How to Get “Traction” in Your Real Estate Investing Business
By GoForClose teamFirst published Updated 4 min readGino Wickman's Traction gives investors an operating system: map every seat in the business, from marketing and acquisitions to finance, then find the one you fit and hire for the rest. A simple dispositions decision path, rental first, then wholesale, wholetail, flip or lease option, gives every property an exit strategy.
There are a lot of real estate investing and wholesaling books about building your business. But if your end goal is to escape the daily grind, gain profits, and recover your time, there is one book from our Top 10 List of Real Estate Investing Books that our Founder and CEO, Josh Miller recommends.
The book is Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman.
Wickman’s book gives you direction on how to get what you want from your real estate investing / wholesaling business, so one day you can be the CEO, or just the owner, instead of an “operator,” stuck in the daily grind.
What Can You Learn from Wickman’s Traction?
In his book, Wickman teaches us three things, the three “How’s” if you will:
- How to Organize Your Business?
- How to Put the Right People in the Right Role?
- How to Create a Working Team Structure?
We won’t give away the entire plot, or scheme, of Wickman’s work, but we want to share the idea behind one chart he created to help innovators and business starters, like yourself, organize their business through what he calls the EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System): an accountability chart that names every seat in the business and who fills it.
EOS practitioners have expanded Wickman’s simple chart to apply it to the real estate investing business specifically, as Josh walks through in this video on YouTube. Here is how that expanded chart is laid out.
The top of the chart begins with the Visionary / Integrator. This is the Business Owner, aka You! Beyond your role are those areas of business that are key to operations and sales, including those roles that are specific to the Real Estate Investing space.
The first four areas of the business that need to be filled are Marketing, Acquisitions, Dispositions, and Title Company.
The last three areas to be filled are Project Management, Property Manager, and Finance.
Together, these seats show the mechanics of a well-oiled Real Estate Investing Business. If you’re new to the industry, you may feel a bit unnerved looking at a chart like this, because it drives home the fact that you cannot fill every role without sacrificing a lot of your time and effort.
Most people get into real estate investing / wholesaling because they want to leave the 9-to-5 routine and earn a passive income. Instead, they find themselves trapped in an almost 24/7 job, with no holidays or vacation, and not a single break to make it work. So what can you do to avoid being stuck in the daily grind, burning out and losing deals?
A Tool to Scale and Achieve Financial Freedom
The EOS helps you replace yourself in every role on that expanded chart. You should be able to look at the chart and decide the role you best fit in, that is, beyond the Visionary / Integrator role.
For example: after his first house flip, Josh discovered that he was better at Marketing than Sales and Negotiations. So he took over the Marketing in his REI business and hired himself a Sales team to handle talking with sellers, paperwork, and acquisitions.
In the same way, you should find the role that best suits you, then hire the right people to fill the subsequent roles. This way, you free up your time and can focus on what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing in real estate investing / wholesaling.
To help your operations run more smoothly, and so you can close more deals a month, our CEO, Josh Miller, also created a chart he used to streamline the disposition of his properties.
How does Josh’s chart work? An example: once a property comes under contract, each qualification has to be answered with a “Yes” if the property is to become a rental. But let’s say the property is in a bad location. Then it becomes a question of whether or not the property can be a wholesale deal. If not, then can it be a wholetail? What about a flip? And finally, can it be a lease option?
It is always a good idea to have an exit strategy. A chart like this takes the guesswork out of deciding what to do with a property, even before you get it, allowing you and your team to do a lot more volume.
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