Building Wealth and Purpose Beyond the Beach with Rhyan Finch

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I’m Mattias, an agent and investor.

[Erica]
And I’m Erica, a licensed therapist.

[Mattias]
Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing.

[Erica]
Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors.

[Mattias]
Ready to level up?

[Erica]
Let’s do it.

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent, Mattias here. Today we have Rhyan Finch on the show. Rhyan was an excellent guest, has been a very busy person with his different endeavors and getting into businesses and real estate and investing and all that.

So it’s a really good conversation. I think that we went into a little bit more of what it’s like to, what mindset you should have, the ways you should think about your net worth, how you should have active income versus having passive income as well. I think we both agree that we don’t really, you know, the idea of just living off your cashflow and sitting on a beach, drinking mojitos all day, is this like glorified image.

But in reality, like I think both of us probably would go a little bit crazy if we didn’t actually have something that we were pursuing, a mountain to climb. But I think it’s just really important as you go through life to take time. I think we often just are stuck in the cycle.

We’re just, we’re showing up to work. We’re doing what we need to do to pay the bills and not really thinking big picture. And I think it’s good, it’s really a good practice to build into your life, to really zoom out, look at what, where you wanna be in five years, where you wanna be in three years, where you wanna be in 20 years even.

I mean, like have some sort of idea of where you’re going and then have some way to track it. We talked about the personal, having your net worth be one of the KPIs that you can kind of use as a guiding post. So if you are, he talked about getting a bunch of rentals and then selling them and getting businesses and then selling those.

And ultimately, at the end of the day, the beauty of what he’s talking about is that he’s taking action where he can do things like that. If you never buy a house, if you never start a business, if you never buy rentals, you’re not gonna have those options. You’re just gonna be stuck kind of, you know, working for somebody else or maybe being self-employed.

But if you have that KPI, you have the, of following your net worth and you are making decisions like, okay, well, I’m gonna exit this company, I’m gonna exit this business, I’m gonna sell it, or I’m going to sell my real estate to do something else, or I’ve used my active income to put into real estate investing and I can track the growth of my net worth through, yeah, actively tracking it. I think it’s just important, it’s a good step to kind of like keep knowing that you’re kind of going the right direction because at the end of the day, like we may not want to sit on the beach for the rest of your life drinking mojitos tomorrow, but at some day, you’re gonna wanna have the opportunity to have that choice. And I think that’s what it’s really about.

Even if you don’t think you’re gonna be somebody that’s gonna just enjoy not doing anything or being retired, you still wanna be able to have that choice at some point. So working towards that is important. I think also stuff that we get into a little bit is knowing who you are, knowing what your strengths are.

We talked about having clear communication being a thing that often like a CEO type person, a visionary person struggles with, to be able to effectively communicate so that everybody on the team understands what needs to happen. But it starts with understanding that about yourself to be able to come up with strategies and work arounds to make sure that you are making up for that. I mean, typically I say, you need to work with your strengths and not try to overcome your shortcomings.

But at the same time, you have to also understand that somebody over here who’s just listening to you ramble, that’s gonna have no idea what you’re asking them to do, and they’ll just be like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. And then you thinking that you’ve beautifully summed up everything that needs to be done and they should know exactly what to do, will get frustrated when it’s not done. And so I think it’s just a really good practice to continue to learn who you are and how you operate through, that could be personality assessments, it could be work traits assessments, it can be desk assessments.

I mean, there’s a bunch of different things that you can do, but I think each one kind of helps you unlock new insights about yourself. And then also, if you can have everybody in your team do it, that’s another way of understanding how they work and how they operate and what they need. And then you know each other better, you can make jokes about, oh, that’s just Mattias being, chasing the new butterfly, chasing the new shiny object.

Or that’s just them being stuck in the mud or not wanting to do something new, just wanting to do exactly what they are used to. But you need both. I mean, you need the gas and the brakes to be an effective organization going forward.

So all that to say, we have a really great guest today. So stay tuned for Rhyan Finch. Welcome back to the REI Agent.

I’m here with Rhyan Finch. Rhyan, thanks so much for joining us.

[Rhyan Finch]
Thanks for having me.

[Mattias]
Yeah, Rhyan, before we kind of get into your story, can you give us a bird’s eye view of what you do?

[Rhyan Finch]
So right now we own, I am the CEO of First Class Real Estate. So we have nationwide locations. And then I also run a hard money company, a title company, I’m involved with those.

And I buy and sell houses as well.

[Mattias]
Okay, you do it all. What got you into the real estate space to start?

[Rhyan Finch]
You know, it’s funny. I do a couple podcasts here and there. No one really has ever asked that question that way.

And so it’s funny you said that. So what got me into real estate was my aunt worked for a tax company. And one of the books that they recommended was Rich Dad, Poor Dad, because it was talking more about business stuff, you know, like opening a business and stuff like that.

And so she gave me Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And then that’s when I learned all about real estate. I was like 19 years old.

And so I ended up buying another house and a couple houses. And then that pushed me to getting into real estate because I was like, well, if I’m gonna keep buying them, I might as well get into real estate. And I went through that through 2019 to 21 or so, all the values of anything we had went up.

So I was like, all right, this is great. I’m gonna do that.

[Mattias]
Yeah, totally. Wait, so when you got into real estate more full, did you go for your license right away or what’d you do there?

[Rhyan Finch]
Yeah, so I was actually a plumber. And so I bought a house and then I had a daughter and I was a plumber in the plumbing union. And she gave me that book and it kind of pushed me to kind of buy some more houses.

And then I saw, okay, wait, there’s a commission tied to this. Okay, so I’d had two, I think at that point. And then I was gonna buy the third and I bought the third as I moved into real estate.

So then I got licensed and I cold turkey, quit plumbing and jumped straight into real estate.

[Mattias]
Okay, how’d that go?

[Rhyan Finch]
It was, what was that? That was 2006. So it was end of 2006.

So October of 2006. So it was rocky. I ended up selling about 30 houses that year.

So which was good for that time. But then my biggest problem was I went from one income to another, right? And then you owe tax on that money.

And so it almost, you thought I hit the lottery. It wasn’t like I made a fortune. At that point in time, house prices were lower but so it wasn’t a ton of money, but I went and spent it.

I think I went to the Superbowl that year. The Bears went to the Superbowl. So I went, and then I bought a bigger house, right?

So I took that money. I bought a bigger car, a bigger house, went to the year I thought it was gonna last forever. As it slowly started trickling down, I was just grasping for air, trying to just maintain and dig back out.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that lifestyle creep is definitely something to watch out for. And one of the things that I’m writing about in my book is kind of like, it’s not like you can’t have a nice life and that you can’t have the nice things, a nice car, whatever. Some people will never do it.

Like the Warren Buffets, right? They’ll never buy a nice fancy car there or a nicer house, because it’s been in the same place forever. But like, build that base first.

Why don’t spend it on the flashy stuff right away? Build your base, get your assets and start paying for it. And then maybe start growing your lifestyle.

For sure. Being 100% passive is, I guess, the goal, right?

[Rhyan Finch]
It’s funny, because I’ve actually been dabbling in that in my mind even recently. And I think I’ve gone one way or the other. What happens is you go through this kind of journey of what you think you want, right?

And you’re always wherever you are, obviously. And then you think you want this. And so you’re just having to continue.

Now, you would think that maybe the argument is, do I go for more or do I, or do I stay content with what I have, right? And so for me, staying content with what I had was challenging because I didn’t want to just go round and round and die, right? So I wanted more purpose.

And with that more purpose gave more opportunities. And I went to getting more passive. And then I go on to another side where it’s like now I want less passive because it’s a time, how do I explain it?

There’s a velocity that goes on. So which means if you can go in and you can say you can get a $100,000 property paying you $1,000 a month, right? Just for easy math, if you look at it.

Okay, you’re gonna get $1,000 ongoing. Good, I want to get 20 of those. So I go get 20 of those and I have $20,000 a month coming in, right?

Well, eventually those houses get capital. They have value. You could sell them.

But if you sell them, you owe taxes. So you go through this kind of this dilemma. But what happens is you have 20 and you have that cashflow and you’ve reached it.

Now what?

[Mattias]
Right?

[Rhyan Finch]
You’re like, now what? All right, so you’re gonna go through this, now what? And it’s gonna say, okay, I’ve got 20,000.

Okay, now I want to go buy a nicer car. I’m just gonna use that for example. I want to go buy a nicer car.

Well, now I’ll use the cashflow of that to pay for the car because it pays itself off because that’s what all the books will tell you. You say, yeah, but the conservative side of me says I should just pay cash for that because interest on it. Now I’m paying the interest I’d be getting there.

But the problem is I have 20,000 a month coming in and I don’t have 50,000. Let’s just use that as a number to go pay the car off. Right?

So I’ve got to wait two months and use two months worth to do it. Everything inside of me says, that’s not how you’re supposed to do it. I just spent two months of work for a car, right?

And I know everybody kind of goes through this thing. This is that journey you’re going through. And then what happens, you forget it.

And you sell it all and you’re like, okay, now I have a million dollars. All right, well, now I got a million dollars. Well, now I got to go deploy it again somewhere else.

But now I got to pay taxes on whatever I just did. Or now I got it, now I can pay for the car outright. But I still don’t want a fancy car because I don’t want to use the money that could be making me money.

So then what happens is, even if that was the case, you made that sale, you got the taxes, you bought your car, all right? But now you get up in the morning and you got to say, okay, do I do this over again? No, we’re entrepreneurs.

We’re going to go to something new, something else that’s going to challenge us, right? Somebody goes from owning a restaurant to deciding that now they want to go into real estate. You’re like, wait a minute, those are two different things, but we don’t see it at the time.

So we start going to other categories. But what I was getting at in that is, by the time you took to get those 20 houses, to getting $1,000 a month and letting them do it, let’s say that was over five years. It took you five years, right?

We’re just making this number up. It took us five years to get 20 houses paying $1,000 a month. Well, in a year, how big could I build a business?

So if I build a business and it could make $20,000 a month and I could build that business to make $20,000 a month in three months, then that was faster. Well now again, I’ve got my $20,000 a month. We’re just running parallel to the real estate side and this is not for or against real estate.

I’m just showing you this is the difference. But one’s passive. The 20,000 of the houses is passive.

Running the business was a little more active. Not that it’s active day to day, it can become passive, but it’s cashflow. Now, here’s the dilemma.

You ready? And I’m sorry if I’m going too fast, but.

[Mattias]
No.

[Rhyan Finch]
The house value you had making 20,000 goes down in value. You start seeing your net worth going down even if your cashflow is going good. So you’re happy with that.

You’re like, I mean, you’re not happy with that. So now you move into the other side and you have a business. Well, the business is going good, but it starts to slow down.

Well, now is it time to exit either of them? And then you go back to that same problem. And so building a business is not passive, it’s active, but it can make a lot of money faster, right?

If you’re buying properties, you can actually make a lot of money faster, but it’s active because you got to buy it, fix it up and sell it, right? So then you got active and passive. The time goes by and if you get to passive, you almost get lazy.

Does that make sense? So if you start becoming lazy, you’re like, I could have used this time to do X, whatever that would have been. And so we think we just want to get the passive and then go sit on the beach, but you won’t, you’ll get to there and then you’ll go be active again.

So that was all that was to say that.

[Mattias]
No, yeah, no, I totally agree. I think that the way I see it is basically as you’re earning money that you’re also investing in something like so that, and like you can go back to Robert Kiyosaki, he’s got the cashflow quadrant, right? So you go from being an employed person to going to self-employed.

A lot of people stop there and think that they’ve made it, but in reality, if they step away, no money comes in. And so they’re really an employee. And then what you’re talking about is getting over to the business and what I was talking about too is the investing quadrants where your money and your time are leveraged and you’re able to earn without your necessarily, it could be without your active.

Like I know in the business building world, you’re gonna be super heavily involved, but eventually you can get systems in place and people in place that you could get more out of it. Or you could just buy a franchise, for example, and have it run by- Most people don’t, right?

[Rhyan Finch]
They stay in the business because actively, I can grow it faster than if I hire someone to grow it. Then, and that makes it passive, but then it’s passive. And what are you gonna do?

Not pay attention to it and then it starts to go down because they don’t run it as good as you. And that was the reason you didn’t fill your void with that. And then you fill it with it and it’s making you a cashflow, just like a rental property, but it’s worth something.

And you’re like, well, do I keep this or do I sell it? So you’re just always gonna go through this. You sell it and you’ll attack.

So I see a lot of companies selling right now because they’re almost at the height. I see a lot of people trying to exit houses at the height right now because they’re going through mentally what we’re talking about in one category. They may not own a business.

They may only own a business and not real estate. They may decide, I’m gonna take all my, you know what, this business stinks. I don’t like dealing with a person.

So now I’m gonna sell it and I’m gonna go put it over here in the houses. And somebody in the house was saying, I don’t wanna deal with fixing toilets. So I’m going over here to put it into a business.

So it’s crazy because it’s just not as, it’s not as direct as you would think. This is the goal, get there and that’s winning the game. It’s like a continual cycle.

Selling the business gives you a quick exit, taking that money and then learning how to manage it, whether that’s leveraging against rentals or leveraging it on flips or using that money to do marketing for your other business. So five grand spent here makes 20 grand. So, but that’s active again, right?

So you have all these different ways. It’s just, it’s all a fun game.

[Mattias]
Well, I was gonna say that I can’t imagine wanting to be on a beach forever sipping the mojito or whatever. Like I think there’s always a mountain that I wanna climb. There’s always a new challenge I wanna climb, get through.

And so I agree. Like I think I want to have something active because it’s good for me. I need that or go crazy.

And so it’s gotta be something. I gotta be doing something. It could be business building.

It could be real estate sales, whatever. It could be more of the investing side. But I think as long as I’m still growing the overall, the net worth with investing in some form, that’s kind of the goal.

And yeah, I agree. I don’t wanna be completely passive. That’s just not in my nature.

And to one clear distinguisher as well is that what you’re talking about is you have the liberty. You have built something that you can afford to be able to make these decisions. A lot of people don’t even get started with building up a rental portfolio to have money that they could put into a business or whatever, build a business up that’s big enough that they can sell.

And a lot of real estate agents, they never have a business that’s really sellable. That they might be able to have some sort of referral agreement that they can kind of slow down and then get some referral income for a while, but then that ends. And it’s not like it’s this big exit of a million dollars or multiple million dollar exit that other businesses might be able to get.

So I think it’s important to keep that end game in mind, at least to build the net worth. And it could take you a lot of different ways, but as long as you’re kind of working towards, yeah, increasing that net worth, increasing the ability to retire one day when hopefully we all will maybe not need to work all the time and be able to enjoy a little bit of a slower lifestyle.

[Rhyan Finch]
Yeah, I mean, I think you’re hitting the nail on the head where you keep going back to net worth. And really, I think a lot of that is what we don’t pay attention to. If I go to work today and I sell a house and I make $10,000 this month and I spend all of it, I don’t have a sellable business.

I didn’t build any net worth, even though I made enough money to live off today, right? And so the problem with it is, is to your point you were saying earlier, is like I make 10,000, I got to pay the bills and that money’s gone. I don’t have the money to build a business.

And this is where you can get stuck, if you will. But it’s stuck here because we can’t see past doing that part of this. And that’s why when I mentioned active, you’re doing active to drive in more revenue, but you have to be disciplined in managing it to put it somewhere else.

You know, you talk about selling a house and you’re making money and then they’re buying real estate. And so, you know, it’s all a fun game and it’s just, it takes discipline. Anything you see of building a net worth, once you’ve done enough of that, you realize what it took to do that.

So, you know, you’re gonna see that you’re like, hey, all right, I get it. They had to show a lot of discipline to do that. You know, somebody’s got six pack abs.

You know what they had to go through to get six pack abs. They didn’t need a carb and they worked out every day, right, so that’s what you’re looking at when you’re doing the net worth. Not that you want to even tell somebody what the net worth is, it’s just the concept of doing the right thing.

The same activity to sell a $10,000 house is the same activity it takes to find a $200,000 equity position on a house. It’s just the feeling of being able to pay for that payment. I don’t know if I can pay it.

I gotta buy it and let somebody else pay it. How much money will it take me to add that $200,000 to my net worth? And so, if it took me 20 grand to take it down and then rent it out, I’ve added that to my net worth and I did that in an hour versus I went out there and, you know, took eight hours to sell a house.

And so, nothing wrong with that, Todd. It’s just looking at it both ways. You gotta go, okay, how do I get to this next level?

And it’s gotta be the most amount of money in a velocity, the larger thing. You get a $100,000 deal, a $200,000 deal, a $300,000 deal, and you just keep building.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah, and I think the net worth is kind of like the personal KPI, right? Like you can see if what you’re doing and what active things you’re doing or passive things you’re doing that they are creating. That’s the track.

You wanna keep track of that and see how that’s progressing as you go. But I wanna pivot and hear more about the businesses you’ve created because it sounds like you probably have a high drive and see ideas and go chase them. So let me hear some more of the stuff that you’ve created and, yeah, some of the stories.

[Rhyan Finch]
I like vertically integrating things, right? So I’m like, if I’m gonna go do one thing I wanna do, you know, you go to the shoe store, you’re not gonna go in there that they don’t have socks, right? Like you know that they’re gonna have socks that are for sale.

Now, it could be that they’re selling Nike socks that have a margin. And it could be their own brand of them. There’s a margin to be made and people are coming in for shoes, right?

And so, you know, once you start doing that, it’s no different than what we were talking about on the other stuff, which you’re taking the profit of business one and investing it into business two to give yourself a chance to do it. If you’re selling shoes and somebody is now coming in to buy Nike socks, your margin’s gonna be smaller because you’re selling somebody else’s product. But if you wanted to go take the extra money and make your own sock line, I don’t even know what that would take, but whatever that is, you would increase your margin.

And you would only do that if you did increase your margin. Then you would take that and then you would go into shoe cleaner business, right? And then you would just keep on doing that over and over.

This is what all the bigger businesses do. You see them take over. Okay, we’ve made this amount of money.

Let’s go absorb this. Or they go borrow it knowing that if you loan me this amount of money for me to open up the sock side, I can make that amount of money. Well, it’s very similar in what we’ve done.

You know, different partners bringing different strategies. Going back to what you were saying, it really ties into, I thought about this when you were saying this, is taking equity positions in other businesses that you’re not running is a huge passive income. And on the flip side is, if you can go in and drive business to it, it’s not necessarily passive, but it just has this ability to throw a log on the fire and make it go bigger, right?

So when you’re doing, and people will bring you into businesses when you can bring that value into their business. So if you’re going in and they say, hey, I got it to here. You know, usually it’s because my mind was here.

If somebody’s already taking a business to here nationally or whatever, they’re like, you’re thinking about this locally. Let’s run this nationally. Why do I want to run it nationally?

Because you’ve got to think through more customers are national than they are local, right? So then you expand on that. And it feels again like this massive thing.

And at the same time, it moves down to, wait a minute. I mean, the same thing this customer needs, someone else needs, they just don’t know we exist. Whatever the problem is, it’s usually solved by paperwork or money.

So which means you can have this paperwork allows you this new state, right? Or this paperwork allows you this new company to be able to offer or it’s money. It’s going to say, okay, if I wanted to go open this business, how much money do I need?

And how long until I get that money back? We’ve all seen the show the profit, right? And we’ve seen a shark tank.

This is kind of what they do over and over. They’re like, hey, you’re bringing the business to me now. I can go buy it.

And now they’re going to say, we’re going to park this money. We’re going to have a little bit of active investment. We’re going to use our team to drive up your sales.

And we’re going to get an equity point based on those mathematics of your revenues and your margins.

[Mattias]
No, it makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s a plague for a lot of people is not thinking big enough. And I think the 10X is greater than 2X kind of concept is part of that thinking where it’s, you know, if you’re like, I can’t hire that first person, I can’t fire that first admin or whatever, whatever starting point you need, you know, that’s holding you back greatly.

And if you think about like, okay, well, I’m going to be selling, let’s keep it to real estate sales. Like I’m going to be selling, you know, 200 doors a year. I’m going to be selling 200 houses a year.

And, you know, I need support to be able to do that. And so since I’m going to be doing that, like I need to put that person in place. And I mean, that’s what I thought of when you’re talking about like, you know, going to the national market as opposed to just a local market.

It’s just, you know, it’s sometimes it’s easier if you think really big to put everything into place to make it happen instead of growing 2X or growing 10X because you’re kind of just opening up that big picture and planning for it that way.

[Rhyan Finch]
And I’ll tell you, I’ve seen it where people have had the big mindset and the big vision, all right, but they miss some of the details. And the reason I bring that up is because if it takes paying more to get to the next state and this other, they didn’t count the whole cost of what it was going to be. And I get the fear side of, I don’t want to expand because I don’t know what it’s going to cost.

But the level of who you have to become to know what it’s going to cost and then execute that play to going and running it is huge because you don’t want to go have a brokerage. You’re set up in one state, you’re on a state line, you decide you want to open up the other state, you open up the middle list, you get the broker. And now you’ve got your $500 a month cost, whatever the number actually is, right?

And you’ve got it, but there’s no sales going on there. Now you’re just losing $500 against the other. So you didn’t think to the detail of who was going to run that other thing and how were they going to be compensated?

Because if they don’t, but if you looked at it just subjectively on the top, well it’s going to cost me $500 a month, just for an easy number. It’s going to cost me $500 a month because I already have all the costs I have for state one. When I go to state two, it’s $500 a month.

Well then who’s going to do that? Well then whoever’s going to do that is going to cost me X a month. So now I have $500 plus X, and then whatever my average income is per revenue that they bring in, right?

Then you’d say, well then it’s going to cost, let’s just use $3,000. It’s going to cost me $35 a month. How many deals a month at this rate do I have to have before that’s profitable?

And how many months will I pay it before I’ll have that? Then you’re looking at it, and then it becomes really simple, but then what you have to realize, this is the hard part, all right? This is where a lot of us real estate people get stuck is, well whoever I’m going to hire in that next state over, I don’t know them.

I don’t have them. Why are they going to do this, right? And we hold ourselves back to going, no, what I have is valuable.

What it is is a change for them. They’re going to come out of this and go into this, and I am the person that’s going to find the right person and give them this opportunity. The entrepreneur, right, as we talk about the quadrants, you’re going back to, you’re putting up the money, and then they’re running that business for you.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah, it is a tricky thing. I’m sure many people fail at it. I think it’s unique.

Do you operate with, I think oftentimes when you get into the CEO kind of roles, when you’re the visionary, when you’re that kind of person, there’s often a need for very strong operations kind of person as well. Do you find that true, or are you able to do both?

[Rhyan Finch]
Well, I mean, you look at the visionary integrator style of things, which is like you need that integrator that can kind of run it and drive it, because if you get too stuck in the weeds of things, then you can’t really focus on growth or doing more. At the same token, it’s really important that those two have a clear vision together, right? So if you have an integrator, they need to know clearly, and sometimes visionaries can lack the details going back.

Like I just had this experience of seeing it, myself included, is like, hey, why did you do that? Well, because we thought this. Well, why did you think that?

Well, probably because I didn’t tell them otherwise, right? So I was like, oh no, I saw it a different way. And I think of a story when you’re saying this, and I tell all the people at these things, it’s a really dumb story, but it really will resonate, is I was coaching my son’s baseball team, and we had a guy, I’m going to use him, Little Jimmy, his name’s not Jimmy, but Little Jimmy goes up, and pitch is struggling.

I see it, I said, here’s what we’re going to do. New strategy, nobody swing until you get a strike, all right? That guy’s walking people, we’re behind, let’s not give them anything, nobody swing until you get a strike.

Goes up there, first pitch, ball one. Second pitch, ball two. Third pitch, right down the middle, bink, he hits it back to the pitcher, and the guy throws him out of first base.

And so he’s running back over, and I’m like, what are you doing, Little Jimmy? You can’t follow instructions. I told you don’t swing until you get a strike.

I mean, you did not have a strike on you, that was the first pitch across the middle, and you swung at it. If the next pitch was a ball, you’d have had a three-one perfect setup to be able to have a good hit. Instead, now you’re out, you’re being selfish, you’re not paying attention, and you know what, you’re letting your whole team down.

And then Little Jimmy looking up at me, you know, kind of a little quivering a little bit, no, it wasn’t, I’ll exaggerate it like that, but anyway, but he says, but coach, it was a strike. And it was such a business ah-ha for me, that I went, I said don’t swing until you get a strike, and I know what I meant, and the other people knew what I meant, but he didn’t know what I meant. And when he didn’t know what I meant, it cost the team, and it’s not his fault, it’s my fault, because I communicated what I thought was it, and when I say it was such an ah-ha, this little story that goes on, it’s like, you start to realize, okay, if it’s all on you, and you’ve got to communicate, you need them to echo it back, you need them to explain it, you’ve got to say it over and over, you’ve got to do it, and the mission is critical in order for you to communicate that all the way through, and that they receive it, and they understand it, and so, you know, in not doing it, you end up having a failure, or breakdowns all the way through.

If you don’t realize it’s not your communication, if you don’t realize it’s your communication that actually caused it, you’re going to think everyone else is just playing against you, or they’re just dumb, right? And you hear that, I’m sure you’ve seen it on the thing, it’s, yeah, these people are dumb, they don’t know what they’re doing, and you’re like, no, they’re not dumb. Nobody’s out to just deny what you’re telling them to do, and it works with your kids, too.

You tell your kid, go clean your room. Well, I didn’t say clean it right now, so he thinks I’m going to clean it after video games. Well, that wasn’t very clear, right?

So, just being clear in communication is so, so vital for success, in my opinion.

[Mattias]
So, it sounds like you, to help overcome that, you have them reflect the plan back to you. Is that a strategy you implement?

[Rhyan Finch]
I mean, I think you do in the beginning. It just takes a lot. I tell people, I say, fast is slow, and slow is fast.

And I know it’s a silly saying, but when I’m saying it, I say it over and over.

[Mattias]
That’s a good saying in CrossFit, by the way.

[Rhyan Finch]
What’s that? Did I say it in CrossFit? What’s that?

[Mattias]
That’s a saying in CrossFit, too, yeah, like pacing yourself.

[Rhyan Finch]
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, fast, if you want to do it fast, you know, if you want to do it fast, you need to do it slow, really. And what I mean by that is, people like to do a group meeting and convey everything in one meeting.

It’s best for my time, get everybody in one room and have a conversation. And now I’ve said what I mean, and they need to understand it, ready, break, let’s all go run the play now. And then we come out of there, and nobody runs the play.

Somebody went grocery shopping, somebody went somewhere else. But I stop, and there’s 30 people in the room, and I do a one-on-one. That’s exhausting.

It’s gonna take me all day, one-on-one, to go through. But the back-and-forth questioning helps me understand where they’re at. If they don’t have that, then you don’t know where they’re at and how they received what you wanted.

And so, a lot of times, that is the key, is slowing down to communicate. Now, you only have to do that in the beginning, because then you’re building from a foundational conversation that goes on. And from there, then it’s one-liners almost.

Hey, where are we at on this KPI? Or whatever it is that everybody knows.

[Mattias]
I think effective communication is definitely something that is struggled with. A lot of people that are the visionary, this type of personality, I think it’s very common for that to be. I’ve said enough.

It’s very clear to me that I’ve communicated what needs to be said, where there’s people that need to know, there’s some types of people that need to know 300% of the task before they can do 100% of it. They need to know way more than others. And I was thinking that maybe there could be a custom GPT made for people that have a hard time communicating effectively, where you lay out, okay, you need to iron this out perfectly.

You need to ask me follow-up questions. And we’re gonna go back and forth until we finally get this whole game plan perfectly laid out. And then I can send that or start the meeting with these bullet points because I know now that I need way more communication with this idea that I’m trying to convey.

That might be out there. If it’s not, I’m gonna do that when I get off this call.

[Rhyan Finch]
Well, questions are really the key part in the communication because if you tell somebody, hey, do this, it’s one thing. It’s another thing if you ask them, it’s like, how many appointments do you need? How many leads do you need today?

How many calls do you have to make today? How much revenue do you need to add to your income? How much is it gonna cost you to do this?

How can you add this amount to your balance sheet? How do you add this to your network? Whatever they are, where could you find these?

And the human brain will answer those questions. And that’s kind of the key part of it is when you ask the questions, good leaders ask good questions. And then when the person says the answer, they own it.

And that’s the key part. And then try not to overwhelm it with too many windows open of trying to do too much at once.

[Mattias]
Sure, it makes sense. I was curious, I mean, you have a wealth of experience here. Do you have any golden nuggets that you wanna share to our listeners?

[Rhyan Finch]
You know, I get kind of this question on podcasts and I try to almost go back and say the same thing to this answer because I know each one is to somewhat of a different group. And I think it’s outside of the line of even what you’re asking. But the answer to it is really, it’s really something that was powerful to me.

And it’s just based on experience. And based on experience, everyone has a goal. Everything they set out to do, whatever it was.

And at some point in time, they stopped. They just woke up today and didn’t work toward that goal anymore. It could have been their diet, could have been their finances, could have been their real estate career.

They just talked themselves out of it or something went on. You know, and I just woke up today and had a headache and then that just broke the routine or whatever the thing is, right? It’s just these small little things.

And the nugget that I usually share is like, go back to where you quit. Wherever you were working on that, wherever you quit, whatever you stopped is like go back to that thing and start it again. I get it, stuff went on or you went through stuff or any of that stuff that has happened.

I understand that. You need to understand that and then move back to going back to where you quit and driving it through because you’re not starting from scratch again. You may come up with a new idea and something, but at some point that was valuable.

It was a good reason that you wanted to do it. Assuming you didn’t quit it for saying that it’s a bad thing, but you quit for the wrong reason, if you will. Go back to where you quit and then start building again.

[Mattias]
Yeah, you know, I think that if you look at habits, everything you do kind of builds upon itself. So like every time you go to the gym, like if we’re talking about that as being a habit, wanting to be in really good shape and then maybe you stopped. Well, every time you don’t go, that builds that muscle.

That builds that like, I’m not gonna go to the gym. It’s harder to go the next time. But every time you go to the gym, it’s easier the next time.

And so to your point, that’s a really good thing is to know that and if you go back to it, just showing up once is gonna make the next time easier and doing whatever you need to do to get to where you were wanting to go. Yeah, I love that. Rhyan, what about a fundamental book you think everybody should read or maybe one that you’re currently really enjoying?

[Rhyan Finch]
You know, one of the ones I really try and focus on, you know, I mentioned Rich Dad Poor Dad and that was really instrumental to cash flows and buying properties and understanding how money and stuff works. The other side of the coin to me is business and the E-Myth Revisited book is, it’s really, really good and the problem with it is, I had a mentor even tell me about it and I didn’t read it. And I said, yeah, yeah, I read that, I read that, I read that.

And the reason I say this is because at some point in time I read it and somebody that’s hearing this may be like, yeah, I read it. And you weren’t ready for reading it again, right? You got to read it through at least one time and then read it again because it’s so detailed of a roadmap for building a business and building something scalable and getting out of the rat race of doing the same job over and over again.

Again, I’m not against active income. You should do active income while building something else. And then so at some point that when you’re building, if you’re working on building a business or something, if you’re self-employed, you should be working toward a business.

And this is really, really key. And I will tell you, there’s some things that may seem in the weeds from the starting point, but it gives you such a long vision that you can see all the way to here that don’t pay attention to some of that stuff that doesn’t apply to it, but start working through some of these other pieces. And it’s not easy.

Have you read it? Have you read that one?

[Mattias]
Yeah, but I was actually just thinking about how it didn’t really resonate with me when I read it. And I was thinking as you were talking, I was like, I need to revisit that.

[Rhyan Finch]
Yeah, yeah, well, because you even said it earlier, you said, hey, you do a business and then you don’t fill in the role with somebody else to be able to do it. So now you have a job. That’s the premise of this book is that we don’t do it with the idea of filling someone else in our role, which gives us freedom.

Not that you even have to. If you wanna run a pie shop and you wanna show up in pies and keep all the money from being there, you just need to know the person that you could hire to run that pie shop can make it where your free time can go do something else and you can build something else and do something more. And that’s really the freedom.

That’s the thing you’re trying to build and do. Now, I get it. Somebody may not make the pies like you.

They may not do the things you’re gonna do. That’s where it goes through all the details of how you’re gonna organize that. Somebody’s gonna say, I’m in sales.

I’m not a detailed person like that. I don’t like reports. I don’t have time.

If you don’t have time, you’re gonna keep doing the same thing over and over again. You have to make time for building out the checklist, the KPIs, and getting a clear vision on what everyone should be doing in your organization. And then it becomes really, really easy because you’re gonna go back in and you’re gonna have little jimmies.

And little jimmy is not gonna follow the playbook you gave. Little jimmy, you need to not swing till you get a strike. And little jimmy’s gonna go right over this way.

You’re like, nope, come back over here. Look at this. You’re gonna have visuals, boards that say, this is the process.

And you take them through the process. And then you’re gonna have trainings where you take them through the process. If you’re working with a buyer, there’s a process, right?

We’re gonna meet, you’re gonna get approved. We’re gonna show a house. We’re gonna write a contract.

You’re gonna do a home inspection, a walkthrough, and a closing, right? Everyone knows the process. But the home buyers don’t always know the process.

So we’re communicating to them a process without showing them. So you should meet with them first. First thing you should tell them in the meeting, the process.

If you’re hiring somebody in your office, show them the process. But I’m not a process person. I don’t have those, man, with ChatGTP and everything else like that.

You can create a SOP and a thing. What we spent forever making, you can now make in like 30 seconds. So there’s much use for that anymore.

[Mattias]
Yeah, using Loom too is amazing. You can show people what you’re doing and it creates the SOP from the transcript along with the video of you showing them how to do it if it’s on a computer. But no, I love it.

That’s great. I will put that on my list of something to revisit. But anyway, where would people be able to find you if they wanted to follow you for more?

Social media, websites, anything like that?

[Rhyan Finch]
I have Facebook and Instagram for Real Estate Rhyan. But it’s Rhyan, R-H-Y-A-N. It’s @RealEstateRhyan.

[Mattias]
Cool, Rhyan. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. It was a great conversation.

Thanks for having me.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit REIAgent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in the show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.