The Raw Unfiltered Truth Behind Leadership, Growth and Perseverance with Justin Colby

"Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. Today, I have a special guest for us. His name is Justin Colby. Justin shares his pretty unusual views on business, leadership, and scaling. We talk about a lot of stuff, from who you should hire, when you should hire them, the most common mistakes that investors make in his opinion, and what drives him in the day-to-day. Justin's background and experience in real estate business - Justin, how are you doing today, man?

"Good, bro. Thanks for having me."

"Yeah, super excited to have you here. For anybody listening that doesn't know you already, doesn't know your story, give me the crash course - who are you, where do you come from, what do you do?"

"Yeah, I've done it for quite a long time. I've been doing this business since 2007, so 17 years. Done over 2,700 deals and counting. I'm actively buying two to five properties for myself each week. I'm wholesaling another 5 to 15 or so. I used to want to be the biggest, baddest wholesaler business person. Now it's actually about being efficient. I've already bought two apartments this year. I'm buying a third at the end of this month in a couple of days. I'm buying more to keep in my portfolio than I ever have."

"Very active in the business, I believe in being a dynamic real estate investor. What I mean by that is you should be wholesaling, fixing, flipping, and buying rentals. You should be doing the trifecta, and it's just a function of leads. Shocker, here we are with Bateman Collective, right? It's a function of bringing enough opportunities that you can do all of it, right? Because sometimes it's a great rental, sometimes it's a great flip, sometimes you just want to wholesale to get some quick cash so you can ramp up marketing so you can get some more. There's always a specificity - big word for the morning - on deals. But I help a lot of individuals not only just get the first deal but get consistent deal flow with the science of flipping."

"Very cool. So let's break this down a little bit. So, number one, you've been in real estate since, did you say 2007?"

"Yeah, 2007."

"What an interesting time to start."

"By interesting, you mean just ridiculous. Like, no one knew what was happening. The banks didn't know how to deal with short sales and foreclosures. And like, I'm broke, right? So even if you were around, dude, even if you could have offered me your service, I couldn't afford it. Like, literally sleeping on a couch. Repo Man took my car, home went to foreclosure, the whole thing."

"The only thing I needed to do was cold call agents. Funny enough, agent outreach again is like a big vertical to find deals. So I was cold calling agents, acting as if I was some big investor. I wasn't, and it got me my first 20 deals or so. From there, I moved on to buying at the auction steps and using a lot of direct mail and buying from wholesalers. Then getting into PPC, which is more of where you're at when that started rolling around. Direct mail started tanking, that's right when PPC started ramping up."

"Yeah, having a look back... Yeah, that's wild. Good for you, man. So obviously more than a few years in the business, more than just a couple."

"I had hair like yours when I started."

"Love this business. Did that to you, huh?"

"That's it. Sure did."

"Let it be a warning. If anybody listening is just getting into real estate, maybe it's time to stop."

"No, I would say if you just think it's all fun and games and you want to go drive fancy cars and flex all the time, then it's probably not the right avenue."

"Yeah, fair enough. And it does seem like as an industry, we attract more of those people than the average industry for whatever reason."

"Yeah, I think real estate lends itself a little bit to that. It doesn't help, obviously, there's a lot of TV shows. So now it's about the fame and the fortune and all that kind of stuff. But just like financial services and whatever, you kind of attract that type of person. But yeah, it is what it is."

"It makes sense. So I know you're a smart dude, Justin. I want to give you a platform to basically talk about the things that you're most passionate about here. So let's just say you're talking to the typical person listening to this podcast. Remember, these are people that are experienced real estate investors, generally doing deals, but of course, we all want more. We're all trying to accomplish something that we... Right. So that considered, in as mean of a way as you could possibly say it, what are they doing wrong typically?"

"You're just putting the cart before the horse. Too many people want to scale and grow and hire, right? Because they don't want to do the work. And so let's just use a service like yours. You bring in, I get 10 leads a month, 20 leads a month, just name the number. And people start to say, 'Okay, well I want to hire acquisition people.' Well, that doesn't make any sense because all of the money is being made on the buy."

"If we all agree that you make your money on negotiating the buy, the last position you should be hiring is an acquisition person. The challenge is they're trying to build a business before they're ready to build a business. And so they get caught up in the flex of it all and the social media of it all and saying how big their office is and how many employees they have."

"But if they aren't a true leader to start with - and there's a handful of people out there that I can say are true leaders, they know what they're doing. You know, Donovan Ruffin, Eric Klein, I mean there's people that are out there that are showing it on social media, but because they can back it up and do that. Tiffany and Josh High, these are individuals - in their case, a couple - but you know, they really do have a leadership ability to grow a business."

"Many of the people out there, many of your clients and people listening to this are going to probably hate me, and that's okay because I'm just giving it to them real. They're not ready to grow and scale. They shouldn't be. They don't have the leadership muscle yet."

"Yeah, well that's fair. Let me challenge this for a second. So let's just say I'm getting started in the real estate investing space. Maybe, you know, I start to do a few deals. I consider should I start to hire somebody, maybe not an executive assistant, maybe lead manager, acquisitions, you know, whatever it is that I'm hiring versus me. If I were to give it some more time, wait until I can get my take-home income above that $250,000 a year mark that you talked about, get a couple years under my belt. The way I see it, the me that has done that doesn't necessarily have the leadership skill compared to the me that hasn't done that yet. In either case, I'm probably jumping into leadership without having any idea what I'm doing. But is there like... what's... there's incremental leadership, right?"

"I agree with you to some extent. You got to start somewhere, right? That's really what you're saying. Like, some point you got to start, you got to do it. Right? Same thing I tell newbie investors. It's like, okay, just get in. Like, you got to start. Right? So I hear you, but there's incremental growth in that skill set."

"First of all, you should be reading books. You should be watching or listening to podcasts. You should be going, getting leadership type training. There's so many leadership type coaching trainings out there. But the other thing is, hire the person that's going to be better at that than you are. This is why you need the money to be right."

"Okay, so let's just say I'm... use Brandon as an example. Let's say you're incredible at the tech side of what you do. You dominate. But in terms of the people side, like going and finding the right people, hiring the right people, training the right people, managing the right people... like, there's all these different layers to when you're growing, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, let's just say you're like, 'Well, that's just not me.' But then you got to go hire the person that that is. But then you don't want to hire your buddy. 'Hey, bro, I want to go, you know, hire and train people and manage them. You want to do it?' Because he's your buddy. You want to hire someone who's coming from Google, who has a tech background, who has an operation background, who has a lead background, who is in the, you know, Google PPC world that you were able to recruit that might cost you $125,000 a year. But now you don't have to go do that, and you know that they have a resume and they have a skill set that's been there and done that. Does that make sense?"

"That's why you need the income up. That's my point. You hire different people if you wait a little bit longer versus the people that you would hire if you're just kind of barely getting getting off the ground."

"Which which does make sense because... because what I was going to say before is like, I waited till I had $300,000 in revenue in my business per year until I hired my first person. In my opinion, I hired them too late because I was like so busy with everything I didn't have time to like train properly and like that was kind of a common theme for a while for me. It was like I want to delay hiring and so I don't start hiring until I'm just way too busy and then at the point that I start hiring, it's then going to take me a certain amount of time to find a person and then that's not going to be the right person. So I find somebody and then it takes me some time to find them and then like I end up getting this person in the seat a year after I needed them."

"Yeah, and it's and it's really delayed. But to your point, I was looking to hire like at the beginning... all junior level people. Sure, I didn't start with somebody who's an expert of the things that I'm not. So I... and I probably could have. I probably could have afforded that, but that's not what I did."

"Well, so the thing that I would pose to you then, specifically to you, right, when you're talking about your real life example... have you read the book 'Buy Your Time Back' by Dan Martell?"

"You know, at that time I haven't. Since then..."

"Well, sure. No, no, but now that you have, right? So at this point then, I would tell almost anyone I think it's probably one of the best business books I've read in the last 5 years, let's say. But then you got to just go back to his, you know, hiring principal about like just even the economics of it all. Right? So let's just say you make your $500,000 a year divided by 12 or 2,000 divided by four, that's the number that you would pay someone essentially to... because you're making $250 an hour. So you're going to pay someone whatever it is, $75 an hour to do your exact role, your role, right? Because they're going to be that high level. But you don't pay them your salary, you pay them that number."

"Just in that concept, I believe that there's a value of like... then you can hire based around that. But I don't believe in hiring just to hire. Because what Dan Martell talks about, or even where I'm at... like in my tech business that's, you know, literally ready to launch now finally. So I feel your pain, is right? Like we hired our CEO, came from three different exits already. He took three different private companies and exited them into the nine figures. All three of them are in the nine figures. So he has the resume to do it, but I'm going to pay a lot of money for him, right?"

"Because I don't have the skill set or frankly, I don't have the desire to go be the CEO of this new company we've founded, right? Rocket Le. So, so I'd encourage people... I mean, you don't have to go find that person either, not in the real estate business per se."

"Yeah, but this goes back to the point I really want to highlight this: stop trying to be Justin Colby 17 years in the business, or name the name. I don't care. Grant Cardone, name whoever you want to name who has been doing this a lot longer than you. If you've been in this business and you're a client of Brandon or you've been watching this or listening to this and you've been in the business for two, three, four, five years, you have a lot of runway to catch up on. There's no way to like condense it into a year or two, right? You need to still have some level of learning growth because things change, like the economy right now. Right? Everyone's all caught up on the interest rates. So understand, don't be the version of Justin 17 years in business. Be the version of you right now and be the very best version of you."

"Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. Something you talked about before was that there's so many like leadership trainings, books, content to consume available that can make you better. I'm curious to hear from your perspective, let's just say I have little leadership experience. I can tell you where like our typical client is probably some leadership experience but a lot of frustration with it. Where have I... like I thought I knew leadership and then I started building and growing the team and now I've got you know, five or 10 people on my team and now I feel like I know less about leadership than I ever have because I'm seeing how much I don't know. Right? So this... let's just take that example. Like, what if you were them? What content would you be consuming to level up?"

"Well, I think that the one everyone probably has already heard of, I'm making that assumption, but like EOS or Traction, right? They have a whole full-blown like growing, scaling leadership business. Right? So read the book Traction, but then the EOS system essentially is... I don't want to call it coaching, it is like a... I guess it's coaching, but it's really meant around this: how do you run a company? How do you have your weekly meetings? How do you have your quarterly meetings? How do you have your yearly meetings? It's the operating system."

"And so it is probably more... Well, so I'm not saying anything someone doesn't know, but at a minimum start doing that. Right? Level 10 meetings just alone. Implement everything in that book. They would be way further along. So far, yeah, like that. Right? Because even how do you run a real meeting? What you know how most people run a meeting, right? The CEO, the owner, Brandon, Justin, get there. 'All right guys, so how many sales have we had? All right, is anyone complaining? Do we need any customer... anyone meet out? Okay, what are our goals for next week?' Like, that's the meeting. That's not a meeting, right?"

"So even understanding how to run a meeting is important. And so I think that's probably the best in the industry is, you know, that EOS operating system. Again, I don't know if I want to call it coaching, but it's something like that. Right? Accountability and the operating system. So that's probably where I'd point most people. But you have people like Tony Robbins that teach leadership, right, which are bigger names. There's a ton of... I mean, I don't even know how many books are out there about leadership. And Maxwell has so many books, you know, '21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership', right?"

"And so... but it is a muscle that needs to be worked out constantly. You cannot just like... it's the... it's the business owner. Here's how I view business owners today. They are the guys that go to the gym and lift heavy weight, but they come home and eat burgers and fries and drink beer and, you know, have a dessert at night. Well, you're not going to get ripped. You're going to get big, and I don't know if you're going to look very good because you're going to be doing it the wrong way. But it's not the right way to do it."

"Simultaneously, if you can have a better diet, you're actually going to change what your body looks like. Like, right? So you can't outwork out a bad diet. It's all about the diet. So you can't grow and scale a business without the ability to be a great leader. It's all about the leadership. Right? So that's kind of how I... I use an analogy to help people understand. Like, if you're going to eat pizza, burgers, fries, donuts, and lift heavy and think you're actually going to be shredded and ripped, that's not going to happen. You can't go and run a company and build and grow and scale without mastering being a leader. It's not going to happen."

"Something you said that I want to make sure we don't look over... it's something someone told me that had a huge impact on me years ago. Just that your business cannot outgrow you as a leader. And like, if you believe that, you'll find examples of that every day."

"100%. You're the constraint of your business. But the tough thing about being a bad leader is that you believe everything except for that. You believe it's all because of that person exactly."

"You know, a book that I read recently that was pretty great... have you read 'Leadership and Self-Deception'?"

"I have not."

"Okay, but I will... not like the... the premise of the book is it's... it's basically it's all your fault. It's not everybody else's fault. And... and like the way you treat people encourages them to continue to do the things that you are upset about them doing. And you're... you're creating all your own problems. It's a... it's a really good book. But anyways, it's... it basically supports exactly what you're... what you're saying."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm... but that's true of any business owners. Is it's always you got to look in the mirror, right? Just using the analogy of the person working out, look in the mirror, dude. Why don't you just boil some chicken, eat broccoli, and you won't have to just be getting big, right? Like, you'd actually start to get shredded."

"Yeah, because when you... when you look at what it really takes, you're not sure you want that anymore. I'm... I'm convinced that most people have... if they... if they knew what this entrepreneurial journey takes before they would have start on it, nine times out of 10, they wouldn't even start."

"Agreed. I think the only reason people actually get to the end is because they're deceived at the beginning. And you're deceived at like every stage. You just feel like if I could just make it around this corner, then I'm going to get..."

"And I coach people for a living on being an entrepreneur in real estate, right? The whole Science of Flipping Community is me coaching them on how to be successful at real estate investing as an entrepreneur. I'll tell you the number one reason people don't win is because they don't realize it's not all puppy dogs and rainbows. And again, what it really takes to become truly successful."

"Now, some people do, and they actually fight the fight and they dig in deep and they're ready to go for it. But the other people just like... like, 'Man, I thought this would have been easier. I would have thought, you know, whatever the case is.' Right? And... and so they quit. And then they want to blame whoever the coach is or what, because, you know, whatever. But the reality is, they didn't realize how much work that needs to go in."

"To your point, there's days where I say like, 'God, wouldn't it be nice to be Tom Cruise in the movie Cocktails and just be a bartender at the beach? No brains, no headaches.' Right? I'd have all my hair. It'd be great."

"Yeah, yeah. It totally would. I'm... I'm actually curious to hear because you... you see like which of your students make it and which of them don't. I have a hypothesis. It's kind of like that... I... I don't know, it's a saying or what that, you know, the person who loves to run runs farther than the person who likes to get places by nature of, you know, human nature. Right? Like, is it true your students that are really successful with this first is not that they just... they like their drive isn't to get the thing that the business will give them as much as they're... their drive is to do that hard thing?"

"Yeah, I think there's a combination from what I see. Part of it is there's enough pain of like, 'I don't want to be working for someone else. I hate my job. I'm really sick of it. I never have much money. Like, I'm just drowning.' So part of it is the pain of like, 'I'm ready for a change. Like, something... I can't do this forever.' Right?"

"The other part is genuine love and interest. To your point, the love of running, the love of real estate. Like, 'I want to be in real estate,' and they just say, 'I'm gonna make it happen.' And you know, the people that I can help mentally understand the time expectation of results..."

"So I have Five Laws of Success, right? One is - and if you're watching or listening to this, I would write these down - but one is decide what you want and who you need to be to get it. So decide what you want and who you need to be to get it, because that's the part of love. Then you have to commit to it. So you better love it because no matter what, it's hard, right?"

"Running isn't actually easy at distance. A short little sprint, anyone could do it, right? Running up your driveway, anyone can do it. You go and run 10 miles, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 miles... like, these... these people... ain't easy. One mile for most people isn't easy, right? So just you got to commit to it."

"Then you got to go do it. You got to take a lot of action. Then number four is you got to be extremely uncomfortable because the thing that you want, the number one what you want and who you need to be to get it, is something you don't have and you aren't getting. So it's going to bring you way outside your comfort zone."

"And number five is just remove your time expectation on the result. Right? And what I mean by that is if you say, 'I love real estate and I'm going to be successful in real estate,' and you full stop that... that's it. Full stop. Then you will, because you didn't tell yourself by the end of the year, in 30 days, by the time I'm 50, whatever. You don't tell yourself those things. So you never really have a way to unwind it. You just say, 'I love real estate. I'm going to be successful in real estate. I'm committed to it. I'm going to do whatever it takes. It's going to be weird as hell, and it's going to be, you know, make me super uncomfortable, but I'm going to go do this.' You'll go do it. It's because the love of running, same idea. Right?"

"Yeah, yeah. You're totally right. Something you mentioned, Alex Hormozi before. One of my favorite things that I've heard him say is macro impatience, micro... I'm sorry, micro impatience, macro patience. Like concept that like... kind of it's kind of like what you're talking about. Like remove that... remove that time expectation. Like those who are most successful in a certain thing... like on a day-to-day basis, hour-to-hour basis, it's like, 'I just got a lead. I'm going to call that right now because I'm impatient about getting to the result. I'm impatient about trying to get this deal to close.' But on a macro level, when it's been 3 months and I just started this and I haven't gotten a deal closed yet, that's where I'm patient. Right?"

"That's both. But that's where everyone loses patience, and you're like, 'Ah, you got this wrong.' Like, it... like that's why I keep saying like, everyone wants to be me 17 years into the game or... or name the name. I'm just using me as reference, but you know, that's not the game. I'm nowhere near where I want to be. Nowhere near. I just said I bought two apartments already this year. I'm buying a third. I'm buying two to five properties a week. Like, I'm not even close to where I want to be able to get in the real estate business. Not even close. And so I'm just going to keep my head down until I get there."

"What I'd argue so much of that is what's in your brain. It's not like... like, do you have... have financial resources that you didn't have when you started? Right now, absolutely. I'm sure like relationships right now that you didn't have when you started. But I'd be willing to bet that if you had none of like... if you... if you wiped out all the money, all the relationships, everything you started from scratch right now, it would not take you near 17 years to get where you are because the biggest thing contributing to your success is who you've become as a person. And that would be like much, much faster."

"You are dead on, my friend. I could not agree anymore. 100%. You could drop me off in Arkansas and say no Instagram, no Facebook, no recognition, no money, go build the business again."

"It's never been easy, even when it seemed that way."

"The same thing Grant Cardone essentially did on billionaire undercover or whatever it was, right?"

"I forgot that he did that."

"Yeah, yeah. I could go do it because I know how to work this business. I've been here. I've done it, right? And so I could go get my first deal and the second and the third and build it back up again because I have the runway of experience. All of you out there listening or watching this, you don't give yourself the runway of experience. You want it today. You want the microwave result, right? Like, 'I want to achieve this in a year or two years or three years.' If you're in real estate in general for a short quick win, get the hell out of real estate. That's not the game, right? It's not a short sprint."

"Real estate should be a lifelong journey of like... awesome. Because you can create active income, which is the flipping and the wholesaling, and you can create passive or wealth accumulation is how I say it. Is go buy a whole bunch of rentals over time. Use other people's money to do it. Don't use your own. Use leverage. Do it right. Buy right and do it forever. Like, I'll never not be in real estate. Ever."

"That totally makes sense. So I'm curious. You... you talked a lot, Justin, about this being hard, people not being willing to do what it takes. What in... in your experience, let's just say we look at the past 17 years, what was the hardest part of that?"

"Every inch of the way. There's never... there's never not hard. Started was hard. Yesterday was hard. Yeah, it's all hard. Yeah, it's all hard. And that's what people don't understand. It's always hard. Now, it's only hard for people who really want more. Does that make sense?"

"So I heard... I can't tell you when... a little while ago, someone told me parenting is only hard for good parents. If you're a parent, be easy. Yeah, kid, sit the hell down on the couch and drink a beer. I don't care, right? Like, you... you don't care. It's not hard. And I feel the same about business. It's always hard because you want more. You want better, right? You want to improve. You need to iterate. Things are changing, right? So it's never not hard. And this is where people literally go, 'I give up. I want to go back to my W2.' And I say, 'Not me, never.'"

"Because we only get one ride around Earth, right? No one leaves alive. And if I'm going to do this, I want all the experiences, all the feelings, all the challenges, all the things to see where I end up. I'm not here to just exist."

"And so when... when you talk about this... is a great question because I could just go off... like, there's never been just an easy time. I will give you an example that I thought it was an easy time, and I think this was about back in '14, '15, '16, something... we were just rolling. Money was coming in. Things were doing good. I basically said, 'I'm no longer needed here. My team's got this.' So I said... I took the owner's box is what I called it, right? Like, I basically hung it up. Like, I wasn't shown up to meetings, nothing."

"Well, all of a sudden my business doing this started doing more like this, and then started to go like this. And it's because I took myself out of the business completely. And we just talked about leadership and the power of leadership. And this is what people don't understand. Like, look at Elon Musk, look at Warren Buffet, look at Steve Jobs, on RIP, look at Bill Gates. Like, they're all still in the business. They may not be, you know, making the computers or writing the code or building the actual car, but they're in the business, right?"

"I, because I thought it was going so good and was easy, took myself out of the business. Major, major, major mistake. Um, so I think that was a big lesson. Never, ever, ever, right? Like, even today, even though I have a team and there's nine people in the office running my real estate team, I'm on our weekly calls. We have two every single week. I talk to my general manager every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Like, I'm not plugged in. Now, am I negotiating a deal with a seller anymore? No, I'm not, right? Am I, you know, trying to find the buyer? No, I'm not. But you... you know, doesn't mean business is easy just because I've been able to scale and hire and build a team."

"Yeah, that totally makes sense. Sorry, you just... you brought up a ton of questions. I'm actually... I'm really curious. So... so one thing I want to say, this is more of a... a challenge than anything. I want to hear how you like react to this. I would argue that what you're saying, um, as it applies to business only applies if you have the belief that continual growth is good. If you at any point wanted to say, 'I want to just be the Justin Colby that was able to run the business that he had one year ago, and I'm okay with that business accomplishing exactly that and never more,' then I bet you that's when it would get easy."

"Uh, no, you're not... you're not wrong. For like, that is 100% correct. That is not an argument. That is fact. 100%. If... if I was willing to say I am willing to make this... this was a good year, this is what I want, I don't want more, then it's just kind of cruise control, right? And then it becomes rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Yeah. But again, you can do a lot of things and make good money. Like, why real estate? Why be an entrepreneur, right? Why not just go find a job that can just pay you that level of income?"

"Yeah, so it's a super fair point. But I think it's... it's worth mentioning though, because not everybody shares that same belief as you do. Some people, they're in business to generate a certain amount of income, and if they can get that, then they don't necessarily want more. They're not necessarily wanting more impact. They're not... like, that's what... why the business exists is to like generate some livelihood for them. So if... if... like, and then those people will talk about how... how easy business is and how their business is running on autopilot and all those... and all those kinds of things."

"I... I love those people. I'm closer to those... not to cut you off, but I'm sorry I did. I'm probably closer to them now than I've ever been. And I don't mean I'm just going to say I want just this, but I can tell you I'm not the biggest 'bigger is better' fan. I just don't believe in that. I just told you you have nine people. Like, I don't necessarily need 12 or 15 or 20 people to get to where I want to go, right? Bigger isn't always better."

"Right, and so if... if I'm rephrasing it for my own purposes, then I also tend to agree with that. However, because of I have this system kind of running with these nine people, what that allows me to do is create more opportunity and have other things that take my time to go build and grow. So it's not like I'm just like, 'Okay, we're on a steady path here with the nine people. I'm just going to... I'm chilling now.' Finally, that's just... again, it's not really how I've been created."

"Like, I have my real estate business, I have my coaching business, I have my tech business with Rocket Le. That's just to name three of the biggest businesses, not to mention all the other things that I also have going on, right?"

"I agree. And by the way, from me, if you are one of those people listening to this that are like, 'If I can go make 250 grand a year in my pocket every year, I am totally satisfied. I love it. It is exactly where I want to be.' I love you for it, right? I'm just not built that way. Like, there's no judgment on my behalf. There's no like, 'Oh, you're small-minded.' No, no, no, not at all. That's awesome. That is why you built the business, so you can have your version of happy. There's different versions of it for everybody. There's no one size fits all. So good for them."

"Yeah, that... that totally makes sense. I... yeah, I would argue that what you're saying is for you, bigger is not better, but better is really important. You just... you can't... yes, stagnation in it, right? So maybe it used to be that you thought the way to get better was to go bigger, and now you go for better in different ways, which... which is... which is pretty fascinating."

"I'm also really interested to dig into what happened. So... so there is something you said that is... I don't know, you call it a little bit unusual. Usually what people are arguing for is that their impact on the business is more minimal and that if you have the right people... like, it can run without you. You shared your experience of when I thought that was true, I stepped out, and then the business started to stagnate, and then the business started to drop. And that's because I wasn't there. So I'm... I'm really curious to hear from your perspective, back then or even right now, what is the value you add to the business that no one else could add? Does that make sense?"

"You... you almost can consider me like the head of Business Development, really. And the reason why is like, for example, great example, real time, this moment, this morning, I get on a call with my general manager and one of our private lenders in one of our apartments has a very big personal scenario happening and is basically asking for his investment back. It's not a small amount of money, right? It's well into the six figures. And so I say, 'Okay, let me go kind of resolve that and go, you know, to my network and to figure out where we could replace that.' You know, and... and they have equity, they're an owner with us, right? So we have to basically go replace an owner of the company and a lender all at the same time."

"Right, so I kind of look at that more as biz dev, right? Like, all right, well now we got to go do something that really shouldn't be put on general manager's plate. It's not going to go to my acquisition, TC, disposition, construction, M&A, right? That's kind of me. So I kind of look at it more as a biz dev as the business continues to move and iterate and change. I'm the leading charge of the biz dev, if you will, right? Specifically to the real estate business. I would not say that for the tech business. I'm not... not... not big on tech. But yeah, so for me, like my role right now, literally have a week or so to go replace $500,000 in one of our apartments. And that's... that's kind of my job."

"Couldn't you just hire someone to do that? Like, they just say you..."

"We actually have... we have an investment relationship manager. Yep, we have him. So the answer is yes, but I... I think this is a little bit more like... so anyways, I'm going to call him. My thought is someone in my own ecosystem probably would want this opportunity, honestly, because they're going to get ownership of the apartment with me. So my initial thought was like, I probably have a handful of people that if I just even made a post on social media, which I will, by the way - you'll see it - someone, it might be one or two people or three people are like, 'Oh, I got 100 grand, I got 150, I got 200.' And then we, you know... because I... I... the connectivity of that, I really like."

"Like, let's just say you, if you saw me post that and you said, 'Justin, I got 100 grand or 200 grand or 500 grand, whatever. I want to start owning more real estate or add to my portfolio.' I would rather be a partner of yours than my investor relationship manager. He tends to find individuals I don't know. They tend to be better debt partners than they do actual business partners on the entity. Make sense?"

"It does, it does make sense. So I would rather have you come in on the LLC because I know you, I like you, I want you to be a part of my ride as well, be a part of my dreams and my future. So that's why I'll probably see what happens when I post, but also call him and say, 'Hey, do you know anybody that makes sense?'"

"So you have the relationships, the people that you know you want to do business with, that kind of thing. And that's... that's a hard piece to hire out."

"Oh, it's... I mean, it's impossible. I mean, that's really my role across all of my businesses, is being kind of the face, biz dev, sales if you will, to some extent, right? Like marketing, right? And so it's all... I don't know if there's a name for it, but it's all kind of captured into one. That's why I need to have my social media constantly running. That's why these podcasts are so important. I'm about to have a book launch that I got to be out there. I got to have recognition because for these things, whether it's raising 500 grand in a week, right, whether it's getting great podcast interviews like we're doing, whatever it may be, that's more my role."

"Yep, that makes sense. Cool. Thank you for all the wisdom you shared today, Justin, and... and dealing with all my... I think this is one of my more fun episodes."

"Dude, you have very good out-of-the-box questions that aren't like, 'So how did you get your first deal?' I'm curious that... that... that's what's going on here is I just... I... I just want to learn from you."

"Yeah, you know, that's... that's on them, but yeah, no doubt. Um, so uh, if anybody wants to... wants to follow you or get to know you better, what's the best way?"

"Best way is hit me up on Instagram, the Justin Colby. Uh, in fact, what I challenge everyone when I'm on a podcast, actually hit me up, message me, say, 'Hey, I heard you on Brandon's podcast. What's up, dude? I want to say what's up.' I want to reply. I want to build a relationship with you. So if you hear or see me on this episode, go to the Justin Colby and hit me up. Let me know you heard me or saw me on this episode."

"All right, that sounds great. Well, thank you for taking the time and sharing some of your wisdom. For everybody else listening, I will see you next week."

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