Learn how good leadership can change your entire business and make it 10x better from real estate investors Tony Moore and Dakota Bailey.
Leadership is one of the most important things we can have as business owners but is never really spelled out what it is or how exactly it benefits us. Join Tony Moore and Dakota Bailey, owners of LTD Property Group in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and myself as we go over how great leadership can improve your business 10x. We talk about how to be great leaders, care for your employees more than just how they're doing their work, and what you can start doing to improve revenue and profit. This is a great podcast with 2 entrepreneurial young men who want to grow their business but also want to pour into others.
Tony Moore and Dakota Bailey are co-owners of LTD Property Group. A real-estate company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Tony and Dakota preach teamwork and helping their employees succeed in their careers but also in their personal lives. They currently own around 60 units in Fort Wayne with a growth mindset to continually expand and eventually have financial freedom!
LTD'S SOCIALS
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ltd-property-group-llc/
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/tonyanddakota
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/LTDPropertyGroupLLC
INSTAGRAM: http://www.instagram.com/tonyanddakota
LTD PODCAST
http://www.youtube.com/tonyanddakota
LTD WEBSITE
https://www.ltd-propertygroup.com/
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Leadership is one of the most important things we can have as business owners but is never really spelled out what it is or how exactly it benefits us. Tony Moore and Dakota Bailey are two young entrepreneurial real estate investors out of Fort Wayne, Indiana who are great leaders and even better men. Learn from these two on how leadership can change your entire business and help you make more money than you thought was possible.
Thank you, guys, for joining me on this particular episode. I have two young guys with me who are killing it in the real estate market in my hometown, Fort Wayne, Indiana. They run a company called LTD Property Group. Their names are Tony Moore and Dakota Bailey. Amazing stories. Coming basically from nothing rising up. They have 60-plus rentals with single-families and multi-units. They do a lot of flips. They do a couple of million dollars a year in flips.
The thing that amazes me is they are empowering young people within their organization. They are leading them well, not just financially. They talked about a nineteen-year-old kid making $170,000. Not just financially, but they are also interested in leading them spiritually in their faith, health, and financially. They are just an amazing couple of young guys that are making an impact in this world. Thank you so much, Tony Moore and Dakota Bailey, for being on the show.
I want to take this time to tell you guys about a couple of things that we are doing. IronDeep.com, go over to it. We are putting together a couple of men's retreats. It's in northern Georgia in the mountains at this awesome place called Bison View Lodge. It will be a highly undistracted environment of businessmen getting together for a purpose in Christ and to sharpen each other and to grow and build that deep connection with God and each other.
I'm putting this together. IronDeep.com. Go check that out. At least sign up for our newsletter each week. You will get the YouTube channel videos that are coming out each week. We are putting some videos together and we want to impact businessmen for the kingdom. If that's you, I would love to hear you and what you want to hear from Iron Deep, so check that out. I can't wait to introduce you guys to this episode's guests, Mr. Tony Moore and Dakota Bailey. What's going on, guys?
How are you doing?
I'm doing fantastic. Thank you so much for being here because you are the only people I have ever had on the show from my hometown, Fort Wayne, Indiana, the town I'm in right now. Thank you. We need to get more of us on here. Thanks for being on the show. I am super excited to interview you with a couple of young guys making their mark in the real estate industry. Sixty-plus rental properties, mostly single-family and small multi-units.
Wholesaling company, $7.2 million in assets, $2.6 million in equity, doing a couple of million dollars a year in flips. That's amazing. Congratulations. I love interviewing successful young guys because they bring a whole new hunger and perspective to this. Welcome to the show. I always like to start with this question. Maybe give me your three-minute version. Tony, why don't you take this one? How did you meet Dakota and start this business together?
The very first time Dakota and I met, I was a lifeguard at a lake. Dakota came up to me and asked me if I could teach him how to fight because I had a fight club in my backyard. They say that you are not supposed to talk about fight club. I was recording the videos and putting them up on YouTube. Some kids around the school knew who I was.
We went from learning and training together to becoming friends and spending a lot of time in each other's houses. Eventually, we split off and did our own thing. I went to college. Dakota went from doing landscaping to some factory work and stuff. He tried some jobs that he didn't necessarily like. He tried some that he did like. He got into car sales and started doing phenomenally.
Dakota is a master salesman and he is a coach for Wealthy Investor, which is our mastermind with Ryan Pineda. I went from job to job after I got done with college, not necessarily knowing what I wanted to do. I had a little girl. I knew that I was staying in Indiana. When I had a child, that grounded me. I'm not with her mom.
At the same time, I have a little more freedom because I don't have her all the time, but I would also like to get her more at the same time. There's that dynamic there. I opened Rich Dad Poor Dad one day. I read half the book. I didn't have the money to buy it. I came back and read the other half in Barnes & Noble and that created that little light bulb. I was already into personal development.
Dakota got into personal development, too, because sales are huge. You have got to know yourself. Dakota was doing personal development and reading Think and Grow Rich. He got a lot out of that book. He had mentors, friends, and stuff pumping him up. We were both throttling up our mental thermostat as far as what was on our horizon and what was on our radar.
They talk about the reticular activating system. All of a sudden, we saw and heard about this flipping seminar that was coming to town and that was FortuneBuilders with Than Merrill and they got a lot of bad publicity at the same time as having some great publicity. We went and checked that out and we are like, “It's doable,” and then we still didn't do anything for about a year to a year and a half.
Dakota thought about buying a property and I talked him out of it and a handful of his friends talked him out of it. He's like, “Why did I let you guys talk me out?” We eventually got to the point where we started a company and we went to some of the sheriff’s sales and noticed that all of the other angry win-lose millionaires were there from the car dealerships and that sort of thing.
We went a different direction and decided to throw down some bandit signs back when that worked a few years ago. I got a call. I got an awesome deal on a property, and then I got chicken and wanted to back out. Dakota called me and said, “I will put in your portion of the money so that you can be an equal partner in this.”
There were three of us at the time. Dakota saved me and kept me in the company even though I was ready to bail. I'm super thankful to have a friend that great. Fast forward to all that, we started picking up properties in the rougher part of town until we developed our skills, got used to the process, and created strategies and spreadsheets.
With the masterminds that we have been in from Arete, Ed Mylett, some of those guys are inspiring to Dakota. He's got the Arete shirt on. The Future Flipper Mastermind that's now changed to Wealthy Investor. They rebranded. It turned into a $1 billion company from a multi-million-dollar company. From all the seminars that we have been to, we acquired all this knowledge to scale. We have hired a lot of people. We have 6 or 7 people who work for us consistently, including a couple of W-2s. On top of that, we have got a property management company Airbnb manager and all that type of thing to make sure that you can delegate, automate, and eliminate stuff that's not working and use our time in the most dollar-per-hour way possible.
Thank you so much, Tony. Things that I heard were you couldn't even afford the book Rich Dad Poor Dad for $15. You had to go back to the Barnes & Noble store and read it halfway through, and now here you are, millions of dollars into this business in a relatively short amount of time. Dakota, you went up to Tony. You wanted to learn how to fight.
I'm thinking about like your mindset because right then and there, you seemed like you wanted to grow. You wanted to learn something new and grow in that. You have had these mentors in your life. Ed Mylett. You talked about some of these other mastermind groups. Talk about your story into this, too. What maybe is the same twist or into real estate? Talk about your mindset because, if I look at both of you guys, you are the one who kept this thing going from the beginning. You are the one who said, “No. I'm going to bring you in. I'm going to pour into you.” Talk to us about that.
I'd have to go back to high school. I was always very defiant and I didn't listen to teachers because whenever I heard them, I was like, “You guys have no idea what you are doing here. You are going to tell me what to do with my life. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.” The interesting thing is I did well in school. I got Es and Bs, but I was kicked out most of the time. Everybody thought I was failing and not doing well. All the teachers were like, “You are going to end up in jail.” They thought the worst of me even though they were like, “You got so much potential and you are going to waste it.” I just didn't want to do what they wanted me to do.
I have always been defiant, which a lot of people saw as a negative thing, which served me in a lot of ways as long as you can learn how to control it. From there, I got out of high school. I started working physical labor working 60 hours a week and I knew I wanted to know my own business. I started landscaping. I was like, “This is it.” After working 60 to 70 hours a week where I couldn't see anymore, and then finding out that I couldn't get ahead and I needed a job every winter, I ended up being in factories, mechanics, and stuff like that. I was like, “This is not working.”
I ended up getting into car sales from there, then I developed my skills and did well in car sales. That was the big a-ha moment for me. I started reading self-development books and then I started developing myself and my ability to talk to people. In my first year in sales, I made $84,000, and then it went from $96,000 to $160,000 to $140,000. I started making good money, but I didn't have a whole lot of time.
About my third year in, that was when Tony told me to read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. He was in college and he was reading those books and he was like, “I read this book. It was amazing. You should read this book.” That helped me to realize, “I came from nothing. I thought six figures, that was the ticket.” When you make six figures, you are rich. You made it. Now you are good. Now you don't have to work hard anymore.
I found that once I was, then I was still working 60 to 70 hours a week. I had to work every single Saturday and I usually worked six days a week. I was married at the time. It took so much of my time with it. It’s my choice, but at the same time, I spent so much time on it that I lost my wife. She left me because I wasn't giving her the time and attention that she wanted or deserved.
From there, I was like, “There's got to be another way to still make money and to still have my time.” After reading that book, that was the ticket. Also, I felt like that put words to what I already felt because the Rich Dad Poor Dad talks a lot about how he loves to learn, but he doesn't like the educational system.
I'm like, “That makes a lot more sense to me,” because it was very confusing to me how I never read a book in high school.” When I got out of high school, I was devouring books and just learning like crazy. It was interesting to me that I always thought that if I didn't like school, I didn't like to learn when that wasn't the case.
Rich Dad Poor Dad put words to what I already felt, which was you can make a lot of money, have time, and continue growth without liking the system and constraints that they put you in. That helped me with figuring out myself and then knowing that there are other people out there who are like me, who like to learn and want to grow.
The last thing that I will say about growth is that a lot of people feel as if once you graduate high school or once you get a diploma or something, the growth stops when I don't believe that. I believe that growth is a continuous thing that we are always going to continue to do and that we should do. A lot of people feel as if, “I got this degree. Now I'm smart and now I have made it. Now I no longer have to continue this,” when I think that's the opposite of what we should be doing, but I think that the school system puts you in that to where once you achieved a certain level, then you have now made it.
It takes me back to reading Rich Dad Poor Dad and he talked about the education system. I have four kids and I'm thinking about their education and how they are in school. It goes back to school and forces you to learn stuff that maybe you are not interested in. They force you to read certain types of books that maybe you don't want to read, but when you started reading books that you were interested in, it was like, “That's where the ticket is.” You want to learn because you are interested in what you are learning about.
Also, benefit. Sometimes I read books, and I'm like, “This is dry as crap and I hate it,” but I know that it's going to benefit me so much, like taxes. If you read a book about taxes, it sucks. How is it going to benefit you?
I'm the same way. I don't like learning about all that stuff, but when I find this little ticket or this little nugget, I'm like, “I'm going to save $30,000 or something in taxes,” which means I'm going to make $30,000 more, and then it's like, “This is awesome.” Talk to me about your business, Tony. You guys started off buying in areas of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and some of the rougher areas that you talked about.
In a relatively short amount of time, you got 60-plus rentals and you have done some small multifamily units. What's your strategy and your goal? It seems you guys are doing very aggressively active income but building wealth. Is that what you guys are looking at? Tell us about your strategy and a couple of young guys doing this.
Our original strategy was to leverage debt to buy rental properties. We figured we could plan on maybe $150 a month of cashflow based on the good prices that we were able to buy these properties at. Dakota is fantastic at sales. I'm pretty good at marketing, so we are able to find great deals. People are like, “How are you buying properties for half of what they are worth? That's impossible.”
Even banks were letting us know that like, “I don't think you can buy a property for less than what it's worth.” After about a year of us buying them consistently for half of what they are worth and the appraisals coming back, they are like, “These guys are different. We are going to create different products for them because they are doing something different, novel, and interesting.”
Our business trajectory has been an exponential relationship like a vert ramp if you are into skateboarding or a hockey stick, where for the first two years, I was still working jobs making $11, $12, or $13 an hour. Dakota was still working in car sales. We hadn't consistent mechanisms to continually bring us deals like consistent marketing.
Dakota said, “You spend all this time applying for jobs, going to the job, hating the job, and quitting three months later. Stop doing that and figure out how to make the company money.” I was like, “I'm going to drown us. If I don't figure out how to make us some money, we are going to go under. I don't want to lose everything that we have got. I don't want to lose all three houses that we have got.”
It's a lot. You are used to making $11 an hour. That's your mindset too. When I first started, I was a substitute school teacher. I made $12,000 a year, so I get it. Three houses are a lot. Maybe it's not a lot to you now, but to the normal person, it is.
We went from me quitting and starting full-time into the business to me figuring out how to get us one big deal that was $20,000, and we were like, “I hope that I can keep it up.”
We started in the first two weeks too. In the first week or two that Tony quit, he went and locked up a deal that made us $13,000 or $15,000. I was like, “That's half. Now we are good for six months.”
“I replaced my income in six months.” That's crazy.
My mom started working for us full-time shortly after. During COVID, she was no longer needed as a nanny because the parents had to stay home. My mom started writing us letters. She would handwrite the people's name and their addresses and we would send these letters out, and we have kept that up consistently.
As soon as she started doing that, we had some consistent call flow coming in. We would answer phone calls. Dakota kept working in car sales and we were using his W-2 income to immediately cash out refinance. We were finding the banks that would allow us to do an immediate cash-out refinance. He would fund the business as a private money lender occasionally, and then we would get an appraisal on the property and we would buy it so well that they would give us all of our money back and then some.
We would pay Dakota back, put some money in the bank, and go find the next one. We did that as a consistent strategy, and then we got this incredible accumulation of rental properties and this equity and we were feeling good about ourselves. We looked at our cashflow and we were like, “Why are we not making very much money?”
At that time, we had invested in various forms of education. One of the best seminars that you should go to, Brett, and everybody reading should go to. We are bringing it to Fort Wayne and it's called PSI Seminars. They have them all across the US, but that was the red pill. It was an eye-opening experience in the matrix where you become aware of everything, your subconscious limits beliefs, and it's undeniable because the way that you experience it is through doing. You get to participate in some things that are social experiments, but they don't tell you the moral of the story.
As for our personal development stuff, that's how we have maintained our friendship too and continued to grow exponentially. We joined Arete and Ed Mylett got on one time and said, “Do you know the most important thing in business is?” Everybody was like, “Sales and marketing.” He was like, “It's scaling. Don't just hire one person. Hire 2 because if you have got 1, you have got none. If you have got 2, you at least have 1 while the other one is out sick or on vacation.
That inspired us to start taking steps toward owning a business that generates massive amounts of income so that we can strategically deploy that income into things that will grow us as people grow the company, help us build out systems, get organized, and that type of thing. It was year three and a half when, all of a sudden, we started accumulating massive amounts of rentals.
Right around when COVID hit, we thought that maybe everything was going down, but everything took off. People wanted to get rid of their rental properties. People stopped paying rent and we took over a lot of those properties. When we focused on flipping, that's when we started to generate significant income.
It was a few years ago. It was when I left in April. That was when we also joined Ryan Pineda’s program, which was a significant game-changer for us because we followed Ryan Dossey, who I'm sure you know. We followed him and Tony said, “I'm doing his strategy.” We are like, “This is the way. We went in his program.”
We ended up joining Ryan Pineda, who's more about flipping, and then he kept saying, “You got to start flipping and wholesaling more,” or he said flipping at the time that we decided to wholesale and flip. He kept saying, “You got to stop with his rental bull crap.” We are like, “No. You don't get it. It's Indiana. We are buying these houses for $25,000 that are written out for $700,000. It's a no-brainer.”
He is like, “It's not. You need to start flipping and wholesaling, generating some serious revenue and build a business here.” When I quit my job in April of 2021, we started hiring people, and now is when we started switching from, “Now we can't keep doing these rentals and stacking away money and building equity and not making any money. We need to make some serious money now because I'm about to leave and I want to get paid too.” Also, it's working okay, but it's more of a retirement plan. It's not going to replace our income. We recover from being passive to going to a business that's active, but then we want to be passive in it because we train people instead of doing it the rental way.
Dakota, speak on that a little bit more because you said the game changed when you started bringing in active income. A lot of people look at real estate and they want to build this wealth and they want to buy these rentals. They want to keep stacking them and you guys are doing that. It seemed like you weren't getting ahead. The game changed when you started to build that extremely active income, which is brilliant and super important. I want to speak about that. I have a lot of real estate investors reading this. Talk to us about why the game changed with that and how did it chang?
It was specifically because when I was quitting, I was like, “I was making $100,000.” It's not like I needed it because I have low expenses. My house payment was $850. My car payment, I paid it off and I refinanced to pull out the equity to make more money with it, but it's $300. Altogether, I spent $1,000 and have no credit card debt or anything, but I'm still used to that income level. I'm like, “If I'm making $100,000, I want to continue to make that.” In order for us to make that, we have to make money. We can't live off these rentals because they don't spit out any cashflow or anything. It builds our net worth. It’s depreciation write-offs.
Ryan Pineda was a huge influence on us to change our mindset of like, “This is not the way. It's one way and it's great for depreciation, but that's the reason that the wealthy use it. It's not for actual cashflow or anything.” Especially the way that we do it. We refinance out. We pull out all of our equity. We don't make a whole lot of money yet after all of the expenses and stuff. You think you do and then something goes wrong because we are like, “We fix them up, we make them nice, we do all this stuff up front, and we do all the maintenance, and then it's going to be fine.”
We then decided, “Let's start flipping and doing this.” I found that I like building that, too and Tony does. It's more fun, but also developing people and having that camaraderie and getting people around you who are similar mindset for me is very important and feels like it's one of my gifts. I believe in God. I believe that God gives us gifts that we are supposed to use in order to help other people or whatever our gift is. Sometimes it's not to help other people. Most of the time I'd say that it probably is. Mine is like I feel like it's to empower people. It's like I see something in you that you maybe don't see in yourself or you do. You just don't have the belief or the confidence in order to do it.
I know what they are capable of and so then it's helping them to pull that out and develop it. That's something that I feel is one of my gifts, lending my belief in somebody when maybe they don't have it themselves. I get to use my gifts in order to get people in certain spots. Every single person who works for us makes the most money they have ever made in their entire life. That was the most exciting thing ever, and then our goal is to get every single person to be able to make six figures, and we set them up for a win-win where we have a similar vision to where as they grow, we grow.
We have to structure it right to where they can't outdo us because otherwise, the company goes under and then we all lose. If we can get aligned with the visions and then help them to develop themselves to grow, it's going to grow our business and it's going to grow them. We work on growing people as individuals, not necessarily growing the business.
We want everything to be aligned for them, their health, their spirituality, their relationships, and their business, which a lot of people talk about. Don't get in all that stuff. Don't worry about them, but for us, it's more about the people than necessarily the business. We want to align our visions where we are going because the people who are here want to be here.
Every morning, we have a meeting, and they say, “This doesn't feel like a job.” That doesn't mean that we don't perform at a high level because we are performing at a high level, but it doesn't feel like it because we are working toward our goals and dreams. Whenever you are making progress towards those, I feel like it doesn't feel like work at that point.
I wanted to say too that for readers out there, just so you guys know, we delayed gratification for a minute. We had the ability to bargain with our future. We also created a good foundation. Dakota and I don't pay ourselves that much. We leave a generous portion of the money in the company. We pay ourselves 5% each of the net profit of our flips plus a small salary. It's $500 a week.
$26,000 plus 5% of net profit is what Dakota and I make from the company, while usually 60% to 70% of the money goes back into the company so that we can afford to do research and development, try different marketing tactics, and invest in our sales. Dakota and the guys got back from a 10X boot camp. I'm flying out to Hawaii to do some spiritual stuff. We are going to 10X growth con after that. We keep saying that we are going to slow down on seminars and then the next best one pops up and we are like, “Got to go.”
Our acquisitions guy made more money than we did. A couple of them did, which is awesome. For me, it’s awesome. Our net worth went up significantly because we structured it correctly, but it's still pretty cool that we could pay them. I don't even know how we paid them. We have a 19-year-old kid who made $177,000 last 2022. I don't even know how we paid that. That's more than I have ever made in sales, and that was his first full year in sales. We are super proud and happy that we are able to support people and pay people that much money.
It's so crazy when you think about things because you think about this world and then you think about the other worlds where you guys came from. I think about my teaching world. My parents were both teachers growing up. The most money my dad made was $60,000 a year, for example, after 33 years. Even CEOs are making $120,000, which is great.
$120,000 or $150,000, which is a nice chunk, and then you get this nineteen-year-old kid who comes in and makes more than that. It is a crazy world that you have opened up. I love your guys' growth mindset. I want to ask a quick question and I want to direct this towards Dakota on this one particularly. You started with three people. You guys are partnerships or co-owners in this particular company. You guys balance each other out.
Dakota, I think you have had to help Tony with some things with his mindset at the start, but you guys have maintained this. There's probably been some bumps in the road, but can you speak to the partners out there? It doesn't have to be business partners, either. Whenever you are in a partnership, it's like you are in this. It's almost like a marriage. You are in this and you are doing these different things. You have to make these big decisions. Talk to us about this and how do you guys maintain a healthy partnership?
I have been searching for this because I was divorced before and then thought, “What is it that is making a good partnership or connection with people?” The reason why Tony and I are such good friends and have been such good friends is authenticity. Being transparent. Sometimes Tony says some stuff and I'm like, “That's stupid. That was some bull crap. I don't like the way that you are talking to me or something.”
We are able to speak to that and we do it in a respectful way but we are able to be authentic with how we feel and not say, “You are dumb. I can't even believe you said that.” It's more like, “I can understand and appreciate where you are coming from. Here's my perspective or this is the way that I feel about this whenever you say those things.”
To me, the most important thing is authenticity because if you feel like you have to suppress who you are in order to make somebody happy, I think that you can only do that for so long, whether you are in a partnership, in a marriage, or friendships in general. I want the people who work for us or Tony, our partnership, to be, again, aligned with where we are going.
If you don't want to do it anymore, that's okay. I need to know right now. What happens is you changed your mind about where you wanted to go and now you are putting on this picture and then trying to make the other person happy, and you are not even all into what you said you are all in. The people that work for us are all in, and if they are not, that's okay. Just be authentic with it. I think that authenticity is what has helped our relationship stay strong because we are not scared to share exactly how we are feeling. It’s hard sometimes, but we do it.
We have learned from things like neurolinguistic programming too. It's like the words that you choose. Dakota did this before. He learned before he took these courses and things. He would always say we. Even when he did something, it was always we. Anytime something bad happens in the company, it's always us. It was leadership and it was language like the language that you use.
Even when you are feeling a disagreement with somebody, like using the I language coming from responsibility, understanding yourself, and being emotionally intelligent. The words that you choose to express yourself are ultimately what the other person ends up absorbing. If you are giving off negative energy, make sure that it's like, “I am feeling this negative energy.” Not like, “It is your fault.”
It's not like, “You made me feel this.” “No, you didn't make me feel anyway. I'm experiencing this. I felt this way. I felt like when you did this. It made me feel like this.” It's not a debate. It's not about like, “You shouldn't feel like that.” “I do. I'm sorry that I feel that way.” When you did it, this made me feel like that. It's not saying that he made me feel that way. It's not like a forceful thing where it's blame. That's something that we always work on.
It probably helps you, guys. You guys both have this consistent growth mindset and go to these different seminars. I'm sure you are picking up these different things and maybe you are in a rut. When you go to these different seminars and you get some breakthrough, you bring it home. That helps you guys navigate through it. You are constantly growing.
Tony, I will ask you this. You sound like your company has this amazing culture. People want to work there and they don't feel like it's a job, which speaks to your leadership and both of you guys and your leadership. How do you lead well in this culture? You talk about this nineteen-year-old kid, which, a lot of times, people get pessimistic about some of the younger generations. They label them in a certain way. How do you guys lead your team so well? Is there anything that comes to mind?
Dakota is the primary leader. I like to operate mostly at home, so my office is at home. Something that Dakota started implementing, he received some coaching and his coach gave us a format for meetings. Once a month, we sit down with everybody. We ask them 1 through 10, in your experience of the other people working here, give everyone a 1 through 10 rating on how you feel they are in regards to work. Being here, getting things done, and being positive. Their beingness. How do they show up 1 through 10?
Also, something that's very important to Dakota and I that we would probably terminate someone very quickly. For some reason, it's extremely annoying to not have someone do what they say they are going to do. 1 through 10, how likely are you to get the task done that we asked? Did you at least let someone know if you didn't get it done? One through ten, how likely is it that you are going to get the task done? Doing that one activity. On the one hand, I will say we want autonomy. We want people to be able to govern themselves and do whatever they want like, “The dude is playing ping pong two hours a day.”
They look forward to it and something else that we add in as well as this thing that's seemingly judgmental. We have autonomy here. We have feedback here, but somewhere in the middle is gratitude. We have gratitude journals. That was something else that Dakota implemented where people talk about the three things that were great for them and everybody listens.
It gets to absorb that energy of things that they were grateful for that happened. Three things they are grateful for now. 1 or 3 things that would make it great. Your I am statements. All of the things that you are feeling, your beingness. All of the things that are motivating you right now. There's a quote of the day. I can't remember the other one. There's one other thing.
That little bit of structure just gets everybody in an attitude of gratitude and gives people feedback on where they stand. Dakota also pointed out that it's interesting how 1 through 10 is subjective, but people often fall on the same number when they think of a person in their head. We are all within 0.5 to 1 of each other as we go around the room. It's not just subjective. It's also an energy. You can experience it and it's fairly reliable even though it's not something tangible.
A quick logistical question. Do you do this publicly where you give people 1 through 10 or is this something they do on their own and they give it to you guys? Do they go around and say, “I think Tony is like a six?”
It's public. It's all of us in the room, and then you rate yourself and 2 to 3 reasons why you rated yourself that way. Then you go and rate each person 2 to 3 reasons why you rate them that way as well. One other thing that I want to talk about is leadership. It's interesting how leadership is a balance of structure and freedom because people have to be free to be with you.
If you are forcing them to do something, that's not a leader. That's a manager. It's interesting, but if you are saying, “Go do whatever you want. You provide no structure.” That's poor leadership as well. It's providing the structure in order to get done what we need to get done to is going to help them accomplish that, but then still having them have the freedom of choice. They can say whatever they want, they can do it.
Good leadership and this is the same in relationships. It's creating a structure. I have noticed that I want things like something spiritual in my life. You are like, “I don't want to force myself to read the Bible because now it doesn't feel like I'm doing it. I don't want to force myself to pray or I don't want to schedule sex or anything like stuff that you know is important.”
It's important to create the structure for it. I used to always want to be organic, nice, and all these other things. People do what they are supposed to do. It's supposed to be spontaneous and all these things, but I think that it's very important to create the structure for it. It doesn't matter how it gets done. It matters that it gets done, and that's what real leadership is too.
One last thing I will add to what we do to create accountability is go over. This is something with my coach. I don't remember where I got the one thing, whereas about a scale of 1 to 10. That was not for my coach. I don't remember where I thought about that. My coach talked about your spiritual, relationships, health, and then business and created different goals for that. 2 to 3 goals that you are going to have within 1 or 2 years.
Then what we do is we break it down to our standards. That's going to be your daily action that you are going to take in order to get closer to those. What we do is we write all of those down for each other and then every single week, we go over, “Did you hit it? Did you get your goals every single day?” I have to text my coach by 5:00 PM on Fridays and I text them every single time. Also, on Mondays, we go over, “Did you guys all hit your goals?”
Now we are holding them accountable for their spiritual, health, relationships, and business. That's what I mean. It's not all just one. We want them to be full human beings and have the full life experience to the best of their abilities. We are going to help hold them accountable and help them grow because that's one of our core values is a growth mindset. If you are not interested in growing, we don't want you to work for us.
This show is a game-changer. You guys are going way beyond what other leaders are doing in their organizations and I appreciate that. That's why people love working for you. It's great for this nineteen-year-old kid to make $167,000, but he's also growing in his health. He's growing in his other areas of life, in his family life and spiritual life. That's awesome. Congrats. Final question. Where do you guys see yourself, Tony? Where are you guys going in the next several years?
The original goal was to have 80 properties and we have almost hit that, but that was residual income. At some point, we were like, “We will fire everybody.” One of the ultimate goals is freedom. We keep pushing that back a little bit in order to make room for other people and their visions as well. The thing is, we need to have a big enough vision in order to fit everybody else's vision and what they want for their lives inside of that.
That's one of the reasons why scaling is so important too. That's something that I'm still working on is my five-year vision. Ideally, I'd like to be retired in five years, which doesn't mean that I'm going to stop working. It means that I will have exponentially fewer hours thinking, developing, researching, and problem-solving with business activities. I will be able to do more things like coaching. I would like to do more neurolinguistic programming, helping people blow out their baggage, and eliminating limiting beliefs.
A lot of people have parts that they need to be integrated, like part of them feels this way and part of them feels that way, but they don't realize that their whole people got to accept all of the parts of themselves and appreciate the attributes and contributions that each part brings to you becoming the best version of yourself.
The vision is to teach other people how to do it and to go after bigger deals too. Maybe large multifamily storage. We are open to almost any investment that makes sense and creates more abundance and more freedom. I still have a part to integrate because part of me is like, “It'd be cool to have a Porsche.”
There's another part of me that's like, “I could bless so many more people if I took all the money that I was going to put into that Porsche and sent them to some of the seminars that we do.” I sponsored thirteen people last 2022 to go to this seminar because they told me the money was the thing holding them back. I was like, “$600 is not as much money as you think. I guarantee you that if you drop your iPhone in the water, you are going to buy a $1,100 phone tomorrow.” That's my vision.
Dakota, what about you?
Mine is probably very similar, where step one is freedom and that's been an interesting dynamic now with bringing more people on because along with bringing on team members, it's helping them to achieve their dreams. Sometimes that's in a sacrifice, maybe for my own. I was planning on moving out to Phoenix, and then I found that it would change the culture and stuff if I left. It's implementing that and then not feeling like I'm letting the team down at the same time.
That's an interesting dynamic. I can't remember the exact quote, but it was something like, “Responsibility takes away your rights.” That's what I found now. I feel more responsible for these people and it's taking away my freedom in some ways. Figuring that out and then hiring somebody maybe to replace me who can hopefully do it better. Figuring that part out, that's step one. Freedom.
The second would be helping other people to do this. We bought the Fort Wayne REIA. Now we are starting to host those events. We want to teach other people to do the same thing because we believe that everybody can be free and I think that real estate is one of the best ways to do it. I want to do business coaching the same way that my business coach is helping me hold me accountable. I think that I'm very good at that. I'm very good at helping people hold themselves accountable and then also with consistent results, that's what I have gotten good at as being very consistent.
In anything that I have done, I have been ultra-consistent. I'm not the best. I don't have the most intensity, and I always say consistency beats intensity. That's something that I tell myself and I'm able to hold people accountable at another level because I hold myself at a very high level of accountability. I'm able to help other people reach things they maybe didn't think they could or knew they could. They haven't had somebody to help push them along the way.
That's what I want to do is help as many people as I can on as big of a scale as I possibly can because that's always the hard part finding out how big we want to go, but I also feel like it's my responsibility with the gifts that God's given me to go and give them back and do as big as I possibly can. It's finding that balance of how big I want to take this, but then still be able to live my life because I can't fill from an empty cup.
I keep hearing that you guys want to grow and scale, but you want to do it responsibly. The other thing I keep hearing is that you guys want to impact people. You guys want to help people, empower people, and give. You want to coach people and teach them what you have learned. You guys are doing an awesome job.
I appreciate you being on this show. It's awesome. I wish you guys so much success and I hope that we get more people like you that lead teams that give opportunities for these people like your team and people you are going to impact in the future. Thank you so much, Tony and Dakota. It’s awesome to have you on the show.
Thank you.
