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Hey, remember that scene in the Matrix where Neo suddenly needs to fly a helicopter and he has absolutely no idea how? Now, I'm gonna come back to making millions through these skills. But first, let me tell the story. So he doesn't know how to fly a helicopter now. He doesn't panic. He doesn't go read a book. He doesn't say, well, someday I'll learn that. They literally upload the skill into his brain and he blinks, he looks up and he says, I know how to fly a helicopter now. That moment messed with my head at first when I first saw it, because I realized something. The people who win at life aren't always the book Smart people. They study for years. They just acquire skills faster. What used years now just takes minutes. And while we don't have a plug in the back of our head, we do have something shockingly close. Now, in the next few minutes, I am going to upload five millionaire skills into your operating system. The same skills that took me years and years to learn the hard way, but did eventually make me a millionaire many times over. Now, if you actually use these, your life and your business will start moving at a completely different speed. You'll be flying helicopters. Not really. And hey, if you find this helpful, smash that, like, button with your left thumb and let me know in the comments. Your favorite tip or the one that you disagree with and pissed you off most. All right, so my name is Brandon Turner. Beardy Brandon on social media. And this is five skills that'll make you millions. All right, skill number one. It's one that almost nobody's talking about yet. And yet it is going to separate the winners from the losers over the next decade. I'm calling it Using AI as a Thought Partner. That's the skill. Using AI as a thought Partner. Now, I know what you're thinking, Brandon. Really, AI. I thought this was about millionaire skills, not tech stuff. Now hear me out. This is not about being some tech bro or tech nerd or learning how to code. This is about having a strategic thinking partner available to you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that never gets tired, never judges you, and has access to more knowledge than any human on the planet. Now, I want to explain exactly how I use this in my life and how it's really changed my life and how I run my businesses now. Honestly, I used to have these moments maybe you can relate, where I'd be, you know, staring at some problem, a deal, a business problem, an issue with a personnel, some decision I need to make. And I just felt stuck. Like I knew the answer was in there somewhere, but I just couldn't get it out of my own head. Now in the past, I would maybe just call a friend or I'd call a mentor or usually I just sit there spinning my wheels for a long period of time. Now I open up AI and I have a conversation. Not just like, hey, Google, what's the weather? I'm talking about a real deep, strategic, challenging conversation. You know, I'll say something like, hey, here's a deal I'm looking at. The property's a 48 unit apartment complex. They're asking price 3.2 million. Current rents are well below the market by 15%. Here are the numbers, blah, blah, blah. Here's what I'm thinking. What am I missing? What questions should I be asking that I'm not asking? Poke holes in this and the AI comes back with things I hadn't thought of. Not always. I mean, sometimes it tells me stuff I already know, but. But maybe two or three times out of ten it surfaces something that saves me thousands of dollars or points me in a direction I wouldn't have gone or just simply helps organize and clarify the thoughts in a written way. So here's the framework that I use and I call it the Ask method. Ask A. Articulate your problem. Write it out in detail. Like the act of explaining your situation forces clarity. Now most people never do this part. They walk around with fuzzy problems in their head and they wonder why they can't solve them. Duh. Now the S and ask goes. Stretch your thinking. Ask AI to challenge your assumptions. Say, what would someone who disagrees with me say? What are the risks that I'm ignoring? What would this look like if it were easy? Now these kind of prompts force you out of your own echo chamber. Now K in ask is keep iterating. Don't stop at the first answer. Go deeper. Ask follow up questions. Say, okay, that's interesting. Tell me more about that. What would happen if I took that approach? What's the worst case scenario? And listen, here's the key. This whole thing with AI as a thought partner only works if you tell the AI how to think, not just what to answer. Most people treat AI like Google. They type in where should I buy a rental property? And then they get some generic surface level response. Crappy prompt, crappy answer. Garbage in, garbage out. But millionaires treat AI like a senior partner at their business. And the difference comes down to how you set up the conversation. Now, if you want a world class Thought partner. Instead of a generic chat chatbot, you need to give it three things. You need to give it a role, a standard, and a process. So this is the exact prompt that I use and I recommend you can just take this and use it. It's in the description below. It turns AI from a toy into a weapon. Act as my elite thought partner and strategic advisor. Your job is not to agree with me, but to make my thinking sharper. Ask clarifying questions before giving advice. Identify blind spots, faulty assumptions, and risks I may be ignoring. Offer three to five strategic options, not just one answer. Explain trade offs clearly and simply. If my idea is weak, say so, and show me how to strengthen it. Think in frameworks, not fluff. Optimize for leverage, speed and long term upside. Here's what I'm thinking about right now, and then I'll put the thought in and then you drop in that problem or decision that you're wrestling with. Now, when you use a prompt like this, you're not outsourcing your thinking, you're just outsourcing upgrading it. You're no longer asking for answers. You have the answers. It's in there. You're training a system to think with you collaboratively. That's the difference between dabbling with AI and using it like a millionaire. The millionaires I know aren't just using AI to write emails or generate cute little images. Some of us are. But they're using it as a strategic advisor, a thought partner, a sounding board that's available at 2am when you can't sleep because you're worried about some deal falling through. And here's the thing. This skill isn't just about AI. It's about a willingness to think deeply and strategically about your decisions instead of just winging it. And AI is just the tool that makes it accessible to everybody, not just people with expensive advisors and big networks. Now, if you're not doing this yet, you're leaving money on the table. Period. All right, on to skill number two that's gonna make you millions. Decisiveness. And yeah, this is a skill and it's one of the most important if you wanna be a millionaire. But it's the one that most people probably struggle with more than any other on this list. Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, in my business, which I do real estate investing, I buy a lot of real estate. I had around 30 rental units. Not bad, but I was kind of stuck. Like I was doing okay. I was making some money. Properties were cash flowing okay on paper, and things look Fine. But I was just kind of coasting, like, drifting. Like I wasn't growing and I wasn't really excited about life. I wake up and think, well, what am I even building toward? And I didn't have a good answer. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I mean, I was reading books still. I was analyzing deals. I was on a big podcast about real estate estate. And I was networking and doing all the right things, but nothing was really moving in my life. And then I read a simple quote that, no joke, changed my life. It's from a book called Traction by Gino Wickman, which is phenomenally helpful if you haven't read it now. The quote was something like this. It's often more important that you decide than what you decide. And it hit me like a freight train, or more like a 747 because I was on an airplane flying back to Maui from a conference in Denver. When I read it, it hit me like a freight train, 747 airplane. When I realized this, my problem wasn't that I didn't know enough. My problem wasn't the market or interest rates or my capital situation. My problem was that I hadn't made a decision. I was stuck in this, like, endless loop of like, well, should I do multifamily or should I do self storage? Should I flip houses? Should I go out of state? Should I syndicate? Should I just keep buying small stuff round and round and round? Maybe you can identify with that. Maybe you've just been caught in indecision in analysis paralysis. I mean, I was researching my options instead of picking one. And that indecision was my real bottleneck. It wasn't money or knowledge or the market. It was indecision. So I decided, I said, I'm going to go all in on mobile home parks and I'm going to syndicate. I'm going to raise money from investors and I'm going to buy big deals. Boom. Decision made. Now, was that the single best investment strategy in the entire universe? No, probably not. Like, there's a lot of great strategies out there. There's tons of them. There might have even been something even better. But here's what I've come to believe with every fiber of my being. The best strategy is the one you pick and stick to. That's not just real estate, that's just business. The best strategy is the one you pick and stick to. It's like a diet is keto. The best is Mediterranean is intermittent fasting. Honestly, who cares? The best diet is the one you Actually follow a B plus diet you stick to for a year. Beats an A plus diet you quit after three weeks. Every single time. The same thing is true with business and investing. Same with life. That one decision, mobile home parks, and syndicating them like that unlocked everything. Suddenly, I had clarity. I knew what to study. I knew who to talk to. I knew what deals to look for and which ones to ignore. I mean, every conversation then had more purpose. Every action had direction. And I got excited again. And within a few years, that decision led to Opendoor Capital, which now manages over a billion dollars in assets in real estate. It's wild. All because I stopped deliberating and I started deciding. Now, why is indecision so dangerous? Well, here's what most people don't realize. Indecision. It isn't neutral. Now, it feels safe. It feels like you're being careful. It feels like you're being smart. You're doing your due diligence. But indecision has a massive cost. And that cost is invisible, which is what makes it so fricking dangerous. Like, every day you spend stuck in I'm not sure yet is a day that you're not building. You're not learning from real experience. You're not compounding. You're not growing. Like, the opportunity cost of indecision is enormous. And you never see it because it shows up as the deals you didn't do, the businesses you didn't build, the life you didn't live. Now, I've met so many people who have been just getting ready to invest for five years, 10 years. They've read every book, they've listened to every podcast episode. They know more about cap rates and cash on cash returns than most active investors. But here's the thing. They don't own a single property. Why? Because they never decide. They're waiting for some perfect answer before they decide. Meanwhile, someone with half their knowledge but twice their decisiveness bought a duplex three years ago and now owns 12, 15, 100 units. The knowledgeable person is smarter. The decisive person is wealthier. That's not a coincidence. Now, let me explain this 70% rule for decision making. See, I'm not saying that you should be reckless. Please don't hear that. I'm not saying close your eyes and throw a dart. Like there's a difference between being decisive and being stupid. And here's the framework that I kind of use to balance this. I call it the 70% rule for decisions. And no, this isn't the same 70% rule for house flipping. If you're familiar with that totally different concept. The idea is simple. If you have 70% of the information you think you need, decide, don't wait for a hundred percent. You'll never get there. 100% certainty does not exist in business or in life. If you're waiting until you feel completely confident and you have every possible data point, you're going to still wait forever. 70% is enough, you know enough to make a smart, informed decision. The remaining 30%, you'll figure that out after you decide through action and experience. That last 30% of information is almost always only available on the other side of decision making anyway. I mean, let's use an example. Let's think about your first car that you bought. Like, did you test drive every single vehicle on the market? No. You narrowed it down. You drove a few and you just picked one. Now, was that the perfect car? Probably not. But you got it and got you where you needed to go, and you learned what you actually wanted for next time. And you probably bought a different car next time because you learned what you liked and didn't like. Decisions work the same way in business and really all of life. Speed over perfection. Now, here's something else I've noticed about millionaires. And I mean every single one that I've spent real time with, they make decisions quickly. Not carelessly, but quickly, fast. Like there's a huge difference. See, they gather the key information, they weigh the major pros and cons. They maybe chat with AI to discuss it, and then they pull the trigger. They don't agonize, they don't pull 20 friends. They don't need to sleep on it for six weeks. They trust themselves. They decide and then they move. And when they get it wrong, they adjust. That's the secret. Decides that people aren't afraid of being wrong because they know that most decisions are reversible. Like, yeah, you bought a property and it doesn't make you a lot of money. Okay, fine, sell it. You hired the wrong person. Let them go. You chose the wrong rental market pivot. Very few decisions in life are actually truly permanent. But the decision to not decide, oh, that one's permanent because you can't get that time back ever. You know, I love the way Jeff Bezos actually talks about this. He separates decisions into two categories. There's one way doors, and there's two way doors. One way doors are decisions that you can undo. Those, like, deserve obviously careful deliberation. But most decisions, they're two way doors you walk through. And if you don't like what's on the other side, you walk back. The problem is most people treat every decision like a one way door when it's actually a two way door and they stand in front of that door for months, sometimes years, afraid to walk through it. So my encouragement to you, stop standing in front of two way doors. The decision muscle, like it has to be exercised. And that's the thing about decisiveness. It is a muscle and a skill. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. So start small. Like if you can't decide what to eat for dinner, just pick. In five seconds, go. Can't decide what book to read next. Grab one, start. Can't decide whether to go to the gym this morning. You're going done. Train yourself to decide quickly on small things. And then when big decisions come, like what market to invest in or whether to quit your job or whether to take on a business partner, you're going to have the muscle memory to weigh the options and pull the trigger instead of freezing. Because here's the real truth that nobody tells you about success. The people who are living the life that you want, they're not smarter than you. They don't have more talent than you. They don't have some secret advantage. They just decide and do and then they decide again and do and again and again and again. While everyone else is still thinking about it, they decide and do. That's the whole game. Decide, do, adjust, decide, do, adjust over and over until you've built something incredible or you learned a lot. Now, how might this play out in real life? I want to give you an example of how I teach it inside. Like when I'm helping coach new real estate investors or even experienced real estate investors. And I teach this inside of my real estate education companies. But you can apply it to whatever principle in business you're in now. We call it the crystal clear criteria. We define six decisions every new investor or existing investor in our program must make the first month. No waffling? No, I'm still figuring it out. You just decide and we push you on it. Number one, strategy. Are you doing short term rentals or house flipping or traditional multifamily buy and hold? You pick one. Number two, property type. Are you going to do single family houses? Are you going to do 2 to 4 unit small multi? Are you doing a commercial strip mall? Like what are you buying? Number three, location. Where is the best place to execute the strategy and the property type you just picked? Is it your local market? Are you going to go out of state? Is It a specific neighborhood Number four condition. Are you looking for fixer upper properties or something you can force appreciation on or something already stabilized? And turnkey. 5, price range. What is your ceiling? What's your floor? Know your lane before you start shopping. It'll eliminate a lot of the noise. And six, profitability. What makes it a good deal? What makes it good enough? And what's a no go? Like, define the number. Cash per unit, or is it cash on cash return? Like what your metric you care about. So when a deal lands in your desk, you already know if it's a yes or no. That is crystal clear. Criteria, six decisions. And once you made them, the fog lists. You stop looking at everything emotionally, and you start looking at the right things logically. So your real estate agent knows exactly what to send you. Your team knows what numbers to run, or you know, what numbers to run. Your time is spent on deals that actually fit instead of chasing every shiny object that pops up on Zillow. Does that make sense? It's six decisions, and that's for real estate. But in your industry, you have that as well. It's all it takes to go from I want to do this to I know exactly what I'm doing, and I can make decisions and I can move forward. I can can decide and I can do and I can decide and do until I reach my goal. All right, skill number three, and this is a big one. In fact, I originally had this skill broken into three separate skills. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is not really three separate skills. It's one skill with kind of three layers. And then the magic only happens when you connect them all together. Now, I call this skill goal alignment. People, like, align their goals, and it's the ability to create a compelling vision for your future and then reverse engineer it all the way down to what you do on a random Tuesday morning. Because here's the problem I see with almost everybody who is stuck. It's not that they don't have goals. Most people have goals. Like, I want financial freedom or I want to own rental properties. I want to quit my job. Great. Beautiful. Inspiring. Cool. But here is the massive gap between, like, I want something and then what you're actually doing today. What's that gap? That's what I want to talk about. That's what goal alignment is. That's where dreams go to die. So if we can just close that gap, like millionaires do, we're going to get there. So millionaires build a bridge from the big Exciting vision all the way down to the daily habits and weekly actions that they execute on. Everything's connected, everything's aligned. And that alignment is what creates momentum. So let me show you exactly how this works. I call it the goal alignment method. And it has five levels. Level one is the crystal clear vision. Now this is a three year picture of where you're going to head. I mentioned that story earlier, remember, about being kind of stuck with my real estate because I didn't make a decision. But once I did decide and I fully committed to it, next I needed to lay out a vision for where I was going. This is like level one of the goal alignment method. I did it on an airplane, that airplane from Denver to Maui, where I live. And I landed with just an incredibly clear vision of the future. It was written in a newspaper article format from the future. It was like, this is where Brennan's at. So to do this, you sit down, no phone, no distractions, and you write out in detail what your perfect life looks like three years from now or your perfect business. Not one year, not 10 years, just three years. It's close enough to feel real and far enough away to be ambitious still. But here's the key. You write it in present tense as if it's already happening. And I like doing it like a newspaper. Not I want to own 50 units. Instead, Brandon owns 50 rental units that produces $15,000 per month in cash flow, right? Or like he wakes up in his beach house on a Tuesday morning and checks his property management dashboard over coffee. His portfolio runs without him because he's built great systems and hired great people. Now that could be third person or first person, whatever. It's not. I want to spend more time with my family. Instead, it's like I pick my kids up from school every day at 3pm we have dinner together as a family every night on Fridays. I take the day off. We go on adventures together. Do you see the difference? The first version is a wish. The second version is a picture. And the brain is wired to chase pictures, not wishes. So after I made this newspaper article from the future which talks about how I, you know, owned $50 million of real estate and had over a thousand rental units, I blew the thing up on a giant poster and I hung at my office and I looked at it every single day. I mean, just having it there, it kept me orientated toward that word, orientated, I think it is orientated toward what actually mattered instead of getting pulled into the urgent. But unimport stuff like that really just fills up everyone's day. And here's what's wild. When I look back at that crystal clear vision I wrote, most of it came true. And not only that, I surpassed it. I didn't end up with a thousand units, I ended up with 14,000. I didn't have $50 million of real estate. I bought over a billion. Not because of magic, not because of manifestation or the law of attraction or whatever you want to throw at it. Because when you have absolute clarity about where you're going, every decision becomes easier. Every yes and no becomes obvious. You stop drifting and you start driving. Now, I know you might be asking yourself, well, Brandon, how do I know what I want? Well, this goes back to decision making. It doesn't matter. It's more important that you decide than what you decide. So write something that's compelling, that's exciting, that's cool. Now, the vision by itself isn't enough. That's where most people stop. Like if they even get that far. I wrote my vision, I got a vision board. Cool. Now what? Well, you gotta reverse engineer it. So level two of the goal alignment method is your annual goals, like the yearly target. So your crystal clear vision is a destination. Your annual goals are the mile markers. Look at your three year vision and ask, if that's where I want to be in three years, where do I need to be? Year one, like one year from now, where do I need to be on pace? If your vision says you have 50 units in three years, then maybe your annual goal might be to have your first five or ten. Now if your vision says 15,000 per month in cash flow, then maybe your annual goal might be your first thousand or two thousand or five thousand by December. Now, I use what's called smarter goals for this. Now you've probably heard of smart goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound. That framework has been around since the 80s and it's fine, but I think it's incomplete. So I added two letters to it. Smarter. Exciting. Like, does it fire you up? Because many people set goals based on what they should do or should have and they feel guilty putting down what they actually want and would actually fire em up. Like, if you want to give away $100,000 from your business to charity, great, do that. But if that doesn't fire you up, but a private jet would, then write down the private jet and R Risky. Like, finally, a goal shouldn't be too easy to hit. Like if you already go to the gym four or five times a week and you have for years Then maybe a goal around going to the gym four or five days a week isn't risky. Now at the same time, if you own like two rental properties and you want to own 200 houses by the end of the year, that might be just a little bit far away. And that's just going to end up demoralizing you more than it fires you up. I mean you really want your goal that is just out of reach, but not out of sight. Now we have our annual goals, but then we go to level three, our quarterly benchmarks or like our 90 day sprints now. Cause a year is just too long to stay motivated. Your brain just can't hold a 12 month timeline with any kind of real urgency. So you break the annual goals into quarterly benchmarks. If your annual goal is 20 units, then your Q1 benchmark might be secure financing and close on a five unit or Q2 might be. Then close on five more and Q3 might be five more and Q4 might be the final five. And then you stabilize it Like I think of quarters like a sprint. 12 weeks, like that's short enough to maintain intensity, but long enough to actually accomplish something meaningful. And at the end of every quarter you do a mini reset. Like what worked, what didn't? Am I still pointing the right direction? And you adjust as needed. In fact, if you're in any of my education programs like First Deal or Freedom Accelerator links in the description below. We do this as a group every single quarter we do annual goal setting. Then every quarter we reset our goals and our habits and actions and all the stuff we're about to talk about in a second. So check it out. Level four of the goal alignment method is the weekly targets. Now these are the building blocks. We're getting really granular here. And this is where impact happens. So if your quarterly benchmark is to close on five units, then what needs to happen this week to stay on pace? Maybe this week you need to analyze 10 deals or you need to make 3 offers or follow up with your lender on that pre approval. Or you need to call back that agent who sent you a lead on Thursday. Maybe you got to schedule a property tour for Saturday. These are your weekly targets. They're specific, concrete, completable tasks that completely connect back to the quarterly benchmarks, which connects to the annual goal, which connects to the vision that you said. Do you see the kind of cascading effect of this? The alignment? Everything flows together, nothing's random. Every weekly target exists because it serves the bigger picture. So I set my weekly Targets. Every Sunday night, it takes me about 15 minutes. I look at my quarterly benchmarks and I ask what do I need to accomplish this week to stay on track with that. And then I write down my target for the week. I call it the weekly one. It's simple, but it's incredibly powerful. Now level five are your daily disciplines and I call this the hack system. I'll explain why. This is the bottom of the alignment method where the rubber meets the road. Your daily disciplines are the habits and actions and behaviors you execute every single day, rain or shine, motivated or not. This is where I use what I call the hack system. So hack is an acronym that stands for your habits, your actions, your constraints and your KPIs. So habits are like the D weekly behaviors that you commit to no matter what. They're non negotiable. For me, that includes things like morning quiet time, exercise, reading, reviewing my vision. Now they don't directly need to make me money, but they keep me sharp, focused and grounded. With everything else going on in life, I can't let these fall apart. Now a few more that I'm tracking right now include getting out of bed by 6am, going on a weekly date with my wife, meeting with my executive team, reading fiction for at least 15 minutes a day. Now if you're a real estate investor, you might also do some business ones like analyze three properties per week, or make two offers per week, or have four networking conversations per week. Habits you see are the fuel that drive you towards success. So remember this, you get the results of what you repeatedly do. Now, actions are the specific needle moving tasks you identify and commit to doing in the coming week. Now for a real estate investor that might be go to that meetup on Tuesday or call that seller back or book our trip to Maui. So millionaires record and then do the vital actions every week. They don't let them slip through the cracks. Now constraints are the things that you commit to not doing. And honestly, this might be one of the most powerful categories because success isn't about just doing the right things, it's about not doing the wrong things, the bad habits, the things that knock you off. So my constraints include not checking any my phone like social media after 8pm, not having sugar six days out of the week, not saying yes to meetings that don't align with my goals because what you say no to is just as important, maybe more so than what you say yes to. And lastly of the hacks, it's KPIs, it's your key performance indicators. The Scoreboard. The numbers you check off every day and week to see if your habits and actions are producing the results you want. So, like, things like, did you analyze the deals you said you were gonna do? Did you do the meetings you said you're gonna do? Did you make the offers you're gonna do it. So we track these on a habit tracker or a hack tracker every single morning or night, whatever you wanna do. And it takes less than two minutes. Check dash, check dash. Did I do it? Check did I not dash? That's all I do. Takes like literally less than two minutes every single day. I can look at my numbers, I can see my week, my picture, and know if I'm on track or off track with the habits that give me the life that I want. Now. Hey, if you want a free copy of my hack tracking sheet, it's totally free. It's yours. Just go to a better life.com tracker. Again, that's abetterlife.com tracker. I think you'll find it incredibly helpful. Now let's sum this skill up here. Here's why the goal alignment method changes everything. Because here's what most people do. They set a big goal, like I want to be financially free. And then they wake up on a Monday morning and they have absolutely no idea what to do. So they do whatever, maybe feels productive, like read a blog post or listen to a podcast, maybe browse some listings. And then at the end of the week, they've been busy, but nothing actually moved. Or worse, they spend their week scrolling TikTok and Instagram and listening to entertainment podcasts because they didn't know what to do. So the goal alignment method eliminates that. When you wake up on Monday morning, you don't have to wonder what to do. You look at your weekly targets, which connect to your quarterly benchmarks, which connects to your annual goal, which connects to your crystal clear vision. Every action has a purpose, every day has direction. And here's the really powerful part. When you track your daily disciplines and review them against your weekly and quarterly targets, you start to see the connection between what you do daily and the results that you get monthly. So the weeks where you like nailed your habits and your actions and your score is really high in your KPI tracker, everything's better. Like you're winning. The weeks where you slacked, your results suffer. And once you can see that connection, you can't unsee it. You go from hoping for success to engineering it. And let me be real, most people will never do that. Like it takes, you know, 15 minutes once a week, and then two to three minutes every day. But still, people will not do it, even though it will fundamentally change your life. And then maybe once a quarter, you spend an hour. If you're in the better life ecosystem, which would be first? Dealer, Freedom X, we do it together. If not, you do it on your own. It's an hour or two. And overall, like, this is all it takes to absolutely fundamentally change your life through the goal alignment method. And that's why it works, because people who do it, they're operating with a level of clarity and intentionality that puts them in a completely different category of life. So their vision's clear, their goals are aligned, their daily actions are connected to something bigger, and they can see it working in real life time. That, my friends, is goal alignment. And it's the single most powerful productivity system that I have ever used, and it's made me a millionaire many times over. And that skill will also make you a millionaire many times over. Now, skill number four is strategic delegation. Now, I know, I know you've heard this before. Delegate, don't do everything yourself. Thank you. Every business book ever written. But here's why. Most people absolutely suck at delegation. They either delegate nothing because they think nobody can do this as well as I can, or they delegate everything, and then the quality just goes off a cliff. Have you been there? Have you done both those? Now, this is a sneaky one. They don't even know what to delegate in the first place, and so they just don't do anything ever. Does that sound familiar? Now, look, I've been all three. And when I first started building my business, my portfolio, I tried to do everything myself. I mean, almost everything. Like, I was the property manager along with my wife, Heather. We were the bookkeepers, we were the contractors, the marketing people, the deal finders, the negotiators. Like, I was working 80 hours a week and was miserable. There was times where I think my wife forgot what I look like. And then somebody told me to delegate, and I swung hard the other direction. I probably read in a book. And I just hired a bunch of people and I said, here, handle it. And then they did handle it, just not the way that I wanted. And things fell through the cracks. Quality dropped. I got frustrated, and I went right back to doing everything myself because nobody can do anything as good as I can. Right? Have you been there? It took me years of painful trial and error to really figure out that delegation isn't just one skill, it's actually three. And you need all three working Together for the whole thing not to fall apart. I call this the ISP framework. Identify, systematize and partner. Let me explain step one. Identify what to delegate. So before you delegate a single thing, you need to figure out what is actually worth getting off your plate. And most people get this completely wrong. They actually try to delegate like these big, complex, high level stuff. Go find me a property. Because that's what feels overwhelming to them. But that's kind of backwards. And here's the principle. Start with your lowest dollar per hour tasks and then work your way up. So think about it this way. What is your time actually worth? Like if your goal is to make $200,000 a year and you work 2,000 hours a year, then your time's worth like a hundred bucks an hour. So if you're every hour you're spent working on like a 15 an hour task, like mowing the lawn or doing bookkeeping or scheduling appointments, or responding to routine emails, running to the hardware store, all that stuff, you're just literally losing 85 bucks for every hour you work. So I want you to do this exercise. Write down everything that you do in a typical week. Like everything. I know it's a lot of work, but put a dollar per hour value next to every task. What could you hire someone to do this for? Like, could somebody else mow your property? Lawns could some for 10, 20 bucks an hour, then delegate it. Could somebody do data entry or bookkeeping? 15, 20 bucks an hour. Delegate it. How about answering tenant maintenance requests? 20 bucks an hour. Delegate it. I've told the story before, but I'll say it now. My first successful delegation probably ever was I hired my MOT in law just to answer phones from tenants because I didn't want to talk to tenant anymore. I was too much of a pushover. They're like, can I have a dog? I'm like, sure. They're like, can I have 12? I'm like, how about 15? Like I'm just, I was so bad at delegate like or saying no to people. So I just put my mother in law and just said say no to everybody. Not really, but like she was the bad guy and she loved it. She's so good at it. In fact she still does it today. And so like that taught me, like, oh, I don't have to do everything myself. I can delegate it. And it cost me a few hundred dollars a month because it wasn't that many hours. But it freed up my time to go do other stuff. So you see the pattern. You start at the bottom, the stuff you don't like doing, the stuff that doesn't make you much money per hour. And you buy back your time hour by hour. And every low dollar task you remove from your plate frees you up to spend that hour on high dollar activities like finding deals or raising capital, networking, building relationships, negotiating strategic planning, talking with your AI thought partner. Like that stuff actually will make you wealthy. I call these like your thousand dollar an hour activities. And here's the uncomfortable truth. Most investors spend maybe like 2% of their time on thousand dollars an hour tasks and like 98% of their time on 10 to $50 an hour tasks. So flip that ratio and watch what happens to your income. You don't have to delegate everything either. Like start with one task, the lowest dollar most time consuming thing on your list. Get that off your plate this week, then next month, remove another one, then another, and slowly but surely you'll buy back your time and redirect it toward work that actually moves the needle. You want more information on that, check out the book by Dan Martell, Buy back your time. Phenomenal. Now step two, Systematize. Before you delegate. Now you know what to delegate. You've made that list. But here's where most people mess up. They hand off a task to somebody with zero instruction and then get frustrated when the result is garbage. Been there, done that. Now that's not a people problem, that's a systems problem. So before you hand anything off, you need to create what I call a simple sop. It's a standard operating procedure. Before you roll your eyes and think that sounds like some corporate jargon and boring stuff. Let me reframe this. An SOP is really just like a checklist. It's just like a step by step list that says here's how we do this thing every time so it gets done right. So like here's an example. When I first gave my mother in law that idea of managing, you know, answering phone calls, I could have just said answer phone calls. And I probably did. And then she'd have to just kind of guess at how it would work. And she's like, well I don't know, can they have a dog? I don't know, can they pay rent late? And so she had to make up rules. And so things fell apart. But then I said, well, let's just write down the rules. So I wrote down the rules. This is what we do, this is how we handle these problems. And 99% of problems could be handled. Like when talking about managing tenants in Like a four page document. Like just like this is what they say, this is what we do. And then things just started going well. Like she stopped asking me questions because it was written in an sop. And so when I created checklists for my mother in law and for every other person that I've hired, like things started getting done correctly. Like tenant screenings, move ins, move outs, maintenance requests, workflows, rent collections, all that stuff. It's all simple documents. So like here's the steps, this is the order, here's what done right looks like. And then suddenly everything gets consistent. Now, not because I hired a better person, same person, but because now they had a system to follow. So here's my rule of thumb. If you're going to do something more than like three times, write down the steps. Doesn't have to be fancy, like literally a Google Doc with numbered steps is just fine, just keep it organized within folders. But that's it. A checklist on a napkin. If you have to do that, it's fine. The point is to get the process out of your head and onto paper or digital somehow so anyone competent can follow it and get the same results that you would. One of my favorite ways to do this if you work in the digital world like I do is Loom L o O M. It's a screen recording app, but they also you can screen record all your processes and then they have an AI tool that will literally turn it into an SOP right for you just based on what you're talking through on the video. It's awesome. Now here's the bonus. SOPs don't just help your people, they actually help you see where your process is broken as well. Like when you force yourself to write out the steps, you often will realize, wait, step four doesn't make any sense. Why am I doing it that way? Systems create clarity, Clarity creates results. Now step three, partner on new projects with the 108010 rule. So if you've identified what to delegate and you've systematized your kind of reoccurring tasks, great. But what about new projects, things that you've never done before? You don't have a checklist for it yet. Well, that's where the 108010 rule comes in. And this simple concept like, probably saved my sanity. Like I first heard about this in Dan's book I mentioned earlier, Buy Back youk Time from Dan Martel. I interviewed him, by the way, twice on the Better Life podcast. So be sure to check those episodes out. If I got good editors, they can put them on the screen here. But here's how that works. I do have good editors, the best. Now, here's how this idea works. Every new project or task has three phases. So the first 10% is the vision and direction. And that's where you define what success looks like. You set the standard, you provide the clarity. You say, here's exactly what I want and this what looks great, and here's what terrible looks like. And this is what the deadline is. That part's non deleg. Delegatable. Is that a word? Like, this is your job as the leader. But the middle 80%, that's execution. This is the part you hand off to somebody else. That's the grinding, the doing, the building, the actual work. And here's the key. You don't touch this part. You let your person run with it. And you resist the urge to micromanage. You trust the process. Now, if they have questions, great, they'll come to you. But let them run, let them cook. And the last 10% is a review and refinement. You come back in at the end, you review the work, you give feedback, you tweak what needs tweaking, you polish it to your standards standard. So you're doing 20% of the work. And the first, like the first 10, the last 10, but you maintain control of the quality and the vision. Now, the other person does 80% of the heavy lifting. So think about this. If you spend an hour setting up the vision for a project and then 30 minutes at the end reviewing it, but you save 10 hours of execution time on it, that is a 5x return on your time. You do that across every area of your business and your life, and suddenly you've got your time back. Now, I'd love to give you another real world example of how this could work in the real estate industry. Again, if this is not, you, don't worry about it. But we have a thing in real estate called Driving for Dollars. It's where you get in your car, you drive a neighborhood, and you look for properties that fit kind of your criteria, what you're looking to buy. Because we're got. We're decisive and we decided and we have a vision, right? We have goals. And so you drive around, you say, hey, there's a duplex. I'm going to write down the address. And then you can like call them or you can mail them. There's a lot of strategies there. But here's how the 108010 rule could work really, really well. Here you define the first 10%. This is what I'm looking for when I'm driving for dollars. Here's the checklist we're going to use. Here's the SOP for how this works. This is property you should write down. And then here's what you're going to do with that property after you write it down. Now that takes maybe an hour of time. Then you hire a college kid for 20 bucks an hour to drive around and just follow your SOP. That's it. You don't have to drive for 8 hours, 10 hours, 20 hours a week. They drive and then they give you the list and you look at it, you say, okay, great, now I can upload it and send direct mail or whatever, but you did the beginning, you did the end, and you don't have to do the rest. Pretty cool, right? I love that concept. Now let's put the ISP framework together. Here's how it all works in a system. So you identify what to delegate by auditing your time and starting with the lowest dollar per hour tasks, the things that don't make you money and you don't like doing. You systematize reoccurring tasks with simple SOPs and checklists so anyone can execute them consistently. And then you partner on new projects using the 108010 rule. So you set the vision, you hand off execution, you review the results, and that is how millionaires operate. So they don't work harder than you. They're not smarter than you. They just built a system for getting the right work done by the right people at the right time. And so now you have that system too. All right, speaking of the right people, let's go on to skill number five, because honestly, we can't just talk about delegation without talking about the thing that makes delegation totally possible and work. Hiring the right people. And that is a skill that you need to get. Because here's a reality that maybe you don't want to admit. Like, you can have the best systems in the world, the most beautiful SOPs, the clearest vision, the most dialed in hack tracker on the planet. But if you put the wrong person in the seat to do the work, none of it matters. It will all fall apart. And hiring is hard. I mean, it's genuinely, painfully, expensively hard. I've gotten it wrong way more times than I'd like to admit and probably got it wrong more than I've got it right. I like, I mean, I hired a contractor who stole five grand from me. I hired an employee after a month of searching who lasted three days. It Was like a head of marketing back at Biggerpockets. Lasted like three days and lost his job. It's like I've hired just a phenomenal number of people who have done phenomenally bad. I mean, these people will say all the right things and they look good on paper, but then they just botch everything and they just. They're not the right person. Whether it's a culture fit or a skill fit, some of those bad hires have cost me well over fifty grand. When you add up the losses and the turnover and all the drama around it and the opportunity cost of the work that I didn't get to do because I was putting out fires from the person who shouldn't have been doing it in the first place. Like fifty thousand or a hundred thousand dollars easily from the wrong one hire. That's not unusual either. Studies show that a bad hire can cost a company anywhere from 17,000 to over $240,000, depending on the role. It's one of the most expensive mistakes that you can make in business. And yet most people spend more time researching what TV to buy than they do on their hiring process. So how do millionaires do it differently? So after years of terrible hires and a few absolutely incredible ones, I developed a system that I call the FIT method. Because at the end of the day, that's what great hiring comes down to. Finding the right fit. So FIT is an acronym. It starts with F. You filter ruthlessly. So here's the thing most people do wrong. They post a job and they get a pile of resumes, and then they try to find the best one out of everyone who applies. That's kind of backwards, though. You're choosing from whoever showed up. Instead of designing a process like an SOP that attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones. So filtering starts before the first resume even comes in. It starts by writing a really good job description that's brutally honest. Not the corporate HR fluff that says things like fast paced environment or self starter. I'm talking about a description that tells people exactly what the job is, exactly what the job isn't, what a typical day looks like, what. What success in the role looks like. And this is critical. What kind of person will absolutely hate this role? Yeah, you read that right? Or heard that right? Tell people why they shouldn't apply. So, like, when I hire for, for example, Open Door Capital, my investment company, like, the job posting usually has a section called like this role is not for you if. And list things like if you need constant supervision, if you're uncomfortable being alone if you want a 9 to 5 with no surprises. Now, does that reduce my applicant pool? Absolutely. That's the point. Like I would rather have 20 qualified applicants than 200 random ones. Now I also add a filter question something specific that requires a little bit of effort. Like I put a line in the post and it says like in your application. Include the word pineapple in your subject line. And then tell me about a time you solved the problem without being asked. You'd be amazed. Maybe 20% of applicants actually put that that word in there. The other 70 or 80% didn't read the posting. They didn't. They have no attention to detail and they can't follow simple instructions in their application. How are they going to follow my SOPs? That's it. I just eliminated 70 to 80% of the bad candidates before I read a single resume. Now next is interview for character, not just competence. And here's a mistake I made for years. I hired for skills. Can they do the job? Do they have experience? Do they know the software? Check, check, check. Hired. And then it ended up with someone who was technically capable but like a nightmare to work with. Like they were a bad attitude or they had no initiative or they would blame everybody else. Instead of taking ownership, they couldn't communicate. They created drama for the team. Now I flip it. I interview for character first and competence second. Because here's the hard earned truth. You can teach skills, but you can't teach character. I mean, you can train someone to use your property management software, you can teach them your systems. You can show them how to analyze a deal or how to run a construction budget. But you can't train someone to be honest. You can't train somebody to care. You can't really train someone to take ownership or to solve problems without being told to. So how do you interview for character? Well, you ask behavioral questions. Questions about real situations that they've actually been in, not in some hypothetical way. Not like what would you do if real stuff. So, a few favorites. So tell me about a time you made a mistake at work that affected somebody else. What happened and what'd you do about it? I mean, that kind of tells you about accountability. Do they own their mistakes or do they just blame other people? Do they learn from failure or do they repeat failure? Tell me something about a time you had to do something you disagreed with. How did you handle it? And that tells you a little bit about their emotional maturity and their teamwork ability. Can they disagree and still commit or are they just going to be a cancer on your team every time a decision doesn't quite go their way. Or how about tell me about a time you went above and beyond when nobody asked you to or wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't. This is one of my favorites because the people who can answer this question with a real specific story, those are your A players. They are the people who take ownership, the ones who don't just do their job. They do whatever needs to be done and they pay attention. And it's those are the people you want, right? Pay attention to how they answer things too. Are they specific or vague? Do they say we or I? Do they take credit for team wins when it's really them? Or do they give credit to others? Do they speak negatively about past employers? All these are signals. And then lastly is test, test before you trust this one saved me from a lot of bad hiring because even after filtering and interviewing, you still don't really know someone until you've seen them work. So don't go all in on day one. Test them first whenever possible. I actually start this early in the process, even before the first interview. I have them do several. We call it the gauntlet. They have to run through a series of little tests, and each test is designed to let me see how they actually work on a project. Now, once they get through the gauntlet and I have a few applicants left and I do the interview, then I put them on a trial project or a probationary period. Maybe it's 30 to 90 days. I tell them up front, this is a trial for both of us. I'm evaluating you, you evaluate me. At the end of 30 days, we'll decide if this is the right fit. Now that does a couple powerful things. One, it takes the pressure off both sides, like nobody's locked in. If it's not working, it's not a big dramatic firing, it's just the trial ending. And second, it lets you see the real person because everybody's on their best behavior in an interview. Everybody's charming and everyone's enthusiastic and everyone's oh, I love hard work. But give it a few weeks, the masks will slip off. The real work ethic shows up. The real attitude shows up. Now for smaller roles, like maybe a virtual assistant or a bookkeeper part time help, like again, I will often do paid test projects before actually hiring them. So here's a small project. I need you to go do this thing. Here's a deadline, here's 100 bucks. Go. And how they handle that one small project Tells me more than any interview ever could. Did they ask clarifying questions? Did they hit the deadline? Did they go above and beyond or just do the bare minimum? Did they communicate proactively or they just go silent? And was the work actually good? So, like a test project, it's maybe a few hours of their time, maybe it's a hundred bucks, but it could save you from making a $50,000 mistake. And that, my friends, is the best ROI in business. So. So putting the fit method together, let's summarize it. The system's simple. You filter ruthlessly by writing honest job descriptions using filter questions, reducing the pile of people who actually pay attention and are genuinely interested. Then you interview for character, like behavioral questions, real stories. You look for ownership and integrity over all the technical skills that you can still teach later. And then you test before you trust. So that's trial periods. It's test projects. You see the real person before you commit long term. In other words, you date before you get married. All right, and here's one more thing I'm going to leave you with on hiring. When you find a great person, I mean a truly great A player, make your life easier, wish I could clone them kind of person, you pay them more than they expect, more than they need. Seriously, overpaying people is one of your best ROIs ever. Because the cost of losing an A player and replacing them with a B player is astronomical. Not just in money, but in energy and momentum. Insanity. Like the best investment I ever made was not a piece of real estate. It was the people I hired to help me build all of this. Get hiring right, get everyone aligned, moving in the same direction, inspired by your vision, and everything else gets easier. But if you get that wrong, nothing else really matters. So there you go, five skills. You got AI thought, partnership. You got decisiveness. You got goal alignment. You got delegation. You got hiring. You didn't have them an hour ago. Now you do. And if you want to revisit any of this, hey, I've got an AI generated summary. Nice little handwritten AI summary of this entire video with all the frameworks and prompts and all that just waiting for you. So click the beardy summary link in the description down below. And now here's my final challenge to you. Pick one of these skills and maybe one piece of the skill I talked about today and implement it this week. Throw in the comments which one you're going to work on, because a year from now, you're going to be a year older. Regardless. The only question is whether you'll be a year closer to the life you want or still standing in the same spot you are today. All right, drop a comment, tell me which skill you're starting with. Like, comment, subscribe, all that good stuff, and I will see in the next one. Now for OpenDoor Capital, for FirstDeal.com for Freedom Accelerator and all my other companies. My name is Brandon Turner. Beardy Brandon on social media, signing off.