Chad shares everything—from his lead channels, building a team, and balancing a growing business while raising three kids under two. If you’re ready to take your real estate game to the next level, you’re in the right place.

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Show Transcription:

Tony Javier (00:00):
Want to know how to go from zero deals to 20 plus a month on autopilot in less than four years, one of my clients, Chad Young, is going to share how he did it. This interview, he answers a lot of tough questions like how he built his team, what his best lead channels are, and what it’s like to balance having three kids under two years old with his growing business. If you want to learn from one of the best in the business, you are in the right place. Let’s jump right into this interview.

Chad Young (00:26):
The summer of 2019, I started marketing, uh, for off market properties. Um, I basically listened to the Wholesaling Inc podcast and just tried to do literally like everything they said to do at the time. Um, so I wrote tens of thousands of handwritten letters, <laugh> to properties. I bought a bad list of data and we mailed out tens of thousands and it was people that sold their homes like eight years prior and just dumb stuff. But it made, uh, it took me nine months to get my first deal. Um, started marketing in 2019 in the summer and got my first deal I think in March, April or May, somewhere like maybe May of 2020. Yeah, 2020. I remember the first contract we ever got, a guy named Penny Dennis and I locked up the contract at her house and then I went home and, and Trump was all over TV saying like, the Chinese virus is here, like closed the borders.

Chad Young (01:15):
And so it was like, oh crap. Like what’s gonna happen now? ’cause um, my wife and I owned a janitorial company at the time and we’re really wanting to pursue this pretty heavily. And uh, I, we at the time had been on the longest run of economic expansion in US history and I was like, well this is like gonna be that event that like pushed us over the edge into recession. Um, that obviously Covid had the opposite effect. <laugh> when we print trillions of dollars kind of took off to the moon on pricing. But um, yeah, that was it man. Started, started out doing texting and then moved into the radio and mail and PPC and TV and billboards and um, our pretty much mass mass market. So mass media,

Tony Javier (01:58):
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Tony Javier (02:43):
Awesome. Cool. And what does your team look like right

Chad Young (02:45):
Now? Yeah, we’ve got, including myself, we have a staff of 15 full-time. Um, three are VAs in the Philippines and I would put 12 as full-time in office. Um, we have myself as the owner and I facilitate the marketing and I lead the acquisitions department right now as well as like just a chief putter outer of fires. That’s a lot of what you do and you have a dozen employees. And then we’ve got an operations manager who I’m training to be a chief putter outer of fires and um, to just help hold the key team accountable and help grow our team and level us up. Uh, we’ve got two lead managers, a transaction coordinator, a project manager, two dispositions, oh, we have a relation, two acquisitions and a relationship manager. And then our three bas I think that was everybody. And I have an executive assistant.

Chad Young (03:39):
We are about 120,000 a month at this point for our marketing budget. Um, I think that’s about what we average and it is all between, I don’t know the exact breakdown, but it’s all I know the bulk of it is TV and radio are well over 20 grand a month for both of those. And then, um, PPCI think probably hovers around 20 a month and then we mail out 50,000 ish letters a month, whatever that ends up breaking down per postcard. I think we pay like 53 cents a postcard or something. So then what else do we do, man? We do pay per lead. I have a pretty love hate relationship with paper lead and some Facebook retargeting. That’s pretty much it. Um, so it’s, we, I don’t know what CRM you guys use, but we use re simply. And one of the things that we found is kind of a shortcoming of most CRMs and it has to be done basically manually, is when you start to get across a bunch of channels.

Chad Young (04:38):
So you’re doing, uh, radio, tv, PPC, you’re sending out mail. It almost every single lead that calls in we’re like, Hey, how’d you hear about us? ’cause they called off of our website number and they’re like, well, I saw your TV commercial, heard your radio ad. I’ve been getting your mailers for three months. I just saw your billboard. And it’s like, how the crap do you attribute that? Like that’s really hard to be like, oh, okay. And in a CRM you can only typically pick one lead source to attribute that to. Um, and so what we just these last couple weeks have, um, been doing is I’ve had my executive assistant who is, she’s a, a virtual assistant that’s got like a master’s degree in like civil engineering or something. She’s very, very smart when it comes to like spreadsheets and formulas and data interpretation.

Chad Young (05:18):
And so she’s actually put together a, uh, spreadsheet for us. We’re, we’re attributing partial lead sources. So if somebody says, you know, I heard about you on TV ci your radio or heard about your, uh, radio ad, saw your TV ad and got your postcard we’re attributing like 33% to each of those three. ’cause each of them had a hand in the play. And so that’s giving us a much more accurate picture. Um, you’ll find a lot that when you’re doing mass media and you’re not attributing, like you’re not breaking it down by partial attribution, you’ll find a lot of things like tv, radio and mail will look like they’re underperforming. And then certain things like your website will look like it’s performing like a 15 x and it’s not the case because a lot of inquiries are driven to your website. And so I don’t have all the exact data right now.

Chad Young (06:10):
I think TV and radio were pretty tied for us at like a four and a half x or somewhere around there. Um, now that we’ve been able to break it down by like partial lead attribution, pay per lead is our worst performing service right now. And then pay per click and mail I think cover around like a three x. But like I thought our TV was sucking a lot more than it was until we did this. And then I was like, oh, okay. What I thought was like a two and a half x is actually like a four and a half x and it makes a huge difference when you’re like looking at where to plow tens of thousands of dollars a month. Um, and so I, I could never go back to like the lack of data in reporting that we had. So yeah, I think TV and radio are kind of the dynamic duo for us right now.

Chad Young (06:51):
But, but it took us a long time. Like we, it took us I think two or three years to figure out how to make money on tv. Like the, I don’t know if it was market shift competitors got out, but like we bled money for the first probably 80,000 in TV ads over a couple years. And then we finally like it started to return in ROI. So our sales process doesn’t differ across any lead channel. Um, we are all in-person appointments. We don’t do anything virtual really starts with the lead management department. And that’s one of the things that I kind of wanna, um, I’d like to hit on. ’cause we’ve made a lot of improvements from lead management all the way going through acquisitions. If you guys aren’t measuring like your live answer rate, your same day contact, um, your speed to lead, um, things like that, you guys really, really should be answering those, or excuse me, really should be, uh, managing those and knowing what those numbers are.

Chad Young (07:39):
But so our, our biggest thing, like the biggest reason we’re able to crank out the amount of deals we do, like we did 28 houses last month, is ’cause pretty religious and relentless about measuring those things and continuing to improve them. And so like our live answer goal is like 90% and we count that across a couple things. So if somebody calls us, did we live answer like that’s either a yes or no, and then we count live answer for a web form ’cause we get a lot of web forms, paper lead forms, stuff like that. Is when we got the paper lead form, do we respond to them within three minutes? So that’s basically the best attempt. We can do it live answering a web form. And like our goal, you know, is 90%, I think we’re at like 96% for this month and we typically have a little over 90%.

Chad Young (08:25):
But before we started measuring this stuff, um, we, we hired a consulting company called Sharper Process, which I think a lot of people in the real estate space are pretty familiar with. I think Tony does coaching with some of their people as well. And they challenged us, they’re like, you know, what’s your life answer rate? And I was like, I don’t know, we’re probably like 80%. Well we actually measured it, we were at like 25%. It was horrible. But you think you’re answering all those phone calls ’cause that kind of frenetic energy people are always on the phone. You’re like, yeah, we must be answering the phone calls. Um, but anyways, we, at the time we started measuring it, I think we were doing like eight to 10 deals a month and we did not increase our marketing spend at all. We just increased like our live answer rate, same day contact rate, things like that.

Chad Young (09:02):
And we were able to go up to like, you know, averaging 15 deals a month, which is pretty cool. Not changing our marketing, just improving processes. So like the main portion of our sales, it always starts with like your first impression, which is lead management. Um, that’s a very scripted role for us. We, um, there’s certain things we want to hit. We use a lot of the John Martinez and Steve Train, um, our sales people. So our acquisitions agents before they can ever go on a seller appointment, um, they have to go through about $20,000 worth of coaching programs We do. Steve Trains, John Martinez, and a handful of other ones. Um, and then once, once we get ’em into the house, it’s all, um, belly to belly with sellers and we’re, we’re shooting for like an hour and a half long appointment. Pretty much every trick of the trade that we can, we set the stage, which is a John Martinez thing and Steve Trank thing.

Chad Young (09:50):
We scorch Earth, which is a John or uh, Steve t Trang thing. We’ve been very, very blessed that like in our market, we’ll average 2025 deals a month and like our next biggest compe competitors maybe doing like three to four a month. And so, um, we’ve just been able to build a huge brand in our area and um, it’s been nice. So it makes it a lot easier. Like, you know, Google reviews, we’ll go up against a competitor and um, they’re like, yeah, look at your Google reviews. And you had, you know, like close to 200 of them at five stars we’re like, yeah, we’re like just outta curiosity, like how do we stacking up against our competitors? We know the answer to this. We’re like, we’re asking, they’re like, well they didn’t really have Google reviews so they had like two. I’m like, oh, that’s kind of weird.

Chad Young (10:32):
Does that seem kind of weird? <laugh>? I mean, you know, just placing those little seeds in people’s minds. So, but yeah, that’s kinda our sales process. It goes all the way from lead management to in-person appointments. We don’t get a massive amount of deals from follow up because we tend to close most of our deals within the first 30 days during the pipeline. Um, but we do get, uh, probably 15, 20% of our deals from follow up. Yeah, we’re doing, um, kind of the next evolution of business. We’re always gonna do wholesale and flip, like it’s great, keeps the lights on. Um, and it’s very profitable and it’s fun. We’re able to grow a really fun dynamic team. Um, and a and a business that I’m proud of. We have really good reputation in the area. But the next kind of extension of the business that we’re doing is, um, land development, specifically land entitlement.

Chad Young (11:13):
And so, um, just kinda give you guys like general breakdown of why we’re doing those and types of numbers that are in these deals. Um, like we have a deal that we are gonna be all in it about 450,000 on with the purchase and then the cost to take it through entitlement. And if anyone doesn’t know what that is, is we’re just taking bare land, taking it through like the permitting, engineering surveying process to get paper locks out of it. That we can go to a builder or a developer and say, Hey, here’s 47 buildable lots and we haven’t moved to earth, we haven’t touched the dirt, done nothing to it. It’s just paper lots. Um, but like that development will sell to a builder for about 1.2 million. And so the spread on that is, you know, like seven, $800,000 on that one. And uh, you had to flip like a hundred homes to make that much money <laugh>.

Chad Young (12:01):
And so, but that’s one deal. And so like we’re pretty heavily, we’ve like gotten really good at marketing and sales the last four years and now we’re shifting a little bit of that to like land. Um, it’s significantly harder to get into and there’s a lot more that you need to know about it. Um, but it’s a, a higher barrier of entry. So there’s, you know, Joe Schmo who’s just sticking out band designs, like he doesn’t know what to do with a five acre chunk of land typically. Like he doesn’t know how to monetize it. And it like this development deal, we’ve gotta put a hundred thousand dollars into it to get the value up from 400 we bought it at to the 1.2. So most people don’t have like that kind of capital or knowhow that man, we got a lot of them. Um, my biggest challenge right now is continuing to, um, try and fire myself from a bunch of roles.

Chad Young (12:47):
There’s only a handful of roles that I’m in. Um, currently we’ve got a really phenomenal high performing team, but I really want to be at a point where I’m basically just advising the business. ’cause we have just founded my business. The more roles I step out of, the more I allow people to grow into their role and into leaders in their role. Um, we just make more money. If, if a department has to come to me for an answer to a question, I am the bottleneck for that person. And like, I can’t get back to people within five minutes when they need answers sometimes. Um, and so trying to figure out how to get me out of more roles, which is just more hires and more people to, to manage. And I don’t know if some of the business owners are like me on this call.

Chad Young (13:29):
You, you’re like, yeah, I’m gonna hire more people to step outta roles. But what ends up happening is you’re, you’re hiring for growth. So like let’s say we go from one dispositions to do two dispositions. We just hired another role, but it didn’t take time away from me. It added time because now I have to manage two people in that role and I wasn’t even doing dispositions before. And so my mindset for it, for the upcoming challenges that we’re facing is I’m trying to hire now to get me out of roles and then we can hire to grow. So we’re intentionally kind of stunting some roles. Like we were gonna hire a social media manager to grow like my social media and our branding. Um, and I was like, I don’t wanna do that right now. Like, we could make a lot more money, but that doesn’t take, that doesn’t gimme time back.

Chad Young (14:13):
That actually takes time away from me each week to do film content and stuff like that. And so we’re intentionally kind of slowing some roles we were gonna hire and looking at hiring other roles to get me out of those roles. And then we can hire the income producing roles, which, uh, big goal that I’ve got right now is we, it’s kind of in tandem with like the hiring and training is, we have a couple departments we use train for our, our online like SOP platform, um, onboarding people training. It’s where all of our documentation for stuff is on how to do stuff. And we’ve got a couple departments that we still have to build out the training for like our marketing department and and finance and stuff like that. We’ve got all the departments that have really been running for a while like dispositions, acquisitions, lead management, tc, stuff like that.

Chad Young (14:59):
Um, but we really want to finish building our training. It’s um, I don’t know, maybe other people have done it way better than we have, but it’s been like a heavy year long project for us. Um, your processes are always changing and you have to make sure that that stuff is up to date. ’cause if you’re teaching people or setting an expectation that, well why did you do it this way? And they’re like, well that’s ’cause what it says to do. And you’re like, well that’s outta date you should have known. I mean, you can’t really tell people that you gotta keep stuff up to date for ’em. Um, but with that, we have a couple, probably three more hires that we need to make towards the end of the year. Um, or we’re actively seeking to, um, recruit and hire those people. And, uh, once those roles are filled, I should have a lot more time and uh, I won’t be the bottleneck for a couple departments, which means we’ll have more growth in those departments, which trickles down to the entire company.

Chad Young (15:48):
Um, I mean we’ve got a bunch of coaches and mentors that we kind of pay to help us. Um, everything from writing creative job descriptions to analyzing candidates, um, that work with us on the hiring and training process. Um, just, uh, and I, I don’t mean this in like a prideful way ’cause there’s probably all sorts of stuff I don’t realize that would help, but the things that we’re doing, we’ve intentionally set up to help us in those areas. And it’s kinda like the season of people are like, do you read a lot of books? I’m like, yeah, I read a lot of books. But like there’s seasons where like I just need to do what the books say. Um, and we’re kind of in one of those seasons where like we have the infrastructure set up for these things. We have the coaches, we have the, um, the processes built out for ’em.

Chad Young (16:27):
Now it’s just like plow to the grind and uh, actually like hiring the candidates and training them and making sure they’re onboarding successful and setting up good job descriptions and SOPs and um, accountability and metrics for those people. So, uh, losing key hires, if we lost somebody that was a key hire, I mean there’s a million things that could stop us, but that would be probably the biggest roadblock. Let’s say we lost like an acquisitions or something, um, or dispositions. Like we would put everything on hold to rehire that position because that is the biggest, some of those positions are the biggest income producing. They’re literally the oxygen to our business. If that got cut off, that would suck pretty bad. Um, that has never happened and but it will at some point. And so, um, continuing to have kind of a bench too. That’s why we’re always looking to grow like our social media and our branding so that you’ve kind of got a bench of applicants that you can go back to if, uh, if you do leave the key higher, like you wanna be able to, I don’t necessarily wanna say refill that role quickly ’cause you want it to be the right person regardless of how long that takes.

Chad Young (17:32):
Like we will suffer and bleed longer to hire the right person instead of just putting a body in the whole life. We want brains, not just a body. Um, but that could significantly slow down. But one of the cool things that as you grow a team that we’ve seen is having redundancies in place. Like, and we’ve heard this from a lot of different people who went through the businesses or coaches that have coached businesses and they’ve always kind of said like, that one 50 to 200 transactions a year mark is a really hard breakthrough point because you’re typically not large enough to have two of every role, like maybe two acquisitions or two dispositions or TCS or something like that. So you might be in one at that point. And there’s a couple things that that means. One, that person has all the leverage if they wanna request a pay increase or things like that.

Chad Young (18:20):
Like you’re, you might be SOL to say no to those things. And so I don’t like people having leverage, um, that just drives me crazy. And then two, if that person leaves like, or takes a vacation, let’s say like somebody’s doing that work, you still got, you know, 20 transactions or 10 transactions that are closing that month. Like somebody’s gonna have to TC those and get those across the line. And so we’re kind of at a stage now where we’re starting to build out, um, multiple redundancies. So when somebody’s out, it doesn’t go to our operations manager, it doesn’t go to me, it goes to the other person in that role. Um, and basically every role within our company has metrics that they, they have healthy salaries than they have bonuses tied to those. And so I think though they might be taken on a little bit more work, it’s like, but yeah, you get, you know, four extra contracts this month or eight extra closings, like you’re gonna bonus off of those so you’re gonna be paid for the extra work that you’re doing.

Chad Young (19:14):
And we have an amazing team that just supports themselves. We’re very much like a, a tight knit family. We’re all super competitive and uh, it’s a, yeah, they’re just a great team that supports one another. Um, and I I would say that like no amount of success in business makes up for being a failure at home. And so what we have always done is, um, a lot of people will design a business and then they’ll kind of work their lives around that. And we’ve always been very intentional to like design our lives and then we build a business around that. And so when we looked at creating this business, uh, my wife and I, uh, we had, so, and just to kind of put things in perspective too, when I started this business, we had just had, um, our firstborn child and then within a year and a half of starting the business, we had two more kids.

Chad Young (20:01):
We had twins a year and a half later. And so we had three kids within a year and a half of us starting this business. So like work-life balance is almost like that’s a <laugh> a figment at that point. But um, we just sat down and it, and I, anybody that’s got a spouse or a even a business partner, I would heavily encourage you to do this. You just sit down and it’s like, what are our non-negotiables? And for us it was like, I only work five days a week. I have weekends off. I leave the office at 5:00 PM and I’m home at like 5 0 5, I live right down from our office. Um, and those were kind of things and then it was like, okay, we also wanna, like, we also want to have a, a date weekend with my wife and I without the kids every single month.

Chad Young (20:40):
And so we hired a nanny to help us do that and we do a date night every single week. And so, um, we just, as people, we have a, a very natural inclination just to drift towards whatever’s easiest. And if you don’t have a lot of like intentionality with those things that are important to you, you’re gonna drift to whatever makes you the most amount of money or is the easiest or provides the most amount of comfort. And oftentimes that is not our family. And so we just sat down towards like, these things are like non-negotiables for us. Like we’ll build a business around our life, but these things have to happen. And so, and I’m also married to a Mexican, I don’t know if anybody else like married a Latina, but like, dude, if I’m home at five 10, like they won’t find my body.

Chad Young (21:17):
So like she’s, she’s a passionate person as is, which probably helps me Toad line. Um, but yeah, no, it’s, it’s wonderful dude. I, I feel like we have a very, just by God’s grace we have a very healthy work life balance where it’s always been a 40 hour work week for me. Like she knows that her and our kids are the most important thing to me, um, far more than the business. Like we’ve had not had a lot of money, we’ve had a lot of money. I would way rather have no money and a healthy family than boatloads of money in a crappy home life. Like that’s not a situation I ever want to get in. Yeah, I don’t know if if it’s stuff that people don’t use, but I mean Ari simply has been kind of a godsend for us. We, I really, really like that platform.

Chad Young (21:57):
We, I, I think they’re up to like 1500 members now and we were like sub 50 members when it started. So we’ve been with it really since the beginning. It’s an amazing CRM that not only saves us a stupid amount, like if we had, let’s say we went to Salesforce and we had a similar program built out for it. I mean it’d probably be a 50 to a hundred thousand dollars build out and then about $5,000 a month. And I know this ’cause we’ve gotten quotes from the developers. Um, and then it’d be um, you know, 5,000 bucks a month to have 40 phone numbers in there and the texting and the calling and the emailing capabilities. Um, I think we pay like five to 700 bucks a month for RA simply. And like we don’t have to have a developer on, like, I, I literally know guys in my mastermind groups that have developers, full-time developers on staff that are like $200,000 a year just to fix stuff with their sales force when it breaks.

Chad Young (22:47):
And I’m like, dude, that’s just like rain damage to me at that point. I can’t imagine that. I mean it’s cool, it works for them. They do really well. They do phenomenally well. But um, and then we uh, I think programs we use, um, so everything related to a property goes in our CRM and then we use monday.com as like a for me to communicate like projects and stuff down to our team and be able to control due dates and like check in on where projects are at without having to ask people. That’s been a pretty big program for us. Um, there’s not a lot of like high speed, low drag programs that we use that are like unknown. I mean it’s, we do the MailChimps RA simply that type of stuff for, for dispo. Um, probably the same stuff most people are using. We just have been using some of ’em for years and kind of figured out what works for us in the systems.

Chad Young (23:36):
We have like 40 different numbers, maybe even 50 by now that we keep track of for our different marketing campaigns. It measures your KPIs, you text from it, you call from it, you can store files in it, you do your drip campaign follow ups from it. Um, it’s, it’s a phenomenal CRM If there’s people that tell you like, you can’t do 20 to 30 deals a month on a CRM that’s not Salesforce, they’re dead wrong. Like, we do that every single month on re simply. And it’s, it’s an awesome platform. You can manage multiple markets in it. It’s, it’s great, it’s awesome. And we’re a super, I say we like my company, I’m a very open book with this stuff. So like there’s nothing off the table. I might not know the answer. Like if you’re like, what was your TV invoice last month? I, I don’t the number one most important thing and everybody in our business, if you ask ’em what’s the most important thing that and what do we do the best?

Chad Young (24:22):
Every single one of them would say culture. And I say that ’cause we just had a quarterly, um, review, a sharper process and we literally rated like the different aspects of our business and culture was like the thing everybody rated as the top. And that alone, like we don’t have, we have had, um, in the last four years we’ve had one employee move, one employee started and got, uh, got arrested like two weeks into it. And so we just didn’t continue with his employment. And then one of my very first hires was my stepbrother who was a project manager and he, he quit within like the first year. But like we haven’t had an employee really leave our organization other than that. Um, so most of the people in our organization have been here for two and three years, um, like from the beginning kind of.

Chad Young (25:08):
And um, one of the biggest things that we do is we make it very hard to get into our company. And so our application process like we’ll, we’ll put out a job post and um, like for acquisitions, uh, in particular the last job post we put out for acquisitions, um, we I think got like 150 or 180 candidates, dwindled it down to three to five interviews and hired one of those people. Um, but one of the cool things about like Sharper Process or some consultants that you can work with is, um, we are very heavily into the predictive index, um, personality assessment and cognitive test. And so two of the like five steps that somebody has to take to get even considered for an interview with our company is they have to take a predictive index personality assessment, which gives you a bunch of data points on like their natural giftings and behaviors and then a cognitive test.

Chad Young (26:04):
And we have bars for both of those and they’re two very different tests for very different purposes. But they, when you hire the right person who is in a role that suits their natural giftings and abilities, those people thrive in those roles. It’s when you hire somebody in a role that um, like, like for instance, one of the data points, and I’m speaking specifically to acquisitions is in the predictive index test you have like the midline and then to your right you have um, the first data points a and uh, it can go right or left of the midline. Somebody who has an a extremely left of the midline, they’re collaborative and wanna work in and through people to accomplish goals. Whereas somebody with an A to the right of the midline is on the opposite end of that spectrum and they’re a very independent hard charging type of person.

Chad Young (26:51):
And for sales, you want somebody with an A to the right of that midline. ’cause if they’re to the left of the midline and they wanna work in and through people, they’re horrible for acquisitions. Like they’re gonna go and give away money at the appointments ’cause they wanna help people. Um, I’m not saying you don’t wanna hire people who aren’t helpful, but you wanna hire somebody who is a hard driver who another data point says that rules are kind of more of a flexible thing. Like when they’re told no, it doesn’t really mean no and that’s the type of personality. So like that role specifically on the predictive index is called a maverick. And it is like industrywide, do you know for an acquisitions person you want a maverick or a personality type extremely close to that because they’re operating within their God-given talents and like their natural disposition as a person.

Chad Young (27:37):
Whereas when you have somebody in that type of role that doesn’t fit that type of role, you’re asking ’em to self modify their behavior and it is it, dude it is so crazy. So that one employee that we had that moved, um, her name was Lydia and I remember Sharper Process, they, we had a quarterly review and they went through all of our personality profiles and they’re like, okay, what role are you in? And then they would look at the personality type and they’re like, okay, yeah, that’s a good fit for the role because of these data points. And they got to her and she was a transaction coordinator and they’re like, what role are you in? She’s like, transaction coordinator. And they looked up at her chart and they go, Hmm, I bet you make it a year in that role. She lasted a year and then she was like, I can’t do this job anymore.

Chad Young (28:17):
Because she had to self modify her behavior. Like one of the things that um, she had to do was, um, her, her another data point see and it’s like on one end of the spectrum is patience. And she was like had the patience of job. Like she was way the heck over here. I am the opposite where I want things done yesterday. And uh, and so she had a ton of patience. When you are trying to close transactions on time, you don’t typically want somebody that’s like, oh, you need an extra few days. Like that’s totally fine. And so she burned out ’cause we put metrics in place where it’s like, you’re not hitting these metrics because your personality type is giving them too much time. Um, and she saw that and she ended up taking another job and she actually moved cities. And um, but those things are extremely important and um, hiring the right fit in the right role adds to your culture.

Chad Young (29:08):
Um, the other assessment that we use through predictive index is called the cognitive test. And I like this test even more than the personality test because, uh, cognitive test measures how quickly you problem solve complex problems. It’s not an IQ test, it’s not how intelligent somebody is, it’s how quickly people problem solve complex problems. And so it’s a 12 minute time test and it’s like it’s, it asks all the weird questions like if Triangle is to square what is like Pentagon to like an octagon, like weird questions that you have to select the answers for. But what you see is people that have a low cognitive ability, and that’s not saying they’re dumb, they just, they take longer to process complex problems. You have to tell that person like 12 times how to do the same thing. And then the next day they come back to you and they’re like, how do you do this again?

Chad Young (29:55):
They can eventually get trained up, but like I want the person that has a very high cognitive score because I can give them very vague direction and like, this is what I want done. And then they go and do it better than what I would’ve done it because they’re a fast problem solver. And you, as you start to kind of pair the cognitive test and the personality assessment, you just get like really good at hiring the, and like we’ve messed up on hires before for sure, but you get really better, I should say at hiring the right people for the right role. So like if somebody had a low cognitive score being like a cashier would be phenomenal for them. They don’t have to problem solve a lot throughout the day. It’s the same mundane routine task over and over again. Whereas if like you had a low cognitive score for somebody who was an operations manager or a CFO, somebody that had to continually problem solve on the fly and come up with um, that type of stuff quickly, they would absolutely burn out because it’s not their gifting to problem solve quickly.

Chad Young (30:52):
And you can literally measure that with this test. And so we have like a line in the sand, like if you have below this number on your test, you can’t even work for our company. I don’t care if you have 20 years of experience in the field, like it will take you too long to train on our processes and we don’t wanna do that. It’s just, it’s not a benefit to us or you. I I hope that kind of answered, I know that was a long-winded answer, but those two things have like immensely helped putting the right person in that role. It’s in predictive index, it’s a part of the predictive index program. It’s literally just called the predictive index. Cognitive test. Okay. Um, and like somebody coming outta college right now is sitting at like a two 80 on average. Average American sits at like a two 40 and like our, our bench is two 40. Like if you don’t have a two 40, you’re not working for the company. Yeah. The majority of people we hire have like three fifties and stuff that are just like, they just, they problem solve fast and it yeah, it takes away a lot on management. Like, I don’t have to hold your hand through this. Yeah, that’s huge.

Guest Speaker 1 (31:48):
That’s huge. Yeah. I had a, I had one just for the group. I’ll just throw it in the chat. Um, y’all can take that or not. We, we’ve done Team Trek a couple years in a row with everyone and that’s been, um, that’s been huge.

Chad Young (32:03):
Yeah. And it helps with management styles too. Like people <laugh>, the, our uh, consultant always kind of jokes that I have like the, what she say, the personality type of like a serial killer. ’cause like my, which is like your competitiveness like literally goes off the, like off of their chart. It goes beyond what is measured <laugh>. ’cause like I am just incredibly competitive but like employees knowing that like they know that if they want to sway my decision, they have to show me how we can win. So if they wanna come up and say like, Hey, well I want to, I think we should move markets, like there’s another market we could go into. They know that you have to show me how I can win doing this. Like how does this achieve what we want to do? And so it just helps in how you interact with people.

Chad Young (32:45):
And I will say too, acquisitions people like notoriously are the hardest to manage. Like it’s just hard dude. It’s, you’re literally getting somebody enrolled at like, they get told no nine times outta 10 and they’re still okay with that. They’re very much like rule breakers. I’m like, like we had to take uh, company cars away from our acquisitions ’cause they kept getting speaking tickets. ’cause rules to them are suggestions, which is that makes a great salesperson, but like it’s hard to manage and pay for insurance on. Yeah, let me look at our train right now. And I do know that we don’t train our guys to adapt to different personality styles. Some businesses do that with great success. We just haven’t. And the reason I haven’t is because I’ve always trained our acquisitions guys like there’s left brain, right brain and I can’t Is it right brain is the more like logical side, right?

Chad Young (33:28):
Or do I have that mixed up? Is that left brain? Yeah, so left brain’s artistic and like you, you make decisions and if anyone’s read the book, start with why. Like you make decisions emotionally and justify them logically. And like, it is not a logical decision to sell a house at a discount like you. And so one of the things that we do not allow our acquisitions reps to do is to discuss numbers, scopes of work, renovation numbers, stuff like that. When you have somebody in that frame of mind where they are making a decision for something that ultimately benefit them, provide them comfort, take away fear, whatever it is that is an emotional state of mind that that person is in. As soon as you’re like, well yeah, the roof is gonna be $17,000, we’re probably looking at $3,000 per floor click, you’re taking it right back into the right side brain.

Chad Young (34:12):
Like you’re taking it back into the logical based emotion side or logical based brain side. And we don’t want that. We want like we provide people with what the options are. We ask ’em a lot of questions. Um, but we, we really try and never bring like budgets and stuff like that into it. Like we want to ask them the, um, the questions about, you know, if this doesn’t go through, like what are your guys’ plans? Um, and you want to get them thinking in that future frame of mind. Um, but I, I’m reading through our training right now. Um, okay, so we set the stage, we thank them for considering us as the, the real estate needs for the time. We let ’em know how much time that their time is valuable and we kind of set the stage of how long these appointments typically take.

Chad Young (34:56):
We let them know that we’re gonna, um, be walking the house, taking photos, kind of just setting the stage in general. Um, and we do let ’em know that by the end of the appointment whether the home lines with our criteria and standards or not, we’re gonna be giving them an offer and then we get their permission. Like, you know, if this is something that numbers make sense for you today, is this something you’d wanna move forward on an agreement with? You always kind of set that stage because when you get to the end and you give somebody a number and they’re like, nah, I’m gonna think about it, you can go back to it. Well I know we talked about it at the beginning, you said, um, you know, if the numbers aligned for you that this is something you’d wanna be moving forward on today, it it sounds like maybe something, maybe that’s not the case.

Chad Young (35:31):
Can you, can we kind of peel that back a little bit and just chat about it and then they have to kind of explain, well I know I told you this, but this is actually what I want to do. We build rapport, um, talk about the updates and renovations required and then, okay, so this is kind of the problem impact and perfect picture, perfect questions, which we take a lot of this I think from John Martinez. We, uh, once a walk through the homes complete, uh, we find a good place to sit down with them. People feel a lot more comfortable when you’re sitting at a table with them, things like that. It’s just a sales thing that they know. And then throughout the appointment we’re asking them questions for their reasons, wanting to be, uh, selling the home, you know, what has you thinking about selling the home really?

Chad Young (36:12):
How long has that been going on? It sounds like that’s been pretty tough for you and you just let him talk and then we ask the impact questions, you know, what would that look like for you? How do you feel about selling your home? And so you’re, you’re getting those impact questions. And then we use a lot of Chris Voss. Uh, if any of you, I’m sure probably everybody on this call has read, uh, never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. He has a master class that I think is like 10 times better than the actual book ’cause you’re hearing him say it. Um, we went on the masterclass and downloaded those videos to our Google Drive and so that’s one of the trainings people go through. And so they do a lot of the mirroring of people. If people are like, yeah, I need to sell in three months, you’re like three months and you just kind of, you know, ask that question with an influx and it gets them to talk.

Chad Young (36:55):
Um, and then we uh, we kind of pose a picture perfect questions, you know, in an ideal world, what would the end result of you selling your home look like? Um, what’s holding you back from, from selling the house? Things like that. And then we identify decision makers. Um, if there’s anybody that would wanna hold this up and we let ’em know like, Hey John, typically when we, uh, are are about to enter into an agreement with the seller, um, we’ve kind of found in the past that everything will work for you. But sometimes there’s some other people that maybe they had to consult and we, we didn’t even know about those people. Um, people you know that might not feel comfortable with this house being sold. Is there anybody you can think of that like if we wanted to, to walk into an agreement, it came to price on or uh, came to agreement on price and terms like is there anybody to be upset about you selling this house?

Chad Young (37:41):
And you’re kind of getting those deal killers out of them and finding those decision makers. And then once we do that, we kind of summarize all the stuff that they talk about. We summarize it again to make sure that we have it. And then that’s kind of where we, we drop our price anchor and then start. One of the things that we have kind of found that a friend of mine in, uh, collective Genius Mastermind told me they started doing on their pitch, which I actually really like, he’ll drop his price anchor and be like, Hey, this is our like buy it now. No questions asked, no inspection type of number. And they drop a really low price anchor and then they’re like, or um, we have this thing that, it’s called wholesaling in general, but um, we’ve got a huge network of investors and I think we’d actually be able to get you close for like, you know, 1 75 for this.

Chad Young (38:20):
But it would take us walking through a bunch of investors, but I honestly think that’s your best shot at being able to get the most amount for your, for your home. And we started implementing that maybe like a month ago. And what we’ve seen is we’re locking up more contracts at higher than what we would normally. ’cause these people don’t like they’re, we’re we’re saying, hey, this is really pushing the envelope. Like you, you know, our cash number, it’s over here, but here’s the number. If we put it out to a bunch of investors that we work with, um, and what we’re finding is we’re still able to find an investor to pay for it and then we go back to the person and say, Hey, you know, I, we did kind of shoot for a, a pie in the sky number there. We do have an investor who’s willing to buy it, but they’re at, you know, 1 55 and realistically like we have it sold for 1 75 or 180 or whatever.

Chad Young (39:06):
So we’re still making an assignment fee, but as long as you’re setting that expectation for the seller, like, hey, this is our price, you know, like what our take title to it price is what we will buy it for, we’re gonna try and get you a higher offer. You’re almost like, man, like bummed I couldn’t get 1 75, but like it is what it is. I really appreciate you guys trying and like it, it’s just kind of a different, um, pitch and so we’ve kind of been leaning into that as of late. Yeah, and it’s, and it’s been great. It’s been a good pitch for us and, and literally every single person that, like we’ve had a price drop on that over the last month, which I think was like five people. Um, because we set that expectation that like, hey, if they can’t do that, we can cross that bridge and talk about like what we’d need to do for a price adjust adjustment if we come to that, we’re hoping we can sell it for this price.

Chad Young (39:50):
But every single person has been like, yeah, like let’s just do the price reduction and get it sold. Like you guys were open and honest and we appreciate it. And so it’s been great. I know, you know, it might take an extra three to five days for us to shop this around to our investors. We’re gonna have to do a walkthrough, but like is that worth it to you to try and get an extra 15 or $20,000? Like nobody’s gonna be like, no, don’t do that. Like, I don’t want an extra 20 grand for three days. And then inevitably, like if you end up having to do a price chart, which sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. Like you’ve set the stage and said like, Hey, this was the price I was really comfortable at, but unfortunately we couldn’t make it happen quite as much as we thought we could sell it to you for or for you. But uh, yeah, it’s been great for us. Someone else, Hey is

Guest Speaker 2 (40:26):
That, uh, that Sharper Process company? Are they out of Indiana?

Chad Young (40:31):
Yeah. Yep. Gary and Susan Sharp Harper out of, I literally think they’re out of Gary, Indiana ironically enough. But um, yeah, so I think we pay 2,500 bucks a month. Um, and they do a lot of really cool things with that. They will fly somebody out and do a quarterly review every quarter with your staff. Um, and like you don’t have to pay extra for that. It’s in, in your membership. Um, they facilitate, um, a two day in-person onboarding event where they’ll fly out and like onboard your staff to the program. They also do a weekly, they call it weekly important numbers, but it’s like our weekly all company meeting where everyone’s giving their metrics and their numbers. I can’t like undersell how good they are when they, I I attribute like 80% of our exce success to implementing what they have had us do. They have such a successful business operating system when it comes to like scorecards and their meeting tempos and accountability.

Chad Young (41:26):
It has been like rocket fuel for our business. Like it has been amazing. And what’s one of the really cool things that I just never realized ’cause ’cause we hadn’t done it before that I appreciate so greatly when they fly somebody out and do your quarterly and you’re a participant instead of like the boss in those meetings, seeing somebody else like talk to your acquisitions person and be like, why didn’t you hit your numbers? They’re like, well, you know, I wasn’t, they’re like, okay, but why didn’t you hit your number? Like they, they don’t let them out without giving an answer for the entire team. Like, this was the goal we set last quarter. You didn’t hit it like, what’s going on? And we’re, we’re hitting our goals every quarter now, but in the beginning these meetings were painful, but it was like, it was a weird pleasure seeing, I could ask my acquisitions guy, why didn’t you hit your numbers?

Chad Young (42:09):
And it would’ve just been this dancing game of like avoiding confrontation and it just wouldn’t have worked. But like having a third party do that and seeing your people like squirm because they literally have to be like, well I was lazy or I didn’t, I just decided not to pick up the phone that day or whatever. We have been working with them for a year and a half and so we were probably eight people, we’re probably half the size that we are now. But like one of the things that they do, and this is an extra that I pay for that is like 1200 bucks a month or something in addition to that is they have what they call CSO calls, um, chief Sharper Officer. It’s like a giver of wisdom, but like the CSO person that we deal with, her name’s Amanda Dean and like I, I’m pretty sure Tony Javier meets with her on a very regular basis as well.

Chad Young (42:56):
Um, she’s literally like a COO in your back pocket for 1200 bucks a month. We meet an hour a week and uh, man, if you do nothing else with Sharper, like those calls are unbelievable. She, like, she and all of their other coaches, um, like she ran Tennessee Home Buyers, she was their COO for like 15 years. And so wow. She now works for Sharper, but I’m able to go to 15 year CFO or COO and say, Hey Amanda, when you guys had to retrain an acquisitions person, how did you do that’s or like when you guys had to recruit, dude, it’s, it’s unbelievable the level of expertise and she can identify stuff. You’re like, I literally never would’ve seen that and you probably just saved me like a hundred thousand dollars a year on my marketing costs. Like, dude, 10 a hundred times pays for it.

Chad Young (43:39):
Yeah, it’s a dude. Those C SSO calls are amazing and the whole sharper platform like, it, it brings a level of accountability and ownership and it’s, it’s, it helps your team see that like we’re investing in you. Like we’re bringing in a consultant to literally get you better at your job and your position, which doesn’t only benefit the company like you’re growing personally and professionally in that. And dude sharper, it’s just been unreal. Whether you do Sharper or any other business consultant, like bringing in a consultant that specializes in growing REI businesses is, it’s been rocket fuel for us. Like nothing short of rocket fuel. We’ll do, and I’ll tell you too, tj, when, and this is how I’ve found our PPC company, TV mail vendor, everything. When you’re in a mastermind group like this, I just went to everybody and I was like, Hey, what’s like, the one that I’m a part of most regularly is called Collective Genius.

Chad Young (44:30):
And I would just go to them and I would go to, I would ask everybody, Hey, who’s like the top operator in the room? Who’s the top operator in the room? And then they’ll all tell me and then I’d go to the top operator and say, Hey, who do you guys use for your SEO? Who do you use for your SEO? Who do you use for PPC? And you start to hear trends between all of these top companies and all of these top companies we’re like, yeah, we’re, we’re sharper process, we’re sharper process. And I’m like, okay, well it worked for you. And I went and talked to him and I remember Gary, the founder of the company, we were down in the hotel lobby at like midnight one night and uh, he came down and talked for like two hours to us. And I literally remember after that conversation I was like, dude, literally what is in your brain I needed my business?

Chad Young (45:08):
Like, and so the next day I made a call and we hired their company. But it’s just awesome. It’s one of those connections that you start to hear the trends, like all of like our SEO company works with the results driven, like they do their SEO and their PPC and stuff like that. And so you start to know who the top vendors are for the top operators and just copy it, just use the same people. And like, it’s not, they don’t just teach like theory. Like Gary Harper owned one of an REI business that was doing like 300 houses a year for a decade. So like he’s done it and he coaches it. He’s just a, everybody on their team is unbelievable. Yeah. So our first marketing, like I said, I guess our very first marketing strategy was sending out handwritten letters and it didn’t work for us.

Chad Young (45:49):
When before texting was like really taboo. I jumped on that bandwagon and we got three deals. And, um, I just hated texting. I absolutely hated the responses you got. Like, it was not the type of business I wanted to build. And so we, our first three deals and netted us like close to a hundred thousand dollars in profit. And I rolled all of that into radio and I think, but anyways, when we first started on radio, we were the only company in our area that was doing it. I, I cry about those days sometimes, because we were spending like 5,000 bucks a month and getting like three to four deals a month that were like $40,000 deals. Like it was like shooting fish in a barrel. It was unbelievably easy and fun. And we only had to handle like 40 leads a month. Like it was nothing, dude.

Chad Young (46:31):
Um, we probably made more money than, than I do now, but, um, <laugh> And so, and we just recycled the money, we poured all that money back into split testing, different PPC companies, poured all that money back into split testing, different SEO companies and um, TV companies. But our progression was letters that didn’t work. Texting into radio, radio provided phenomenal returns. We paired it with tv. Um, TV took us a lot longer to get. We jumped on tv I think in 2020. I was literally Tony Javier’s, like I think second student before he even had like a program. I just, the guy that we got on through radio, I was like, Hey, do you know anyone doing like tv, like radio’s crushing it for us. I’d love to try tv. And uh, he connected me to Tony and Tony’s like, yeah, I’ll send you like my media buyer and just let know how it goes. Like, send me, I think it was like five grand or something. And I’m like, dude, done. Like, take, take the money.