Grace Gudenkauf on Shrinking a Portfolio to Build a Better Business

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0:00 Hello and welcome back to the Owner Meeting podcast. I'm Christian Ozgood, your channel host, also founder of
0:05 Multif Family Strategy and way too many other companies. Grace is joining us today who also has quite a few
0:11 companies. We're going to talk about some of how she's optimized this today. She's made some business changes that
0:16 I'm actually quite jealous of. She is the co-founder of Wire, which is Women Invest in Real Estate, which it has been
0:24 ridiculous to watch that thing grow. I'm obviously not a woman in real estate. my wife is, but I see you everywhere. I
0:31 feel like if I know a female in real estate, I look through that like I'll be talking to them. I'll talk about their business and then like five of their
0:37 pictures, I'm like, "Wait, that's Grace again." You are everywhere. You're a Bigger Pockets Publish author. She literally wrote the book on
0:42 self-managing your rental pro uh properties. You have your own investment company, uh, which you've made some
0:47 dramatic changes to. I am super excited for this episode. Like, I bring on some fun guests. Grace is like a 10 out of
0:53 10. This is this is a dream guest for the channel. So, Grace, thank you. Welcome. Thanks for having me.
0:59 Absolutely. Way overdue. I apologize. That's an oversight on my side and I suck, but we finally got you. So, the
1:05 podcast is now an official podcast. We now count. Yeah, I'm excited for the topics we're
1:11 going to dive into. It's fun talking to other higher level investors and I've done a lot of things, made a lot of
1:17 mistakes, so I've got things to share. Uh, see, that's the only people I want on the podcast. Everyone knows that
1:23 Grace has done cool things. If you'd happen to not know, Grace, Grace, give us the quick backstory. Where did you
1:28 start? What is your portfolio and business look like today? It was just like the the 30,000 foot view start and
1:34 finish. Yeah. I invest in Eastern Iowa where I was born and raised and lived up until
1:40 just a few years ago. Everything I own is in a 15minute radius, but I manage all of that from Tucson, Arizona. moved
1:48 here a couple years ago to get away from my portfolio and my and because my fiance got a job and we had started very
1:55 DIY investors. So, we really had to figure out how to get out of that. Mhm. I flipped a lot last year. We'll talk
2:01 about why I'm not doing it anymore. I'm building a couple triplexes, which is super exciting and new for me. And I'm
2:07 really at a point in my portfolio where I was scrappy. I bought all the real estate. I did all the things. And now
2:13 I'm trying to make it easy and simple so I can enjoy my life and focus more on wire, which is truly what wakes me up
2:20 every day, gets me out of bed, and what I have fun with. I hear this all the time from entrepreneurs is real estate. Here's the
2:27 beautiful thing about real estate. Once you kind of get your flow, it's fairly boring, which I don't know about you, I
2:32 like my money to be boring. Like the the the main thing is like we know how to do it. It's on autopilot. like we manage
2:38 the rentals, they bring in the money, we occasionally have some drama, we solve the it's a basic business.
2:43 Almost everyone I know who built net worth and wealth in real estate finds a
2:49 passion project within real estate. Some of them become developers and contractors. Some of them become
2:54 coaches. Like I mean, your community is is absolutely phenomenal. But you find something in real estate where you're
3:00 like, there's other nerds who love this stuff, too, and they want to. So, it's fun watching that become the passion
3:06 project and watch that company take off. That's uh again, huge congratulations. That's coming. You did a million dollars
3:12 uh already this year, right? Or is it in 12 month rolling average? No, we haven't had a million dollar
3:17 year. We hit our million dollar the in revenue, but total revenue.
3:24 That's such a huge benchmark in any company and it deserves it. Like you have this this awesome community. I've
3:31 never heard of anyone who doesn't love it. What point in your portfolio did you start the community aspect? How how far
3:38 in were you? How did this all come? This is actually a great story and I also want to preface like I'm from
3:43 smalltown Iowa where if you made 100k like I'm not from Seattle where there's
3:48 tech money and there's a big city like 100k is like a lot of money. Like my parents only probably ever made
3:56 60 70k. I don't know. They did very well for themselves because they invested real estate. But so I just want to add
4:02 that in there that it's very different when you grow up like that. But I started Wire actually when I started
4:08 investing in real estate, but it didn't have a name. I just was like, "Hey, I'm going to throw up a Zoom in January of
4:13 2021 because I just figured out all this real estate stuff. It's really cool and I have nobody to talk to about it. So,
4:20 if I can throw this up on my Instagram and I found this girl named Amelia, who
4:25 is now my business partner, but I didn't know her at the time. She seemed cool. She was also from Iowa. I was like,
4:30 there's no way there's two people in the whole state of Iowa my age doing this. So, come be on this meetup. And we
4:38 thought like our my mom would show up, her mom, and a couple other people and I'd be happy. And like 60 or 70 women showed up to
4:45 that first meetup and we were like, whoa, what the heck? It was co keep that
4:50 in mind. Okay. And it was the best time on planet earth to launch these. But right, how did you market this where 60 or 70
4:56 people showed up? That's still I mean that's a just my Instagram like I literally was like you have to message me your email
5:02 and I'll add you to the list and then everybody would do typos. It was like the most ridiculous system. But like I
5:08 was not intending to start a business. I just wanted to make friends. That's all I wanted to do. And it really continued like that once a
5:15 month for about a year. still never thought we'd ever make money from it. And then the first time we made money,
5:22 Amelia looked at me and she goes, "We should do a retreat." And I was like, "You're crazy. No one is going to buy a
5:27 retreat from us. Like, that's ridiculous." She's like, "Well, I already sold a few tickets, so we we
5:33 have to do it." I'm like, "Oh my god, partner, by the way, that is that is I I
5:38 love and hate it when my my business partner, Caleb, will do that to me all the time." He's like, "I have an idea." I'm like, "Ah." He's like, "Well,
5:44 unfortunately, it's already happening. Right. And away we go. That's so exciting. Oh,
5:49 what a great partner. Okay, so she she already pre-sold some tickets. You're already committed to hosting this event.
5:55 How did the first event go? Where was it? First event we sold at cost. Like we both walked away with like 500 bucks and
6:02 had a weekend with 20 girls in real estate in the mountains in Gatlinburg. And we thought we were rolling it in
6:08 like to post a profit on your first event. By the way, that you sound like 500 isn't
6:14 much. To not lose money on a first event. We kept it simple. Phenomenal. Well done.
6:20 That's actually a great point. So many people will throw massive events and it'll cost them, you know, they'll be
6:26 200k in the hole for this massive event. So, and I think that's a theme in wire is we've always been lean. We've always
6:32 been profitable. And so after that, you know, we kind of still did it willy-nilly for a year or two. Threw a
6:38 course in there, did some more retreats. Then I'd say about a year ago, we officially launched our wire community
6:45 membership. Put in a ton of work. We have over 200 investors across the US and that is really our bread and butter.
6:52 Our retreats are now beyond like I can't even describe if you went to that first retreat what they
6:58 look like now. You know, private chef, 20 people. We just did our 10th in Zion National Park doing adventures, hiking,
7:07 what great location. Zion, Gatlin, Gatlinburg is one of the coolest places in the country. I love Gatlinburg. So,
7:13 okay. So, you're choosing awesome locations. You're running these retreats. People are coming. Private chefs. This sounds like a dream
7:21 business. So, you basically get to travel anywhere outdoorsy that you want to go and you get private chefs and you get
7:28 like and you make some money doing it. Crazy. Yeah. Crazy. I think one thing that Amelia and
7:34 I have done really well is we've made wire what we wish we had and what we wish we had in fact is what most women
7:42 and investors in general not just women wish they had which is a community and a place to learn from people's mistakes
7:49 and level up and see other people doing bigger things than you and it's so incredible that we get paid
7:55 to just hang out with these amazing people go to these incredible places of course we put a lot of hard work into it
8:01 but at the end of the A definitely a dream job. Oh, that is so fun. Well, again, huge
8:06 congratulations on on hitting that that million-dollar mark. Now, something I found in my business, the worst part was
8:14 like my first million-dollar year. I found we had so many people in the community, uh, ours runs a little bit
8:21 different where it's more mentor like we are mentorship first, education second, community third. I'm
8:27 trying to I'm trying to expand community, but you have 2,000 people in the community. You're mentoring like 70
8:33 people at the same time for like that. That's what my business looked like at around a million dollars. I'm like, I
8:39 have I lost all of my time freedom. And while it sounds like a lot of income, the marketing cost and the
8:46 overhead, I didn't run as lean. So, when I'm going I'm like, I make I make enough where I'm making a lot of money for a
8:53 lot of time. I'm not making enough to hire the amount of people that I need to get any time back. So that was like the
9:00 beginning. Half a million dollars like dream job. It's all perfect. I'm coaching people. It's a community. It's
9:06 beautiful. You get to a million dollars. I felt for me I'm like I'm this is harder now. You have to add
9:12 systems to come business. Are you finding at the million-dollar mark you're running into that or did you guys manage to run this as a partnership lean
9:18 enough where you're like, "Hey, we actually just did a better job launching our business than Christian did, which would be hopefully the case."
9:25 I think the difference is is I think we went slower. I think we've gone a lot slower than a
9:31 lot of people who build these huge communities have. So, we haven't had as big of issues. So, it feels really good.
9:39 Like Tuesdays, I don't work on wire. It's my real estate day. Um, I really don't work on weekends. I probably work
9:46 20 to 30 hours a week in wire, maybe 10, 15 in real estate, but I'm also gone
9:52 like at least twice a month. So, throw those weeks out the window. So, I feel that we've really gone slow
9:59 and steady and been very intentional, which I'm really grateful for. Granted, we pro we probably could have made way
10:05 more money by going faster, but Ameilia and I always joke that we have too many hobbies to be working full-time.
10:12 And I I think you lose some relatability if if because there there are a lot of people who who build large communities
10:18 or who who take off with when I started my company, we got lucky that like I was partnered with Cody Davis at the very
10:25 beginning of my career and he got the most watched episode of all time on Bigger Pockets and we had the show on
10:31 Upflip also get a million. So we got like we started during COVID and we had
10:36 two multi-million view episodes go like so it's like there was so much
10:41 we had a lot of growth very we're like well I mean we we might as well scale to do it but what you lose is
10:47 you lose some relatability like if I'm trying to coach someone from from like when I started it's like hey I got to my
10:52 first 100 units very relatable it was this slow steady thing you come from a place of like hey I have four or 500
10:58 units all of a sudden it's like okay well now I'm like, I have a much bigger business
11:04 that had like huge podcast and this big marketing spend. And when you're trying to coach someone on step one and two,
11:10 yeah, I don't have the life that most of my mentees want. I have zero time freedom,
11:16 tons of business. I like what you did a lot better, and I think it's more relatable for most people starting this.
11:22 You can make a ton of money in any business. Limiting your growth is going
11:28 to give you a tighter community. You're going to stay relatable. You're going to have fun. Uh, but you're at the million-doll mark in your company
11:35 and you got to have fun the entire way with a partner. I think that's amazing. A Millie and I are intentional.
11:42 Yeah. And we like, for example, you'd say you were mentoring 70 people. We did
11:48 one-on-one coaching in our community and we only did four each cuz we're very My worst fear is getting in over my head.
11:56 So, I'm really good at saying no. I don't give a I'll say no. Like I
12:01 don't care. This is the ones. Know when to say no. That's gonna save you more money than you could imagine.
12:07 Yeah. And so I just think we've been intentional and that's always been prized above high more money.
12:14 Yeah. And that is the correct way to do it because what you end up with is like for me to maintain quality it just mean
12:20 it means more hours and it means it means constant input and it means like adding team members, systems, processes,
12:26 expenses. It's really hard to keep quality up and growth up at the same time. If you just
12:32 lead with quality, you end up with the best possible group. I know so many people in your group is this like
12:37 tight-knit community of people and it's going to grow itself. Like if you don't do any outreach, your people will invite
12:44 people forever. You have an infinitely growing business. My prediction,
12:49 you'll outscale me and pretty much everyone else who has a large like you know quoteunquote large community
12:55 because you kept maybe we might not we might not catch Pace Morbby. He's he's pretty far out ahead of
13:00 Yeah. But for 99% of the groups out there, you're going to pass them because you're going to last long and your mentees and
13:07 your community will bring in more people to the community. It's a self-growing business. It's beautiful model. I think
13:12 it's the best model out there. Funny that you say that because we have watched multiple people do five times
13:20 what we've done and then already be done with their business or already shut it down or already
13:26 pivot it or do whatever. And so, of course, when we're watching them have that crazy growth, you're always
13:32 thinking like, "Oh my gosh, I wish we were that big. I wish we were doing that. I wish the grass is always greener." And that's why conversations
13:38 like this, and I appreciate you, Christian, being honest about like it was hard. I work a lot. I made a lot of
13:44 money, but I didn't have any time. Like those are I still can't tell you one thing about time freedom. Like, nope, don't know.
13:49 Never had it. I've [clears throat] never had it in my life. I appreciate you being honest about that because that's what when so many people
13:56 see only the good parts and not the downsides. So, it's great to always talk with other community owners and business
14:03 owners to see what is the full picture. Yeah. No, absolutely. And it's so fun
14:08 watching you grow that. Now, the main thing, real estate. You're investing in real estate. We're going to get to we're going to get to some of this. I saw a
14:15 post recently. Um and I think it's I think right now as of today it's like your your I think it's your top pinned post on Instagram, but it was you're
14:21 selling your portfolio. Now not all of it. I'm giving away the post. If you slide through it's like ah the hook I'm
14:28 selling everything. I know. I got that was a good hook. I was like ah this is a good hook.
14:33 you've downsized some of what you've done and you've restrategized and I think this is going to play right into the way that you built your community of
14:39 this slow measured how do you preserve time and actually build what you're trying to build. What did your portfolio
14:46 look like before you started selling down and what does the business look like for you today?
14:53 Yeah, I want to get into the first Yeah. My first couple years in real estate, I bought like 20 units in Iowa.
15:00 Um, and I would do anything to make an extra 200 bucks in cash flow. You know, I was 22, 23 years old that I had quit
15:08 my engineering job one year in to go all in on this. So, like I would do anything to up that cash
15:14 flow. Lots of strategies. I did keep it all within a 15-minute radius, which has
15:20 been like a really great thing that I've done. That's amazing. But I got to about year four in business. I had maybe 30 units and I
15:27 decided I'm going to start flipping and I hired in a full-time maintenance person, a full-time project/propy
15:34 manager and we flipped like 12 properties in 2024. And so we were I had
15:41 great systems to keep everybody in place. And at the end of that year, I thought like I'm going to keep growing
15:46 this. I'm going to, you know, I'm good at real estate. This is my thing. Like I got to I have to keep growing this. And
15:52 my project/propy manager after about a year and a half got his dream job in
15:58 Salt Lake City for a massive developer and gave me, you know, like a one-mon notice. And the first two days after
16:05 that notice, obviously I was super excited for him, but I was like, "Oh crap, what am I going to do? We're in the middle of these five projects. I'm
16:12 1700 miles away." And it only took about two days for me to realize,
16:18 actually, I don't know why I'm doing this. I don't like flipping. I don't like project management. I'm not good at
16:24 renovating. Why am I doing this? What am I building this toward? So, I decided,
16:30 all right, I'm going to scale that down, be done. Also, it's so messy, as you know, when you have so many projects,
16:36 private money, lenders mixing around your quality
16:42 over quality, and I really like to do quality over quantity. And I was like, I just have too much going on. They're
16:48 taking longer than they should. things are getting missed. I just don't like this. And so I real I went from like 12
16:55 properties last year. I haven't flipped anything this year. I finished some of the flips in 2025, but I haven't
17:01 acquired any flips. Moved into building with a partner. I decided I do not I'm
17:07 already the head of wire with my co-founder Amelia. I can't be the head of this big flipping business. So, let
17:13 me actually and when my property manager quit, project manager that week, a guy
17:19 who my realtor's husband who I'd known for like four or five years finally decided to quit his job as a police
17:25 officer and he's an incredible contractor in very good at what he does.
17:30 And I was like, "Wow, this is meant to be. You're going to GC all my stuff that I need to finish." And then we ended up
17:37 partnering on some properties, building two triplexes together, also doing a loft together,
17:44 did a single family together, and it really helped me stay in my zone of genius, be completely out of the
17:50 renovation, which I'm not good at. I'm good at running a business, organizing systems. I'm good at running the
17:55 numbers. So, I get to do that. A year ago, I could never have guessed that I would have a partner in real estate.
18:01 I've always been super anti-partner, like, do not partner. it's a marriage,
18:06 blah blah blah. But like we traded personal financial statements, we wrote out mission statements. We wrote out
18:12 roles and responsibilities. Like we really went through it with a fine tooth comb to make sure that it was going to
18:17 be a fit. And that's what you have to do on these. I've found that because I've had partnerships that have just got it been
18:23 incredible. I've also had partnerships that have been absolutely terrible. And this is from someone who has I've I've 31 partnerships. I send out 115 116
18:32 K1s for all of the various partners on various projects. It is a pain. And if you have enough
18:39 partners, someone's going to fight with you at some point. Now, I have like a 1% fight rate.
18:45 When you have that many people, that still means you're you're always fighting with someone over something, which is it's kind of miserable. I like
18:51 the way that you've structured it where you found a partner and you guys structured the partnership. I'm curious, do you guys have a solid so so what is
18:58 the mission statement and do you have a exit plan in the partnership if things
19:04 go sideways? Those are the the two big things that I've found have uh when they come up it's really good to have is
19:10 where are we headed and once we get there what do we do? Great question and
19:15 thankfully I was able to learn from people in wire of like what happens when
19:20 you don't have an exit strategy or you don't talk about what you want the future to be. So our mission statement
19:26 was actually to build and to flip. We have not flipped. Yeah. We got so busy with building. So we
19:33 really need to revisit that. And eventually we were planning to revisit
19:39 maybe opening up a GC firm because again he's really great at all of that.
19:44 There's really not a lot of competition in our area. Mhm. And as far as the exit plan, yeah, we
19:50 signed an operating agreement. I can't remember exactly what it says, but we absolutely went through like what
19:56 happens if you decide you don't want to do this? How are you going to communicate that to me? What are those
20:02 conversations going to look like? Mhm. And I'm a very direct communicator. Like
20:07 I want you to be like, "Dude, I feel like you're not pulling your weight. Please, what's going on here?"
20:12 Yeah. And I feel like so far it's been good. Of course, it's not gone to plan because we got the builds are taking longer.
20:19 Other things came up on our plate. So, it's definitely we need to revisit that
20:24 and, you know, have some more serious conversations. But, I've been pretty happy. I think he's been pretty happy.
20:30 And I never could have guessed I'd be in a real estate partnership. Isn't that crazy? When it starts to
20:36 start, hey, we got the right group. We got the the right team. You put it together. And I have so I've had this conversation many times with my YouTube
20:43 buddies Dion McNeely, Matt Hawkins, Lumberjack, Landlord, Zuber, all of them are all antiartnership and all of them
20:49 are like, "Hey, we don't want to work as hard as you." So maybe maybe that is the answer. But I have found if you get the
20:54 right partnerships, it becomes so much more fun. I'm partnered in Texas on almost every deal in actually literally
21:01 every deal in Texas with Caleb Hmel. And this 22-year-old is just absolutely amazing to work with. He's phenomenal.
21:08 He pushes me to do projects that I'm like, "Ah, we can do it, but I don't know if we have to." Like, he pushes me to grow like I wanted to when I was 22.
21:15 And so, he keeps my companies expanding in a way where I'm like, if it was up to me, I might actually just do less. And
21:21 so, it it's fun looking back and being like, this partnership pushed the companies to a different place. And I'm
21:27 really happy with where we ended up. So I I am pro partnership. Like 100% pro
21:32 partnership. Pro the right partnership. Yes. I And I I've shared this many times on the podcast, but one of my best
21:38 partnerships and worst partnerships was being partnered with Cody Davis, my original business partner. Like when you partner with people who have never had a
21:44 job, never went to college, never done all the other things. Huge fans of just going I'm a huge fan of going straight into entrepreneurship. However, if you
21:51 work with someone who's never worked on a team ever, you have your own problems of like, oh, amazing entrepreneur,
21:57 rounded skill set. No. So, as the companies grow, the most expensive and most lucrative partnership, Cody Davis,
22:03 we talk about this all the time. Cody's still a great friend. We don't partner on deals anymore because the riskreward
22:09 isn't the same as it was when we were younger. It's it's too much it's too much drama and up and down for me.
22:16 Caleb, he's like, we buy for cash flow. He's with the program. I'm like, "Okay, we have the exact same vision, same
22:22 market, same vision. If we close, our income goes up. I don't want any drama. I don't want any major renovations. I
22:28 just want to do cash flowing real estate, close, increase income, continue to pay less in tax." That's basically
22:35 basically my acquisition strategy now is how much do we need to buy to not pay tax this year. Yeah. And my partnership with Amelia has
22:43 been almost five years now. Gosh, that's incredible. And it's incredible. I could never do
22:49 wire without her. We'd never be where we are if we didn't have each other. But there's absolutely been hard
22:55 conversations. There's absolutely been tough heartto-hearts of like, you know,
23:01 where are we at and how do we get better and all of this. And it's so amazing to be have a partner who can get through
23:07 that with you and be on the other side where things are better than ever. You're both in your zone of genius.
23:13 You're when you're down, the other person is up and can help you get out of that funk. and vice versa. Emilia and I
23:19 are really good at that for each other of talking each other off the ledge of like we will both admit usually I'm the
23:24 one talking her off a ledge, but we actually have a bookkeeping business with wire and the other day she was
23:30 talking me off the ledge. She was like, this is unusual. Usually it's the other way around. I was like, I know, I know. I just really needed, you know, I was
23:37 just really down about something and confused and you really helped me through it. And that's what a great partnership can do is that they're there
23:44 for you. This sounds so cheesy, but it's really true. like through all the hard parts and then that makes the good stuff
23:50 even better. Mhm. This has been something I've learned, but I'm curious your opinion on this. Is there anything as a true
23:56 perfect 5050 partnership? Like, can you have a partnership where both people are equally valuable all the time at every
24:03 stage of the business? Probably not. And it's I'll have her on the podcast so she gets away on this as well.
24:09 I genuinely feel that is an equal partnership between us. But something
24:14 that's interesting is yesterday we were talking to our coach and she was reminding us like you guys don't always
24:19 have to be paid the same, work the same, or have the same responsibilities. If one of you wants to do more than the
24:26 other as long as you're on the same page, one of you could be full-time, one of you could be halftime. Like that is
24:32 not off the table. And that seems so simple, but we were like, "Oh, wow. That's a great point." And there's some
24:39 things that I like to do that she doesn't that have sparked some of those conversations. But I really do feel very
24:45 lucky to say that I think we both give very equal value. We both had different
24:51 strengths. But is it always at every moment equal? Of course not. And I think that's where I see a lot of
24:58 partnerships blow up is someone like well I think I you know I brought more here or I did more. It's like I let me
25:03 use Cody my relationship as an example. When we started, Cody Davis was 20 years old and he had 30 units. He'd done three
25:09 deals, seller financed in the same market. I had two duplexes and a eight-year sales career. I had more
25:15 business skills. We weren't building a business. We were in acquisition mode. Cody was unbelievably more valuable than
25:21 me in the beginning of it. uh when we started our uh coaching program and Cody
25:26 instantly got a podcast where he gets a million views front end of our business
25:31 Cody just brought more value as we got into the operations and the details and the focused work and the teamworks and
25:37 the me I brought more value and we've had back and forths and the there's always points where you can look at it
25:42 and be like I feel like the partnership's unfair. My biggest rule is as long as both people are giving it
25:47 100%. Everything 50/50 is fine. Your 100% doesn't have to be the same as mine and
25:52 mine does not be the same as yours at every phase of business. What you said is perfect though.
25:59 If someone wants to do more, there's a beautiful thing that you have in companies called like income that could
26:04 be split differently. You can do salaries differently. Yeah. You can rework the equity, which I
26:09 usually actually think is people jump to the equity too early. I I think salary is a much easier. It's like, hey, I'm
26:15 doing more. Can I get paid more? Like I'm doing more job. Can I get paid more for the job? But you have salaries, you
26:20 have equity, you have all sorts of different types of compensation. It's not that hard to sit down and have a
26:27 discussion with someone of this is what I want to do and if you want to do less, how can we make this work or vice versa.
26:33 Yeah. And and be okay with an initial disagreement and working through it. Uh,
26:40 I think as you grow your company, your businesses, and you get into more of that leadership and operations, yeah,
26:45 you need to have very specific job descriptions, org charts, who reports to who. And when you have all of that laid
26:52 out and filled in, it could be relatively clear of, okay, it looks like, you know, 70% of the daytoday is
26:59 this person and 30% of the dayto-day is you. What would that look like to move
27:04 some of those percentages around or better apply compensation towards the workload?
27:10 That is absolutely those types of conversations that will move your business forward and probably need to
27:15 happen in a lot of people's businesses. Yeah. Ah, you have a partnership where you guys are able just to maintain 50/50
27:21 and both stay fully engag. I mean it's it's it's a beautiful thing when you have I call them strategic partnerships
27:26 as opposed to just like a capital partner like you have that this is a true we are partners in this venture
27:32 together. That's that's so cool that you have that. I think that that will carry you unbelievably far. Losing them
27:38 businesses that was really hard. I'm like this was a twoman operation. Now it's like when we made the decision to
27:43 to part ways on like a meta business level, it's like uh I I guess I'm the
27:48 guy now that this is a whole different business. I think probably now that we're reflecting on it and probably how
27:54 I lost all my time. But I also think cuz we went slow and steady that anytime we started to
27:59 deviate or get disconnected, it was so much easier for us to course correct and
28:04 get back on the same page cuz we weren't overloaded, overrun, overworked. like we
28:10 always had the bandwidth to keep our partnership first and foremost and that's what that's what it takes. So
28:16 so beautiful structure on that and I think this plays into your area of genius. You literally wrote the book on
28:23 self-managing rentals for bigger pockets. I mean you are actually literally the author for how to do this.
28:28 Your genius is systems and operations which I think is playing right into how you run your partnerships, your slow and
28:33 steady growth. I think you're a fantastic marketer. I also think you understand your business better than
28:38 most business owners do. That's why your business is what it is. It doesn't need to be a $10 million business right now.
28:44 The way you're running it, it's going to carry itself there organically, slowly, steadily. You're going to kill it.
28:50 When you're running the real estate business, what are the ways that you can optimize? Because you started with
28:55 flipping, you're doing developing, you have buy and hold, you have a lot of stuff. You've shut down your flipping
29:02 division. So you're making like big strategic decisions. How does one start
29:09 if you're not your operational genius? How does one start in visioning what
29:14 they want? Too many people do one of two things. So I want I want to try to direct this a certain way. Biggest two
29:20 problems. They plan so much that they never start. And I think that's like 90% of people. That's the biggest category
29:26 hands down. They over plan which is hard not to do. The other side is they want to say yes to literally everything. And
29:33 you mentioned earlier, you're good at saying no. How do you actually know where you're headed
29:39 at all times through business? Because it changes. There's so much going on. I'm really curious. You're you're you're
29:45 coaching me now. I need to know how to do this. I mean, I think there's two pieces to
29:50 that question of like, hey, how do you stay optimized and how do you stay intentional? Yes. Being intentional, I
29:56 think, is having a lot of honest conversations with yourself. I journal here and there. I wouldn't say a lot,
30:02 but I really try to always get back to, okay, I'm overwhelmed. What is it that is feeling easy? What's feeling hard?
30:08 What am I good at? What am I not good at? And having a lot of honest conversations with you or your business partner. When it comes to staying
30:15 systemized, which is what allows you to be intentional and what allows you to
30:20 have the time to say, "Wait, I hate this. I need to take a hard pivot over
30:26 the next 30 days. Great. I'm glad I have the organization assistance to do this.
30:31 I'm going to dumb it so far down for people, they over complicate it. It's a lot of micro habits that stack up to
30:39 staying organized and doing things the same way every single time. For example,
30:44 one of the most powerful things you can do is time block. And as entrepreneurs,
30:50 I know everybody's guilty of this. You have, for example, I have a wire email and a real estate email. And I used to
30:57 fling back and forth those two so fast throughout the day a hundred times. So,
31:04 I was never focused on anything. Now, I have very clear days. And maybe it's your maybe you have a W2. So, instead of
31:11 checking your real estate email t times a day, you decide, okay, Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I have two solid
31:18 hours where I do nothing but my real estate work. and you make a list of what are those repetitive things that I need
31:24 to do every single time. For example, I've trained all my contractors that I pay pay bills on Tuesdays. Today's
31:31 Tuesday. What do you think I was doing before this podcast? I went through I paid my bills the same way. I have a
31:37 very strict system. You have to email me the bill. It has to have it has to look a very certain way. I pay the bill one
31:43 of two ways. It's only through my business bill pay or my business bill pay will send a check and then it goes
31:49 straight to my bookkeeping system. All of those things make it so easy and so simple. So I'm not running around
31:56 dreading every bill that comes into my inbox throughout the week. I just plop it in my folder called bills to pay and
32:03 I know Tuesdays I only have to dread paying bills once a week. Tuesday mornings I do it first so it's
32:09 done. And it's those little things over and over and over again that create systems that allow you to have that
32:15 freedom. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I imagine we're going to we're get a bunch of response to this. Everyone in the uh in in the
32:21 comments, let me know if you have not done the uh the the bill pay where all the small bills pile up because you're
32:27 like, "Oh, what do I owe for what property?" as you scale. That was like the number one thing when my wife doom pile of bills.
32:32 There there was a certain amount of I'm like, "Okay, we're so busy. Anything under like $200 I'm like they're gonna
32:38 charge us like a 9% late fee for that's cheap enough where I can if I forget I'll get back to it later. And
32:45 [laughter] I'm like it can't hurt me enough to to not pay this on time. And so I had like
32:50 my important bills and like the I promise we're going to get to this pile. So when my wife joined the company she's like how much do you owe like people and
32:57 like little things? I'm like so I'm not a details person. So I don't know the answer to
33:03 it. So um and so she came in. She's she's like, "You are aware there's like $15,000 of various like tiny unpaid
33:10 things." I was like, "See, that's this is news to me. That's that that sounds when you put it in that context, that
33:16 sounds horrible." And that's where you get people like who are integrators in your in your companies. But the it's the little things. We're going to set up a
33:22 bill pay method and we're always going to do it the same way. It's going to go to the same email. And if you're not a great bookkeeper yourself or you don't
33:28 have the time, I have one person at the end of this funnel who is excellent at this thing. When you're adding staff to
33:35 your team, you mentioned that you run pretty lean. Where are the places that you guys supplement for the tasks that you don't want to do, don't thrive, you
33:42 know, like what what critical roles ended up in your business where you do have employees or other people assisting
33:48 in real estate? Yes. In real estate, it's pretty lean now. It's me, an assistant, and then my
33:55 business partner. At one point, I had Oh, and a maintenance person. At one
34:01 point, I had a full-time maintenance person. of full-time project and property manager or project manager, a
34:08 part-time property manager. So, two and a half full-time employees,
34:13 two full-time employees and one part-time employee, and then the VA, so I guess another part-time. But that's
34:19 because I thought I was, you know, going to be closing selling one and a half flips a month. And that is not lean at
34:26 all. Now I'm like, how do I make this as simple and stable as possible so I only have to work on Tuesdays in real estate?
34:33 Don't tell the IRS that because actually I work 120 hours all the time.
34:38 Yeah, [laughter] that's okay. I believe Donald Trump still has his real estate professional and I'm like I don't think he's running
34:45 No way. I'm looking at his schedule. I'm like, God, I don't think that's crazy. My goodness.
34:52 Like where would he find extra 720 hours? So, I guess he's doing that between uh, you know, 1 and 4:00 a.m.
34:57 when he's supposedly sleeping. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So, you're not alone. That's great. Yeah. But systems, it's the little
35:05 things the same way over and over and over again. Another way I see people get
35:10 really overwhelmed in real estate is not tracking their flip or renovation budgets up to date. So, for example, on
35:17 my Tuesdays when I do my bookkeeping, when I have active projects, I have an active Excel sheet. I have a
35:22 bookkeeper. Wire even has full-blown external bookkeeping services. So, if
35:28 you need a bookkeeper, go to womeninvestrealestate.com. You'll find our bookkeeping tab. But I
35:34 do my own bookkeeping because QuickBooks and your bookkeeper are going to run 30 to 40 days behind. So, I actively every
35:42 single week am updating that. And because I pay my bills at one time, I know exactly how to update that
35:48 spreadsheet. So I have a realtime data on how this flip is doing so that I can make pivots like turning it into a
35:55 rental because I went over budget and it doesn't make sense to pay a huge realtor's fee and put it on the market
36:01 and sell it. I'd rather just cash it in as a rental or cutting certain things out of the
36:06 budget because we've already gone over on X, Y, or Z. And then retroactively
36:12 looking through those budgets. So maybe every quarter you have a review. So what I did when I
36:17 flipped is I always had I had a giant list called lessons learned and every teeny little thing that me and my
36:23 project manager would run into, we'd put it in jot dots on that document and then after the flip, we would take that whole
36:31 list and implement it into systems. So for example, maybe one of the lessons learned was we did painted before we did
36:39 XYZ and we shouldn't have done that and because it resulted in them having to come back to paint twice or something.
36:44 Yeah. So then I would take that and be like, "How do I systemize that?" Well, let me go to my SOP on how I hire and
36:51 plan a renovation. Let me add in here that this person always goes first or to
36:57 doublech checkck XYZ before ABC happens. So now I'm actually putting those little
37:02 lessons learned back into my SOPs and how I run my business to make sure it never happens again.
37:08 So, and those are the it's the little things. But everyone I've known who had a a business that ends up being simple
37:14 for them, it's little things like that. And you said my favorite thing in the world, which is just time blocking. If
37:20 you run multiple companies or if you have a W2 and you're doing real estate and scaling side by side, having
37:26 specific times where this is what I'm working on, like I have in my schedule these exact same times as when I onboard
37:33 new mentees. I always do one-on- ones with people who join the program because I think it's important. It's a mentorship. So that's blocked. It's the
37:39 same time. I know my times there. I have set times for the podcast where I'm like, "This is when I'm in studio
37:46 podcasting. This is when I still like to do my own edits. One of the only things that I really enjoy doing. I can think
37:51 about my business." So, it's like I have set times where I get to relax and edit the podcast and the video and
37:58 they're always specific. I know what company I'm working on, what day. Mondays in the morning, it is property
38:05 management for four straight hours. We don't do anything but property management. You call me about anything else, I'll just end the call. I'm like,
38:11 "Nope, not talking. Nope, not it's not property management time." Having the discipline to block that, it allows you
38:17 to do I I'm It feels like 10 times as much. Like it is unbelievable how much you get done when you're like, "Nope,
38:23 this is what I'm working on at this time. This is what I do." True focus work from entrepreneurs is
38:29 rare. And so when you can figure out how to unlock it, make like another thing I do is for certain tasks that I hate,
38:36 I'll pair it with going to a coffee shop. Like that's a treat. I get to do this. I turn my phone off. I get to, you
38:42 know, review all my financial statements in an hour at a coffee shop. So figuring
38:47 out how to trick yourself, I'm all about tricking yourself or placebo effect or whatever, doesn't matter. Figure out how
38:53 it works for you and do it. And another trick that I have that's very easy easily implementable is if you have
39:00 different businesses, you need to have different Google profiles and different emails for each. For example, my Good
39:05 Morning Investments profile is yellow cuz that's the branding. It has diff
erent bookmarks. Different pages
39:11 automatically open up when I'm in my Good Morning Investments Google Chrome. When I open up Wire, it's purple. It
39:17 looks different. I have all my other important things bookmarked. And I'm never opening that on a nonwire day. So,
39:22 if I ever think of something I need to do, and this I just did this this morning, it's keeping yourself
39:28 accountable to not open up that email and switch tasks. But what I do is I'll
39:33 email from my real estate to my wire just a reminder, but like I'm not like,
39:38 "Hey, tomorrow I need to reply to soand so, but like do not open it up." It is
39:45 the tiniest self-discipline and building habits to keep yourself focused. And it
39:50 will feel so good once you figure out how to unlock. Yeah, it was really you can end up
39:55 thinking about five tasks and doing 80% of five of them and you're sitting there a week later and you're like, "Wow, I
40:00 haven't actually done anything. I've just like kind of tinkered through all of my businesses." Whereas, if you just
40:06 sat down and finished tasks, I'm husbands are probably going to relate to
40:11 this. Uh getting task 95% done, then moving on to the next task. That's like the number one. I'm like I'm like, "We
40:17 got up all of the uh I finished all the light switches. I just have one more to do. And then 5 months later, I'm like, I
40:22 remember when I almost finished that one time. If you could just focus and get it done, it's now done. And you can move on to
40:28 the next thing. And it works the same way in business. If you focus and you're an entrepreneur and you can take all
40:33 that energy and put it one place. Everything moves forward. When it's done, it's done. And now you're forward.
40:38 And now you move on to the next thing. It is the that is the single best thing that ever happened to my business. I'm
40:43 so glad that that is what you said because I think people need to hear that. It is time blocking. It is color
40:49 coding things. I love I'm a big color coder. That's really smart. I have like three
40:55 colors. I probably need 10. That is exactly what you need to do though. It's like, hey, I'm in this mode. I I go to
41:00 this place. The color scheme is that like I know what I am doing. I know what I'm working on. It's funny.
41:06 It's efficient because you can recognize the color instead of having to read like my Google Drive is very colorcoded and
41:12 so I know exactly where things are. I don't even have to read or look for it. And that is super super helpful.
41:19 Oh, that's actually okay. This is exactly what I wanted. I said I want you to coach me. That's like I haven't color coded my Google Drive. That's going to
41:26 save me everything. I did do the Google uh if I if I'm working on my resort. Robin Hood is green. I know my main one
41:32 is purple. I go through, but I'm like I need to I need to do a lot more of this. And here's another
41:37 I'm way behind you on this. Here's another hack for time blocking is in the calendar event. I live by my
41:44 calendar. I think that you everybody should yes if you're thinking of random things you need to do or even if it's recurring in
41:51 the calendar event literally write out exactly the steps. So, for example,
41:56 maybe you need to pull statements for your bookkeeping. Literally putting in bullet points the whole list of
42:02 statements so you're not sitting there rethinking, wait, what credit cards do I have? Wait, what bank accounts? What
42:07 mortgages do I have? Like, stop thinking. Write it down. Have one source of truth that you always revisit and
42:15 that you know is the answer with a with capitals. There's not multiple lists floating. And so that way, maybe you
42:22 have a 30 minute admin bucket that's just a bunch of random crap. Just go add to that throughout the week and then
42:28 maybe it's on Fridays and you know, I just need 30 minutes to get through this list of 12 things that if I had tried to
42:34 do it throughout the week, I I would lose so much time stopping my task, starting a new one, going back to it,
42:40 getting distracted. You got to commit to time blocking your calendar, and really making sure that
42:47 you're not recreating the wheel. that I think is the biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make is they don't think
42:52 that they run a business. So they always are reinventing the wheel. Like when they buy a property, sitting there and
42:57 thinking, "Okay, I just closed yesterday. Wait, what do I need to do? Oh I need to turn on the electricity. Oh, I need to get insurance." Like, write that down.
43:05 And then once it's written down, you just follow the template. So easy. And I downloaded that into our in our course. I'm like, "This is what you do
43:10 the day of close. Every day or every time you close, there's a ton of stuff to do. You're
43:16 going to forget it unless you go through the checklist. So, just do all of these things when you close. This is what you
43:21 need to save for your tax documents. You just put it in a folder. So, you give it to your tax person. It's not a year-long
43:26 project. You just have a folder with your stuff. It's the It's a pain in the ass to do. And almost all inves I'd say
43:34 almost all entrepreneurs, almost all suck at doing it. Like they because most
43:41 of us are somewhat of a visionary. We're excited about the next thing. And so it's like,
43:46 "Yes, we closed. Awesome. I'm so sure I won't forget to take the settlement
43:51 statement and put it in a folder." And then you get to tax like, "What title company closed this? Where did I put that?"
43:56 Great. That's the call of shame. I call that the call of shame where you have to call a title company from a year and a
44:02 half ago and say, "Do you remember me? I actually need all the paperwork from that property I bought last year. Can
44:09 you please send it to me?" Like don't ever if you have the right systems you won't ever have to do that.
44:14 Yes. Okay. Final final two questions. How do you get good at saying no? How do
44:21 you know when to I think it comes down to knowing yourself, knowing what you want, and
44:27 being not non-influencable. I don't know if that's a word, but I'm not easily
44:32 influenced. Like I know myself. I know what I want. I know who I am. So that's maybe sounds like a cheesy answer.
44:39 Know yourself. That's a huge piece of investing. You are a member of your team and if you don't know how you are, if
44:45 you don't know where you're going or what your strengths and weaknesses are, you're going to put yourself in the wrong positions in your company and it's
44:52 going to be miserable and you're going to say yes to things you shouldn't say yes to and no to things that you probably shouldn't have said no to.
44:57 And if you're not good at that, maybe writing out a vision statement and revisiting it when you're trying to
45:03 figure out to say no or yes and saying, "Does this get me to that vision?"
45:08 Okay. No, I love that. That is short practical advice and it's perfect. No, no, no additional notes. That is you
45:16 need to know yourself and if you know yourself, you know when you need to say yes or no. And if you're finding yourself, if you're finding it's
45:21 difficult, you need to either revisit your vision or you need to spend more time thinking about uh who am I and
45:27 where do I slot my company? If if you don't have clarity on those, yes and no is going to be really confusing.
45:34 Great advice. Also, clipping team, great clip. Uh for
45:40 short points, are you the clipping team, though? No, I do have I do have I do have a
45:46 clipping team. I I like doing the long edits. I send the raw format to them. I'm like, "You guys fi find the moments.
45:51 I'll tell you which ones suck." Um, I actually keep a little button here over on the side of my chair. So, if I have a great idea, I'll just click the button.
45:58 It will time stamp my video so they get it done. That's that's Christian's version of being organized. That's That's a great system.
46:05 Yes. Now, if you actually looked at it, which I I'm not going to move my camera because I'll never get it back in the right position. It is literally taped to
46:11 the chair. My wife would My wife's like, "Do not zoom out. Your space looks terrible outside of camera." Uh, so
46:18 that's funny. I'm not I'm not grace level organized. I'm I'm unesthetically organized. Okay, final question. The question we ask
46:24 every time. Most expens expensive mistake. We call it the stupid tax because when you're young, you're the dumbest you'll ever
46:30 be. The first time you do it, you learn a whole lot of things through trial and error that you cannot learn just by
46:37 taking the mentorship, just by you learn by doing. So, could be a personal relationship, could be time lost, could
46:44 be straight up our favorite one. How do we save people money? But what is the most expensive mistake have you that you
46:50 have made in the last 5 years of your business? I lost a $70,000
46:56 city grant that was pretty easy to get for a really dumb mistake that I did.
47:03 Long story short, the triplex that I bought was on a lot with an existing house. And when I
47:09 bought it, it came with a ton of code violations. I sat on that for a very long time, not knowing what to do
47:14 because I never thought I would build. Thought I could save it. And they basically gave me a deadline saying, "If you don't have this house demoed by this
47:22 date, we're taking you to court. You're going to get sued." I was like, "No problem. I'll get it demoed." Where I
47:28 made a mistake is I got it demoed in time and I didn't show up to court because my unintelligent self thought
47:37 there's no house there. How could I possibly get sued over fines? I told the city inspector, "Hey, it's blah blah
47:44 blah blah." I didn't tell the attorneys. I didn't show up to court. So, I lost the court case. Got like a $3500
47:51 fine there. Actually, this is a $7,3500 mistake. So, I got not only a $3,500
47:58 fine. Yeah. I got successfully sued by the city over something that I fixed because I just
48:04 was not thinking. Yeah. And then for that grant I was supposed to get, they basically said, "We can't
48:12 give you this grant. We just sued you." Like, that's not going to go over well with city council. So, I lost the grant.
48:18 And I remember I cried after that phone call because I was just so mad at myself of like dude how are you that dumb? And
48:27 I just told myself as long as I get the next one this will have been worth it.
48:32 And I am building another property and we got we are so close to getting we got
48:38 the first approval for the grant another $70,000. It needs to get signed and signed an
48:44 agreement at next city council which should be. We don't know why. We're not expecting any reason why it won't be
48:51 signed. So that's the light at the end of the tunnel is I lost the first one, but it was worth it cuz I figured out
48:58 hopefully how to get the second one. $73,000. See? Oh, and right at the start of this
49:03 podcast, great great way to tie this all together. Right at the beginning, you had talked about what a big deal $60,000
49:09 was in Iowa and making $100,000. You had a $70,000 mistake. That was basically
49:16 like when you started that was like the annual salary. Like
49:21 yeah, that's a year of money in Iowa in Seattle. That's like
49:26 you're homeless. But I go reasons Christian moved to Dallas. Way way up there on the list. But like
49:33 that was like that's a year of financial freedom lost over like
49:38 I didn't show up to a meeting. I didn't think Yeah. I just didn't think hard enough there.
49:45 Oh, okay. That Yes. always show up to your court cases. How does one know what to There's
49:51 There's a million things happening especially if you're doing like development or demo. How does one avoid that mistake moving
49:58 forward? like like what what systems do you have in place to make sure that you never miss another $70,000 court
50:05 hearing? That was just a case of me dragging my feet and not knowing what was happening
50:11 and having too many things on my plate cuz I had no freaking clue how to demo
50:17 and build a house. I thought demo was going to cost 10 grand. I didn't realize that demo is actually redoing all the
50:24 utilities, excavating it, grading it, hauling everything away, asbestous
50:29 testing. Like there's so many things I just did not know. So I don't know really think that I
50:36 probably did about as best as I could knowing that it was just all so new to me. But having probably having really
50:43 clear priorities, making sure you know exactly what your workload is and never slacking off on things. I just waited a
50:51 little too long to get things going and it caught up to me in the end. Yes. And another idea if uh if you
50:57 happen to be a woman who is investing in real estate, there's a group called Wire where you can actually learn from the
51:02 mistakes of people so that you can take Grace's mistake and like hundreds of other people's mistakes and not make
51:08 them yourself. So, Grace is is is so good at growing organically. She just doesn't self-promote because she's uh
51:13 she's epic and awesome. So, I'm going to do it for her. Join Check out Wire. That community is awesome. People love it.
51:19 And I think the most effective way that you can avoid making some of the same mistakes is you get around people who have done the thing that you want to do
51:25 so they can tell you what to do. They can tell you like, "Hey, you're probably going to spend more than $10,000 demoing a a property."
51:31 Yeah. They'll help. It's probably going to be 50. Yep. It's probably going to be 50 or depending on what market you are, it
51:36 could even be a heck of a lot more depending on what you're demoing. You should talk to people who have done
51:42 the thing that you want to do. And if Grace has done some of the things that you want to do, Grace, how would someone get a hold of you or your team most
51:49 efficient way? Yeah, the easiest way is on Instagram at grace.investing or if you want to check
51:54 out Wire, wire.com community and wire has two eyes. There we go. We'll put those below in
52:00 the show notes as well. So, if you're watching on YouTube or anywhere, we stream to like literally anything that
52:06 could be streamed to. Absolutely. Click the link, check that out. I am a mega fan of Grace and everything she does. I
52:12 love the way that you run your business. I think it's the most sustainable business practice. Cannot praise you enough. So, thank you for gracing us
52:19 with your time, Grace. And we That was way too corny. A team, don't cut that, but we probably should. Everyone, thank
52:25 you for listening today and putting up with me. Grace is a huge treat to have on the podcast. We will see you guys all
52:30 on the next episode. Thank you.