The Leadership Mistake That’s Killing Your Business (And How to Fix It) | Cody Hofhine

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If you want to stop grinding and start growing, Joe Homebuyer is your competitive edge. What is up, the Science of Flipping family? This is a great episode.
Now, he and his business partner are on separate episodes because they functionally run separate parts of the business. Today, I have my guy, Cody Hoffine.
He is one of the original leaders, thought leaders, and simply one of the experts for years, well over a decade, along with myself in the space of real estate investing. And I have Cody here with me today, brother.
What is happening? Dude, I'm so excited to be here. I was fired up.
I landed in Miami, never been to Miami to like actually stay here, be here. We're only here for one night.
Now I'm wishing to hear where more nights. Dude, I wish you were here more nights too.
It's a great place to be right now. And it's raining though.
Why is it raining? Come on. As Florida.
All right. So listen, you and I have been around a long, long time together.
Yes. You were one of the original members of Wholesaling Inc.
Yep. You've done however many thousands of deals.
You've been a leader to how many thousands and tens of thousands. You are now the co-owner of Joe Homebuyer and you have a franchise with over 80 franchisees.
That's right. How the hell did that all come about? I wish I could say as a genius, so sometimes I sit there and pinch myself wondering how it all happened.
Um, step-by-step, I think this goes back in just general in life. And I think you could probably pin it to your own life is life had to perfectly happen for me.
And you start with working for a dad and then realizing when Oh nine hit and the economy, he's in construction. So we were building all these big massive commercial buildings 09 market crashes and i he wanted to keep paying me because he's just an incredible dad an incredible mom um but i couldn't let him do it so i went and got of all things a sales job uh selling vinyl fencing this is how i met mark stubler my business partner so you start to see how this all pans out and works out.
When you look backwards, you can see everything like hindsight. It's all 20-20 vision.
But as you're moving forward, sometimes it's like you don't know how to connect the dots. You know why, the rest of the reason.
It's awful a little bit, right? That's when he said, why is this happening to me, right? Now, internally, that's what most people say. They have to reframe it.
It's happening for you. Absolutely happening for you, even though you can't see it in the moment.

When you look back, you're like, I had to do it.

It was hard though.

It was hard.

If you didn't have wholesaling ink.

No.

If you didn't leave wholesaling ink.

Yeah, and I don't have wholesaling ink if I didn't do insurance because insurance allowed me to insure all these real estate investors.

I was one of the largest agents insuring specifically fix and flip investors. And I would go to these meetings all the time, like, nonstop.
Yeah. And I would never listen to real estate.
All I'd hear is I have three rentals. I'm like, ah, that's three in policies.
That's three brand new policies. I'm going to go meet that guy.
Yeah. I'd never once heard I made $50,000 on this deal.
I made $80,000 on this deal. I made $20,000.
Never once heard it. All I heard was three more homes that I get to insure and make 400 a year on those policies yeah yeah you know listen some people would say get singular focus and you'll have great results which is true yeah but sometimes you got to open you got to kind of open up your ears a little bit and say okay what am I not hearing yeah right which is that which is you're like oh there's three fix and flippers here that you know and so talk about, you know, you are brilliant in this space and you've been around for a very long time about leading people.
Yeah. And now you have 80 franchisees that you get to lead and bring to the promised land, so to speak, within the real estate space, investing in wholesaling, fix and flipping.
Talk to us a little bit about what it takes to like run a company that has 80 people depending on you. i think in most cases in i think you probably see this in coaching someone's coming to you for that silver bullet it's like what is the one marketing channel that will produce x amount of leads and produce x amount of deals every single month and here's what i have learned over the years i've learned that it's less to do about external strategy and more to do about internal mastery like the more more we work on ourselves, our business is just a byproduct of who we're becoming each other day.
So Jim Rohn says, rarely does a man's income exceed his level of personal development, right? And so the commitment for me is how do I teach each one of our Joe franchise owners? How do I teach them and develop them into becoming just incredible leaders and do the work inside? Like, how do we help them have stronger mindset? How do we help them have better habits and not just serve them, but also serve their business and their family? Like, these are things that are not being taught, I think, just out there everywhere. Sometimes it's that even with Wholesaling Inc., we're really good at teaching people how to get get their first deal but we really didn't go deep on mindset or someone that's fearful of spending more than a hundred dollars on direct mail like that was tough yeah we had hundred dollars remember those days oh my goodness dollars on direct mail yeah and you'd get a deal yeah wild no you can't even get a click for a hundred dollars no uh but but yeah, it's, it times have changed, but it's, it's making sure that we are developing them as human beings because the business will only go and grow to the level of your commitment to your personal development.
And, and I've seen this and that's why I work heavily with incredible mentors in my life that are better than me. I'm some of the things that I'll share on the podcast, know that I sit on the shoulders or stand on the shoulders of great people that have taught me this stuff.
Robin Sharma, one of those dear mentors slash friends now that I, I love learning from all the time because he's kind of helped me realize like, don't do this victory on your own. There's nothing worse than doing a climbing.
We're all climbing our Mount Everest, right? There's nothing worse than getting to the top and realize no one's there with you you didn't bring your family along with your wife your kids with you it's like that's an empty victory and so i totally build it in a way that you can still have incredible balance in life and doesn't mean equal time in all areas but that we're present in all areas with the time that we have yeah you know listen i say it is slightly different but the reason why I reframed coaching for myself is I don't want to get rich off people and be at the top of the mountain with no one around me. Yeah.
I want to get rich with people. Yeah.
And we're all at the top of them. Yeah.
Right. And that's a big passion of mine going into 2025.
Right. And I know this is you and Mark's big passion as well as not do it, you know, or do it with everybody, not just teach everybody and say, Hey, and say hey go do this thing right um you said something that kind of triggered a thought i had over the last week is the the idea of like inter value intra value versus enterprise value a great friend of mine cole said that to me this was like, that is great.
I love to hear more about where you're going with that.

Yes.

Well, the value you see within yourself and respecting yourself to have your mind and your body and mindset, your body, your inner person, your faith, your belief system in alignment with what you actually want. And that is where you usually will talk about the business side, the money side, the finance side, right? Yep.
And if you can put your intra or inter personal value in alignment with your enterprise value,

the business and finances, then you can actually achieve that.

Yeah.

But if it's incongruent, it's going to be lopsided, right?

So if you only focus on business and money, you might make a whole ton of money, but you

might be overweight, overworked, stressed out, impatient.

No relationships.

Exactly.

Right. So let's talk about how you bring that to the table for Joe home buyer franchisees.
Okay. So example last Thursday.
So every Thursday I get to do a call with our franchisees and it's always built around personal development. So they know my call is just going to be personal development.
It's like the, we call it the chocolate covered broccoli, right? Like no one wants broccoli wants broccoli so you gotta you just gotta hide the broccoli in the chocolate right yeah yeah given what they think they want but given what you know they need right um and so last week we went over five daily non-negotiables some of those are for example read 10 pages daily there's so many great people out there in fact i would assume you read a ton yeah and if not you're probably doing a ton of audio audio audiobooks are my thing like on the way here yep uh i will tell you i listened to two just because i want to highlight this right uh brand it like sirhant yeah because i think he is our generational branding genius okay okay so i'm like what does he have to say about this brilliant book by the way if you guys care about brand yeah my book um and then the uh what was it undo i'll look at it right now but basically if things aren't working how do you change yeah i think it's called undo okay you know on my book um anyways because i'm always looking to get better yes and the the great people have already lived an incredible life have left success clues for us all along the way. And they write them in these books.
That's right. And it's available to everyone.
Elon Musk. Yeah.
He read 10 hours a day as a kid. Look what he's doing in the world today.
Totally. Like he read the Britannica, the whole Encyclopedia Britannica before he was nine years old.
Reset is the book. Reset.
Reset. And things aren't going the way you're trying to make them go.
How do you actually press reset so you can achieve what you want? Yeah. By Dan Heath.
He's already a three-time bestselling author, right? Like, yeah. The great people are always trying to learn.
Always trying to learn. Warren Buffett, I would consider him already a great, a great, a great, still spends eight hours a day reading.
Isn't that crazy? Well, now it's because he has nothing else to do. He's on a whole different planet of what he's doing.
Yeah. But it's just, it's, it's, that's some of the daily non-negotiables working outs, like bringing your body to a sweat, working out 45 minutes a day, make that a daily non-negotiable.
And so they're not coming to me to say, Hey, my marketing's out of sync. What do you think I should do? I'm like, I don't know, but have you moved your body today? Like if you drink water, have you gone out there and done these things yeah and like no we haven't done those things you've got to do those things like the business is only as good as you are treating yourself and they're like oh man i'm so tired i'm like it's 3 p.m that's right like you we got to get in shape yeah like we got to make sure we're making the right so even though they think it costs time to go to the gym or it costs time to do some of these habits.
No, those are the things that will give you the energy to do the business and what the business requires. But it's an investment.
You know, I'm going to say something you already know, but it's an investment, right? So I wake up every day at five so I can get to the gym. You have four kids.
I have two. So I have to wake up at five because of what you just said.
That's four kids. So I know Justin doesn't get any gym time or get to focus on Justin time or sit in silence because we never get that.
No. If I don't wake up before everyone else, I know that to be true, but because by the time my day is done, I'm zapped.
Yeah. Right.
So now what now? Where's my gym time? Where's my focus time? And it's an investment in the cost. I don't want to pay the cost of whatever.
That's even the wrong word. That's already the broken mentality thinking about it.
It's the investment in yourself because the age old saying is you have to fill up your cup first to be able to pour into others. Right.
And so that is an investment in yourself. That's right.
All else. That's right.
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No, I'm a hundred percent with you. It is, it is what I'm love doing each and every day.
It's, it's, I just think in talking about my wife the other day, I was like, what's amazing is I get paid to do what I love to do. And it's just sit and read, like sit and like study and write out models and business models and be mentored by just great people yeah think about um an example do you know dan martell of course you've been on your podcast yeah okay so dan martell he taught a principle to me that i still use each and every day with my kids i use each and every day with our z's and that is the one three one principle like i love it's one of my favorite principles it's great is everyone's going to come to you with a problem and so these these uh franchisees they come to us like oh our acquisition manager it's just not working i got rid of them and i'm like are they not working or is like the communication on what they needed right not working and sometimes it's hard for them to really look in the mirror and realize the problem is themselves and so that frame sometimes you mean like 99 of the time it's more than than not right yeah like it's hard we had to go through this me and mark had to eat humble pie we had our first hire and it would have been easy well i did say it i'm guilty of it i'm like that acquisition manager sucked yeah like it just sucked yeah it's a c player at best but really what i'm saying is i'm a c leader at best because you're only attracting who you are and so when people are like you gotta have a players like you've got to do whatever you can to get a players that's great but if you're not an a leader yeah they're not staying you can convince them you might con them just like someone comes to an interview and cons you on hey i'm this person i'm this person then first day at work you're like wait a second this is this is nowhere who just interviewed yesterday right they're not going to stay a players are looking for a leaders they want to know people know where they're going they're not going to stay long and so if i want a players on my team me and mark we had to do the work and it wasn't easy it wasn't easy to look in the mirror and realize i was the problem that's right i was the bottleneck i was the reason why c class talent was working for our business because I was a C-class leader.
Well, and to finish the Dan Martell thought, right? What are the three solutions to said problem? Yeah. And together, we'll figure out what is the one answer.
That's right. How hard is that as a leader though? Many of them don't do it.
They just want to put out the fire. That's what we're trained to do is speed to this, speed to this.
We have Amazon at our fingertips fingertips we have all this easy stuff that makes life so easy but leadership is not speed to the problem it's slow it's taking time and saying hey justin you say there's a problem where you were you uh my house last night you and my wife said this so my wife was just saying something similar about me yeah she because i'm dealing with a really unfortunate real estate problem with the bad contractors yeah really unfortunate and she said if you were a little bit slower and a little bit more patient would you have even hired that contractor and the honest truth when i really had to internalize that question was like fuck no she's right she's right right and that point as a leader. Sometimes you're just like, go and let's just keep going up.
We got to just, we just bought the apartment. We got to get the contracting.
We got it. Right.
And so taking some time being methodical, but doing it and doing it efficiently is really important. And that's, you know, that is what takes you from growth to scale.
Right. So Joe Holmbayer takes investors doing deals that need to grow and then they can grow and scale.

But it's also run fast to also slow down.

Like slow down to run fast.

That's your idea, right?

That's right.

That's crucial.

And I think of when it comes to leadership in general, it's not going to be easy. It's the hardest work.
Do you know Anthony Trucks? I don't. Okay.
So a friend of mine, Anthony Trucks, goes and speaks all over on stages, and he calls it the dark work, right? He says it's not easy. It's hard.
It's the hardest work out there. So it's not fun.
What I do is not the fun work. It's fun for me, but a lot of people don't want to hear it.
It's harder for them, right?

It's harder for them. They want to think it's the marketing.
They want to think it's the acquisition manager. They want to think it's, well, it's because this is off.

Or it's the leads, or it's the market, or it's the interest rates, or it's the neighborhood.

Correct.

And that's the challenging part is like you have to get their buy-in to say, are you good with me just really hitting you in between the eyes?

That's right.

Because I'm objective to this.

This is where i get really good i want to help you i don't have any any significant interest in you flipping that home i want you to flip it and win that's right let me tell you why you aren't that's exactly right so we've had experiences and mark knows like if there's a hard message that's to be delivered that's's how I get to deliver it. Okay.
So how do you deliver that? Let's talk to the leaders of the group or want to be leaders. Yeah.
How do you take a really hard message that you have to deliver to anybody? Yeah. How do you frame it? Okay.
So there's a book out there first and foremost to kind of reference to this, Crucial Conversations. It's one of the greatest books around this.
Okay. And it just talks about these conversations have to be had.
You just have to have them. They're not going to be fun.
They're going to be awkward. But something changed when I really love the individual because I asked for the permission.
Hey, are you okay that I'm going to tell you things? And it may be things that you may not like to hear, but are you okay if I tell you the honest truth right now? And they're like, yeah, tell me. And so I get their permission first and foremost.
And then I tell them it. And I don't mince words.
I don't think, well, what I kind of noticed is like, no, it's like you just say it and you just have to say it. Here's what I noticed.
You always want to blame the leads. You always want to do this.
You always want to do this. That's not going to get you anywhere.
That's a victim mindset. Victim mindsets don't get anywhere.
Do you want to be amongst the winners or do you want to be amongst the losers? What is your answer? and like, well, I want to do this. You always want to do this.
That's not going to get you anywhere. That's a victim mindset.
Victim mindsets don't get anywhere. Do you want to be amongst the winners or do you want to be amongst the losers? What is your answer? And like, well, I want to be a winner.
Can you see how that's a victim or are you mad at me right now for telling you that's a victim mindset? No, no, that totally makes sense. They know I love them.
I get away with it because I honestly love them. And I say that I reference it many, many times.
You know, I'm saying this, Justin, because I love you, dude. Yeah yeah i love you too much to see you go down this road because you're better than this yep you're way better than this and i just call them out it's not the fun conversations but it's the real conversation it is and more often than not that person endears you more loves you more percent at the end of it all and they're spittle they're Cody, I want to punch you in the face.
We had a guy that it wasn't working out right for the franchise. It wasn't working out right.
I had to deliver the hard message and I had to call him out. And it was a heated up conversation.
I had to call him out. And then at the end, a phone call came in directly from this individual saying, I am so you're absolutely right i'm so sorry i should have never said that but they know i love them even though it wasn't working out and it wasn't the greatest situation they know i love them they know i love them dearly it's it's i mean and especially as guys like we always want to fix the problem and don't want to help.
We want to just fix it versus help them fix it.

Yeah.

And that isn't a good leader.

A good leader doesn't come in and just fix the answer.

Like we were just talking about Dan.

One, three, one is because he's not sitting there just fixing.

That's exactly right.

Give me the three solutions.

We together will figure out what is the best solution.

That's exactly right.

Right.

That's exactly right.

Give another book or two.

I mean, I just love leadership. I mean, it's just something.
Give another book or two that you think would be helpful for people i love that okay great principles come from robin sharma so if you love anything robin sharma like he's my favorite so he has the 5am club that breaks down in like a fake story principles but then he has like his eight forms of wealth which is unreal and he has, oh, what is his other one? Well, just go look him up. He has another one.
Robin Sharma, his books are my favorite. The other one I love, I love all of Jim Rohn's books.
What's the one we give out to our group? Leading an Inspired Life. Leading an Inspired Life.
It's so easy. His books are great because when he writes them, it's a principle.
It's one, two,'s over i hate personally at least my mind i don't know how your mind works my brain needs to finish like the chat i hate mid-chapter or i forget what the beginning chapter is about that's right so i and i hate when people are like i have this chapter and it's 20 pages i i hate those books so this is bite-sized so you can sit read it, and then just stew on it and journal about it, whatever it is.

And then the next day, I do another one.

John Maxwell, all of his books.

He's the greatest.

Like, that guy is the OG.

That guy is the original when it comes to leadership.

He has over 80 books now.

He's actually mentored me and Mark.

Yeah.

An incredible human being.

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Let's do it. Right? And being a leader.
Now, how many of the franchisees are their growing personnel, right, that are no longer a solopreneur? Okay, so some of us, meaning do some of them come that they're still solopreneurs? Is that the question? Yeah. My point being is how many of the franchisees are growing in people beyond just growing in business? Yeah, okay.
Is it a big focus? It is a big focus. Yeah.
So with Joe Homebuyer, I would say many that feel stuck, that can't break the ceiling, it's because of that solopreneur, right? Yeah. That's when you get the fizzle, the sizzle where everyone's like, I'm burning out.
It's now that passion is in alignment with the work they're doing anymore. Like it's because of that solopreneur right yeah that's when you get the fizzle the sizzle where everyone's like i'm burning out it's now that passion is in alignment with the work they're doing anymore like it's there's a misalignment so now they're getting burnt out they're wearing way too many hats which means think of all the think of all the things when it comes to your business acquisitions dispositions marketing like just think of just those top three maybe yeah do you love doing all three of those? No.
Either do I, right? I love sales. I really love acquisitions.
Yeah, I love acquisitions. So yes, because if I'm an owner, I'm going to do enough work on all of it because it's like it's my baby.
It's my business. But there's going to be a point where you're not in alignment with your natural gifts, your natural strengths, your natural passions.
And when you keep doing that work, marketing, dispositions, you do it long enough, pretty soon you're going to alignment with your natural gifts your natural strengths your national passions and when you keep doing that work marketing dispositions yeah you do it long enough pretty soon you're gonna be like i haven't broke the ceiling i haven't figured it out i'm done like i'm just gonna cash in my chips and and go back to a safe job or whatever it is and many do that and so um yes they come to us for that and i would say the biggest challenge is most people don't know how to find great talent that's a huge challenge keep talent and how to lead talent yeah so a lot of people think delegation i was guilty of this this is why i say with a smile on my face because i was bad at it i would just delegate and delegate i thought was just push it on their desk and they got to get it done and report back on on friday worst case is i never even asked them to report back on friday There was no accountability. There was nothing.
And so there was this abdication, I think, is the word that I'm looking for versus delegation. It was just like, forget it and set it and forget it and don't check in on them ever again.
True delegation really is elevation with that accountability where you're helping them rise to the top and become a leader. You want to be replaceable.
You want people in your organization to care about your business more than you do true story this was cool i was flying to puerto rico i was speaking at jerry norton's event yeah uh jerry norton happens to be he has about six active franchises with us he bought 10 of them he has six of them active with us yeah so he flies us out there to go speak to his group of students that are at fast track and then some of those those students are now interested in looking into Joe Humbire. But we were there to just do value, just to have fun.
Yeah. I fly into New York.
And then while I'm in New York, I get on the plane. I get upgraded to first class.
And I'm like, score, like dinner and all that, even though it's not the greatest meal. Yeah.
But I'm like, great. This will be fantastic.
Because I didn't have time to, like, get a meal in between. Because it was like, get off the plane, get on the plane and I was back on to go to Puerto Rico.
This pilot comes out, captain Dan wines. I'll never forget captain Dan wines, captain Dan wine steps out and he walks out to the, to the first class and he shakes everyone's hand, thanking everyone personally, shaking their hand.
And I'm like, this guy's legit. Like I want to take a page from this guy's book.
He goes back to comfort plus says, folks in Comfort Plus, thank you for being here. You guys, this is why I get to provide for my families because they're great people that continue to fly Delta.
Thank you so much. Then he goes back to main class and says the exact same message.
Then he comes up and I'm like, man, this guy is literally world class. So when I think of world class or delivering magic, think of what's a, I know you got Disney World here, but is there a bunk, like, bad version of a Disneyland here? I don't know.
I don't even know. Is SeaWorld good? I don't know.
I've never been. I haven't even.
So maybe. So, but it's like, Disney gets it.
Yeah. Themed everywhere different.
Like, they deliver magic. This Dan Wines wasn't his business, but yet he cared about, like, his own business.
He steps up and grabs the phone that has the cable, and he does the PA PA system. He's like, Hey folks, just so you know, I want to tell you, you've got world-class and he uses words.
Me and Mark really love. I love world-class.
He says, we have the world-class, um, flight attendants on this flight today. Let me tell you the process.
Thousands of people apply for this job. Only 1% make it.
And so let's get a round of applause for our flight attendants. And the whole plane is like cheering these flight attendants so we don't even know and we haven't received the service yet and then on top of he says hey guys normally when i go to san juan um we fly at this altitude today we're going to be flying to this altitude just to keep you out of that rough air we want to make this as smooth as possible again thank you for choosing delta and uh our our goal is to like continually like so that you have a great experience and then he ends it and i'm like this guy was top notch i've never seen a captain do this well three quarters away through the flight he hands out postcards to the flight attendant they go through all of first class and it's a handwritten note from captain dan wines wow and i'm like who is this guy? Like he cares about this business.

Like it's his own business.

That's right.

And then on the end,

and I have it on my phone.

It's actually over there.

I,

I'm like,

Dan,

I have to shake your hand.

Like amazing.

World class.

Thank you.

That experience.

And he says,

well,

you seem pretty cool.

So we do a picture together.

He has his captain hat on.

I have my Joe hat on.

And he's like,

you look pretty cool.

I want to be a Joe.

He takes my hat and then he puts his hat on me and we take

Thank you. He says, well, you seem pretty cool.
So we do a picture together. He has his captain hat on.
I have my Joe hat on. And he's like, you look pretty cool.
I want to be a Joe. He takes my hat and then he puts his hat on me and we take another picture.
Yeah. Like world-class experience.
But here's where I'm getting at. He didn't sell me on Delta.
He didn't sell why Delta is better than Spirit or American or United. He didn't say anything other than he made everyone in that plane feel special.
He made them feel incredible. And because of that, I'm now deeper converted to only using Delta.
There's my process. I get to witness this live and I come back with a different conviction, a different energy back to the office to say, hey, we've got to be growing Captain Dan Wines in Joe Homebuyer where they care so much about the business that every time they speak, people just feel incredible and they're going to be that much deeper converted to Joe Homebuyer.
And we have that to this degree. We have that.
We have people that care about it like it's their own business. That's true delegation.
That's true leadership is when those Captain Dan Wines pop out in your company and they care about your business more than you care about your business. That's when you know you you've nailed leadership i got to witness it on delta that's phenomenal so where where's joe homebuyer going what's what's the 2025 uh vision for the franchise of joe homebuyer yeah we want to uh we want to add another what do we want 40 this year was it it was 40 franchises that we're going to add this year as a goal okay um on top of that the reason why and i think some people be like well why not 100 why not 200 i would love that don't get me wrong but there is a strategy that you have to maintain the culture of course and with real estate it's a little bit trickler than like a crumble cookie where you just have to stand on an x and put a batch of flour together and all this stuff it's not that i mean real estate is already a trick.
There's so many people that don't do it right. There's so many people that, I mean, this industry is one of the most hated industries because of people that do it wrong.
I don't want them part of Joe. Like I want them to never even hear the word Joe homebuyer.
I hope they fizzle out and do whatever they want to do. So 40 would be, we have connected with and found through great individuals.
Um, we got Brent, we got Jerry we got Jerry, we've talked together of great people that are looking for that growth. People that are saying, hey, I want to take my business to the next level.
Where do they go right now? As I just heard that, where can they go to go to better reality? Right now, they can definitely go to joehomebuyer.com. But we also have a giveaway for your audience.
It's the joeway.com. And that is the five steps of negotiation.
So when people say rarely do people get past the first year in business, even rare, if you make it past three years and Dan Martell was actually, I was talking to him on the phone. He's like, you're a unicorn Cody.
He's like, not many people make it past 10 years in the business. You're a unicorn.
My friend, not many people make it past 10, 10 years in business. Yeah.
And I would tell you that majority of that success does come from that negotiation, right? That's what allows you. Now, granted, it's hard to say because you got marketing to go inside of that too.
But I would say I'd attribute a large portion of that success on how well we negotiate. And that's why they can get their hands on this document.
So I would say go to that website one more time. The Joe way.com.
Joe way. And it's the five steps of negotiation with an accompanying video that you, I mean, it's, it's, it's what we share with our Joes.
When you want a leader like Cody, I would tell all of you guys, right?

Make sure you at least talk to them.

If you're doing deals and you want a leader like Cody to help you across the finish line to grow a real business, make sure you go to the Joe way.com.

So with that being said, we just talked, Mark i just talked about the the difference between marketing and conversion yeah and i think a lot of people need that sales process because they want to blame marketing economy city whatever yeah but really it's because they don't know how to convert the actual transaction yeah. And that's the same in all categories of life, right? If you just actually look at every conversation you have, there's one side basically making a suggestion and selling and there's one side trying to figure out what they want, right? Yeah.
I do it with my wife all the time, right? If I want pizza and she wants this, I got to figure out how to get her into the pizza side versus whatever she's trying to think about, which is like healthy or whatever the case is. Right.
Um, talk, talk to us about like the state of what Joe, Joe by home buyer is going through with leads, uh, marketing channels, growth. You want to add 40% that's 50% growth, bro.
That is no small feat. No, no, it's not.
It's not. And it really is coupling and partnering and recognizing who is a fantastic fit and working with the people where those people are sitting.
So it really is. It's a very focused, dedicated year that we're going to have.
Good. But we're excited about it.
As it comes to portions of these cells, right? Yeah. Think of one thing instantly.
I hope this is already like a gold nugget you can take today. Think of right when a phone call comes in.
So there's two things that we do at Joe Home Buyer. We do really, really well.
We started tracking this years ago, our live answer rate. So many people go to a voicemail.
Of course. Or I'm in an appointment and there's no one as backup.
So it's just going to voicemail and they just didn't have any kind of backup. We don't allow that.
So we started tracking this. We're probably around 50 percentile, if I had to guess, in live rate when we first tracked this.
And we're like, what if we improve this? What would it do to our metrics? We started improving it. And once we started tracking it, because what you measure grows, right, once we started tracking it, we quickly got into the 90 percentiles.
Wow. Well, coincidentally, contracts started going up.
We stopped losing deals. Now there's two sides to this.
So first and foremost is live answer rate. What does that do is allows you to get a hold of the person, even the person that says, go pound sand.
I hate you, Colby. Take me off your me off your list like okay i'm grateful that i know

that now versus 20 follow-ups over the next two weeks to find out no i just call and tell you guys are scumbags take me off the list right ah then you lost all that time but had you answered live you would have known that in 10 seconds versus two hours of follow-up yeah right yeah so that's that's the first thing second of all is we found out that many people that are calling in they're also calling multiple people and all they need to have is one warm voice and it could be your voice. If you don't answer, they're not just saying, well, I'll call back Justin Colby next week and hopefully answers next week.
No, they're moving on. They're going because these people, they have like 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
They're maybe on a lunch break and they're like, I have no time. So they are making sure that they're getting what they need to get done in that 15 minutes on that break, the smoke break, whatever it is to call and line up someone to come by their home.
If you don't answer the phone call, someone else is getting it. So we are rarely below 96%.
Many weeks, we're at a hundred percent live answer rate. It's not a, here's another setup.
It's not for acquisition managers to be on round robin. We do not believe in round robin robin everyone's phone rings whoever pulls out a holster gets it because if round robin style and that round robin is in appointment yes they just lost the voicemail that's right so we have to have all phones ringing we have lead managers phones ringing so they know that after three rings if one of the acquisition managers didn't answer it lead managers are now on call like we have to answer that phone and we realize that helped increase our conversion rate like instantly the second thing is when that lead comes in is a voice or i should say a strategy of qualifying versus disqualifying so many times and it can be easy even how many years we've been doing this i've been doing now well since 2015 so 10 years you've been doing it since 18 years 18 years 2007 think of the night where you kind of just want to go home and hang out the kids yeah and granted you may not be taking a ton of calls you probably have a team to do it but let's say it was you there could be that night that you're like i just want to go home and you'd use a voice of disqualifying so tell me justin what do you want for your home and they tell you a price you look at zillow it right? Oh, this isn't motivated.
Okay. Well, it sounds like you probably want to go with an agent because I can't give you that kind of price and we disqualify, right? Versus qualifying sounds like this.
Okay, Justin, it sounds like, you know, what you want for your home. Tell me a little bit more about it.
And I'm going to find these other pillars of motivation, like the condition of the home or the timeframe that they didn't move out in or the driver, what made them pick up a phone and call cody hoffine like don't allow price to dictate if someone's motivated or not because 99 times out of 100 it is not uh it's not a uh sign of motivation it's actually a deceiver people are going to say this they're going to fly a kite because we're trained as negotiators to drop an anchor right and then we meet in the middle somewhere middle somewhere. But the whole point is, are we qualifying our leads or are we disqualifying our leads? And so we're really training our Joes when they come in to have a mindset of every lead is hot.
We answer all leads live and we sit there and we qualify. And these qualifying calls are no longer five-minute calls.
Like qualifying calls are 30 minutes, 45 minutes, because that presentation that takes place in those first 45 minutes is the setup for all these negotiation when you say when we talked about the joe way.com the five steps of negotiation once you've done this setup call correctly those five steps of negotiation start to work in your behalf so you get a home at a deep discount i mean that's huge that is really everything now when you run your leadership calls, are they only franchise owners or do they get to bring their team on?

Yeah.

The whole operation.

So it's not just the owners.

It's their whole operation.

It's their acquisition managers.

In fact, one of our favorites is Chris Osborne.

This guy is not even the owner.

And he is on.

And he adds so much value to the call because he'll tell us things that, hey, guys, this is what he's talking about.

Like, when he talks about not giving up, like, I had this lead, I'm sitting out in the, in the driveway. I knocked on the door.
They didn't answer. I knew they're in there.
I knocked again. And then I sat in my car.
I'm like, gosh, dang it. Why wouldn't they just answer the door? And I thought, you know what? They need my service.
He's like, so I went around back and I knocked on their bedroom window and I woke him up is all they came out. And 30 minutes later, walked out with a contract.
Because he had a mindset of not just tenacity, but he had a mindset of where most people are going to have a fear mindset. Like, oh, they're going to hate me.
They're going to like be bugged at me. Oh, they're going to yell at me.
Oh, they're going to think I'm too much. He was like, no, I'm better than everyone out here and they need my service, not just anyone's service.
They need my service. So he goes back there and knocks on their window.
30 minutes later, contract. I love that tenacity.
I use another word for that, but that's some tenacity right there. That is, right? I love it.
So yes, all of this is for everyone. We even have our vendor partners and their company join us on that call so that everyone can be part of this family, this culture of growth, of daily growth, and making sure that we're all becoming better versions of ourselves.
What if your real estate business ran like a machine with constant deals, higher profits, a roadmap to financial freedom? That's exactly what we help entrepreneurs achieve at Joe Homebuyer. We provide the sales, negotiation, and marketing training that separates top investors from the rest.
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Bigger. You guys are here at the right time uh this week i did a lot of kind of self-analysis in the sense of where i'm going and what i'm building and all that kind of stuff yeah one of the things that keeps ringing out to me is the word connection yeah right now a lot of people could take that a lot of different areas right but in my um idea here um, idea here for this episode is just the connection to the people.
Yeah. Right.
And building the community and having connection, being meaningful with your connection. Cause it's just like faith.
Like if you're not meaningful, you can say, I believe in God or Jesus, but like, if you don't have any intention or connection to that, then it's a little flippant. Right.
It's like, yeah, right. But if you, and you are the exemplary example.

Okay.

The epitome.

The epitome of that, right?

Because you're pouring into your leaders.

You're building the connection.

And if leaders of the franchises have that same level of commitment to connect with the people that they run the franchise with, they will be successful. Absolutely.
Rarely does a man's income exceed their level of personal development. Right.
So we get them bought in on this and they're starting to see it. And there's so many principles that we teach through that, that no other, like it's not going to be just a wholesaling.
If it was just wholesaling or fix and flip, it wouldn't be these principles that I teach on Thursday. They're all, they're all leadership principles that lead and guide their team to victory.
Yeah. Listen, you can't, you know, the, the mind, the body and the mind are so important because I I've seen it time and time again is people might make a lot of money, but if they're failing their body, it's all useless.
Right. Cause then they're tired, they're cranky, they're, you know, which leads into marriages falling apart, disconnected their kids, et cetera, right? But if you don't first set up your mind to be right, this is 99% mindset, right? Because you and I both know this isn't always puppy dogs and rainbows, right? No, no.
There's a ton. I mean, I deal with problems.
We're blessed. Here's why.
As the presidents of our companies, we are given the hardest challenges. Yeah.
That is our blessing. Yeah.
That is what lands on our plate is the biggest, oh, shits. Yeah.
Right? Yeah. But that's the blessing that we have to overcome that challenge.
Yeah. So that we can pour into those who haven't had it yet.
Yeah. So we know how to help them go through that challenge.
Yeah. And that's a blessing that you and I sit in, right? 100% agree.
But, you know, they need to understand that it's not always the X's and O's. Yeah.
Right? It is the whole thing. It is the whole mind, your body, your fitness, your faith, your business.
All that gets wrapped up into your business being successful. Because if you can't tie them, you can't have one without the other.
That's exactly right. Well, and it's an empty victory at the end of the day.
It's an empty victory if it is one-sided. Like, I don't want to have an empty victory.
I want to be where all of us win together, including my family. Like, it's a joy.
She's very much part of the business, my wife. Well, is she? And the kids in the choices we make.
Like, it was very much our kids' decision when I said, hey, dad's switching from insurance to this. It's going to be a lot of long hours.
There's going to be this. I might miss some sports.
I might miss this. And my boy was only, he's now 16.
My boy at the time was six years old and I got his buy-in at six years old. I said, so are you okay that some nights I may not be able to tuck you in because I might be on appointment, but it is for the better Bentley.
I will not waste my time out there. I won't go out there and just waste time and just say business to do business like when I'm out trust that it's because it's for a better life and we're going to accomplish this he says okay dad Wendy bought in on it my wife and so when there was times when I wouldn't come home and Bentley be like I wish dad was here tucking me in when he's like instead of being a ticked off mom she'd be like instead of saying like oh I wish she was here too like what a what a piece of crap right no she says hey remember remember we had that conversation on sunday how dad's gonna go out and do this stuff yeah he's like yeah this is one of those nights but dad's out there because he's he must be getting a contract because he wouldn't be out there if he wasn't getting a contract and i'd come back with a contract communication's huge involvement and buy-in from all your family's huge.
It's not easy. This business is hard.
It's entrepreneurship is a sacrifice, but it shouldn't be a sacrifice forever. There should be a point where you're doing the Dan Martell method and you're buying back your time and replacing yourself with incredible team members.
And that takes working on yourself and being a leader. So ultimately you can accomplish that dream.
There's no doubt. Now you guys have an event coming up for your franchisees.
We do our annual event. We do it every year.
We love it. Talk to me about that event.
Yeah. So we kick it off and this year it's in an arena.
So like an actual boxing arena, like historical arena where they used to have boxing events. And our whole theme is around that.
So we will have like our MC will even wear like a robe and all this fun stuff yeah um there it's it's gonna be a blast and then on top of that we have the industry experts so we have brent daniels who if he was on here he'd tell you he was the first franchise owner he was number three okay uh he's number three franchise owner he'll be with the first quite a bit uh you two actually no yeah yeah no the first was uh actually a person that rented a rented mark's basement of all people and then they saw what he was doing he's like i want to do this and they started doing it and as we became a joe he became the first one to do it he's like i want to do this yeah uh and he's still with us he's already renewed his contract it's already been over five years since he started with us and that's a lot of commitment well it's what's cool is we've now seen proof that someone can outstand that like outdo the statistics that you're not going to make the past three years right we've proven it now with joe alone like we have people coming up on their sixth and seventh years which is amazing really really fun yeah um but we'll have industry experts then uh jerry norton he'll be up there speaking a lot we have pace morby flying out and speaking that's awesome and so it's kind of a it's kind of a fun time to just lead the business, work on the business, connect with community. You know, as well as I do, community is everything.
I do believe the people that are winning at the highest level are collaborators. It's not the people going solopreneur.
The people that are winning high are the ones collaborating with other people and they don't see it as competition, but they see it as collaboration. The collaborators are winning right now.
That's right. No, it's funny it's funny.
I said that at the beginning of 2025, this year for me, is a collaborative year. And I don't mean that it stops at the end of the year.
I mean, moving forward. My intentions in business are always to be more in a collaborative effort than trying to figure it out and do it alone.
Right. And that's why I think Joe Homebuyer and Justin Colby and everything that we've done, there's going to be a lot.
There's going to be a lot. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. Great people should be working together.
Great communities should be working together. Absolutely.
That is going to be a fun thing I'm looking forward to this year. Listen, guys, if you like the leader of Cody Hoffline, I need you guys to at least go check out just for your own sake.
I get nothing from it. But go check out Joe Homebuyer.
What are the two websites we want them to go to? So you go to joehomebuyer.com. That's our main one.
Yeah. And that's where they can kind of just read through and see how it is and speaks to the person that's already doing deals.
But then the joeway.com is where they can go get their five steps of negotiation. And here is my promise to you.
You watch those videos and I promise you your negotiation will change for the better. That's my promise.
Phenomenal. Guys, this has been awesome.
Brother, I really appreciate you being on. Yeah, I do the man.
If you're looking to grow this business and you want an actual framework to do it, the franchise model is a great model. Joe Homebuyer is a great model.
Appreciate you both for showing up. If this has been helpful and you liked it, make sure you share this with two of your friends.
We'll see you on the next episode. The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options, which is why with USAA Auto Insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable all at the touch of a button.
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