How to Scale a Business with Chris Craddock

george grombacher 0:00
Come on

I’m left with is Georgie and the time is right welcome. Today’s guest is struggle powerful Chris Craddock, Chris, you’re ready to do this? Let’s do it, brother. Come on, let’s go. Chris is the founder and CEO of the Redux group. He’s a nationally certified life coach with a doctorate in leadership. He’s the host of the uncommon real estate podcast. And he is the driving force behind our ei revive. Chris excited to have you on tell us a little about your personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do.

Unknown Speaker 0:42
Yeah, you know, I,

Chris Craddock 0:44
I graduated college in 2000s, have gone way back and went on an organization called Young Life loved it. But couldn’t really make ends meet the DC area. I’m making 20 to $25,000 a year as we started having a family and so I started flipping houses as well to just make ends meet, you know, made 12 times what I made in a year in about four months and allowed me to continue doing ministry for many years. And as I have more kids, I’ve got six kids now, which, yeah, it took a while to figure out what caused it now that I know I can stop that. But

Unknown Speaker 1:18
But with that said, Yeah, you know, I had to do something to essentially survive here in this area. And so I started flipping houses, again, I in ministry, I’d always lead large teams, and going back to school, I got a theology degree. And then I got a doctorate in leadership. And just always lead large teams, read Gary Keller’s book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. And what I loved about it is that there was a color by numbers path to, to make a million dollars a year and doing that in a way that Zig Ziglar talks about, right that you can have everything you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want in life. And so it wasn’t winning through other people, it’s winning with others. And I love that, you know, I’m a, I’m a massive extrovert. And I would rather make a little bit less money and do it with a bunch of people I loved and make more money, and, you know, do it by myself. So. So yeah, we started building a team and the team started growing really fast. And then we started looking at a lot of other verticals within the sector, we’re in, you know, everything from insurance, to construction to title, to lending to hard money lending to flipping and wholesaling, and buying property portfolios. And, I mean, the list goes on and on coaching, and, you know, as a real estate agent, and I’m part of EXP, which, you know, incentivizes you to bring in other real estate agents and kind of coach them. So anyway, that’s my story and about five minutes. So sorry, I went too long.

george grombacher 2:47
Not at all. I think that that’s really well done. So six kids were roughly the same age, Chris, and I’ve got two kids. So um, there’s a whole podcast, probably a whole series of podcasts on that. But that’s, that’s for another day. So where, where do you want to focus today? I mean, I’ve got a million questions. I’m curious how you prioritize your time. I’m curious. I’m curious how it is that that you’re able to scale all that. I’m also fascinated like you the whole color by numbers thing, because I want to be successful. I find that people want to be successful, but they don’t know how.

Unknown Speaker 3:27
Right? Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, that’s one of the big things is, you know, if you if you’re a business owner, or business leader or ever want to become one, one of the books I think everybody needs to read is called the E Myth. So many people have talked about it. And in the past, lots of entrepreneurs talk about it. But that’s one of the big things is that you get into something like like, let’s just call it real estate, right, which I got into, and you can make a lot of money and everybody thinks you’re gonna build a business, but really what you’re doing is just building a high paying job for yourself. And Robert Kiyosaki talks about that in the fourth quarter, like the, you know, the Cashflow Quadrant, right, where you realize that no matter what you do, or even flipping people think that’s, that’s real estate investing? Well, it is kind of investing. But it’s no more investing than investing your time and being a real estate agent or investing your time and your nine to five or investing your time and something else unless you build it to a place where you are not involved. Right. So I’ve got one of my really close friends that I’m in a mastermind in, and he built a real estate team, which you don’t see much of this, where he made he made about a million dollars a year when he worked 16 hours that year in that business, right? And so that’s a real business, right? Otherwise, you’re looking at a job where you are trading time for dollars, right? Even if you’re the business leader, if you are required. If you disappear for two months, and the business kind of starts falling apart. Then you have a job, you don’t have a business and so that’s that whole idea is build your business so that you are not required. And then if you’re like me And I enjoy working, I enjoy the thought process of it. What you add to your business, just add superpowers super fuel to it, and just helps it grow even more. But it needs to be something that if you disappear, your income doesn’t disappear, or you’ve just got a job. Right. And so that’s kind of my thought behind that.

george grombacher 5:19
Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. So you obviously have a passion for for the ministry. Got a passion for leadership and developing teams? Could what you have done? Could it have been in anything? Could it have been? You mentioned construction and insurance? This is all transferable?

Unknown Speaker 5:40
Yeah, I mean, it literally can be anything I think, I think running a business is the same thing. It’s all about leads and leverage, right you bring in. So it starts with activity and skill, right? That’s, that’s how you earn the right. You have to bring in money, right? So activity, doing enough talking to enough people and getting good at what you’re saying when you talk to them. Right? And that comes from just just doing the reps, right? And then you bring in money once you once you make money, then you need to figure out how to create leads, right? How does How do leads come in without you making the phone calls, right? So your marketing, your your sales team, all that other stuff? You’re like all of that has to happen to bring in leads, and then leverage, how can you get your business to run without you running it? Right? So it starts with activity and skill. And then once you’ve earned the right and you earn the right, like everybody says, Well, how do you earn the right? Well, you earn the right when you prove that you’re good enough that the market is going to pay you money to do what you do, right. And so once you have money, your business earns the right to build out its org chart. And then when you build out your org chart, that’s when you replace all the things that you’re doing with other people that can do what you’re doing. And, and I’ll tell you, like I’m massively good, closer, right? Like, I am a great sales guy. But I’ll tell you, one, good sales guy, or five sales guys that can do 80% of what I can do are going to outperform me all day long. But then the here’s the crazy thing, what I found is a lot of the salespeople that that we brought in, they weren’t as good at me as I am at first. But what I found was a my time was being pulled in so many different directions. And so they were able to follow up on leads in a way that I was never able to follow up. And so their closing percentage ended up being better than my closing percentage, because they were able to follow up and really build that out. So anyway, that was that was one of the massive revelations for me when I realized that, yeah, that that was that that was the case. And, and you also kind of stopped believing that you have to be the one driving everything. So

george grombacher 7:54
yeah, that’s a that’s a really important thing. Is is do you find the that, as you’re looking at people that are trying to do what you’ve done, where we’re how are they getting in their own way?

Unknown Speaker 8:14
Yeah, how are they getting their own way? They just one, they either jump out of the business too fast and just hand people and say, Here’s my big pile mass, you take it without any plan or without any way to help them. And then they’re in over their heads, and then they drop the ball. Or they micromanage and stay too far in the weeds. And basically, Jim Collins calls it the genius with 1000 helpers, decides that you’re going to be the person that that does everything tells everybody what to do in the mix. And then you know, one, Nobody enjoys that. And then too, it’s yeah, it’s just not, not where people want to

george grombacher 8:53
be. Yeah, appreciate that. So, is there a certain amount of revenue that’s that’s the that was coming in, when you said okay, now it’s time for me to build this out. How, how do I know it’s time?

Unknown Speaker 9:09
Yeah, um, how do you know it’s time to build out? Um, well, I guess here’s, here’s how we look at it right is, if you make let’s just say 100,000 a year because that’s an easy number to burn down. If you make $100,000 a year, that means your time is worth $50 An hour right. And so one of the things I learned from Mike McCalla wits in his book clockwork, which he was the one that wrote profit first. One of the things he talks about is the fact that you need to do basically a time audit, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s simple, not easy. Let me rephrase that. You go by a sticky note pad, right? And on your sticky note pad, everything you do for two weeks, you just write it down, return phone calls, return emails, like all those things. And then you just pop it in the wall of your office, pop it on the wall, pop it on the wall, and then after two weeks, you kind of categorize those things, what are the things that are below your pay grade, if you make $100 an hour, or $100 or 100,000 a year, and you’re making $50 an hour, what are the things that are below $50 an hour, you put them in a side category, and then you hire somebody to do that, you keep doing the other things. And then those things you’re doing, I guarantee you, if they’re above $50, an hour, your income goes from 100,000, a year to 200,000 a year, 300,000 a year. And then after a few months, then you do that again, because now all of a sudden, you’re making $200,000 a year. And so you know, your time is worth $100 an hour. So now you’re looking to hire anybody that is going to do these jobs that are less than $100 an hour. And that’s part of your leveling up so that you’re getting the things off your plate that are not in your genius zone, but things that are the highest income producing activity for you. Does that make sense?

george grombacher 10:55
Does it makes it makes a ton of sense definitely answers my question. And you are helping, you’re helping a lot of the time people make careers in real estate. And so I imagine it’s not dissimilar to somebody who started in a financial planning practice, or, or an accounting practice or a law firm. It’s like professional services. So that probably a lot of people who are listening, are getting hung up on these parts of just sort of having the same year over and over again.

Unknown Speaker 11:30
Right? Well, yeah, I mean, absolutely, if you do the same thing you’ve always done, you’ll get the same results, you’re always you’ve always got so if you’re in let’s say financial services, like whatever you’re you’re working with folks that are your retirement plan, investing all the other stuff, you need to have more people coming in. So you need to figure out how can you get more people coming in, you need to be better at closing, right. And then once you’re better at closing, you can do more marketing, you can you can hire more people to bring more people to the play, which then you can get more people to, to be talking to those folks to close them, right, other people that are working for you that are close, you know, maybe maybe lower dollar accounts, and then you shift to higher dollar accounts, right? And then you just you start building out your team like that, right? And that’s that whole idea, right? So I remember for me, even though I love working with buyers, that was one of the massive changes for me is if I’m working with a person selling a house, right, so now I now I, my time moved to kind of coaching my agents who are then working with the clients, right? But when I when I first made that shift, I was like, no, no, I can’t like all these buyers are people that are personal friends of mine, I can’t do that. But a buyer took somewhere around like 12 to 16 hours, whereas a listing took three to four hours to do. And so I’m like, Oh man, if if I gave, if I had somebody on my team showing houses, opening houses, all of a sudden, I have, I can pay them and buy back 12 hours of my life, you know, and if I do that with four people a month, that’s 40 hours of my life. And then what can I do with those 40 hours, I can spend some time building into those people that are my friends so that they don’t feel abandoned. And then I spend other times building out and growing this machine that can grow so that I can get things in place that are now producing what I used to have to produce.

george grombacher 13:29
I love it. So much of it comes down to just knowing the value of your time and and understanding the numbers. How much time do you spend planning Do you have like calendar monthly planning quarterly planning and stuff like that?

Unknown Speaker 13:43
Yeah, um, I do in man, I’ll tell you it’s if I want to be totally you know, everybody loves to tell their their highlights, but they don’t they don’t really get real. I’m gonna get real like, we I do two to three times a year and I need to be doing it minimum Quarterly. We do have a if you’ve ever read us traction, which I think is a great book, Gino Wickman. talks about, you know, building out like your level 10 meeting which I’ll tell you there’s a 10 minute YouTube video on an LT LT and what level 10 meeting, there’s a there’s a great 10 minute YouTube video on it. And it is incredible. And so we do do that every Thursday and check on our quarterly goals and stuff like that. But we need to be spending more time every single quarter building out a quarterly goals rather than just kind of yearly bi yearly stuff. So we do it but we do it a lot more than we originally used to. But it’s not enough and definitely not enough.

george grombacher 14:48
Always opportunities to be getting better. Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s

Unknown Speaker 14:51
funny because you hear all these, you know, I get the opportunity to speak a lot. I get the opportunity to you know, and so like, like, I’ll be somewhere With a bunch of friends, and you’ll hear people on stage and even myself included, and everybody’s sharing the things that are going great, but then you’ll go have dinner with all the other speakers afterwards in. And then you hear like, you open up the hood of the Ferrari and you realize lots of parts are rusted out, right? Like it’s not, it’s not as pretty as it sounds from stage. There’s lots of parts that are need to be put in. And so I don’t know, that’s where I’ve just tried to be a little bit more real on on stuff that yeah, a lot of things are going really, really well. I mean, I couldn’t even, you know, just seeing where we are, like, from where we started. It’s just, it’s just incredible. It’s a dream. But the reality is, there are still so many broken parts and so many pieces that that aren’t where we need to be.

george grombacher 15:42
Yeah, I appreciate. I appreciate the honesty. And, you know, Chris, if everything was just going perfect, and it was just all ideal, then it would be real, after all, so we’re always going to get better and improve. So appreciate you sharing that. Because the people are ready for the difference making tip, what do you have for them?

Unknown Speaker 16:01
Oh, man, I’ll tell you, every, every day your business will grow to your business and your life will grow to the extent that you grow. So if you are not, if you are not spending time investing in yourself, activity and skill, that is it right there. I mean, you’ve got to be spending, I say a minimum of a half hour a day in personal development outside of team meetings outside of all the other stuff. You know, I’m usually listening to Audible or podcasts. And I usually do about an hour a day. And so I would say, minimum half hour a day, but I think an hour a day will really be rocket fuel to your life. Because you can choose your profits, you can choose your mentors in this world, I’ve never met a lot of the people that are the biggest mentors in my life. And so, you know, you can think, oh, man, I’m just gonna work hard. I’m just gonna, whatever. But I mean, that’s just that’s foolishness. Wisdom is found and, and learning from other people and learning from people that are better than you are. And so why wouldn’t you spend half an hour to an hour remoulding your mind to think the way that these people are thinking?

george grombacher 17:08
Well, I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets a Come on. Chris, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you?

Unknown Speaker 17:16
Yeah, so if you are a real estate agent, or are thinking about becoming one, obviously that the average podcast listener listens to seven podcasts, I would love to be one of the other seven, keep listening to this. I’ve got a podcast called the uncommon real estate. And that’s for real estate agents that also want to become investors. Second, I’ve got a Instagram channel, or Instagram page, and I will reply to any messages. Although I’m about 15 messages behind I need to catch up. But I’ll reply to any messages that anybody sends out. People were so generous with their time with me when I was really working to level up and so anybody that is interested in any of this stuff I’m talking about at crab rocks era, DD R O CK. If you’re interested in becoming a real estate agent, or even joining our tribe as a real estate agent, just our organization, you know, not our team or anything else, but just our tribe just reach out to me. And yeah, those are some of the easy things. Chris craddock.com is my webpage and Chris graddic official tic tac. So yeah, we’d love to help anyway, I can

george grombacher 18:20
love it. If you enjoyed this as much as I did show, Chris your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Go to Chris craddock.com. Listen to the uncommon real estate podcast wherever you enjoy your podcast. Follow me on Instagram and connect with them there and I’ll list all those in the notes of the show. Thanks again, Chris.

Unknown Speaker 18:40
Boom. Thanks so much.

george grombacher 18:41
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai