Build a Business, Not a Prison — the 4 Rules Nobody Taught You.

My aunt was dying of cancer. I had the money to fly out and see her. I had the means, but I didn't go because I had clients waiting, showings on the weekends, calls in the evenings. I had built a business that didn't allow me to leave it. That's when I understood what I actually built, not a business, a prison. Here's what nobody tells you in your 20s, making money and building freedom are two completely different skills. You can get very good at the first one and still end up trapped. So, I want to give you the four rules I use now, the ones I'd hand my 20-year-old self if I could sit across from him. Revenue, execution, assets, leverage. Let's go build something real. Number one under revenue, learn to sell early. If you can't sell, you're going to struggle, period. I didn't have any formal [clears throat] training, but I learned to sell early. I've always sold things since I was a kid. When I was in elementary school, we bought baseball cards and we traded baseball and football cards. And then, as I got into middle school, I started selling those coupon books in school. You remember those coupon books you would take and you would win prizes for them? I would take them to the ladies at church and I would sell them to all of the people and the members at church. And then, our church got into Amway. You know that pyramid triangle thing that you sign people on? So, I used to do those presentations at my family's house when I was 12. And then, as I moved into junior high, I started selling candy. My mom would take me down to BJ's, we'd buy these huge box of candy and I would sell them individually into pieces. And then, as I moved into college, I worked at Kinko's copy center where I sold copies to customers. And that's where I got my last job from the copy center because I did such a good job at customer service and being friendly and smiling that this small business owner offered me a job to work with him selling software, which I knew nothing about software at the time, but we were selling software to hair and nail salons. And ultimately, I ended up doing presentations to small business owners and at conferences all around the country speaking and selling and doing presentations, which led me to what I'm doing today. And that's where I learned that that magic isn't in a pitch, it's in understanding people. As I moved on past college and I got into my real estate career, one of my very first experiences early on that I remember talking to someone who was trying to sell their house on their own. You've seen those signs called for sale by owners. And so, when speaking to the gentleman, that's one of the ways that we as realtors can pick up potential contracts for people that want to sell homes. So, meeting with the family and this couple and I sat down with them when we talked into the gentleman, I asked him, "Does his wife work?" He says, "It's no, his wife stays at home." I asked him, "Does he work?" He says, "Yes, he works all the time." And so, I asked him, "So then, the people that you're going to be showing your home, is your wife going to be showing the home to strangers?" And at that moment, he decided to sign a contract with me realizing that he was going to be putting his wife at home letting strangers into the house that they had not been vetted, that they knew nothing about. Sales equals questions plus solutions plus confidence. Number two under revenue, play long-term games. Quick wins feel good, but compounding is where the real money lives. Like many people who are interested in and buying and investing in real estate, I too was also interested as a young man in buying and investing real estate. But at the time, there were no podcasts, no YouTube, anything like that. So, we had infomercials. And I remember watching this guy on TV, his name was Carlton Sheets, and he had an infomercial about investing in real estate. So, I ordered it and we bought it and it came with this big binder of like lessons, instructions, and things to read and then CDs. That's back in the days when we had CD players. So, I listened to the CDs, I listened to the binders, and I and I went through and did all the exercises. And so, by the time that I became a realtor in my early 20s, I knew going into it that I wanted to also invest in real estate. And so, having that knowledge of investment and knowing that before I got into it, when I started evaluating deals and looking at deals as a realtor, I was also looking at deals as an investor. So, long and behold, I bought a couple of properties, my family bought a couple of properties, I helped my sister buy a few properties, my brother bought a couple properties. And so, at the end of the day, we ended up with 13 properties between my immediate family member, and we had over a million dollars in equity. Some of those properties we kept for 10, 12, 13 years, accumulating 400 plus percent appreciation, all while generating cash flow. The last deal that we did for my parents was a trailer that we actually picked up for $7,000 that still to this day prints off $600 a month in cash flow for my parents. Real estate is slow, building a business takes time, even YouTube took me 2 years before I got started. But the longer you stay in the game, the more it pays. Ask, is the thing that I'm working on still going to matter 5 years from now? Number three, execution. Don't skip the boring stuff. The most profitable things I ever did were boring. Documents, follow up, contracts, agreements. When I was in real estate as a realtor, I had this folder that I'd walk around with it that had literally every single and a checklist of all the things that need to be included to make a complete file. So that I wouldn't miss anything. So we literally took all the documents that we needed, put them into a checklist, and then we signed off as you completed a document, whether it's you needed a signature, you needed a notarize, you needed you needed a disclosure agreement. All those things were on there so I wouldn't have to remember it and I wouldn't have to forget. And so I would carry that around with me, making it so easy that my files were always complete. When I was doing the actual selling side of the business, right? And so when I was meeting with customers and had to talk to them about potentially selling their homes, I had this binder that I would carry around with me. And in that binder, I would have all of the potential questions that someone might ask me, and the ways that I would respond with visual images. So someone might say, "Hey, you know, I want to sell my house for a higher price." And then I would go to section where it talks about higher price, I pull it out, and I could talk to them about why this might be a better price, why they should not sell a higher price. So I had all of the things that potential people might ask me already in a binder. And so having that stuff organized allowed me to close more deals, better deals. It allows me to also have a higher percentage of close rate than a lot of other realtors simply by being organized. Now, when I start getting into real estate investment, I did the same thing. When I bought that course that I talked to you about earlier, I had inside the course all of the forms and agreements that I needed to take to someone to potentially buy their homes. I had letters I had to send out to prospects, and I also had Google Sheet that's on my computer that essentially is called a property analyzer. And so in there, I can quickly do the numbers, I can do the math, and see if a property makes sense. And that has allowed me a lot of time from wasting on looking at potential deals that didn't even make sense on the surface, rather than I could quickly evaluate them and know whether I was getting into something good or not or know where I should make an offer. Most people just show up not knowing what to say, not knowing exactly what they're looking for. The professional shows up prepared, ready, and has all his documents and systems in one place, so he knows exactly what to say and what to do next. That's what real execution looks like. Boring equals scalable, boring equals profitable. Number four under execution, document, don't just hustle. Hustle's how you start, systems are how you scale. I used to do everything manually, but when I started recording what I did, email systems, onboarding clients and customers, that's when things really started to take off for me. When I started my YouTube channel, the spark came because people kept asking me the same thing, how do you do this, how do you do that? And so I sat down, I made a video explaining how do you register? How do you get certified? How do you log in? How do you do a search? And so I just literally recorded and documented every single action and activity that I did, and that eventually became my YouTube channel. And then from there, people said, "Hey, can you take that and condense it into a course?" Because they wanted to know step-by-step because at that point I already had several hundred videos. So I took the same videos that I had documented just the activities that I was doing, and then I organized them, and I spoke specifically to like step one, step two, step three, and then turn that into a course. And that course and that community still generates revenue for my businesses today, some 7 years later. When I had my construction company, one of the things that I noticed was there was a process where we had to submit these payroll reports, and the government issues them in a PDF. And so, you literally would just type have to type in like the person's name and their hours and stuff each and every week. And I found it to be quite repetitive. So, I took it, turned it into a Google Sheet, and then now I could just copy and paste every single week the information and just change the hours. And so, essentially, I took this task that was taking us 4 hours a week to do, took me 30 minutes to build a sheet, and then 10 years later, we're saving time for myself, all my subcontractors, and clients. Turn your hustle into a handbook. Under assets, number five, relationships are more valuable than capital. I used to think that you needed funding, but really what you needed was the right phone number. So, when I was first starting out and to the world of construction, I had applied for my GC license, I had went and took all the tests, I did all the activities needed to do it. However, during that time, the real estate market took a turn for the worse around 2008, 2009, the market crashed. And so, I found myself with a lot more expenses and bills than I had money for. So, my friend who turned HVAC contractor introduced me to another gentleman who he said, "Hey, Eric, you should meet him. This guy is talking about something that we've never heard before, federal government contracting." So, we go to meet him, and I'm interested. He starts telling me about this billion-dollar market. So, that's when I first learned about government contracting. I tell him that, "Hey, I've already passed my general contractor's exam. I've already taken a test, but I need $5,000 in order to qualify because at the time my credit wasn't good. This person who had just met me literally lent me the $5,000 that I needed to get started because he believed in what I was trying to do. Fast forward, him and I became partners. I started helping him get some of his first small business contracts with the government and ultimately some 17 years later, we're still really good friends. His company does hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. We speak probably once a month and he gives me an update on what they're doing and what trends he's seeing in the marketplace and now we both from that time have grown over the years together. We grew up and we learned from each other. We've bounced ideas off each other and we both built successful businesses that sparked from a one-person introduction. I can also tie back my real estate success to someone who I met at the church that brought me into the community and introduced me to their members so that I can become their realtor of choice. A lot of those relationships led to some of the investment deals that I made with my family that turned out to be very profitable deals over the long term. Build a reputation before you need referrals. Under assets, number six, your identity will lag behind your growth. As you grow, you'll keep thinking, "I'm not ready. Am I legit?" When I started the construction company, it's interesting because after working with my friend as a consultant for a couple years, then working with his brother as a consultant for a few years, I decided it was time for me to go off on my own. And I remember that vividly because I hadn't actually never did construction. Remember my background, I worked for a software company and then I became a realtor. So I actually never did construction in my life, but I had worked with these two gentlemen under the trades contract. One was a painter, one was an AC guy. So I had seen and got a feel for the construction industry within a few years. When I decided to go into construction, I said, "Okay, what am I going to choose to do in terms of like a specialty area, right? I didn't want to be just a generic contractor." I knew that if I chose a specialty area, then I would be more valuable. And so, in just in talking to people, someone said to me, "Eric, why not choose steel buildings?" And I said, "Okay, tell me more." And this gentleman had built his entire career making money doing metal buildings. And I said, "Okay, great." So, I literally chose the industry that I went after because someone that I knew said that they had made money doing it. It wasn't a over huge analysis. I didn't go run through spreadsheets. Someone said that they did it and they had have been successful in their career. They also agreed to vouch for me. And so, now I said, "Okay, you're going to vouch for me and we're going to go after steel buildings." Fast forward 5 years later, we became one of the top builders in the entire country metal building-wise. Actually, this picture right here of me standing with the president of SECO, one of the top five metal building companies in all of the United States of America, and I was in top 10 within that company from an idea that someone gave me and not knowing anything about the industry. I remember the first time we put a contract, I relied completely on this person 100%. I trusted in him to actually help me put the numbers together. I knew nothing about it, but I relied on his credibility, his authority, and his years of experience in the space as an authority figure to put me into business. Move like the person you're becoming. Number seven, leverage. Don't build a prison. When I sold real estate, I loved the business, but I never quite figured out how to hire an assistant. So, ultimately, what happened was it ended up costing me my nights, my weekends, time from family, time from friends. I couldn't even go on dates without receiving phone calls from people because most of the time when people wanted to see homes, it was in the evenings or on the weekends. And the same thing when you are selling someone's homes, you go on the weekends and you do open houses. So, during that time, I felt like I wasn't building a business, I had actually built a prison for myself. In fact, I remember one time that my aunt was passing away with cancer and I had all the money and all the means to go see her, but I didn't because I had clients and customers that were waiting for me. So, fast forward when I decided the next time to build a business, I said that I want to make sure that that never happened to me again, and I wanted to put family and friends as a priority in the event that someone got sick or ill that I would have the ability to fly and go see them without having to ask permission from a boss or a customer or someone that didn't want to pay me or compensate me because I decided to take a few days off. Don't build something that depends entirely on you. Build a machine or better yet, build media. In the beginning, yes, you may find yourself working nights, weekends just to get through some initial traction, but keep this in mind. The ultimate goal is to build something that would allow you to hire and grow team members as it grows. That should be the goal from the beginning, not an afterthought. So, when my son came to work with me and the new business that we established, the first thing that I told him was, I have all these things that I want you to get accomplished. However, I don't want you to be the one to do it. I want you to go out, find the best people, bring them into the organization, hire them, train them, mentor them, manage them, and then now you build an actual team to get these things done. So, what I did was I gave him the tools and the resources that I had to learn how to do that. And so, those are the skills that he developed. He learned how to write job descriptions. He learned how to interview people. He learned how to manage people. He learned how to hire them. He learned how to write operations and procedures. He learned how to write SOPs, right? That stands for standard operating procedures. So, ultimately, the skills that he developed were the skills to become a leader, not the skills to become an actual worker. And so, those skills pay a lot more, and they allow you to take on a lot more responsibility, growing out teams, and becoming a valuable asset to the company or to the employer that you work for. Now, he knows how to leverage people. Revenue is vanity. Time freedom is real wealth. Your 20s are for building tools, not trophies. Learn how to think, how to sell, how to manage, how to lead, and how to protect your peace. I've made money in multiple industries, but what really made the difference were these seven principles that I laid out here and the real framework: revenue, execution, assets, and leverage. If this resonate with you, subscribe. I'm not here to hype you up. I'm here to give you the blueprint I never got. Let's build something real.