Josh Fonger - Get Control Of Your System

Josh Fonger is founder and CEO of WTS Enterprises. Based on the book "Work The System" by Sam Carpenter, Josh helps ambitious business owners break free from the day-to-day by getting control of their systems. His specialty is taking stressed-out entrepreneurs from working "in" their business to working "on" their business using systems so that profit and freedom can become a consistent mechanical reality. He's personally helped over 1,000 business owners from more than 300 industries. In the real estate space, he's helped investors, property managers, flippers, wholesalers, real estate agents, and more. Find out how you can help work less hours and get more fulfillment in your life by applying Josh's teachings.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

you can work all day, every day, seven days a week, and still have worked through it because you're really, really busy. But if you can first put in the ingredients that are essential to your family and your health and exercise and things like that, then that gives you parameters and boundaries for which you have to figure out. Well, how do I run a business where I'm only working X number of hours a day when everyone else in my industry works 2X?

Speaker 2: 0:30

Welcome to the Real Freedom Show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, mike Swenson. Let's get some real freedom together. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Real Freedom Real Estate Leverage Freedom where we're helping people build time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, mike Swenson. If you're interested in getting started or looking for the next step on your real estate investing journey, check out our website, freedom through RealEstatecom. Lot of great content on there to hopefully help you get going in your journey.

Speaker 2: 1:13

Now for today's episode.

Speaker 2: 1:15

We've got a super amazing guest.

Speaker 2: 1:17

If you're somebody that is busy in your job, right, either you're outside of real estate, you're in real estate, you have multiple streams of income, you're running into probably some sort of ceiling of achievement and it's probably built around systems in some way, shape or form. And so we've got Josh Fanger here. He works with investors, property managers, flippers, wholesalers, realtors, other entrepreneurs in the real estate space you name it in addition to other industries. But he is the founder and CEO of WTS Enterprises, which comes from the book Work the System from Sam Carpenter and I'm sure you'll talk about kind of your journey and how that came to be. But really you help ambitious business owners break free from the day to day by getting control of their systems and helping them to scale, and so coach and help people build their systems, help them scale their businesses to ultimately achieve kind of their time and financial goals. So, josh, we're so excited to have you on the show. Just share a little bit about your background and kind of how you got into launching this company and your work with Sam.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Yeah, definitely so. Actually I'm not currently a real estate investor, but that actually was my goal. Out of college I got a degree in architecture. Then I started working with a commercial real estate and development company out of Phoenix and went back in my master's in business. But as I was going up the ranks in commercial real estate and I'm getting laid off in 2008. And at that time could not find a job in real estate and had a couple of kids at the time I've got four now and I realized I had to make a pivot. And that's when I got into which was actually not, wasn't my goal, wasn't my dream. I actually wrote an essay about why you should never hire a business consultant. So I wasn't really wanting that career, but I couldn't find anything else and so I started doing that about 15 years ago and I really fell in love with it.

Speaker 1: 3:09

I loved working with automated business owners and kind of cut my teeth in that industry by helping people with inside sales and outside sales and their operations and their merchandising and financial forecasts and helping them through bankruptcies and things like that, and really enjoyed the work. I really enjoyed helping business owners this is particularly small business owners make transformations to grow, to really get unstuck from where they were in business. And along the way I ran Carpenter, the author of Work the System, and realized there was a piece in what I was doing that was missing, which was I would essentially fix a company and they'd be off on their way and then six months a year, two years later, I would follow up with them and find out that a lot of the old habits came back, Like they had some great sales quarters, they were moving up and then an employee left, they lost a vendor or whatever it was. Something bad happened and they kind of went back to old habits and I realized that I was not fixing the systems of the business, I was just fixing the problem that they presented me with.

Speaker 1: 4:22

And Sam Carpenter's book Work the System is all about those underlying systems that produce the results in business and life and basically documenting those systems, organizing those systems so that the infrastructure that a business owner builds allows them to scale and grow.

Speaker 1: 4:40

And his case why people really love the story is that he went from a 100 hour work week to a two hour work week and was able to grow his income up 20 times, and he wrote a book about it right. Hence Work the System, and so that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years now is helping companies, and a lot of them are in the real estate industry. So, yeah, lots of home flippers, property managers, investors, wholesalers, realtors, so a lot of folks who do that work. I could systemize their businesses, which is great, and then a lot of just people who, because they're entrepreneurs whether they're, you know, dentists or their insurance agency owners, whatever it might be they they've grown their companies and now they want to, you know, they buy, or buy some short-term rentals or things like that, and so I helped them make that transition.

Speaker 2: 5:32

Now you know, we know for a lot of folks you know that are maybe sales minded, entrepreneurial minded, they tend not to be as administrative minded and so you know it's really kind of helping them understand you're standing in your own way a lot of times and so it's having that person that can kind of come alongside, that does like systems, really thrives off of building those systems to help scale. But but yeah, kind of walk through what maybe that that initial conversation looks like or how to identify those those initial problems. What do you typically encounter when you, when you have those first conversations with people?

Speaker 1: 6:07

Yeah. So usually people when they, when they come to work with me, already skimmed through or read the book, work the system right, so they kind of get the, they get the idea and they say, gosh, I need help. And so I only work with entrepreneurs who, for one, realize they're stuck Right, so they're working too many hours, there's not enough bottom line. They don't really see a path forward unless they they operate differently and you put it good in the introduction, like they're maxed out right. They realize I can't really put any more hours in and when I hire people they don't do the quality work I want, they don't stick in the results I want out of my, my team, and so they never grow their team right. They kind of their team stays small in whatever industry that is, but in real, real estate that you know, they may have a few folks, maybe a few family members, that work with them, but they can't ever really build that team because they've never taken the time to build the systems. And so one of the first things I end up doing is making sure that the owner of the operation analyze their own life and what they, how they, how they manage their own time, because I usually find that they are wasting a lot of their time on things that could be delegated very simply if systems were put in place.

Speaker 1: 7:20

And so a great example was a was a home flipper who also was a property manager and he had maybe 150 units and and I'm reviewing he was, you know, so busy, always stressed out, really busy, and and I said, let's just look at some of your days and I kept seeing like Home Depot run, home Depot run, deliver this, deliver that. And I'm like so you own this business, business. Why are you going to Home Depot to deliver materials? He's like, well, no one else can do it. And I said, I bet someone else could go to Home Depot and buy them. He's like, well, you know, they wouldn't know where to buy it, they wouldn't know what. That is too important. I can't keep my guys moving on these properties. I can't, because he's flipping these properties. I can't let them just sit around and wait and they're too expensive for them.

Speaker 1: 8:04

To long story short, we develop a quick little system. You find someone who's you know $18 an hour. That guy does the runs for him. Oh, what do you know? He just freed up like 15 hours a week of his time. So now he takes those 15 hours of time, reinvest it into the next system and then, of course, you can expand and it depends on the entrepreneur whether they want to expand their business. They want to expand their free time, because people are different, I guess, different phases of life. Whether they're their 30s, they have different ambitions than when they're in their 60s in terms of what they want to do with that extra capacity of time and money.

Speaker 2: 8:43

Well, and I think part of it too is understanding that, like you said, you know I need help. For some people it's seeing that growing something big actually can help you achieve what you want and not create too much stress, because I think some people think big is bad right, like if I create something bigger, it's just going to be harder and more challenging. And so it's kind of finding that person that doesn't want to be the lone wolf or doesn't want to try to do as much as they can themselves, but they realize by building something, building that system, it actually can be easier and I get more of what I want.

Speaker 1: 9:17

I exactly yeah. And there is this phase where if you're, you know, all by yourself, then great, you can make all the choices. You're never going to grow but you have control, total control, because just you right. But there's this middle ground where you have a few folks and you haven't, but you're managing three or four people and it's not a great phase to be in. But if you can get beyond that, where you have I don't know 20 people who are underneath you and you have people that you trust and you have some managers and sub managers, supervisors then you can totally step away from the company, like Sam Carpenter writes about in his book, and have it run 100% without you and continue to grow. So there are kind of different phases and you know, I had one client who real estate investor and his big thing was auctions.

Speaker 1: 10:05

That was kind of his, his model in sec. He realized he couldn't go to all these different auctions, to all these rural areas. He developed a system so that someone could go to these things for him on his behalf. Then he developed a system so that instead of having to monitor all these different construction teams when they're doing their remodels, he developed a system where he could do that remotely from anywhere in the world. That was the way he grew, from driving all over the place like a crazy person to being able to figure out a way to have the freedom and to scale. I think that with modern technology, there's so many ways to take what maybe traditionally, 20 years ago, you really had to physically be there to make sure the work was happening to. As you know, you could expand a lot more now.

Speaker 2: 10:58

Even as a real estate agent I know the older realtors talk about back in the day you'd have to go down to your office to find the MLS book, to sit down with your clients to be able to pick out the properties. Now, obviously, all of that's done on the internet. Just think about how much time that saves you. It's just a natural evolution of technology. Now you can do more and be more efficient with your time. Talk about that. Balance of some of your systems are people. Some of your systems are technology Making people to see how those can help. And it's not necessarily the entrepreneur coming up with a system themselves, but being able to work through people who can create those systems for them.

Speaker 1: 11:42

Yeah, definitely, the larger your company gets, the more you're going to have specialized people underneath you. Let's just say, if you have a property management company, which is sort of all my company's clients do, as opposed to you developing the system for the maintenance guy, the facilities guy, they can develop the system because they're actually the ones doing it. They're the ones handling the calls, they're the ones going out there to the job sites. A big part of our philosophy is not top down, where the owner has to develop and document and manage and run and maintain and oversee and measure every single aspect, micromanage their business Instead, to develop a strategy and a philosophy that empowers their people, even the lowest level, new people to be engaged in the work they're doing in a way that they see as a process. They help document that process and then they want to manage, maintain, improve and measure their own process because they care about the performance and long-term viability of the business. They only do that if you, as a leader, give them a future with their business and you let them know that as this enterprise grows, based on them getting better at their systems and running them, they're going to have a better future themselves.

Speaker 1: 13:04

That's a big part, the work, the system method is great for the owner. Obviously, the idea is, the only way it can be great for the owner is the people. I think it's great too, and so we try to really empower as many people as possible and bring them along to as high a level as they want to go. And if they again, like you said, if they'll be engaged in developing and implementing and optimizing the systems that they work in, whatever department that is in the real estate business, they're going to make it, they're going to, they're going to maintain it themselves, as opposed to the owner have to always be involved in trying to optimize it for them.

Speaker 2: 13:45

I love what you said there giving people a future because I think this is something that was surprising to me getting into real estate, you know, I came from a nonprofit company where it was kind of we talked about our feelings all the time and like it was very personal and we felt like a family and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2: 14:02

And I moved over to real estate and it was a little bit more holder, bottom line oriented.

Speaker 2: 14:08

And yet what I saw was a lot of these administrative and operations type people are just treated like a disposable asset Well, if you can't do it, I'll go find somebody else who can.

Speaker 2: 14:19

And surprisingly, what happened is these people are constantly rolling through admin and operations staff because the operations admin staff don't want to be there, because they don't feel valued. And so, like you talked about showing them a future, showing them a way that they can work up the chain, and it's a balance between you know you don't want to over promise them the world of like everybody's going to be the next CEO. Well, there's only one person that can be the next CEO or the COO or whatever that might be. But showing them there's more to this role than just punch in, punch out, collect my paycheck and I'm on my way, and so I think that's the key is letting them feel I'm a part of this. We're growing this together. I want you to be able to hit your goals through working in what we're building together, versus, if you can't do it, I'll just go find the next person that can.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Exactly, yeah, and we're talking about real estate being an asset. I mean, your people are an asset and if they're coming and going every six months, that's very expensive to recruit onboard train, manage, coach and then have them leave. And one of the most efficient things you could do, obviously, is to obviously find the right people through a good recruiting system. But if you can nurture and maintain them and some people they're seedlings at different places, right, and some folks their ambitions differently different but once you gauge that, if you can have a system that allows them to enjoy their work, do productive work, then they can end up getting paid more and they would somewhere else, and if they stay there longer, they're going to have more experience as well. So it's just a natural to want to build systems where they can thrive.

Speaker 1: 16:01

And most people are not like entrepreneurs. They don't want change all the time, they don't want variability, they don't want risk, they're content just getting better with it and being rewarded for doing that and, like you said, kind of having this family environment. If you're going to be somewhere 40 hours a week, they want to enjoy who they're working with. So that's a big part of work satisfaction and there's a system for doing that, for making that happen repeatedly. And that's what we try to tell you is that it's not a great business and a great culture don't happen by chance or by random chance, and you're also not going to just randomly have a successful business.

Speaker 1: 16:43

You're going to have to build it right and there's some key ingredients and you want those ingredients to not just happen one month or one quarter or one year. You want to be intentional about building those things and then intentional about keeping those things thriving over long haul. And it's just like a healthy person. You can't just go on a crash course diet and get healthy for one month and then forget about it a month later, like it's not going to work. Your health is going to go back down. Same with any other business, right? And I think that, especially people that I know who are entrepreneurs and real estate investors, they have a strong for risk or searching opportunities, for making strategic decisions, and that's great. That's why they are in the position they're in. But to build an operation underneath them, they have to think differently.

Speaker 2: 17:36

You mentioned building a good culture. What are some tips that you can give with people that are like, hey, I think for a lot of folks that are high D driver type personalities, they like to move fast. It's like, well, how do I build a good culture? Like I can't just tell them let's build a good culture. It takes time, right, it's softer, it's long, more future oriented. You can't just like say, okay, now we've got a good culture, so talk about for people that may be wanting to strengthen their culture how they could do so.

Speaker 1: 18:06

Yeah, yeah, definitely so. In Stan's book he calls it a working man's philosophy, as in like he's applied what's in a thousand books into a very simple recipe and if you follow it, you will have a good culture. First, it starts by having a clear strategic objective. So you and everyone else in your business knows here's what we're trying to achieve, here's how we're gonna do it. Try to achieve it. Here's our ideal market. Here's our unique selling point, just simply the basic elements of our business, to keep us all on the same page. Here's how we're gonna make decisions, and people like that. They like confidence, knowing this is the direction we're gonna go. We're gonna go as fast as we can. This way, people will buy into and believe that this owner, this strategy, makes sense. I think this is gonna create a winning future.

Speaker 1: 18:54

The next component that you put in writing is your operating principles. So, just like some companies will have values or they'll have principles, sam Carpenter calls them general operating principles and these are guidelines for decision-making and they help mechanically build the culture of the business. So you might have principles that have to do with time or speed or customer service or loyalty or whatever the principles are that matter to you as the owner, and to your customers and to your industry. You're gonna put those principles in writing and then say, hey, what do y'all think about running a business with this kind of culture, with these kind of principles? And most people are like, yeah, I wanna work in a place like that. And then everyone starts to conform their personality, their decisions, their beliefs around these series of principles. And then you can hire based on them, you can coach based on them, you can fire based on them, you can kind of, I guess, rebuke based on them. You can kind of like use them to get people in line and like, hey, we're gonna be an honest organization. You said you were there, but you were over here, like you have to. This is how we run our business here. Or we get the job done kind of business.

Speaker 1: 20:10

And you left at three o'clock. We had a big deadline that was due. You didn't go the extra mile to finish it. That's not our kind of culture. We're the kind of culture that finishes. You know, like these are the things that help guide how he will make those gray level decisions. And you want to put that in writing so that the owner doesn't have to be everywhere to influence people all the time. They can have a document that can be everywhere, influencing people all the time. And that's what makes the heart and soul and culture of the business scalable is that it's not a person, it's now written down and so we help build that infrastructure. So those are some, you know, two key components to making sure you actually are purposeful with your culture and it's going to stick to the long haul.

Speaker 2: 20:58

It's not just hey, let's throw a casual Friday out there for dress, and let's throw a pizza party, and now we've got a good culture.

Speaker 1: 21:05

People like that every once in a while, but it's not going to keep them there and they're not going to. They need more than that. Yeah people are deeper than that.

Speaker 2: 21:13

So talk about kind of the journey from somebody you know working 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They're starting to implement some of these things get more free time. Talk about maybe like systemizing the rest of their life. You know, like you've got a lot of stuff. If you've got kids and families and obligations and travel, how can they maybe work towards systemize that stuff too to be able to focus on the things that matter most to them outside of their working life?

Speaker 1: 21:40

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so the first thing I'd say is that entrepreneurs probably real estate investors largely have a lot of flexibility, like they don't have a boss, so they can do whatever they want whenever they want, and therefore they usually just fill it up with busyness. And so the first thing to realize is that if you can optimize a part of your personal life, it's just as effective as optimizing a part of your business life, because time is time right, so I'm looking at my pool right now. So if I spent an hour a week screwing around with my pool and then I said, hire someone to deal with my pool, oh, I got an hour back a week of my life, right, it's not my business, but it saved me an hour.

Speaker 1: 22:21

And so I think that's the first thing is think about anything you do in your personal life that actually is not adding value. It's remedial, it's a low cost thing, and a lot of times you can hire things in your personal life for cheaper than what you could hire them in your business life, and so that's the kind of the first thing I think about is how do that? Secondly, oftentimes people are not sequencing their life properly, so they will do the wrong work in the wrong time period of the day, and so I like to figure out when people's energy is they're high energy and low energy and I like to figure out what work they're doing during this high and low energy time, and usually I find out that they're not doing the right tasks, the right projects, the right initiatives in the right time of the day, and so just shifting that around can make a huge difference. Then we go into optimizing and batching and automating all these different things, but I think these are all tactics I'm telling you now, but they always go back to what is the tactics? You have to follow in line with your end goals, and your end goals are gonna be that company strategic objective and then your personal strategic objective, like we're our family, is very unusual.

Speaker 1: 23:29

Most families probably are unique in their own way, but we've got four kids, we're home school, our schedule is very dialed in because we're trying to achieve certain things with our kids, certain things with our families. With our family, we know that this is the recipe to make that happen. So, right after this, I'm gonna go in an afternoon and date my wife. We're gonna go for a hike, so that's part of our thing is going to date. But we're not like date out in the city, we're like we're gonna go out in the woods and hike in the middle of the day. That's our dates, all right, so we prefer that. So that's part of the recipe. Building in evening prayer time with our kids, that's a part of the recipe.

Speaker 1: 24:10

So what I think for, I would say, busy entrepreneurs who are very ambitious about money and success in their business is, if they want to not scrub their family life, is adding the ingredients.

Speaker 1: 24:23

You want to build the family and I would say, husband wife relationship that you want first and then build your business around it.

Speaker 1: 24:33

You'll end up being happier than going the other way around, because usually the family will take what hurt, the leftovers, right, and that's no good, and so I always tell you to kind of build the other way and you'll get more efficient, you'll get tighter.

Speaker 1: 24:47

I have an accountant I'm working with right now and that's exactly what we're doing is, as an accountant, during tax seasons, you can work all day, every day, seven days a week and still have worked through it because you're really, really busy. But if you can first put in the ingredients that are essential to your family and your health and exercise and things like that, then that gives you parameters and boundaries for which you have to figure out well, how do I run a business where I'm only working X number of hours a day when everyone else in my industry works 2X? Right, and then you start to think more creatively and more about delegation and more about automation and more about increasing the value proposition to your clients and possibly raising the prices and just things like that that I think a lot of times, people, they just get stuck in the industry, average once everyone else doing and they just do that.

Speaker 2: 25:40

That's good. I mean, that's kind of a good summation. There's really kind of designing what you want out of your life with all your other priorities and kind of back end your business into that and then work on your business at the same time. So awesome stuff. Josh. Really appreciate everything that you shared For people that wanna reach out to you, learn more about what you're doing. How can they do so?

Speaker 1: 26:02

Yeah, definitely, I would say. And for those who are watching the video in this book right here W Work the System. We have the summary of that at WTSenterprisescom, so that's a free download. Of course, we have a system assessment and ultimately, what I love doing is working with entrepreneurs and real estate investors people in the real estate game as a coach, business coach, business consultant and helping them grow their enterprises. So love to connect with folks there at WTSenterprisescom.

Speaker 2: 26:29

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your journey and how it's kind of helped you as an individual build your own business. But obviously you're making a lot of strides with entrepreneurs and folks in the real estate space and other industries too, so best of luck to you as you continue to grow in the future. Thanks, mike meter, great to have met you, and