of here. I want to go home and not have to think about it.”

Let’s talk about some things that are usually very easy to get off your back quickly. One is if you’ve got collections or accounts receivable, that’s easy. Get someone else on that. Another thing is bookkeeping. Get someone else on the bookkeeping. Quit doing your own books. They got companies that do all this stuff. We have a note servicing company. If you’re out there and collecting your own payments on houses because you’re selling houses with seller financing, check out Moat Note Servicing. You can get that off your back. Can you think of any other easy ones?

Systematizing Your Business: When hiring people, find that person who not only can do the task but is willing to hang in there for more than two months.

I always look at services that I can get through Fiverr or Upwork. If I need any graphic design work done, I don’t have to use Paint or even Photoshop. If it takes you 45 minutes to do something, pay someone $5 on Fiverr. You might have to do two revisions, a few minutes of telling them what you want in a revision, it’s getting done. You don’t have to hire somebody. You don’t have to increase your payroll, insurance or any of that stuff. You send the money to somebody who can get what your vision is completed. If you get to a point where you need payroll, there are payroll services. Get them to clock in and out on a software side or even a punch card and get a payroll company, HR services. You get four to eight people. You need somebody to turn to because those people are going to have questions like insurance questions or whatever.

You can go get yourself an HR company. There are also IT services. You might not have a technical background. I have a pretty expansive technical background when it comes to computers. At a point, you can hire a tech company to go and take care of that stuff for you rather than you trying to fix everything yourself. The thing that always drives me crazy is when people are like, “I don’t do that anymore. That piece of software stopped working or that copying machine stopped working. We work around it instead of trying to fix it.”

Let’s talk about the one-horse show here. Delegate your bookkeeping, collections, IT and all that stuff. It’s hard because you’re not rich yet and you’re trying to save money, but there’s a fine line between working below your pay grade and working out of your league and spending money or making money. Be careful with what you choose. I like to get that idea of not working below your pay grade. If you bought three houses in the last quarter and you made $45,000, divide that by a 40-hour workweek or a 60-hour workweek, whatever the case may be. Figure out what you’re worth an hour. If that job that you need to be done is less than that, you’re writing a check to somebody. That’s a good rule of thumb.

The other thing is you need to be aware of the VA services that are available overseas. You can maximize some menial tasks for $2.53 an hour. They’re way better workers than our minimum wage workers here in the United States. The job is important. The time is almost completely opposite. From where I’m from, it’s twelve and a half hours difference. Lunchtime here is midnight there. In the Philippines, they’re used to working your hours. The technology is bringing a middle class to the Philippines. People that make $5.50 an hour in the Philippines is equivalent to a $50,000, $60,000 a year job in the United States. For $5.50, you’re getting a guy that used to run for a hospital. These guys are not dumb. You can’t even compare their $5.50 person to our $10 person an hour in the United States. They’re so much more proficient most of the time. You can’t speak on all generalities.

It’s getting things for scheduling, booking appointments, writing documents and email response. There are so many things that you can sub out to help alleviate some of that time that you’re spending. The important thing there is to start to take a look at how you’re spending your time, what you’re doing. You can figure out, “What can I get that would help free me up to pick out which houses I want to buy or go do more sales calls because that’s what I’m good at?” You need to be doing that. You can hire more people. One of my goals is to create and save jobs. That’s with my TV show and with everything that I do, it’s always to create and save jobs and to be able to say, “You’re doing great. You’re one person.” “I did $1 million.” “Yeah, but what’s the quality of life that you’re living?” “I enjoy my life.” I always say, “Build your business for your lifestyle, not your lifestyle for your business.”

It’s finding that balance. That balance is different for everybody. I don’t preach like, “You’ve got to work the four-hour workweek because some guy wrote a book.” Some people will think that it’s great. That would be boring for me, to not have more things to create, more things to do. You have to find that balance. It’s sitting down and saying, “I’m going to work 50 hours a week.” How are those 50 hours going to be spent? Try to block it out. You could sit back and be like, “There’s a bunch of time here that I could be doing more selling, creating more revenue, versus doing some of the backend stuff that I could sell out to other people.” By putting in black and white on paper, it creates that ability for you to have that step back moment and say, “I’m wasting a lot of my time.”

We got an outbound calling room. There are 37,000 people behind on taxes in my city. I’ve got one person, a VA, that sorts that list because they’re not all prospects for me. The one that was $100 late or $500 late last week and is behind now $500 is not my guy. I need someone who’s $7,000, $10,000 behind and got a real problem and the windows are closing down on it. You cut the list in half. Half of 37,000 is 18,500 people. I’ve got $3 an hour VAs that speak good English. In fact, we have to pay him a little bit more, maybe $3.50. We like to keep the wage low but give a bonus upon accomplishing the tasks that we wanted to get accomplished that day. The carrot is always in front of him. We got three of them. They’re calling 200 people a day. All they’re trying to do is find out, “Are you the owner of that house that’s on 116 Main Street?” “Yes.” “Would you like to talk about selling?” “Yes.” “Talk to this guy.” They turn it over. That’s all they’re trying to do is find a warm body who wants to talk that owns the house. They’re calling 200 people a day times three. That’s 600 people a day.

Build your business for your lifestyle, not your lifestyle for your business. Share on X

I’m paying $9 an hour combined total with bonuses for connections and sales. Every time you reach 200 that day, you get a little extra. Whether they reach 200, I don’t know. Some of this stuff is hard to police, but I feel good that it’s working because it’s being successful. It’s buying enough houses. If they only call 170, I don’t give a crap because I’m buying enough houses. It will become a problem if I’m not buying enough houses. That was one way. Sometimes I want to get a bunch of people off the internet, “Go find me every real estate club in the planet that has to do with this.” They start going across the United States looking for real estate clubs in Facebook or something. They do those things for me. I love those. I have six VAs that work for me throughout all my companies. They’re team-players as far as I’m concerned. I’m glad they’re on my team. It gives a whole other dimension to help when you don’t have to pay $15 an hour for good health. I’ve got a link for a VA company that I recommend. Let’s move to the offer. Talk to us about the offer.

The offer comes down to the product or service you’re offering and how you can make a small tweak to make a big difference. I always give this example. You go to the Mexican restaurant. There’s one that I go to where I love the guacamole. It comes to a medium-sized black cup and it’s $9. I’m like, “This is awesome. This is as good as that restaurant over in Philly that’s incredible and charges $13.” It comes with the mortar and pestle set up and they charge $13 for it. They’re in the city, but you could charge probably another $1 or $2 and only have to give a little bit more to fill out that set up. The appearance, the perception, is raised so much that it’s like, “I’m not going to spend $11 versus $9. It’s great stuff. I’m getting a little bit more and the presentation is there.” To spend an extra $30, $40 on a cup of each for the appearance can help elevate how much revenue you could do. It’s little things like that or simplifying the offer.

You go into the Alex and Ani store and say, “It’s my wife’s birthday.” “What do you want to say? Give me two words.” They come back with three options. You’re like, “I want that and that.” They match together and made a $60 sale in asking two questions. That’s the offer that I’m talking about when I say you can make these little changes. Refine what you’re offering, how the customer interacts with the offer and how your employees interact with the offer, your team members, how they interact with it. If you can get it down to this fine point, it makes it so much easier to say yes.

I’m trying to think of how that works in my business. I don’t know if it applies here because it’s not about the offer, but I think service seems to be dead in this country. Service is lacking. I try to tell my people, “We’ve got to give service. We’ve got to be whatever it is. If they’re asking for it, we need to figure out how to give it to them. I don’t care how stupid you think it is. We need to make it easy to give it to them. How do we make it easy for them?” It’s instead of saying, “That’s a dumb thing,” and pushing them off. I don’t like the question either. I don’t think we should have to do it, but if that’s what they’re asking for, do it. I want to be known as a service.

Your people are calling people who are upside-down in debt. They need a whammy. I envision that we have signs around here that says, “We’ll buy houses for cash.” I envision it’s a similar type of model. Buy it for cash and get it fixed up. Sell it at value or hopefully above value.

The name of my company is Cash 4 Houses.

It can’t get any simpler than that.

Systematizing Your Business: The offer comes down to the product or service you’re offering and how you can make a small tweak to make a big difference.

The problem is I put Cash4Houses.net, which was the biggest mistake in the world. Whoever owns Cash4Houses.com gets a phone call for me every day. Everyone inadvertently puts in .com instead of .net. I’ve come too far to change it. After 2,000 houses, I’m not changing it.

Maybe you should reach out to them and try to buy the site off of them.

I already did. It’s not going to work. Do you have an example of someone who changed their offer? You had that one with the guacamole, but is there anything off the top of your head when someone changed an offer?

One of my clients is an interior designer. Changing her offer in how she collects the money has made a pretty significant difference. It’s changing her offer so that the contract is more of a front to middle loaded rather than on the backend. It has enabled her to collect the money without having to go chase people around, as well as putting together proposals in a more simplified way. It’s like, “This is the proposed amount.” The front page gives you the most. If you want to know more, there’s more in the back, but you don’t have to read through all of it to get the summary. The people who are making those decisions aren’t the people that are going to peer through every single page. It depends on how big the company is and how many decision-makers there are. You have to be able to look at it and make a decision. For her, it has made a lot easier.

An offer can also be who you’re targeting. Who are the clients or customers that you’re trying to target? What are they trying to look for? Where are they looking for? It’s also trying to be there for them. One of my coaching clients worked through trying to understand that trying to get business organically through networking stuff is great, but it’s not going to be enough to get you to where you want to be. It’s specifically going to where the clients are and not just like, “Hopefully, so-and-so that I meet at this event or at this conference is going to network. It’s going to all work out.” Depending on what you offer and sell, maybe it could. When you’re talking about a very specific niche of things that you’re looking for like, in your case, people that are upside down.

It’s motivated sellers.

You’re looking for those specific people. Calling me up is not going to help you. I live in the house I grew up in. It has zero payments missed and a zero interest in moving versus calling people down the street that pay way more for their house and all that. It might be a thing that this could be a way for us to get out of a bad situation that we got ourselves in. Finding those specific people and narrowing it down is helpful.

Trying to get business organically through networking is great, but it’s not going to be enough to get you to where you want to be. Share on X

You have a giveaway called Rocket Your Business Value. What’s this? It’s a PDF. What can they expect from it?

It focuses on different ways that you can increase the value of your business. We’ve talked about quite a few of them. Here’s an example. If you want to sell your business now, how invested are you in the success of your business versus, and I don’t know how long ago you started but say a year or two after you started where you were doing everything?

I’ve been in it for several years. In the first five years, I did everything then I started getting some people.

It’s the value there. If you want to sell your business five years before you start giving people responsibilities, it’s a lot lower because they’ve got to keep you on board to keep it working unless they have a machine that they can plug you into. That’s one of those things where it’s like, “How do you go back to processes? How do I build the processes and put other people in place so that if I sold the whole business tomorrow, they’re getting all of that without needing me in it?” I don’t have to be in the picture. It’s like the upside-down pyramid effect. When you pull it at the bottom, the whole thing is going to collapse.

I have a coaching segment of my life and that’s all centered on me. I’m the center point of that business. That business can never be sold because I am the featured asset of that business. You’ve learned to recognize that pretty quickly, “It’s the time to turn the page on this. We’ve been doing it for five or six years.” “There’s no subbing this out.” I started out wrong. I know coaching guys that own coaching companies that are free. I set mine up around the wrong thing.

You could start a program where you’re recruiting other coaches to work under you as part of an agency. It’s never too late. It’s just a matter of whether or not you want to invest the time to write down all the things that you’re doing for it, look at the time that you’re doing, write down all the processes that you go through, maybe make some videos so that you can do that and do group coaching calls with those coaches to help expand that reach. It’s not impossible. You’ve got to be willing to take the time to do that.

Recalibrate everything. To get that Rocket Your Business Value PDF, go to 1000houses.com/Rocket. Let’s talk a little bit about processes.

Systematizing Your Business: The process is the package that everything is delivered in. It’s how your team members, your clients, and you interact with your business.

We’ve been talking about the process the whole time. The process ties into the team and the offer. It’s the package that everything is delivered in. It’s how your team members, your clients and you interact with your business. It’s looking at like, “How do I set limits?” One of the things I did with one of my coaching clients was I said, “You’re running in a hamster wheel with, ‘I’ve got to be available 24/7 from the phone and Facebook. All my people are constantly writing questions and things of that nature.”” I was like, “What if you set a limit and train them to understand like, ‘This is the two-hour window that I will be on Facebook five, six or seven days a week. This is when you can expect the answer.” In the middle of the night, my phone will not make any noises unless somebody calls me. When they’re calling me in the middle of the night, it’s probably important or a robocall that we haven’t gotten out. Hopefully, we stay away from there. It’s setting yourself up to help set those expectations for both team members and clients. That’s where the process plays into delivering the whole business.

When I decided to try to create processes and get myself out in the middle of my business, I went to this mastermind with an open mind. I went there with a desperation that I had to let someone there. I needed it so bad that I was committed to listen and try things out of my comfort zone and save this $1 million a year job or business. I tried to save at least half of it. The first thing that we did was we built a tree of a hierarchy of who’s at the top of the business, which was me, and everyone down. It’s as a 10,000-foot overview of what their job title was like acquisition guy, acquisition manager, salesperson and sales manager. I drew out all these circles on this thing. It was like, “How am I going to find these people? How am I going to train them?”

I was not a very good trainer. I would hire people and say, “This is the job. This is the end result. I haven’t got this whole seat perfected yet. I need you to help me figure this out.” They would sit and I would tell them, “I want you to get on the computer and document every place you go on your computer to do this.” I made them write their own handbook. I said, “I need you to document this so if you’re not here, I know how to do it.” What I was really saying was, “If you’re not here, I can hire someone else to do it.” I said, “I want to know how to do it if you’re not there. Explain it to me.” I got them to write the manuals for their seat. I would go back and tweak those manuals if there’s something they wrote in there that I didn’t like. I would tweak it the way I want it. I had a little manual for that chair. “Here’s the magic,” and we got to wrap it up.

By the time I finished systematizing and getting everybody, I thought that I was going to have to give up half of my million in salary and just keep half of it so I could be free. What happened was each individual person was so much better than divided Mitch at that job that I made more than the $1 million I was used to making even after they got paid. That’s what happened, much to my amazement. People have told me about it, “Mitch got to get hit in the head with a hammer with a concept before he learns it.” I did what they said. I let them unwind me and wind me back up. They made me do things that were painful. They said, “Go on vacation and don’t call your office for a week.” I was like, “I can’t do that.” They said, “That’s what you’re going to do.” I’m like, “I can’t do that.” They said, “You’re going to do it. We’re going to find out where your office is broken.”

It’s the best way to do it. It’s to not be available. If you’re always there to put out the fire, those issues can’t be in their head. When you make changes, more issues are going to be in their head. Change is like, “You’re not there. How is this going to get done?” Somebody is either going to figure it out or is going to sit on the wayside and hopefully nothing gets broken.

I had a certain amount of people around me. I learned that I had trained them not to make any decisions without talking to me. They had to call me about everything, “Can we buy paper?” I had to learn to say, “I don’t know. What do you think? If I’m not here, are you going to buy paper or not?” He says, “We need paper.” I said, “Then buy the paper. You don’t have to call me to buy paper.” I’m the one who trained them to do that inadvertently. I didn’t mean to. It’s like, “We need staples.” “Go get some.”

Before my grandfather left the company and passed away shortly after, he used to complain to other people. He’d be like, “Bert and I were doing this stuff. We were purchasing all these parts and doing all this inventory management stuff. Now we’ve got four people and they don’t get done anything I wanted to be done. Nothing is getting accomplished.” I’m like, “Not everybody has that level of experience that you have going back several years. There’s a difference.” It’s more people you have to communicate. Everybody’s got to be on the ball at the same time. It’s not just you knowing every piece of what’s going on and spitting out an answer but also working seven days a week in pretty much around the clock.

Getting comfortable with hiring people is a task in and of itself. Share on X

The lesson for me was because those people were focused on one thing they had to do all the time, when Mitch was there, Mitch had fifteen things he had to do. He didn’t do any of them very good because he never could finish a task without the phone ringing or whatever. These people were so focused. That’s all I did every day, I could concentrate. They did their job much better than me. I was better than them one-on-one, but I could never sit in that chair for eight hours. I learned to value that very much. Now I don’t care if I’m better than anybody at anything. I want them to be better than me at everything. I’m 58 years old. I’m tired of this.

That goes the same with the training, “If we train our people, what if they take that information and leave?” What if they don’t leave and you don’t train them? You’re stuck with them because your comfort is there. Getting comfortable with hiring people is a task in and of itself, being able to trust somebody else. I’ve worked with clients on trying to figure it out. We did that one time. It didn’t work out well. We tried it again. That didn’t work out too well either. No one wants to go through the process of hiring people with all the steps it takes and having to meet with different people and find the right person. If you do enough in your sales, you can hire somebody to do things for you. That’s one of the reasons HRs have a job.

This is one of the biggest hurdles for me in setting up the business. This is relevant. I’m going to put it in the context of my business. For readers out there, if you have a different business, put it in the context of your business. I was used to buying 100 houses a year. When the time came to fix my business, all the times before I tried and failed, I did not give myself permission not to buy 100 houses that year. The time that I got successful and the last time I tried, A) I got professional help. B) I gave myself permission not to buy 100 houses that year. I was going to buy 20, 25 or 30, but it wasn’t going to be 100 because I was going to be spending my time trying to make a business that runs without me. I couldn’t do two things at one time. That was one of the biggest things. I gave myself permission to take a couple of steps backwards, which was dropping sales that year. God only knows how much 70 houses were worth to me. I don’t know how much it was worth. I do but I choose not to. Now I’m free.

I gave up 70 houses one year so I could profit on 70 houses. I didn’t have to be in that business anymore and it still ran. It ran better, faster and more profitable than when I was there in the middle. I gave myself permission to not do as well that year because I had to focus on something that wasn’t going to make money for six or seven months. I had to get all these chairs there and had them working together. I had to get them all pulling in the same direction. When it started working, it took off. Go to 1000houses.com/Rocket. Get a consult with Super Joe Pardo. He’ll help you systematize your business. If you need someone in your corner, give him a call. Talk to him about it. We also have the giveaway Rocket Your Business Value, which is a PDF on certain things you can do to increase the value of your business. One of those is getting your butt out of the middle of it and making it a whole a plateful of goods you can sell. I want to thank you for taking the time to stop by. You have a podcast. What is it?

It’s called Business with Super Joe Pardo.

Go find his podcast. Are you going to have me on your podcast?

Yes. Hopefully, I’ll have you out here in Lake City for the podcast and conference.

Systematizing Your Business: If you do enough in your sales, you can hire somebody to do things for you. That’s one of the reasons HRs have a job.

You also teach people how to do podcasting. That’s another thing you do. I have a $997 course on profitable podcasting if anyone’s ever interested. I’m thinking about working out something with Joe about it because he’s already doing it and I don’t have time. Podcasting is not my forte per se, although you might be surprised at how good I am at podcasting and how it pays.

I was surprised. That’s not me just blowing smoke. It’s awesome to see somebody doing so well from podcasting. There are a lot of people that aren’t. They don’t know how to build that audience and build a target with a funnel to get people to buy the thing that they’re looking to sell, whether it’s their product or somebody else’s product or an event. There are so many different ways that you can use this authority that you’ve built by doing these podcasts.

There’s a whole lot to it. It’s not as complicated as you might think. The good thing is I like what we were talking about. I had good people around me and they knew about this stuff. I didn’t start a podcast to make money. I started it to spread my authority, expertise and the perception of Mitch Stephen over a wider geographical territory. It ended up being something much different. It’s because the people around me knew about it. I didn’t know anything about it. They still know more about it than me, but I know what I have to do now. A lot of people would quit their job to make what I make on this podcast. It’s about 85% of the people in the world at least. This is fun. I get to talk to smart people like Super Joe Pardo. I get to learn things from these guys. They think it’s an interview but it’s my ploy so I can rake their brain for as long as I want.

That was my goal a few years ago.

You can ask smart people if you can take them to lunch and rake their brain. They’ll tell you to go jump in a lake. You can ask smart people if they’ll be on your podcast for an interview. They’ll say yes and show up at the time agreed. The questions that you ask at the lunch they blew you off on are the same questions you’re asking on the podcast. I do this for a lot of reasons. One is it keeps me smart. It keeps me on top of my game. I meet a lot of great people. You’re one of them, Joe. Thanks for being on.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Go to 1000houses.com/Rocket. Get your free PDF. Don’t forget to check out TaxFreeFuture.com. You won’t believe what your financial advisors are not telling you. Learn how to invest and grow your financial resources tax-deferred or tax-free. It’s a huge benefit. We’re going to explain to you why those financial advisors are not telling you what you need to know and why. There’s a reason. I’d like to thank each and every one of you for stopping by to get you some Super Joe Pardo.