How He Closed 46 Real Estate Deals WITHOUT Ads (Jaben Makings)

🚀 From Small Town to Real Estate Success | Jaben Makings’ Journey

In this episode, we sit down with Jaben Makings, founder of Onnix Investments, to break down how he built a thriving real estate investment company from the ground up — without paid ads.

Growing up in a small Nebraska town, Jaben didn’t follow the traditional path. After struggling with school and experimenting with multiple business models like dropshipping and Amazon FBA, he finally found success by going all-in on real estate.

💡 In this conversation, we dive into:

• How Jaben overcame “shiny object syndrome” and stayed focused
• The relationship-based strategy that fuels Onnix Investments
• Why his team closed 46 deals in one year without paid marketing
• The real numbers behind off-market lead conversion
• How structured “deep work” beats burnout every time
• The power of consistency, discipline, and long-term thinking

📈 Jaben also shares his blueprint for scaling:
Building a business that runs without him — and transitioning into a visionary role while exploring new opportunities like hard money lending and commercial real estate.

🤝 If you're in real estate (or any business), don’t miss his advice on:

• Providing value before asking for deals
• Mastering follow-up (where MOST deals actually happen)
• Staying transparent and ethical in a competitive industry

🔥 Whether you're just getting started or looking to scale, this episode is packed with actionable insights you can apply today.

👇 Drop a comment with your biggest takeaway!

#RealEstateInvesting #Entrepreneurship #Wholesaling #BusinessGrowth #RealEstateTips #PassiveIncome #Mindset #OnnixInvestments

📲 Interested in learning more about licensing or mentorship?
Connect with our team here: homeguys.com/yt

🔗 Connect With Us

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#RealEstate #BusinessGrowth #Entrepreneurship #Mentorship #RealEstateInvesting

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Knowing what I know now is like the majority of those millionaires got really good at one thing. They locked in, made a ton of money, and then they started diversifying and investing into other avenues and getting those seven streams of income.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Um last year I want to say we only had three fall off. That's how tight our wholesale is.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Wow. Burnout isn't always from too much work, sometimes it's just from a lack of structure.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

Um hey, Home Guys Nation. Actually, James and Jen here this time. It's kind of a mix and match who you're gonna get on a podcast. But um this time James and I have partnered up and we have Javin Makings, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 0:54

Correct. Um, and Jabin is out of Scottsdale, Arizona. Um, and he's doing a lot of the real estate, wholesaling, investing that we've got going on too. So um, but Jabin, you grew up in a small town, um, according to the bio and then a little um blurb I got, and this also connected with James struggled in school, um, spent years chasing the next idea before the last one had a chance to breathe until something clicked. You stopped bouncing, locked in, and built a sales-driven real estate investment company with zero ads just building relationships, which is what we love. Um, that's kind of how Can you tell us your secret?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Because that's what we're doing. I wish there was.

SPEAKER_03 1:39

It's all about the relationships. Um relationships, discipline, and having a system that actually works. Um, but here's why Jaden's a little different. He breaks down why most people get stuck, why burnout is a structure problem, not a workload problem, why shiny object syndrome is killing more businesses than bad markets ever will. Um, so to stay tuned, this is gonna be a great conversation. Um, I know James has a lot to say on this topic. Um, and we're excited to have you here.

unknown 2:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Thanks so much for having me on. I'm fired up to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

So say that it's J Bin.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Jabin, J Bin makings.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Okay, so it's uh it's cool because uh my business partner is Jade N. So you just flip that B around and it's okay. The B. Flip it to the D.

SPEAKER_03 2:26

So it's just what I keep wanting to say. I keep wanting to come and get it all in a little different. Yeah, so why don't you um I know a lot of those things in that intro kind of resonated with James. Um, and and a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of people that um just kind of find their own way, find their own path. So why don't you kind of dive in? Let us know how how you got here.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Like, yeah, absolutely. I grew up in a small town in Nebraska, right? A town of 1200 people. And I uh we're pretty close to Omaha, so we had a little bit of the best of both worlds because we could drive into Omaha and get the city and then go back out to the um town and have that small town feel. But I I figured out early on that school wasn't really for me. Like I was bouncing around, I could never sit still. I hated just sitting there all day and learning. And my parents were dead set on me going to college, right? That was that was their big thing. They were like forcing me to go out first, and they they've since changed, right? My brother, they're not making him go. Um, he's about to graduate, and they're like, You could you do whatever you want now. But I remember I was um working, right? I was working from a young age, always starting starting little businesses. Uh, but I was at one work one day after school, and my mom calls me freaking out because she had gotten my ACT scores, which I didn't even try on the ACT. I went and bubbled in a bunch of different answers. And for those of you listening who don't know what that is, that's the test you have to take to get into college, or at least it was at the time. And I had too low of a score to get into college. So my mom was pissed, right? And that's when we realized that college maybe wasn't the best option for me. Well, fast forward a little while, I talked my parents into letting me move down here to Arizona instead of going to college, and I move out here in July, uh, two months after I graduate. So I just turned 18 and come down to Arizona with my eyes set on eventually starting a pool company. So I come down, I worked for a guy to kind of learn the ropes before I'm gonna go out and start my own thing. And while working for the pool company, I I didn't love it, right? I saw the owner who was, I think, probably in his 60s, he would have to go out and clean pools when people would call out sick. And that like that scared me because I'm like, I don't want to do this forever. This this kind of sucks. And it wasn't necessarily the hard work, it was just just having to do that when I was 60 uh years old. So I'm like, I gotta figure out something else to do. Well, real estate sounded really cool, like that that was a big drawing factor in. I had read a book in high school about real estate investing, so maybe that would be an end goal owning some properties. So I'm like, let's go make a bunch of money really quick as a real estate agent. So I go and get my real estate license, and that couldn't have been further from the truth. That was it was way harder.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Uh 18, 19 years old, getting ready to take the world by the tail, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Exactly. Gonna go make a million bucks and retire.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

So that was um that was a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Then reality came knocking on your door.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Say that again. Then reality came knocking on your door. Reality set in, yes. And then uh my biggest problem though, when I was a real estate agent, I did that for a good probably three years. My biggest problem was I was bouncing around from idea to idea every couple months. And I I remember seeing these posts on Instagram, they would say the average millionaire has like seven streams of income. So I'm like, I gotta go get seven streams of income right now. And knowing what I know now is like the majority of those millionaires got really good at one thing, they locked in, made a ton of money, and then they started diversifying and investing into other avenues and getting those seven streams of income. But I would bounce around, I like you name any trendy business. I had probably thought about it or I had tried to start it, like Amazon, FBA, dropshipping, solar, like you name it. I had thought about it or tried to start it. And then I realized that that that wasn't the way. I was never getting anywhere because I wasn't focusing on one thing for long enough. So, fast forward a little bit, I started Onyx Investments three coming up on three years now, and I said I'm gonna go all in on this one thing, I'm not gonna let anything else distract me. And I'm I'm gonna commit to this for three years, and now we're coming up on three years, and I'm gonna stick with it a lot longer because it's you know it's gonna take a lot longer to get where I want it to go. So I've just been laser focused, and that has absolutely changed the game for me.

SPEAKER_03 6:48

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Now, did you get laser focused? Did you finally meet a therapist and gave you something to make you laser focused? Or yeah, I'm just asking for a friend, okay?

SPEAKER_00 6:59

No, I think it was just a big mindset shift and realizing that I wasn't getting anywhere. And well, what's funny about it is my old mentor, when I was on the the real estate team, when I was an agent, his name was Kelly Cook, and he always preached shiny object syndrome, but where I was at in life, it never clicked, right? You always you always hear about times when you heard something when you were a kid, but it just didn't resonate with you at the time until you're older, and now you understand why they were saying that. And that was one of those things. He's talking about shiny object syndrome all the time, and then it it really clicked for me a couple of years later. I wish it would have clicked at the time, but it just didn't.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

I I think that's growth though. I think that's the growth in you, and and again, it's so funny. Listening to your story, I I can literally just put my own stuff in there, you know, put my own name in exactly where you can't stay still, you're starting all kinds of businesses, even even in junior high, starting, you know, selling uh bazooka bubblegum to blow pop, you know, out of the backpack. You know, it's I was always it's it's exactly the same thing. It's it's probably like something that's people like us are always, you know, always doing, we're always thinking, it's just staying that hyper uh that focus, and that's that's partly my problem, right? Is staying focused on there and then having a team, and so that's why I got I got a team. So we have what do we have now? 18, 19 people uh in our business. Um, I'm 100% focused on now. Jen and I are on the franchise stuff, but it's having that team that's our business that runs. What do we do for deals? What 125 deals last year? Yeah, 150. And you know, I like last year I was a little bit involved. This year I won't be involved at all. It's just gonna run itself. I mean, our systems are all locked in, hence is why we want to do the uh the franchise, right? Like let us teach you how to basically a business in a box. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 8:53

Yeah, and and yeah, all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it, like you were talking about. Um, but so was there a specific moment that you realized that the bouncing around was the problem and you needed to really dive in, or was it just kind of an evolution of wait a minute, I just need to pick something. I'm I'm spreading myself too thin here.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

I think it was an evolution and then just like not seeing the kind of success I was hoping for um as a as a real estate agent. And I I kind of I preached this one other thing about if you have like massive dreams, you have like you really have like three different options. Number one is you you hunker down and you figure out what it's gonna take, like you figure out the work ethic and go all in and get successful. Um, option number two is you lie to yourself and say, hey, I never wanted to achieve those goals anyway. Right. And I see a lot of people do that. They're like, I actually don't want that, like because they see how much work it's gonna take. And then option number three is you you keep those same high goals hoping that you're gonna achieve them, but not putting in the work, and then you end up being depressed and sad because you're not achieving those goals. And so I chose option number one, and I'm still choosing option number one, trying to put in the work and figuring out what it's gonna take, doing whatever it's gonna take to um hit those big goals that I have.

SPEAKER_03 10:10

Awesome. Yeah, and that's it is really just dialing in. Um, and I know James, like we figured this out too. Um it's just yeah, picking picking that direction and working toward that. And James, you've always done that. You've always just been you kind of set your sights on what you want to accomplish and then just figure out how to get it done.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Right. That's that's a lot of people don't have that mindset, right?

SPEAKER_03 10:38

Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

What she's saying, Javen, is um, you know, I'll I'll think how to I I see a path and I nothing's gonna stop me to getting that path. My my biggest critic is somebody telling me you can't do that. I'm like, here, hold my beer.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

It doesn't matter what it is, it can be anything. Like don't make the bed. It's almost a reverse psychology thing, and he's like, Yeah, well watch.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

It's funny. Yes, you you should ask my wife about that. I'm I'm the same exact way. Tell me I can't do something. Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

What in the world? You know, like you were talking about your grades too. I mean, it was the same thing. I I didn't care. It's not that I didn't care, I that just didn't interest me. You know, I knew, but by by 2021 years old, I had a townhouse already where you know my friends were still trying to figure out what the hell they were gonna do. So yeah, so it's really cool listening to you because again, uh I literally see myself in in you um moving forward.

SPEAKER_03 11:40

So sorry if I can um I'm just gonna jump in real quick from the parents from the mama bear point of view, good job for your parents for just letting you do your thing. I mean, I'm sure it was scary for them too, going, You're doing what? You're okay, because like you said, they had a plan for you. They wanted you to go to college and there was a safe path that they kind of saw. Um but as a parent too, our daughter came to us and she did the same thing at like 16. She's like, I'm not a college kid. I'm I'm just not. She's like, I'll come, I'll figure out a plan. And she actually joined the National Guard and she she just figured it out. Um and you know, now she is working in the business, but she worked her way into it. Like she did the same thing. She got her real estate license at 19 and worked in a title company, and she just kind of worked her way through, but um, you know, allowing her to have that support system too. Um, so like with your parents, and you said with your brother now they're just like, okay, you'll figure it out, like whatever you want to do. Giving you giving you guys that same space to do that. Um, but so quick question too. What so now when you have a shiny object pop up, what would how what's the filter? What's the how do you decide if if it is just a shiny object or if it's something that's actually going to contribute and move you to the next level?

SPEAKER_00 13:02

Yeah, that's a tough question because there is like we as business owners, there's always something new. Like there's smaller things within like every day, there's something new we can chase and with every week, with every month. Like there's always something bigger and better that we can be chasing. So it's it's really just walking this fine line, trying to make sure it's getting us to those goals without spreading ourselves too thin. Like, for example, I even I took this motto within the business, right? Like I was preaching about how I focused on on one business. Well, even within the business, I was focusing on on one thing, which is agent outreach. And I see a lot of new people when they they get into the business, they're trying to do a bunch of different marketing channels at once. Um, whereas I I kind of went the opposite, like I went as far as to not even touch the disposition side of the company up until recently. Like we were an acquisition-only company. We had another company that we had split the deals with, and they would send it out to their buyers' list because we were just so laser focused on trying to get the agent outreach model rolling and being consistent. And now with dispositions, we're gonna be doing the same thing, and now there's different things within the business that we want to try out. Like there's a new text team platform um that we're gonna test. So we're always testing little different things like that, but we're making sure that it none of that gets us off the course of of where we're going.

SPEAKER_03 14:21

You don't get distracted by it.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Yeah, do you have a job description? Do you have uh, you know, how how long is your let me start over. I'm looking through here and it says building without ads, right? And obviously that's your agent outreach program. Um, I'll be we've tried it what two or three times and absolutely failed. Um, I don't know what we're doing wrong because again, um we're pushing it more this year than we ever have. Uh, but I'm hearing these people that done 30 deals and they it was all by agent outreach. I'm like, yeah, we're spending almost a million dollars on advertising. So we do a lot of radio, we do TV, a lot of inbound uh uh calls. And again, how can we get our agents trained up to go and and learn what you guys are doing? I mean, I are I'm assuming is it a brokerage that you have, or is it one or two people doing it, or is that your whole I don't want to you don't have to give your whole business plan.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

I'm just uh no no I'll I'll share, I'll share.

SPEAKER_03 15:24

Yeah, what does that look like? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

So we it's there's several sales guys. We actually had some good turnovers. So I had four sales guys in here humming along. Um, fired like two and a half of them, right? Two of them fired and then one of them were I was kind of coaching out, so then dropped down to once, then you know we were aggressively rehiring, got four people in here total now. Three of them are brand new, so one veteran guy, and I'm um kind of jumping back into sales a little bit to keep the momentum going. But with the agent outreach side of things, it a lot of people misunderstand how much volume it's actually going to take to get these deals, right? Even when I first started, I thought I'd go make a handful of calls to these agents every day, and it'd be okay. Well, come to find out it actually takes a crap load of calls to these agents because a lot of these agents may only come across one deal every single year. So we did 46 deals last year, so you can imagine how many different agents we had to be talking to on a monthly basis in order to get that uh number of deals.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Are you guys doing a meetup at all? Or wouldn't you all like doing a happy hour, like bullshit?

SPEAKER_00 16:30

No guys. In my opinion, it's just like I said, there's so so much volume with these agents. We need a ton of agents in our pipeline that it would bog us down if we were going out to lunch with all of these agents. And now there may be exceptions to that one-offs, like where we go take an agent out to lunch if if they're a really high performer VIP, but those are far and few between.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

We need a lot of leader of a team, maybe that might they can go back and relay it to their team. Like if you run across the house like this, you can yeah, that'd be good.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

And we we do um several different states, so we're not just here in Phoenix, so we're in North Carolina, Indiana, Texas, and then obviously here in Arizona. And I can send you guys over the numbers that we have because once I once I figure out the numbers, like the conversion ratios of everything, it it all kind of made sense. And it's actually it's a lot of conversations every day, a lot of dials. Um, so once you guys have that, it will really that would be absolutely great because I think that's what we need.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

We need those metrics on you know, what do we need to hit? Because I can almost guarantee from what you just said that we need we need to come close.

SPEAKER_03 17:33

Um yeah, we we've we brought in a couple people that we thought, like, hey, this is your job to make these connections, and we didn't, it was more of a it we needed them to drive it because we didn't really know what it looked like. Um thought it was gonna work at the time and it just it hasn't yet. But yeah, yeah, what you're saying is and we kind of get that is like you just need one person dedicated to to making those connections, reaching out, doing all the the outreach piece.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Yeah, and if you guys you guys have a pretty successful team. So if I were you, I'm gonna give two different methods to do here. So one for the listener who's brand new and doesn't have a CRM or anything, I'll teach you how to do it. And then I want to show you guys how you could do it. So if I were you, what I would do is go get a list of agents from a title company. Uh you know, depending on what state you're in, they'll give you a list of agents or batchleads.com. We're all agents too here.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Um we we make everybody on our team, we want to be agents. Yeah, oh okay, yeah, just because it gives us that credibility uh against everybody else. And we all know that everything's moving towards that, you know, of everyone having to be an agent no matter what. So it's just we're just ahead of the curve.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Yeah, that's smart getting everybody licensed. Yeah, I like that. And then I would you want to cold, I'd upload that list into your CRM or power dialer, and then just cold call through. You can send out mass text messages basically saying, hey, I'm an investor looking for uh investment properties, and if they respond, pick up the phone and call them. Uh, and then same with the people that you're cold calling, you would just want to try and build a relationship with them. And the goal is to just not necessarily take from them, you got to provide a little bit of value. I look at it like an ATM. So if you if you go to an ATM and you haven't made any deposits, you can't withdraw anything from that. So you want to, it's the same thing with business. You want to try and provide some sort of value and make those deposits so that way you can withdraw something which is asking for those investment properties. And the way I do that is just being a valuable cash offer resource. And I let them know that we are really good at solving sellers' problems. So any difficult situations that they come across, they can send it to us and we can help them solve those problems. And now once you make that initial connection, the the hard work is hasn't really started yet. Like I think out of all the deals I've done in my career, only one or two of them have come from that initial call, right? We're on that initial call where I got an address and ended up going under contract on it. Everything else has come from following up and follow follow up religiously. So every one to three weeks, depending on how tight of a connection you have to them. If they're a high producer VIP agent, you're probably talking to them weekly, um, two weeks for an agent that's in between, and then you know, a lower producing agent who you're not as close with, probably every three weeks. And now, if you're somebody that doesn't have access to the CRMs or power dialers yet, what you can do is just go on realtor.com, go into the market that you want to start in, and then they have free agent lists on there, and you can just start calling them on your phone, upload them into a spreadsheet, and then obviously make sure you're following up religiously.

SPEAKER_03 20:44

And we actually have team members in place that could be working on something like that, um, making those connections. Or I'm just thinking through it, like it, yeah, that's something that we can build out pretty easily.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Yeah, it's just getting, I would love to know those the metrics of like, hey, by talking to somebody, you know, the 20th time is when you're gonna get that deal, or um, because we all know those metrics on our wholesale deals, right? Um it's just I don't know what is good and what is bad. And and I could probably I can almost guarantee we didn't do it right.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Well, the one metric I can share with you right now is I don't have the exact conversations pulled up, it's it's a lot. Um, but I do know that out of we 20 deal leads that we get, which a deal lead is an off-market property that an agent sends us, right? We don't count any on-market stuff that they send us there. So 20 off-markets, we'll offer on about 10 of those, right? A lot of them might be too high priced, or maybe the motivation's not there, so we'll just pass. And then out of those 10 that we offer on, we'll go under contract on one.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Are you is your typical 70% minus repairs, or do you guys go a little higher?

SPEAKER_00 21:56

No, we we we use a formula. Um, we'll take after repair value, we'll take seven percent off for holding costs, closing costs, and commissions, right? Because we're we're looking at it as if we were the flipper every time. Like it's gotta make sense. Like, if hey, would we? Buy this property, so we'll take that after repair value times it by 0.93, take that seven percent off. Then we'll take the rehab cost uh off of that, which is typically between 30 and 50 bucks a square foot, right? Sometimes higher, um, sometimes a little bit lower, and then we'll take off flipper profit. And we found that the majority of flippers are looking to make about 10% of that ARV, and then once we have that number, we have the wholesale price, what we could sell it to the investor at, and then we'll take off whatever we're trying to make for an assignment fee off of that number. What's your added?

SPEAKER_03 22:43

A little reverse engineering kind of.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Yeah, exactly. Last year it was, I believe it was 9600, but that was the majority of the year we were still splitting deals with another company. So this year we're expecting that average assignment fee to go significantly up as we start to build out our own disposition process. Nice, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

Well, we're at um what about 20, 25 on uh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:08

The wholesale is uh yeah, but the average is I think 24 something, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Wow. One of the things that I I teach and I preach a lot is I see a lot of these guys that uh hey, I just got three thousand dollars wholesale deal. I go, look, it takes just as much effort, if not more, sometimes, to get a three thousand dollar assignment fee as it does a$25,000 assignment fee.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Those are always the biggest pain pain in the butts is the small ones. It always works out like that.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Exactly. Last year I said we're not going in and we're not gonna say ever out of our um out of our salesperson's uh mouth again is we're gonna try. Because if you say we're going to try, that means we failed. Because the numbers are too tight, and it's just numbers are too tight. I mean, we know our numbers, we know what's gonna sell, we know what's not gonna sell. So, why are you doing yourself just? I'm trying to teach that to the sales team. You're not doing yourself any justice by taking even lower, you're not even getting paid either. So, um, last year I want to say we only had three fall off. That's how tight our wholesale is. Wow, but we we are very, very honest from the start because we don't go and change the price at the end. Where there's very price um at the end, you know, you know I'm talking about where they yeah, renegotiate, and that's part of our um our sales tax is we actually say, Hey, this is what the competitors are going to do, and I understand you probably should take that$200,000 offer when I only offered you$150,000. But I guarantee you, I don't see them um signing that contract up, I see them renegotiating, and sure enough, as I gave them that scenario, they come back to us. So I think we we we turned like 10 of them last year, yeah. Or they I I because here we want to be honest with them. Like, if you can go for a higher price, go get it. If it works out, that's great. But I just I'm guaranteeing you it's a bait and switch.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Yeah, I love playing the rebound. There's so many wholesalers out there that'll go, especially for on-market stuff, which we don't really touch a lot of. Yeah, but what a lot of them will do is they'll just go up and offer the seller of the world, get it under contract, and try and get the price drop. And like I've I've locked up deals where they've gone under contract two different times before me, before coming to us, and we're the third ones under contract getting the deal done. So it's it's super frustrating when we have to compete with those people.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Well, we're buying two, so we don't want to do anything. One little like little stuff can really ruin our company if we uh if we let it, and that's why we don't. I hate to say we want to be transparent on everything or do the right thing, but that's just what we want to do, anyways.

SPEAKER_03 25:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

And sorry, Jen, you were gonna say something.

SPEAKER_03 25:55

No, that's okay. I was gonna say ours is about educating the sellers too. Like we go in and we let them know we even give them a little flyer that hey, here's what we can do for you. And we we get it, you're gonna do your due diligence, you've got other people coming out. Ask them these questions. If they can't answer these questions, call us back. Like we can help you. And it's um, yeah, it's that transparency, and it's you know, we're not bashing anybody else, we're just kind of hey, protect yourself a little bit, make sure you're because they don't know what to ask, they don't know what they're looking for, and they're seeing the dollar signs, and yeah, that's great. But like both of you said they're gonna come back in and they're gonna slash the price, and and we've done the same thing. We've had people call us back and like, you were right, that is exactly what happened. Um, and we've gotten some some deals and transactions from it, but other people called us back after the fact and told us, like, I should have gone with you, you were right. But they were already so far into the process and already so far committed, um, and that's where people get stuck too. So um right.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

So that actually just rolls right in um to my next question, unless you got one, Jen. No, go for it.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

I'm I'm actually gonna steal steal that from you, Jen. I just wrote that down. In a list of questions to give to the agent to have them ask other investors.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Yeah, that's um that's again, so we we make sure does it say assignable? You know, because we'll tell people we have two different contracts. We're like we have one where we're physically buying it for cash, and then we'll tell people that we can wholesale the deal. Um, but to get you what you want, this is what we're gonna do. And so we look at it as from left to right left side is cash, next one is wholesale, the next one is either creative finance, and and we can still list the house for you, too. And we've listed a lot of houses because if you get a six hundred thousand dollar house, people are not gonna want to take four hundred thousand dollars for it, but why not still list it and make twenty thousand dollars on commission? Yeah, so yeah, that's one of the things that we've added. Um, because we want to take a lead that comes in and we want to monetize that lead no matter what, right? We want to yes, if we can get a cash deal, let's get a cash deal, but let's figure out what else to do with it too. And that's where us all having a license really comes into play.

SPEAKER_03 28:13

Yeah, and online we can connect too and have a have a deeper conversation about what that some of the um those questions we ask and and what that looks like. But it's my biggest it's been huge, but you had a question.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Yeah, so um your next thing is is burnout and discipline. You know, one of the things on here it has a why is burnout a structure problem and not a workload problem. Uh, what does discipline outside the work actually change? Uh inside the what is it?

SPEAKER_03 28:41

I I gave them some questions to ask. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

What does this uh discipline?

SPEAKER_03 28:46

What does discipline outside of work actually change inside the business? So, and then what comfort-driven habit? So this one was interesting. Um, yeah, where do you see people getting stuck?

SPEAKER_01 28:58

Well, right. So I I just I wanted that like the burnout and uh that is I was just talking to maybe you're in the same uh uh spot there, Javen. Is this the longest job I've ever had?

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Yes, same.

SPEAKER_03 29:15

Because it's because it you can like you can pivot, you can change, you can adapt, you're not stuck in one.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

But she's right, right? Because when I first started, I was doing everything. Jen was doing everything from the sales to the clean out to hang in the cabinets to you know transactions and the fun like all through the phone at nine o'clock systems behind the scenes, yep. All of a sudden that stuff started going away, right? And then you built you build up your team. But you know, you just said it, it's like how do you keep that that brain going and when we have brains like ours? Because you you all of a sudden you're like, Oh yeah, I'll just push it away. Um, in fact, I think because of my brain is why it took me a little bit longer to get here because I always had used to have a backup plan or plan, and then a backup plan, and then a backup plan to the backup plan, right? So the problem with having all those backup plans is they're just as good as the first one. You just give up on the first one and go to the next one, yeah. Right? And so when we when I was a firefighter before, I said it. Jen's gonna laugh, but um it's a drinking game. Like, how would that ever happen? It's it's it's again that burnout. How how do you what do you do to to stay uh laser focused when you have to be laser focused and you're changing something? I'm assuming you're not doing the same thing all the time in your business, like me. You're you you switch modems, you know. You now all of a sudden you're doing something completely different than you were before.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

Yeah, I try and keep my day as as structured as possible, but quick story on kind of the burnout. So when I was start starting the business, right, it was just myself doing literally everything, which it wasn't it wasn't that bad because I eventually hired a VA, so she's handling a lot of the back end stuff. So my day is mainly just sales. But I'm I'm doing calls at a certain time, doing follow-up at a certain time, I'm making offers at a certain time. So I got to a point where my day was was pretty structured, even though I was doing sales. And when I started hiring for the company for salespeople, a full-time transaction coordinator, uh, things kind of changed because now I was at everybody's beck and call. And I thought that that was the way that it had to be. So as I'm bringing people on, I'm I'm constantly just a backboard for them, answering questions, uh, running numbers on properties, putting out fires. And I was getting super, super burnt out. And at first I didn't know why, but then I realized that it was because I was context switching all day long. And if you're bouncing around from one thing to another every 10 to 15 minutes or getting distracted by one thing, and you never get into this these deep focus blocks or deep work blocks, there's no way your brain's not getting fatigued from that because you're just context switching all day long. So I had to re-implement structure and go back to my you know 60 to 90 minute time blocks like I had before. And you know, believe it or not, a lot of these salespeople's questions, they don't need to be answered right away. Like 95% of them can wait a couple hours. So I started doing that, and I had specific times that I would go out and walk the floor or check Slack. Um, but then the rest of the day is you know back to the structured working, and that doesn't solve burnout entirely, like it still comes up, but not as bad as it was when I was when I was trying to do those things bouncing around all day long. So it made me realize that sometimes burnout isn't always from too much work, sometimes it's just from a lack of structure.

SPEAKER_03 32:50

Yeah, and I think you can relate to that a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Yes, yes, I I can definitely relate to that. I think I don't need structure, but I I realize I do need structure.

SPEAKER_03 33:01

Otherwise, you're just you're you're looking for something. And I was I was gonna kind of touch on this a little bit too. It's um the you know, whether it's the ADD or whatever, but if everything is running smoothly, and I know James and Jaden, Jaden do this. Um if everything's running smoothly, like, okay, well, I need to find the next thing, and then it kind of creates chaos. Um so having that structure and that that focus, kind of having, you know, yeah, like you said, having your day mapped out, here's what I'm gonna do today, and then kind of staying on track with that um is helpful.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

I'm wrecked when I when I have a bunch of white space in my calendar and I don't plan it uh the day before or the morning of because then, like you just said, my my brain's searching for what to do, and then I'll start doing something for five minutes, and then I'll be like, oh shoot, I gotta do this, then I'll bounce, bounce over to that. So it's like I gotta structure my entire day with those blocks and be like I'm sticking to this at these specific times. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

Yeah, yeah, that's uh I really, I really have that problem.

SPEAKER_03 34:08

I love you, honey.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 34:13

I I definitely have that problem.

SPEAKER_03 34:14

And and I think you've you've recognized that recently too. You you've recognized that recently too, um is you know, having the need for for yes, I need a plan. As much as you want to be able to pivot and you know do your own thing, it's like you you still need that structure, and and um that that is a big part for you.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

Right. So hey, we're um I got a one more question to really ask you. Um, what's the one thing that most people building a business right now are getting completely wrong? Um I don't know if you can, and then there's another one. What does winning look like for JM, Jabin, uh three years from now? So, like, so tell me a little bit like what's your future gonna be? Uh, what's your goals? Because we all don't want to continue to do this in in the same spot. I'm assuming you got bigger goals too.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Yeah, I mean, then back to your first question, what people are are doing wrong is basically what we've been hammering on this whole podcast is not staying consistent, right? And a lot of people think they'll come in, they'll make a couple calls on Monday, or maybe they'll go super hard for one entire week, or maybe an entire month, and then they'll stop and let off the gas and then then get back to it the next month. It's like no, you you're a lot better off just being consistent every day, even if you're not, you know, going balls to the walls every day, but you just hit a consistent number day in and day out, regardless of how you feel, you know, sick, tired, rainy, sunny, like just come in and make the same amount of calls every single day because consistency is gonna uh beat the sprinting uh nine times out of ten. And then three years from now, our big our big goal, my big goal is to get this company to where it's running on its own. So I can go out and and start building other pieces of the business. Um so what that's gonna look like over the next couple years is getting probably having a couple managers within the company and then a general manager over them, and then we'll see. Maybe we'll get some executive leadership in here at some point with how big we're trying to grow, where we have a CEO, CFO, COO, um, and all those roles. And long term, I really want to build some other arms of the business. This is more 10 years down the road, uh, where we have a hard money company within Onyx. We uh are doing commercial real estate, so we we not only have acquisitions and dispositions for the residential, but we have acquisitions for the commercial. Um, and we have some sort of fund where we're we're buying commercial, we're wholesaling uh commercial, and then another on top of the hard money, we're doing you know, bridge loans and stuff like that for fix and flippers. So we kind of want that to all be in one house eventually. Have you built your own fund yet? You're for raising raising money? Have you done that? No, we're not not even close yet. We got I'm gonna get all this going. I think we're gonna get the once we get a GM in here in the next couple years and the the business is running on its own, where I'm just kind of in more of a visionary role, then I can go start executing on these these other business ideas. And what's cool about it is once you get the main business figured out, you're going into the next business with way more knowledge, with way more money, with way more resources. So everything starts to snowball. It's like anything in life, everything compounds and kind of works downhill where it gets a little bit simpler to make to build the next business and then the next business after that. So although the the time to build the first one is is taking forever, the next ones aren't gonna be that hard. And that's a good lesson for anybody that's listening and and starting their business right now is like just stick with it for you know three, five, ten years. Um, and it's not gonna be like that forever because the next businesses you go to start are gonna be way easier with the capital and the knowledge that you have. Agreed, completely agreed.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

Um, one of the things that uh I was always taught at a very uh at a young age, if you don't know how to do something, pay somebody who does know how to do it. Because why why fill up your bucket with something you don't even enjoy to do? Pay somebody else that knows how to do it, and they're probably gonna do it 10 times better than you anyways, right? Um where you have I always tell people, I can't find a good employee, I can't find a good employee. I go, if you find somebody who's about 70, 75 into your business like you are, you got to hire that person because that's all they're gonna give. They don't own, they don't they don't wake up in the middle of the night at two o'clock in the morning going, Oh crap, how am I gonna do payroll? You know, we do that, we're the ones that have to freak out a little bit about that. So that's 75 uh in, you gotta hire that person because they're never gonna be 100% like you. And that's pretty much all they're gonna put. You you gotta have somebody maybe and get somebody. I I would even say our guy is probably 85% in.

SPEAKER_03 39:09

I was gonna say he's Paul's in. He's he is he drank the Kool-Aid, as we say. Like he's he's amazing. And and finding those people is hard too. And that's that's probably a whole nother conversation and podcast about um, you know, just uh hiring and really dialing in and finding the right person for the right seat that fits your culture. Um that's a whole that's a whole nother podcast. Um but yeah, that's sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 39:37

No, no, no, no, no. I was I was just kind of disagreeing with you. Um so basically, hey, uh I don't even know how to end this. Um I don't think.

SPEAKER_03 39:47

I yeah, I got something. Um so we talked about investor fuel. Um they are having an event in a couple weeks. It's called Freedom Fuel. Um, ignore the first link I put in there. I was trying to copy it from Facebook, but the second link um explains um kind of it's it's a it's open to everybody in every industry. They do this once a year. Um they have people presenting and it's um they rebranded it Freedom Fuel. Um, but to take a look at that, uh it's in a couple weeks in Dallas. Um I think we have a couple extra tickets if you are interested in attending, but um we yeah, we're part of and you talk to Mike Hambright, we're part of his um mastermind group, which it's a good group. Yeah, we I mean in the beginning, James and Jaden joined every mastermind out there, and they were once a month, they were bouncing around to all the different ones. Um and got some nuggets here and there. We've been part of this group for five, six years now, and um it's we call it just doing life with people. Like everybody is whatever success looks like to you, it doesn't matter. I mean, it can be the car or it can be traveling or it can just be spending time with family, but everybody um just supports each other, and they're all doing the same um real estate investment, all at different levels, but it's it's been a great network. Um, and like I said, we kind of rebranded it doing life, um, helping everybody just reach their goals. So that's it, that's been a great group for us. Um and then Javen, if people are interested, have questions about what you're doing, how you're running your business, anything about like you know, ignore the shiny objects and stay focused, how can they reach out to you or where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 41:36

Yeah, if you're anybody listening to this, if you guys DM me the word home guys on Instagram, I'll actually send you the script that I use to reach out to real estate agents every single day. And my Instagram's at jaben.makings. It's my um username here, if you guys can see that.

SPEAKER_03 41:52

Oh, yep, there it is. Um perfect. And then I know Brady will put our contact information somewhere on the screen here. Um, and if you're interested in, you know, talking to me or James about anything, home guys, franchising, business, life, um, you can find us at homeguys.com. And uh like I said, Brady will put our contact information up on the screen. And Jamin, it was awesome talking to you. Um, I know it was a good conversation for James, someone that is kind of in the same position he is.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

And good to know that my brain is out there with other people too. Yeah, and then it's scary, but right. I mean, I always tell people my I feel like my brain's working fast all the time.

SPEAKER_00 42:40

It doesn't shut off.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

It doesn't shut right, right. Like, can I hit a button to turn this off?

SPEAKER_03 42:46

You know, but you know what? But you guys have uh the plus side of that and the positive side of that is look what you guys have built, look what you've look what you've done.

unknown 42:55

Right.

SPEAKER_03 42:55

Um and you know, drag us along for the ride, your wife, I'm sure, too. Um like it's it's been a ride, but uh it's amazing. So thank you so much. Um we'll stay in touch. Yeah, let's see.

SPEAKER_01 43:07

Yeah, stay in touch because we're we definitely can all help each other out. I would definitely be encouraged, like even when we were in Scottsdale for investor fuel, if it's something that you you want to you know come see what that's about too, um, and not having to worry because I think this year, yeah, this year in November we'll be in Scottsdale.

SPEAKER_00 43:25

Okay. Um let me know when you're here. We'll definitely have to get together.

SPEAKER_03 43:28

Yeah, absolutely. Even dinner, drinks, lunch, whatever. Um, we'll we'll connect and um this is what it's all about. Just finding finding people doing the same thing and helping each other out. So, Javen, thank you so much, and we will see everybody next time.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Awesome, appreciate it. Thanks, guys.