IAM1466 – Successful NoVa Real Estate Investor Launches Coaching Business to Help Investors
Special Throwback Episode - Podcast Interview with Brad Chandler
Brad Chandler of Bradchandler.com and Express Home Buyers is a coach, real estate investor, and wholesaler who has successfully flipped over 2,100 houses since 2003. As the CEO of Express Homebuyers he and his team – do over 200+ real estate investing deals per year without his assistance. During the chat, Brad covered a lot of ground including advice and tips for successful investors who want to own a real estate business and how he has been so successful but also delved deeper into business as a whole covering everything from hiring, masterminding and how he’s able to constantly read books and information to help him to be a better CEO.
Topics we covered included:
- What's wholesaling and what's a real estate investor?
- What is flipping homes?
- What should people do if they are thinking about doing real estate investing?
- What have you seen are consistent characteristics of the most successful real estate investors?
- The importance of Mindset and Masterminding
- A typical day for Brad
- Advice that you have aspiring real estate investors?
Resources Brad Mentioned
- Book: Deep Work
- Book: The One Thing
- Brad's Podcast: The Real Estate Investing Hot Seat Podcast
- Brad's Site: https://www.bradchandler.com/
- Brad's Company: https://www.expresshomebuyers.com/
- Book Summaries
- Purchase Audio Books
Episode Link: https://ceochat.co/episodes/chat-46-successful-nova-real-estate-investor-launches-coaching-business-to-help-investors/
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Transcription
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00:00 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:25 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is fresh from the I AM CEO podcast and formerly the CEO chat podcast So doing something a little bit different as we ease into the fall from the summer and you know Everybody's traveling a lot more, You know life is obviously a lot different than it has been in the last 4 years definitely since I started this let alone the last 2 years or so But I had a podcast called the CEO chat podcast, which is a lot more of a long-form podcast I didn't really reach the 1400 plus episodes that we did with the I AM CEO podcast.
So there's a lot more long-flowing, a lot more conversational, but might be dusting off the CEO chat podcast and bringing that back out. So with that being said, while considering that, what I wanted to do is go through some of the interviews that I had that were some of my favorites and share those. It's not going to obviously be the entire interview. We're going to have links in the show notes so that you can go and listen to the full interview. But I wanted to do some snippets that you can get. You're going to hear, of course, the visibility, either the resources or the connections in each of these different snippets.
So it's going to be 1 of those things that are really going to help you to hopefully learn more about the guests that are on the show, what they do, how they do it, why they do it, but also get that opportunity to really learn about some resources that can make you more effective and efficient. So sit back and enjoy this special throwback CEO chat episode.
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:27 – Brad Chandler
One of the first books I ever read was E-Myth by Michael Gerber, and it's how to systematize your business so that your business can give you out of life what you want, other than what most people do. It's just the opposite. Entrepreneurs just basically start a company, and now they have a job. They still have a job because if they don't show up, they don't make money. I got that literally the first couple of weeks in business. I'm like, I am going to make my business so I can use it to get out of life what I want. Early on, I started systematizing.
I started hiring good people and started putting processes in place. Now, the company literally runs without my involvement. I'm still the CEO, but I could literally leave for 6 months and come back and the company would be in good shape. The second question you asked was, how did I learn it? Boy, we went through some hard knocks. I did not have a mentor at the time. So, We made millions and we lost millions. We just made some terrible mistakes along the way. But through trial and error, we learned. We learned how to raise money. We went and raised tens of millions of dollars because most of my career, what I was doing, I was buying, renovating, and selling houses.
Well, you can imagine if you're buying 20 houses a month or 15 houses a month in the D.C. Market and then you're putting in $50, 000, how much actual cash you need. So literally, we had tens of millions of dollars in debt. And last December, it was like, things just aren't working. I was struggling to make payroll, and I was thinking, God, did all this hard work that I did, is it going to go down the drain? I was like, there's got to be a better way. I knew that renovations were literally the hardest part of the business. I said, if we could get rid of renovations, we would just be in so much better shape.
So, we did just that. What we do now is we get the house under contract. We never do actually buy it. But then, we go out and find a cash buyer who doesn't know how to market as well as we do. We assign the contract to that cash buyer and we make a nice hefty fee in between there. So you've heard of people saying, oh, you can buy real estate with no money down and without income or bad credit. And most people will slough it off and say, you know what, that's a scam. And that's what I used to think, too, until I really learned that it's not. And we're living proof. We're going to have our best financial year ever this year, and we're probably going to do north of 200 transactions. And we never had to put out a dollar to buy a house.
03:39 – Gresham Harkless
Sciple That's awesome. That's awesome. What exactly is a real estate investor? How would you define that? David Kretzman
03:44 – Brad Chandler
Yeah, so as a real estate investor, there are all different kinds of strategies you can use in real estate investing. You can buy houses, you can buy apartments, you can buy shopping malls. We focus on single-family houses. Right now, we're doing wholesaling. You can either buy a house, fix it up, and resell it. You can buy a house, fix it up, and you can rent it. There are all kinds of different strategies, but we're focused on just the wholesaling part of it. In terms of the business, what it looks like is, we have about probably 10 people altogether on the acquisition and sales.
They're the ones who are actually taking calls from sellers and buyers and matching them up. We have a marketing department right now that's about 3 and a half people. We do rely on about 8 VAs, virtual assistants in the Philippines, to help us with calling people and just different support issues. And then we have a small accounting department. I have a COO, myself the CEO, and then my partner Judd Allen. So that's kind of what the company looks like.
04:38 – Gresham Harkless
You know, you have a strong team in place because you, it sounds like you found talent and you've been able to attract talent and be able to keep talent so that you're able to kind of grow and build that business.
04:48 – Brad Chandler
That's the truth. And I've heard someone else say, that you're truly only long-term competitive advantage is your people. So we didn't always have the greatest people. It seemed like we always had 1 or 2 weak links in our team. And I can say with 100% surety that this is the first time in 14 years that we don't have 1 single weak link in our chain and our team. We are just so excited. While we've had a lot of success, we feel like with all the mistakes and everything that we've learned, we're really in a position now that we're poised to just explode. So we're really looking at some really interesting concepts to get us to be a regional and nationwide company here in the next 18 months.
05:25 – Gresham Harkless
So I know we talked a little bit more about real estate investing and what that means. And I'm sure there's a lot of people that, you know, haven't or would love to kind of reach the success that you've reached. So what should people do if they're thinking about, you know, maybe buying a single-family home and wanting to flip it? What types of things would you tell them to do?
06:46 – Brad Chandler
So the number 1 thing is just, if you actually are going to buy it and flip it, that means buy it, fix it up, and resell it, just know that the renovation part is a brutal undertaking. It can be just devastating to some people. If you don't know how to deal with contractors and you don't know how to estimate the renovations of a home, it can get you alive. What I would highly urge you to do is do exactly what we're doing, and that's wholesaling, where you don't actually buy the house. If you're dead set on rehabbing, fine, I get that. But at least do 2 or 3 or 10 wholesale transactions so you can understand how the process works. I came out with a book a couple of months ago called Wholesaling Secrets.
Discover this 1 technique we use to close over 200 wholesale deals every year consistently. They can start there. On my site, bradshandler.com, there's a blog that has a ton of useful information in terms of marketing and whatnot. I've literally developed a coaching program in the last 6 months because I felt there was a real void in the space. There were a lot of gurus out there teaching it. But yet, they didn't have a business that I ever wanted to aspire to have. They did a couple of deals, and they said, maybe I can make more money teaching people how to do this. But hardly any of them have a seventh-level business that's functioning without their day-to-day involvement. I thought to myself, I've made a lot of money, I want to give back, I love teaching. I built this coaching brand, and we just launched last month.
08:12 – Gresham Harkless
Shenmue Awesome, awesome. Congratulations. We're going to make sure to have all of those notes and links to the books and the show notes. Could you take us through? If you're actually coaching people, could you take us through some of the things that you've seen that have led people to be very successful at wholesaling or starting their businesses? Feroldi-Morales-Morales
08:31 – Brad Chandler
Yeah. I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit. As I mentioned, I read that book in ninth grade, but I was selling blow pops in seventh grade. I've always been enthralled with business and how some people succeed and how other people don't. I said to myself, when I figure this out, I'm going to write a book. Well, it wasn't until the last 6 months of building my coaching program that I figured it out. Why is it that someone can come from a broken home and just be wildly successful, and then another person can come from a great home, and a great education, and they don't achieve great success? Do you know what it all comes down to? It all comes down to mindset. It's when the person wakes up every day, what are they telling themselves? Are they telling themselves that I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough, I can't do this? Or are they saying, I may not be the smartest guy in the world or lady in the world, but I'm going to figure this out?
So the number 1 thing is that whether you get into real estate or selling cars or high tech, whatever it is that you're planning on starting a business, if you don't have the proper mindset, you will never succeed. I can give 100 people the exact same coaching program that I do. And there's going to be a few select ones that run with it and make millions of dollars or hundreds of $1, 000 a year. And then there's gonna be a bunch of them that don't. And I guarantee you, it's exact same information.
So, why are some people succeeding? Are those 3,10 or 20 people who are succeeding? Are they smarter than the other people? Nope, not at all, because I'm certainly not the smartest person in the world. I had such a low GPA and SAT scores that it's embarrassing, I won't even share it. But, I always believed that I could just figure things out. I always said I'm not going to quit until I do. That is the No. 1 thing for any successful real estate investor or any business owner. Get your mindset right, and then get your systems right. If it's a marketing business, we learned over the years, you've got to have a killer follow-up system before you start spending a dime in marketing. I made that mistake. I didn't have a killer follow-up system. I know that we lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars because we didn't have a good follow-up system. It really wasn't probably until 5 years ago that we developed this amazing follow-up system. It's really been a game-changer.
10:38 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Definitely, especially the mindset thing. I think so many people ignore all of that stuff and don't pay attention to their mindset when in reality, sometimes they grow really successful businesses, but because their mindset is weak or they don't really have that developed as much as they should, then the business falls apart and they don't really understand why. Some people are not even able to get things off the ground and they think, hey, I'm smart, hey, I'm talented, I know how to do X, Y, and Z, but they really don't think they could be successful. So that's huge that you're echoing that and you're helping people to kind of understand that that has helped equal and it helps you with your success.
11:14 – Brad Chandler
Yeah, But you made a good point. We had success right out of the gate. Boom. And then, of course, with any business, things got really, really tough. So, if you've got the wrong mindset when things get tough and you're like, you know what, that was a fluke, I should have never done this. It's the same thing. You've got to have that mindset all along. And believe me, I'm not perfect. I'm trying to break through a whole other level right now and take this company regionally and nationally. And I'm also not trying, I'm growing this real estate coaching program. And I've got to make sure that my mindset's like, hey Brad, you can do this. It's not going to be easy, but you can do this. You know exactly what you need to do. So it's not something that comes easy probably for anyone. It's just something just like with anything else, You got to work on it to be good at it.
12:01 – Gresham Harkless
Now, I know that you're juggling a lot of different things. So you have your coaching program. You have Express Homebuyers. Could you take us through what a typical day is for Brad?
12:16 – Brad Chandler
I know you mentioned that you have your commute to kind of start out your day. Could you take us through what happens after that? Yeah, so I typically work out 3 or 4 days a week. I get up in the morning, get my kids to school, and go to the gym. I get to the gym at quarter 9, get out of there at 10, get to the office at 10 or 15. I have a COO with Express Homebuyers and I have my operations manager with Brad Chandler Coaching. She does a fantastic job of helping me plan out my day. 1 thing I literally didn't learn until the last couple of years from reading this book, The 1 Thing by Gary Keller, is that I probably wasted thousands of hours over the last 13, 14 years being in business doing tasks called shallow tasks that didn't mean much. That's checking email mostly. That didn't really lead me to my goal. Every day, I get up and say, what's the 1 thing I can do today such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
And typically, that 1 thing is time blocking. Time blocking is where you cut out all distractions. It used to be that when you interviewed, people would say, oh, are you a multitasker? Oh yeah, I can do 10 things. Well, Studies have proven that that is such a flaw that really, really smart people shut off everything and focus. Again, this goes across business and goes into sports as well, the greatest athletes. They're able to focus for 40, 50, 60 minutes at a time and have intense focus.
So I've started to do that in the last 2 years. And it's been a real game changer where I say to myself, okay, I'm going to time block my day today. I had, I think 3 or 2, 2-hour time blocks and I'm not doing anything else, I'm turning off, anything that can distract me and I'm focusing on those things. And those things are the things that are going to move you towards your 5-year goal, your 1-year goal. The premise of the 1 thing book was you can do anything in 5 years. So you set your 5 year goal and then you ask yourself, what can I do? What can I do this year to reach my 5-year goal?
And then you ask yourself, what can I do this month to reach my year goal? And then what can I do this week to reach my monthly goal? And you go all the way down to what can I do right now to reach my daily goal? And then make sure that every day you focus on that 1 thing. What so many entrepreneurs, and not even entrepreneurs, but just team members and employees do, is focus on the phone that rings, the text that's coming in, and the email. At the end of the day, they've gotten all this stuff done, but did it really move them towards their goal? Most of the time, the answer is no. That's what my day looks like. It's turning off distractions and doing time blocking on the things that really matter and not getting bogged down in details that are pretty much just distractions that could wait until after the really important work was accomplished.
14:54 – Gresham Harkless
That's awesome. Yeah. And that's actually 1 of my favorite books, The 1 Thing. It helped me to understand how to focus because I started to see things as more like dominoes rather than trying to take on the world in 1 day. You do those small things. And I love the fact that you broke it down to something that's very, very simple to do every day where you're talking about time blocking. So a lot of people think that it would be something like, oh, I have to sell a house every day or I have to make a connection. But really, you broke it down to something that's very, very simple. That's definitely why I love that book and the idea of that book.
15:25 – Brad Chandler
Sciple Yeah, I just finished reading it. I'm about half an hour because I'm listening to it on Audible. But there's a book called Deep Work. And the entire book is about how successful people get really deep and focused in their work for short periods of time per day. And it is a, you got to read the book. It starts out a little slow, I'll warn you about that, But it is a fantastic book. Kline-Bulls-Sawyer Awesome. BradChannel.com is the best place. I'm at brad at bradchannel.com. There's a lot of good information on that site, and like I said, the free book and stuff will give you a flavor of the business.
16:01 – Gresham Harkless
Frankel- Awesome. Brad, I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule. I just wanted to give the floor to you. If there's anything additional you want let us know. Again, I really, truly appreciate the time that you took out of your schedule.
16:15 – Brad Chandler
Feroz- I appreciate you having me on, Gresham. And we did cover a lot of stuff today. I hope it was helpful to your listeners. And I guess just in closing, I see a lot of really unhappy people, whether it's their job or their relationships or their marriage. And I just think to myself, and they don't change. They just keep doing the same thing day after day. And or people in really bad health that don't take care of themselves. And I think to myself, like, what are these people thinking? Do they think that, you know, this is just a dress rehearsal and they're going to come back and be able to live their life over again? The answer is this is not a dress rehearsal. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your life. You only have 1 life to live. So why not make it exceptional?
16:54 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and the CEO Chat podcast. And I hope you enjoyed this special episode. Gave us an opportunity to kind of take some of the snippets from some of the longer forum podcasts that we have and repurpose them here. And we might be dusting off the CEO Chat podcast and talking a little bit more about some of those longer forum episodes and hopefully some of the people that have been on the I AM CEO podcast on the Long Reform episodes.
But I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you enjoyed this little snapshot. Of course, you can go to ceochat.co and have the opportunity to listen to the full, complete version of the episode. But also you can maybe see that it's very important to create content but also to be able to listen to and take in the hacks, the nuggets, the stories, just all the things that make these interviews so unique and so special. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and be sure to follow up with the guests Follow up with the CEO chat podcast and hear about all the awesome things we're working on.
17:55 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:28 - Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:00 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is fresh from the I AM CEO podcast and formerly the CEO chat podcast So doing something a little bit different as we ease into the fall from the summer and you know Everybody's traveling a lot more, You know life is obviously a lot different than it has been in the last 4 years definitely since I started this let alone the last 2 years or so But I had a podcast called the CEO chat podcast, which is a lot more of a long-form podcast I didn't really reach the 1400 plus episodes that we did with the I AM CEO podcast.
So there's a lot more long-flowing, a lot more conversational, but might be dusting off the CEO chat podcast and bringing that back out. So with that being said, while considering that, what I wanted to do is go through some of the interviews that I had that were some of my favorites and share those. It's not going to obviously be the entire interview. We're going to have links in the show notes so that you can go and listen to the full interview. But I wanted to do some snippets that you can get. You're going to hear, of course, the visibility, either the resources or the connections in each of these different snippets.
So it's going to be 1 of those things that are really going to help you to hopefully learn more about the guests that are on the show, what they do, how they do it, why they do it, but also get that opportunity to really learn about some resources that can make you more effective and efficient. So sit back and enjoy this special throwback CEO chat episode.
01:27 - Brad Chandler
One of the first books I ever read was E-Myth by Michael Gerber, and it's how to systematize your business so that your business can give you out of life what you want, other than what most people do. It's just the opposite. Entrepreneurs just basically start a company, and now they have a job. They still have a job because if they don't show up, they don't make money. I got that literally the first couple of weeks in business. I'm like, I am going to make my business so I can use it to get out of life what I want. Early on, I started systematizing.
I started hiring good people and started putting processes in place. Now, the company literally runs without my involvement. I'm still the CEO, but I could literally leave for 6 months and come back and the company would be in good shape. The second question you asked was, how did I learn it? Boy, we went through some hard knocks. I did not have a mentor at the time. So, We made millions and we lost millions. We just made some terrible mistakes along the way. But through trial and error, we learned. We learned how to raise money. We went and raised tens of millions of dollars because most of my career, what I was doing, I was buying, renovating, and selling houses.
Well, you can imagine if you're buying 20 houses a month or 15 houses a month in the D.C. Market and then you're putting in $50, 000, how much actual cash you need. So literally, we had tens of millions of dollars in debt. And last December, it was like, things just aren't working. I was struggling to make payroll, and I was thinking, God, did all this hard work that I did, is it going to go down the drain? I was like, there's got to be a better way. I knew that renovations were literally the hardest part of the business. I said, if we could get rid of renovations, we would just be in so much better shape.
So, we did just that. What we do now is we get the house under contract. We never do actually buy it. But then, we go out and find a cash buyer who doesn't know how to market as well as we do. We assign the contract to that cash buyer and we make a nice hefty fee in between there. So you've heard of people saying, oh, you can buy real estate with no money down and without income or bad credit. And most people will slough it off and say, you know what, that's a scam. And that's what I used to think, too, until I really learned that it's not. And we're living proof. We're going to have our best financial year ever this year, and we're probably going to do north of 200 transactions. And we never had to put out a dollar to buy a house.
03:39 - Gresham Harkless
Sciple That's awesome. That's awesome. What exactly is a real estate investor? How would you define that? David Kretzman
03:44 - Brad Chandler
Yeah, so as a real estate investor, there are all different kinds of strategies you can use in real estate investing. You can buy houses, you can buy apartments, you can buy shopping malls. We focus on single-family houses. Right now, we're doing wholesaling. You can either buy a house, fix it up, and resell it. You can buy a house, fix it up, and you can rent it. There are all kinds of different strategies, but we're focused on just the wholesaling part of it. In terms of the business, what it looks like is, we have about probably 10 people altogether on the acquisition and sales.
They're the ones who are actually taking calls from sellers and buyers and matching them up. We have a marketing department right now that's about 3 and a half people. We do rely on about 8 VAs, virtual assistants in the Philippines, to help us with calling people and just different support issues. And then we have a small accounting department. I have a COO, myself the CEO, and then my partner Judd Allen. So that's kind of what the company looks like.
04:38 - Gresham Harkless
You know, you have a strong team in place because you, it sounds like you found talent and you've been able to attract talent and be able to keep talent so that you're able to kind of grow and build that business.
04:48 - Brad Chandler
That's the truth. And I've heard someone else say, that you're truly only long-term competitive advantage is your people. So we didn't always have the greatest people. It seemed like we always had 1 or 2 weak links in our team. And I can say with 100% surety that this is the first time in 14 years that we don't have 1 single weak link in our chain and our team. We are just so excited. While we've had a lot of success, we feel like with all the mistakes and everything that we've learned, we're really in a position now that we're poised to just explode. So we're really looking at some really interesting concepts to get us to be a regional and nationwide company here in the next 18 months.
05:25 - Gresham Harkless
So I know we talked a little bit more about real estate investing and what that means. And I'm sure there's a lot of people that, you know, haven't or would love to kind of reach the success that you've reached. So what should people do if they're thinking about, you know, maybe buying a single-family home and wanting to flip it? What types of things would you tell them to do?
06:46 - Brad Chandler
So the number 1 thing is just, if you actually are going to buy it and flip it, that means buy it, fix it up, and resell it, just know that the renovation part is a brutal undertaking. It can be just devastating to some people. If you don't know how to deal with contractors and you don't know how to estimate the renovations of a home, it can get you alive. What I would highly urge you to do is do exactly what we're doing, and that's wholesaling, where you don't actually buy the house. If you're dead set on rehabbing, fine, I get that. But at least do 2 or 3 or 10 wholesale transactions so you can understand how the process works. I came out with a book a couple of months ago called Wholesaling Secrets.
Discover this 1 technique we use to close over 200 wholesale deals every year consistently. They can start there. On my site, bradshandler.com, there's a blog that has a ton of useful information in terms of marketing and whatnot. I've literally developed a coaching program in the last 6 months because I felt there was a real void in the space. There were a lot of gurus out there teaching it. But yet, they didn't have a business that I ever wanted to aspire to have. They did a couple of deals, and they said, maybe I can make more money teaching people how to do this. But hardly any of them have a seventh-level business that's functioning without their day-to-day involvement. I thought to myself, I've made a lot of money, I want to give back, I love teaching. I built this coaching brand, and we just launched last month.
08:12 - Gresham Harkless
Shenmue Awesome, awesome. Congratulations. We're going to make sure to have all of those notes and links to the books and the show notes. Could you take us through? If you're actually coaching people, could you take us through some of the things that you've seen that have led people to be very successful at wholesaling or starting their businesses? Feroldi-Morales-Morales
08:31 - Brad Chandler
Yeah. I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit. As I mentioned, I read that book in ninth grade, but I was selling blow pops in seventh grade. I've always been enthralled with business and how some people succeed and how other people don't. I said to myself, when I figure this out, I'm going to write a book. Well, it wasn't until the last 6 months of building my coaching program that I figured it out. Why is it that someone can come from a broken home and just be wildly successful, and then another person can come from a great home, and a great education, and they don't achieve great success? Do you know what it all comes down to? It all comes down to mindset. It's when the person wakes up every day, what are they telling themselves? Are they telling themselves that I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough, I can't do this? Or are they saying, I may not be the smartest guy in the world or lady in the world, but I'm going to figure this out?
So the number 1 thing is that whether you get into real estate or selling cars or high tech, whatever it is that you're planning on starting a business, if you don't have the proper mindset, you will never succeed. I can give 100 people the exact same coaching program that I do. And there's going to be a few select ones that run with it and make millions of dollars or hundreds of $1, 000 a year. And then there's gonna be a bunch of them that don't. And I guarantee you, it's exact same information.
So, why are some people succeeding? Are those 3,10 or 20 people who are succeeding? Are they smarter than the other people? Nope, not at all, because I'm certainly not the smartest person in the world. I had such a low GPA and SAT scores that it's embarrassing, I won't even share it. But, I always believed that I could just figure things out. I always said I'm not going to quit until I do. That is the No. 1 thing for any successful real estate investor or any business owner. Get your mindset right, and then get your systems right. If it's a marketing business, we learned over the years, you've got to have a killer follow-up system before you start spending a dime in marketing. I made that mistake. I didn't have a killer follow-up system. I know that we lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars because we didn't have a good follow-up system. It really wasn't probably until 5 years ago that we developed this amazing follow-up system. It's really been a game-changer.
10:38 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Definitely, especially the mindset thing. I think so many people ignore all of that stuff and don't pay attention to their mindset when in reality, sometimes they grow really successful businesses, but because their mindset is weak or they don't really have that developed as much as they should, then the business falls apart and they don't really understand why. Some people are not even able to get things off the ground and they think, hey, I'm smart, hey, I'm talented, I know how to do X, Y, and Z, but they really don't think they could be successful. So that's huge that you're echoing that and you're helping people to kind of understand that that has helped equal and it helps you with your success.
11:14 - Brad Chandler
Yeah, But you made a good point. We had success right out of the gate. Boom. And then, of course, with any business, things got really, really tough. So, if you've got the wrong mindset when things get tough and you're like, you know what, that was a fluke, I should have never done this. It's the same thing. You've got to have that mindset all along. And believe me, I'm not perfect. I'm trying to break through a whole other level right now and take this company regionally and nationally. And I'm also not trying, I'm growing this real estate coaching program. And I've got to make sure that my mindset's like, hey Brad, you can do this. It's not going to be easy, but you can do this. You know exactly what you need to do. So it's not something that comes easy probably for anyone. It's just something just like with anything else, You got to work on it to be good at it.
12:01 - Gresham Harkless
Now, I know that you're juggling a lot of different things. So you have your coaching program. You have Express Homebuyers. Could you take us through what a typical day is for Brad?
12:16 - Brad Chandler
I know you mentioned that you have your commute to kind of start out your day. Could you take us through what happens after that? Yeah, so I typically work out 3 or 4 days a week. I get up in the morning, get my kids to school, and go to the gym. I get to the gym at quarter 9, get out of there at 10, get to the office at 10 or 15. I have a COO with Express Homebuyers and I have my operations manager with Brad Chandler Coaching. She does a fantastic job of helping me plan out my day. 1 thing I literally didn't learn until the last couple of years from reading this book, The 1 Thing by Gary Keller, is that I probably wasted thousands of hours over the last 13, 14 years being in business doing tasks called shallow tasks that didn't mean much. That's checking email mostly. That didn't really lead me to my goal. Every day, I get up and say, what's the 1 thing I can do today such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
And typically, that 1 thing is time blocking. Time blocking is where you cut out all distractions. It used to be that when you interviewed, people would say, oh, are you a multitasker? Oh yeah, I can do 10 things. Well, Studies have proven that that is such a flaw that really, really smart people shut off everything and focus. Again, this goes across business and goes into sports as well, the greatest athletes. They're able to focus for 40, 50, 60 minutes at a time and have intense focus.
So I've started to do that in the last 2 years. And it's been a real game changer where I say to myself, okay, I'm going to time block my day today. I had, I think 3 or 2, 2-hour time blocks and I'm not doing anything else, I'm turning off, anything that can distract me and I'm focusing on those things. And those things are the things that are going to move you towards your 5-year goal, your 1-year goal. The premise of the 1 thing book was you can do anything in 5 years. So you set your 5 year goal and then you ask yourself, what can I do? What can I do this year to reach my 5-year goal?
And then you ask yourself, what can I do this month to reach my year goal? And then what can I do this week to reach my monthly goal? And you go all the way down to what can I do right now to reach my daily goal? And then make sure that every day you focus on that 1 thing. What so many entrepreneurs, and not even entrepreneurs, but just team members and employees do, is focus on the phone that rings, the text that's coming in, and the email. At the end of the day, they've gotten all this stuff done, but did it really move them towards their goal? Most of the time, the answer is no. That's what my day looks like. It's turning off distractions and doing time blocking on the things that really matter and not getting bogged down in details that are pretty much just distractions that could wait until after the really important work was accomplished.
14:54 - Gresham Harkless
That's awesome. Yeah. And that's actually 1 of my favorite books, The 1 Thing. It helped me to understand how to focus because I started to see things as more like dominoes rather than trying to take on the world in 1 day. You do those small things. And I love the fact that you broke it down to something that's very, very simple to do every day where you're talking about time blocking. So a lot of people think that it would be something like, oh, I have to sell a house every day or I have to make a connection. But really, you broke it down to something that's very, very simple. That's definitely why I love that book and the idea of that book.
15:25 - Brad Chandler
Sciple Yeah, I just finished reading it. I'm about half an hour because I'm listening to it on Audible. But there's a book called Deep Work. And the entire book is about how successful people get really deep and focused in their work for short periods of time per day. And it is a, you got to read the book. It starts out a little slow, I'll warn you about that, But it is a fantastic book. Kline-Bulls-Sawyer Awesome. BradChannel.com is the best place. I'm at brad at bradchannel.com. There's a lot of good information on that site, and like I said, the free book and stuff will give you a flavor of the business.
16:01 - Gresham Harkless
Frankel- Awesome. Brad, I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule. I just wanted to give the floor to you. If there's anything additional you want let us know. Again, I really, truly appreciate the time that you took out of your schedule.
16:15 - Brad Chandler
Feroz- I appreciate you having me on, Gresham. And we did cover a lot of stuff today. I hope it was helpful to your listeners. And I guess just in closing, I see a lot of really unhappy people, whether it's their job or their relationships or their marriage. And I just think to myself, and they don't change. They just keep doing the same thing day after day. And or people in really bad health that don't take care of themselves. And I think to myself, like, what are these people thinking? Do they think that, you know, this is just a dress rehearsal and they're going to come back and be able to live their life over again? The answer is this is not a dress rehearsal. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your life. You only have 1 life to live. So why not make it exceptional?
16:54 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and the CEO Chat podcast. And I hope you enjoyed this special episode. Gave us an opportunity to kind of take some of the snippets from some of the longer forum podcasts that we have and repurpose them here. And we might be dusting off the CEO Chat podcast and talking a little bit more about some of those longer forum episodes and hopefully some of the people that have been on the I AM CEO podcast on the Long Reform episodes.
But I hope you enjoyed this episode. I you enjoyed this little snapshot. Of course, you can go to ceochat.co and have the opportunity to listen to the full, complete version of the episode. But also you can maybe see that it's very important to create content but also to be able to listen to and take in the hacks, the nuggets, the stories, just all the things that make these interviews so unique and so special. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and be sure to follow up with the guests Follow up with the CEO chat podcast and hear about all the awesome things we're working on.
17:55 - Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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