155: How to Scale Your Vision Bigger, Faster with Kris Krohn

Summary

Summary of "How to Scale Your Vision Bigger, Faster with Kris Krohn"

Podcast: Real Estate Investing School Podcast
Host: Brody Fawcett
Guest: Kris Krohn
Episode: 155
Date: May 6, 2024

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Brody Fawcett sits down with Kris Krohn, a well-known real estate investor and entrepreneur, to discuss the art of scaling—not just in real estate, but in life and business. Kris shares insights on developing high standards, the mindset required to scale, building teams, and the nitty-gritty of his real estate strategies. The conversation is energetic and packed with actionable advice for both aspiring and seasoned investors, as well as broader lessons in leadership, leverage, and time management.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Building & Maintaining High Energy

• Kris emphasizes that energy is a cultivated trait, not an innate one. His transformation from a shy, average individual to a high-energy leader came through intentional study and daily routines—no caffeine or supplements, just discipline and habits.
  Quote:
  “Being a high energy human was just a byproduct of wanting to learn how to connect meaningfully with other people…that a lot of that is trained by choice.” – Kris Krohn [02:18]

2. Standards, Tolerance, and Intentional Living ([04:24])

• The importance of developing high standards is stressed as fundamental to both personal and business growth.

• Kris introduces the "integrity quotient"—in his company, failing to do anything you've committed to is a fireable offense, establishing a culture of accountability.

• Balance is critical: high standards in business, but low or playful standards in family and leisure for “having fun”.

  Quote:
  “In life, we get what we tolerate...my life really didn’t elevate until I started developing standards.” – Kris Krohn [04:42]

3. Employee Management and Delegation ([07:29])

• Entrepreneurs must eventually hire not just the most affordable team, but the best talent they can afford.

• Delegating outcomes (what needs to be achieved) rather than methods (the how) preserves team creativity and engagement.

• Failure is necessary for team growth—let people own outcomes, including mistakes, to foster learning.

  Quote:
  “My job as the visionary is to bring the really big picture vision, but...if I start defining what it looks like at the lowest level...I’m going to squeeze out any creativity or vision in my team.” – Kris Krohn [10:03]

4. Kris Krohn’s Real Estate Journey & Strategy ([12:40])

• Kris’s motivation was born from financial hardship early in marriage.

• He sought the fastest, least risky, most profitable, and scalable real estate strategy—and landed on single-family homes in top markets, buying below the median and holding for short intervals.

• Partnerships became a key accelerator: by leveraging others’ capital (401k, IRA, home equity), he scaled rapidly and passively.

• Today, Kris operates a team of 200 across the nation, focusing on only the top 5 U.S. markets, averaging 34% annual ROI.

  Quote:
  “...If I would buy single-family homes priced below the median for that market, buy it in the top five markets, rent it out and do a short-term buy and hold for three, five, seven years and then sell it—that would be the best strategy.” – Kris Krohn [13:57]

5. Market Selection & Execution ([18:33])

• Market selection is driven by macroeconomic trends: migration, affordability, income, and economic development.

• The path to finding the right property is exhaustive—342 hours per acquisition on average, sifting through hundreds of deals.

• Most investors (the “mom and pops”) accept much lower returns because they don’t or can’t achieve this level of diligence or scale.

  Quote:
  “I put in 342 hours of work on average per acquisition...That’s also reviewing hundreds of homes.” – Kris Krohn [21:27]

6. Mindset & the Power of Mastery ([25:47])

• Mastery unlocks disproportionate rewards—a philosophy Kris applies to both real estate and business at large.

• If you’re not prepared to master something, partner with a master and split the upside—it’s the slice-of-watermelon vs. whole-grape analogy.

  Quote:
  “If you master something, you get a disproportionate reward...” – Kris Krohn [25:49]

7. Scaling, Partnerships & The Riches in Niches ([28:42])

• Success lies in serving a well-defined niche: Kris scaled single-family when everyone else moved to multifamily, focusing on superior ROI.

• Partnership structures built early in Kris’s career now form the foundation of his large-scale investing.

  Quote:
  “The riches are in the niches...Be where nobody else is.” – Kris Krohn [28:43]

8. Real Estate Wealth is a Long Game ([31:18])

• Compounding favors the patient: Most wealth from real estate occurs late in the investment timeline.

• Even mediocre deals, held long-term, become significant wealth builders due to appreciation and refinancing opportunities.

  Quote:
  “15 of that 17 million happens in the last seven of the 20 years...So it's exponential.” – Kris Krohn [31:18]

9. Lessons from Scaling & Managing Time ([44:31], [46:57])

• Scaling isn't just about growing a portfolio—it’s about multiplying leverage, freeing up time, and building systems.
• Kris adopted a counterintuitive scale philosophy:
  “If you want something done right, never do it yourself.”
• He works three days a week, channeling energy into high-value activities and spending the rest of his time on personal growth and family.

10. Time Management & The Time Machine Principle ([48:57], [51:28])

• Pareto Principle rules: 80% of wealth comes from 20% of activities.

• Time blocking and giving the brain “office hours” is essential to prevent work from bleeding into personal life.

• Know your hourly value and rigorously delegate anything beneath it—constantly raise your threshold for what’s worth your time.

  Notable Tip:
  “Say no to everything below your highest-value activity; only say yes to opportunities that match or exceed your standard.” – Kris Krohn [51:28]

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• On Energy & Charisma:
  “Being a high energy human was just a byproduct of wanting to learn how to connect meaningfully with other people…that a lot of that is trained by choice.” – Kris Krohn [02:18]

• On Standards:
  “In life, we get what we tolerate...my life really didn’t elevate until I started developing standards.” – Kris Krohn [04:42]

• On Vision and Delegation:
  “Know what you want, don’t care how you get there...let people fail and learn.” – Kris Krohn [10:03]

• On Mastery:
  “If you master something, you get a disproportionate reward.” – Kris Krohn [25:49]

• On Strategy:
  “...buy single-family homes priced below the median...hold for three, five, seven years...That would be the best strategy.” – Kris Krohn [13:57]

• On Scaling & Time:
  “If you want something done right, never do it yourself.” – Kris Krohn [46:57]
  “I always think, how do I get time back? ...If you master getting time back, it'll always be a net result of making more money.” – Kris Krohn [47:09]

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• [00:59] Kris’ transformation from shy to high energy, and how charisma can be learned
• [04:24] Standards, toleration, and their impact on personal/business growth
• [07:29] Balancing standards with tolerance in hiring and team management
• [10:03] Visionary leadership and effective delegation
• [12:40] Kris’s initial motivation and breakthrough real estate strategy
• [18:33] Market selection methodology and scale
• [21:27] Work required for above-average returns and professional diligence
• [25:47] The philosophy of mastery and strategic partnerships
• [31:18] Real estate as the greatest long-term wealth builder; compounding returns
• [44:31] Mindset shifts required to scale business and regain time
• [46:57] The origin of Kris’s "never do it yourself" principle
• [51:28] How to double your income by knowing and raising your per-hour value

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Conclusion

This episode is a masterclass in both real estate strategy and high-performance mindset. Kris Krohn emphasizes that true leverage comes from mastering a niche, developing uncompromising standards, being relentless about reclaiming your time, and knowing when and how to delegate. Whether you’re a new investor, an entrepreneur wanting to scale, or someone simply looking for more balance, the practical frameworks and philosophies shared here offer a roadmap to scaling your vision—bigger and faster.

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Connect with Kris Krohn

• Free Resources: freewealthgift.com
• Social: @KrisKrohn (all platforms)

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If you’re seeking the exact playbooks Kris has followed—or want to accelerate your own journey—there are few better episodes to binge.

Transcript

[Chris Krohn]

If you master something, you get a disproportionate reward. 20% of the people are making 80% of the whatever. If you carry that out to the top 1%, the top 1% are receiving a massive disproportionate reward in relation to everybody else. But if you're a.0001%, you get the world, you get everything.

[Brody Fawcett]

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Real Estate Investing School podcast. I'm your host, Brody Fawcett, and we have an awesome guest today that's probably don't need to read off the bio because you know who he is just from hearing his name. That's Chris Crone. What's up, Chris?

[Chris Krohn]

Brody. Really good, man. Glad to be here, dude.

[Brody Fawcett]

I'm, I'm excited, excited jam today. This one's gonna be a little bit different. I'll tell you why in a second. I'll tell everyone else why in a second. That's listening. But dude, you always have so much energy. Where does that come from? How, how do you, like, I know you went from back to back to back on calls this morning. You've been busy. How do you keep all that energy going?

[Chris Krohn]

Well, first of all, energy is something I value. I think a long time ago, I was a very shy, probably a pretty boring human being. I would not have stood out to anyone in a crowd. And I remember thinking to myself, I don't know if God made me special. Like, I don't feel like there's things that I'm really good at. I don't feel like there's like, things that like, set me apart. I wasn't like an extraordinary, exceptional athlete or I, you know, wasn't the valedictorian, like, I don't know, like, just God, am I just average? And the gift of agency allows us to lean into whatever we want. And I decided at one point in my life, I was serving a two year Christian mission for my church between high school and college and I was in Germany. And I remember that the first few months I felt like I was just sucking wind because I was just nervous to talk to people. And I felt like such a failure because I'm here to talk to people and I'm just so nervous and there's so much anxiety. And I remember I was sitting on the church, you know, steps as the sun was setting one night and I had this conversation with myself, like, Chris, you're not doing a good job, bro. Like, you've got to learn how to connect with people. And then this came up it's like, Chris, you need some today. They would say, riz, like, you need some charisma. And I made that decision that I was going to be charismatic and then I made it a study of like, wow, like, well, what is that? Well, that's the ability to connect with people in a deep and meaningful way, but to also be able to communicate. And it show up in a manner where I think you're entertaining, to listen to, you're fun people, find you energetic and exciting. And so honestly, being a high energy human was just a byproduct of wanting to learn how to connect meaningfully with other people. And it's kind of weird. I tell people that are like, dude, I cannot imagine you being a quiet, shy soul, because now, you know, I am a high energy human. And. But that a lot of that is trained by choice. And then also I have a. I have a routine every morning where I cultivate energy. And so I just got energy all day long. I don't do stem supplements, I don't do coffee, caffeine or anything like that. It's just, just natural.

[Brody Fawcett]

Interesting. And I want to dive into your morning routine stuff here a little bit later. But it's funny, I took. We're doing this like, team, I don't know, we hired someone to come in and we all take these tests. It's basically, it's supposed to. Everyone in the, you know, everyone on the team takes it and based on the answers, you go through it with, you know, you know, with the guide, and it's supposed to be how you can work together a little bit better and more efficiently, et cetera. But it's, it's interesting. As I was taking, I actually had my wife take it too, because when we got it, we almost have like switched roles in this weird way, like when we first got married. She's very type A, like, like, it has to, like, it's black and white, this is the way that it works and all these things. And kind of like, if you, if you screw me over, like, I, I can close the door and move on and that's it. And I. That wasn't me. Like, I was never like that. Right. And so it's interesting we were talking about it because I feel like I've kind of switched a little bit where I've gotten this bad to say, maybe like more impatient with certain things. And I was like, looking back and I was like, why did I change? Have I changed? And a lot of it, I think the more busy I've gotten, the less like energy I give to the things I don't care about as much because I feel like I'm so busy and I have to save this energy for the most important things. Things. Now, it doesn't seem like that's the case with you. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. I don't see all. I don't think you're doing anything wrong.

[Chris Krohn]

I think that you've elevated your standards. And when you have high standards, it becomes easier to know what you're willing to tolerate, what you say yes to and what you'll say no to.

[Brody Fawcett]

I don't know.

[Chris Krohn]

I don't think I necessarily mistake that for impatience. I would just say that you're more intentional with how you want to live your life.

[Brody Fawcett]

I appreciate that. Yeah. That. Actually, that makes me feel better, at least.

[Chris Krohn]

Good. I did that to make you feel better. But no, in truth. In truth, a person's standards determines. Like, in life, we get what we tolerate. And there's a lot of us that when we hang out with our friends and family, we're bitching, moaning, complaining. We call it BMW and my company Bitch, moan, Wine. And when we're doing that, it's because we're hating ourselves for tolerating something that actually doesn't fit within the standards we wish we had. And my life really didn't elevate until I started developing standards like what honors me and what doesn't, what is okay with me, what is not. And before, I think I was just very lukewarm, like, I don't know, go with the flow, everything's okay. And it's like, well, that definitely showed up in my results in a negative way. And my results didn't start taking off. So I said, hey, guys, here's the standard. Like, in my company, I have what's called an integrity quotient. If you say you're going to do 10 things, you get to do all 10 things. If you do nine, and that means that your batting average is.900. That's. That's great for baseball, but I'm going to fire you because you do not get to commit to something and then actually not do it. That's a fireable offense. That's a very high standard. But guess what? It also means I have a work environment of eight players where everyone does what they say they're going to do, and it's brilliant.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. Like, I'm. I'm going through this. We're landscaping our entire backyard right now. Right? It's Been this huge process and I've been, been through multiple contractors and long story short, like, I was having couch with a wife the other day and I was complaining about something that they missed or didn't do and whatever, and she's like, have you, have you ever been, like, happy with any of these, these workers lately? And I'm like, maybe some. You know, and so it's like this catch 22 of. And then I was talking to one of my buddies about it later where I'm like, yeah, I wish in some ways my standards weren't as high with all this stuff because it drives me crazy. And he's like, but is that actually a bad thing? And anyhow, there's pros and cons to it, right? Like, you demand this of yourselves, you demand of other people, and you get excellence. But it, like, there's so, so many downsides that also come with that.

[Chris Krohn]

Well, I think I, I think that if you have high standards on everything, you're going to be an intolerable human being and you yourself may not actually enjoy who you become. There's actually a balance in life. So there's a time and a place for really high standards, and then there's a time and a place for no standards. Like, my, my kids know that when we're going to play, I only have two rules. The first rule, which is a standard, have fun. And the second rule is to have more fun. And so, like, it's pretty easy to mess. It's pretty hard to mess that up when your standards are so quote unquote low, other than just have a good time. And so, I don't know, sometimes, sometimes we need our high standards, and other times I think we need to take a break from them.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, no, I think it's good just, just hearing you say it and talk about that. And I wasn't even planning on going down this road this, this soon. But how does that roll into, like, employees just in general? I know you have a lot of employees, a couple hundred of them. Like, I've gone through this phase where I think lots of entrepreneurs go through it. You start out when you're like, okay, I'm gonna hire somebody I can afford. Right? And then you're gonna go from there, like, hire someone with a little bit more skill, but you're still putting a lot of energy and time into it, I guess. How does what were this conversation fill in to that? Holding people to a high standard, but, like, not to the point where it's taking your time and energy all the Time, because you're trying to teach them how to do it.

[Chris Krohn]

Netflix owners Reed Hastings came out with a really great book, no Rules Rules. And it's about freedom and responsibility. And I just had to drop it here at the start of the answer because I don't want to forget it's such a great book for entrepreneurs when it comes to employee management, because you get to know where your standards are at, where you get to demand excellence. And so I think, I think on that one, there was a time in my life when I was only hiring people at the lowest salaries possible. And then I started learning that you get what you pay for. And so there's a balance. And I think it's important for, for me to know what is the market going rate for the talent that I'm demanding in a particular role. And if I consistently find myself trying to get a value or a discount off of that, then I am going to get what I pay for. And so at some point, you, you want to have a lucrative enough company that you can pay for a talent. People that are performers, they're producers, they'll show up on time, they'll do what they say, they're going to take pride in their work, they don't have to be motivated by bonuses. Like, they're just good human beings that believe in your mission and believe in their abilities and everything comes together to co create something better. That's who I'm really looking for.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. And I know you're big on multiplying your time and delegating and finding people that can, you know, do stuff essentially you don't want to do. Right. And building your business. How does that play into. You have this vision, something you want to create. Right. And I feel like that's a piece where, you know, that's, that's probably your highest dollar per hour task. That's where you're the most valuable. And you might have somebody that's an A player on the team that's really good at whatever their role is, but they also aren't ever going to understand your vision and how that works. So how do you not spend so much time, hey, this is the way it needs to be done? Or like, no, this is wrong because that takes time to do. And how do they learn that, I guess, and apply that?

[Chris Krohn]

Yeah, well, first of all, my job as the visionary is to bring the really big picture vision. But if I start defining what it looks like at the lowest level and the how I'm going to squeeze out any creativity or vision in my team and my management in my managers, and. And that's also a problem, which means I have to be dedicated to the vision of what I want, and I have to let go of how I get there. So you get to have one. If you try to have both, you're really going to strangle people, which is know what you want, don't care how you get there, because I don't care how my achieve, how my team achieves the goal. I only care that we actually get there. And so if they say, well, Chris, we knew you thought it was going to be doing a webinar once a month for three months, but we ended up putting on one mega event and we actually produced a higher outcome doing that way. And I have to have the flexibility to say, hey, you achieved the outcome that we wanted, and I pat you on the back for the initiative that you took to get there, and I also congratulate you for doing it. A second part of that, though, is then you have to let people fail. People do not learn if you helicopter in to rescue them from their own ideas because yours are quote, unquote, better. If you are constantly doing that, you haven't hired the right people. And your people will make mistakes and they need to fail and they need to be able to learn from them. And if they're the right people, they'll learn and they'll get better and they'll make very few mistakes in the future.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. Yeah, man, that's so good. Like I said, that was on my list. I wanted to dive into the, the employee, the team building stuff, the delegating leadership. I know you're, you're big on all that stuff. So glad we got that out of the way a little bit. I mean, this is a real estate plan podcast, right? So we got to talk a little bit, A little bit real estate. And then I want to, when I say this is different, I almost want to just honestly take advantage of the time I have with you as well. We'll get into the real estate stuff. I want people to hear your background and how you kind of got going and scaled and your strategies. But then I want to selfishly, like, yeah, ask you some, some different questions. Business, entrepreneurship, like, things that have been on my mind and you guys are listening. You have to let me know if this is. If, if you like that style of stuff, let me know. We want your feedback if you want it. You know, strictly the real estate stuff. We want to. Want to hear your feedback there as well. But. But yeah, Chris, give, give us a Little bit of background. I know you got started in college. That's kind of when I got started with, with real estate as well. Opened my eyes. Tell us kind of your journey and your strategy. Maybe starting out, you know, year one, two, three and then what you're doing now. Has that strategy changed? What's kind of your, your just in general philosophy there?

[Chris Krohn]

It started first with motivation. Motivation can't be trained. You've got to have an awful experience to ignite it. Mine was coming in and having my wife tell me basically we don't have money for tuition, for rent and for food. She had actually left the grocery store crying because, and humiliated because she couldn't buy groceries. And that was a moment that really ignited me into action that said, okay, fine, I'll please my mother in law, go to college and get a degree. But I know that it is not going to actually do what I need life to do. So I'm going to go find some mentors. I'd found two people that had made over $10 million in real estate and basically I followed them around and started learning everything I could from them. One of the first pizza moments after seeing their land development deals and their flips and their multi families and seller financing deals and all these things as I started like honing in and saying, all right, thank you guys for letting me watch you, but I need a strategy that I think is going to make. Like what's the best strategy? Like, like help me out. And neither of them could answer. I'm like, that's not fair. There's got to be like, I'm at my house, I'm going to Bobby's house. What is the fastest way of getting to Bobby's house? And like, oh, so you want speed, that's what you value. Okay, well I can show you an investment that will make you a lot of money, but it comes with a lot of risk. Like well what if I don't want the risk? Like well then we have to look at a different strategy. So I learned that I had to create an algorithm based on my subjective desires. And what I really decided was to create a strategy, select a strategy based on what would require the least time, the least effort and the least risk. Number four, it had to be the most profitable, had to work in up and down markets and it had to create value for society. So those six criteria became like the defining aspects of this algorithm. And then I dumped the 30 top real estate strategies into it. And what emerged was this. If I would buy single family homes priced below the median for that market, buy it in the top five markets, rent it out and do a short term buy and hold for three, five, seven years and then sell it. That would be the best strategy and that, that articulates in the form of an ROI. And that was 6,500 homes ago. So $2 billion of real estate ago. I developed this theory and I felt like I had proved the theory. When I was graduating college, I had 25 homes. I had taken $3,300 and house hacked my way into 25 homes. These 25 homes that I bought during those college years were making me 12,000amonth. And I found proof the strategy and it was articulated through an ROI. I was making over 25% a year on my money. Today, years later, I now average 34%. And so my common strategy is I get 5 to 10 million views on social media every week. People all over the world find me. And people that have 401ks or IRAs or retirement accounts, even home equity. My real estate strategy over 20 years will outperform their retirement 108 to 100. And that's just such a ridiculous, astounding number. But their average 6% on the 30 year average in the market versus my 34 ends up producing 108 times more money over 20 years. So what that means is I have people that will partner with me. My strategy is they give me the money, technically they just, they put it in the house, we partner up, we own it. 50, 50. And now I build a portfolio. So every day I'm buying real estate with someone else's money on houses that are averaging around 34% annual ROI. And basically according to Rule of 72, that money is doubling every other year. So I'm basically an alternative to retirement. That's what I leverage real estate for. It's totally passive. And that's kind of how I initially built a name for myself.

[Brody Fawcett]

Okay, I love it so much to unpack there, kind of like working, working backwards. Because I do want to touch on like how did you go buy 25 homes as a college student starting out with nothing. Right. But like with what you're doing now. So essentially, and I love this, we talk about partnerships all the time. And at the end of the day, that's all real estate investing is. It's win win scenarios. How do you, what's a win for me? What's win for the buyer? What's when everyone involved has to win and all you're doing is structuring these scenarios and hey, how do I Make it so you win and I win. As soon as that happens, the transaction can occur.

[Chris Krohn]

Yep.

[Brody Fawcett]

And, and so like, essentially what you're doing is you're finding the deals. Now the team you have now, which, which. How many people make up your, would you say your real estate investing team?

[Chris Krohn]

About 200 people.

[Brody Fawcett]

About 200 people. Okay. So like, so that's, that's a high leverage thing, like someone coming to you and you have 200 people that are working probably full time, finding deals, doing things like. That's a lot better than somebody maybe hopping on Zillow trying to find a deal. Right. So, so you have that working for you and then you find the property. Do you typically you handle like getting it under contract, negotiating the price, all that stuff, and then they come in from there?

[Chris Krohn]

Yeah, we do. We do the entire process. So it starts with a team of researchers. Actually, if we zoom out really big, there's 324 markets that make up the United States. I only buy in the top five markets. And the reason why is because producing a 34 ROI, you can't do that in every market, not even close. And it's hard to hit that ROI. It's. This is a machine that's been perfected over 20 years and spent millions of dollars building it. And so I only invest in the top markets because half my ROI comes from the market, not the house. So we go into the top.

[Brody Fawcett]

What are those top five markets? And how do you. Is that based on appreciation? Is that based on just long term, you know, stability, rents? Like, how do you decide that?

[Chris Krohn]

So the value of real estate, what something is worth is what someone's willing to pay. And when some markets go up, like LA in 1980, they were panicking and news reporters were going into the market saying, oh, no, real estate is now over $100,000 a home. And they're like, the market has to crash. There's a panic it's going to come down. That same house is worth a million dollars today. Like, real estate will have its corrections, but it's only going north. And so what I do is I have to look at the microeconomics and act and ask, where's the next la? Which means I've got to look at a series of things. Population migration, home affordability, average incomes, and most importantly, the economics of companies moving into that area that are creating the supply and demand issue and problem. So, for example, last year, half a million people left California, 600,000 people left New York. They went to Texas. The majority went to Florida, Central Florida, Ocala county is one of my top five markets. And in that market, it's high for appreciation. The local government has a surplus of $20 billion that the state is putting into infrastructure. They just dropped $5 billion on the new railway between Miami all the way up to Central. And you basically take a look at the macroeconomics and we have a problem with the demand for way more houses than we have. And that's, that's skyrocketing. The. So I go into a market like that and then I find the path of progress where all the new builds are, and then I set up camp and I start buying houses. They gotta fit in a very, very tiny box. I never touch a deal unless it's producing a minimum of a 25% ROI, because that means that I can outperform your 401k 27 to 1. But really we're averaging about 34% in all of our markets. And so there's a whole team.

[Brody Fawcett]

Are you buying these homes that. Are you putting money into fixing them up or when you say this small box, like, obviously the return is part of that box, but what else?

[Chris Krohn]

Yeah, so usually there are very few repairs needed. In Florida, I'm almost strictly price. 70% of what I'm buying are actually new builds that fit inside that box that can produce that level of roi. But if I go into like Memphis, Tennessee or Oklahoma, I might be buying a home in the 80s that I needed to put 20 or 30 grand into to do a total gut refurbish. And so the homes, there's a standard that the home needs to operate at to be able to create the performance and the ROI out of it.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. Amazing. So are you finding. Yeah, I love this for multiple reasons, but like, are you finding that a lot of these homes that you're buying. Because this is the big thing, right? Like, a lot of people think that they can pick a random house that pops up on the market and invest in it. And they're like, hey, the real estate's terrible right now. Like, the market's so high, the numbers don't work. Nothing pencils. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't work like that. There's more that goes into it. If it was that easy, everybody would do it. Right?

[Chris Krohn]

And I put in 342 hours of work on average per acquisition. And that's also reviewing hundreds of homes. So your mom and pop shop investor is going to look at like, like a handful of deals and make a decision. And that's why Forbes reports that the average real estate Investor produces a 10.4% average ROI compared to 34. Like, it's. It's astronomically different. And that's just because at this point, I'm a. I'm a professional, and I have every resource at my disposal. When you're kind of new in the beginning, you don't know how to do that.

[Brody Fawcett]

Right, Right. So say that again so people can catch that just on the. You look at. You put an average of. You said 342 hours per acquisition.

[Chris Krohn]

Yep.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, that's. That's. It's just so important for people to hear that because I think so many. It's like, oh, well, it's easy for Chris or it's easy for Brody, or like, oh, yeah, you know, it must be nice because you guys know how to do it. No, it still takes work, and it still takes time and energy in order to get the deals.

[Chris Krohn]

Yeah, 100%.

[Brody Fawcett]

So I want to talk about the new build stuff or, like, if that's part of your criteria, you're looking for this. So, like, for me, the way I invest a lot, it's not so much. I talk a lot about, like, you can find a deal. Right. The way you find it can make it a great deal. And it sounds like in your case, that's really what it is. You're honing in on the way you find it. I focus a lot on the way that we fund it and getting creative on that and then the way that we force it. Just like, you know, whether it's adding bedrooms or buying an unfinished basement or converting something, like, that's probably my bread and butter is that creativity piece on the forcing it and funding it, but sounds like maybe I'm wrong. It sounds like finding is like you're. That's where you're getting those discounts, and that's where you're creating a lot of. A lot of return.

[Chris Krohn]

You know, when I started buying real estate in the beginning, I responded to a lot of handyman stuff and fixer upper stuff until I started realizing, wait, if I'm better at finding for every house that I can find at a discount that needs to be fixed up, I can also find a house that has the same level of value that doesn't need to be fixed up. And the reality is if I don't have to fix it up, it's easier. And so we ended up basically just moving through a lot more real estate, and it's a lot more turnkey on what we end up finding. And for us, it's just, it's just time and mastering these markets and evaluating everything to find something that fits the box to hit the roi.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I think that's, I think that's great. Plus, I love the fact that just having a newer asset is like, I've changed, you know, my strategy a little bit. In the past it was like strictly, hey, what's the highest cash on cash return? It's not always about that now. Right. Because I want to be a passive real estate investor.

[Chris Krohn]

Well, and part of that is, you know, cash on cash. We're, you know, cash is being crunched right now because we've got these high interest rates and rents, you know, still need another year or two to catch up and rates are going to come down. So there's some movement there. But, you know, a cash on. Cash on. A lot of the deals that I'm dealing in are producing 2, 3, 4, 5%. And then if I take a look at, I'm outsourcing the paying off of the home to my tenants. So my principal reduction usually is about 4 or 5% a year. And then on top of that, my depreciation and tax write offs end up impacting me about 3 or 4% a year. And then the appreciation, you know, is going to weigh in. And that's how I aggregate an overall ROI, getting to that 34%. So I am in cash flow markets like Oklahoma and Tennessee where the cash on cash is higher but the appreciation is lower. And then I'll go into other markets where the appreciation is higher, cash flows lower, and we're getting very similar ROIs. But a lot of what I'm doing is telling people, hey, for the first five or ten years, don't, don't really go crazy on cash flow. Focus on growth, you know, because if you take 50 grand, you know, if I take 50 grand and I average 34% a year on it, then over 20 years, I'm going to turn that into $17.4 million. So again, it's the strategy where it's the least time, the least effort, the least risk is a huge part of the game. So it's got to be passive, but it has to have the numbers.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, yeah. And it sounds, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but typically a lot of people that are putting money with you and investing with you, what's that avatar look like? And is it a lot of people that are like, hey, this money's gonna go. They don't want to necessarily be an active real estate investor. So to speak. But they want some returns.

[Chris Krohn]

Yeah. So I would say my, my average avatar is someone that is really curious about real estate, would love to own it, but they know they're not Gonna put in their 10, 000 Malcolm Gladwell hours. They're not actually gonna seek to become an expert and eventually a master. And I have a philosophy in life. My philosophy is if you master something, you get a disproportionate reward. So, for example, we've all heard of the 8020 Prado principle. 20% of the people are making 80% of the whatever. Well, if you carry that out to the top 1%, the top 1% are receiving a massive disproportionate reward in relation to everybody else. But if you're a.0001%, then you get the world, you get everything. And so what I love about mastery is it allows me to become more like one in ten thousand or one in a hundred thousand or one in a million. Now I'm picking up the most insane rewards. When I master something, Brody, I get 100% of the gains. If I'm not willing to master, then my rule is I partner with a master and, and I will give up half the money. And that's because I would rather have a slice of watermelon than an entire grape. Most people don't adhere to that philosophy, but the people that partner with me do. And so my avatar ends up being people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. They've been really good accumulators. So 401k ers, Ira's house payer offerors, putting money in savings. They feel broke because you don't think that you're going to touch your 401k and your IRA and the equity in your home. So you don't have money because you're stashing it and hoarding it. By the time you get to me, you're able to start doing some basic math, huh? I've been working for 20 of my 40 years and I've amassed, you know, $250,000. Forbes says I need $3 million at retirement. If I want to annuitize it and get it to produce a basic hundred thousand dollars a year, I'm off track. I am not going to have enough money. And that's when they'll look at me and be like, okay, so I want it to be passive. I don't want to be an active real estate investor. And, and I want to know that one day I'm going to wake up to millions of Dollars. And that's when they knock on my door.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, cool. Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. I think that's. It's awesome that you serve those people because they need it in that space for. For sure. And I think that. Well, two things we focus a lot more on, you know, the actual, like teaching people how to master it. Right. And which is good hearing. Like, you talk about these different things because one of the biggest things you talk about. Right. Because we have people that are. Maybe they might be. Everyone's got their superpower. Right?

[Chris Krohn]

Yeah.

[Brody Fawcett]

And how do you lean into that? And then how do you go, you know, maybe you have a lot of cash, maybe you don't have a lot of cash, but you're really good at having the knowledge and understanding this. Maybe you don't have that, but you have like the hustle and you can grind and figure it out. And so it's all about just finding those. Those pieces and those people that need to rely on you, and you need to rely on them once again. Win. Win.

[Chris Krohn]

Yeah. I'm very grateful that at the start of my journey that I was taught that the riches are in the niches. And what that means is be. Be in the blue ocean where there's no sharks. Be where nobody else is. And so I decided to scale single family homes because no one wanted to take on that task. Scaling single family buy and holds people are like, no, you're supposed to graduate to multifamily. But what I learned is that I can get an ROI at least 10% higher and 10 points higher, not 10%. Like, I can get a 34% ROI consistently on single family. But in multi family, I cannot homogenously produce a 20 or 25% return. And if I could, it's still decidedly less than single family. And yet everyone said single family is too hard to scale. So I said, cool, that's our impossible Goliath. Let's do it. And then we learn how to do it. And that's why we, you know, have this tiny little niche. So you are right. There's people that want trainers like you, there's people that want to learn. And then you have a whole bunch of people like, I'm going to cut corners. I say I want to learn because I want the outcome, but once they start doing it, I'm not going to find myself as committed because it's harder than I thought. And I'm the alternative for those people that just basically says, nah, I want this to be like an alternative to a 401k that just pays me 100 times more money.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And for some people, it doesn't. It doesn't make sense to learn new skill set. You know, like, hey, you have this. You. You have this skill. You know how to produce lots of active income. Focus on that. Go all in on that. Even if you step back from that and learn this other skill set, or maybe you're taking more of your time to do it, the return, you might be losing more than you're actually gaining, right. Instead of going with someone like you, which is great. And then the other thing, too, that's just. I think it's. We talk a lot about just cash flow in general, right? Because it's just more about replacing your active income, creating freedom. But there's this other side of real estate that it's. I view it as, like a byproduct. Some people view it as like the. That's like their bread and butter. But it is crazy. And I think I've seen it now because I'm, you know, I've been investing for maybe 12 years, right? Like, fairly young, I guess. But, like, I've started to see now more and more and more the properties that I have. Even the ones that, you know, maybe were like, oh, this is like a mediocre investment. It's insane. What five years does like, it is crazy. And how that compounds and that rolls over and, you know, cash out, refinance lines of credit, like, it's insane. If you utilize it, what it can do for you.

[Chris Krohn]

The first. If you look at a graph and you say $50,000 sitting in the market at 34% over 20 years, it grows to 17.4 million. 15 of that. 15 of that 17 million happens in the last seven of the 20 years. So it's exponential. So the first five years in anyone's real estate journey feels very boring. It's like, well, I bought a house and I'm waiting. Or I bought three houses and I'm waiting. By year five, you're right, it starts picking up momentum because you can double the portfolio, maybe triple the portfolio. And that's when people like, you know what? This is something. You wait another five years and you double and triple it again. Dude, you're gonna feel. You're gonna feel like a million bucks.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. Well, it's crazy that most people, the most money they've ever made has come from some form of real estate or owning a property, right? Usually a primary residence, and then they sell it. They do that on accident, and it's Just like, man, if you did that on purpose now, imagine what that would look like in the Future.

[Chris Krohn]

As of 2024, the average equity position for a person owning a home in America is $299,000. At age 65, the average retirement holdings is 254,000. So when someone retires, they have more net worth in home equity than they do in, hey, I just worked 40 years and stock piled money into this thing. And meanwhile, I just bought a home to live in, trade it up once in a while, and I have more.

[Brody Fawcett]

Money there, a low down payment, you know. Yeah.

[Chris Krohn]

And so it's like this idea of like, shoot, if I just bought four more homes, I'd be a millionaire. If I bought five, 70 homes, I'd be a multi millionaire. I just wish I had done that. And it's too late because you lost your time.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, crazy, crazy, crazy. That's. Yeah, it's good. Good reminders, everybody. It should be, should be motivating. It's just been a realization more and more lately as I'm like, wow, there's a lot more options, like you can. There's. Real estate's very forgiving, especially in the long term. Especially in the long term. Okay, so with, with that, what you talked about, why you figured out scaling single family, because that's how you can get the highest returns. Right. So you wanted to figure that piece of it out. What are some, like, the difficulties that came with that, especially when you're kind of spread out amongst different markets. How do you, how do you manage all that? How do you coordinate all that? Property managers, everything.

[Chris Krohn]

So the very first time I went out of state, this was after 2008, and I bought a tape of homes from Fannie and Freddie. And a lot of these homes were in Ohio and Detroit, Michigan, and in those two markets, buying up a few hundred homes at a 93% discount. I thought I was going to make millions of dollars. And a year later, I got out of everything and I lost a million. And what I learned is that I'm glad I didn't give up on going out of state because I learned how to evaluate good markets and bad markets. And the next time I would go out of state, it was the biggest win. I went to Phoenix, I went to Vegas. I started buying thousands of homes. These were homes that prior to 2008 were selling for 3 to 400 grand. I was buying them for 100 grand, 130 grand. And a lot of people thought I was crazy like, Kris, why are you doing that? I said, Understand that real estate is very simple to time. It's based on a very simple supply and demand formula. Like right now in our country, we're missing 7.2 million single family homes. We're overbuilt on multi and condos, townhomes, but we are massively under built in single family. And so here's what I can tell you. As rates come down, prices are going to skyrocket. If rates stay high, prices are going to hold static and they're still going to keep moving north. And by the end of this year, your national median home price is probably going to be over a half a million dollars instead of the 438,000 that it's at right now. So there's a lot of people that are like, dude, it can't keep going up like this. I'm like, it's going to keep going up like this. And so when you start looking at the different markets, you learn how to play the game where you realize that not all markets are the same. Some markets have better macroeconomics than others. And I had picked two of the absolute worst markets to buy real estate in. So losing a million dollars, Brody totally sucked. But the money that I've made since by learning how to go into the very best markets like Vegas and Phoenix, guess what happened within five years, all of the, we had too many homes. And that's why I got them at a huge discount, because no one wanted to buy them. Because a home is only worth what someone's willing to buy. Five years later, people had still continued for five years making babies. Immigration was still happening in this country. And what we had done is we had eaten up all of the supply and there was new demand. And when you have new demand, this is important to note, you can only, you can only build a house minimally for what it costs to build. So when I was insuring this $130,000 house that had been selling for 340,000, when I was insuring it for 270, some people would find out and get mad. They're like, crone, you bought it for 130, why are you insuring for 270? I said, because if it burns down, that's what it costs. And if you just wait a few years, we're going to catch up to that part of the market. And we did. Within 100, within five years, we cleared $100 million in gains on our portfolio. And that for me was my learning moment where I'm like, okay, out of state. If it's the right Markets make sense. So we started building infrastructure and going out of state and learning how to produce these really high ROIs.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. So cool. Yeah, I think too, it's, there's just a lesson there. The stuff that people aren't doing or is difficult to figure out, like there's something special there, right? Like, like it's in the heart. The riches are in niches like you said, but it's also those niches that people haven't figured out or they don't want to figure out. So with that, when you do, I mean, you're saying your average hold is what, five, seven years? That's kind of like your target. Then you sell. What are you doing with that? Typically you're rolling into something else. You're doing a 1031 with your investors.

[Chris Krohn]

1031 and roll into a new market that has now the right next level upside. I just rolled into Oklahoma where I have new build, where I'm getting these beautiful 15, 1700 square foot homes for under $200,000 a home. And these are, these are prime, prime locations. Right. So, you know, as my markets creep up, one of the secrets to my Strategy is buying 30% below the median. Current national median, $430,000. My average purchase price around $270,000. And that means that there's room for market correction. And also if you look at the percentage wise of what percentage of real estate goes up the most, the scale actually looks like this. Condos and townhomes are suppressed. Three bedrooms to four bedrooms actually will appreciate the highest percentage and then that number will decrease as you approach $1 million. So buying below the median is the fastest appreciating market of real estate.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that. That definitely shows. So bringing it back to how you got started, you know, you're in college. You by the time you graduated, you had 25 properties, you said, averaging about 500 bucks a piece of cash flow. So you said you, you got started by house hacking. I know you didn't house hack all 25 of those homes. So what was the process of that? Because you talked about going from like, you know, broke and that was kind of your, you know, you're back up against the wall. Pressure's a privilege type moment where you're like, I got to figure this thing out. I got to learn how to do this. You found some mentors that were essentially crushing it in real estate and you're like, I want to do that.

[Chris Krohn]

Yep.

[Brody Fawcett]

Well, how did you do that if you didn't have any Money. I know everybody's wanting to know that, right?

[Chris Krohn]

So it took me 14 months of following my first mentor's advice to put five grand in the bank. And I bought a tiny little college with a basement apartment. And it was worth 150, and I got it for 110. So my 3% down payment was 3300 bucks. And so $3300 allowed me to buy the first house. And I lived in that house, but I rented the basement, and the basement covered the whole mortgage. So I live for free. That was the first thing that made my wife go, aha, okay, I understand this real estate thing a little better because she was so skeptical when we got involved.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, same, same, same story.

[Chris Krohn]

Then a year later, we got a home equity line of credit on the home and we bought a second house. So I didn't have to come out of pocket. That's also house hacking. It was a newer home, it was a nicer home. It was worth 250. I got it for 160. So I got it $90,000 below market as a foreclosure. Rent that out to a family, made 600amonth. And now in the third month of collecting that cash flow, my wife came to me and said, when are we going to buy more real estate? Because now she saw it, we're living free. We got this. You know, I was, I was not a great earner back then while I was in college. So 600 extra dollars passive from a property light bulb went on and she's like, buy more. And the second home, the equity we used bought our third home. And then something magical happened. Brody. When I bought my first home, if I reflect back on like my in laws and my family and my parents, my brothers, they were all super skeptical about what I was doing. And humans are like crabs in a bucket. If you try to do something different, you're not going to get support. But the second home that I bought, like, they saw it as kind of like a fluke. It's like, oh, crone didn't get murdered on the first one, he got lucky on the second one. Three is a magic number. When you've done something a third time, skepticism turns into fomo, turns into anxiety. And all of a sudden my father in law called me up after that third house and he said, hey, what are you doing? He started crunching my numbers and he's like, dude, if I gave you some money out of my 401k or my equity in my home, like, could we just do the deal? 50, 50 and I was jumping out of my skin like, yes. But I tried to play it chill, bought a house. We ended up flipping that one. And he made 100% on his money that year. And he was so excited that we just started buying homes. And by the time I was a senior in college, I was now up to 10 homes. Three that I had bought, seven with him. And I remember just sitting back in class thinking, on the one hand, I'm very disappointed because I'm a senior and my goal was to own 20 homes by the time I graduated and I have 10. So I don't know how I'm going to get 10 more because my father in law has slowed down. He stopped. But on the other hand, I'm so glad that I had a father in law. Like, that brought me way further. And that's when I had this thought, I need more father in laws. And there were four people that were kind of the age of my father in law that had been savers, like my father in law. 401k errors, penny pinchers. Took each of them out to lunch that week. All of them came back at the end of the lunch hour and said, let's partner up. So with them now, I could just start buying a home each month on rotation. And by the time I graduated college, I had 25 homes. They were each paying me 500 bucks a month. I was making over $12,000 a month on those holdings. And my partners were happy. They wanted to buy more. And I was done. Like, I had enough money that I graduated college, I didn't have to have a job anymore. So, yeah, I house hacked my first three. And then I use partnership as a creative tactic for acquiring the next 22 homes.

[Brody Fawcett]

Cool. Yeah, yeah. And that sounds like it kind of set the foundation for leading up to even what you're doing now on a large scale.

[Chris Krohn]

It's been 20 years of partnering now. And my partners love it. They're like, dude, I love what you're doing. I love the results that you're getting. But I don't want a second career and I don't want to be trained. I just want the benefit. And when they put up the money and we let it compound, they're very, very happy.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And that's like, I think that, like I said, everybody's in a different, different situation. But you know, specifically those people that are wanting to learn about real estate and dive in, like, that's the power of it. You, you figured that out. You leverage that of understanding how to Go find these deals, buy them at a discount. What? It looks like you. You took the leap of faith. And not only that, you put in the work, the 14 months, you know, that finally started paying off, where everyone's like, oh, you know, he doesn't know what he's doing. Most people give up during that process.

[Chris Krohn]

Yep.

[Brody Fawcett]

And then from there, like, because you had that, you're able to leverage other people that needed that and didn't have that, you know, and couldn't afford the time and the energy and learning all that. Yeah. So. So powerful, man.

[Chris Krohn]

Thank you.

[Brody Fawcett]

Okay, so I want to. I want to transition a little bit. Well, before that, I want to ask you a question. So based on that, you just went over kind of the process of, like, scaling your, you know, your real estate investing from how you got started to what you're doing now, obviously, on a. And what was the period of that time period? How many years from when you bought your first house in college to. To now?

[Chris Krohn]

20 years.

[Brody Fawcett]

20 years. Sweet. Cool. Crazy. What can happen in 20 years? Yeah. What would you say, looking back, like, the. The mindset kind of shifts that you went through? Like, yes, you went through with real estate and. And going and like, with that, obviously, had you known or had the same mindset you have now that you had back then, or if you would have had back then what you have now maybe would have changed, you might have gone faster or bigger, whatever. Right. But kind of, how did that kind of happen? Because I think that's the whole other piece of it that's important to touch on.

[Chris Krohn]

So I think a lot of people think I'm a real estate guy, but I'm actually a scale guy. You see, When I was 16 years old, my dad had a construction company. He had one crew, and he was on it. And I would answer the phones in the summer for like $6 an hour, and I would basically line up estimates for my dad. And I remember talking to my dad one day, and they said, dad, he was. He was. He was working some equipment on this custom fireplace. I said, dad, I'm taking the phone calls. You're getting enough phone calls that I bet you could get. Spin up another team and, like, you could double your company. Like, you could take on twice as many projects. And I'll never forget, my dad stopped what he was doing, and he looked at me right in my eyes, and he said, son, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Now, I just assumed that that was the correct philosophy, because when I was in college, I was a 18 credit full time student. And I had a full time job, 40 hours a week. And I was doing my real estate business full time. And so I was working so hard during college that I was having no fun. I wasn't going to the dances, I wasn't playing, there was no parties. I was just working my tail off. And something happened when I graduated college. I didn't need my job anymore. So I quit that. I was out of college, so I was done with that. And I hired a buddy to basically manage my entire real estate portfolio and keep growing it. And they gave up 25% of my cash flow as a base. That was the 3 of the 12,000amonth. And then he would earn commissions on all the future deals for selling lease options and things like that. And so I literally went from working 130 hours a week to not working at all almost overnight. And for that to happen, I had to adopt a different philosophy because I hated my dad's philosophy. And I chose to adopt the philosophy, if you want it done right, never do it yourself. And I've leaned hard into that ever since. And what it's done is it's allowed me to create balance in my life, get my time back, make a lot of money every year, have my money grow, but also have my time remain intact without working full time. You know, I, I work three days a week. It's been that way for years. And I've got time with my kids and my wife and time to travel and have fun and play and spirituality and all the other things that add color and variety to my life. And it all came from learning that I don't have to work to make money.

[Brody Fawcett]

That's amazing. Yeah. Such like a probably light bulb epiphany moment that kind of transition and shifted everything for you. Yep. No doubt you wouldn't be able to do what you're doing now without that mentality.

[Chris Krohn]

Well, because it's now about scale now it's always, I'm not always thinking, how do I. Most people think, how do I make more money? I don't think, how do I make more money? I always think, how do I get time back? And if you master getting time back, you'll. It'll always be a net result of making more money. So reverse it. It's not putting the focus on the money.

[Brody Fawcett]

So. So do you ever struggle with like, because right now you're saying you're about three days a week work. Do you ever struggle? Because I try. And I mean, I'm not quite three Days, but I have like, you know, about three days that I'm not working. I try very hard to, you know, block off, and I've designed it that way, but I still find myself being able to flip the switch sometimes. Difficult, right? Like, I used to, like Fridays, I used to work like two hours. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna bust out two hours. And then, you know, the rest of the day is like, hang out with the kids early weekend, whatever. But it was so, like, I had to eventually shift to, like, not working at all, as opposed to working for a few hours, because I get in this mindset and all of a sudden it's so hard to switch back and forth and go like, fully present dad mode, no expectations, like you're talking about. Or there's two rules, you know, have fun and have more fun and then go back to like, no. There's a high standard and we need to push the envelope if we want to do something great. How do you, how do you balance that? Because you're, you are the perfect person to ask because it's not like you're just sitting back on like, yeah, I work three days a week. My passive income covers my life. And, like, it's amazing. And like, I do some real estate stuff on the site. No, you're like, in every category. You're. You're all in, like, you're all over the Internet. You're all over the place. And that has to take like an aggressive approach to it. So do you ever feel like on your off days, you're like, oh, I could be doing this and it would get me more ahead if I were to spend a little bit more time. Maybe I need to work two days instead of.

[Chris Krohn]

There's a fallacy that if you work more, you'll make more. Show me an entrepreneur and I will show you that they make 80% of their money with 20% of their time, which means that they have invented 80% of their schedule to make them feel good, to make them fall into society's game plan. Give me any entrepreneur and I can prove this math. And my brand new book, Time Machine actually illustrates this math because it's all about how do you actually get your time back and not letting your life be overrun. There are a couple of tips, though, that I've had to do to make it happen. And the first one is time blocking. So, for example, I will not come in and out of like, oh, I got a text, I'm going to jump back in for two minutes. I'm going to Jump back out. I have office hours for my brain, for example. I don't. I don't use my brain for any critical thinking or analyzing before 9am or after 5pm and part of that is just so that I can recapture my brain, because when it's critically thinking, it's usually for work. And so part of being able to control your time is you have to control your mind. So I have office hours if it's Wednesday and it's wife Wednesday and she and I are going to spend the whole day together. I don't look at my phone, I don't answer my texts, because that's not what the time is blocked for. And so that's a very, very real skill set for me. That was hard at first, and. And then I had to learn. There's no jumping in and out. It's like, if you're in, stay in. Which is why that work schedule is. Is usually Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. That's usually what it looks like. Unless we're in an off weekend, it looks a little different. And so that's been. That's been working really beautifully for me. I think more than anything, it's just. It's just training. For the first six months, I had to take my. My phone. You can buy, by the way, a device on Amazon where you drop your phone in and it locks it in there until the time runs down and then it reopens the capsule. And for the first six months, I had to do that. I literally had to give my phone up to my wife to train myself to release myself from this thing so that I could actually be dad or be me or be husband or just do something different.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. So it was an intentional thing, and it didn't come easy. You had to work at it until it became a habit. Yep.

[Chris Krohn]

Just have it.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah. It's so funny because it's like I. I would say we all agree with that, you know, Pareto principle. Like, we all understand that and see that. But then when push comes to shove, it's like, oh, I got ten more minutes here. Like, if I just got this much done, I would be able to get ahead. And it's just like this backwards way of thinking. We have to rewire.

[Chris Krohn]

But there's something else that I do. Every entrepreneur, every person that works for money should know what they're worth per hour. And if you're an entrepreneur, here's how you double your income. If this year, let's just say that my time is worth. I'll rewind the clock. Let's say that my time is worth as a business owner, $500 an hour. I'm now going to, I'm going to take a look at all of my activities and I probably have some activities that pay me 2,000 an hour or 5,000 an hour. And then underneath that I have a bunch of activities that pay me $200 an hour, $50 an hour, $20 an hour, etc. There's an obvious line and if you draw the line of demarcation and hand off everything below the line, you're going to get all your time back and then you're going to be tempted. Oh no, I want to use it. But you're only able to use it on the new standard. Here's the new standard. If my two highest paying activities are $2,000 an hour and 5,000, then I'll take my highest activity and times it by two until I can find an activity that will pay me $10,000 an hour. I will either say no or I'll delegate the yes to somebody else. Now you have a system for knowing when you are supposed to work and when you're not supposed to work. Most people don't have that kind of system so they're tempted to go in and out of the market. And if you don't have the math that I just demonstrated, then when you want to make more money, like sometimes you'll be literally grabbing coffee for the office and you'll be literally get paying yourself $14 an hour. And then sometimes you're checking emails that's worth $21 an hour. And at other times you're working with a new client that might be worth $10,000 an hour. The moment you tell the universe, I will never say yes to anything unless it's over $10,000 an hour, the universe will dig up opportunities. You say no, no, no. And once it's 10,000 or higher, you say yes. Now your income is going to double. But in the meantime you got your time back.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yeah, yeah, 100% agree with that. And the other piece of that too is because there only is so much time if you're filling those hours with more of the fourteen $21 hour task. Guess what's happening? You have to go make up for it on an even higher scale because there's only so many a lot of hours. And so I'd rather have my time back.

[Chris Krohn]

I'd rather have my time back and just say, hey, sorry universe, I'm waiting for you to deliver up the goods. If it's not $10,000 an hour. And by the way, employees can do this too. It just looks a little different. My book Time Machine really gives a really great illustration on how you reclaim time. You might only be able to reclaim. It's the opposite. You might only be able to reclaim 10 or 20% of your time. But if you can use that efficiency efficiently to grow projects in the company to make more money, get on a good relationship with your, with your manager. And now you can work towards actual raises in six month periods of time where it's like, hey, I figured out my most valuable resource to the company. I started saying no to the minutia. I freed up my time, started doing more of what the company wanted. I'm now a higher performer. Now I deserve a raise. Anyone can and should give themselves a raise by using that kind of system. In other words, don't let your boss tell you what you're supposed to do. Have an intrinsic understanding of the value of your projects, figure out what a win to the company is and then start producing more of those and less of the other stuff.

[Brody Fawcett]

Yes. Yeah. And most people don't, they don't care. I'm, I got my salary, I get, I'm making this much money, like whatever I need to do, I'll do. And they punch the clock as opposed to understanding the economics of it and how it works and how you can actually drive that. And that's been like, I talk about like have you have this, you have a maintenance zone, you have an execution zone and you have like a research zone. So much we spend our time stuck in like this maintenance zone of like just going through the process versus actually like executing those, those money making activities. And you ask my team, that's literally been our focus so much. Like it's been our conversation. It's at the top of one of our kind of like playbooks. It's like, hey, first priority. Not that everything's about money, right? But like, are you doing a task that's driving dollars? Because if you're not, it's so easy because they're everywhere and we can spend all of our time perfecting these systems that don't drive more dollars.

[Chris Krohn]

I do want to say this though. Every company on the planet has a mission and a goal. And the goal is the same. It's to make money. And I don't want anyone to ever feel bad about that, that a business has no business being in business unless it knows how to be profitable. Because if it's not profitable, it's not sustainable. If it's not sustainable. Then everything you're trying to put in the marketplace, the next generation or the next week, people can't actually enjoy it. But the mission totally 100% gets to be like, oh, we're bringing this to the market, or we create this value add for individuals, or we're helping produce this thing that they can't get anywhere else. But you have to use money as a measurement, as a company, and then in your own personal life to actually.

[Brody Fawcett]

Know Chris as a person. Yeah. Is that not the exact same as a person?

[Chris Krohn]

Yes, it is the exact same as a person. You, you have to know your, your financial standards. This whole conversation started with standards, and people don't know when to say no. Like, let's just say I've got a guy sitting next to me right now. He's on my team and he's helping me run the whole tech side of this to make sure that I don't mess it up because I'm going to fat finger the buttons and everything's going to go wonky and the camera's going to shut off. And in his life, he's talented, so he could actually have a side gig. And if he knows how his company values his dollar per hour, he then gets to ask, well, when I do a side gig, if I just charge the same dollar per hour, I'll make more money, but I have to give more time. What I would invite him to do is to pick a side gig that pays him double or triple what his company does. And here's why. He'll do fewer projects, but the ones he does, he'll be more appreciated. And then if he gets enough side gigs now he has enough money where he has got options. If he's not fully in love with his career, he has a transition out because he raised his financial standards. Every employee, every owner that employs someone has to generally get a minimum of a 400% return on their salary. So if I pay someone $50,000 a year, if they're not comp. If they're not contributing to $200,000 your revenue, then they're not actually pulling their weight and they're tied indirectly to revenue, and they'll always be the least promotable. But if you start learning, oh, what is most valuable to the company, and how do I go from a 200x return to a 400x return? That person's always going to get a raise every time they ask for it.

[Brody Fawcett]

So good. So good. Yeah, I have my video guy next to me too, and, and one of the it's interesting. Like, six months ago, we were having this conference the other day. Like, what's your. Like, what do you do? You know, he said, I'm a videographer. And I'm like, dude, the only problem with being a videographer is they're. They're everywhere.

[Chris Krohn]

Yeah.

[Brody Fawcett]

Like, you don't want to just get good at video. Like, you don't know why you're doing what you're doing. You're. You're. Let us film this, and you make it look good, and that's amazing. But, like, how good is that? And so it's like, I want you to understand marketing, why you're filming what you're feeling. I want you to understand the psychology of it. So, like, we've invested in courses, and he's spending a lot of his time in. In podcasts and just diving into, like, no, how can I go have this valuable set where I understand why I'm doing what I'm doing, not just doing the thing.

[Chris Krohn]

You got it? Yeah. 100%.

[Brody Fawcett]

Dude, this is. This has been amazing. We got. We got some real estate in there, so that's good. We can check that box. But I think it's all. All the same, man. Everything we've talked about, like, the standards, all of it, just the mindset, the mentality, it all feeds it. Right. And that's really the reason why a lot of people are into real estate in the first place. If people want to connect with you, Chris, I know, like, I have a stack of your books which are phenomenal. What's the best way to do that? How can we support you? How can we make sure this was. This was worth your time today?

[Chris Krohn]

Oh, thank you, Brody. Listen, I love. I love giving people the gift of knowledge. And so I've got tickets to my upcoming events. I've got free books. I've got free wealth consultations. All of those are free gifts that can be [e-mail] and freewealthgift.com basically says, hey, pick. Pick whatever you want from the menu, you can have it all, too. And let me just invest in you. Let me give you some bonuses. Let me help you understand and create some value in your life. And if you want to follow me on social media, it's Kris Krohn. Both my first and last name are spelled with a K, K, R, I, S, Krone. And pick your favorite social media platform. I will be there.

[Brody Fawcett]

I love it, dude. Well, thanks so much. We appreciate your time and all your. All your knowledge. That's definitely what you've done is given us the gift of knowledge today. So we'll link all that in the show notes. Thanks, guys for tuning in. We'll catch you next time.

[Chris Krohn]

Thank you.