The Titanium Vault hosted by RJ Bates III

Extreme Ownership & The Dichotomy of Leadership

• RJ Bates III • Episode 477

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If you’re new to my channel my name is RJ Bates III. Myself and my partner Cassi DeHaas are the founders of Titanium Investments.

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Over 10 years in the real estate investing business
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Speaker 1:

Today I want to talk to you guys about two of the most important books that I've ever read Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. If you haven't read these books, I highly recommend both. They're one of the very few books I've given a five-star rating for, partially just because of the impact that they made on me when I initially read them many years ago. Now, some of you might have heard this story previously, but Extreme Ownership was actually the first ever Audible book that I listened to. At the time, we were in a bad place in our business and things were not going well. We were overwhelmed. We had a bunch of failing flips, rental portfolios Just the business was in a bad place. There was a lot of revenue but not a lot of profit and, quite frankly, we were just underperforming across the board. We had really failed ourselves. We had tried to scale and grow our business too quickly and because of that, basically, I had drowned the business and because of that, basically, I had drowned the business, and so I one day was stuck in an airport, our flight was delayed and I made a post on Facebook and said what's a great Audible book to listen to? And one of my partners at the time Jeremy Demers said Extreme Ownership. So I downloaded it and I listened to it over the next couple of days. So I downloaded it and I listened to it over the next couple of days and I'll never forget listening to the chapter. There are no bad teams, just bad leaders. And I realized that I was that poor leader. I was the guy who was blaming everything else except for looking internally at myself and who I was as a leader inside of my organization. So from there I really adopted a lot that extreme ownership teaches. And sometimes we have a tendency to look at something like a book, like extreme ownership, and we say that's just such a simple phrase. But today I want to ask you guys do you really go throughout your life adopting the phrase extreme ownership? Do you look at everything and say that I am taking ownership of the result of what's happening, or are you looking elsewhere and pointing the finger? Most of you guys are real estate investors or wholesalers. We have a tendency to look somewhere else and blame it. My leads are not motivated, the PPL sucks, it's the wholesaling regulations. I don't have the time. Blah, blah, blah. It's everything else. I don't have the time, blah, blah, blah. It's everything else, but yet, if you were to look around inside this industry, you will find someone with a worse circumstance than you succeeding. Why is that the case? So that's what I basically did in 2019 when I read stream ownership for the first time.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that I look at today in comparison to 2019 is decentralized command. Now, the reason why I'm bringing this up today is because inside of Titanium University, we have our book club. This is not something that's mandatory for everybody to join. It's voluntary. Anybody that wants to join can and then we have a specific book that we read. At the same time, we get together for a one-hour Zoom call to all give away our biggest takeaways from the book. What's glorious about this is that normally, you read a book and whatever you take away is what you take away and that's it. You move on to the next book, you apply what you learn, but inside a book club, it's amazing to see people in different circumstances, in different places in their journey giving takeaways over the exact same piece of literature that you just read and consume and hearing their takeaways. It's also hilarious seeing yourself read the exact same book that you read in 2019 and seeing chapters like extreme ownership and there's no bad teams, just bad leaders placing a huge impact on your life, like it did for me. And then in 2025, seeing a chapter like decentralized command place an even bigger impact than it did in 2019.

Speaker 1:

In 2019, I wasn't in a place for decentralized command to really place an impact on, but now I look at it and I'm so proud of what we have built as an organization at titanium university. Of course, I'm proud of the results that we're getting for our members and the community and the atmosphere, but it starts inside of our, our leadership inside the organization myself and Cassie, and then Nick and Sima and I see that we have completely adopted decentralized command where basically to dumb it down, if you have not read the book a leader can only lead a certain amount of people before too long. It's like there's too many people I can't actually hold this many people accountable and so you need to have decentralized command in different departments. And so when I look at Titanium University, different departments. So when I look at Titanium University, nick is in charge of the sales organization, sima is in charge of marketing. Now they work together hand in hand, but they're in charge of those departments and I am not, whereas previously, if you looked at Titanium's organization going all the way back to 2019, I was inside of each one of those. I had to be, and so seeing that now that we actually truly have decentralized command, it's made such a difference not only in results, but also my personal feelings about my organization.

Speaker 1:

So if you're an entrepreneur and you're in the position where now you have multiple people, you're building out a team and you're scaling up that business, start looking around and seeing, like, how do I feel about this? Who actually is a leader? Who's in charge besides myself? Because if you're in charge of everything, facts are you're going to be dropping the ball. Now, I've said for years that tree ownership is a great book, but the dichotomy of leadership is the better book, and then reading both of these just recently inside of Titanium University's book club for a second time which I don't do that very often I realize that there's even more inside of that dichotomy of leadership that we are implementing, and maybe that's the reason why I'm so proud of how we're running this organization, and one of the chapters that stood out to me is be a leader and a follower.

Speaker 1:

Now to most leaders, when you say that, the ego gets struck and it's like, well, I'm supposed to be that leader. But there is this relationship that Cassie and I have developed with Nick and Semma, coming in and knowing that we needed their expertise in marketing and building out a sales organization and understanding how to do things that we weren't great at. We're great at running a wholesale operation. So to grow an education business, we need to lean on someone that actually had that experience and that expertise and things that we had never even attempted in our careers. And so we both took a backseat and became a follower to Nick and Sima's leadership and because of that, we were able to develop something extremely special inside of Titanium Universe A lot of the things that now people over the past 14 months have said I'm so grateful that you guys do this whether it's the daily implementation calls, the comp review portal, the live seller call reviews A lot of these ideas were not from RJ and Cassie.

Speaker 1:

They were from Nick and Sima, and this is from us deciding that, yeah, I'm a leader, but I'm also a follower inside of my own organization and seeing that dichotomy between us has completely shifted the results that people inside of TU gets, and that's ultimately the most important thing for us as an organization. Of course we want to be profitable, we want to make money, but it's about the solutions that we provide and the results that we can get, because if we do that then on the backside it's so much easier for us to get new people to join, and that's across any different types of business. I'm using TU as an example. But if you get great at dispoing wholesale deals, you start earning that reputation as a dispo powerhouse. And what happens? Other wholesalers will come to you and want to join venture and you become more profitable as an organization. How can you do that? Make sure that you're also a leader and a follower with utilizing decentralized command. Sometimes you'll have someone in an organization that specializes in something. They fall in love with the process in a business like myself with acquisitions and then you'll have someone else inside the organization that falls in love with another part of the process. Maybe it's comping and underwriting and dispositions like Cassie, where we both have to be a leader but also a follower.

Speaker 1:

The last one is be focused but detached. One of the biggest changes in my life as an entrepreneur has been becoming detached to certain things inside of our business, specifically things that were draining me of energy Finances, bookkeeping, accounting, taxes, payroll these things drain me of my energy. I would do it every single Friday. I would have a cashflow report made up and see how much cash was in the bank all of the bills and I would approve and deny, and this just drained me of what I built up Monday through Thursday to literally just try to survive through Friday. Some of it was just because of the amount, the magnitude of the decisions that I had to make, and I found myself not even enjoying being inside of my business at times.

Speaker 1:

What is the purpose of becoming an entrepreneur if you can't even enjoy being in your own business's presence? That defeats the purpose of what we're trying to accomplish as an entrepreneur. And so now I'm still focused on it, but it's so different I don't have to make each and every little decision. We've now got into a place where, yes, we have the bookkeeper, yes, we have the CPA, but we also have a chief financial officer who helps us forecast and plan things out, and we know our numbers, frontwards and backwards, and all of us do Myself, nick, sima, cassie Everyone understands the objective of where we want to go, with a low, an on-target and a stretch goal and we have our labor and our marketing and all of this budgeted out to basically the penny. And then the decisions that are made on a weekly basis are not done by any of us, but by that team. So my point in today's video is no matter where you are, there is power.

Speaker 1:

In these books, I read extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership back in 2019 and it changed my life back then.

Speaker 1:

But now, reading them again in 2025, I realize in more detail some of the things that we're doing and why I feel like it's so successful, and I can lean into that. I can lean into decentralized command, I can lean into being more and a better follower of the leaders inside of my organization, and I can appreciate the fact that, yeah, I can stay focused on things that drain me of my energy, but I can also be detached from it, so I can give a hundred percent where I'm supposed to, to my organization, which ultimately leads to everyone that's relying on me all the TU members, all of the people inside of titanium that need me to show up and be who I am for the organization. I'm not drained of my energy and I don't look at a day of the week like a Friday as a horrible moment. I look at it now and say it's one of my favorite days of the week. It's an opportunity for me to show up and give everything that I'm supposed to give to my organization.

Speaker 1:

So at the end of the day, I want you guys one to read both of these books, embrace the values that are given into them. I think they're two of the most powerful books that I've ever read and I'll forever feel that way. If you've read these books, let me know what you think in the comments. Make sure you give this video some love, guys. We'll see you guys tomorrow.