How to Build Bigger and Setting SMARTer 2023 Goals

Dave Meyers:
Hey, what’s up everyone? Welcome to On the Market. I’m your host, Dave Meyer, and today we’re going to be talking about 2023 goals. First, we will review the goals that we have for 2022, what we hit, maybe what we failed at, and then talk about what we’re looking forward to and aiming for in 2023. For this conversation, I have my friend Henry Washington with me. Henry, what’s going on?

Henry Washington:
What’s up, buddy? Good to see you again.

Dave Meyers:
Likewise. We also have James Dainard.

James Dainard:
What’s going on guys?

Dave Meyers:
Kathy Fettke live from Dallas right now.

Kathy Fettke:
Hello. Looking at some properties. Super excited.

Dave Meyers:
Look at your glove. That’s the excitement of real estate investors who get to go do property walkthroughs.

Henry Washington:
That’s a fact though. Looking at properties always gets me high.

Dave Meyers:
Yeah.

James Dainard:
Glowing why she’s shopping. Who doesn’t glow when they shop though?

Dave Meyers:
I know most people are looking for retail stuff though, but Kathy is just looking for multi-family complexes and it’s just glowing at the same time. Or single families.

Kathy Fettke:
Some women like to buy shoes and I like to buy houses.

Dave Meyers:
I’m with you. All right. So if you listened to our show on Monday, we talked a lot about 2022 mistakes that we’ve made, but we’re going to shift to the more positive side of things. I’d love to just hear before we go into next year’s planning, what some of the goals you had for 2022 were and sort of how you performed on them. So Henry, let’s start with you. What were some of your goals, and how’d you do on your list of goals? Oh, he’s dancing.

Henry Washington:
Yeah, man.

Dave Meyers:
Pretty good.

Henry Washington:
You know what’s funny? The real estate, the market shifts if you will, throughout 2021 and 2022 kind of correlates to how and why I hit certain goals. So my goals pretty high level where I wanted to buy 15 doors that hit a 10% cash on cash return with a net cash flow of … I shoot between three and 500 a door. So for 2022, we ended up doing, let’s see, we’re currently at 30 doors that we bought and that hit that number that we’re holding. Then if you look at the closings, we have scheduled before the end of the year. That’s another 16. So we’re going to be at about 46 doors. So the original goal was 15.

Dave Meyers:
Damn. Did you hit 15 by February?

Henry Washington:
Yeah. So what happened was by February I had 20 under contract and some of those ended up falling through and we didn’t get them. So we hit several of them early and then we got a big chunk because we bought a commercial office complex and that wasn’t on the plan for this year, but that had 11 units in it. Then we’re closing the year with closing on a 15 unit trailer park.

Dave Meyers:
Oh, nice. Well, I guess first of all, when we get to the part of the show, we’re going to talk about 2023 goals. We have to hold you accountable for a stretch goal. If you tripled your goal for last year, have you set a higher one?

Henry Washington:
That’s why I led with how the market is speaking to these goals because I typically have a door goal or a rental property goal and then I have a disposition’s goal for my flips, right? Because we flip the ones we don’t want and then we keep the rest. So my flip goal was to do about 15 flips and try to hit about 1.2 million and we were well under that. So as far as the number, we did 18 but we only got to about 761,000 on that goal. So a lot of those were smaller flips, some of those were partnerships. So I was only taking 50% of the proceeds there. But in 2021, it was the exact opposite. I didn’t hit my rental door goal. We bought way less rentals but we did way more flips and way more profit.
We did over 1.2 million in 2021 and we weren’t planning on it. So the market was just telling us in 2021, you’re going to make big profits, sell everything you can that makes sense to, and then redeploy those assets into things that you’re going to hold long term. Then 2022 was a little bit of the opposite. So we definitely, definitely missed the goal on flips, but that’s okay because we well exceeded our goal on holds and I got into this business for ahold. So if I’m going to overshoot one and miss the other one, I want it to be this way. I want to grab more doors that I’m going to keep forever.

Dave Meyers:
Oh, congrats man, that’s awesome. I mean great to hear that you got well and above your goal. James, what about you? What were your goals in 2022, and how’d you perform?

James Dainard:
Man, 2021 and 2022 have been like the craziest busy years I’ve ever been in real estate. It’s been absolutely nuts. For 2022, I had a few goals that I really trying to get to. The first one was, I was trying to do $200 million in sales as a broker direct to investors. That’s been a goal mine for a couple years now. I haven’t quite hit that mark quite yet. We ended up falling short on that and we did about … We’ll probably end up clocking, we got one more month in there, but we’ll probably be around 160 mil in sales, which is still great. But it definitely something we’re pushing to get to, I’ve created the plan to get to 200 million next year. Other goals that I had was we wanted to acquire about four to 500 more doors for our portfolio.
We’re going to do this more through syndicating, not through … Well, I kind of do this two different ways. Me and my business partner, we do larger deals together and then we do buy a lot of development property and we own it together. So we have our own set of doors which are roughly around 1500 doors in there. So we were trying to get that closer to 2000 by the end of the year and we fell short, we hit about 300 doors for the acquisition. The reason being, I think we missed that goal mostly it’s because the deals just weren’t there. It was better to skip our goal and just move on and start refocusing. Because if it’s just not there, you can’t force it in. I do think that we’re going to be able to hit that number next year because the opportunities are definitely there and we’ve already boughten substantially more doors in the last 60 days than we did all previous year from there.
So other goals that we had for 2022 is we wanted to lock all of our portfolio rates in. So we spent a lot of time in that last quarter of 2021 and 2022 forecasting our whole portfolio out. Because a lot of times when we’re buying these apartment buildings, they’re on five year notes. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to stagger all of our loans out. A, lock the rates that were cheap. So we’re able to get really good money on all these deals and increase the cash flow but then also stagger out all of our balloon payments because we wanted to make sure that we weren’t running into a fiscal year that where we were just going to get crushed with refi’s going on. So we spent a lot of time … We knew 2021 was this crazy growth year. So in the beginning of 2022, we just kept with the sales but we really wanted to just look at everything internally, audit it, stabilize everything out. So we were very happy with hitting that goal.
We don’t have one loan coming due for at least four years and so we don’t have to worry about some sort of rate jump or anything like that. So that was a big goal for us to hit. Then one other thing that we were definitely were proud of that we hit, we had a goal to do about $20 million in short-term dispositions, which is going to be fix and flip in development sites. We ended up doing about 30 mil in dispositions.
Part of that was probably 15% growth in values, but we ended up internally through my business partner, we did about 30 mil in dispositions, which I’m really glad we racked a lot of those in the first two quarters of the year because I think it would’ve been a lot less if we would’ve hit into that third quarter. So we definitely actually, on the short term in the sales side, we kick very close to our goals if not excelled. We didn’t pick up a lot of rental doors or as much as we wanted just because the deals weren’t there. So I’m definitely going to be doubling down on 2023 as we’re seeing better deal flow to acquire more and more doors.

Dave Meyers:
Well, first of all, congrats James. It sounds like an awesome year overall, but it’s interesting that you and Henry basically had swapped experiences. You did more flips and less rentals where Henry did the exact opposite.

Henry Washington:
Yeah. I also wanted to take a moment, and thank you, Dave for allowing me to go over my goals first. Because when I’m talking about a goal of hitting 1.2 million and doing 15 flips, James is like, “I want to do 1.2 million on one deal.”

Kathy Fettke:
Goals.

Henry Washington:
We’re trying to get 200 million. I’m like, “That’s cool.” I just want to make a million off of my 10 deals.

Dave Meyers:
All right. Yeah, you would be Henry, we have to go first. I’m going to let James-

James Dainard:
That is my 200 million ghost though. I’ve just been chasing that for years. I have a plan. No, for 2023. I know I’m going to get it. So it just means bigger deals.

Henry Washington:
I said yesterday before you actually were able to hop on because of your technical difficulties that everybody needs James Dainard problems. I would love a James Dainard. I’m chasing $200 million problem.

Dave Meyers:
Fell short at 160.

Henry Washington:
Yeah. What are you going to do?

James Dainard:
You got to be careful what you ask for. Every morning I wake up and I have a fire in my email box. There’s 10 issues, permit issues, contractor issues, but you just got to work through them and just figure out how to put the right systems in there and also just be a little bit of a deal junkie.

Henry Washington:
The difference between you and somebody like me who wakes up with fires in my inbox is that when I check my email, I’m not doing it on a boat.

Dave Meyers:
That is a critical difference. Well, all the fire emails is a good segue because I feel like Kathy is always just like the zen investor. No stress, just always calm, so.

Henry Washington:
Just buy stuff that works …

Kathy Fettke:
Oh, no. No, no, no.

Dave Meyers:
… [inaudible 00:11:15] before. It’s okay.

Kathy Fettke:
I got big fat challenges. But I would say I win because I achieved a goal that I didn’t even have. I didn’t even write it down.

Dave Meyers:
Which was what?

Kathy Fettke:
I just always thought the coolest thing in the world would be to be a co-host on BiggerPockets with Dave Myers. What? What? I mean that was just a dream, not even a goal. Here I am. So I’m serious. That’s amazing. I was skiing when I got the email from Caitlin saying that I was on and I have that ugly face cry, that happy face. But you’re like, “Ugh,” that my daughter took a picture of. I’ll send it to you.

Dave Meyers:
Oh, we got to post that one.

Kathy Fettke:
Yeah, all sweaty from skiing and oh my God. So she’s like, “What’s wrong, mom?” Anyway, yeah. So that’s a goal. That was a secret goal. I’m so grateful. On my actual written goals, I’m married to a coach, right? Rich Fettke, he does this for a living every single year. We sit down, we write down the most important things we want to accomplish beyond what our normal work is. I mean we all have things that we’re doing and working through, but what do we want to do beyond that? Pushing ourselves. So I had three, and again that’s Rich’s thing is I keep the big ones to three because the brain can’t handle more than that.
My big one was starting a women’s mastermind and I failed. I didn’t do it you guys, I didn’t do it. I did one but I didn’t make it official. So that’s going to be 2023. I don’t know what stopped me. I think I just didn’t know quite … That’s an excuse to say I didn’t know how to do it. I think I was scared because I haven’t done it before. So I just did one and I think it was really fun and went well. So that’ll be next year because I just really believe in women helping women become better leaders. We still have work to do. We still have work to do there. Still not a female president.

Dave Meyers:
Well, you’re a excellent candidate to lead that mastermind, Kathy. So we need you to do it in 2023.

Kathy Fettke:
Oh, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I’m going to do it. Okay. Then my second one was to finish my revision of my book. I wrote “Retire Rich with Rentals” in 2014. It was so outdated. Then, when I got on this show, I’m like, “Oh, no. People are going to read that book and they’re going to be like, none of this makes sense. None of it is possible today.” But this had been a goal. Do you guys ever have a goal and it’s on there every single year? The same freaking goal.

Dave Meyers:
Of course.

Kathy Fettke:
Yes. So 2018, 2019, 2020. I mean every single year. So my husband Rich being a coach was like, “Do you need some accountability this time because we really need you to rewrite your book. It’s very outdated.” So I’m like, “Yes, help me.” So he set an appointment at the audio recording studio where I would record it, non-refundable, and he knows that I didn’t want to lose thousands of dollars, set the date and he’s like, “This is the date you’re showing up whether it’s done or not.” So I did, I revised that book. It re-recorded, it’s updated to 2022. So I did that. Really, really happy.

Dave Meyers:
Congrats.

Kathy Fettke:
Thank you. These are the professional goals. The third one was I knew in January that the market was going to shift. I knew that, well obviously the Fed had stated they were going to raise rates seven times this year and that means a massive and sudden slowdown to the economy. So I knew that was coming and I wanted to be prepared. So I wanted to have a fund because I wanted to have a big bundle of cash. Millions and millions of dollars. How about 20 million just ready to acquire? We did it.
I found my perfect partner. I’m here in Dallas right now, ready to go meet with her. We’re going to go look at the acquisitions that we’re about to go after. I’m super proud because I got this one done and I got the right partner and she’s both a property manager here in Dallas. I’ve been working with her for 10 years. I know her very well and she’s excited and she’s basically doing her deal, which is buying older homes but not too old. They’re kind of light rehab. We’re fixing them up to really nice A class condition because so many high tech people are moving from California to Dallas and they’re going to expect California standards. So we’re really making these places nice. All the equity goes into the fund, all the upside and we just share it. 75, 25 with the investors, so.

Dave Meyers:
That’s awesome.

Kathy Fettke:
We did it. I’m super excited and we’re taking advantage of this time when so many people are afraid and they shouldn’t be, but they are. Because people believe headlines which we’re looking at sales volumes, I’m just going to say this really quick, but sales volumes today are not that different than pre-pandemic. People are still buying and selling homes, but you can’t compare year over year data. You can’t compare now with crazy, right? You’ve got to go back to pre-pandemic. So headlines know how to freak people out. They’re comparing now from last year, which was an unprecedented year. Don’t do it. Don’t look at headlines that compare now with then. So anyway, I’m thrilled maybe that other people are reading those headlines because we’re going in and there’s just not competition when you can come in with cash, it’s fantastic.

Dave Meyers:
Awesome. Well, congratulations to all of you because my real estate goals are lame compared to all of yours. I was going to say that my goal was launching this podcast with all of you, which is true and really appreciate you saying that, Kathy. But also appreciate all of you and Jamil, wherever he may be preparing for his TV show launch that you all helped me make one of my annual and lifetime goals come true, so. That’s a big one for me. All right. Let’s take a quick break and then we’re going to come back and talk about our goals for 2023.
All right. Time for 2023 goals. James, you talked a big game about your plan to hit 200 million in sales. So let’s hear about this goal and your plan of attack for 2023. I guess is this the most important goal you’re going after next year?

James Dainard:
Well, no. The most important one is to get a little bit more. So they’re kind of counter, I got to figure out the magic sauce on this because I’m also trying to get a little bit out of my operational side of the business on the sales side. So I want to step out more but then continue to grow. The reason I want to do that more is, I’m trying to get out of the service side as much and get the right staff and we have a great team, expand the team and then be more in the investor. As my career as an investor over the last 18 years, it’s always been a lot of hands on hard work and getting in the weeds, getting things done, fixing things. As I’m getting older and doing more deals and getting more capital, I want to be more passive.
So that means I really want to focus on the long term investment goals, not just racking these checks in. So that is the ultimate goal, is to hire up, bring in some more partners inside of our businesses, groom some people that can take over as operators in the consumer and service side. Then I can focus more on the investment strategy side, like building the right teams to keep growing. Because I do think there’s going to be a substantial amount of opportunity for the next 12 months. If you have the right teams together, you can really let your money work and grow. So I guess the biggest one is see my kids and wife more and work less, but still grow the businesses and focus on the bigger picture. That $200 million in sales, I’ve been chasing this for three years now and I cannot get there.
What I realized is it’s because I stick to what I know so well and what we are really good at for us as a broker and a brokerage, we only sell what we know very, very well. I won’t sell any type of investment that I haven’t currently done so because we want to know how to package it, look it and help people work through that investment deal. We just don’t … For example, on warehouse leasing space, I’ve never done that before. We don’t sell that. It’s just we want to make sure that we’re really helping our clients through. But that’s always based on my experience, that doesn’t mean I can’t bring in more people to help improve the client’s experience. So I’m going to be actually … To get to this goal of 200 million, we’re we’re going to double our sales team, which a lot of people are shrinking their sales team for this 2023. Everybody’s pulling back right now and just going, “Okay, let’s get stable. I’m doubling down.” So we are hiring two times more.

Dave Meyers:
Are you finding it easy to hire right now? Do you see an opportunity in grabbing talent from other people who are scaling back?

James Dainard:
Definitely on the sales side, that is for sure. There’s a lot of lost brokers out there. The markets, it wasn’t a real market for the last two to three years. It was this artificially inflated market that was on fire. What that did is even for experienced brokers or new brokers, it A, brought a lot of people into the business that maybe really weren’t real estate people. They were just trying to make money. The second thing is, what it did is people gotten really lazy on their daily habit. It started becoming too easy. If you’re a broker, you didn’t have to worry about the marketing plan, you had to just throw a sign in the yard and figure out how to feed the offers and work that deal as best as possible. That is not selling. That is feeding offers and that’s negotiating at that point.
So a lot of simple habits that you need as far as an investor, a broker, a lender, these rules got broken, whether it was underwriting, how you were doing them, what you were buying, if you could execute. So as that’s kind of shooken up, there’s a lot of people … I’ve had substantially amount of salespeople reaching out to me about careers. In the construction side, we’ve definitely seen a … It’s getting easier across the board property managers, we’ve been able to staff up a little bit more internally for our syndication properties in our internal rentals. Superintendents are definitely starting to float around a lot more, construction workers because a lot of big builders laid off. A lot of people are stopped buying their forecasting to not be moving as much. So yes, the hiring is getting a little bit easier. Not in all sectors.
I think my general marketing, accounting, those things, those are still hard to hire for. But our real estate trades the specialists. It definitely is. So what we want to do is take this and what I’ve figured out is I only have so much space that I can grow that 200 million in. There’s only so many single family rentals, fix and flip property’s development sites that we can sell to be tangible and to keep growing. There’s only so much opportunity out there. You got to source enough off market, on market. So what we’re really doing is we’re doubling and tripling down on segments that we just started that we do some business in. As brokers, we source a lot of dirt for developers in Seattle where we’re finding the property, locking it up, selling it to them on a term. So what we’re doing is we’re doubling down on those big sectors. So multi-family commercial.
We’re just trying to expand it rather than just create more fix and flip and bur opportunities. We want to create the opportunities in all these different segments, which seems like a no-brainer to be doing that as you’re growing your business. But when you’re doing this many deals, you get caught in the weeds and you just want to get deals done and it’s going well. So now we’re trying to grow the segments and maybe part of my business shrink a little bit just to focus on the growth of these. That’s what I had to get to. I’m okay doing that.
I think that was the biggest thing I did over the last month was really do some soul searching of, I never want to stop growing, but how do I want to grow and if I want to grow as an investor, then I need to give up some of these other things that create very good income. That’s okay because the bigger picture is I can be a lot more effective in our large development deals, or syndicating, or lending of money because we do so many different things in the Pacific Northwest, you have to keep them narrowed in. Then we’re also trying to pick up a thousand more doors this year. I think we can hit that.

Dave Meyers:
Just throw that in. Just, oh, by the way. Just by the way a thousand doors.

James Dainard:
I think there’s going to be so much opportunity. I think we can do that. We’re going to be doing that through 10, 31 exchange team. We’re wrapping up a couple right now where we’re going from seven doors to 30 right now. We’ve wrapping up a couple 10, 31 exchanges. Then honestly, with people not buying bigger deals, the deals are there, but we need to staff up accordingly to keep these units. So we’re hiring right now, like we are buying a thousand doors. I think we can get in that.
We’re very excited about that because it’s hard to acquire good rental property that can pay a high yield in Washington State. So big goals, but you got to have your goals big. Your goals aren’t big, you don’t grind as hard. So it keeps me on the hamster wheel, but I have a certain goal to get to. I want a certain amount of money every month from passive income and I’m not there yet. So I have to create more income, I have to save my money, stick it away, and just let that keep growing so I can get to that magical number that I’ve been chasing.

Dave Meyers:
Well, so James, I want to ask you before we move on, like you said, so your philosophy about goal setting is to set big goals. Does that mean, you know you might not hit them each year? Or what’s your approach to how attainable you think your goals should be and how many of them you set?

James Dainard:
I think that’s a good question. I set my goals bigger and I think it depends on who you are as a person. Some people like that gratification of, “Hey, I got this done, check it off a list.” I mean, to be honest, if I have a list and I got to cross things off, it is very gratifying. Like, “This is done, this is done.” There’s something about that that is … Okay, even if it’s, “Hey, I picked up my groceries done,” but I’m a person that I like failure makes me work harder. Success sometimes makes me a little … It takes it off the gas, I don’t know what it is.
So that’s not for everybody, it’s just how I do it. Maybe it’s not the healthiest habit, but I like to make it to where I’m always trying to push myself to that code red. Usually that means hit trying to get to a goal that I couldn’t hit or that I thought it would be a long shot. I’d rather have a long shot goal than an easy one. I don’t need to knock that. The bigger picture is what I’m chasing and if I don’t hit my goal, I get anxiety and it makes me work harder, smarter and do it differently/ it’s the best way for me to do it, but it’s not for everybody.

Dave Meyers:
Anxiety fueled gold attainment. It’s something I really, really relate to, James.

James Dainard:
Yeah, if you want to get to more deals, you got to get the magic mix of way too much caffeine anxiety and it turns into a total basket case and you just get things done.

Dave Meyers:
Yeah. Continuously telling yourself that every success was actually just a failure. That’s the key that I make sure to throw in there.

James Dainard:
That is one of my biggest goals for 2023. Quit drinking Rockstar. It’s a big one.

Henry Washington:
Well, there goes our Rockstar sponsorship.

James Dainard:
Unless it gets sponsored. Yeah, that one, I formulated a plan for that too.

Kathy Fettke:
Oh, shoot. I thought that was going to be your mastermind. It’s like everybody sits around and drinks Rockstar’s all day and just gets anxious and like, “Oh, how can we have goals we can’t hit?”

Dave Meyers:
Well, James, I totally relate, but let’s go to Kathy. I feel like she probably has a healthier idea of how to set goals.

Kathy Fettke:
No, it’s funny because I was like that for many years, 20 years just charging. I think life just has a way of calming you down as you get older, maybe. I don’t know, you’re just not old enough yet, James.

James Dainard:
I feel like I’m getting there.

Kathy Fettke:
Oh, you start to see the kids grow up and you start to see things sag when you’re in Downdog. It’s just like maybe it’s time to relax. Anyway, what are we talking about, guys?

Dave Meyers:
Nothing. Show’s over.

Kathy Fettke:
Oh, I just want to spend time with my grandson who by the way just got a police car that the little ones guys could drive. So now every night, he patrols the neighborhood with his police car.

Dave Meyers:
Yeah. That’s adorable. I wanted one of those so bad when I was a kid. What are they called? Power wheels?

Henry Washington:
Power wheels.

Dave Meyers:
Power wheels, right? Yeah.

Kathy Fettke:
Yeah. It’s got alarms and sirens. I’m sure the neighbors love us.

James Dainard:
Yeah. What happened? That was usually for the really cool kids. Now I see them everywhere and I’m like-

Dave Meyers:
Yeah.

James Dainard:
If you had that it was having Reebok pumps.

Dave Meyers:
Oh my God.

James Dainard:
Then the Reebok pumps in a power wheel.

Dave Meyers:
Yeah. You were the coolest kid on the playground for sure. Well, what were we talking about? Oh, goals, Kathy, you said three goals, right? That’s what you set. So do you have your three goals for next year yet?

Kathy Fettke:
We usually sit down on New Year’s Day and do it together as a family and then the next week we do it with our company. But if I were to guess what it will be, I’ve already said it. I am going to have and launch the most awesome women’s mastermind. Can’t wait. That will be fully flushed out by I think before January. So maybe that’s still a, this year goal. Maybe you’ll actually hit the goal this year. Hey, it’s not over.

Dave Meyers:
Yeah. There’s still time.

Kathy Fettke:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So in 2023, again my values change over time and I’ve got two daughters and the youngest one’s 23 and a dream has been to work with her, work with both daughters. So the 23-year-old came to … I actually went to Europe with her this summer and she came with me to Portugal to look at the Golden Visa program and the program we were setting up to help Americans and other people who were looking for a citizenship. Krista was with me in Portugal, fell in love with Portugal, fell in love with the idea of the Golden Visa program. She wanted to do it. So now she’s working for Gateway Portugal which is a friend of mine who started that company and it’s been so much fun helping her launch that. So that’s one of my goals is to help my daughter. I’m a part owner in this business now and help her launch this thing. So I would say for 2023, really living that dream of being in partnership with my daughter on something she’s super passionate about.

Dave Meyers:
Cool. That’s awesome. I love that.

Kathy Fettke:
So fun. So fun to see her. Everybody … Not everybody, but a lot of times you want your kids to work and your business with you, but they need to choose that. Never force that. Just be so awesome that they want to do it with you and not too young. They need to go find out what other jobs are like and what other bosses are like and then realize you’re the best and they have to go find that out. But she was ready and she came to us wanting to do this and she’s been booked with three, four conversations a day already with people in-

Dave Meyers:
Wow, that’s so cool. Congrats.

Kathy Fettke:
What else? Obviously, the fund keeping that growing and then the big one is working through some of the projects that I started years ago that have been challenging. We have ground up development projects, so this is a tough time for builders. So my goal is of course to do as best as I can for our investors. We actually sold out two of our subdivisions early this year, so the timing was great, but we’ve got three more. So just giving it all everything. I’ve got creativity, marketing, working, like I said with our high-end luxury homes. We’re working with the shared vacation model with Ember Homes, which is like Picasso. And that is just a phenomenal model where people can have these vacation homes and not have to pay for the whole home because who uses their vacation home all the time? People don’t.
It’s a waste of space. It’s a waste of land for people to have these vacation homes they don’t use. I mean where I live in Malibu, it’s 50% occupied because all these rich people own homes that are empty and that’s not great. So this is a way to share that so that there’s shared ownership in these vacation homes. You get your days. So things like that. Really finding alternatives to the projects I’m already in to do the best I can for my investors. Now what Rich would say is make it smart. Really got to … What does that mean? How many? Get it down in writing with numbers and dates and be specific. So that’ll be what I do on January 1st.

Dave Meyers:
Nice. Well, if you don’t know what Kathy’s talking about, about SMART goals, this is a really popular goal setting framework that is super helpful. SMART is an acronym. S stands for specific. So I’m going to read this, I haven’t just memorized this. Specific says, in order for a goal to be effective, it needs to be a specific goal. Answers question, what needs to be accomplished, who’s responsible for it, what steps need to be taken to achieve it. M is for measurable. I think this is super important.
Obviously, I’m a data nerd, but quantifying your goals makes it easier to track your progress. You have to be able to keep score if you want to set a goal. A is achievable. So James, I don’t know if your big goals would fall into the SMART goals, but I like it. Achievable, but ambitious should be the A. R is relevant so that it’s actually important to you and that it’s important to your big picture. T is time-bound, which I think is really important too. You have to give yourself a deadline. So if you’re interested in goal setting and want a framework, SMART goals is a really, really good way to do that.

Kathy Fettke:
Dave, that’s why I didn’t accomplish the mastermind one. I was like, “Yeah, I want to do a mastermind, but I didn’t make it SMART. I wasn’t specific. I didn’t say many. I didn’t say exactly what that would look like.” So you could say that I achieved it because I did have one, but that’s not what I really had in mind. But what I had in mind, I didn’t write down.

Dave Meyers:
Totally. Because I guess the process of doing a SMART goal is a lot of the work you need to accomplish your goal. If you can figure out what specifically you want it to be and what the metric of success is and when you’re going to do it by, that’s a lot of the work for a lot of these goals. So it forces you to take some of the ambiguity out of it and then you can focus on execution and less on what is this thing going to be? I guess it just helps. All right. Henry, what are your goals for 2023? I guess let’s just start actually with what’s your philosophy on goal setting?

Henry Washington:
So yeah, my goals for 2023, I like to keep them simple. So I kind of just carry over the same goals and then either adjust them based on what happened in the previous year and how that made me feel or and how that made us feel about where we want to go the next year. So we’re still looking to buy 15 doors, we’re still going to do about 15 flips. Want to hit that 1.2 million number. I do have goals around hiring people this year because we’re just still a small operation. I still do acquisitions. My wife is our property manager, my handyman is my sister-in-law, right? I hired a social media manager this year so I could take social media off my plate so I could focus more on the actual business of investing in real estate. So next year I want to hire … We’re going to bring in somebody to do acquisitions. I want to get a personal assistant to help me with some of the day-to-day administrative things that take too much of my time.
But all of that is just around me not having to spend as much time in the business so that I can hang out with my wife and kids more. But for me, what’s important about goals is A, that you have them. Right? So you need to write your goals down. I think there’s something powerful about actually writing them, like putting pen to paper. You can type them and that’s cool. But when I write my goals down, I don’t know. It feels more real. It feels more like something that I am going to look to achieve. So some of the hacks that I do with my goals is not only do I write them down, but I write them multiple times a day. So every day when I wake up in the morning, I work out and then I sit down and I write my goals over and over again. I try to write them three to five times each. I wish I had the paper because I’m in my office. It’s typically-

Dave Meyers:
Like Bat Simpson on the chalk board?

Henry Washington:
Yeah, exactly. 100%. I have a notepad and I write my goals over and over again because for me, it’s a mindset hack and people get little flu, flu when you talk about mindset, but for me a mindset is a mental tool to help me stay physically disciplined with the tasks. So me writing them every day is really just me making sure that my goals are staying on the forefront of my brain so that as I’m actually doing things throughout the day, I have my goals in mind because I put them at the front of my brain every single morning. So it helps me work towards those things. It helps me when I’m time blocking, I’m making sure that I’m blocking time and working on things that are relevant to those goals. Another thing that I do is I put my goals in picture form and then I will save them as a vision board on the home screen in my phone, just so that … I got your phone in my hand all day.
So every time I go to unlock my phone, I can see my vision board. It helps me remember, especially if I feel like … Because we’re all going to get into places where we feel like the things that we’re doing are spinning wheels, but those wheels aren’t actually getting us closer to our goals. Then I get overwhelmed. And so when I get overwhelmed, it’s very easy for me to just look and see, “Okay, if what I’m doing right now isn’t moving me closer to one of these goals on my phone, then I need to readjust what I’m doing because we are all going to get overwhelmed and we’re all going to get burned out.” Just like James said, you wake up and you’ve got the fires in your inbox and it’s easy to just focus on those fires. But sometimes what I’ve noticed is all these fires aren’t really fires and all these fires don’t really take me to do something.
Sometimes it’s a fire that somebody else thinks is a fire that I have to handle when it’s really just something I need to push back on them to take care of. It’s not that big of a deal. So it helps me to stay focused. It helps me to always remember the things I need to be working on need to be pushing me towards those goals. Then I also like to write my goals down and then I stick them everywhere. So in my office you can’t see it. But on the wall here, on the side, on the sticky note, I’ve got goals written down over and over again. On my office at home, same thing hanging from my monitors are my goals. Next to my bed, I have my goals. I even have my goals on a sticky note in the shower so that when I’m showering I see my goals.

Kathy Fettke:
Wow.

Dave Meyers:
Is it those goals, like buy 15 rentals, like those goals you just … You paper, you wallpaper your house with them?

Henry Washington:
Yes, I wallpaper my house with my goals so that I see them everywhere because I just want to make it that much easier for me to stay focused on the tasks that I’m doing should actually be moving me towards those goals or else it’s probably not as important as I think it is because we will all get overwhelmed with tasks. So those are just little life hacks that I use to help me stay focused on the things that are important. I just truly believe that there is power in repetition, seeing things over and over again because you’re going to consciously, your efforts will push you. Consciously, you will do tasks that will push you towards those goals, but also subconsciously, you’re going to start doing things that are going to push you toward those goals as well.

Dave Meyers:
Man, my lock screen on my phone is just a picture of a fried chicken sandwich. So I guess that shows why you’re more successful than I am.

James Dainard:
How does the sticky notes work inside the shower? The only thing I keep inside my shower are energy drinks. So how does sticky note work?

Henry Washington:
I forget what they’re called, but there’s like water shower … It’s made for the shower, so the paper’s super durable and it’s a pencil that you write with so it’s not like ink.

Dave Meyers:
I like it.

Henry Washington:
I get them off Amazon. I’ve got two or three of those little notepads in my shower.

James Dainard:
See, I was thinking about getting a cooler for my shower so I could just have a cold fast energy drinks as soon as I get in.

Dave Meyers:
Well, if you’re trying to quit, James, you got to switch out the Rockstar’s for Henry’s now.

James Dainard:
I know.

Henry Washington:
Dude, my wife has one of those little cosmetic refrigerators that women have for their cosmetics that are supposed to stay not room temperature. I don’t know, but I’m like, hmm, I could probably toss a beer or two in there, maybe.

Dave Meyers:
Okay.

Henry Washington:
Right.

Dave Meyers:
All right. Well, those sounds like some ambitious great goals. Is there any other tips any of you have or thoughts on goal setting that you want to impart on our audience? Kathy?

Kathy Fettke:
With our business, we use a software called Ninety.io. Ninty is spelled out and it’s kind of based on EOS.

Dave Meyers:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Kathy Fettke:
Yeah. Meetings are just such a waste of time most of the time. You’ve got the loud mouths who come up with ideas and they just derail the meeting. A lot of people hate meetings. So with Ninety.io, you basically have your headlines. Everybody just gets a few seconds to say something that everybody in the company needs to know. Then you review your to-dos, that was supposed to be done last week. So everybody is held accountable because it’s on the software and doesn’t get shot, checked off till it’s done and you’ve announced it and then you go into this section that’s all the ideas, all the things that can be done to improve or the issues, basically the things that need to be discussed and they all get put in here. Then as a group, you move to the top, the issues that the entire group wants to talk about. There’s a timer on it.
So you don’t have people who just dominate with their idea that nobody cares about. You know what I’m saying? There’s always the loud mouth and that could be me. So this just keeps it on track. Anyone can call out and say, “Hey, it sounds like this is something for a subgroup. If you really want to get deeper into the how of this, the to-do here is to set up a meeting and you do it offline so that the whole group doesn’t have to be here figuring out this thing that only two you care about.” So I just highly, highly, highly recommend Ninety.io because it takes the vision at the beginning of the year and breaks it out into quarterly steps. What’s the first bite of this elephant? What’s the first thing we need to do? Then you take that quarterly goal and you break it down into weekly steps called milestones, and it’s all on that software. Everyone can see it, everyone can see how you’re doing on it. It’s been tremendous for us.

Henry Washington:
So another hack that you can do to help you achieve your goals is … So like humans, we’re all naturally pumped about our goals at the beginning of the year because everybody on Instagram, everybody on YouTube is all talking about goals, plan your goals, set your goals, new Year’s resolutions, there’s all these things that are telling us let’s get ready for the new year. So we get focused for a few months and then life happens, things happen, then we slow down, maybe we get off track. Even the most disciplined people about their goals will start to slow down after about 90 days. So you can use that first 90 days to your advantage. So when you’re planning your goals, don’t just plan your goals, but plan a 90-day plan. So take your goals and you can Google 90 day plan. There’s tons of templates, but you can essentially just break your goals out into the what’s the goal, who do you need to get it done, and then what steps are you going to take within each month in the first 90 days to achieve that goal.
It’s kind of like some people are most productive in the morning and then they trail off. So they take advantage of the mornings and they try to be as productive as possible so that if they trail off, they still get a lot of things done. You can do the same thing with your goals and try to be the most productive on achieving your goals in the first 90 days. Then, if you trail off, you’ve got a big head start within those first 90 days. So you can be super strategic, plan out those first 90 days and while you’re still motivated about getting your goals done, you’ll be able to accomplish way more of those tasks because you’re feeling like that’s what you should be doing before life smacks you in the face and then you need to throw your goals out the window anyway.

Dave Meyers:
That’s a great tip. Yeah, it’s like plan to have a plan and plan for the fatigue and understand that that’s just human nature.

Henry Washington:
Right.

Dave Meyers:
Well, I love all these tips, I love these goals. I really appreciate that all of you basically said in addition to financial goals have lifestyle goals too. I mean, most of us invest for reasons that are just beyond just making a lot of money, but also able to do things that are fulfilling to you as well that you feel are important and meaningful. That’s very important for goal setting as well. I have one last goal setting question for you guys. If you could create a goal for the On The Market podcast for 2023, what would that goal be?

James Dainard:
I think the number one goal is to make sure that David Green wakes up very sad when we take over the number one spot. Nothing against David Green, but sometimes you just got to do something to somebody cereal and take over that number one spot.

Dave Meyers:
We got a long way to go, but I like the ambition of that goal.

James Dainard:
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, set big goals. It’s like, it just you just-

Dave Meyers:
Yeah.

James Dainard:
I don’t like baby steps. Just go for it.

Dave Meyers:
I’m with you. Let’s do it.

Kathy Fettke:
Dave, what about being on Real Wealth’s top 10 podcast list?

James Dainard:
That’s not a goal. That’s an expectations, Kathy. We need to talk about expectations going forward.

Dave Meyers:
So for everyone listening, I was like, I forget what I was doing, but I was like doing some research. I Googled top real estate podcasts a few months ago, well into on the market, and I found Article by Real Wealth Kathy’s company for top real estate podcasts and On The Market was not on it. So I said it to Kathy, I called her out a little bit, was asking why, what we have to do to make her top podcast list for next year.

Kathy Fettke:
So the funniest thing is I didn’t even know that list existed in the best part was that somehow my show isn’t number one. I’m like, “That sounds kind of self-serving.” Anyway, we must have a great SEO person because-

Dave Meyers:
Totally. Very good.

James Dainard:
I also found that list too. So you do have an SEO, good SEO person.

Kathy Fettke:
I will have a good conversation with her.

Dave Meyers:
All right. Well, now we’ll see more honest, we didn’t make it the first year. We had to prove ourselves that after … What are we at? 50 something episodes at this point that were worthwhile. All right. Well, my goal next year is to get at least in the top five for investing shows. I think we can definitely do that. Hopefully make two Dave’s cry. Let’s get David Green sad and Dave Ramsey sad one day. If we could dethrone those two, we’ll know that we’ve accomplished something great.

Kathy Fettke:
There’s a new Dave in town.

Dave Meyers:
Oh, wow. That’s so funny. Yeah, all Dave’s. Well, three Dave’s at the top one day.

Henry Washington:
I mean, let’s not discount the fact that we hit a goal of a million downloads already.

Dave Meyers:
Yeah, we did. That’s incredible. Over a million downloads in six months, which is ridiculous.

Henry Washington:
Yeah.

Dave Meyers:
Well, we appreciate all of you for all of your support for giving us those good reviews, for sharing it with your friends. I don’t know if you guys have seen this, but I think yesterday we’re recording this in early December, the Spotify year wrapped thing came out. I don’t know if you guys know what this is where it shows you the things you listen to most on Spotify, and I was seeing a lot of people post that On The Market was their top podcast that they listened to in 2022, which was super cool to see. So even if not on the real charts, we were in top of the BiggerPockets charts and above Dave Ramsey on a couple people’s individual lists at least.
So we appreciate you all. Thank you for supporting the show. Hopefully next year is another year of great growth for this show. Kathy, James, and Henry, thank you so much for sharing your goals and your philosophy on setting goals. Really appreciate the inside look into how you all think about what you want to accomplish and how you actually go about accomplishing those things. Let’s just do a quick reminder here of how anyone listening to this can connect with you. Kathy, where should people find you?

Kathy Fettke:
Well, probably the easiest is on Instagram @Kathy Fettki or at realwealth.com.

Dave Meyers:
All right, James?

James Dainard:
You can find us on Instagram at jaydaneflips or check out jamesdainard.com for just a bunch of free videos. Me walking through nasty Houses.

Dave Meyers:
Henry, what about you?

Henry Washington:
Same. I’m at the Henry Washington on Instagram or check me out at henrywashington.com.

Dave Meyers:
All right, great. You can find me either on BiggerPockets or on Instagram where I’m at the Data Deli. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode On The Market. We’d love if you either go on Instagram or on the BiggerPockets forums, tell us what your goals are for 2023. We’d love to hear them and how you’re going to go about setting and accomplishing your goals. Thanks again. We’ll see you next time.
On The Market is Created by me, Dave Meyer and Caitlin Bennett, produced by Caitlin Bennett, editing by Joel Esparza and Onyx Media, researched by Puja Gendal, and a big thanks to the entire BiggerPockets team.
Well, content on the show on the market are opinions only. All listeners should independently verify data points, opinions, and investment strategies.