Episode 038 – Minimum Viable Action: Focusing on the First Obvious Step

minimum viable action scrum May 24, 2021

Michelle talks about the book, Effortless, and how much she loves the concept of taking Minimum Viable Action. MVA is doing the next, easy and logical step in any process. Most people overthink things or end up attempting to educate themselves to death (along with their pocketbook). They may feel overwhelmed with “all the things they have to do” in order to get to the next big milestone in their business plan. They just get stuck and the thing that keeps them stuck may be something incredibly simple – they just don’t know it. If you’re stuck, haven’t picked up your next property, or maybe even your FIRST property, this is the episode for you!

Plus, contest details are inside this episode! Enter to win BIG!! Go and Grow!

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, this is Michelle, the master of money mindset, and you are listening to BNB dash boss and in today's podcast we're going to be talking about MVA - minimum viable action. This is the first step you need to take.

A lot of times we hesitate and we procrastinate and we just never get going. And the reason why is everything seems so overwhelming, we see this massive journey that we are going to be on and we can't even take the first step.

So I'm going to talk to you about taking that first step,

but first. I wanted to remind you that today's podcast is brought to you by audible, you can get your first audiobook for free by going to audible trial.com forward slash. S T R revenue that's audible trial.com forward slash STR revenue. And when you do go in there and pick up the new book Effortless, because we're going to be talking about it today, Effortless, is an amazing book and it's a follow-up to Essentialism and you are going to love it. So go to audible, get your free trial on your free book today. Audible trial.com forward slash S T R revenue.

Okay, so I read a lot of books. I listened to books. Most of the time when I am walking my dogs in the morning, I take a nice long walk in the morning, but I love to listen to books when I'm walking my dogs.

And I love listening to certain authors, right? So obviously all of us have our favorite authors or sometimes a favorite book or a book that really moved us. And we say, okay, well, I want to read something else that this person wrote, right. So Effortless came out and it was a follow-up to essential ism.

And I thought, oh my gosh, I've got, I've got to read this book. And I got, you know, I got into it the first few chapters and it was, it was pretty good. I mean, you know, he's a good author and he's got a lot of stuff, but it wasn't like really grabbing me until about chapter seven and chapter seven, just about knocked my socks off because I was like, yes, Yes, this is it.

This is it. Have you ever had a book do that to you or just like, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Building your short-term rental business. It has a multitude of steps and in our courses and classes and membership, we teach people how to plan out their journey. To jot their course down, create a success path, all the little steps that they're going to take along the way.

Right? All the steps, all the milestones, everything that's going to take place along the way. And it's incredible to me that so many people just have such a hard time getting started. And I'm always trying to understand why some people have a challenge with things, you know, it's like, just do it. You know, you just like, don't question me and just do it, especially when you're coaching someone or even when you're a mom or something, the kids are like, why, why, why?

And you're like, stop asking me why and just do it. Don't ask any questions as I'm thinking of the mom thing. And I'm thinking of all that stuff, I've got a couple of people that I'm coaching and they're having just amazing challenges getting started. And it's been bothering me so much because I want to help them.

I don't want to give up on them and I know that they want to do this. It's the weirdest thing because we're like find your why, and we're going through all these steps. And when I started listening to this chapter of effortless this morning on my walk, I just got the aha. It was like, this is it. Let's put it in a nutshell, right?

When we have a huge task in front of us and believe it or not, most people believe that just getting one property is a huge task. If you've never done it before, if you've not gotten your first property. It can feel overwhelming. You're just like, I have no idea what to do. Right. It's something that you've never done before.

If it's baking and somebody says, I'm wanting you to make a cake by scratch and you've never baked before. You're just like, I don't know what to do. This is going to be really complicated. You know, you just don't know and you don't know how hard it's going to be. Somebody says, build a house from scratch.

Here's a set of tools. It's an overwhelming task. I don't even know where to start. I know I have to make a plan, but like, do I make a plan first or do I buy the property first or do I go to zoning and make sure that I can build a house on Amy? What are the steps of doing this? It is overwhelming. So I always feel for people because I know that there's something blocking them, just getting yourself moving is extremely hard.

So in this book in effortless, Greg was going over a couple of other books that I've read. And he was like, Maria Quando has her book about uncluttering your home. You just pick something up and you look at it and does it spark joy in you? And if it does, then you keep it. And if it doesn't, you throw it away.

But the whole idea of Maria quandong's thing is first, she kind of got to pick everything up. Right? You got to get it all together. And that's quite an undertaking for people who have hoarded a bunch of items. He mentions in there, a story of a woman, her house was just so cluttered and she had a ton of books and books were just lying everywhere.

And you would think that it would be super easy because she should just get some bookshelves and put some bookshelves in and they were talking to her about, let's just get some bookshelves and she goes, well, I don't know what kind and I got to measure. I got to see which wall they can go on. And before I can see which wall I have to take measurements and stuff.

Well, the whole thing came down to the big procrastination of the whole entire thing of just getting bookshelves up, which seems so simple. All was at a dead Holt. The whole project was at a dead hold because she did not have measuring tape. She couldn't measure her walls. And since she couldn't measure her walls, she had no idea how many bookshelves to buy.

Right. So she was just at this dead stop. And I thought to myself, that's so true. I mean, how many times have you started to do something? Just some easy task. It doesn't even have to be a difficult task. Something super simple stopped you. And you're just like, Ugh, I can't get past this. And I don't know why something is just, it's like a mental block almost, but still part of a physical block and you're just not getting past it.

And so as you read on, in effortless, he's like, look, you have to break these things down. To the first actionable step that you can take this minimal actual step. You have to look at it. You have to look at it, find it, and then do it. Right. So he took Maria quandong's book and said, okay, well, instead of doing the whole house routine, why a lot of people weren't getting it done.

They were reading sparked joy, but they were never sparking joy by getting rid of all the stuff. There was another guy in there and he had a book and in his book he was like, just get rid of one thing right now. And he was like, wow, that's a new and different and okay. And so. The author, Greg, he decides I'm going to get rid of this dried-out old Barker.

I don't know. I didn't throw it away before and boom. He threw it away and then he started with other stuff. Like, let me just get rid of this and let me just get rid of this and let me get rid of this. It was one easy step and he could duplicate it over and over again. But before he didn't know where to start, he was overwhelmed with cleaning up his office.

You know, there's a lot of times where like, I should do this, I should get this cleaned up. I should get this organized. I should get this job done. I should go out there and look for properties. Right. I should. But why don't we it's because we don't even know where to start. We don't know if somebody just said just to this one little thing, a ridiculously simple little thing, they gave us that one little thing to do, and you're like, okay, I can do that.

I've gotten through fears. Doing that process. And I didn't realize that you could do other things with it. When my kids were young, we used to travel to Disney all the time, and we went down to Disney world all the time. It was our favorite vacation spot, where we started our vacation rentals and we, he would be down there weeks and weeks at a time.

And we had annual passes and the annual passes used to include the water parks there at Disney. And we would go to the water parks. Well, one of Disney's waterparks has this. Big slide, a water slide that is super tall. It's like 200 and some feet. I don't even know how tall it is, but it's super tall and it goes pretty much straight down.

And the year they open that. My husband was like, daring me. You need to go down the slide. And I was like, you go down the slide, you go down. And we were going back and forth. And so I wasn't super afraid, but I mean, it was looking at it from way up there. You would see people get down to the bottom and they did not look happy when they got done, you know, smiles and stuff.

People who are just like, whoa. So I, if I want to do this, but I went up there with my husband. And by the time we got to the top, you could see how high it was and you could see how it went straight down and, you know, he kept teasing. You go first, you go first. And so finally I just said, okay, I'll go first.

So we get up to the top. Uh we're first in line. I get there. The Disney employee says, okay, take a seat here. All right, lean back, cross your legs. Put your. Arms crossed in front of you and then just push off. So I did not overthink it at all. I didn't think about what was coming after at all, to be honest, it was just this thing.

Do these steps. Okay. Sit. Got it. I'm sitting. It's like crush her feet. Okay. My feet are crossed, you know, I'm leaning back and folding my arms over my body and then scooch. I did not think of all the things that were going to come after it. I just did what they told me to do. And I went first and I went down the slide and it was awful, just so you know, it was not a great slide because when you have a bathing suit on, it was like somebody having duct tape on your back and then just ripping it off.

It was painful. Had I known I would have worn some kind of shirt or something because. Just having that on your bare back was whoa. It w it was a painful experience, but I did it. And when my husband finally got the courage up to do it and he came down and he goes, how did you do that? He said, I was scared to death.

I don't understand how you did it. And I said, I did not think about it. I just did it. I just took those steps. And just did it, whatever they told me to do, I did it one little step at a time. So when he was telling this story in effortless of the lady who wanted the bookcase, somebody gave her the measuring tape.

They went out and got the measuring tape and she measured the wall. And. Boom, boom, boom. The next dominoes fell so incredibly easy. Once she got past that one block, the dominoes can fall a lot faster. What is holding us up in building our business bigger? With short-term rentals. And what is holding you up if you haven't moved yet, if you haven't even gotten one property, what is the big holdup?

A lot of times people think that they need a lot more education. Oh, I need more education. I need more education. I need to know more. I need to know more. Actually, I think that's one of the biggest lies. I've heard a bunch of gurus talk about it lately. And I think it's so true. Steve Larson did a presentation on this at funnel hacking live a few years back, and it was one of my favorite presentations.

I'm going to talk about that. In the next episode, because that by itself needs to be addressed. The fact that people think they need more education, you don't and hold off till next week. If you want to buy more education, because some little steps, little things are all you really need. Right. I'll go over that.

But what I wanted to say really is. This idea of these minimal viable actions, these tiny little steps, the first obvious step is the only thing we need to focus on it is the first step. And it's the only step we need to focus on just like going down that water slide, just like that. Just like that. Don't think of all this stuff that comes after.

Just think of the first easiest step that you have to do. And I think that when it comes to short-term rentals, people are always looking and thinking about, oh my gosh, first I have to pick the location. And that is true. You definitely have to pick a location, but I've already told you in a bunch of episodes.

Find something close to home. If you live in the middle of Timbuktu, nowhere, and you don't think that's a good idea, go to the next closest city. Something you can get to in less than an hour drive, otherwise move because honestly you don't want to be buying something hours away and not be in control of it with your first business.

It's not a good idea. It's not a good idea to buy somewhere way far away, where you have no control and you don't know anybody. It's a waste of your time. It's a waste of your money. It's going to be a waste of effort. It's going to be really hard. And I don't know why you would pick this investment category to do.

You didn't live somewhere where you could do it. Most of us, it's something we think about because it's in front of us all the time. We're like, holy cow, I've got an extra room. I think alternate into a BNB or holy cow. I love to vacation here. I think I'll buy a property here and I'll come and visit all the time.

When you guys scenario like that, it's going to be easier for you to find somebody to do it. If you are far away and you really want to do this business, then hire property management company to do that for you. When you first get started, if you can't make money with a property management company, you're not going to be able to make money.

Anyway, just have a property management company manage it for you far away. It's going to be easier on you and you're not going to lose a lot of money. That's. Probably the best thing to do, but if you want to do this business on your own and you want to get started, start close, start close to yourself, start in a place that's close to yourself, unless you just hire that out and give it to a property management company.

Okay. I'm just telling you, I don't care what those gurus say. I don't care what these other guys who have never done any other real estate investing. They've only been investing for the last five years or so. You need somebody who knows what the F they are doing. You really do. If you're going to listen to somebody and they haven't been through the ups and downs of real estate, because I'll tell you something.

It all looked fricking amazing in the 1980s and it just kept going up, up, up, and it went up for years. It went up for decades. Guys, the properties just kept going up and if you're in Florida or Arizona right now, probably Tennessee, all these places where. All the Dems are moving out and moving to your area.

Right? So you're in all these cities where everybody's leaving California and everybody's leaving Illinois and they're leaving New York and they're going to your state. And you're thinking to yourself, this is a great opportunity. I'm telling you it's good, but it won't be good forever. And when it goes bad, it goes bad, fast, and you better know what the F you're doing.

And these guys, they won't know what they're doing even during COVID. A lot of people found out. They didn't know what the hell they were doing. It works good when it's running good, but that's not how cycles work and everything runs in cycles. So you want to take care. So I'm going to make that first step easy for you.

You're picking someplace close. Okay. You're picking someplace close to where you work or where you live. Someplace you would want to go and spend a little time. That's it? It doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be difficult. Okay. Get your little map out. And take a look what's close. Are you gonna do it in your city or are you going to do it someplace close where everybody goes to?

So let's use, for example, my favorite couple on the planet is adjacent and Carol and Jason and Carol live in Texas. They've been doing a rental property pretty close to their house. Not, not super close, but pretty close. But Jason has told me over and over again that they got this little place where everybody loves to go out to the lake and it's not a far drive from his place.

But he thinks that, you know, this is going to be great. And that's where he's going to focus on. Now. It's a little lake where everybody from the city can drive out and get some time away. Perfect, perfect location. That is a perfect location. So here in the valley and in Arizona, if you don't want to deal with all the people in the area around you and you don't want to do Scottsdale, or you don't want to do Tucson, or you don't want to do, you know, wherever you're from in the valley.

You may want to go up to the mountains. There's a bunch up in paisan our Prescott Sedona. I mean, there's a lot of really cool getaway places that are a close drive and they're perfect. Perfect for this. Okay, perfect. So pick the location. That's all you're going to do this week. Just pick the location.

I'll give you a whole damn week to do it. Like I'll give you that whole week. But by the end of this week, you pick the location or give yourself a day and say, okay, that's my first step. Picking the location. Then once you pick the location, the next step is really easy. The next step is using air DNA. And I know there's a lot of guys who say, oh, just go on Airbnb by yourself and look at the rates of other people and blah, blah, blah.

You know what? They're lazy investors. And they haven't been doing it long enough to know what the F they're doing. They really haven't. They think they know, but when you see properties and the prices on Airbnb, if you see their availability, it's because they're not booked and they do have a new thing now where you can look at the properties and get ideas of what revenue people are pulling in using Airbnb.

But it's not nearly. As good as air DNA. So if we're going to use a tool, let's use a tool that was built and designed to do exactly what we are doing. And that's investigating the market of a place we want to go to for the love of God, don't make this shit up. As you go. These tools are already there.

It's like you don't have to reinvent the wheel it's already been done. Okay. Air DNA is already out there for you. It's not that expensive. It's really not. It's a tool that you're going to need for this business. It is a tool that is built for exactly what we want to do with it, and that's how we're going to use it.

So get it. Stop trying to save money. What do you do? Step over dollars to pick up dimes. That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous to listen to these guys. Oh, how you can save money. Yeah, sure. You can. And you won't get the accurate information that you need. You need accurate information. If you're going to do due diligence on investigating them real estate and investing in it.

Are you kidding me? You're going to have it. No, you're not going to have asset. You got to do it right. Do it right. The first time, get the right tool, use the right system or get the F out of the business. Because it's a business guys. You've got to think of it like a business. You have to take it seriously and you have to do it right.

Or don't do it at all. Okay. So now we go get air DNA and we do this cool little thing with it because we know the zip code of the area we're going to be in because we chose which area we're going to be in. We buy that zip code. We buy that zip code inside air DNA, super easy. Okay. So for instance, three, two eight, one nine, one of my favorites of codes in Orlando.

It's been a great location and I liked the houses there and the houses are in an upscale and I can use them. So I'm just using it as an example, let's say I buy three, two eight, one nine from air DNA. Now you pick your five digit zip code that you are buying from air DNA. You buy that zip code. And now all the houses that you look at inside that zip code, you will be able to plug into their system and get an accurate idea of how much you're going to make.

So this makes the very next step, super easy. Step one. Was picking the area. Step two was buying the zip code for the area. Right? Step three. What is step three, step three is looking for rental properties there or properties. You're going to buy. If you're going to buy, you're looking for properties for sale.

If you're going to rent and do rental arbitrage, look for properties that are for rent. Okay. It's pretty easy. That's what you're doing. All right. So let's say you're renting or if you're buying, just switch it out. It's not hard. Okay. But let's say you're looking, you find some properties that are available, whether for rent or for buying.

Okay. Now you take the property address and you plug it in to air DNA and air DNA says, boom, this is how much you can count on making on that property annually. Here it is. Exactly. And it's pretty darn close. And before COVID it was extremely accurate. So let's say that you are renting a property. So let's say you want to rent this property for $2,000 a month.

That would be $24,000 a year, correct. Okay. So you're spending $24,000 a year. How much do you want to make a month on that property? And let's just guesstimate and say all your expenses, your water, your electric, your cable, all that stuff. Is going to run you another thousand dollars a month. So add another 12,000 to that.

Okay. Because you know, utilities are expensive depending on where you are. That means you are going to be paying $36,000 a month minimum on this property. That's going to be your expenses. How much do you want to make a month? If you want to make $2,000 a month, that means that property's income has to be another $24,000 more than your expenses.

Super easy. That just means you have to be making 60 K a year. Can that property pull in 60 K a year, if not next, find another property for rent and just plug that one in. Okay. It's that easy. The difficult part for most people is. Each property's rent is up or down. Well, what you have to do is you have to take a look at the properties.

That's literally the majority of us who started buying rental properties just knew the rents in the area. And we knew that we could pull in, let's say 1200 a month for a three-two. Right. So since we knew we could do three, a three, two for 1200 a month, we just worked at backwards. You can do the same thing.

If you know that your expenses are going to be ax and you can figure this out. It's not that hard. And honestly, if you wanted to, you could do door knocking. And this is what Maria Gero Donna and I have talked about and discussed on other episodes, go door knocking. Honestly, you need to talk to people.

You need to talk to neighbors when you're buying places or renting places, you need to know what's going on. And we door knock a lot. Good investors have door-knocked they might not door knock as they get older, or they've been in longer, but they'll have somebody do it for them or they'll buy in the neighborhoods they already know.

And the reason you go door knocking is to find out stuff. You're asking questions, basically like doing surveys and the area. Hey, do you know anyone in the area? Who's selling a house, I'm looking for a property around here. I want to buy and fix up, or I want to buy and turn it into a short-term rental or just tell them what you plan on doing.

They'll tell you, they will tell you everything. Neighbors will tell you everything. They'll say, oh, you can't do short-term rentals here. It's illegal. Now that might not be true. It might not always be true, but you're like, it'll give you a hint to check it out. Right? Holy cow. They're right. You can't the HOA there says no rentals are allowed.

Next neighborhood. Got it. If you're buying to fix up properties and you see a crappy property and you walk across the street and you start talking to somebody, they'll tell you about that neighbor with a crappy property, especially if they have a nice property, like. Dude, we've been trying to get this guy to sell forever and we can't get him to clean up anything.

He hasn't paid any of his HOA dues. The city's got all kinds of leans against his property. Hello, warning signal. If you're going to get that property, you better check the liens on that property. Right? Neighbors know everything. They love to talk about people. So you need to not be chicken about it, and you need to do some door knocking.

When you're going into a neighborhood to do a short-term rental, you can ask, do you know if there's any other short-term rentals around? Have you seen anybody doing short-term rentals around, ask questions, ask them what they pay for utilities. Do you mind me asking how much you pay a month for your cable and your electric and your water here?

And they'll tell you, they'll say, oh yeah, well, the water's included with the HOA. The HOA fee is 280 a month. That includes the landscaping and water and insurance. So right there, you know, you don't need all that stuff, but you're going to need your short term rental insurance. You know that, but they'll tell you, they'll tell you what they spend on their electric bill.

They'll tell you all that stuff. People love to talk and they love it. When you are honest with them. If you come in and say, I'm looking for this and you know what? You buy, find your boots on the ground. If you're not very close, somebody might say, oh my gosh, I've always wanted to do that. Keep my number.

I would love to help out. If you buy some place here, I can help you clean the properties. I clean properties. I know somebody who cleans properties. They're going to tell you all this information. The funniest thing is when people start investing the good investors and the people who actually do well are the ones who start doing it.

It's not that you have to be perfect at doing any of this. You will get better as time goes by. It's just like driving. No one starts off as a great driver. They might think they did, but they never really did. And they might've started out playing video games and driving was very similar, but it's still something they had to learn.

Right? It's still something you have to learn riding a bike, something that you have to learn. Anything you do, you have to learn it. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. Okay. You need to do this stuff you really do. And honestly, that's why I always say to start with one property, then move it to three properties in that same area and then move on.

Why because you can master what you're doing. You need to do it first by yourself. Hands-on and then let somebody else do all this stuff. Because if you just start out with a property, 2000 miles away from you and you hire a property management company, they can just start feeding you a line of bull a mile long, and you will know.

You won't know, you won't know you're being lied to. And that happened a lot in Florida for a lot of years. And it still does. There are so many people from Europe who have properties in Florida, right? When you pull up the titles and you buy mailing lists to mail, to homeowners, you'll notice that a ton of these property owners are in other countries.

They're in England. They're in Ireland. They're overseas. And they leave all of this stuff to property management companies who are charging them every week for landscaping every week for pool care every month for pest control. And they're getting none of it, none of it, they will very rarely do a press control.

You know, there's some times where. They won't even work on the pools until they get somebody who's going to use the pools and pay that extra fee for using the pool. And the pool is green. You can see people's yards that look like crap, and haven't been kept up and you contact the owner and they say, oh no worries.

We have a property management company who takes care of all of that. And you'll ask them, have you seen your property lately? Have you seen it? When we were Brian properties in Florida, we would take pictures of crappy properties. We would go driving for dollars is what we called it. We drive around neighborhoods, find the shittiest looking property.

And literally it was sorry. There's going to be a warning on this episode because it's true. They were crappy looking properties, just not well-maintained at all. And we would take a picture of the property and a picture of the property next to it. And then we would make a little flyer that went into our letters and the flyer would say, this is your property, and this is your neighbors.

And they could see right next door to each other as like, who do you think vagrants or thieves are going to target the house that looks empty or the house that is well maintained and well kept. Your property is a target. If it looks like crap, because people know it's empty, they know it's sitting empty, they can see a million newspapers in front of it.

Right. And then you're wondering why the heck it's not getting rented out because you have crap property managers. That's why. And so it was a big, big problem. They were pocketing the money that they said the pool guy got it. Every week, they were pocketing the money that they said the pest control guy got once a month, they were pocketing the money.

From the maintenance guy that he was changing out the filters every month, none of that was happening. And they were making a crap load of money. They were fly by night companies in and out all the time, all the time. The problem with not knowing what is being done is you don't know when it's not being done.

So you have to get your feet wet in this business by doing it at first, you really do because only then can you delegate something? So it's like, if somebody said to you, you have to teach somebody how to bake that cake. If you didn't know how to do it yourself first, how are you going to tell them how to do it?

You could read a recipe to them, but even you wouldn't know if they were doing it right. If you didn't know how to do it yourself, if you had never done it and you were watching them, your guests would be as good as theirs. But when you have done something, it's much easier to teach somebody else to do it for you.

And it's much easier to know when they're not doing it or they're not doing it correctly. Right. So let's take all of these steps in buying our properties and finding the properties and duplicating the properties. Let's take it down to the steps. That's why in our membership program, we do the success path because we're like, okay, Getting another property is one of your goals.

What are the steps to getting there between this property and the next property? What are the steps you have to do? Now? If you've gotten one property, it's easy to know what to do. If you haven't then just buy one of those $7 courses. It's not that difficult guys. It's super cheap, but you're going to go and pay people a ton of money for these courses.

And they're going to tell you the same thing, just draw it all out. I can draw it all out and make it as fricking complicated as you want. But the fact is the steps are really, really easy. And not only either the easy, you don't have to know all the steps in advance in order to do any of them. Right. You just have to know the next step.

You just have to figure out what the next logical step is. The first step has got to seem doable to you. You have to be able to believe that you can do it because if you don't, you will procrastinate and sit on this for ever for forever. Just like the Sandlot for a lever. You will not get your next property.

You'll be sitting on it and sitting on it and Sydney and I it's quite doable. There is no step in here that is difficult that you can't do that. Anyone couldn't do. I don't care if you got, you know, three kids and you're a stay at home. Mom, you have no freaking excuses. I had five kids, I had five kids and I homeschooled those five kids back.

When people used to treat you like you were trailer trash. If you were a homeschooler, this was way before COVID and it was super cool too. Right? They thought we were nuts just because we knew the school system sucked back then and it still sucks. And it's getting suckier way back. 30 years ago, we did all this stuff and we built these and it wasn't hard.

It's kind of funny too, because if you think about it, think about the moms and the dads who are out there doing T-ball or doing Scouts or doing all these activities with all the kids. They are the busiest parents, you know, They have full-time jobs, they do all this stuff. And then they, they, you know, coach your kids or scout your kids on the weekends in their spare time.

Nobody pays them to do that. I actually had one lady one time. I did Scouts for more than a couple of decades, right. Between all my kids. And I had one lady one time ask me, you know, well, you get paid for this. And I looked at her. Yeah. I was like, are you kidding me? I go, nobody pays me to do this. And she goes, what?

The girl Scouts don't pay you. And I was like, no, I was a neighborhood director and I didn't get paid. It's all volunteer. The people will get paid her in the offices, making money, these kids. And I, we don't get paid. Oh my God. And you know, she thought we were a babysitting service. She got man because the co leader, because our co-leader got sick.

And we had to cancel a girl scout meeting because we needed another adult there. I called all the parents. No other adult wanted to be there. And so it was like, well, we have to cancel the meeting. You have to have at least two adults, you know, to make it a safe location, even back then. And nobody wanted to do it.

So she was really pissed off because she didn't have her babysitter. How dare we just cancel? You get paid for doing this? No, we don't. The craziest part about that is that the majority of people who do a ton of stuff are really busy people. They just take that first step. That's all there is to it. They know what needs to get done.

And then they do it parents, I think, especially parents with a lot of kids, they know what needs to be done and they do it. It's just one more kid. It's not easier, but it's pretty darn easy. If you can make a bed, you can make five beds. You know, if you could do laundry, you can do three loads of laundry.

If you can clean a house, you can clean a lot of houses. People make businesses out of this stuff. They like to do. If you can bake, guess what? That's what makes people bakers, because they like doing it. If you like doing it and you don't mind doing it for somebody else and getting paid to do it, you might make a career out of that.

It's not that difficult. But people will overthink this stuff for ever. And it's like, stop overthinking it. Look at the next step and just do the one step that needs to be done and know that it's doable. How do you know it's doable? Because there are millions of BNB owners out there right now, millions.

And guess what? They want, like 5 million more. I saw the new record thing. They're like, we're going to have 5 million more people by the end of this year. And guess what, if you aren't buying those properties, if you aren't running those properties, someone else will, they will, might not be you, but it will be somebody they will get rented the house on the block, you know, that you always wanted to buy.

It's going to get sold by you or by somebody else somebody's going to buy it. It's not going to sit there empty forever. There's always somebody to do it. The whole thing is. You need to think of this as an easy doable plan. And I think that's why we do break it down into those simple, simple steps. Right.

We build the simplest version of our plan and we break it down into easy doable steps. And then you just check market. It seems overwhelming at first, but it's not. And if you don't want to write out the whole plan. Just write out the next three steps. Just write out the next three doable steps. So if you're looking for a property, number one, pick the location, right.

Then number two, plug it in, plug it into air DNA, check it out. See if it's going to make you money. Right. Know the area. Look at the rents, see what they make, and then you'll know how much do you want to make? You can plan this all out. You can figure it out. You can work it backwards any way you want to work it.

If you know part of the equation, you can always get the other answers, right? You don't have to know all of it. You get to plug it in and figure it out. If you know what you want to make, have that end. If you know what the rents are in the area and you know what the utilities are, and you can figure all that stuff, what your expenses are going to be an estimate, those figure that out.

So that those numbers, when you pull them up from air DNA, they're going to make a lot more sense to you. Want to make sure that you have your profit figured out and put in there too. I would never make less than a thousand dollars a month on a property. It's just not worth it to me. It's just not worth it to go through all that time and effort to go in there and build it.

I might as well do a long-term rental if I'm only going to make that much because my long-term rentals make that much and I don't have to do any work for them. To me, that would be a lot better. Do the easiest thing, least amount of effort, most amount of profit, right? Least amount of effort, most amount of profit build the simplest version instead of learning and planning for everything.

You don't have to learn and plan for everything. We're just going to do the simplest version of this and get it done. And once we do it, guess what you learn mostly by doing, just like driving a car. You could have sat and read a million books about driver's ad, and this is the same thing, people, it is the same thing.

So to finish this off, I'm saying, instead of learning everything and planning for every little scenario, let's just charge full steam ahead with our simplest actions. Okay. We're going to opt in for the minimal viable first actions. We're going to maximize our learning with the least amount of effort, because the maximum amount of learning we get is by doing these are the, I mean, this is it, right.

You can read all you want about everything. You could watch videos about everything, but you're going to learn the most. By doing it now, remember to stay tuned for Fridays additions, going to be a best of the short-term rental revenue podcast. And then Monday, we're going to come back. I'm going to talk to you about education because it seems like education is getting really big, but people are charging more and more for crazy, crazy stuff.

So you can buy yourself a really nice Gucci bag. Or you can buy yourself just the bag that you need and put lots of money in it. And when it comes to investing, the latter is the better. Okay. It really, really is. And we're going to discuss that on Monday. Pray for America. God bless you guys. Have a great day.

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