MI300: Niche Down to Scale Up w/ Peter Lohmann

23:39And they feel like the more complicated it is, the more they feel like you're playing a game or trying to get one over on them. So no easy answers. I honestly think one of the issues with trying to find great property managers is that any property manager who's sufficiently skilled such that you would be happy with their performance is just going to go buy their own stuff. They're just going to go... They're going to go compete with you as a real estate investor. And they're going to go buy and self-manage their own stuff. Now, as to why we haven't done more of that, we could probably talk about that.

24:12But that is honestly the sort of unsatisfying answer that I think is probably more true than a lot of people would like to admit. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Even Einstein had blind spots. That's why modern science is built on the idea of peer review. Investing may be more art than science, but that doesn't make peer feedback any less valuable. The tricky thing is finding qualified people who are interested and willing to help vet your investment ideas. That's why we built the Intrinsic Value Community. It's a place to connect, share ideas, learn, and get feedback.

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26:02That's public.com slash T-I-V-P. Paid for by public investing, full disclosures in podcast description. Just like everybody else, there was a time when I was a beginner investor, and I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on. But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investor's Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors. And now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with.

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27:12And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. I want to touch on that because that was my experience with property management. I had, I don't know, 10 homes or so that I was renting, turned it over to a property manager who also had homes in the area that I was renting in. He had more than me. And so he got the better tenants. He got the first priority over maintenance stuff. His stuff took precedence over mine. And I don't necessarily fault him for that, but it was not a good experience for me. So I ended up going back to self-management.

27:49But yeah, I mean, like you said, I just wanted to hear why. And I think it's great that I wanted to get into that, your own portfolio now. And if you're competing or how your clients view your ownership of your own investment properties. Yeah. I mean, we only own a small handful. So I think my partner and I together own 12 residential units, maybe, and then two small commercial units. And it's irrelevant to the overall size of the portfolio. And the idea that we're competing for tenants, it doesn't play out like that. Because first of all, our stuff is almost always occupied. And even if we do have a vacancy, the chances of a tenant cross-shopping our unit and a unit you happen to also own that also happens to be vacant and have the same number of bedrooms and be in the same part of town in the same price range, it just isn't realistic.

28:42So that to me isn't a concern, at least not on the scale that we're at. Yeah. Let's get into... There was a tweet that you wrote about the importance of niching down if you want to scale up. This applies to property management, but I think it applies to any business. Can you go into how you niched down and talk a little bit about how other businesses could or should do that? Yeah, absolutely. I'm pretty passionate about this. So any type of small business, when you start a company or small business for the first time, you're thinking, okay, I need customers. How do I get people to pay me for the thing that I do or the thing that I sell?

29:19And you're immediately thinking, you're thinking about, okay, well, who could be a customer of mine? And your mind goes to, well, everyone, everyone should hire me to do this thing because I can do this and I can do that. I can do this other thing. And if you want me to, I could go do this. And so everyone you meet in your mind is a potential customer and you're sort of trying to tell them about what you're doing and you're giving them your business card and you're explaining about how you could help them or sell them the thing that they need or you think they need it. And you almost feel like the whole world is a customer.

29:50Every adult who has a credit card. And that's a very typical, but naive view of the marketplace and customers and how things actually work in the real world. And it makes packaging, marketing, and selling your product or service literally impossible. So in order to actually build a real business with sustainable profits, you have to niche down. You have to figure out exactly who your customers are and what language to speak to them in. Not English, French, or Spanish, but how do they think about your product or service? And how can you speak to the problems that they're having? And the more specifically, the more you can do this in a targeted way, the more successful you're going to be.

30:34So in property management, initially, we thought... I'll go through the history of RO property management is just the history of niching down. So when we started, just like I explained, we thought everyone who owned a rental property or would ever own a rental property was our customer. Student housing, short-term rentals, furnished, unfurnished, class A, B, C, D, fix and flips, wholesalers, basically anything where there was rent money moving around, we wanted to be involved in and we thought that we should be managing. So that's what we did. And so we did get customers pretty quickly. And if you look at the trajectory of our growth, we shot up past 100 units, I think in under a year, partially because of this mindset.

31:16And that was a great way to get started. The problem is you very quickly run into limits when you do this, because you can't do everything for everyone. And like I said, it makes it really hard to market and sell what you do. Because when you call someone as a potential customer of theirs and you say, Hi, what do you do? And they say, we do everything. It's like the guy who pulls up in a van and it says painting, plumbing, roofing, siding, electrical. You're like, God, this guy, he can't be good at all these things. It's just not possible. Or he wouldn't be driving around in a van. He'd be running NASA or something if he was that smart.

31:52So again, it just doesn't resonate with people. Now, when you get on the phone with a customer and they say, what do you do? And you say, we manage two to four family rental homes in German Village for long-term real estate investors. Whoa, now you've got my attention. This guy is serious. This guy is focused. He's got a vision and a plan. You're instantly like, whoa, how do I get on your list? I want you to be managing my stuff if you own a two to four unit in that neighborhood. So right away, we realized that we didn't want to do short-term rentals. We didn't want to do anything with furnished.

32:26So that was kind of our first steps that we took to niche down. A few years went by. Then we realized that these class D, like these really low end properties in bad parts of town, they were total nightmares. So then we stopped taking those on. Another couple years went by and we realized that the property owner has just as much of an impact on our experience or our ability to manage effectively as the property condition and location. So then we started getting picky about who we wanted to work with and how they related to us. Another few years went by. Then we realized that OSU Campus Rentals, which ironically was where we started, they were a deviation from our standard process.

33:05So we didn't want to manage those anymore. So we stopped taking those on. And then we realized and on and on and on. And so over the 10 years that we've been in business, we've gotten more and more narrow with who we'll work with and what types of properties and in what capacity. And the fear that holds people back from doing this is you're worried that you're going to cut off a huge segment of potential customers. And there's no way you're going to continue to grow because there's just not enough people who meet this narrow niche criteria. And every time you decide to do it anyway, a bunch of new business opens up.

33:39It's like a law of the universe. The more you niche down, the more customers there are. I can't explain it. I don't know why. But that is true. So don't worry so much about niching down too far. In my experience, people don't niche down anywhere near far enough. They need to niche down till it hurts and then niche down some more. And now maybe you're approaching where you maybe should be, but probably still not even quite there. And that's my advice. It's one of those things that you probably hear it a lot. But until you experience it, you're not going to internalize the lesson, unfortunately.

34:08So even if you're listening to this and I sound convincing, you're probably like, that probably doesn't apply to me. I think we can do, I think we can service everybody. I think we can figure this out. Okay, go ahead, give it a shot. And I'll talk to you in a few years when you've working 80 hour weeks and you can't write a system and you can't take a vacation and you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off. The solution is to niche down and then you can systematize your business. It's great advice. I wanted to take a little bit step back there. You talked about property investors and it sounds like you will get rid of them.

34:38If they're, it's like the Pareto's principle, if they're the 20 % that are causing 80 % of the problem or the 1 % that are causing 99 % of the problems, do you actively get rid of those clients throughout the year? Yes, 100 % we do. We wouldn't be able to be anywhere near as effective as a property management company if we weren't doing that. That's another reason I think property management companies are ineffective is they do let a few clients dominate their team's time and their energy and focus. And now all the other customers are suffering and not getting the attention that they really are paying for.

35:14So you have to be really aggressive about moving on from customers where it's not a good fit anymore. And they may be a great fit for another property manager. So you're not doing them any favors by dragging out the relationship and just stressing about it and you're getting mad at them when they call and just move on. Just let them go. They'll find a better property manager. You'll find some better clients. Everyone will be happier. I wanted to get into the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. I know that you're a fan of that book. I wanted to hear a little bit about the move that he talks about from being a technician to a business owner or working in your business versus working on your business.

35:54Can you go into that about your own experience with moving, hiring employees and moving more towards that business owner mentality? Yeah. So this is just a fantastic book. I can't recommend it highly enough if you haven't read it about small business ownership and growing and how to build a real business rather than just a job that you own. So the book talks about when you start out with your mainstream business, I think the example is a bakery in the book, you're doing everything. You probably got into it because you like baking or whatever it is that your small business is. And so you show up to work, you're baking the bread, you're talking to customers, you're running the register, you're opening, you're closing, you're dealing with everything.

36:38And because you're passionate about that, that's why you got into it. And it seems natural that you would do that. And customers are paying you for your baking skills and the experience that you're cultivating in your little shop or whatever and use this analogy for your own, whatever you're up to. And the problem is, that is a very small box that you've just painted for yourself. And you've really limited yourself by thinking of it in this way. The journey that you need to go on is moving from being a technician, which is what they call in the book, this stage, to being a business owner. And I forget what the book calls it.

37:14But basically, the skills of being a good baker have absolutely nothing to do with the skills of being a good business owner. And so you need to personally transform in order to transform your job into a business. And that journey that you have to go on is kind of painful and it's not very well documented. And it's difficult. It's a huge mindset shift because you have to start thinking of yourself as an owner of a business versus just a place where you go to work. And your output, what you design or what you craft needs to shift from the bread to the system that makes the bread. And if you can successfully do this, you will level up and you will be able to hire and train and manage a team to execute your vision.

38:08And this is one of the hardest things you'll ever do is making this mindset shift and becoming the person who is able to own a business. I don't know if I'm saying this quite right, but it's kind of that thing where like when the student is ready, the master appears. Like, you have the business that you deserve. And until you transform, your business won't transform. So you have to go through this difficult journey. It's kind of like a mind F. It really is trippy because everything that you're rewarded for when you start, which is like, the bread tastes good, and the customers are smiling. And there's this whole thing with this Puritan work ethic where it's like, the harder you work, the more the business grows and is successful because you're there for longer hours.

38:55Everything gets turned on its head. Where none of those things are actually relevant to growing a big business. Instead, your skills in the areas of management and leverage and hiring and systems, those are the skills that translate into letting you move up and let your customers still have a great experience with your business. So that's the challenge. And it's a journey that never ends because even when you make that initial shift, that mindset shift, old habits die hard, you kind of fall back into it, or you make a bad hire. And now you feel like, well, I guess I'm the only one who can do this.

39:35And so now you're back at the store at 4am every day. And the challenge is you have to push through all that, continue to level up, continue to get better at hiring, better at training. You may have to go through two or three employees before you find the right one. And if you give up, you'll never make it to the other side. And even when you do make it to the other side, it's kind of like an infinite game where maybe you're only working 40 hours a week, but you still got this one little bakery on Main Street. And what if you want to have five of them? Well, you can't be at all five stores all the time.

40:02So now you have to figure out how to manage managers. And that's a whole other meta skill. So that's what makes business fun is that it's challenging and rewarding and it goes on forever. But it can be really frustrating in those early days when you feel like, you're like, I'm working as hard as I can. The bread's amazing. What's the problem? Why am I not experiencing the financial success that I was promised. And it's because you're actually, you're running down the wrong path. So I wanted to hear a little bit more about that in your own experience. I imagine in the early days, it was you and your partner, you were handling all the administrative stuff and maybe all the maintenance stuff.

40:38Talk about that first hire. Talk about that movement to a business owner mentality in your own experience, your own career. Did you work with a mentor or a coach or anything like that to identify the bottlenecks and what was preventing you from moving to that next step? Yeah, there's a few different things going on there. I did work with a business coach early on who pushed me to hire my first employee way earlier than I would have otherwise done. And that was great advice. And that was really transformational for me. Because as soon as you get that first employee, that's your first taste of leverage.

41:14and I had never worked in management. I had never had any direct reports in my engineering job. I was always just an individual contributor. And so when this guy, his name is Greg Hopkins, great guy, he ended up moving away after a few years. But when he showed up for work the first day, he's like, Hi, I'm here. I'm like, great. And it was crazy to me to think this guy is just going to do whatever I tell him to do. It's like a weird feeling. I could just tell him to do anything. He's going to go do it. It's kind of a crazy thing, actually, if you're not used to it. I just vividly remember having that experience.

41:49But it was great because all the stuff I hated doing, I just had him do and he was happy to do it because he was there to get experience. So that was powerful. And in terms of how I made this journey myself and what helped me along the way, I did a lot of reading. I wasn't as much into podcasts back then. This was 10 years ago. Podcasts were still early days. But my partner was always... He was more clear on this than I was at the time. And so he also had a really high opinion of the value of our time. And so he was aggressive at pushing us to use other folks to do low value work so that we had more time to focus on high value activities.

42:26And he was also big on making sure we charged enough to properly compensate us for the value of our time. That was good because it let the business be profitable really early on. I'm trying to think what else helped me get clear on this. I mean, the book was definitely transformational as well. And also just networking with other business owners, you start to pick up on this culture as well. And if you immerse yourself, what's that thing about the average of the five people you spend the most time with? If you immerse yourself with other successful business owners, and there's various peer groups you can join for this, like EO and Vistage.

43:04And there are some minimums around the size of business you have to achieve. But if you can even just create one informally, you're going to start to absorb their values, their mindsets, the way they think about things. And that can be a huge accelerator. You tweeted about some limiting beliefs that you had that maybe was part of this, that transition from technician to business owner. Can you talk about some of those limiting beliefs. And then also I wanted to touch on the book, Vivid Vision. I think that's the name of the book that you, I think you went off to a cabin by yourself and did the, whatever, the, read through this book.

43:41It's got a series of exercises that helps you get really clear on your long-term vision. I did the same thing, went down to Hocking Hills with that book. And I just wanted to hear about your experience with it, along with the limiting beliefs. Yeah, definitely. So limiting beliefs is a really powerful phrase. Sometimes just hearing something articulated in a certain way can be transformational and can really illuminate it for you. And limiting beliefs is one of those little phrases for me, where a limiting belief is something you believe to be true, but it's not. And it's keeping you from leveling up.

44:14It's keeping you from achieving what you're trying to achieve. And when I started this property management business, I had all kinds of limiting beliefs around a lot of the stuff we've been talking about, like only I can do this. Only I can effectively create a rental listing. Only I can talk to clients on the phone. Only I can prepare the rental owner statements every month. Those are limiting beliefs that prevented me from hiring and training people to take over those things so that I could focus on higher leverage activities or working on the business instead of in the business. So that's a huge limiting belief that a lot of small business owners have is around only they can do this, only they can do that.

44:53So that's how they end up at the store for 80 hours a week. Other limiting beliefs, I would say limiting beliefs I had back then around maybe the income that I could earn. It's interesting if you look at the history of RO property management, we've had fairly steady growth, but the take-home profit, or what they would call this in the SMB transactional world is SDE, seller's discretionary earnings, basically. The sum of my salary and my owner's draw. If you look at what that number was for many, many, many years, maybe the first five or six years of the business, it asymptotically approached what I was making as an engineer, which is weird.

45:33It approached and approached that same salary that I had been making when I was hired by somebody else. And I think there was something there. There was some subtle psychological phenomenon where I was like, I don't deserve to make more than this because this is what someone else agreed to pay me. And so through whatever mechanism of pricing and value and leverage, it was just a weird phenomenon. So I had to break through that limiting belief around what I was worth and how much I could make in a year before we were able to blow past that amount of money that we had made as engineers. So that was interesting.

46:09So encourage the audience to think about what are the limiting beliefs that you have? Because I think just naming them is you're 80 % of the way there to blowing past them is if you can just think about what they are and articulate them, maybe write them down and start to ponder them and talk with other people about them. Because what I find is when you articulate your limiting beliefs, other people come along and like, dude, no, like that's not true at all. You can definitely do that. Or you're more than capable. I've seen you do X, Y, Z. And it just, that can be a huge unlock. Let's touch on the Vivid Vision book and how that helped benefited the company.

46:47I just am very curious about your experience with it. Yeah. So Vivid Vision is this short little book by a guy named Cameron Herold. He's a friend of a friend. And he goes through in the book, he spends a lot of time describing the importance of the founder or owner and how their vision to them is crystal clear, but to everyone else in the organization is extremely opaque. And they have no visibility or insight into what the founder is actually trying to accomplish. And this is a source of much frustration for the founder or the business owner because they feel like, isn't it obvious what we're trying to do here?

47:24How could you be so stupid? Why would you do X, Y, and Z? It's clear we're trying to do A, B, and C. But the problem is, of course, the other people don't know that because they're not mind readers and they just got hired three months ago or they missed the one meeting where it was talked about 2 years ago or whatever the case. So what he describes is, he walks you through the process of creating a vivid vision. And what it is, it's just a document that you write as a business owner or founder, where you describe the business as it will exist in 3 years. So you go through financial performance, how it's viewed in the marketplace, awards that they're winning, what is the employee situation, how many employees, how are they compensated, what does the headquarters look like?

48:05Anyway, he walks through all these different dimensions and he encourages you as the founder to get as clear a picture as possible of what this business is going to look like in three years. Where are we going? But he has you describe it in the present tense. So if you read through our vivid vision, it's like, RL Property is a property management company in Columbus, Ohio. We manage X units and our revenue is Y and we have Z employees and we're viewed... So you're describing it as if it's as if it's already true. And then what you do is you have this vivid vision, which ends up being four to 10 pages or whatever.

48:41You have that professionally edited and get some graphics in there and kind of snazz it up a little bit, make it look fancy. And then you share it with everybody. He describes, share it with your employees, share it with your vendors, share it with your key customers, share it with people who are... You're thinking about hiring to come work for you. Anyone who will listen basically as a way to help make this vision real. And you challenge your executive team or your leadership team, if you're big enough to have one, you challenge them to make the vision come true. And in the EOS thing, which maybe we'll talk about, there's this visionary integrator dynamic, whereas the founder, you're typically the visionary.

49:18And it's the integrator's job to take your vision and make it a reality. So let's jump into that. That's from Traction. And EOS stands for... Entrepreneurial Operating System. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsor. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows. We Study Billionaires is our flagship podcast, and we've made a name for ourselves over the years by interviewing the best investors in the world, including Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, and many, many more.

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50:37And I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on. But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investor's Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors. And now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with. With my How to Get Started with Stocks course, you can master the principles of excellent lifelong investing with valuable insights for both beginners and pros.

51:07The course covers 10 different sections, beginning with the basics of what a stock actually is and how the stock markets work, to strategies to optimize your retirement savings, how to pick great companies for the long term, what to look for in ETFs, and how to monitor your investments, plus so much more. To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code STOCKS15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. Not to be cliche, but building a market-beating portfolio really doesn't have to be a mystery, at least with the right tools.

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52:27Between the screener and Legend Investment Portfolios to reference, I've gotten a ton of ideas from TIP Finance. What are you waiting for? Take the next step in your investment journey today with the right tools at your fingertips. Grab your device and type into your browser, theinvestorspodcast.com slash TIP-finance to get started. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash TIP-finance. All right, back to the show. So let's talk about the book, Traction. I've heard you talk about it. I've heard Levi Bankert mention it. I have the book, but I've not. It's many of my books. I haven't gotten to it yet.

53:07But it's on my radar now. Can you share a little bit more about how it's helped you guys? Yeah. So Traction is a book that explains EOS. It's by a guy named Gino Wickman. And I read the book originally about eight years ago. It was recommended to me by my brother-in-law. And I read the book and bounced right off it. It made zero impact on me. I was like, this is intellectually interesting, I guess, but it has no relevancy for me as a small business owner with three employees, which is probably about what we had at the time. And then I forgot about it and went about my life and continued to struggle and grow the business and slowly did so.

53:49And then about three years later, I kept hearing people talk about the book. It resurfaced in my world. And all of a sudden, a bunch of people who I respect were talking about how they were using it. And it started to really make waves in the property management industry specifically. A bunch of property management company owners were using it to run their business. And so I was like, God, this book, I didn't like it. Why is everyone talking about it? Maybe I'll try reading it again. So I read it again and it changed my world. It blew me away. And the difference was the context. The book is useless if you have one or two employees.

54:24There's nothing in there really for you. And that's why I recommend reading The E-Myth if you're under a million in revenue, because that book that we just spent a while talking about is highly relevant at that stage. That's when you're moving from a technician to business owner. Traction and the EOS system is all about the chaos that starts to happen when you're over a million in revenue and adding employees and how to solve that and make the business continue to grow in a calm, structured way. So it's basically a series of modules that you plug into your business. And just like it says, entrepreneurial operating system, it's a standard way of doing certain things in a small business that all small businesses need.

55:05Things like hiring, managing, running one-on-ones, keeping a scorecard, doing annual planning, quarterly planning, how to set priorities, all these things that start to become important. And if you're not doing them effectively, how to run meetings. If you're not doing them effectively, the business starts to really struggle to continue to grow and becomes very chaotic. So I reread the book, had a huge impact on me, immediately started self-implementing EOS, which is one option is you can read the book and then just basically start to do the stuff in the book. The other option is you can hire a professional implementer.

55:40It's pretty expensive, but that's an option as well. I ended up bringing in a professional implementer about two years ago to sort of finish off our process and to facilitate our quarterly and annual offsite meetings, which I think has been high value, but it is pricey when you're just starting. So the differences are what? There's the visionary, then that's typically you as the business owner, founder. And then the challenge is how to find somebody to integrate the vision or like from the vivid vision thing, somebody to integrate all that. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So part of the EOS language is the concept of visionary and integrator.

56:19just like you said, the founder typically, I think 80 % of the time is the visionary, where they've got these big ideas and they see the future so clearly. And they've got all these ideas. And they're typically very effective at selling to key customers, but they may not be as detail-oriented. And they get very bored and bogged down when they have to be involved in minutiae and policy and even processes and things like that. And so you want a visionary to be paired with an integrator, which is the flip side of that coin. An integrator is someone who loves systems and processes and loves making the machine work and loves being given a vision and then executing against that.

57:02And if you have co-founders, you'll often find that one is leaning toward a visionary and one is leaning toward an integrator. And there's an online quiz. There's a free online quiz you can take to figure out if you're a visionary or integrator that I've linked before to on Twitter. But it's going to be very helpful to understand this dynamic that's at play. And if you have a visionary, but no integrator who's empowered at a small business, it's very, very frustrating for the employees. Because the visionary comes back with all these big ideas. And then there's no follow through, there's no execution, there's no implementation, the employees are just supposed to somehow magically make it happen.

57:36And then the visionary is frustrated and the employees are frustrated. And it's very toxic. It's really like the visionaries like the CEO and the implementers like the COO, that's kind of the parallel there. When you have this working well, it's very powerful because the visionary comes out with the big ideas, the implementer executes them, and the employees are reporting to the integrator, not the visionary. And the visionary is happy with that. And it just is way better when that arrangement is set up the way it's described in the book. So with your partner, since you had to bring on an integrator from the outside, how does that work?

58:09How does that look within the company with you and your partner? And how long did this integrator stick around to implement the vision? Okay. So there's a distinction here between the implementer and the integrator. Two different things. Your integrator is like your business partner or your COO or someone who works at the company full-time. Your integrator is someone who works for EOS who comes in quarterly and helps you start executing traction or EOS. So they may not have any domain expertise at all in your specific line of business, but they know how to run EOS. And they will help your company get EOS functioning within the business.

58:47How that applies to RL Property Management is my partner and I ran the business side by side for many years. About two years ago, we purchased a small engineering company here locally. He went off to run that business as CEO. And so now I lost my integrator. And so I had to hire for that role. So I hired a COO right around the time that he left. She's still here. And so now that's how we got that. We backfilled that. Nice. Yeah. Thanks for sharing about all that. I wanted to jump into your podcast. I really, obviously, being a fellow podcaster, yours is called Owner Occupied. I listened to quite a few of them.

59:22I wanted to hear a little bit. This is, I think, your third season that you've been doing it. I wanted to hear about some of the recent guests that you have had and just some of the key takeaways from them. You've had Nick Huber on, you've had Moses Kagan, you've had, I'm trying to think who else, just a lot of really great guests that I enjoyed. Yeah, we had Chris Powers on last season. We had Michael Girdley on this season. Michael, yeah. I've been trying to get Michael on, but I wanted to hear your takeaways from some of those guys. Yeah, it's been really fun. Running a podcast is a great way to meet some of these folks that otherwise you may not have the chance to talk with for an hour.

59:58Even if you run into them at a conference and they want to talk to you, you're not going to get an hour with them. So it's awesome. And I enjoy doing it. I think of Owner Occupied as a way to give back to the property management community. That's helped me. It's a free podcast. And I try to really focus on quality over quantity. That's why we do a limited season each year. It's not my full-time thing, but I do pay to have it professionally produced. And I really pour my heart and soul into make that thing something that I can look back on years later and have it stand the test of time. High quality guests.

1:00:29I do tons of prep for every interview, as I can see you do as well. So in terms of what I've learned from the guests, when I think about the overall takeaway that I have, it has to be thinking big. The folks on there who are the most successful, it's clear that they think bigger. It's simple to say, so fiendishly difficult to execute on, and it ties right in with limiting beliefs. The problem that most people have, including me, is that when you do start to think big, and there's a great book called 10x is easier than 2x by Ben Hardy and in conjunction with the strategic coach guy, Dan Sullivan, that talks about this too.

1:01:09It's all related, which is like, when you try to think bigger, immediately, your limiting beliefs kick in. It's like, and maybe this... I'm guessing this is fairly universal. I'll just speak to my own experience. So let me use the property management company as an example. When I start to think about, how do I get my property management company to 2 ,500 units? I can't even get the sentence out of my head, out of my mouth before my limiting beliefs kick in and start to tell me how that's not possible. It's not realistic. We don't have the right people. You don't know enough about marketing. All these things start to interject and prevent me from even getting clear on what it would look like in the first place.

1:01:49And somehow these guests that I have had on my show were able to blow past that, either through ignorance or through confidence or arrogance or just some combination. They just don't care about how hard something sounds or how ridiculous it sounds to say out loud. They're just going to go do it. And you can hear, I mean, it's, Nick Huber just exudes this, right? Moses is a little bit more modest in the way he presents, But he's obviously a big thinker or he wouldn't be where he's at. And all the other guys too. So that's the biggest thing that I've taken away from interacting with these folks, both on Twitter and on the podcast is how do we get to the point where we can think bigger and not immediately get derailed by these limiting beliefs?

1:02:36So it's something that I still really struggle with. And you can make incremental progress where you slowly defeat these limiting beliefs because you're growing your business 10 or 20 or 30 % per year. And the way you defeat your limiting beliefs is you just do the thing and then you don't have the limiting belief anymore. That's kind of like a slow way to do it though, because you're very limited in your growth in that way. If you could somehow defeat the limiting belief around 10xing your business and then just go execute against it, you could leapfrog a decade of growth if you just could get clear on that mindset.

1:03:10said, it's become really clear to me that I'm the limiting factor in my business and in my own success. There's no one else to blame. Not my parents, not the economic environment, not my local real estate market, not the people who work at my company, not my business partner. It's me, right? It's I haven't achieved the skills or mindset or knowledge required to create the thing that I want. That's okay. We're going to get there. But I think getting clear on that first, you're never going to get anywhere with a victim mindset or you're not going to get far. So getting clear first on who's sort of to blame, not to blame, but like who's responsible, which is me.

1:03:48That's like the first step. And maybe one of these days I'll figure out the easy button where you can 10X and not be having these limiting beliefs sort of interject. What you just shared there is great. And it kind of reminds me of the Extreme Ownership book, Jocko Willanick. I don't know if you've read that, but just taking 100 % ownership, not placing blame anywhere else. It's really, really a great point. I wanted to talk real quickly about Twitter. I wouldn't have known about you without Twitter. You're doing a newsletter. You're doing your podcast. I think you've got a mastermind group called Crane.

1:04:20Talk to me about just how you are utilizing your time and what you have found to have the highest ROI for you. This is something I think a lot about. So when you think about how to allocate your time, you want to do things that are high leverage and high impact. That's the framework that I use or the filter. High leverage means you can take a small action and it has an outsized impact, meaning it affects many people or many customers or a lot of people are going to see it. High impact means you're actually making a change or a difference or you're providing high value, right? You can be high leverage without being high impact, right?

1:04:58Like an example that might be getting a viral tweet that's a joke. That's high leverage and you could tweet, you could get pretty good at doing that, but that's not high impact. You're not changing anything. You're not improving people's lives. You're just they're getting a laugh and scrolling past. And on the other side, you can be high impact without being high leverage. The classic example here is one-to-one coaching. One-to-one coaching is extremely high impact, extremely low leverage. So when I think about my activities, I'm looking for high impact, high leverage things. And what those really look like is social media is a great one.

1:05:35If you're tweeting, not jokes, but tweeting things that are relevant to your audience, those can be very high leverage and high impact. And you've seen that I've grown my Twitter audience from basically 300 followers to almost 20 ,000 over a couple of years by focusing on property management, small business and real estate topics, and trying to share what's worked, what hasn't worked, and our own experiences in growing the management company. And then the newsletter is another example. That's high leverage, high impact. So those are the things I look for. That's my first filter. The second thing I look for when how to spend my time is the financial potential needs to be way higher than what I'm up to today.

1:06:16In other words, let's just pretend my business does a million in revenue. If I'm presented with an opportunity to start another business that does a million in revenue, that's not sufficient. That's a distraction. Alex Hermosi has helped me get really clear on this. The next opportunity that I pursue needs to be more like a 5 or 10x what I'm capable of doing right now for it to be worth taking my eye off what's currently working. So that needs to be like a 5 or$10 million business opportunity for me to take time away because there's opportunity cost to everything that you do, right? So that's kind of the second level filter that I start to look at.

1:06:53The third piece here is I got to love doing it. If it's not getting me excited and giving me energy and making me just feel good, I'm not going to get involved. And sometimes you don't know that until you get started. But as soon as you realize that, you got to stop. Because that sort of negative energy or it's pulling you down, that's bad. You got to avoid that. And when you're starting, you have a lot of that just because you're kind of doing everything. but eventually you're going to get to the point where you've got a bunch of people, you've got vendors, you've got employees who are able to take care of those energy draining activities so that you can focus on things that give you energy and don't feel guilty about that.

1:07:29That's one of the hardest things to overcome. That's another limiting belief or mindset is like, I don't deserve to do fun things all day long. False. Who said that? Who made up that rule? You should be able to do things that you find fun all day long. There's no law against that. So, but that can be really hard. There's this Puritan work ethic thing that's really intertwined in American culture where, you know, the grind it out and all that. You got to get over that. And it's hard to do, especially depending on your own upbringing and the immediate culture around where you grew up and your family.

1:08:01But if you can, because what you're actually, you're way more effective at things that you like doing. I mean, it sounds so obvious when you say it, but why would you continue to do things you don't find enjoyable? Because you're probably not doing a good job anyway. So just go find somebody, whether it's an employee or a vendor, who likes doing that thing, give them the opportunity to do it. And now you can focus on something that you're even better at. I wanted to touch on writing. You had a great segment with Nick about the power of writing, that it is a superpower. You're doing the newsletter.

1:08:33Is that something that you love to do? Or I'm curious about like your reading. You've obviously read a ton of books. I want to hear about your reading and writing practice. Yeah, I do love doing the newsletter. It's a weekly property management focused free newsletter. I touch on general small business topics as well and some real estate stuff. And we've got about 3 ,500 weekly subscribers. I was able to get some sponsors. And so it's really been fulfilling. It's a way for me to... I like writing and I must be halfway decent at it because people keep subscribing and you get nice comments back from folks.

1:09:05So I love doing that. And that's another high leverage, high impact activity, right? One click of send, 3 ,500 folks in my industry are reading my thoughts. That's incredible. Similar to podcasting in that way. So yeah, really like doing that. And I am a believer in the power of writing. I think it's critical that you develop that skill as a business leader to be able to write clearly and succinctly. And I think this goes for talking and speaking as well. Folks get confused and they think that using bigger words or writing longer, complicated, treatises on, you know, that's what, no, it's actually the opposite.

1:09:43If you understand something very well, you should be able to explain it extremely simply and with plain language. So in the practice of writing, actually, it improves that part of your brain and you get better and better at it with time because in the process of writing something, it forces you to clarify your own understanding in order to be able to convey it clearly. So it's a very powerful practice. I think writing threads on Twitter too is a great practice because it forces you to do just what you said of like being succinct and cutting out. You've got whatever, 280 characters and you've got to learn to edit ruthlessly.

1:10:19Yeah, I think it's a great, great point. I wanted to hear also about Reconvene. You've mentioned it a little bit. Are you headed there? It's this month, isn't it? Yeah, it's later this month here in September. I was at the first Reconvene. This is a real estate conference that Moses Kagan puts on every year. This is the third year. I was at the first one. I didn't make it last year. This year, I'm headed back. I'm actually going to be on stage interviewing a guy named Seth Boehm, who is an apartment management company owner. He owns a company that manages tens of thousands of rental units. And so I'll be doing a podcast interview with him on stage so we can all learn from his experience, including me.

1:10:58I've got a lot to learn from him as well. So really excited about that. And if you're headed to reconvene, come say hi. It's always a great time. Peter, this has been fantastic. So much good information that you've shared with us today. I really appreciate your time. Is there anything that you wanted to share that we did not touch on? I don't think so. This was really comprehensive. Thank you again for having me on. This was a really fun one. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Also, for the people that want to get in touch with you or learn more about what you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?

1:11:28Yeah, probably the newsletter. So if you go to peterloman.com, you'll see a pretty prominent link there to get your email added and that'll keep you up to date with everything I'm up to. Peter, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by the Investors Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin. And every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com.

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