On this episode of the Note Closers Show, Scott discusses the importance of valuing your time.

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Know Your Value and Value Your Time

Today’s topic is something I think is very important that every entrepreneur needs to know. Every person needs to know this. It comes down to a couple of things that we’ll dive into. First and foremost, it’s a very busy day here in the office. We are working on a couple of things. I’m honored, I’m speaking at a Quest IRA Boot Camp in Houston, Texas. Over 200 people are going to be at it. We’re really excited to share our knowledge on notes and why we love the sexy side of real estate with NPNs. We are also in lockdown mode here in the office as we are working through 200 plus bids. We’re now down to about 80 that we’ve got finally accepted on our counter back and forth. We are on a lockdown mode of fund getting closed on another chunk of assets for our own portfolio now. These assets are all stuff where the borrowers have made payments in the last six to twelve months. They’re still behind our contract for deeds. We’re basically in the final valuation phase of these things. Greg, Nicole and Jen are all tracking down people to drive by and pull values for some of this final stuff as we’re ready to close it.

Pretty stoked about it. It’s another big trade for this year. I should be over a $1 million roughly, somewhere between $1 million and $1.2 million. Looking forward to it because we’re having the last success still with the most trade where we bought 70 over the last 90 days and we’ve gotten borrower outreach with 50 plus of those. We’ve got twenty of those that are basically going to our friends in the Law Office of Daniel Singer. Daniel Singer and Joel Markovitz are going to be doing a little bit more extensive borrower reach out or starting the eviction process. What’s great too is we’ve had several borrowers that approach us and want it cashed out. One borrower has a friend that wants to take over payment subject too and take over the property.

We have officially total about $8,000 for our reinstatements just this month or since the twelfth of this month. That’s only on thirteen loans.

That’s not bad. There’s a delay with the servicing being transferred. The previous servicer did not send out their goodbye letters in a timely fashion or still have it for a big chunk of them. We’ve had to reach out to the borrowers. The seller servicing company didn’t communicate effectively with Madison Management in a timely fashion either. Madison was sitting there on their thumbs trying to do some things. I’ve got to give a big shout to Jen, Nicole and Greg really doing a great job of communicating with the borrowers. The beautiful thing about some things that we’re working on is we’ve got a little bit more of a streamline series of things down for everything. We’ve tweaked a few systems in our office here. We’ve added a new software program that you will enjoy. Make it a little bit easier for you. We’re pretty excited about that.

Today, it’s all about knowing your value. You’ve got to know your value. You’ve probably heard the saying, “Nobody will respect your time until you start respecting your time. Nobody will value you until you start valuing yourself.” I see a lot of entrepreneurs who are doing really below minimum wage work. They are doing minimum wage jobs. To the listeners, do yourself a favor. Pull out a piece of paper and work through this with me. Figure out what you value your time at right now. There’s a way to do this. If you get an hourly rate, there you go. You get an hourly rate. It’s what your value is. What you have to look at is where you want to be. The way to get from where you’re at today to where you want to be down the road is simple. You have to start delegating off the things that are below your paid grade.

Let’s run a formula. Let’s say you want to make $100,000. A lot of people want to make six figures. Take $100,000, divide that by 50 because there are 50 weeks in a year, and every year usually takes two weeks off; a week around Christmas and the week in the summer. You take $100,000 divide it by 50 weeks. That should come to $2,000 per week. If your goal is to make $2,000 per week, now you then divide that number by the number of hours you want to work. Don’t put just four hours, like the Tim Ferriss four hour work week. That’s great in philosophy, but in theory, not so good, not initially. If you’re making $1 million, that’s a different story. You can sit back and not do anything for a long time. We’re talking at $2,000 a week, divide that by 40 hours a week. That means you worked about $50 an hour. That’s what you need to value your time at. How do you get to that point? You have to stop doing things below your paid grade.

This is the hardest thing that most of us struggle with, especially control freaks. I throw my hat in the game because I’m one of the biggest control freaks out there. It’s something that I have struggled with in the past, I’ve gotten a lot better at it but still things that I have struggled with. It’s the delegation and the outsourcing. That’s the way that you boost your timeframe, you boost your hourly worth to get to where you want to be. What do I mean by that? Instead of you doing a $7.50 job, doing something that would take you to pay somebody $7 or $10 or $12 to do, instead of you doing it, you pay somebody else to do it. Why is that important? Yes, you take somebody an hour to do it and you want to pay them $15 to do it and you’re valuing yourself at $50 an hour. If you did it, you just lost $35. If you had them do it and you’re able to take that hour and maximize that hour, you’re now sitting up and getting $65 worth of stuff done, or realistically $85 because you’re going to lose $35.

Take that hourly thing. What’s your hour worth to you and start applying it to your daily activities. What are you doing during your work day to maximize that hourly rate? One of the biggest things that I see new entrepreneurs with, and I was horrible at this, it’s when people leave their job or quit working for the man or doing their own thing, the freedom of entrepreneurship can strangle you. Sometimes, you’re sitting there not knowing what to do. You don’t have somebody there to tell you, “You need to be doing this.” I see a lot of people take the hour or two-hour lunches. I used to be very guilty at this. I would drive ten to twenty minutes to meet somebody for lunch.

Lunches never take an hour or an hour and a half and then get an hour and a half back. That’s at least two hours that I shut on my day. If it was just the social thing, that was literally if your hourly rate is $50, that’s $100 you just blew there. If people were going to meet you and they’re late, and it drags on, that’s two and a half, three hours, that’s a good chunk of the day. That’s a third of your day gone on lunch. If you have long commutes and God knows, people here in Austin and other areas have longer commutes. I used to travel an hour one way a lot of times from Round Rock, Texas down to South Austin, Slaughter Lane. That’s a brutal commute. That would be about an hour to drive anyway. Then you add traffic to it, that’s an hour and a half, two hour drive, not fun. That’s what you have to look at.

I see people doing basically $1.45 an hour job. If you’re putting in 30, 40, 50 hours into a project and you’re only going to pay $100 off it, effectively you’re making $2 an hour. Waiters make $2.50 in an hour. You’re right there with waiters. What I’m trying to get at here is you have to be smart with what you’re doing. You have to learn to delegate. I know that’s difficult for a lot of people because like, “They’re not going to do as good a job as I would.” I agree with that. Maybe they only do 60% to 70% as good as you would do, but at least it’s completed. I can’t remember who used to say this, “Delivered is better than perfect.” If you’re a control freak and you’ve got to wait until it’s perfect before you do anything, it costs you money not to get it delivered. This is why you often see companies that will have a version of something come out. They have a version 1.2 or 1.3. Because they want to get the product to market and they know they can make the quick editions and fix your software updates or anything like that in the coming weeks. It gets delivered and they can upgrade things as they go.

The same goes for a lot of us entrepreneurs with our marketing. A lot of people are like, “I’ve got to work on my Facebook page. I’ve got to work on my website. I’ve got to work on my emails during the day.” Those aren’t income generating activities you should be doing during the day. Those are things you do off hours. What are you doing each day? If you’re going out to an event, like a networking event, you have to make sure it’s worth your time. Go ahead and spend an hour, you may only have an hour commute, half hour there, half hour back, whatever. You’ve got to make sure it’s worth the time. How do you make it worth the time? You pick up business cards. You make connections and you take care of things there as far as leveraging your time and your database. You always try to find somebody that can add a bonus to you. You also want to be of value to other people as well. I always crack up when I see people go to a network event and they hide. They hide in a corner or they hide in a chair. They don’t talk to anybody. They’re not going to really maximize their time to make things happen.

We’ve got a question, “How does one come up with the money when you first start to delegate?”

How do you pay for things when you’re on a shoestring budget? A couple of ways, one is you use virtual assistants to do some of the things that you are doing. VAs are pretty cheap, $4 an hour. You can often hire them on Upwork.com or Fiverr.com. Initially, sometimes you’re going to have to do things yourselves. I get that. I’ll give you an example. When I first started on things, I would mow my lawn because it was cheaper for me to mow my lawn initially for me to do it than to pay somebody to come do it. As I got better at what I did, it became more valuable for me to hire the kid down the street for $25 or $50 to do it for two hours while I could spend time marketing. A lot of people will sit there and tell you, “I can’t afford a full time assistant. I can’t afford to pay somebody $10, $15, $20 an hour.” One of the easiest things to do during your day to find out what you’re doing is just make a list. Pull out a piece of paper, jot it down by an hour or every fifteen minutes and track what you’re doing on a daily basis. Probably 30 minutes is good. If you’ve got it on fifteen minutes, you’re going to spend more time filling in the chart than you’d actually be doing things. You’ll see what you’re doing.

I’ll give you an example. Prime work hours is basically from 9 AM to 5 PM or 6 PM. If you’re on the East Coast, you may want to work a couple of hours later for a lot of your West Coast connections. We’re in Austin, Texas, we’re in the middle. Staff doesn’t have to be here until 9:00. I usually roll in around 9:30, sometimes 9:00. When I work late nights, I would come in at 10:00 or 9:30. My staff is knowing what they’re doing. They’re always working on things, whether it’s working on files or marketing or due diligence or portfolio stuff. We always talk, “What are you guys working on today?” It’s one of the first things we talk about. I have things that I work on too, and I delegate.

I do due diligence much better than just about anybody, you bet I can. It doesn’t mean it’s worth my best use of time. Maybe I’m delegating to a third party source to do a lot of the initial due diligence for a flat fee. If I can delegate my time out to make things happen, the better off it’s going to be. Sometimes maybe it’s bringing in a partner at first where you’re splitting up your cost, your time, what you’re doing, your activities to make things done in a timely fashion. The big thing about partnerships is I rarely see partnerships of three or more succeed successfully. Two people usually work well. You start getting to three, I can tell you, we’ve had several people come to our Fast Track and had partnership with three people, they don’t end up lasting. I actually had a couple get divorced at our Fast Track training before and it was actually a better thing for all parties involved.

We have another question, “What things do you farm out? It seems that due diligence would be the hardest thing since he knows what his criteria is.”

When you’re delegating due diligence, what you have to do is make a list of what your criteria is. Make a list of your criteria. Better yet, you could film a video of you working through your due diligence, so that’s a video training guide for your VAs. That’s a really easy thing to do. Just going through it and having your list mapped out. Many of you guys liked that we did the due diligence check list. It’s a very simple thing. A lot of people have used that as the backbone to their own video training to their VAs or their staff to help them understand and farm it out. The idea is that once you know how fast it takes to do an asset, as far as time frame to pull the numbers, it’s pretty easy to then, “It takes me five minutes going through 50 assets, that’s 250 minutes.” It should take you four or five hours to knock this out. The way that people and your assistants and VAs get better is to give them feedback. If they do it shitty the first time around, it’s because it’s your fault, not their fault. It’s your fault because you didn’t take the time to educate them or coach them or teach them or train them specifically. Everybody is going to screw up at first.

We’ve all screwed up. Usually if you do mess up on something, I will say, “That’s my fault because I didn’t train you properly.” I don’t say it very often because my team is so good at what they do. There has been times like, “I should have told you otherwise.” It’s normal, it’s going to happen. What’s good is I can give them a task and they run with it. Sometimes, it’s better than I would do. Other times, it’s 90% exactly of what I do but I can tweak it a little bit to get that final 5% or 10% good. 80% is much better because I have three people doing jobs instead of me being the only person that does that. A good assistant, a good VA should start paying for themselves almost immediately. How should they pay for themselves? Just the extra work getting done, either have them work on your marketing or have them do some things. Maybe you have somebody that has better social media skills than you are. Somebody completes the website. Maybe they are also getting postcards or mailers out to your database in a timely fashion, or they’re spending time connecting with more people on LinkedIn for you.

Some of the initial things that I have that VAs do is spend time on my LinkedIn. Go on here and find people that fall on to this category. Go and add connections to these people. After they did it for a while, I took them off of it because it was manifesting itself. Another thing that I had people do is when I first started my Twitter profile. I said, “Let’s go find 2,000 of the people that have the biggest real estate activity or real estate profiles on Twitter and let’s connect with them.” That boosted my Twitter following to 18,000 now from the initial 2,000. You don’t have to give them a lot of jobs. Initially, it’s difficult for you to find ten, twenty hours, but if you just get somebody who would do five hours of work or ten hours of work or you share an assistant. You and a partner co-hire an assistant for ten hours a week, ten hours for you, ten hours for them, it’s going to help. Maybe it’s just going through the mail and helping you out with some things. Maybe it’s just running errands for you. Going to dropping off your dry clean and picking up your dry clean, running to the bank and making a deposit, running to Office Depot. There are specific things that we all can do to maximize our day.

What you have to realize though too is if you set yourself a low value, a lot of times people aren’t going to respect you because they’re not going to value your time. They’re just going to be like, “It’s not worth anything.” This is why free has no value. If you offer up something for free, oftentimes there’s no value to free. It’s free, there’s no investment by them. If you host a networking event and make it free, you’re not going to see a lot of continued activity to it. If you charge a membership fee worth $100 or $20 a visit or something like that, you’re going to see more value because people pay to get and invest to it. It is important for you to add value to that. I see this happen all the time, “I’m going to do a network event that’s free. I’m not going to charge for a network event.” Right there immediately, you put a value on that event. It’s not worth anything. If it’s a lunch time or a breakfast time event, I get that, people got to eat. If you have food and drink to it, great. If you’re going to be providing food and drink, you better watch out, you’re going to have the price pigs that show up. By the price pigs, I mean people that are just showing up for the free crap and that’s it.

If you’re going to do an event of some sort, don’t ever do it for free. I’ve done it where I gave workshops and the booth people being there giving away free tickets. Biggest mistake I’ve ever made. I would rather have ten people at the event that paid versus 100 people that didn’t pay. It cost me. My time is worth something and you have to realize it. If you’re doing something and you’re only going to charge $100, $200 or $300 for something, and you put a lot of time into it, you’re effectively telling your audience, “It’s not really worth it because there’s no value there. It’s only worth $300 or $500.” Sometimes you see workshops that are three days, but if you can do it where it maximizes it like what we have done with this going virtual, it maximizes our hour. It helped us do a couple of things. It helped us not only delegate and cut out a lot of the overhead of losing days of travelling and cost and overhead to print up and rent a hotel and all that stuff to minimalize what used to be in the office here, that allows to drop our price down some to make it more affordable for investors, for people to be able to join in and get that feedback.

My time is still worth something for three days of my time or four days of my time. You have to look at your schedule and realize that too. What’s it worth to you? Sometimes I have invested in something that was expensive that I knew that once I walked out of it, I would have a lot of amazing tools or connections or tricks. That’s why I think Masterminds are very important. I’m a part of several Masterminds. They are not cheap. They’re extremely expensive, but the relationships and the things that I walk out of it make it valuable. I’ll give you an example. The ticket for the DigitalMarketer Conference that I went to was about $750 to go to. It’s already paid for itself ten times over. It’s already paid for itself because a couple of things I implemented had boosted traffic, it’s boosted opt-ins. It’s boosted our audience growing, which in turn is going to help us maximize our hour. This is why I’m such a big proponent of emailing and giving your marketing out because you’re going to have one conversation with many versus one-on-one conversations. That one in many leads to individual conversations but it’s a lot more effective than, “I’m going to have one conversation with Scott and one conversation with this guy and one conversation with this guy.” You’re never going to get out of those conversations to get back to do what you need to do.

“There’s something you said whether someone is willing to invest in education or just chase free stuff.”

I get being on a limited budget. Sometimes you don’t have the money. I get that, it just takes time. You have to look at what you’re doing. Are you working at McDonald’s as a fry cook? You’re not going to be making too much money. This is why education is so important. That is why going to school and doing something or getting a technical degree or getting something to better yourself is so important because then you start doing higher-valued jobs. Law school, let’s talk about lawyers. Average fee of an attorney is about $250 an hour. They’re phenomenal at charging for hours. I talk to a lot of people that would call and pick my brain. I’m always glad to answer questions and talk with people for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, it better start turning to something else or I’m going to start, “I’ve got another meeting I’ got to go to. I’ve got another phone call I got to make.” My time is valued.

What I want you to do right now, for those of you that calculated your hour, $100, I want you to do it in reverse. I want you to take whatever your hourly rate was and double it. If your hourly rate was to make $100,000 this year, that would come down to roughly $50 an hour. If you were to take $100 an hour, and redo your hours, it would be $200. That’s great, you double your money. What you have to realize though is if you start delegating to people, delegating out to assistants, delegating out to VAs, you should do more than double the output. Honestly, a very good assistant, a very good employee, a very good somebody that helps you with things, whether it’s a virtual assistant or somebody that’s in an office, should be worth six figures to you. They should help you, maybe not the first year but by the second year, be putting that money in your pocket. They’re valuable in other ways whether it’s closing deals or due diligence or helping you to market and do other things. This is why labor is usually the biggest cost, biggest bottom line for companies, because they’ve got to have those people to put things in place.

When a company lays people off, that’s a very hard thing. It put stress and burden on the rest around there because now they’re not doing the most efficient things possible. Now, they’re having to do the work of two people. That’s not always going to work. You have to realize, you have to start delegating off the things that don’t make sense. That means you don’t mow your yard. You give it to the kid down the street. It means you don’t change your oil if it’s faster for you to take it to Jiffy Lube for $19. If you see things that would cost you more than your hourly rate that you could do yourself, that makes sense to jump in there and do that. I’ll give you an example. I’ve been pretty handy in my past. Most people would not believe that but I’m pretty handy. When I was getting started, I had a ’90 Mustang 5.0. This thing hauled ass but needed a new frontend. I wasn’t making as much money. I was doing okay but I wasn’t near where I needed to be. It made more sense for me to fix the frontend myself than pay somebody to do it because I can knock it out. I did it, fixed it, it drove fine afterwards, it was all fixed. It was a messy work. I did it over a weekend, but I got it done.

It was more valuable to me at that time to get it done and save that money because I could do something that was above my paid grade. You have to look at what you’re doing. If you go back and look at your list of what you’re doing every half hour to hour, start making a notice, what can I delegate? Can I give that to somebody new? Can I find a VA to do that information for me? What that will do is it will separate you into A and B activities. A, your activities that you need to be doing and B, your activities that you need to delegate out to. Maybe it’s not you delegate, maybe you’re talking to somebody or somebody else as an accountability partner for it. Maybe you hire somebody a little bit each time or you bring on somebody to help you out with. Maybe if you’re stuffing envelopes and postcards, you get the niece or nephew or son or daughter to stuff it. Instead of you spending time on the due diligence stuff, maybe you jump online and have a VA pull that stuff for you. Whatever it is, $4 an hour is a lot cheaper. It’s money saved. It also allows you to go out and do that extra $50 an hour time frame.

The biggest thing I could tell you guys is you have to look at your day. This comes down to if you’re chasing different squirrels too. If you find in your day that you’re not focused on one thing, that you’re drifting, you’re doing a variety of things that is not effective, not really getting anywhere, you’re just spinning your wheels, you’ve got to get a look at yourself in the mirror and say, “What am I really focused on? Am I chasing two different things?” That’s really, really, really difficult sometimes for some people to do because sometimes, you have to give up some things to be more efficient. Sometimes you need to give up on some of the money making things you’re doing to make more money possibly long-term. When I was starting off as a real entrepreneur and doing things, I was literally back doing a variety of things. I was doing some short sale deals. I was doing some wholesale deals. I was doing some rentals. I was just trying to make a buck. I see people that do that, “I’m trying to do all these things. I’m trying to wholesale deals.”

There’s a Russian proverb, “He who chases two rabbits catches none.” At some point, you’ve got to sit down things off of the side that aren’t making you money and focus on what’s going to be the biggest bang for your buck. What’s making you money? What’s going to make you money and be focused at when to go that route? Sometimes you’ve got to let go of those other things for a while to get things up and running. It can be scary but I guarantee, if you’re holding to a safety net or you’re holding onto something, it’s probably limiting you. I know people that are still working at jobs that if they were to let go and be focused they make a whole lot more money because they already prove they can close deals. They close ten, fifteen, twenty deals. They can do that. I know some people like to hang around jobs because of healthcare or benefits.

At some point, you’re letting others dictate to you what they value you as versus what you value yourself. Nobody out there at all is going to start valuing you for your higher dollar value or what you’re really worth until you do that. That’s where it comes in, “I’m no longer taking two-hour lunches. I’m no longer going to do this. I no longer waste time doing these stupid activities.” There are some times in the middle of the day, I like to just take off and go to a movie. I’ll take the two hours to rest because I’ve done a good job for the week or I’ve worked so many days straight or weekend straight or late at night getting some stuff done. That’s okay to do. It’s okay to have some downtime. It’s okay to go on those date nights with your spouse. It’s okay to go out and recharge. You need those. Sometimes those hours are valuable to you. I like to take an hour in the middle of the day, noon to 1:00 and usually work out with my trainer. That’s very valuable to me to do. It’s worth that hour to get things done because I do have a staff that’s working through things, getting things done while I’m at the gym. I can come home and recharge through the afternoon or the evening.

Aaron Young, our good buddy from Laughlin Associates will often say, it’s like unshackling yourself. The minute you can delegate off a lot of stuff, it allows for you to have a lot more freedom and unshackle you from the smaller things that just waste your time. If you can delegate anything off, start delegating because you’ll start valuing your hour more. Maybe it’s only boosting you by $5 an hour, but those are activities you can give somebody else to do and you can boost your time, your connections and your activities to give you more time to do the most income generating things. You’d be a whole lot happier off.

I get the need for a job sometimes. There have been times I stop doing what I was doing and I had to take a job for a period. I have done some crazy jobs. I remember one time, after I got laid off from a job earlier on in my life, I was delivering packages for FedEx Home Delivery, getting paid $1 for a delivery. I’ve been making about $150 a day for deliveries. That was a Band-Aid job. It got me over a rough year to where I needed to be. It allowed for me to pay some bills. I get that. I’m not bashing any profession. If you’re working and you’ve got to put meal on the table, there’s no disgrace in working a job. If you’re at that point, sometimes you’ve got to make a leap.

One of the best things I ever did, I was working a job and they offered me a promotion. I said yes to the promotion. I got home and I was basically physically sick. I was like, “Why am I sick?” I realized because I was giving up on my dream at that point. I remember going back up to the office that night, talking to my boss who was still there. I said, “I appreciate the promotion but I’m going to decline it.” He was pissed off. He called me, “You’ll never be nothing.” I’m like, “That says enough right there. If you believe I’m not going to be anything, because of the fact that I’m going to chase my dream, then I’m doing the right thing by leaving.” I remember walking out of there. Somebody told me I couldn’t do anything, that pissed me off. It gave me the boost to do what I needed to do to be successful.

There’s a story I don’t tell very often. I’ll tell you a funny story. While I was running a mortgage company, I’d love Chase Bank as a personal bank, where Chase was one of the better bankers in the state. I opened up about nine different branches here in the Austin market. I went to work in this mortgage company. I had a couple of years. That was really good four years there. I left that to start my own thing, start doing notes in real estate for the most part. I was still in contact with my regional managers at Chase and they were seeing what’s going on. I sent an email out or something and one of them reached out to me and say, “How’s it going?” It was a real low valley in my note business. It was very low. I’ve gone a couple of months without closing anything. Money was very tight for me. I wasn’t married, been divorced at that time. My boss says, “Really?” We got to talk and she says, “I’d love to have you back.” I’m like, “I don’t know about that.” She said, “I would love to have you, seriously. If you’d like, why don’t you come in for interview?” I talked to a friend there and was like, “What hurt is it going to do for you to go in for an interview? Go on to the interview and see what they have to offer.”

I remember getting dressed and pull on a resume, put on a monkey suit and going for this interview. The friend who was the regional manager didn’t show up. It was with some new guy at some new branch that was a low-performing branch in Austin here. I remember sitting there, and he’s sitting there looking at my resume. I guess he hadn’t been communicating with the other lady. We’re going through it and I was asking him questions about what the performance was of the bank and the numbers. I literally realized about halfway through, I was getting pissed off, extremely pissed off. He’s asking me, “We’d love to have you start here.” I remember standing up and reached over the table and I grabbed my resume back for a moment and said, “I appreciate your time but this is not for me.” I took the resume, I waddled it up, I dropped it in the trashcan and I walked out of the bank. I get out of the bank and I’m just fuming because somebody there was like, “We can start you off at $33,000.” I’m like, “Really? I made more when I was there. I’m still making more even when I’m struggling now.” I got to the point where I was pissed off and I got more and more pissed off.

Before I got to my truck, I remember ripping off my tie, which is this yellow with blue colors in it, which is the Chase color, yellow and blue. I remember ripping off that tie and freaking throwing it, running over and stomping on it and tearing it on the ground. I took off the jacket, I threw it in the bushes, un-tuck my shirt and climb into my truck and took off. I remember pulling out of the parking lot and the manager and his staff was watching me out the door like, “What the hell is this guy doing? Is this guy going crazy?” It was one of the most liberating times. I came back just pissed off. I’ve got to a place where I was working and that next week, I hit it doubly hard than when I was calling banks and emailing out. I closed on a deal that made me $25,000 the next. Everything was up from there.

Sometimes you’ve got to go down. I remember that sick feeling of crawling into that office, “I’m giving up my dreams. I’m giving up what I want to accomplish.” I just feel dirty thinking about it right now. I realized how pissed off when I was walking out of there. Sometimes, we get so in the rut of trying to be successful at what we’re doing. Sometimes we’ve got to take a step back and see what we have. Sometimes you’ve got to take that step back to look at what you’re doing and you realize, “I need to tweak things here, I need to tweak things there. I’m not so good at this, I need to delegate this one.” That’s the thing I can tell you more importantly about anything that you do. Value your time. Value what you’re doing but don’t waste your time. Every night before you go to bed, as you’re sitting at the mirror there in the bathroom, brushing your teeth, you look in that mirror, ask yourself, “Did I get stuff done today?” Was I worth what my hourly was today?” If you’re hourly worth is $50 an hour and you put in eight hours, “Did I bring in $400 worth of value today? Did I bring in $1,000 worth of value today?” That’s what you need to realize. At some point, not now, it may be a year, it may be two, three, five, ten years from now, some day out there, you should all be worth $1,000. You should all have a comma in your hourly at some point.

If you think about that, take what your hourly was right now. If it was $50, figure out what it would be for a $1,000 an hour. Take that $1,000, put it by 40, that’s $40,000 in a week. Then take that $40,000, times four weeks, that’s $160,000 a month. Take $160,000 a month times twelve. That’s a pretty good return. If you were to take $1,000 an hour times 40, that’s $40,000 a week times four, which is a month, $160,000 in a month times twelve months. That’s $1.9 million. If you want to make a million a year, divide that by 50 weeks. It means your week has got to be worth $50,000. $50,000 divided by 40 hours, it means your hour is worth $1,250 an hour. That’s what you need to look at. Where are you at? Where you want to be? I know it seems crazy if you’ve never made six figures. I get it, it’s like, “I can’t make that.” “Yeah, you can.” Get 1% better each day at what you do and eventually you’ll look back and be, “I’m a whole lot better off than I ever was. I’m a whole lot better where I am at today than I was a year from now.” You’re still going to have hiccups. You’re still going to have things that kick you in the shins, kick you in the huevos, poke you in the eye. You’re going to have things that happen, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

I’m not afraid of failure. I failed before and I’ve recovered from it. I’m not afraid if something happens and I have to start all over again tomorrow. I’m going to be okay. I’m going to recover. I might be eating Top Ramen for a few weeks. I might be doing some stupid shit. I might make a run and sell some platelets of blood, but I’m going to be okay. I’m going to make it happen, that’s the most important thing. I know that it’s scary sometimes being out there and you’re running through things and you don’t know what you don’t know. Trust me, the more you network, the more you look to delegate as best as you can, the happier you’re going to be and the more money you’re going to make.

Share one thing that you could delegate today. Think about one thing that you could delegate often. What’s one thing you can give somebody else to do to help you maximize your hour. If it’s 30 minutes or an hour to four hours a week, it still adds value to you. Look at what you’re doing on a daily basis or weekly basis and see if you are living up to what you’re making or you’re really below what you’re making. One thing is a great way to learn some of the different activities, maybe you need to delegate or learn from people who have delegated, is our Note CAMP Convention on October 12th to 15th. I’m going to do something that I have never done for Note CAMP before. This is something different. I’m going to list ten different deal sources that they can get for deals. We share this sometimes. I actually share this every time in the Fast Track. I’m going to share for those who get signed up for Note CAMP 4.0, we’ll list ten different sources of assets that people can dive into, people that have list, hedge funds, things like that.

We’ll have several sources on, people that are selling assets on a regular basis, we’ll have those on Note CAMP. I just spoke to a guy who’s going to be speaking on it who has sources regularly. We’re going to have investors on note that are closing deals, but that’s not who I’m going to consider. I’m literally going to give you ten sources of assets that you can pick up from on a monthly basis. That will be a bonus that we’ll share on Note CAMP 4.0. I’ve never done that before. We’re going to do that. Those that are all signed up for Note CAMP 4.0, you’ll get the registration list of everybody that’s going to be there as well. You can go to NoteCAMP.live and sign up for tickets today. Trust me, those sources alone are worth the price of admission, not only to add the database of those that attend, those are two factors right here that are worth the price. Not to mention the wealth of knowledge and nuggets that you’re going to get from all our amazing speakers. Jeff Watson, John Hyre, Jillian Sidoti, Joel Markovitz, Brecht Palombo, George Antone, Sue Nelson. We’ve got some heavy hitters going to provide some great content for everybody out there.

If you’re listening and love the podcast, do us a huge favor. Help us help you by going on and leaving a review on iTunes or Stitcher or one of those podcast platforms. I appreciate it. It allows us and see this as an opportunity of what you like and what we can perfect better and what we can do better at. Until the next episode, thank you all for listening. Go out and make something happen. Keep working. We’ll see you all at the top.

 

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