Best Ever Tweet:
Trevor McGregor Real Estate Background:
– A Master Coach with the Tony Robbins Group
– has done over 10,000 hours of coaching
– For 25 years he has started and grown successful enterprises, including his Real Estate Investment Firm
– Real estate investor who has done fix and flips, buy and holds and wholesaling
– Based in Vancouver, Canada
– Visit him at: coach with trevor
Click here for a summary of Trevor’s Best Ever advice: bit.ly/2qD3hXu
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Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any fluff, and… Well, it is the world’s longest-running, and holy cow, this is episode 1,000, and I wanted to have Trevor McGregor on the show, because I’ve been working with him for about 3,5-4 years now as my business/life coach. He gave me the suggestion to do a podcast, so without him this podcast would not be around, so what a way to kick off the next 1,000 episodes, to have him on the show and talk through the real estate ladder of success. If you recognize his name, then you are a loyal Best Ever listener, so bravo to you.
He has been on a couple episodes, but he gave his best ever advice on episode 320. With that being said, Trevor, how are you doing?
Trevor McGregor: I’m doing great, Joe. How are you?
Joe Fairless: I’m doing really well, and nice to have you back on the show. A little bit more about Trevor – he is a master coach with the Tony Robbins Group. He’s done over 10,000 hours of coaching for 25 years. He has started and grown successful enterprises, including his real estate investment firm. He is a real estate investor who has done fix and flips, buy and holds, wholesaling, and you can say hi to him at his website, trevormcgregor.com. That link will be in the show notes page. You’ll hear some Canadian in his accent, and that’s because he is Canadian – he’s based in Vancouver, Canada. With that being said, Trevor, before we dive into the real estate investor ladder of success and what that is, can you give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background?
Trevor McGregor: Absolutely, Joe. Before we do that, congratulations on your thousandth show. It’s absolutely amazing to see what you’ve done, and I just wanted to give you a shoutout; the feedback that I’m hearing and obviously the listeners are giving is tremendous, so great job in keeping that going.
Joe Fairless: Thank you, sir.
Trevor McGregor: You bet. A little bit about me – Joe is right, I am from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I am a master platinum peak performance coach. I coach predominantly real estate professionals, whether they’re investors, agents, land developers, a little bit of self-storage, a little bit of assisted living… I’ve got a portfolio that encompasses a lot of different wealth building asset classes, and I love it. My background is in corporate; I’ve spent 25 years in a real estate mentor and hospitality company, building it up, and ultimately found that my passion was helping people, whether it was one of our staff members, whether it was a vendor, or whether it was another real estate professional I was meeting… I was always interested in understanding who they were and what made them tick, and ultimately I think that’s what led me to becoming a coach and doing this full-time.
Joe Fairless: Well, there are a lot of directions I could take this conversation, because understanding who people are and what makes them tick – holy cow, that would be another conversation for another time, so I’ll table that for this episode. Let’s talk about this real estate investor ladder of success. I’m repeating what you’ve created, so how about you tell us what the heck that is?
Trevor McGregor: Absolutely. This came to me, it is part of my own journey as a real estate investor, and obviously seeing other investors like you and many of your listeners – what makes an investor successful? What differentiates them from somebody who maybe is a newbie or has been in the business for a while but just can’t seem to get to the next level? So I’ll go on to share what the ladder is in just a minute, but I think that it’s absolutely paramount that we identify again the five key reasons why real estate investors can’t scale their business or go to that next level. Can we do that now, Joe?
Joe Fairless: Yeah, please.
Trevor McGregor: Absolutely. Number one is limiting beliefs – it’s the doubt, it’s the fear, is the anxiety, it’s the questions around “Well, what if I fail?” Limiting beliefs are the number one thing that I find hold investors back from really going out there and doing what they’re capable of doing. Does that make sense?
Joe Fairless: Yup.
Trevor McGregor: You bet. Number two is lack of a strategic plan. Tony Robbins says “Those that fail to plan, plan to fail.” If you don’t have a recipe or a roadmap or a blueprint that takes you from where you are to where you wanna go, you might end up somewhere else. Does that make sense?
Joe Fairless: Yup.
Trevor McGregor: You got it. Number three is a lack of consistent and persistent action. If you’re not getting up every single day as an investor and doing the right things, in the right order, at the right time, you’re fooling yourself. And that leads us to number four, which is lack of leverage. Leverage is really in two parts, Joe. Leverage means the big, fat, compelling reasons why you wanna go to the next level, and it also means having other people involved and leveraging other tasks or duties or abilities to them, because it’s hard to do it by yourself. We need investors, we need appraisers, we need brokers, we need general contractors, so you really wanna check in with your leverage.
Then number five is a lack of accountability, which means if you don’t have somebody holding your feet to the fire, or you reporting back to them once you’ve completed a task, often times the law of diminishing intent kicks in and you don’t get to your results as quick as you could be. I really wanted to put those back out there so your listeners could take a look at that and now ask themselves which one, or two, or three of those could be holding them back. Does that resonate with you?
Joe Fairless: Yeah, the lack of consistent and persistent action – that tends to be something I’ve seen from a lot of investors and just professionals in general who are not successful, because… I think Tony, or you, or someone said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year but underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years, and so often we just don’t do something consistently over two, three, four years because we get upset or disappointed in the results or lack thereof after one year… And I can tell you, this is episode 1,000 of the podcast, and there’s no way I would be talking through this microphone, being able to say that my company controls 130+ million dollars worth of real estate, and we’ve done it within the last 24 months (actually less than that) if I didn’t have a podcast that I did consistently for the last 1,000 days.
Trevor McGregor: That is so true, and hats off to you because you are absolutely a living proof that you have to be out there looking for deals, be out there looking for investors, doing all the things that add to your arsenal of what I call professional pillars. Those are people that support you and helping you go from where you are to where you wanna be. And you’re right about that quote – Tony says we overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in two, three, five or ten years. With that said, I took that and I took a look at some of the investors that I coach all over the U.S., or my investors in Europe or New Zealand or Australia, or even Asia, and I started to look at the effort that they put forth, and I came up with a little spin on the Tony Robbins concept, and I’ve combined a little bit of what Tony talks about and a little bit of what I’ve seen, and it’s called The Real Estate Investor Ladder Of Success.
I know I shared this at the Best Ever conference a few weeks back in Denver, Colorado – which was phenomenal, by the way, and that it has really resonated with all types of investors out there; it doesn’t matter if you’re new, it doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned professional… I think that once I go through the different levels on the ladder, people will really respond and be able to say “You know what? Here’s where I’m showing up in different areas.” Does that make sense?
Joe Fairless: I love it.
Trevor McGregor: So what I’d love to do is have all of the listeners get a picture on the screen of their mind that’s something like this – I want you to picture a ladder with six rungs on it. The ladder obviously goes from the ground up, and I want you to understand that I’m gonna be talking about each level of the ladder, all six levels, starting at the bottom and moving North. So I want you to draw out a ladder; even if you have a pen and paper, draw out this ladder.
The very first rung on the ladder is what I call showing up POOR. We often say in real estate that if you show up poorly in doing something – let’s say it’s property management – what kind of results do you think that you get, if you show up poorly as a real estate investor these days, Joe?
Joe Fairless: Well, I know the answer, Trevor… Do you want me to answer? I’ve already talked to you about this…
Trevor McGregor: I know, and we’ve been through this for many years…
Joe Fairless: No results!
Trevor McGregor: That’s right, you get no results. In fact, it’s worse than that, Joe. Poor equals pain! You know that as a property manager if your property management isn’t good, poor doesn’t equal poor, it actually hurts, it’s like a kick in the teeth. It gives you pain. Now, I know that these are Best Ever listeners and they don’t do anything poorly, so let’s go up to level two on the ladder, because level two is where you give it more effort, and you show up in what we call GOOD.
I want the listeners to think for a minute – if you show up GOOD in today’s real estate world, what kind of results do you think that equals? Joe, what do you think it equals?
Joe Fairless: Poor.
Trevor McGregor: Correct. Good isn’t good enough anymore. There’s too many people out there looking for deals, vying for investors, so we often say that good these days equals poor results, so that’s level two, or the second rung on the ladder. Does that make sense?
Joe Fairless: Yup.
Trevor McGregor: I’ll give an example of that – if you’re just good at communicating with your general contractor, is good good enough to get you to your best outcome?
Joe Fairless: No, not to the best outcome.
Trevor McGregor: Correct. So I invite the listeners to go up one more rung on the ladder, and that is what we call level three, and that is showing up GREAT. Imagine yourself if you’re a real estate investor that has efforts that are great, in today’s world, again, great isn’t great enough, because we say that great equals what, Joe?
Joe Fairless: I’m gonna go with good.
Trevor McGregor: You’ve got it. Now your listeners start seeing a pattern. Poor equals pain, good equals poor, and great equals good. If you’re just great at finding deals today, when there’s literally tons of other investors out there doing the same thing, being great at finding deals will give you good results, but I’m telling you, there’s three more levels on the ladder. Would you like to hear what they are?
Joe Fairless: Yup.
Trevor McGregor: Great. Before we go any further, I want the listeners to imagine a horizontal line that runs across the ladder above the word GREAT. So you should have POOR, GOOD, GREAT, and then a little line that runs across the ladder, and as we go up to level four, it’s where you start playing the game of real estate at what we call above the line, and rung number four is what we call EXCELLENT. If you show up as an excellent real estate investor today, what kind of results do you think that equals, Joe?
Joe Fairless: Great.
Trevor McGregor: You’ve got it. So if you’re excellent at negotiating deals or negotiating terms, or finding anything like that in your toolkit, you’re gonna get great results. But there’s still two levels left, so stay with me here, because we literally go from excellent to rung number five, which is what we call OUTSTANDING. If you show up outstanding as a real estate investor, and if you’re following the pattern with Joe and I, you know that outstanding equals what, Joe?
Joe Fairless: Excellent.
Trevor McGregor: You’ve got it. So as an outstanding investor, if you’re outstanding at raising capital, you’re gonna have excellent results and be able to rinse, then repeat it and do more deals, but there is one level left, and that is level six. That is what we call EXTRAORDINARY. If you apply yourself and you wake up every day and you show up extraordinarily in everything you do, Joe, what kind of results does that produce?
Joe Fairless: Outstanding.
Trevor McGregor: Absolutely. And there’s one thing that you do better than anybody, which is show up in that modality, and I’ll give you an example of something that I’ve always been impressed with you with, and that is having a unique selling proposition, or having a platform, or being able to market who you are and what you do, because if your listeners just worked on their elevator pitch and they were either outstanding or extraordinary in that pitch, do you think that they’d attract more people to their real estate outcomes?
Joe Fairless: Absolutely.
Trevor McGregor: You bet. So my question to all of us as fellow real estate investors is where are you showing up today? Are you poor? Are you good? Are you great? Or are you playing above the line and you’re excellent, outstanding or extraordinary? Because it’s a choice. And we often say that there is no failure, there’s only feedback, so maybe you’re playing at level three right now and you wanna go to level four; or maybe you’re playing at level four and you wanna go to level five… Because you have to align your state, your story and your strategy each and every day, to be able to show up and do it at that level.
Here’s something that I also found really interesting – it takes a massive jump to go from poor up to good. It’s massive, Joe. But to go from good to great is literally about one yard, or one meter. To go from good to excellent is about one foot; that means you’ve gotta do things just a little bit better. To go from excellent to outstanding is almost six inches, and then, just like an Olympic athlete, to go from outstanding to extraordinary or extra-ordinary is what we call a two-millimeter shift. It’s the small things, it’s the subtle differences in how you show up and how you play [unintelligible [00:16:57].05] that are really gonna allow you to live at the highest level.
With all of that, Joe, and based on the number of people that you coach and you mentor and you do deals with, where do you see people showing up on this and how would you say it applies to what you see in our Best Ever listeners?
Joe Fairless: One thing that stands out to me is the compound effect, because even if it is just a millimeter shift from one level to another at the top, if you do that shift and you’re playing at that new level consistently, then there’s a compound effect and that will increase your results exponentially, and not just to talk theory but just to talk actual practical terms, again, I go back to the daily podcast and how it was not my mom, my dog and my dad, and maybe one of my brothers and maybe my sister on Sundays would listen to my podcast originally, but then the more I did it, the more of a compound effect, and now it’s grown pretty well. I use that analogy for other aspects of my business that I know deliver results and do have a compound effect.
Another example is when I write a book, I mail out the book to every one of my investors, and sign it and write a personal note, and I know that them having that book – I’ve basically infiltrated their living room permanently, unless they throw it out… But I basically infiltrated their living room (and wherever they put the book eventually) and that certainly has a compound effect. It’s a smart way of doing it, because it is a one-and-done for me, but the return is in perpetuity, and that’s where what you’re talking about really resonates with me, because once we make that two millimeter shift, the results compound on top of each other, and in some cases it can be an endless return on our effort after we make that shift.
Trevor McGregor: That is spot on, Joe, and congratulations for that, because that compound effect or that ripple effect is also called going the extra mile. And again, how you do anything is how you do everything, so there’s some beautiful examples with the podcast and with you sending out the book, but it also applies to other areas of your life. I know you pretty well at this stage and we’ve worked together a long time – I know that you play at a certain level on the ladder with your fiancee. I know you play on a certain level on the ladder with your health. I know you play on a certain level with your very own personal development and your commitment to work with mentors and trainers and teachers and coaches, and I am absolutely continually impressed with you, because you are always either at or above the line in my eyes… So how does that feel?
Joe Fairless: It feels great, and thank you for that. How can we have an objective evaluation of where we are at, and are there certain categories that we should evaluate more than others?
Trevor McGregor: That’s a great question. What I say to my investors that I coach is it’s really situation-specific. We’ve all got things that we’re really good at and that we love to do and we kind of default to that, and we know that there’s other areas in real estate that we need to seek outer advice. I think the categories that you would break down into is “Who are you? What is your X factor or your unique selling proposition? What is your platform? What are you really good at? Is it finding deals? Is it working with contractors? Is it raising capital? Is it property management?” and literally go through each of those categories and give yourself a score. When you give yourself a score, you’re literally saying “Where am I showing up on the six levels? Am I good? Am I great? And if so, what would I have to do differently to go to excellent?” Because in my mind, Joe, it’s not about having necessarily a quantum leap and going from good up to extraordinary; it’s starting to understand that it’s the little things that add up to the big things. Going to some networking events, putting in more offers, driving more neighborhoods, getting really good at asking investors for capital. And again, we always wanna shine our shield and sharpen our sword so to speak, so that we know we’re getting better. Does that make sense?
Joe Fairless: Sure it does.
Trevor McGregor: You bet. And everybody that’s listening to this has an opportunity to check in with themselves and literally do this, that is RAISE YOUR STANDARDS. Because at the end of the day, Joe, you know as well as I do that it’s your standards, and it’s literally changing yourself from saying “I should” to “I must.” When you do that and you resolve to get better, that’s when you end up having the world’s number one longest daily running podcast, you’ve written successful books and you’ve put on successful conferences, and you go out there and keep doing deals like I know you’re doing. True, true!
Joe Fairless: True! [laughs] I love it. Trevor, thank you for being on the show. Where can the Best Ever listeners get in touch with you?
Trevor McGregor: Thank you, Joe. You can go to www.coachwithtrevor.com, and for any listener that wants to check in with me and have a call or find out a way for them to go up the ladder, I’d be more than happy to facilitate some of the listeners and certainly offer up my services; it’s free of charge to do that. So again, www.coachwithtrevor.com.
Joe Fairless: Trevor, thank you again for being on the show. As always, I take something away – usually multiple things – from our conversations, and today was no different. The Real Estate Investor Ladder Of Success – basically where society thinks we’re playing at, the results actually are one level lower than that, so we need to constantly strive to go higher and higher up the ladder to EXTRAORDINARY. The higher we get, the smaller the shifts need to be, but there’s a compound effect; once we do those shifts over a long period of time – as you said, being consistent with a persistent action plan.
Thanks so much for being on the show. I hope you have a best ever day, and thanks for celebrating episode 1,000 with us. We’ll talk to you soon!
Trevor McGregor: Thank you, Joe. Take care, my friend!
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