Client Case Study - BetterLife Tribe with Brandon Turner | Ep 47

0:00This is episode 47, and on it, I talk with my good friend and past client, Brandon Turner, about the work I did with his Better Life Tribe, and how I helped him turn it around last year. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough Podcast. I'm Josh Long, and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last.

0:31Hey, everybody. So glad to have you here. I'm here with my good buddy, Brandon Turner. We go way back. We'll get into all the details of that. But the goal today is to talk about what we did together. He brought me in last year in 2024 to Better Life Tribe. And I really enjoyed this project. It was a lot of fun. And I really love being able to help a friend out. But Brandon, happy to have you here. I think I would love to get the background intro of you were at bigger pockets. Um, you left there and you've gone on to do quite a bit in real estate. Uh, and then you've got a vision for better life tribe.

1:06I think it'd be fun to hear some of that background and share all of that with everybody here. Cool, man. Well, yeah, thanks for having me. It's always fun to catch up and talk to you. Yeah. We go way back, uh, to mastermind group days, uh, that we met every week for years. Uh, yeah, such an impactful time. Yes. I was with a company called bigger pockets. They're the largest real estate investing education company in the world. Just millions and millions of people go there every month to learn about real estate. I was one of the very first employees there. I was number one employee there and then first one.

1:34And then I stayed for almost a decade, built up their podcast, wrote a bunch of books. I had a pretty successful career there. At the end of the day, though, it wasn't mine. The company sold the private equity. I had some equity in it, but not a ton. And so when the company sold the private equity, I'm not a private equity guy. I'm not an employee, really. I didn't even work my job like an employee. I ran out like I was an entrepreneur and I built businesses inside of the company. And anyway, yeah. So when I left, uh, I had a year to kind of sit around with a no compete contract and just think about what I want to do with my life.

2:05And during that year decided I would launch this thing called the better life tribe. So it's a charity driven business, which means it's not technically a nonprofit cause I don't have the actual official documents, but we donate a hundred percent of profits to charity. I don't even take a salary. We got about a thousand members, give or take all real estate investors looking to scale and grow their business and get more freedom. And, uh, struggled man from day one with that thing. I mean, we launched huge and we just struggled to gain traction. Uh, I struggled in a lot of ways, uh, but struggled to figure out identity, struggled to figure out our sales processes, struggled to figure out all that.

2:39Like, you know, people like me and so they would sign up, but then how do you keep them around? And even in the signup process was messy. I think that's the unique thing was you've built such a great following and talking about your books that you wrote when you started out at BiggerPockets. That was a huge influence in me. Like everybody here, like Bottleneck Breakthrough would not exist if it weren't for Brandon because he was the big brother that I needed who had written books and helped me get my book done. And I was amazed when you I don't know how many years ago it was you posted. You've sold over a million copies of your real estate books, which is quite an accomplishment.

3:12So, yeah, he's he's accomplished a lot and he's built a huge following. And this is really unique, right? Because in the world of influencers, we see building the personal brand, building the following. And you've done a fantastic job at that. And then you go to launch Better Life Tribe and there's this wave of pent up demand. Right. And a lot of people want to get involved because Brandon's involved and it's the right thing for them to do because Brandon's an ethical player and he over delivers value. And we'll talk about some of that in a minute here when we talk about like what you were doing at Better Life Tribe when I started.

3:45But that transition, right? Like it's kind of chaos on a stick out of the gate. You've got so much demand. You've got so much excitement. You feel like you've got the Midas touch almost. And I know it doesn't go to your head, but you're like, hey, this is working. There's some stuff that's going well, right? Yep. But then you get into the trough, right? And I see this so often. And Clay Christensen, great professor at Harvard and consultant, he talks about it. I think it's the innovator's dilemma that it's crossing that chasm from initial demand to longevity and sustainability. Right. And that's kind of where I stepped in for you guys.

4:22Right. Right. Yeah. It was, uh, it was hard. Yeah. From a number of standpoints, but like, I mean, one, like our financials, I was not tracking finances like I should have, was not tracking sales and marketing like I should have. It was just a lot of lessons. And then again, just identity, like product, like what is actually going to help people stick around for long parts of time? Uh, all those things kind of came to a head all around the same time. And that's when the team was just like, we're going to lose this company. Like, and like, I felt like God told me to start the company. I know it sounds like big.

4:51Like, no, it's great. But like, yeah, I felt, I felt, yeah, called to start it. And here it is. Like, we're going to shut down. We're losing, I think we were losing 150 ,000 a month or something like that in income. Like we were losing. Right about a year in, right? Yeah. About a year and we were losing that. And I'm like, how did this happen? And it happened for a number of reasons. But just when you, when I operated on kind of bank account balancing, like, oh, we got a thousand members at 300 bucks a month. We must be making all this money. You start spending. And it's like the example I often use is like, it's like a contractor.

5:20It's like, I used to flip houses. So I'd go into a house, fix it up and sell it. Imagine me going with a contractor and then telling them this big, vast vision of how beautiful the house could look and going around and just amping each other up about how excited we are, how beautiful it's going to look and then leaving, but never giving a budget and never talking price. That's kind of what happened is I'm a really good visionary. I can spec out a good vision. And then I never lined up budget. So we had like nine web developers at one time, like full time, nine developers. A little overkill. Yeah, a little overkill.

5:49But we were building some really cool stuff. Why were we building cool stuff? Because I thought we were going to have 10 ,000 members because that was the vision. So I, yeah, anyway, that's, that's around the time we brought you in because I was like, this is going to collapse and fail if we don't solve this problem. Yeah. And so, so you reached out to me, it was about February, March of 24. And you were like, Hey, I got a mess. Can you help? And I'll be really honest. I care about you a lot. And I did not want to take this on and, and mess up. Yeah. But it was, it was a mess. Like a big mess.

6:22And I'm not rubbing it in. I'm not kicking you all year down. It's all stuff we've already talked about. We already know what we came through. But it was one of those things that like the only reason for those of you listening, the only reason I took on this project was because Brandon was there because I knew he built a good culture and I knew he had good people on the team that I didn't have to fight with. because as a consultant, that's half of the battle is getting people to follow through, getting people to agree, getting people to not say, oh, we already did that. That won't work because nine times out of 10, it's like, well, you did it, but I wasn't here.

6:58And you may have made a thousand missteps. And again, it's not because I'm God's gift to the earth or anything like that. I've just got a lot of mileage. I've got a lot of gray hair. If you're watching this video. You can see it. And I'm bald. I lost all my hair for a reason. So it's not genetic. But so when I stepped in, I was blessed that Brandon has a great COO in Matt. And Matt and I hit it off instantly. And I was able to dig in quickly, spec out a proposal, meet with the team, look at everything really, really quickly, like in a matter of a week, and negotiate something that said, Hey, I know this is going to be a mountain of effort.

7:37I don't want to pull like a McKinsey and get paid large fees upfront. I'm happy to defer my comp because I trust you guys. And I know that if we can turn something out of this, it'll be worthwhile. And we hit the ground running. And the funniest thing was, I don't know if you know this, Brandon, but Matt was like, we need this done in 60 days. It's like, that's the biggest high wire act you could put me on. And I renegotiated. I said, look, I need 90, like 90 days. And it seems ridiculous, but that extra 30 days really does give some breathing room and allow me to really work through things. And so we hit the ground running.

8:14And the funniest thing was you guys had one salesperson. That was all that was left. And it was this really nice kid. He was his profile picture on Slack looked like his high school prom photo. And so I was like, what do I have to work with here? and really nice kid, but I couldn't push him hard, right? Because he was the only one. And when I step into organizations, I'm just a bull in a China shop. And I just come in and ask a lot of questions. And I apply accountability because we just need to have clarity. I mean, I think that's probably one of my favorite things about what Better Life Tribe stands for is the accountability, right?

8:51Like what you guys do. And I'll have you talk about that in a second. But Like I could only apply so much accountability to this sales rep because if I broke him and he left, then we're really hosed because I don't have just a bench of closers sitting around waiting to work on something. And so when we got started, Better Life Tribe was really, like you said, finding its fit and give a little vision. I think I would love for people to hear about this because I think more and more people need to hear about what it stands for and how they can get value and get help in growing their real estate investing.

9:27But you did something really unique in that you focus just on experienced real estate investors. And talk about that and talk about kind of the vision of how it's evolved and what they get out of it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of it comes down to like, you know, the advice, I think Hermose put it in a hundred million dollar offers, but it's like, if you say I'm a consultant period, like, okay, that's, that's helpful to some level. But if you're like, oh, I'm a business consultant. Well, now you're worth more money. Now I'm a business consultant that helps China shops sell more China. You can charge a lot more money.

9:57Like the more specific you are, right? The more generally valuable you are, even if the advice is the same. So the idea was I could just say, I help people invest in real estate. My theory was, and still is that if I segmented that to we help existing investors scale. So you are already a landlord or an investor, but you're not already financially free. You're not super wealthy driving a, you know, whatever fancy private jet, like we can help you get to private jet status maybe, but that's a specific type of person. And by doing so, I narrowed out, you know, I, I closed out 90 % of my potential audience because 90 % of people don't own any real estate or rental properties in America.

10:31But I think that was still the right choice. In fact, I probably should have gone more specific. I probably should have just been, it should have been like existing investors who want to do mobile home parks. I think our multifamily, I probably would have been even more successful actually had I got even more specific. So that was a choice there with those like existing investors. And then you don't have to bring in the newbie questions, you know, like what's an FHA loan or how do I get my first property? Or I don't know what direct mail marketing is. And like, those are important questions, but just not the kind of person that needs to figure out a 401k plan for their team is not the same one that needs to figure out what a FHA loan is.

11:04They're just two different types of people. So I wanted to serve the better life tribe for existing investors. And that's what we've really focused on. I've since launched another program called First Deal. That's the opposite. And I think First Deal pairs well. That launched last year while we were building out the sales team. And as we would get leads, there would obviously be newbies that needed support. And like you said, I mean, 90 % of the market doesn't have homes. And I think so many of the info leaders out there, gurus, whatever you want to call them, do make most of their money off of newbies because there's just more of them and and they're more eager to get over the hump but i think better life tribe the other thing that i really loved was the accountability of like hey you guys started out with pods and i thought they were great they're kind of like our old mastermind group of of what you and jared and sean and i were in for for years on end and and that just great friendly accountability goes so far to help us achieve our goals.

11:58And that's evolved since. And now you got coaching. And the other thing that I thought was interesting was, and this is a great reminder for anybody listening. If I ever tell you to raise your prices, just work with me, wrestle with me to figure out how to raise your prices. Because I'm not the guy that's like, oh, you should be charging triple. I'm not that guy. In one of my other client testimonials, case studies we've got here on the website and in my podcast, Matt Kaufman, they were severely undercharging. And I walked them through the process of like how to raise prices. And they probably ended up raising about 45, 55 % somewhere in there.

12:35And that drops right to the bottom line, but it takes time. And I think you guys, when I first told you, I think you were charging 2 ,500 or three grand a year. And I'm like, man, you guys should really be at 10 grand. And I remember telling Matt and Matt was like, I don't know, I don't know how to get there. I can't stomach that. I can't, I can't think of what we have to deliver, but you guys were already over delivering. Yeah. That's, that's the irony, isn't it? It's like the, and in fact, to charge more, which we're, we're about to bump up to about a 10 K price. I think we're almost there. I just took a little bit more.

13:06Yeah. It's only taking a year, but we're almost there, but like to do so we're eliminating more, which again was also advice of yours. Like we needed to limit that's just so stupid because I'm like, I was providing more value then, or at least more stuff, options, more variety, more variety, more options. But that gets people confused. It gets them, uh, you know, Oh yeah, I know I'm doing this and this and this, but I'm missing out on these seven things you offer. Therefore I'm not getting my money's worth where if we only offered them one thing and they did that one thing, then they would say, Oh, I'm getting a hundred percent of my money's worth.

13:39And it's stupid that that's how logic works in people's heads. The psychology, the psychology, I mean, Dan Ariely, predictably irrational. Like if you, if you need a reminder, like go read that book of just how irrational humans are. Right. Very much. Yeah. And I, and I think this is also too, like the caring, capable visionary coach, which is what you are. And I've done that plenty myself. We see all the potential. We see all the options that we can help people with and we flood them and we drown them. Like how many times have you had a coaching client where you're just like, oh no I completely overwhelmed them and they're paralyzed and they can't take any action right because you saw so much potential in them and you saw so much potential in where they were going and you were excited and you want to encourage them and I think that's the balancing act of being able to meet people where they're at and so I'm really stoked that Better Life Tribe's finding that groove and I think some interesting things came out of it one was you guys had just hired a marketing director.

14:41And he came on board right when I came on board and we got along just fine. But I was like, something's not adding up. And I think this is the nature of remote, busy, fast paced organizations was realizing it took about two months for Matt to realize that he wasn't full time. He wasn't giving you guys 100 % focus, which is what you guys had agreed to. And so it became something that I was I was pushing Matt. I was like, we really need to replace this guy. And Matt came around to it. You guys had already had that conversation. I wasn't saying anything new, but that validation of like, Hey, we need to manage more clearly, especially a key role.

15:21Somebody who's driving all of our leads, somebody who's in charge of all of our creative. And it, again, the wheels kind of came off when I just was applying basic accountability pressure. Like I'm driving sales, I'm driving the sales team. I'm dealing with all the leads. I'm trying to get the feedback loops and things aren't improving, things aren't changing. And then he starts shirking the responsibility to me. And I was like, something's off. And so I think that for a lot of companies, you hire somebody and it usually takes six months for somebody to fizzle out. But then the opportunity cost, right?

15:56Well, you're not getting 100 % out of them.

16:04You're For me, I think putting the pressure on and getting him out of there in two to three months was a benefit. And then I found a new agency that came in. They've been great. They've improved traffic flow. I forgot they came from you. That's right. They've been phenomenal. Yeah, yeah. Gray and his team. They're fantastic. They're so good. And over there at WholeFounder, I think it's WholeFounder.com if anybody wants to go check them out. So, but it's like continually applying that accountability pressure, right? Right. And I think that's more than anything what my clients benefit from. Nobody hires me for that.

16:36Nobody wants that. It's just a side effect of the intensity of Perry Marshall, my buddy that I do a lot of work with. His son calls me the eye of Sauron because when I get fixated on a client in our year-long group, I just kind of bear down like the eye of Sauron. I'm like, no, this doesn't make sense. We have to get the answer. We have to work this out. So that, I think that was really good side benefit for you guys was just like getting the marketing team upgraded. And then the fun one that is unique for you. And I was looking forward to sharing this insight for anybody listening was we needed sales reps, but we didn't have a proven process.

17:16And so my recruiting method is very bespoke. And typically I go, I'll just give it out there. I've already gone through it on another podcast episode, But I go to Indeed and I write a very bespoke ad just for your company. But I couldn't really do that with you guys because most people looking for a sales role are wanting full time, proven, capable, like step into and make money. And we were in a big unknown. And so the cool thing was Brandon does have a fantastic following. And so we were able to go and mine his following and say, hey, we need some part time closers that ideally are already doing real estate investing, already like Brandon, get it and are just looking for something fun to do on the side.

17:59And so I was grateful that Matt pushed me because I wasn't ready to recruit. But by having that ace up your sleeve, really with your list, we got some fantastic talent. And it was super fun because you do have a fantastic tribe. and I really enjoy those people. Yeah, they're good people. It's one of the things that, you know, there's a lot of benefits to, there's a lot of downsides, but a lot of benefits to having that kind of influencer status, like a big following. But the number one most important is just the people you can attract to you. Like all the people that I know that I work with, almost all of them came from my audience.

18:29All the best people come internally. There's some specific roles, you know, obviously like when I go and hire a marketing person again at some point, like that's going to be a specialty role. Maybe they won't come from my audience, but a lot of stuff comes internally now. Yeah, and I think, I love the old Chinese proverb. I usually use this in an organizational behavior frame, but it works too with communities. It says the fish stinks from the head down. And so what it means is however the leader is behaving, the rest of the organization is going to behave. Yeah, yeah. Not to blow smoke up your beard, but this is something that you've done a great job is building and curating quality, quality people.

19:06And so it was really fun because as I did the recruiting out of your following, like everybody was just really nice. And I remember there was one guy, he was the only guy I was like, no, this isn't a fit. He was like a full-time manager at a bank and was thinking of leaving his banking job. And I'm like, bro, nope, I can't let you do that. Like this is unproven. You got a stable thing. He was just a little bored, but he, again, he was willing to like jump off a cliff for you. And I'm like, I can't, I can't let you do that. Like you got a wife and kids and the whole nine, like, so anyway, I think it turned out well.

19:41And you guys turned a profit by the end of the year last year. I remember you texting me and thanking me to get you out of that hole. So, uh, yeah, we, yeah, we, we turned it around. It took, yeah, a little over and probably, yeah, I don't know, probably maybe 90 days from the time we were truly like, oh shoot. To like, Hey, we're surviving. And by the end of the year, yeah, we actually, I think, yeah, it was shot. I don't know how we did that. Like, I mean, other than just your help and a lot of smart people working a lot of hours really hard. Yeah. And you, you got a great team and everybody was all hands on deck the whole time.

20:10And so I think that for me was just, I knew it was going to be work. I knew it was going to be hard. I just really wanted to get you to the other side. Cause once you stop that bleeding, then you can take a breath. Then you can look around and see, Oh, okay. Where is the path to 10 ,000 members? Where is the path to making a bigger impact? So yeah, thanks again for coming on and talking about it. I, uh, I really appreciate you. Yeah. I enjoyed it. I won't volunteer to do many turnarounds like that. This is probably like the Princess Bride, that machine, like how many years it took off my life.

20:49Yeah, yeah. Just move the dial up. The dial, yeah. I got to pick and choose which ones. But it was a lot of fun, and I was really grateful to help because I saw the vision and obviously happy to help you out. So tell everybody how they can follow you, how they can find you. Are you looking for more growth in open door capital? What's that doing? Yeah. I mean, we're always trying to grow in open door capital. We're not buying a lot of real estate right now, but we buy stuff occasionally. But yeah, I mean, Instagram is my like go-to. I'm like a 13-year-old girl when it comes to Instagram. So I'm on there all day long.

21:21So Beardy Brandon, beard with a Y at the end of it. Beardy Brandon. Nice. Thanks, bro. Thank you. This podcast theme music is an excerpt from Triptych of Snippets by Septahelix. It's used under Creative Commons. you