The Real Estate UNLOCKED Podcast
REALEST Real Estate Podcast on the Planet!
The Real Estate UNLOCKED Podcast
STARTING a Business in 2025 What You Need to Know! | Episode 21
In this episode, we’re joined by Jay Holder, Co-Owner of Finish Line TC Services, who shares his invaluable insights on how to start a successful business in 2025. Whether you're a complete beginner or looking to take your business to the next level, Jay walks us through the key steps to launching and growing your business, overcoming fear, and building a strong foundation with minimal resources.
From choosing the right business idea to overcoming common challenges and building a brand that resonates, this episode is packed with actionable tips for turning your dream into a thriving business.
What you'll learn in this episode:
- How to start a business in 2025 with little money
- Overcoming fear and self-doubt as a new entrepreneur
- Key steps to create a strong business foundation
- Practical advice on branding, marketing, and scaling your business
- The importance of building relationships and networking in business
Don’t miss out on this must-watch episode if you’re ready to take control of your future and start your business journey in 2025!
Follow us:
Facebook: / thefate562
LinkedIn: / joseph-marohn
X: @JosephMarohn
Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe to stay updated on future episodes and tips for business success!
What up everyone and welcome back to the Real Estate Unlocked podcast. I am your host, Joseph Marohn, and today we're going to be breaking down one of the core foundations of true entrepreneurship. I'm talking about a proven strategy that allows you to create value, build your brand and set yourself up for long-term success One of the most powerful paths to financial freedom while building a legacy and shaping your own destiny. Today, we're going to be showing you, guys, how to start your own business. Starting your own business is the process of taking an idea and turning it into a profitable enterprise. It involves identifying a market need, creating a product or a service to meet that need and building a sustainable business model around it. As an entrepreneur, you take on the responsibility of making decisions, managing operations and driving growth, all while navigating challenges and opportunities. It's about creating something of value, building relationships and shaping your own future. Now, if starting your own business is something you've been thinking about but don't know where to start, then stay tuned, because we're going to be giving you all the tools and resources you need to launch your own business today. Now you know how we do it on the Real Estate Unlocked podcast. If we're going to do it, we got to do it right. We can't just bring on anyone to speak about business startups. We got to bring on Mr Business Startup.
Joseph Marohn:Today, our special guest on the podcast is Jay Holder. Jay is an entrepreneur who's been making waves in multiple industries. This year, jay took his transaction coordination business to new heights, growing it into one of the top companies in its niche. But it doesn't stop there. Jay has recently expanded into the business buying arena, successfully acquiring a software as a service company. Along with his entrepreneurial ventures, he's active in real estate, working alongside his partners to purchase multifamily units. With over two years in the real estate game and a portfolio of seven doors, jay's journey is a perfect example of how to scale businesses and seize opportunities. Jay joins us today to show us not only how to start a business from the ground up, but also how to scale and maximize profits with minimal investment. So, without further ado I've been talking long enough Everyone if you will, please allow me to formally introduce to you Jay Holder. Jay, what is up, brother? How are you doing today? I'm doing good, joseph. How are you today, buddy? I'm doing good, man. Monday's rolling. Good for you.
Jay Holder:Oh yeah, man, Trying to, you know, fulfill a lot of stuff that we had done over the weekend. We started a Black Friday sale on Thursday and trying to get people into our transaction coordination company, and so right now we're just going through all those packages they got bought and reaching out to those different clients and trying to get them onboarded.
Joseph Marohn:So that's awesome man, some good strategies to get that Black Friday going. Man, you're rolling in some customers like that. Huh, yeah, yeah, doing good with that, awesome, awesome. Well, jay, welcome to the Real Estate Unlocked podcast brother, a place where we bring value to new and intermediate investors by bringing on guests who are extremely knowledgeable, such as yourself, and covering real estate topics on a very basic level. Now, jay, I'm pumped to dive into this. How to start a business is such a powerful topic, and I strongly believe that we don't have more ownership out here because we either feel failure or uncertainty. Maybe it's a lack of capital or a time commitment, possibly even self-doubt or a lack of confidence. But one thing I know for sure is my audience is driven with a strong desire to succeed and create something of their own, and today, together, we get to help them gain some clarity and get another step further along that journey to financial freedom. So thank you.
Jay Holder:Oh, yes, sir, Absolutely.
Joseph Marohn:Awesome, Awesome. So let's just dive into it. Let's help everybody gain some clarity. So first question I want to ask you is what exactly does it take to get started when you're thinking about launching a business?
Jay Holder:Well, you know, when you're thinking about launching a business, the first thing I did and a lot of people teach is first you got to figure out what you actually are good at. You know everybody's good at something, even in like your hobbies or your day-to-day job and then you got to figure out how you can take that and then maximize that to work for yourself. Because ultimately that's the goal of starting a business, is that you get to work for yourself. You get to build something for you, for your family, and then you go from there. A lot of people take that risk where they're trying to fit into a niche that they just don't need to be in Right right.
Jay Holder:That's kind of how I got started was I started down a rabbit hole one day on YouTube watching Grant Cardone, like a little over two years ago. From there, like a pace video popped up and then I started down the pace more b rabbit hole um. And then, once I joined up in his team with gator the gator method um that's when I started tc. And then from there I realized how good I was and how much I liked it.
Joseph Marohn:that's where I built my business, my first business awesome, yeah, man, I'm a firm believer that. You know. Every single person at some point in their lives has thought of a great business idea. Now whether they follow through with that idea or not is a whole other story. But you know, starting a business from scratch can definitely seem like an impossible task for some people, and part of that is due to the fact that most people don't even know where to start. So, with that being said, you know where, where do you begin? What should your first steps be when you're starting a business?
Jay Holder:Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would tell people to do and this is what I've told my kids to do, right, cause I've got some kids that are in college is, like I said, find the thing you're good at, but then study it. Go find people who have already started that type of business or a business in general. Down with them, go over. You know the pitfalls. You know, learn from their success. You know one of the guys I'm mentors me, or whatever. One thing he says is you can spend 20 to get 20 years worth of knowledge. So, uh, again, don't get announced by paralysis, right, don't sit there, read every single book, cover to cover, and never start. But there are ones out there like um, buy back your time is a good one. It is a great book that I've been leaning a lot into that, where you can learn the different pitfalls and the peaks right, the peaks and the valleys of a business how to start a business, how to run a business. Study it, learn it and then just apply it.
Jay Holder:Fail. You're going to fail, like I failed on. I failed multiple times, right, and you know. But you can't quit. So one of the things I do is like right now is. I have a health consistency journey thing going and it's just being consistent every single day. Just keep pushing, just keep hitting the button and it's going to grow. So that's what I would tell people is just figure out something and then be dedicated to it.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, man, I love the transparency because I've also started businesses and failed at them. You know it's a learning experience but, like you said, you know you got to just dive in there and you're going to learn across that journey, in that path, as you start making those failures. You're going to learn from those mistakes, right? So, main thing, like you said, just being consistent with it. For sure, with it, yeah, for sure, yeah. So you know, most visionaries, like myself, have these crazy ideas constantly running through our heads. You know we're always thinking of the next big idea or a way to solve a problem. You know, like I know you talked about, you know, just thinking of a business but like, how do you know that that business is, if there's a need for that business, right, how do you define your target market?
Jay Holder:Yeah, so for us. So on the TC side, on the transaction coordination side, right, it was simple. We're all members of the Sub2 and Gator community. We know what the need is, and that one was easy. The new business that I'm a part of is a software as a service company, and we do PPC and AI generated landing pages and things like that for businesses, and so that's what we had to sit down and do recently was because we just acquired it. Right, so we're taking what they were currently doing.
Jay Holder:Now we're picking our actual target market, and so what you have to do is you have to put yourself in the outside person's shoes and say, if I was looking for this, what would I be doing in life? Right, like what would I? What would my business be that we're attacking? And so for us, it was anything that was service-based right now. So those services-based businesses are the ones that we target. So that would be and this is going to sound crazy but it's lawyers, like immigration lawyers, it's plumbers, hvac, all those companies that we're targeting that need leads, and they get leads through Facebook, they get leads through landing pages, instagram, tiktok, and so then it's like OK, great, now how do we sell it to them and then you start to niche down. But you have to put yourself in the mindset of sell it to yourself, and if it's not something that you can see yourself paying for, it's probably not a good idea at the end of the day.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, that's interesting. So are you using AI to actually generate and pull these leads and then you're providing it to them?
Jay Holder:So yeah, so our service is the lead generation, so we it's. It's building AI PBC campaigns that go out on Facebook, google, all the all the normals that go out on Facebook, google, all the normals. But then it's also building out, like, their landing pages, their websites. It's having a place to host it inside of a CRM so that they can do all their communications to the CRM, pull all that in and so really it's done for you marketing holistically. I mean, our system even does Instagram posts, all that for you.
Jay Holder:So it's a very interesting system and what's really good about it is is we're able to niche it down based on what you're into. Like I said, we've got everything from automotive to zookeeper, like it doesn't matter, we could, we have it and our generation will build it to that, that niche or that market, and then from there we even have it where it's geolocatable. So we know, like, let's say, you're in Dallas, right, dallas HVAC, we could even tell you how many people you have competitor-wise in that area, and then try to make the market, try to make it to where your marketing matches or is better than there, so that you're able to help go after more of that um customer base so yeah, that's smart man because, like you said, man, you're, you're technically, you're just trying to solve a problem.
Joseph Marohn:you're trying to find, you know what people are looking for and then creating a business around that right. And, like you said, man, some people, like plumbers, for example, they just want to get out there and get the work done, right, like they don't want to spend time generating leads and all that stuff. So you're able to provide a service for them, to simplify their business and make it easier for them to generate income.
Jay Holder:Yeah, and then my other businesses are tied to real estate, so yeah, you know.
Joseph Marohn:and then the TC business that was smart too, yeah.
Jay Holder:And then the TC business that was smart, too right, because the sub two community everybody's taught there hey, use a transaction coordinator for every sub two or seller finance transaction and you found what everybody's looking for and just created a business around that. I mean we, we. So I started out in the, like you said, the Gator community. I started TCing like two weeks into the Gator community. I didn't know what a TC was when I started my my first, my TC business. But then, once I joined sub two, I started working with my business partner on some deals and we ended up partnering together and forming our current company that we run together. And then we, you know, recruited talent. So we were probably one of the fastest growing tc companies. As far as like staff, we went from us two to 14 in the span of like three months, um, and then we you know, it's like any business, you go up, you go down, you go up, you down from from a staffing perspective. But we actually just hired three people, uh, today, they started today, um, and so I think we're up to like 14, we're back up to 14 people total, um, and so you just grow from there and, like I said, we just try to provide as much good service as we can.
Jay Holder:I think that a lot of business like, if you're getting into business, you're starting a business, the first thing you need to do is set your core values and don't bend um important, and so we did that we. We didn't do it when we first started it because we were in the process of just figuring it out, but as we've grown, we've set our core values. Now we're planning for 2025. We've got the core values, we've got the KPIs, we've got the key performance indicators. So the KPIs, so that we can then track and measure ourselves. A lot of people treat KPIs as just a tracking mechanism. It's not. I mean, it's good for tracking, but that's not it. You got to measure. And so if you don't have a goal and you don't know where you are in your goal, how do you measure it right so anybody can say I want to make a hundred calls, that's great.
Jay Holder:What do you do with those hundred phone calls? Are you converting those into clients? Or, if you're on the wholesale side, are you converting those into contract offers? And then are you converting those contract offers into actual contracts and then are you actually selling those contracts right? So that's another part of our business that we've developed for 2025 is our operator side, because a lot of us have gotten the operator badge out of the Sub2 community, the operator badge out of the sub two community, um, and so now we're we're working towards how do we operationalize people's businesses for them and help them with how to develop that um whole mindset and that whole shift from just throwing money at the problem to actually doing the work and tracking the work and measuring and making sure that what you're putting money into you're getting money out. So it's very interesting.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, no, and, like you said, man tracking KPIs, it's not just like you're tracking numbers. You know what are these numbers even mean, right, like so then you know what you have to do. Do I need to pivot? What do I need to change to make sure my numbers are increasing or whatnot? You're using it as a baseline to kind of build around your business, right, and we've even had Jennifer Cortez on the podcast.
Joseph Marohn:You know, she was one of my earlier guests on and she dropped a lot of value on what even a transaction coordinator was. Right, because, like you myself, I didn't know what a transaction coordinator was. I always heard of the name, you know, and I was like, what is a transaction coordinator? And Jennifer was one of the people I met early on and she came in and dropped a lot of value on the podcast. So, awesome man, oh yeah, she's awesome, yeah. So now, one thing I've noticed, jay, is that every successful business has is you know, we've all seen it Is that that business always seems to have some sort of mission statement, right, and so how important is it to have a clear vision or mission for your business, and can you explain why?
Jay Holder:I think it's extremely important. I think it goes back to those core values, right? So when you're looking at, what do you actually want to accomplish? What value do you want to provide to society or to people, right? And then put your core values around that and so like. For us, ours is to provide safe, secure transactions to the best of our ability for investors and for assets, and so what we say is we protect our assets regardless of who our client is right. So, to break that down a little bit for you, let's say you are a lender. No, let's say you're a borrower and you're bringing us in to transaction. Coordinate the deal for you. You're going to pay our fee.
Jay Holder:You're going to do all of that. You're our client, but we are there to protect the person giving you the money because at the end of the day, that's who needs to be protected. So what I do is I tell all of my clients up front that's the deal, it's in our service agreement, you sign it, you're going to initial right beside that. But you understand we've had people get upset about that because I answer honestly. If there's something a lender asked me and I give them the honest answer and the deal falls through, there's nothing I can do. I have to give the honest answer because at the end of the day, the asset is the money or same thing like a sub-2 deal, right, like we're going to try to protect the um seller as much as possible and make sure they have everything in there.
Jay Holder:And it's surprising how many people have old information and so they still give it like, well, I told the seller I was going to give them a deed in lieu so they're protected. I'm like a deed in lieu is garbage, like it's not even worth the paper written on because it's not accepted anymore. A deed in lieu after the fact is accepted, but a deed in lieu pre-signed nobody accepts those anymore. It's like what else can we do to protect the seller? We go through it. So far I've only had two deals in my I think I've done 1,200 plus deals in two years. I think I've had two deals where the person when I told them the answer, they backed out of the deal, and only one. My client got upset. So I think it's a pretty good track record.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, no, and you know, what I love about TCs, and especially working with your company, you know is that you guys kind of keep us investors in check, right, like you keep us on our game, because I've had them come back to me and say, hey, did you explain this? Did you walk them through this portion? Because you don't. Last thing you want to do is get to the closing table and then have a deal fall apart because of a miscommunication, right, you know, on our part. So it's, it's helped me become a better investor by making sure that I'm communicating properly with my, my homeowners, right, my sellers, because it's a long-term relationship, especially dealing with the sub two transaction. You want to make sure we're doing right and they understand what the transaction involves, right? So good stuff, man. Now, what are some of the key components of a business plan and why should every new business have one?
Jay Holder:Yeah. So some of the key components of a business plan. Number one is what are you going to be doing, all right? Two is how are you going to measure success? It goes back to those KPIs, but that's not the full measurement. It's what's the actual success in the business plan. And then the third part is a growth strategy.
Jay Holder:And those are all important because you can get stagnant in your business, like you can think, just because you're doing enough, you're paying the bills, you're putting a little bit of money in your pocket, that you have a great business and you don't I mean it hasn't, you know, it's not there yet. And so with a business plan, it's exactly what it says, right, it's a plan, and for me, I did a three-year plan on my business, and so it's like where do we want to be, year one, two and three? That's how we measure. Obviously, we don't break down every single detail for those three years, because that's impossible, right, I can't plan things, I don't know, but I have a goal of where I want to be in three years as a business. Jennifer and I have the same goal. Our two minority partners, january and Jason, they have the same goals. So then you start to back down into what can we do today. This quarter For us, we do a weekly, monthly quarter and each one has individual goals, and so the other part of a business plan is, depending on the business you're going into is if you want to get funding, like a lot of lenders you know, such as like yourself right, if you're a lender and you're going to lend on somebody as a business, you want to see somebody that's actually took the time to think through as much as they can about the business.
Jay Holder:Nobody's ever, ever going to be 100%, but they can present to you more and more data to show you that they're taking this serious, they're treating it like a business. It's not just a hobby, things like that. And, like I said, if you ever go for SBA loans or anything like that, it's required that you have business plans as one item. There's also projections and all kinds of stuff that SBA requires.
Joseph Marohn:Awesome, okay Now. So at what point do you start? You know thinking about a business model, and how do you decide which one best fits for your business?
Jay Holder:So when should you start that? Probably like when you first start, you should have the idea. We started our business model probably on eight months into our business quiz. We were learning right Like none neither one of us.
Jay Holder:I've been in the C-suite of companies for the past 15 years, but I've walked into people's businesses and worked, so I already had the framework. They already had what they wanted to do. I just tried to elevate the position I was in With this. It was my own and it was Jennifer's own.
Jay Holder:We were just trying to figure out how to produce money and produce time and build an actual company, and so I think that our business model now is great, especially when you start hiring people. Like you really need to know a decent business model for you before you start bringing people in, because there is a piece when you start hiring W2 workers like that, like you're responsible for them. So you want to make sure there's something that's sustainable there and that's usually from a business model. But yeah, I think that you should have some kind of rough idea, and that's why I said talking to people who've been in business, learning what they do, asking questions. Find a business mentor, somebody who started a couple of businesses or runs their own business for a while and just ask questions, find out what they did right, find out what they did wrong and then try to put your put your spot in there. Yeah, and.
Joseph Marohn:I bring that up because you know, like, when I used to first start businesses, like it was more of a hobby, right, and then you start getting into it, you're like, well, you know, this is fun, man, but we got to start really generating money because we're spending a lot of money on the, on the other things. So having a good business model in place and making sure you understand what your business model is is definitely a key component to having a successful business. You know so now our job as business owners is to keep the business thriving and scaling our operations Right. Keep the business thriving and scaling our operations Right, and the way we achieve this is by focusing on profitability and also making sure we remain compliant with all the legalities. Now, because you're not a real business owner until you've been sued, right, jay.
Jay Holder:What they say or attempted to be sued anyway, right.
Joseph Marohn:So all right, cool. So while we are in this startup phase, you know what legal steps should we be taking to protect not only our business but ourselves?
Jay Holder:Yeah. So number one obviously is formation. Make sure you're formating the right type of business entity. So whether that's an LLC, a limited partnership, s-corp, it doesn't matter. Um. So I always say I've said, talk to talk to an attorney, an actual business attorney. Find a good tax CPA strategist. That, um, preferably one that'll work with you until you're profitable. But if not, like their work, their weight in gold, like I just switched to one, who's amazing, they're actually helping me with my previous year's taxes Cause I don't think they were done Right, and so I'm trying to say that way. But those are two people that definitely you got to have.
Jay Holder:You've got to know that everyone is insurance. Look at what your service is, what your business is, and work with an insurance provider to find out what type of insurance you need to carry. So, as a transaction coordinator, I don't need personal liability insurance. I don't have a building no one's coming going to fall down in my parking lot or anything like that but I do carry E&O insurance, arizona Missions insurance, which is essentially general liability for any kind of technology and any kind of that our team would make. And so, by that, make sure your insurance is going to cover whoever you hire, if you have people on your staff and outside of that, like I said, part of that whole conversation with those three groups again, define how you're going to do your business, which is your core values. And so when you set those we call core values, boundaries, whatever, just make sure you live within those boundaries.
Jay Holder:And, for whatever you do, don't try to chase a dollar, right, like I see a lot of business owners even today. Right, I see they're like I'll do this and it's like you're going to make 15 bucks and you're going to do that. Great, but this is how much you can lose, this is how bad you can get sued. And I did it and I'm speaking from experience because I did it too Like we, we did it. We, we did things we weren't necessarily supposed to do, but we didn't know either because they were.
Jay Holder:There's's no regulation. There was no regulation on what we did, um, and so that's another thing is find out what all the regulations are for your business. What are you required to have and required to do? Um, yeah, those are. Those are the big things. When it comes to like making sure you're legal, the biggest thing is your entity separate your personal and your business, because you don't want to lose anything personal over something that happens on the business side ever yeah, and, and you know you bring up a good point about the entity and you know, and and making sure that you, you know, start one of those right away.
Joseph Marohn:And you know I think it's a common thing for people to not understand which one to go with Right. So can you explain, you know, the difference between an LLC, a corporation and a sole proprietorship, and which one would you recommend for someone that's just starting out on this business venture?
Jay Holder:yeah, it depends. So like for me uh, my first business I did sports cards and so like bought and sold baseball cards, football cards, things like that. So I just did sole proprietor. I didn't follow an entity or anything like that, because there's nobody I can harm, there's no, there's no like falseness I can do. I either give you the card or I don't. So any ability to be sued really wasn't a big thing for me, right.
Jay Holder:Then when you move into, you know buying houses and things like that, and then the business of TC is we set them up as limited liability companies or LLCs and so we're set up that way because that separates my personal J from my business. If finish line gets sued, I'm in trouble with finish line, that's fine, but nobody touches my personal side and vice versa. So I guess who personally they can't go after my business and that's that's the big thing. And then as you make more money or if you start to get into payroll taxes and things like that, and that's when you want to again CPA, I'm not a CPA, I mean Joseph, let me preface that in case anybody. They said not a CPA, guys, but we're a lawyer, but you want to talk to a CPA or a lawyer about what level you should be at when you do the, the S corp or the C corp. Unless you're making millions of dollars, c corp doesn't make sense. But but S corp makes sense for a lot of people that are going to be paying payroll taxes and things like that.
Jay Holder:Um, and then you get into a thing with llc, then s corpse, which is where we're at right now because I've got multiple llcs to where figuring out tax strategy, and that's why the cpa is important, because you do need all those entities for tax strategy purposes. Um, but yeah, I think I answered your question around about what. Yeah, but yeah, my, I would say, look at it that way. If it's just you doing something like trading goods and sole providers, fine, you know, if you're building stuff for somebody like I know there's a lot of furniture making, my wife likes those people, those furniture makers and all that like to me, I'm getting an llc because if I sit on your chair and fall and stab myself and I sue you, you don't want me to take your house because I broke my leg off your chair, like you just want me to sue your insurance and move on.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, no, I think that's great advice. You know, talk to your CPA and they'll give you the best advice on which way to go about it. For me personally, I started an LLC, but your situation may vary just depending on what type of business you're going to start. So great advice on that. Now, jay, many people feel like they don't have enough funds to even start a business, or maybe they don't quite understand how to access funds to start the business. How much does it cost to start up a new business and maybe give us a few options on how we can fund that business?
Jay Holder:yeah, depending on, like again, what entity structure you go to. On the LLC side, let's just say you do what everybody in our area does and it's two LLCs to start. Usually you're looking at depending on the state unless it's California, um, because they're very high, but any other state it's going to be $500 or less per LLC Right On average. So that's a thousand bucks. And then you need your first month's insurance premiums, things like that, so you could be, you know, two grand in before you start making a dollar Right. But there's different ways to do that. So for me personally, like when I started the TC business, it actually started. I started it with my Gator company, because when I joined Gator, you know, we did the whole. I did the whole PCS thing where I got three LLC set up at the same time. So it cost me like 1500 bucks, but I took one of those LCs and that's what I turned into my first TC business and with that I was able to finance that with credit cards. I know that sounds bad, but I did a personal loan. My accountant went in and took a 0% interest credit card cash advanced it. Well, I didn't cash advance it, I did the credit building or whatever, and then was able to move that over into my LLC as a loan and then I paid myself back out of that.
Jay Holder:But there's lots of ways. There's a company called Fund and Grow. They're very popular where they help you with. It's essentially the same thing. They help you with getting business credit cards, but they like guarantee a certain amount. They work with you on cleaning your credit up. So if you have any like negative effects on your credit that are going to impact you from getting credit lines, they help you get all rid of those and dispute all that um, and that's probably the best one that I've seen. There's a couple of small people or small companies that do it, but Funding and Grow is probably one of the most popular ones. But they're going to cost you and so they have two ways of paying them. You can pay them up front and it's cheaper, or you can pay them a percentage of whatever they get you. So if they get you, they might charge you I don't think 5%, 6%. So if you get you know, if they get you a hundred grand, you're giving them six grand for doing it.
Jay Holder:But that seems like a fair trade off, you know you know it's a lot, but at the end of the day, like if they're going to help you get it, who cares? I mean, you're paying it back anyway. The good thing is, like I said, it's zero percent interest for 12 months 18 months usually what it gets you. So that's a good thing. You just make small payments every month on it and what's great is, if you get enough and you do the consolidation of that of those funds in the real cash, you can always just pay your monthly fee out of that money. So you never really come out of pocket until the end when you got to pay it all back really come out of pocket until the end when you got to pay it all back.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, no, I think using business credit is a smart idea, right? Because if you don't have the capital or the funds to start up a business, you know leveraging credit you know that you've built up over time is a great idea. You know we've talked about business credit on the podcast before on how to start your business credit and how to build it up. So if you guys want, you can refer back to that video. But what are your thoughts, jay, on raising capital at this early startup phase? Is that a bad idea? Is it a good idea?
Jay Holder:I think it's a great idea. Personally, I would raise capital from people you know, close people, because you want that relationship. It's hard to raise capital for a new business that has no capital in it, right, um? But if you go to your you know friends and your family like, hey, I'm thinking about starting this business, here's what I'm projecting. Show them your business plan, show them your model. You might be able to get them to throw some money into it, knowing they might not get it back, right, like I've.
Jay Holder:I've helped people plenty of times with businesses that I've known personally. Like you know. Let me give you a couple hundred bucks and see if you see what we can do. And then you know I've never gotten it back. It's OK, because those businesses didn't work out, but it is what it is. But that's the way I looked at it was go in, talk to your friends, talk to your family and see if they want to go into business with you.
Jay Holder:I'm not a big proponent of giving like cash equity out at the beginning, because you need the cash to stay in the business.
Jay Holder:You can always do like an equity payout or something like that at the end, where you're giving them back their money plus a percentage, but, but again, that's for my businesses. So on my real estate side, we try to bring in private money partners to help us with purchasing the houses and renting them out, and then they get equity position in the house and we go that route. So I think it just depends on your business model. But, yeah, definitely you got a capital raise for sure, whether that's through credit cards, bank loans. I mean, you're going to go into some personal debt for business. I've never seen anybody not go into personal debt to start a business, right, but but but to me that makes you push more. Um, that's another thing. Like, like there's two things that make me really push it's my money, but it's my friend's money. So like, if I borrow money from somebody, I'm gonna push to try to get them their money back, because I don't want to be the reason they're not able to pay their bills in the long run.
Joseph Marohn:So it helps. It helps push you Right Because you know you're you could be a little more lenient with your own money or like, ah, whatever, I'll make that back. But when you're actually using other people's money, you have a responsibility to pay that person back because your name is on the line Right and our name is on the line right and our name is everything in this business right. So you know and you bring up a good point about not giving up equity early on. You know I don't watch a whole lot of TV these days, but you know, one of my favorite shows I used to watch was Shark Tank. Love that show, you know. It's always inspired me either want to invent something or scale up a business so I can land on the show and pitch to the sharks Right. But probably sometimes the sharks wanted huge chunks of equity of the company and a question that used to always go through my head was how do you balance bootstrapping your, your business versus seeking external investors like a shark?
Jay Holder:Yeah, and that's that was it. It's it was for us, it was the credit. So, even like with the SAS company, we did. We we originally put out to bring on investors for the purchase because we did a full asset purchase, but we ended up just self financing between the three of us through leveraging business loans, internal business loans, business loans, so like one of my businesses lent to my my purchase of this business, and then through credit credit, stacking where we just started, stacking all of our available credit, getting new lines of credit and things like that. So that's the way we bootstrapped it.
Jay Holder:Cause the problem is with SAS is people don't understand it yet and so, even though the profit margins are amazing and things like that with this company, when we were buying it, um, it was hard to quantify that for people because they didn't understand, like, how are you getting such a high return on your dollar? Um, and it's because we're creating something that people buy, buy it once, pay a monthly fee and they're using it a thousand times, um, and we don't care how much they use it, um, because they're paying monthly for it.
Joseph Marohn:So right, but yeah yeah, so you know what what investors typically look for when they're considering lending. You know, capital or investing in a business as an equity partner uh, there's a lot of things that are.
Jay Holder:You know that changes, man. That's a great question, because used to it was what was your pL? What was your profit? Last year it was like that. Now, you know, depending on your space I'll just talk about the SaaS space for now.
Jay Holder:Right, they're looking at MRR, which is your monthly recurring revenue. They look at your ARR, which is your annual recurring revenue, and you would think those two would match, but they don't. Because as you're running certain types of specials where you're offering once a year or you're offering, like, a lifetime for cash injection, then you've got the monthly recurring revenue which is supposed to go up year over year, month over month. And then they look at churn rate. So how many people, if I bring on 100, how many of those people stay more than one month? Or, as I onboard 100, how many of the last 100 off board? And you really want your return rate to be less than 10 percent 10 percent, but you want to be less than 10 percent for sure.
Jay Holder:And then you they look at your CAC, which is your, your cost of acquisitions. So how much does it cost you to get a client? Like, are you spending three hundred dollars to get a client that has a long-term value of, say, $200? You lost a hundred bucks, right Like. That's how it looks, that's how you look at it. So, uh, it just depends on. It depends on the investor. But really and truthfully, you know, if you know your MRR, your ARR, your churn rate and your cost per acquisition, you're pretty much good. Um, because as long as those things are all trending up, they start trending down.
Joseph Marohn:It's why are they trending now? Yeah, I highly recommend you guys. That was some great info there, jay. I highly recommend you guys write all those down and really look those up and look into them, because one thing I would tell you is you really want to know your numbers and your business, right, because when you go to pitch it to an investor, if you're trying to bring in an equity partner I've seen it time and time again, even on Shark Tank, right, like they ask them a question and they don't know their numbers. They're like dude, I ain't investing in this business. You don't even know your own damn numbers, yeah. So make sure you guys write that down. It's all great info Now. You don't even have to be a business owner to know that if no one sees or hears about your business, then how are you even going to generate money, right? So what is your advice to approach branding and marketing when you're just starting out with limited resources?
Jay Holder:And that's a great question, because I'm just now going down that rabbit hole of, you know, marketing myself. What's funny is like people know who I am because I'm in all the facebook groups and I'm, you know, I put out value, but I never thought about how to market that value. Um, you know, it's getting out there on social media putting out things. Just it's free for you to do this, it doesn't cost a thing to you know, if you want to spend some money, get a 12.99 canva subscription, go out your post, schedule them on Instagram, facebook, things like that. Just giving value right, like that's the easiest way to start getting clients is by giving out free value. Um, obviously don't give away everything. You got to keep something you know tucked away so you can make some money off of it. But you know, as you're, if you're putting yourself out there, you're making yourself known, you're working on followers and subscribers.
Jay Holder:Um, I'm, I'm part of like two mentor not mentorships, but two courses on, uh, social media marketing. I bought them on a black Friday special last Monday, so I ain't finished them yet, but I already started using some of the techniques I've learned in the in a day of watching some of these videos. Um, and yeah, I could have went to YouTube and I probably could have learned all this for free. All right, I probably wouldn't have to spend. I think I spent 60 bucks total on both of these programs. Um, but these are all right there. I don't have to go to YouTube search. But all right. Now, how do I look up how to set my iPhone settings for the right record? It's right there. I just click iPhone on the on the course. So don't be afraid to spend a little bit of money. Again, don't go crazy. I don't recommend doing a $10,000 marketing mentorship when you've never shot one video on Facebook. Probably doesn't make a good sense of using your money. Right, build up to that.
Jay Holder:But go out there and find those educations, those people, those content creators who say they're doing what they're doing, research them, make sure they are doing it and then get their course. If it's, you know, 30 bucks, 50 bucks Hop on there and go. And then another great way is Alex Hermosi has that program School. Go on there. There's a ton of free groups. You can get in and they show you how to do this stuff. Now are they giving you all the secret sauce? No, they got it tucked away for their paid group because that's how they're going to make their money. But they're showing you enough to where you can piece it together if you don't have the funds to spend. Even if you do have the funds to spend, you might not need to because you might just be good at it. So I would just say, go on there and learn as much as you can about how to market yourself and remember, it's about you.
Jay Holder:Don't brand your business, brand yourself. That's the way I'm doing it. It's branding myself, where I'm just putting myself out there, where people can see me, because you don't necessarily want to just attract your niche. You want to attract anybody that wants to see a business or make some money from the business investment side, so that when you step into a room and you start talking, they're like oh yeah, you own this, like you were talking about Shark Tank. Let's look at this Kevin O'Leary, what does he own? Nobody knows, you do? I mean, we know he owns like O'Leary Wines and things like that, but you don't know all the companies he owns. But you know who. Kevin O'Leary is right, that's who you know. Mark Cuban you know Mark Cuban owns the Mavericks. Yes, that's pretty much all you're going to know. He also owns a pharmacy distribution company. He owns a bunch of other little companies, but you don't need to know that. You know who Mark Cuban is, and so that. Keep doing that.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, now that's. That's super great advice, man, because I can't tell you, man, like you know, one thing Pace taught us early on was like, hey, look, brand yourself first. Right, because once you brand yourself and people know that face and know who you are, anything below that now is you're going to be able to grow it. Right, because if you just build everything, you put all your marketing dollars and everything about this company behind it, and then that company fails, or you close down that company or you change the name, now you have to restart from scratch. Versus you branded yourself, like you just said.
Joseph Marohn:Mark Cuban Everybody knows who Mark Cuban is. Kevin O'Leary they all know who these people are. If they go start another business tomorrow, they're going to probably find success because they, not only because they have the blueprint, but because you know who they are and they can market it. So a lot you know. And one thing I always tell people is like leverage social media, man, we live in a day and age where you can leverage social media. It's free, right? It doesn't cost you anything to create a video. Yeah, you could start putting some marketing dollars behind that video to kind of push it a little bit, but just get in front of a camera and just talk to the people and tell them what, what services you offer and and there's so many different ways you can go about it at low cost options to really brand yourself and brand your company Right.
Jay Holder:So and what's really cool, it was Dan. Dan Martell has a video about this, and it was like and it wasn't even a video about this, it was like a video of a day in the life of a CEO. It was following him around, he flew to like three, three different cities in one day to talk on podcasts. It was hilarious, but one of them he was in Nashville, and this guy was like so how do I get started in social media? He goes you got your phone, put it out, start a video right there, and said now, do I have to post the video? No, I don't. I just started my social media, though, because what he did, what he was saying, was just practice, like, get out and talk, talk on your phone, watch it, see if it's good. If it's good, do a little editing if you can, and upload it. If it's not good, you have this great button called delete and you hit the delete button and you record whatever you want, but it's it. Man, that was one of the things.
Jay Holder:When I saw that video, I was like dude, I I try to make everything perfect, right, like, I've got the fifteen hundred dollar camera behind me. I've got all that. I don't even use it right right now because I'm just practicing recording on my phone in the car, in my office or wherever I'm at in the gym now recording things, putting it out there If it's good. I probably record 10 hours worth of video every couple of days, but I only put out maybe 30 minutes worth because the other stuff is just garbage. But it's just me talking and practicing and learning how to have that communication with the phone. Uh, one of the things I hate the most is seeing myself on camera. So I hate the selfie mode where I'm talking like I try to get my wife to hold the camera so I can't see what I look like. And I can talk all day if I'm not looking at myself, um. But if I'm looking at myself, I'm like, eh, I look funny, hey man, we want to see that handsome face there, brother.
Jay Holder:Oh, y'all can't. I don't want to see it, I just it messes me up. But yeah, I think if people understood, like you said, it's free, like you have a phone, just shoot it, just record it, don't even post it, you do don't matter. I'm like I don't care if people laugh or whatever. I don't care about none of that because my name's getting put out there on something and it's good.
Joseph Marohn:Perfect example, too, is with the podcast. Right, I have a name for the podcast, the Real Estate Unlock podcast but when I created the YouTube channel, I named it Joseph Marohn. I branded myself and that way you know, like I don't want to be just known entirely for a podcast, I want to be able to build off the podcast and build off the platform that I'm on by branding myself and people getting familiar with my face and knowing who I am. So good stuff, man. Now let's talk about building a team. How do you know when it's time to start hiring and building a team? What roles and job titles should we be looking for to fill in our first hires?
Jay Holder:So you know, when we started building a team, we just started bringing on people that could work files. In my transaction coordination company With the SaaS company. The first hire we did was an executive assistant. So we started looking at all those little things that we were doing that we didn't want to do Like I don't like to check email, I can't stand chicken redundant emails.
Jay Holder:So I think if Susan does that and puts the important stuff in a box for me and then I go look at it once a day and I answer what I need to answer, I don't pay our bills like that's what he does. He goes into our account and does it and then I look at the financials every day to see what went in and what went out. But I don't have to actually tediously click buttons Right and so to be an executive, like somebody to assist you with doing all the menial things, like I said, I referenced Dan Martell a lot because I'm on his book right now, but he talks about that like the pain line and all that, and then the um, the ladder, and so the first thing he says always is hiring an assistant because they're going to take care of everything that you don't want to do. That opens you up and I like one of the things he says is like don't step over dollars to save dimes, right, like multi, multimillion dollar companies are not built with $10 task. So, um, I have somebody who does all of my social media editing for me.
Jay Holder:Um, obviously not the stuff I post, you know from the gym, but like videos. I actually put out podcasts, things like that. She goes in, edits it and then she builds some of my um, some of my material that gets put out there, um, and she makes a good payment for her. She was happy with that's what she wanted. But I'm not sitting there spending five hours editing a video like she does that and, and you know, it cost me 20 bucks and it's worth it for me, but that's so, yeah. So find somebody who can take care of those menial tasks so you can focus on the business. Then, once you're doing that, you're going to get to a point where there's new things that you don't want to handle and it's OK. Do I hire somebody to come in and do that, or do I keep it and hire somebody to take X away?
Jay Holder:So whatever that pain point is, whatever you're in pain with and it's not literally I'm hurting, but like tired of doing it, don't want to do it it's physically draining, mentally draining, any of that stuff. I'm hiring somebody that can handle that and it doesn't have to be an employee, it can be a virtual assistant, it can be somebody you know in the Philippines or in South America, any of those things, depending on what your business is and things like that. And then once you get up to to me, and once you start making five, five ish million a year, now it's time to hire bigger, bigger positions. Like to me, that's when you bring in a cfo, a ceo, somebody that's actually business oriented, because then you have a real business. We've all got businesses right, but they're small businesses. Small business, you're the ceo. You're the ceo because that's where you're at in that uh season and journey, uh.
Jay Holder:But the reality is when you get to five million, now you have a functioning, operating business that you're going to be bringing in more people and so you need to bring in somebody who has experience with running at that scale, because once you hit five, the next step is 10, 15, 20. Right, and that's big money for a company, any company. I don't care. If you make 20 million dollars a year and you're profiting 30, 40 percent of that, that's a pretty good number. So that's how I would do the hiring scale. For us. It was hiring more transaction coordinators so that we could produce more files in the transaction side.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, I think the key here is what I always tell people is, as a business owner, know what your time is worth. Right, because, like you just mentioned about doing a five-hour video edit five, know what your time is worth. Right Because, like you just mentioned about you know, doing a five-hour video edit five hours of your time is probably a lot worth a lot more than $20, right, so you have to understand that. You know, in the beginning you may not have all the money to do that. Right, you may have to wear all the hats, and you know. In fact, you know, jay, you may attest to this, but one of the hardest things for me to learn as a business owner was to delegate. You know, I want to wear all the hats. I believe I can do all the things. I'm saving money by just doing more roles. Now, how do you approach delegation in the early stages of your business and what tasks should business owners focus on themselves versus outsourcing? What tasks should business owners focus?
Jay Holder:on themselves versus outsourcing. So I'm still in that learning how to delegate factor because so at a nine to five, I can delegate all day long, but when it's your own company, you're like nobody can do it better than me, right? And that's a small business mentality and a startup mentality everywhere. Like I said, don't try to be if you're not a. I said don't try to be if you're not a bookkeeper. Don't try to be a bookkeeper, like if you're not. Obviously, if you're not paying a lot of bills yet and you're not buying a lot of items, like you're not having a lot of ins and outs, okay, do your own books. But when you start actually doing transactional funding, where you're not funding but where you're actually having ins and outs and you're actually getting complicated, don't try to. You know, go learn to be a bookkeeper. Unless that is your market, don't try to be a bookkeeper or a bookkeeper. You can hire a virtual bookkeeper for $300 a month. Is what you'll pay for a good book, and that's including QuickBooks, so it's not bad. Um, if you're going to hire W2 people, don't try to learn how to be HR. Don't try to learn all the state regulations all that hard. Go to gusto, pay them their hundred dollars a month to do all your people and you don't have to worry about it because they're licensed in every state. They handle payroll, they handle taxes, they do all that. You ain't gotta worry about it. So, um, you know when you're getting it and they'll do insurance and everything. It's great. And then, um, like I said, the executive assistant quit trying to answer all your emails, quit trying to allow people. Um, I heard I forgot who said it but I heard somebody say like your inbox is really just somebody else's complaint department because they're taskless. Your inbox is their task list. That's what it was. They're asking you to do stuff, but it's your inbox. You don't own it. So it's like give it to somebody to handle. Make sure you stay on track with what you're doing.
Jay Holder:Um, do a time audit. Like people look at that. Like you said, it's all about money. Like, look how much money you made this week. Let's just look at this. Take your business, everything you do in it, how much did you make this week? How many hours did you work in your business? Let's say you made freezing math. Let's say you made a thousand dollars and then you did 10 hours that week. We all know that's not true, but let's just say that's what it was. You're worth a hundred dollars an hour. So, like you said, that, five hours I spent in this video that cost me $500 when I could have just paid a VA 20 bucks, right.
Jay Holder:So for me, my biggest thing is getting on getting on doing this with you right being on podcasts, being on conversations, being on meetings where I can talk about my services, I can sell our services and then move on. If I take five hours and I do seven Zoom calls and I sell four people 20 bucks isn't even thought about right, and so it's like that. And so it's measuring your time for both money and energy. Like again, if you're doing those things like that just drain you to where you're not going to be in that space you need to be, to be creative or to have impactful zoom calls to where you can bring in clients, then don't do it Like, pay somebody to do it and move on. But those things that you're really, really enjoying or you're really good at that make you money. That should be what you focus on, and then everything else you just figure out. Either I'm going to do it on a weekend, I'm going to pay X person to do it, or I'm going to hire this company just to handle that. Um, again, it's gotta be profitable though, right, like you can't hire out everything in the beginning because you have no money, like you're not going to be having any money on your profit line, but start building to those things.
Jay Holder:So, like what we, what I do personally on my stuff is I look at how much I make every month from the businesses, or how much the businesses bring in every month, and then I say, okay, if I bring this person in and I pay them a thousand dollars a month, that's one deal. One more deal I got to do a month to keep my current profit margin. That's the way I look at it. I got to a certain what's comfortable for our business for the month and then every time I want to hire somebody and I know what that salary is going to cost me, I say, okay, that's X amount of deals more over this that we have to do, and I think that's a great way. Then another way is leverage systems, and it's not just about technology Leverage, you know, repeatable systems to where everything's done the same every time. Now you and I are both in real estate.
Jay Holder:So we know nothing is the same every single time lives by is if I can put, build a system or a process that will hit 80 of what I get, that other 20 just works out. It always does. And so, um, for us, like on our transaction side, we use like I'll give you an actual application we use, we use monday, that's how we track all of our deals and that's how we track everything, we track our kpis. And monday we have, we have go high level. We have all that too. But we try everything in mond Monday because it's easy to use.
Jay Holder:I built it because I started working on it a time when I was doing all the hats. I couldn't delegate. I tried to delegate it and I didn't like the way they did it, so I took it over and did it myself and that was horrible. I should have just let them do it and pushed it out two weeks, but I was ready. But after that, everything's repeatable, my. But after that, like, everything's repeatable, my team can go in there and when my team goes, hey Jay, what do we do about this? I'm like, give me five minutes and I write something and it's in Monday and I'm like, there you go, go, click on that loom video, that's in Monday. It'll tell you exactly what to do.
Jay Holder:And then for new business owners that are starting to record everything you do from day one. So get a camera webcam. You're going to need it anyway. Get Loom it's free, or you get the upgraded version for $10 a month. It'll be the greatest assistant you've ever had. Loom is the greatest assistant I've ever had because I just turn it on and I just talk while I'm working and then I can take that and I can in there. You can build SOPs from it, you can transcribe it, you can do everything right in the system and then you don't have to ever do it again. I don't have to remember how I did something. All I got to do is go whatever like wash the dishes, right and the video comes up and I go okay, I do step A, step B, all right, cool, we're done. Have a good day, yeah no-transcript with my team, right?
Joseph Marohn:So instead of, you know, get on a meeting every time with a new employee and having to train them over and over, I just record a video and then I put it in our own Google drive, which is my own version of a vault, and I go refer back to that video and you'll see everything we covered.
Joseph Marohn:And you know, even using you brought up, using automation and stuff like I use Fathom note takers when I'm going inside of meetings and stuff. It's awesome, man, you leave the meeting, it gives you all the notes from the meeting, it breaks it down and it gives you, you know, your takeaways from the meeting and even what you should be following up with. It's. It's such a great assistant, right where I don't have to physically pay that person to be there. You typically you would need someone like a copywriter or someone that's in there taking notes for you as an assistant, and now I have a free version of assistance, right. So now what? What are some of the common pitfalls you see, jay, that are here of new business owners fall into and how can they avoid them?
Jay Holder:man. I think the biggest pitfall I see is people relying on their new business to support themselves. I know that sounds bad, because that's what we all start a business for is to be supported, right. But when you're starting to take funds out of your business immediately and not leaving enough in there for growth and actually setting it up correctly, I think that's one of the biggest pitfalls I've seen, where people are losing the ton of money. And then number two is not having a measure at all. It's okay not to know what you need to do, it's okay not to know where you're going, but measure day over day, measure week over week, right? Measure month over month so that you can make sure that you are growing, you're growing successfully and your spend is right.
Jay Holder:Um, I helped a wholesaler with the deal with a thing one time it's recent where he was telling me he was making like 20 grand a month and I was like all right, that's, that's good, I guess. I mean, I guess that's good for you. I was like how much are you spending on marketing? Because I don't know, I go, okay. I said how much are you spending on marketing? He goes I don't know, I go, okay. I said how much are you spending on each of your marketing channels? I don't know. I'm like, okay, but you're profiting 20 grand. He's like, yeah, I go. How many. How many did you close in deals last month? He goes, I don't know. I was like, wait a minute, you don't know what you're spending business. He's like, yes, I was like, all right, cool, let's fix that.
Jay Holder:So we went in and set up his kpi. I went and set up his kpis to where we actually tracked his five marketing channels, how much he was spending of those, how many each marketing channel brought in contracts and how valuable were those contracts. And what we found was there was one market where he was dumping like six grand a month into that was producing zero. But he had this other market he was only putting two grand into that was producing like 30% of his profit and it's like, well, let's close this market. He's like, oh, but I need that. I go, no, you don't. It's clear, in three months you spent $18,000 for nothing, where, if you took this one, theoretically right now, it's still flushing out and it's working to a degree where I was like, if you take 50 percent of that for now, just so, nine grand instead of 18 and you dump it over into this one that's producing 30 percent of your profit. At only two thousand dollars you should be up around 60 percent more profit, profit, I think. Last month he closed he was up like 33%, which is great, because he's also up because his spend is down, because he only put half of what he was spending into it and the other half I told him to keep into the company. And so if he wouldn't have never looked at, actually had somebody look at his numbers and show him that he wouldn't have known that he was giving money away, because that's his pitfall is we become so focused on how much we're bringing in that we don't realize we're losing money. I'm not looking at numbers at a macro level. We all look macro, right, we all say we're bringing in 50 grand, awesome. But if you look at a micro level and you can see that you're spending 10 grand on things you don't need to spend on, then you end up making $10,000 more. So now you're bringing in 60,000 more and I feel together my wife laughs at me because I didn't look at our bank account and apparently I was a member of something that was charging me 50 bucks a month and I never noticed it.
Jay Holder:Been doing it for a year. Did a bank audit I was like what is this item? And Noticed it been doing it for a year. Did a bank audit I was like what is this item? And she was like you signed up for that and said you were going to cancel it. I was like, well, okay, oh, I lost. You know I lost $600 because I didn't cancel it in this, in the window. But uh, you know, and I do that now, like I've got applications, I'm like I don't need that anymore, cancel. I'm like I don't need that anymore and cancel. But I've had it for three months and never used it. But you got to do that audit and I just haven't done it. And so I can speak for myself Do your audits and make sure everything you say you need or you're going to do is there, and track the money and you'll be profitable, and profitability means your business growth.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, it just goes back to what we were saying earlier on right Tracking your KPIs and knowing your numbers, because now you can, you can pivot and you can. You have a baseline and you could see clearly hey, this channel is not making any money. Why do I keep dumping money into this when I should be applying it here, where I'm actually generating money? So good stuff there. Um, you know what? What should we be focusing on in our first year to make sure our business is successful?
Jay Holder:I mean, I'd focus on getting your name out there. That'd be number one, number two just producing good work. Don't worry about speed, don't worry about time. Worry about giving good, good work to people and get plenty of recommendations. So get your testimonials from your clients. It's something we didn't do. We're starting to do it now but, like, like I said, we've done over 1200 plus deals and I think we've got like 20 reviews on facebook, because we don't we always forget to say, hey, can you give us a review at the end of a file, right? Um, I know this.
Jay Holder:One person was talking about how they're. They were a realtor and the first thing they would do is, when they close a deal, they'd pull their phone out and record their client and be like, hey, give me a testimony right now, and it's like, ooh, that's pretty cool. It's almost like holding them hostage, though you kind of can't go. Oh, they suck, because you're on camera right there. But yeah, so make sure you're getting your customer reviews. Build relationships like that's. The other thing is is business in general is a relationship thing, unless you're a mcdonald's or a walmart where relationship doesn't matter. Well, none of us are those people, by the way. Um, your relationships matter and so you know, be courteous, be kind. Uh, live by the rule, you know treat people how you want them to treat you. So you know I'm not saying that your client is always right I don't believe that. But you know they are your clients, so make sure you're taking care Absolutely.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, man, and you know there's. There's just so much we can really get into on this topic, right, we can really get into on this topic, right. It's hard to really cover entirely how to start a business in a one-hour episode because obviously there's so much that goes involved with it. But, jay, let's just give everybody a call to action right now. That's made it this far along the video. If you could give one single piece of advice or an action step for someone looking to start their business today, what would it be?
Jay Holder:Post about it, post about the business you're going to start. That's it. Don't name it, don't give all the details, but just post hey, going to start doing X and whatever X is. Put it out there, because I believe that, I truly believe, that if you put things out there, if one person sees it, your accountability doubles. If two people see it, it triples. And it built, it compounds right, because, uh, I mean, I'm wearing a shirt says consistency, because that's what I've been posting on for the past you know it was 47 or 48 and it's making sure you're doing something every single day to get better.
Jay Holder:So if you post it, you're going to keep, you're going to have to drive for it, Um, or somebody is going to ask you, um, in fact, if you tag me, I'll be the one to ask you about it. So, uh, uh, because I I want to help people in general in life, but I really want to help people in business, cause I think that that that's the American dream, is entrepreneurship, and so if I can help with any way and it's just like message you going hey, joseph, you said you was gonna do this man where you at just curious, um, and you can ignore me, right, that's the power of the internet. But at the same time, I'm the type if you're like me, people do it. You're like, oh, man did say I was gonna do that. Uh, let me do that. You know, um, I think you're the same way.
Jay Holder:Just, I think if you post, you're gonna do something that somebody calls you out. You're like, oh, yeah, I'm working on it. You're immediately going to start working on it because I just think that's a, you know, a trait that we have. But, uh, yeah, I think, yeah, post it, post it up that you're gonna start work, start doing it. Whatever x is, you know you're gonna start cutting lawns. Put it out there if you're gonna start. It's getting cold over here, so if you're gonna start snow blowing, put it out there, um, and see if that doesn't help you build your business or at least jumpstart it.
Joseph Marohn:And I love that man because you know I've been seeing you, man, staying consistent, you're in the gym and you're crushing it, man. So I applaud that. And you know it's posting not just the business but it's, jay, as a person, right. So when I go on your profile I see that not only do you do real estate, you're also a business owner. You have a TC service company, but on top of that you're a human being, right. You're a family guy, you're in the gym, you have kids, you have a wife and people like to see that stuff because now, you're relatable, right, and it's not just like he's some big guru, he's some big real estate guy. I actually relate to this guy. I got kids too, you know. Oh, I like the gym too.
Joseph Marohn:You know that type of stuff you know is good stuff and I really agree with you on that. You know, just post it, you know, put it out there so everybody can see. Again, it goes back to what we're talking about the power of social media. It's free, you can do it anytime you want and you can just pull your camera out and never have to think about it, or you can put some thought into it and really put out some good stuff, but yeah, man, good stuff. So now, last question I want to ask you, jay, before we close this thing out, is you know you've proven to have what it takes to become a successful business owner? What is the biggest lesson you've learned from starting your own business, and how did it shape your journey?
Jay Holder:Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing I learned was how to how to set the boundaries. Um, that's the biggest thing I learned from starting my business and and the reason I say that is I was a hundred percent accessible, no matter what it was. And you know people, you know, even though they're paying you, they're clients, right, they're. They're paying you, but they will take advantage of that and there's a certain point where that bleeds into your personal life. You know, I'm getting calls in the middle of the night, I'm getting calls when I'm out to the movies, I'm getting called at church and it's like look, there's got to be a boundary. So figure out what you want to do your life, put everything into it. Like I'm saying, put every hour you have that inside your boundary, into it. But remember, it's a job, it's your business, but it's a job. So you need to set the boundaries. Make sure that you're balancing your personal life. There's no balance. There's no work-life balance. Nobody, I don't believe in that. But there is a balance.
Jay Holder:Personal life, like if I'm going on a date with my wife, I'm with my wife, I don't care like for me, my business is in the time.
Jay Holder:I'm dealing with title companies and attorneys, title companies that, working at six o'clock eastern time, they're closed at five, so I am not getting on a phone call to talk about what title needs to do until tomorrow. If you need me that bad, email me. Um, and the best way I found to set boundaries around that, especially working with investors, is monetary. I will work with you after hours, but it's going to cost you X amount of dollars on top of what you're already paying me, because that's what's in our contract and so yeah. So boundaries contractual boundaries are really important for me and I found any business I work in or start we'll start with that because, again, like I said, I do. Like you said, I have a wife, I have a family, and the whole point of being an entrepreneur is to be able to spend more time with them, and so yeah, I love that man and I think you just hit it right on the head, right, because I had that issue as well.
Joseph Marohn:You know, making myself too accessible right, and we get into this space because we want financial freedom right, we want to buy our time back. But how are you buying your time back if you're making yourself so accessible and everybody could just call you at any time of the day when I'm with my wife and my kids? I don't even have my phone next to me. You cannot get ahold of me. My phone is off.
Joseph Marohn:I am tuned in with my family because why I've already put in the work earlier on in the day and I think it's really just getting back to.
Joseph Marohn:You know, setting time block in your day, having a calendar in place and if you happen to have an assistant, you know, eventually, obviously you can't do that early on, but eventually you want to have an assistant to filter those calls in and then they know they can, they can have them scheduled on your calendar, set appointments and and just really keeping yourself not so accessible. So I love that man, I love that you hit that on the head so awesome. Well, jay, I appreciate you for coming on here Just pouring knowledge on all of us, showing us how to successfully and start a business. Guys realize that people pay for this information and Jay just gave it all to us for free. I guarantee this episode is going to help so many people take that initial step in starting their first business and they're going to find a ton of success at it. So thank you, jay. You're a huge inspiration to us and I'm honored I get to call you a friend.
Jay Holder:Absolutely. I appreciate you having me on Joseph for real, Absolutely Now.
Joseph Marohn:Jay, where can people get a hold of you or learn more about your TC services?
Jay Holder:The fastest way is just on Instagram. It's at djholdercom. At djholder, on Instagram, there's my link to my TC services, me, my calendar, if you want, uh, my link to my TC services, me, my calendar. Um, so yeah, if you want to go there and then my TC services is, uh, finish line TC servicescom, um, but yeah, instagram is the easiest way to get ahold of me now, um, and then book a call. We have you know and love to help people in general, so let's do it.
Joseph Marohn:Awesome. Now, if you guys are finding value from this podcast, don't forget to show your boys some love. If you like what we're bringing you, don't forget to subscribe. It helps us continue providing value to others by reaching a broader audience. We're out here to serve, learn together and help as many people as possible. Make sure to also smash that like button and drop a comment down below telling us what type of business you plan on starting. Don't be shy now. Drop a comment down below and let us know all about it. Appreciate all the continued support and, guys, stay tuned, because we're pumping these episodes out every two weeks. I got some awesome topics and guests coming up next that will change the entire way you do business. You definitely don't want to miss out. Best believe I'm going to keep bringing you that fire. Thank you, Jay. Peace Later Rooks. Thank you for watching.