Episode 005: Interview With Justin & Tara Williams of HouseFlippingHQ & The 8 Minute Millionaire
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Episode 5 Show Notes
Today we interview our long-time friends and very successful House Flippers / Entrepreneurs Justin & Tara Williams. Justin & Tara have built a business that is a house flipping “machine” that has flipped over 300 houses in the past 3 years. Justin & Tara are masters at creating systems that run like clockwork.
They also enjoy helping people get in the right mindset for success in their new podcast 8minuteMillionaire. Learn how they have done all this while raising 3 young kids and taking lots and lots of “family time”.
Here are a few takeaways from today’s episode:
- Duplicating yourself can transform your business
- If you can master acquisitions, you can get rich in Real Estate.
- Balancing your marriage and Business with your spouse is like a teeter totter, each person takes turns lifting the other one up.
- The importance of finding a “why” that is bigger than yourself.
Resources mentioned in this show:
- Justin referenced the book “The One Thing” by Gary Keller.
- Justin’s Real Estate Investing podcast is HouseFlippingHQ.com
- Justin’s training program is HouseFlippingFormula.com
- Justin and Tara’s new podcast is 8minuteMillionaire.com
Episode 5 Transcript
Download the Episode 5 Transcript
Andrea: Welcome to Spouses Flipping Houses, episode five. We are so excited today, we are doing our first interview with Justin and Tara Williams of the House Flipping HQ podcast, and their new podcast that they’ve just launched, 8 Minute Millionaire. Both are awesome podcasts, and we happen to know them personally and know that they are awesome people–
Doug: [simultaneously] Great people.
Andrea: –they’re very inspiring. They’ve done some really cool things, become really successful in a short period of time, they’re both just total go-getters, and I am very excited to talk to them today.
Doug: And they are married. They are spouses. [chuckles]
Andrea: [chuckles] So Doug, what’s going on in our business this week?
Doug: So, if you’ll remember we listed a couple houses last week, I think we talked about it on the last episode, and put them on the market, and within about probably three or four hours, we got a full price offer on one of the houses.
And that’s really exciting when that happens, we tend to think, “all right, this property’s going to generate a lot of interest and get a lot of offers. And in years past, or months past, we may have just jumped on that offer because it was full price, but there were some things about it that weren’t great, they were asking for some credits back, and–
Andrea: Kind of a lot in closing costs they wanted.
Doug: Kind of a lot in closing costs, and the financing wasn’t the best type of financing, that we like to sell to, so we decided to be patient and wait, we wanted to let it be shown to the masses for the weekend, so we really let it go like three more days or so, and–
Andrea: Which is a little risky because sometimes they’ll continue to look at houses over the weekend and might find something even better…
Doug: Might find something else, yeah, it just depends, we’re not saying to do this every time, but we decided to be patient and wait, and it was shown a few more times over the weekend, and sure enough, yesterday, Monday, we got another full price offer, this one much better.
Andrea: No closing costs, conventional, 20% down…
Doug: Yeah. Better financing, no cost, regular thirty day escrow, solid buyer, full price. So, we’re going to go with that one, and I’m glad we waited, that’s a significant difference in the net that we would have received with those two offers. So that was really cool, and we also locked up another wholesale deal last week, so that was good to have. So it’s been a busy weekend for us. Been good. But we’re really excited to get into this interview.
Andrea: Yes. It’s good stuff. So let’s get to it.
Doug: [simultaneously] Let’s get right to it.
[audio interlude]
Doug: Super excited to have our guests here today, we have our first interview of our podcast.
Andrea: And we’re setting the bar very high.
[all laugh]
Justin: Yeah!
Tara: Yes!
Doug: Very high, there’s nowhere to go but down from here.
[all laugh]
Doug: We have with us today Justin and Tara Williams, two friends of ours, and actually we met back in 2010, or late 2009… do you remember Justin when exactly that was?
Justin: All I know is that our business exploded after we met you guys, so…
[all laugh]
Justin: So yeah, I think it was around 2009…
Andrea: I think Tara and I were both pregnant with each of our third kid, so.
Doug: Yeah, we knew that they were investors and they lived close to us, so we just got together and said, “Hey, let’s go to a Chipotle and see if we can work together, since we’re both in the same business and we live in the same area, let’s go meet.” [chuckles]
Justin: I went to the b House, I kept your key…
[all laugh]
Justin: It was the way I met you too I just kept your key, and…
Andrea: That like the date thing, you keep the jacket? You keep the key to his house.
Justin: Yeah.
[all laugh]
Doug: But anyway, we had a lot in common, and we could tell immediately that Justin and Tara were good people, and people of integrity, and people that were going somewhere, they were movers and shakers, and I knew immediately that hey, we can do something with this guy, we’re going to be friends for a while, and we can get along.
So we’ve been doing business together in some form or another for the last five years, really.
Justin: Yeah. I bought my first rental property with you, right? We did it together, with you guys.
Andrea: That’s right.
Doug: We did. We bought two together actually.
Justin: Yeah, yeah we did a few together, you taught me how to — actually I learned a ton, we learned a ton from you guys. Rental properties, I remember you came over to our office, and taught me the right way how to analyze properties for the first time.
[Doug and Andrea chuckle]
Justin: Because I was just doing whole selling before and I didn’t really care, and then I remember you came to my very first retail flip, because I was scared to death, it was like the most basic retail flip, and you were kind of laughing, and so, anyway…
[Doug, Andrea, and Tara laugh]
Justin: It’s been fun working together. You guys have been…
Tara: Yeah he shares that story all the time, it was big for him.
Justin: I’m working on a book that I was writing this morning, and you’re in it, man. [laughs]
Doug: Oh really?
Justin: Yep.
Andrea: Nice.
Doug: Oh very cool. [chuckles]
Andrea: Also about that lunch meeting I was going to say, what I think is really cool, you know what they say, “behind every successful man there’s a great and hard-working woman”…
Doug: A better woman. Something like that.
[all laugh]
Andrea: We knew that to be true also from meeting you guys. Just how awesome that Tara is, and it’s been so fun to see you now a part more publicly, because we knew what an integral part that you were, but to see you be more of a presence in your business publicly through your podcast and your new podcast has been so exciting.
All: Yes.
Doug: None of this happens without Tara, so…
Tara: Yeah I’ve just been hiding publicly for a while, and now I’m like, “here I am!” Ahh!
[all laugh]
Andrea: Right. That’s awesome.
Doug: Well we’ll get into that new podcast that you guys have as well, but I wanted to mention that, that may have been your first retail flip that you were doing, Justin, but I think you’ve done, what, over a hundred houses you guys, over a hundred houses per year the last couple of years?
Justin: Yeah.
Doug: Just incredible numbers that we’re going to talk about, so… we’ve kind of done a little bit, but hey why don’t you guys tell us a little bit about yourselves, your background, and then how you got into real estate. I’ve heard the story many times, but I want to hear it again, because it’s always a good one.
Justin: Okay.
Tara: You want me to share?
Justin: Go for it.
Tara: Well I was just thinking the other day, because I went running this morning, and it’s so funny, because we met at BYU, and there’s two sides to our apartment, there’s the guys’ side and there’s the girls’ side, and then there’s like this bridge in the middle, this open area.
And at 5:00AM in the morning, pitch black, rain, sun, shine, snow, whatever, two people would come walking out of their apartments. And it was me — we didn’t really know each other — and then I would see Justin going to football.
And I think it’s funny now that looking back, out of all the hundreds, thousands of people there at BYU, the people that we saw were each other, already being hard workers at 5:00AM in the morning.
Justin: Me by force, Tara by choice.
[all laugh]
Tara: Me by force if I wanted to go on a date, I had to–
[all laugh]
Tara: So we met there, and we dated, and I fell in love with Justin, we started talking about real estate, and–
Justin: [laughs]
Tara: –I wanted to talk about it all the time in our marriage… oh wait, wait…
[all laugh]
Doug: Are you sure that was how it went?
Tara: No we had a lot of things in common. We got married, and we started a Dish Network business, and I was pregnant with our first son, and teaching elementary school, and I quit that job, and we started that business, and we were going to make a million dollars within the first year, and take over the world… and instead, we ended up with $120,000 of debt… with a brand new baby, and we had to move to California, and we had to dig ourselves–
Justin: Well not had to– we had to move to Bakersville, which is different…
Tara: Bakersville, that’s even worse. [laughs]
[all laugh]
Justin: Having to move to California would not be a bad thing.
[all laugh]
Doug: “Had” is the optimal word there. You were forced to move to Bakersville. [laughs]
Tara: So we moved there, and the goal to start the Dish Network company was to build up enough capital so that we could get into real estate, because we’d heard that that’s where you– where a lot of people acquire wealth.
And so… the Dish Network business taught us a ton about working hard, and how to work with people, and how to start a business and do all those things. And then we transitioned into real estate, and…
Justin: And we realized we didn’t need to make a bunch of money to get into real estate, right? [chuckles] We didn’t have any money and we started anyway.
Tara: We started with no money, and leverage other people’s money… so we got into real estate, and it’s been pretty awesome.
Doug: Yeah, and you had this business… how did you not get overwhelmed with that kind of debt?
Tara: Oh we were overwhelmed.
[all laugh]
Justin: Oh, we were overwhelmed.
Tara: We were working our guts out, and we just knew we had to get it done.
Justin: Backs were against the wall… were living in an– we couldn’t even afford our own place, we moved in with a family and other employees, 2,000 square foot home, our son slept in the closet of a small room that we’d share, we had no choice.
We just had to get up and make it happen, and what’s interesting is I’ve seen a lot of people over the years; when you look at the route of where they started to being incredibly successful, it’s when their back was against the wall, and they had no choice, and they just made it happen, I just find that kind of interesting.
Doug: Mm-hmm.
Tara: And if you look back over all these years, there are so many times and so many situations where we could have said, you know what, let’s quit, we’re not doing this right–
Justin: [simultaneously] Let’s go get a job.
Doug: Right.
Tara: — we fell, we’re going in the hole, we’re going backwards… but we just held onto that belief, that we can do this, we can totally do this, and we just followed people–
Justin: Maybe I should be an appraiser, or something…
[all laugh]
Andrea: So what was it that shifted your focus to real estate? Because you guys were doing really well with the satellite business… what was it that changed your mindset towards real estate?
Justin: Well, we were always interested in real estate…
Tara: Our minds were always open to it. It’s like when you learn a new word, you see it everywhere, and so we were always open to it, and so when things would– friends would mention something, or we’d hear something, we’d read it or check it out, or…
Justin: Yeah, I read the book — we read the book, “No Money Down”–
Doug: Is that Gary Keller?
Justin: –as we were transitioning, yeah, and then I had a friend, the only guy I knew that had done anything in real estate, and this guy was one of those guys who’d move in the house, live there for a couple years — so nothing big at all, right?
Small potatoes, but that’s all I knew about. And I called him up, and he told me about this call he was going to listen to on something called “short sells”.
I had no idea what a short sell was, I had no idea, but I thought, “oh that’s cool, this guy’s going to share free information with us,” and I remember he did sixty questions in sixty minutes, and we were blown away to all the information he was sharing, and he was kind enough to… for only $2,000, let us attend his seminar, and then line up to work for him.
[all chuckle]
Doug: What a nice guy.
Justin: But to me, seriously, at the time I didn’t know any of that stuff existed.
Doug: Sure.
Andrea: Yeah.
Justin: I was totally oblivious to it, and I was pumped that someone was willing to share their knowledge with me, for how we can make millions, for only that price, so… hopped on a plane, didn’t even hesitate, signed up that night, and then we spent another $15,000 on his coaching program…
Andrea: Is this the one where you won the car?
Justin: Yeah.
[all chuckle]
Andrea: Awesome, yeah, you have to tell that story.
[all chuckle]
Justin: Yeah, so, go ahead Tara.
Tara: Well… so we got coached by this guy, and we’d fly to Kansas City, and we’d have these mastermind meetings, and they were good, we’d still learn information, but we started to notice that we were the ones doing the business, and so we would do half the coaching at these seminars.
[Justin, Doug, Andrea laugh]
Tara: And the guy, we’d talk to him, would sit there and be like, “yeah, yeah… yeah, that’s what I would do. That’s good stuff, guys.” And they’d be like, “How do you do this?” and the guy would give those people feedback, and we would be like, “Well actually we’re doing this”.
So there was a competition within the first year, and whoever did the best in their business was going to win this car, this Chrysler 300, and so he had another seminar, and there were a bunch of people there, and we had to get up and present our business model and what we’d done, and… they go to announce the people, and we’d won. We’d won a car.
Justin: Yeah.
Tara: I have never won anything like that in my life. We’d both not come from money, and I was driving around like I was on cloud nine.
Justin: We were so excited.
Tara: Got a trophy and a big poster, and… but we never got the car. Because who knows what.
Justin: He said he was going to send it to us, right? He didn’t know who was going to win, so he had to take care of some things, going to send us the car, and… it never came. [laughs]
Doug: You got the wrong address, for some reason…
Justin: Yeah, I don’t know…
Tara: Somebody got a really nice car in Bakersville. It wasn’t us.
[all laugh]
Doug: But what I hear between the lines, you had a terrible experience with the prize there, but… and even though it was a really costly seminar, you guys… it got you started, right?
Tara: We still got information, it still fed us enough.
Justin: We have no regrets. Later we found out the guy hadn’t invested in real estate for six years, so… my point, to anyone who’s looking for education, do you need a mentor?
Do you need a mastermind? Yes, these things are all good, but having that been said, there are good ones that are actually doing the business [laughs], and that’s probably where you should focus.
Andrea: Absolutely.
Doug: So you go from doing short sales to a hundred deals a year. Can you tell us how your journey’s been? How have you gone from that to what you’re doing now?
Justin: So when we started out we were doing short sells, and we were doing whole selling, so we didn’t really have any risk on these deals, because we actually started out in 2007. We were literally starting to hit that peak, and then the ahh, free fall.
Which is actually kind of a blessing, because at the time we didn’t know about guys as you and I know like Bruce Norris, and people who would kind of tell you what was going to happen.
We started out with whole selling so fortunately all the deals that we did for the first few years, we had virtually no risk into it. Which is a great way to start out, in my opinion, as you’re learning the business… and then, it was interesting because we were kind of on top the world… it took a while to get going, it took seven months to get our first deal, but we were like, “yeah we can move out of Bakersville, we’re making good money, we’re out of debt finally…”
Tara: Moved to Orange County…
Justin: Moved to Orange County…
Tara: By the beach…
Justin: Yeah, moved to the place of our dreams… and then we moved down here and we still had some momentum going, but in Bakersville, we are the king of short sells, we had all these things going on, and what happened is we moved down here — short sells were changing, we had moved to a different location, we no longer had all the contacts that we had, and at the end of 2009 and 2010, it started to be not the best years.
2010 was a pretty rough year, and that’s when we started to transition, because we were learning a lot of things, we were learning about trustee sells, I went and learned from Mort Hannigan, we were learning about buying on the MLS, believe it or not, we never had bought houses on the MLS as crazy as it sounds, we didn’t know how to properly analyze deals, which is where you came in and helped us out a lot…
Doug: So the cheese was moving.
Justin: Yeah, the cheese had moved and…
Tara: [simultaneously] The cheese was moving.
Justin: But this is a lesson I’ve learned, if you move with the cheese but try not to move too many things at once. We moved the way we were buying, we moved our house physically, we moved– all these things happened at one time, and it was like we had to start over. So it was like the perfect storm.
Tara: Yeah. We lost our major employee.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah, 2010 was a really… tough year. In fact, it’s pretty funny, whenever we look at our… when we bought our house now in San Clemente, our loan officer looked at our– he needed three years, for some reason, even though they only considered two, but he looked at 2010…
[Doug and Andrea chuckle]
Justin: …like $40,000 or something like that, and then the next year was multiple six-figure, and then the next year was like seven figure income.
Tara: Yeah. [laughs]
Justin: And he was like, “What in the world are you guys doing? Whoa, whoa, whoa, what happened?” he had all these questions he had to ask, and we just had to… anyway, it was pretty funny.
Doug: [laughs]
Justin: But yeah, it was a low year, but we got into trustee sells, and once we learned those things… so many times we could’ve quit, once again… I remember Tara crying on the bed one night, because we were going to have our third son born any day, and we were like, “uh, we don’t know how we’re going to–”
Tara: I was crying on the computer, I’m like, “what credit card can I open? I need another one…”
[all chuckle]
Tara: “…give me some money, somebody!”
Justin: We didn’t know how to pay the rent, and at the time we had started buying rental properties, because back then we thought, “okay, we’ve got to buy rental properties,” we had all these things going on, “we’ve got to buy rental properties”, and you remember this, we had this one challenge, and “we’ve got to buy rental properties so we don’t have to worry about flipping anymore…”
But then after we bought all the rental properties we ran out of capital to… we hadn’t made a lot of money from the rental properties yet, and so that’s when one day we decided, okay, we have to sell four of these houses that are supposed to be rental properties, and we did not want to do it. It was like, kicking and screaming, I did not want to sell these rental properties. I had the… the bug was bitten…
Doug: [laughs]
Justin: …and I… just keep buying rental properties. But once we sold those houses, we made more money from those four houses than we would need to pay for our expenses for over an entire year. And they were cheap houses, too. And I could buy all those houses I wanted at the time. So buying wasn’t a problem.
I knew we could make good money from flipping them, and it just — we had the epiphany, we were like, “what if… what if we could do this every month?
What if we could make more money than we need for an entire year every single month, and what if we could systematize it?” And that’s what our focus went to, and that’s what we did.
And in 2011, we ended up purchasing 60 houses, which was more than we had done the previous three and a half or four years combined, and…
Doug: Wow. So 60 houses in 2011?
Justin: Yeah, and then from then on out it was average of about 100. We’ve had a little bit more and a little bit less some years, but close to 100 or more a year, since then.
Doug: And in 2011, that was– you had mentioned trustee sales. So you were buying at auction, correct?
Justin: Yes. That was our main way of buying in– and we started doing that at the tail end of 2010, and we just located– and that’s the thing about this business, you’ve got to get started somewhere, enter the corridor, and then you adjust.
But I never would have discovered what I discovered had I had not just taken action. So where I thought I wanted to buy trustee sales was not where we ended up buying most of our trustee sales. I remember even having you over one time, and showing you like, “hey, look at this, Doug, we could buy these houses here and no one’s bidding on them,” and it was pretty awesome.
So we bought a few rental properties that way, and then every day I would see houses that I could buy but I just didn’t have the money. So then once we got that piece taken care of, we were just off to the races.
Tara: One thing I think too that Justin’s really good at, is he’s always looking– he’s always one step ahead, I think. A lot of times people get stuck in their business in the trenches, and they’re so down– they’re out rehabbing the houses, or they’re doing things they shouldn’t be doing so that they can’t step back and then also look into the future.
So, Justin would have never figured out that the homes in the high desert were such a great price. He was analyzing these houses, and I remember him saying, “Tara come here, check this out, look at all these houses, this can’t be real, right?”
Doug: [chuckles]
Justin: But no one was buying them.
Tara: But if he had been down in the trenches, he wouldn’t have figured that out, because he would’ve been too busy in the business, and so he was always thinking forward, seeing patterns, looking for different things to go, “hey, this is going on, let’s move with this.”
Andrea: Yeah that’s definitely something that we’ve noticed about you guys, is that you talk a lot about the whole… pay attention to who’s moving your cheese, but you really actually do that, you’re always focused on what’s coming next and being prepared for it, and I think that’s really cool.
Tara: Yeah.
Andrea: Another thing we really admire about you guys is your systemization, and you’ve talked about that a little bit, but–
Doug: Oh yeah. The king of systems.
Andrea: You are the king of systems.
[all chuckle]
Andrea: And so, how have you applied that in your business today? Because there’s no way you would have been able to scale the way that you have and in such an incredible way without having really good systems in place.
Justin: Yeah, so, recently we were listening to this podcast, and this guy was talking about Tony Robbins and the primary question, and basically what that means is, is, Tony Robbins basically says that there’s a primary question that we each have that drives most of the decisions that we make on a daily basis.
We ask ourselves this question time and time and time again, and for some people they might say, “what’s wrong with me?” Or what are some of the other questions people say, Tara?
Tara: “Can I do this? Do I have enough time? Do I have enough money? Am I good enough? Am I smart enough?”
Justin: “Is it worth the risk?” Guys like Tony Robbins, I think he says, “how can I make this better?” some people say “how can I add value here?” And I realized at that time my primary question is things like, I’m always saying things like, “how can I systematize this? How can I get someone else to do this for me?”
[all chuckle]
Justin: I’ve been literally asking that since I was a kid. I would get my little sisters to do all my jobs for me, by, like I would make tickets for a fake carnival that they could go to, and even though the work in creating that carnival was more work, it was enjoyable for me.
So my passion– I honestly am not passionate about real estate at all. I don’t really care about real estate other than the house we live in, really.
[all laugh]
Justin: But I am very passionate about systems. I’m very passionate about the process. And I am willing to make more time up front and invest that into creating a system that will later on pay me back in huge dividends.
People always focus on the ROI, the return on their investment of capital, we like to really focus on the return on investment of time invested, which I think is… what is that, R-O-… anyway, something like that.
Doug: R-O-T-I…
Justin: [laughs]
Tara: I think another big thing too is that a lot of times when people can’t systematize or don’t want to, is that, there’s two things: they’re afraid to let go of something, they want to control something. That keeps you stuck.
And then also, they’re also afraid to have open conversations and train and be blunt with the people that they’re working with.
And so even if they go for a minute, “okay, I’m going to let go, and I’m going to systematize and I’m going to train someone else to do this, and let go of the reins a little bit,” then that person starts to do that job, and then they go, “oh, my employee’s driving me crazy, and they’re not doing this,” and I’m like, “well, did you tell them that?” “Well no, I mean…”
[all laugh]
Justin: You don’t want to hurt their feelings.
Tara: [simultaneously] “I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” So they have this enabling relationship where now the employer is now stuck with this employee that they can’t do anything with because they’re not open and they’re not training them, and they’re not leading them… so usually fear and then not having open conversations is what keeps people out of the systematizing freedom.
Doug: I can certainly relate to those last two things you just said, Tara. In fact I think I called Justin six months ago about that very–
[all laugh]
Doug: — very topic.
Andrea: I think they had the very exact conversation that you just had.
[all laugh]
Doug: Yeah we’ve certainly learned a lot about training our team and systematizing, and one thing I’ve always been impressed with what you guys do is empowering your people to make decisions, and helping them to grow in their roles, in a way where you’re certainly not– you’re managing your business, and your team, but you’re not micro-managing them to where they don’t have freedom to make decisions because they’re smart people. You try to hire people who are smarter than you, from what I’ve heard.
Justin: [chuckles] Yeah, either they’re smarter than you, or they become smarter in a certain capacity. And at first, one of the hard things that people have with letting go, like when I hired Vanessa for example years ago, I think it’s going on six years now, I may have been better at analyzing a deal than her at the time, but if I wasn’t willing to teach her that, and let her do that on her own, she would never get to the point where she is now, where she’s better than me, or, even if she’s not better than me, she puts a lot more time into it, so she’s able to get much better results.
She does it consistently and persistently on a regular basis. And I might be working on another business, I might be at the beach with my kids, or be at Disneyland, and that process continues to go, those things continue to happen, because we built that machine, if you will, and now it continues to work.
And now we can choose if we want to expand the machine, or improve the machine, but the machine will work, regardless of what we choose to do with or without us, the machine will keep working, and that’s true freedom to us.
Doug: Can you tell us a little bit about the machine? You don’t have to go into–
Justin: No, it’s a secret!
[all laugh]
Doug: Give me the blueprints to the machine! No, you don’t have to go into detail, but people are probably going, “how in the world can you flip a hundred houses a year?” and you literally buy them and fix them and sell them, you’re not just wholesaling or anything like that.
So can you tell us a little bit about what your team looks like? What kind of machine do you need to be able to do that?
Justin: Yeah. So I’m happy to get into as many of those details as you want. I did used to cover all those details, I’m like short of breath by the end, and when I heard the primary question I realized, it’s not so much about exactly what you do, it’s more the mindset that you have that number one it can be done, and every day you’re constantly thinking on every single little tiny thing, and how can you outsource that?
So yeah I’ll give you a few examples though. As far as acquisitions, acquisitions in this business is probably the single most important part of a business, as you know, Doug, and we purchase lots of houses from you — I should have said we purchase lots of contracts from you, because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble here.
[all laugh]
Justin: But acquisitions, buying houses, is the single most important part of this business. If you can master that one thing, you can become rich in real estate. Even if you’re not the best rehabber, or the best at getting financing, or any of that, it doesn’t matter right? Because you can wholesale, and you can do, anyway, all these other things.
So I decided a long time ago that the number one thing I need to focus on is having a method, a system, for acquiring properties. And so I just thought about, “okay, what are the things that take the longest amount of time?” And at the time, we were buying a lot of houses on the MLS, and trustee sells. So I created a system for doing that.
But let’s not talk about trustee sells, that’s like a whole bear in of itself. We’ll just take MLS for example. One of Vanessa’s primary responsibilities when she wasn’t doing other basic things that I didn’t want to do such as utilities and paperwork and insurance and just all that stuff that just takes a lot of time; lock boxes, and… all those things should be outsourced, first of all. Every little thing that you can pay someone $10 to $12 an hour, you should not be doing.
Tara: Absolutely. [chuckles]
Justin: But then I also needed her to have something– we needed her to have something she could do when she wasn’t doing those things. And I thought, “okay, you’re going to put all your focus into acquiring properties.”
So she would be scouring the MLS, making offers, and it took us a little bit to get her trained on how to analyze those, but once she was trained on how to analyze those, I did not want to hear about or look at the property until she either had a contract or she had a counter back from the seller.
And that one thing, as simple as it might sound alone, literally probably saved me 20 to 25 or 30 hours a week in time.
Doug: Wow.
Justin: I mean think about that. If you were up every day scouring the MLS, or in today’s terms, because people are more focused on working directly with sellers, sending out marketing, taking calls from dead beat sellers… and just doing all these–
Doug: It is time intensive, yeah.
Justin: — analyzing properties that they send you, sending out offers, all of these things, if you can eliminate that? Literally, in your business you should be spending most of your — if you’re a solo person, that’s where you should be spending most of your time.
Now if you can eliminate that, all of a sudden you’ve basically duplicated yourself. And then all you need to do is be the final person to give the stamp, to give the go-ahead.
Or to say, “oh, we’re really close on this counter, can we make those numbers work?” or, “I’ve got a guy who might be willing to pay a little bit more than what I’m willing to pay, maybe I can wholesell it to him.”
So in acquisitions, that’s a huge part. And as far as rehab systems, I’ll try to make this quick, but basically, we try not to do– we try to have all the houses we do be pretty similar. We’re not doing any super high-end stuff… the goal is to be like Ford, right?
The goal is to have every house be so identical to where we can use the materials list and use the same materials on every house, we like to use the same general contractor if possible on every house, and then something else we do, something else we use is a price list, which kind of allows us to say, “okay, we’re willing to pay X amount per square foot for paint.”
So, to make an example, because I know some people might get confused…
When we started out doing this, if the house was 1500 square feet, we would pay about $1500 worth of paint for that home. And I noticed these patterns — now, prices have gone up a little bit, but that’s just an example.
So it’s like a dollar per square foot for that house. And I noticed these patterns are the same for laminate wood flooring, for tile, for carpet, for — there’s all these patterns, it costs about the same across the board, yet every time we worked with a different contractor, we would end up haggling and going back and forth, and getting multiple bids, and then there would be price creep later on, and all this stuff… and we just decided to eliminate all of that by agreeing up front on what the contractor was willing to receive for compensation for these different items, and that’s really helped us a lot.
So, those are a couple little ideas, little tips for you, to give you an idea of some of the things we do.
Doug: Yeah, actually I’ve heard you talk about that before, it keeps a good system to keep your contractors on the same page of what you’re expecting to pay.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. So.
Andrea: Now how do you guys work together and balance being married and being parents? Because we can vouch for the fact that you guys are an awesome family, you guys have three really cool kids, you spend a lot of time together, you guys get to take trips and travel and you have a good relationship with one another, and you also have this thriving and very successful business. So how do you guys balance those things and those dynamics?
Tara: Well it’s really easy.
[all laugh]
Tara: I mean, it’s just so simple. No, I think we’re constantly… we were even talking about this the other day on the podcast, it’s almost like there’s this line in the middle that you want to stay on.
It’s like, “okay, things are great with my relationship with my spouse, I feel connected to my children, I feel like I’m helping others and looking outside myself, I’m growing, I’m developing, the business is going well…
And I feel like within those little areas, you’re constantly going back and forth, like, “okay, I’m a little off…” and you’re kind of a little off… so you have to put focus onto those, and they come and go. Sometimes Justin and I are having a great day, sometimes we’re at each others’ neck.
[all laugh]
Tara: But I think the things that keep us connected as a family–
Justin: We’re not quite as nice as you guys.
[all chuckle]
Tara: You guys… there’s a little more–
Justin: There’s a little more sass over here.
Tara: –there’s a little more spitfire over here.
[all laugh]
Tara: But I think our focus is always, the business is here to support the family… and our number one thing is always, he and I are number one, and our children are always number one, and sometimes it’s easy to get distracted in the business and we get excited, and there’s ideas, and you know what, it’s harder to be a mom than it is to own a business.
Justin: Way harder.
Andrea: For sure.
Tara: Sorry. But that’s just how it is. So sometimes it’s just easier to be like, “you know what, I’m going to work over here, you guys are driving me crazy,” but you have to stay focused on those things, and so we’re constantly– you have to be very open in your communication.
Justin: But it’s important for people to realize there’s never going to be that perfect balance, because I think if you think that, you’re always going to be disappointed.
Tara: You’ll be frustrated.
Justin: We call it a counter-balance. I think even in ‘The One Thing’ by Gary Keller, I think he talks about counter-balance. Because one minute, you’re like, “okay, we’re too far over here, let’s focus on over here…”
[all chuckle]
Justin: You’re always going back and forth. But, yeah, I just think knowing your — we’ve had moments, we’ve gotten a lot better now, because we have a lot more fun in our life, but there were times when we had to set rules for me for example…
[all chuckle]
Justin: …because I would talk about business twenty-four seven. So we set a rule that after 6:00… we had to get really anal on it, right?
[all chuckle]
Justin: Which is not ideal, but sometimes you’ve got to do that, you’ve got to set those boundaries, and I was not allowed to talk about it after 6:00PM. Now sometimes I can’t get her to shut up about it, but…
[all laugh]
Doug: The roles have reversed.
[all laugh]
Tara: The roles have–
Justin: But now we go on more vacations, we take more days off, we’ll do things, so we don’t fill that need… it’s more intercalated a little bit to where it doesn’t feel like a burden. But there have been times where we needed those strict rules.
Tara: I think the thing is too that we both really — I just am addicted to progression and learning, and I think this world is so exciting, and there’s so many cool things to do, within my family, within my relationship with Justin, within the business, and we’re both on that same page it’s like… I see some people dating some people and they’re watching their TV, and they’re on Facebook, and they’re just floating along.
And I feel like Justin lifts me up, and then he’ll teach me something, and then I lift him up and teach him up, and I feel like we’re just this little teeter-totter that you just lift higher, and then I go up a little bit, and he’s off one day, and I’m off, and–
Justin: She’s always higher than me.
[all chuckle]
Justin: She’s letting me try to catch up.
Tara: So it’s this cool relationship of — we just push each other and stretch each other, and keep going, “here’s an idea, let’s use it!”, and we–
Justin: We’ve always had big dreams. I think dreams are important. I remember since the day we got married, I remember talking about someday wanting to run an orphanage, or work with orphanage– all these different things, and I think when you have those goals and dreams that are bigger than yourself, it just helps you just keep pushing and driving even on the days that are a little harder.
Andrea: Do you guys do the vision boards, and– I know you’re big into written goals, right?
Tara: We don’t do a lot of vision boards, my brain is a big vision board.
[all laugh]
Justin: Here’s the thing, we’re–
Tara: I’m constantly wanting to do all kinds of things.
Justin: I don’t know what it is, but sometimes I have to literally– or we both have to stop reading and learning for a couple days or whatever, because we’re too wired. If I read–
Doug: You can go off in too many directions.
Justin: Yeah or if I read business books at night, I get too excited and I don’t sleep well.
Doug: [laughs]
Justin: So I think vision boards and goals and all this stuff are very important and necessary in a lot of cases, but I just see a lot of people… they get that dopamine from the vision board, creating it, they get it from thinking about it, they’ll shout, “I’m going to do this and this and this!” and like, “okay, now let’s go get that cheeseburger.”
Tara: Then they’re so tired, they can’t actually do the goal.
Justin: Just do it. Or they don’t reach the goal right away, just take action, just do it.
Doug: Right, and I think it’s the same for some of those people which go to seminar after seminar after seminar and never really take any action, just get the same satisfaction from, “oh, I learned something else!”
Justin: We are big on goals, though, I remember when I had the goal of buying a hundred houses, and that happened. We had a goal of making a million dollars a year and it happened, now our goal is to make ten million dollars a year by the time we’re forty, and, some people think we’re crazy and they’re like, “why do you need that much money?” We don’t know why. We just…
Tara: We like opportunity. I would love to do some big things in other countries or something, and I feel like those give us the ability to learn how to administer those kind of things, to work with people, and then to also have freedom with money and time.
So I feel like we’re just developing ourselves so we can learn and grow and be good people now, but at some point really help other people to a larger degree as well, or make an impact.
Justin: And we’re Christian, and who knows what God has in store for us?
Tara: Yep.
Andrea: Right.
Justin: If one of our abilities is to run businesses and make money, then we can maybe do some things with that someday. He’ll use us in those ways that– with the skills that we use.
Andrea: Absolutely.
Doug: That was good stuff. Yeah, what I’m hearing is, you have a very important why. And that might be broad and general, but you have things you’d like to do and you’re working towards, it’s not just about making that almighty dollar next week.
Andrea: And yeah, I think when the why goes outside of yourself, not “why? So I can have this nice car, why? So I can have this fancy house.” But because you’re wanting to help others and do really cool things with your income and I think that’s so neat, too. It makes it more satisfying.
Justin: And it’s good to reward yourself, too, I’m just putting that out there. I see people all the time who feel like they need to rationalize that, but what we’ve found is when we have a little… maybe it is a worldly goal or whatever, we always have that little side of whatever you want to call it, but it does give you that extra motivation every once and a while, too. So, I’m just throwing it out there, for what it’s worth.
Doug: Sure.
Andrea: [simultaneously] Yep. We have those goals as well, yeah.
[Andrea and Justin laugh]
Tara: I think what it is, too–
Andrea: Nothing wrong with that.
Tara: –a lot of people look at business as, “I do this so I can make money. I look at business as a tool to develop myself. Because when there is a weakness in our business, it is a direct reflection on me. And I’m like, “what am I doing? What is my belief that’s hindering me? What’s my weakness?” and then I so quickly get to work through that, and have a very measurable goal to go, “oh, there’s my weakness, I have to get out of my shyness, I have to get out of my fear of confrontation… money, and I have to face all those things so quickly within business.”
Justin: We have to improve these systems, or…
Tara: So it’s a huge tool for personal development.
Justin: See there I go to the systems again.
[all chuckle]
Doug: There you go again. So someone listening to this podcast might be a married couple, and they’re interested in real estate investing, they want to flip some houses, they’re hearing all these stories about huge numbers of homes and all of this big stuff, but they’re just getting started.
So what would be one piece of advice, working together as a married couple — or, loved ones, maybe it’s brothers or father-son — but you have a relationship beyond this business you’re trying to venture into. What would be some advice you could give to that type of person?
Tara: I would say find the person who’s doing what you want to do, pay them some money, and follow them. [laughs] Check them out, are they really doing it? And I would really just follow that person, stay focused.
Because you’re going to get a million ways to do this business, and some people go, “oh I like that idea!” and then they start and they, “oh I like this idea!” and then all of a sudden they’re super overwhelmed, and they can’t do anything, they’re just stuck because there’s so much to do.
So I would say find a person that’s doing what you want to do, you like what they do, pay them money, and follow them so that you can start to make that progress. And, for the [audio interference; inaudible], if your spouse is the one who wants to do something, you have to let them take that leap of faith. You have to believe in them for a bit, until they– because for a while I was like, “I don’t know about this, Justin…”
[all laugh]
Tara: “Okay, I hear what you’re saying, but…” but I just kept trusting him, and then now, I’m just like, “Okay. I like this, it’s great.”
Justin: You only have one life to live, right? Not to get into the afterlife or whatever, but for right now, take advantage of what you have. Go after your dreams. And if you fail, that’s okay, you learn from that, and you pick yourself up and you keep going.
We’ve failed many times, and something I’ve found from successful people is that they fail more often than unsuccessful people, and eventually they learn from those things and they succeed in a big way.
Doug: Yeah, “fail forward fast” is one of your favorite sayings on your–
Justin: Soliloquy.
Tara: Our kids say it.
Doug: [laughs] — House Flipping HQ podcast.
Justin: Yeah, they’re just so afraid of failing. Don’t be afraid of failing. Failing is an incredibly great blessing that we have to learn and grow and it sets up for future success.
Doug: So you guys are talking about your podcast. You have a couple of things going on, why don’t you tell people about how they can– what you have going on in terms of podcasts and your business and how people can get in touch with you if they want to hear more from you.
Justin: So I have a podcast called “House Flipping HQ”, which is where I teach people how to flip houses… not just flip houses, but how they can create a business.
A house flipping machine, if you will, that they can flip houses with. [laughs] And then we recently started “8 Minute Millionaire”, I’ll let you talk about that.
Tara: Yeah, 8 Minute Millionaire came because… basically Justin and I walk around the house talking about all these ideas, and recently a lot more people have come to us, wondering how we’re doing what we’re doing.
Justin: They didn’t care before.
Tara: They didn’t care until we moved to this nice house in San Clemente.
[all laugh]
Tara: Even our movers were like, “you guys are kind of young, what do you do?” So a lot of people have been just wondering what we do, and as we start to teach them and help our family and friends, we go, “oh my goodness, we cannot do this with every single person…”
Justin: Every single person, individually, and there’s so much to cover, and it just leads to more questions…
Tara: Yeah. And it just didn’t seem fair that only family and friends could learn some of the awesome life lessons we’ve learned. So we just decided to put it out there, and from doing the HFHQ we realized that you can teach people all about how to flip houses and all of the fundamentals and things, but one of their biggest things is their mindsets and their fears and their doubts, and the things that keep them stuck.
And so that there is to be able to talk to anybody who wants to do any kind of business or something in their life, be able to move past that, and be who they want to be and be fulfilled. So it’s been a lot of fun.
Andrea: And they’re both so good. We’ve been a long time fan of the House Flipping HQ podcast, and I recently got injured running and I’ve been stuck on the silly exercise bike at the gym it’s so boring…
[all laugh]
Andrea: So I’m loving having your 8 Minute Millionaire podcast to listen to as well. So that’s what I do, I listen to podcasts, so I sit on the silly bike going nowhere…
[all laugh]
Justin: We’re excited to listen to your guys’.
Tara: Yeah. You guys are awesome. I can see your picture right here, because we’re not doing video, but I’m like, “these are amazing people. They’re just so good.” You guys are amazing people.
Doug: Thank you so much.
Andrea: Aww. Thanks. Right back at you.
Doug: Yeah, right back at you guys. You put out a lot of great content, I listen to both as well, and I’m trying to keep up because it’s an every day, 8 Minute Millionaire podcast, so I’m a little behind, but I’m catching up.
Tara: [chuckles]
Doug: Great stuff, so, it’s 8minutemillionaire.com, correct?
Justin: Yeah.
Tara: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And houseflippinghq.com.
Justin: House Flipping HQ. If someone’s interested in more direct coaching, they can go to houseflippingformula.com. We may or may not be open for bringing on new students at the time, but we’ll let them know when we are.
Doug: Well I can certainly vouch for Justin. He knows how to analyze a deal because I taught him.
[all laugh]
Tara: Thanks Doug, thanks so much.
Justin: I really think you taught me, and then we taught each other, after I moved in from–
Doug: Oh absolutely. I’ve learned far more from you I think. [laughs]
Andrea: Yeah we follow in your wake. [laughs]
Justin: It’s been a pretty good relationship I would say.
Doug: [laughs] Absolutely, and, to be continued. Hey, thank you guys so much for coming on to today’s podcast.
Tara: Yes, thank you. Thanks for having us.
Justin: Yeah thank you guys.
Doug: Really excited and, yeah, looking forward to seeing what the future brings for you guys. Because there’s it’s always changing and there’s always something big right around the corner, and I know it’s going to be awesome.
Justin: Mwa-ha-ha.
[all laugh]
Justin: All right thanks guys.
Doug: All right. Thanks, have a great day.
Tara: You too, bye.
[audio interlude]
Doug: All right, so that was Justin and Tara Williams, we really hope that you enjoyed that interview and got a lot out of it. Please head over to iTunes and leave us a review and a rating.
We are looking forward to hearing back from you and it really helps our rankings in iTunes, so please head over there and do that for us.
Andrea: If you’d like to stay connected with us, you can check out our website, spousesflippinghouses.com. And we have two free gifts for you there, tips on working with your spouse, and a whole video series on valuing properties that Doug has done, it’s really good stuff.
So you can head over there, and if you have any questions, you want to stay connected with us, that is the way to do it.
Doug: All right yeah check us out over there. So I guess we will talk to you next week and until then, have a great week!
Andrea: Bye-bye!
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