Hey everyone, it's Tom Karadza with another Rock Star Minute.
I want to share something on how I used to be scared of tenants.
When tenants would pay late in the past, I mean, in my twenties, anyway, I was often scared of them. And especially if they're really nice people, I would always just kind of buy into their story, accept the late payments and then kind of go on from there.
And it always caused more problems long term.
So, you know, I don't know if I was being taken advantage of or I just didn't stand up for myself, but it was definitely the wrong thing to do.
And then right around there in my late twenties, I had this sales VP give like about a hundred salespeople this talk.
And he put up this video of this NCAA football coach. I think it was Lou Holtz.
And he had these three principles that he lived by and that he encouraged his whole team to live by. And it was do the right thing. Always treat others as you treat yourself and give 110%.
And that stuck with me really hard.
And the next time I started dealing with tenants... by the way, I should interrupt here for a second.
Nick has never been scared to deal with tenants and tell them what he thinks.
So we were definitely different.
And I learned a lot from him over the years in that regard.
But when I heard those three principles and I decided to start living by those principles, it made my life so easy because the next time I took a call from a tenant who was late on rent, I could empathize.
There was no doubt I could empathize with where they're coming from, but I always decided that I was going to do the right thing.
And in those moments, doing the right thing was telling them "I also needed to fill out an N4", and give them that and for, and it really just made my life easy because then if they didn't show up and pay, I was already started the eviction process instead of kind of extending it another month and going two or three or four months accepting late payments and excuses.
When I did the right thing, it made my handling of tenants so much easier.
So actually doing the right thing gave me confidence to do the things I was scared to do, if that makes any sense.
So it was really valuable to me and it's helped me not only in dealing with properties, but in business as well.
When we started Rock Star, a few times we've had different investors feel like they couldn't fill a property or find a tenant and they were looking to us for guidance and we didn't have the time or the money to run advertising and go out and fill properties for tenants, but we felt it was the right thing to do.
They had got into real estate investing because of us. They felt like they couldn't get the job done.
The right thing to do was for us to go to the property, sometimes even run the ads on their behalf, take the phone calls, find tenants, and fill the properties.
We always believe in that.
So in business, not only dealing with our customers and clients and members, but from another aspect, it's always been helpful too.
We've always believed that you should always be putting out content and writing out different blog posts and communicating with your clients and your members on a regular basis.
And many times you do not feel like putting out all this stuff, but we always come back to what's the right thing to do.
And for the business, the right thing to do is to keep delivering content. So that overrides everything and we do it.
So just that simple principle, do the right thing has guided us.
And in other aspects of business, many times over the years, we've been approached to make" a lot of money".
One guy told us to back up the trucks, we're going to make bucket loads of money by bringing somebody out to one of our events where they were going to pitch real estate investors on a bunch of U.S. Properties.
And they anticipated a run to the back of the room and that we were going to make all this money.
And we just felt that was not the right thing to do.
So it was an easy, quick decision for us to say no to that. And so just living by some principles has not only made our lives easier and made us sleep easier at night.
It's allowed us to make quick decisions in real estate and in business and it's carried through to my family and to my kids and everything.
So it's been a big thing for me.
It might be embarrassing to admit that I didn't know this before until my late twenties.
I didn't live that way, but just following principles and all our decision making.
It's not always made easy decisions.
Sometimes it's made us make hard decisions, but it's made us make the right decisions and it's made me sleep easier and have like a light easy life.
So it's helped us.
Hopefully that gives you something to think about.
Until next time, your life, your terms!