DGS 150: The 5 Currencies for Property Management Entrepreneurs

What is the most important currency when assessing whether or not we’re doing the right things or making really good decisions in the business? Time, energy, focus, cash, or effort? It’s not money, but time that is limited and scarce.

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about the five currencies for property management entrepreneurs. It is a concept that he was taught by his mentor, Alex Charfen.

You’ll Learn...

[01:50] Five Currencies: Time, energy, focus, cash, and effort.

[02:58] #1 Currency: Time - most important commodity.

[04:44] #2 Currency: Energy - some things give us energy and others drain us.

[06:19] #3 Currency: Focus/attention - whatever you focus on tends to grow.

[08:10] #4 Currency: Cash/money - Buy back more of your time and other currencies.

[08:41] Four Reasons: Fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support.

[09:15] Six Core Functions of business. Which function is your weakest?

[09:48] #5 Currency: Effort - put in more than anyone else; your results are assured.

[11:20] Currencies: Assess and evaluate yourself related to the five currencies.

Tweetables

“We trade money in order to get back some of our own time.”

“Do less and less of the things that drain you and do more of things that give you energy. You only have so much energy in a day.”

Focused Equals Power: “The more focus you have, the more power you’ll have, which means you can go faster.”

“If we have enough cash, we can buy other people’s time and get more of our time back.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Alex Charfen

10X by Grant Cardone

Transcript

Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.

DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.

My topic today is we’re going to chat about the five currencies. This is a concept that I was taught by one of my mentors, Alex Charvin. He would probably explain it differently and he has a great podcast, by the way, for entrepreneurs. It’s (I think) really validating for us as entrepreneurs. I really look up to Alex. He’s a mentor that really helped me take my life and business to another level, which is a goal I aspire to do with all my clients.

This is something that I was taught by Alex. These currencies—write them down; these are one through five—I like them in this order. This is just how I’ve always set them and how I like them. This is probably not his order but time, energy, focus, cash, and effort. Let’s get into each of these.

Let me just give you an overview. We have five different currencies that we can invest into our personal life and into our business. When assessing whether or not we’re doing the right things or making really good decisions in the business, we want to take a look at it. If I’m investing, you should be getting a return if it’s a good investment. But a lot of business owners are not making a very good decision, they are not investing correctly or well, so they’re not getting a return. If you’re not making enough money in your business, you’re not having enough growth, you’re probably not doing the right things in investing these currencies correctly. Let’s go through each of these.

Time. Time, in my opinion, is the most important commodity, is the most important currency, hands down. Why? None of us know when we’re going to die but we’re all going to die. Time is a scarce, limited resource. It’s the most important, your personal time. Now, what’s cool is you can buy the time of others. This is why we have team members, pay employees, pay people to do certain services for us and stuff like that. We trade money in order to get back some of our own time. That is the most important commodity.

When we’re young, we do crazy stuff. We work at a job, trading our time, giving up our life, chunks of our life for money. We don’t realize how valuable it is. Eventually, hopefully you’ve realized or starting to realize right now that money is not the most important currency. It’s time. You’ll realize that as you recognize that it’s the one that’s truly limited and scarce.

Related to time, you want to take a look at where’s my time going? Is it towards the things that feed me more life, or make me feel joy, or are the things that I really find fun or enjoyable? This goes back to my podcast episode about the four reasons. Make sure you check that out if you haven’t listened to that. I want to make sure that if you’re investing your time, it’s towards those things; you getting more and more of those. When it comes to time, this is why I have clients do things like time studies, and we have a very strategic way of looking at your time so you can assess that.

The next is energy. We all have things to give us energy and things that drain us. Me coaching clients energizes me. It’s fun. I woke up like 3:00 in the morning, I was super tired and just before this I got off a coaching call, and I feel bit pumped up. It just gives me life. I enjoy being able to teach. I enjoy being able to share cool stuff. I learn. That’s my why, is to inspire others to love true principles. I love being able to learn cool stuff, share with other people, and see them get it. That’s just so fulfilling for me. It gives me energy.

But there are things that drain my energy. I also run a web design agency designing logos and building websites that’s not super energizing for me. It used to be kind of fun for me, but I really did it to make money. That was a job when I was a solopreneur. All of you are doing and wearing hats that you don’t want to wear and doing things you don’t want to do.

Over time, moving towards the four reasons, I want you to do less and less of the things that drain you and do more of things that give you energy. You only have so much energy in a day. That’s a currency you can protect, you can work to be healthy, you can do some self care, you can protect yourself enough load things, but you want to pay attention to your energy levels and the things that are energizing you or the things that are draining you.

Next is focus or attention. Whatever you focus on tends to grow. Those that are into the law of attraction stuff, recognize this, but wherever they say energy flows where attention goes. If you want more of your energy to go towards more positive things, you need to place more attention on those things.

Focus is also one of the greatest secrets in business. So many business owners get diluted in their focus and their attention, and they wonder why they can’t go as fast. A good analogy is to look at light. You can have a flashlight. It’s helpful. It’s more helpful than maybe a candle in some instances, or maybe something’s really dim like a fire. And you can move it around. A flashlight’s really cool.

But if you really want to have something really powerful, and you focus that light, you then end up having a laser. A laser can cut through things. It can do really cool stuff.  It can cut machinery, it can do some really powerful stuff. It can do dangerous stuff.

Focused equals power. This is a principle in the universe. The more focus you have, the more power you’ll have, which means you can go faster. In the property management business, for example, if you are diluted in your focus—you’re doing lots of different types of management while you’re small—you’re not going to be able to grow as effectively in any of them. It’s like trying to run multiple races at a time. You’re scattered, you’re diluted.

A lot of entrepreneurs lose focus and get distracted by opportunity. You want to make sure that you can determine, where’s my focus going and is it giving me more of the things that I want? More all of the other currencies maybe or more towards the four reasons?

Currency number four is cash. Cash also, like all of these, is a limited resource. But if we invest our currencies correctly, we can get more of it and we can turn that cash into more of these other currencies if we’re investing correctly. If we have enough cash, we can buy other people’s time and get more of our time back, and then we can do more of the things that energize us.

A lot of business owners, as I said on a previous podcast when I talked about the four reasons, make more and more money and they have less and less of the four reasons. Just to recap, just real quick, fulfillment, freedom, contribution, support. These are the things we want to get from our business. We want to make sure focus is tight.

A lot of business owners, the reason you’re not growing right now is because you are focused on the things that the business is already doing well and you’re not putting the majority of your focus as a leader and as a business owner on the things the business is struggling with currently. So go back and listen to my episode about the six core functions of business. That’s where you can determine where should our focus be as a company right now. Which function is our weakest.

Cash. It’s also important to recognize cash. You’ll need cash flow. You need some space and some padding there that’s going to give you a lot more ability to focus and have attention. Cash can affect all of these other functions.

The next is effort. This is the last one, number five, effort. We only have so much physical energy, physical strength that we can do. After that we can put into something. But if you’re willing to put in more effort than anyone else is willing to put in, your results are assured.

A great book on this is Grant Cardone’s book, 10X. I like the audio book because you get to hear him talk about it and share these principles. The basic principle is if you do 10 times the effort—it’s very focused on the effort attribute—you put 10 times the effort towards something, you’re going to get the result. And it’s 10 times more than what you’d typically think you’ll need, and the results are assured. There’s no way you’re not going to hit that goal.

Now, all of these five currencies will show up on a time study, except cash, really. Time study will reveal to you where your time, your energy, your focus, and your efforts are going currently, so that you can figure out how to reinvest it. It’s a cheat code to having greater productivity.

But my goal for you is not to become just more productive. I don’t need you to do more stuff if you want your company to grow. You don’t really have to do more. In fact, the ultimate goal is for you to do less things but spend more time and attention doing the things that you really enjoy doing, that give you energy.

Take a look at yourself through the lens of these five currencies—time, energy, focus, cash, and effort—and figure out where is this going. If you want to work with me as a coach, go through my proprietary time study process, to identify your plus and minus signs energetically, figure out how to reinvest and eliminate the interruptions in your business that are stealing money, focus, time, and effort, and improving that.

This is something that I coach clients and doing once a quarter. So reach out and let’s connect. We’d be glad to help you. This (I believe) is the greatest secret to offloading, figuring out how you can get out of being the biggest bottleneck in your own business, is just starting with assessing your time and seeing where these currencies are going.

Take a look at your currencies, assess yourself, evaluate yourself related to these currencies, and figure out how am I doing in each of these? Give yourself a rating. Am I deficient? Where am I weak? Am I weak on cash? Am I weak on time? Am I weak on energy? Am I weak on focus or attention? Am I weak on effort? And then start to dedicate a little bit more of those currencies towards what’s weak so that you can improve that.

If you’re weak on time, maybe you’ve got good cash. So invest some of that cash towards time. Maybe you’re weak on effort. You’re like, I’ve kind of floating and coasting right now, and I really would like some more of these other currencies. Cool, invest more time and put in some more effort towards it. More attention and focus, that if you want more cash, certainly a way to do that is invest more of those.

All right. That's what I'm going to say about the five currencies. If anybody has questions about these, feel free to hit us up in our Facebook group, doorgrowclub.com which is our free community. Make sure to apply. We don’t let everybody in. Once you’re inside, you can ask questions related to these things.

Or send me a message on Facebook or through any other social media platform. I might see it. I try to monitor them all. We’d be happy to help you move your business forward. So take a look at your currencies.

That’s it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. I hope everybody has an awesome week and success. Bye, everyone.