Steve Napolitan: Welcome to More Business More Life® podcast. Today I have a dear friend and a client, Mike Bailey from Lockhart Bailey Group in real estate. And when I met Mike, he was running four plus businesses and had some other investments with his mom and going for success. And on the outside, everything is amazing, right? It looks like millions of dollars and all these success and over 600 real estate agents, property management, staging company, all these things. But what we’re going to cover in this episode is how that was just breaking down his life and while you’re reaching for success to reach for those end dollars, it wasn’t giving him the life that he want. And then we’re going to talk about how did he recreate the way he does business, actually doing less and making more, and now being a family man and enjoying the time with his kids and his wife and his extended family beyond. And you might say, wow, less and having more. Yes. And this is an episode you’re not going to want to miss. Watch through the whole thing because I did the same thing, by the way, and I’m going to share that too. And then I was able to transform my life by doing some of the things that we’re going to teach right now and share our stories on this episode. So let’s jump in. So Mike, thanks for being here.

Mike Bailey:  Well, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. I think this conversation is going to be a gift. Thanks for doing it.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, thank you.

Steve Napolitan: Well, and you just heard that intro that I just did. If we start with a highlight and then we can dig into what it was like, because sometimes letting go of your businesses can be scary, like, oh, we have a revenue. But how would you highlight if you were to say, this is what it was and this is where it is now, what would be your highlight?

Mike Bailey: Oh gosh, man. Somehow I ended up with my hand in just about everything. And when I get into something like real estate, all these offshoots of real estate I wanted to take a hand in and it got pretty crazy. So we had four businesses, four true businesses, one being just real estate sales and our team running that team and so forth. Then we had a company, a real estate company that we ran for 10 years, but that was going on in the background and that went up to about 600 or so agents. So I was pretty big. And then we had staging staging company and a property management company.

Steve Napolitan: And for those that are on staging is in real estate, you bring all the, so now you’re a moving company, literally trucks, moving furniture in and out of houses.

Mike Bailey: Literally selling real estate and then I was also a mover. I drove the truck the big, like a rental truck. I drove that thing to houses and staged my own houses for the most part in the beginning.

Steve Napolitan:  And you own those trucks too.

Mike Bailey: We own the trucks and we had almost 5,000 square foot warehouse of furniture. But people don’t realize that what you got to do to maintain the furniture, fix it, and hire help to be in there all the time and organize it. And there’s a lot of things to it other than just thinking that I could go stage a home and sell it for more, and I could do this for multiple agents. And that was my thought process in the beginning. But I wanted to get involved in all these things because it was related to real estate, which I really enjoyed after a 20 year career somewhere else.

Steve Napolitan: It does overlap. It makes sense from the perspective of looking at it. It’s like, oh duh, we’re already here. We might as well do it. And if we can make money doing these things and make it better, it’s not just the money too. You were making it better. If you’re selling a home and you stage it properly, you can tend to sell the house for more because it’s properly, it’s like anything you polish. If you want to sell a car, you’re going to wash it, wax it, clean it. I mean, it’s presenting the house in a really good way. So it’s not like these weren’t stupid ideas, but it was just a lot of stuff. And then the one, because I cut you off, the last one was the property management.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, property management. You talk about owl clients, I guess I shouldn’t say that on camera probably.

Steve Napolitan: Well, it’s not necessarily ow clients, but I remember when you were telling me it’s just an out situation because most of the time if you’re not hearing from your tenants, everything’s good. But if you hear from the tenant, then it’s like something’s wrong. So it’s not necessarily the people that are out, but it’s the situation.

Mike Bailey: You only hear from ’em when they’re complaining or what have you. But I was used to that. I had a long career prior to this, and I only dealt with those type of issues, so I was used to it. But one thing I should preface first is that I didn’t start the property management. Well, I started the property management, but I didn’t start the staging. My mom was already a realtor here. She’s a very successful realtor. Her name is Renee. And she started this staging as an offshoot to help her sell homes. And we always offered it for free to our clients. So it became a really nice feature or a nice aspect of our business, like

Steve Napolitan: A bonus.

Mike Bailey: Like a bonus to stage our client’s homes for free. And we still do it today. However, the time and effort that it took to do that was crazy. And then we had to, excuse me, we opened it up to all the agents in our company. So we would stage our clients or our agents’ homes if they wanted. And we did it for way less than we should have. It was more of a burden on us. And we were doing it for the most part because we wanted to grow our company and we could get more listings by staging more houses and sell ’em for a higher price. So it meant that we were making more money, but personally, my mom and I, we were out driving trucks and moving furniture to other agents’ homes to stage them or help stage them

Steve Napolitan: Literally. You’re like, okay, let me get that. Did you have people loading the trucks or you were loading too?

Mike Bailey: We did. We hired, boy, it was like you couldn’t hire staff.

Steve Napolitan: I know we’re going back in time.

Mike Bailey: You couldn’t hire a true staff to work there full-time because it was not always something going. But we did have a person inside the warehouse, we’d bring the furniture back and they would organize it and put it back. But furniture is not light and it’s not something easy to put away and fix all the time. So it was tough.

Steve Napolitan: Yes. I mean, because even if you have one person in the warehouse, I suppose if there’s a big couch or a sectional or something, you’re going to have to have extra people there so they can literally pick it up. And then I understand because you don’t know how many listings you’re going to have in a month. So one month you could have 11 and one month you could have four. And so then having full-time staff could be an issue. So basically you’re just getting man hours as you could, or you literally filled in is what I’m hearing. So you’d be like, oh, I can’t get someone, so I’ll go lift the couch.

Mike Bailey: And this staging portion of it, I mean, it almost was funny when you and I got together and talked about all these businesses, it was kind of funny because we were taking on the burden of trying to help all of our other agents, the agents in the company to grow the company at the cost of us. And so you mentioned that we made millions and so forth. That’s not quite true in staging because staging, we made no money when you added in our hours and labor.

Steve Napolitan: I guess I was collecting all four of your companies in that case, it’s true, was the loss leader.

Mike Bailey: The Loss leader. But it helped us get listings. So it did help the revenue side, but it really was tough when you’re not totally and focused. And that’s my sole job and I’m going to build that company and I’m going to grow it to be a successful company. So many other staging companies, this was an internal thing.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, it wasn’t your main passion or focus, but it makes sense mean. So this is where it makes sense as someone listening to this, it’s not like, oh, this was a dumb idea. I mean, when you look at it on paper, it’s like, okay, we’re going to have a better opportunity for someone that wants to list their home. Why would they not go with your company? Because you’re going to add that staging aspect that you already have. There’s no calling anyone except for your own team and say, okay, we got another listing. This is what we need. And then you’re bringing all that stuff over. And then also when you go to recruiting for your other company, when you had the 600 agents, if they could get a discount staging because they’re part of your firm, that’s like a recruiting bonus. So I could see all the bonuses and then yes. So staging might not be profitable, but then it was helping all the other companies. But the problem with it was, this would only work. And remember when you and I met, I said, okay, Mike, this works. If you’re not doing anything there, it has to be completely delegated, which was not true. And then you’re already losing money on it. So I could see the math, you’re looking at the paper and you’re like, I can’t hire a bunch of people, then I’m going to lose even more money. So that was the dilemma.

Mike Bailey: It was a dilemma. And one thing you helped us realize you worked with my mom too, was that it really wasn’t saving us money to do it ourselves. And we got into that mindset, or my mom was a big culprit. I mean, she would always stay up all night doing things, but realist, she didn’t see the cost of that.

Steve Napolitan: And consequence even beyond cost. Right. Your life. Sorry to jump in on that.

Mike Bailey: No, that’s true. I mean, that’s what you helped us with is just looking at it from a different angle. Because we were both single at the time. My mom was single and I was single, and we were working 24 hours a day for the most part. I told you the other night that I had a little apartment after my divorce and just like a cave with two desks in it, and I would come home from work to work. It was a bad situation.

Steve Napolitan: That’ll keep you single.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, that’ll keep me single. Especially the twin bed that I had stolen out of staging.

Steve Napolitan: Okay, so there’s another perk. You got a bed out of it.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, I could have furniture. I could have furnished that thing pretty good. But the other thing about staging that’s kind of funny is that you have to buy furniture. So the more houses you have, the more furniture you need. And if the market turns or the cycle turns, your furniture is in somebody’s house for months.

Steve Napolitan: So you’re just sitting out there with inventory out there in all these houses, and then you have to pick that furniture up and move it by the time it closes. So to coordinate that is a whole another full-time job. It literally is a moving company.

Mike Bailey: It is a moving company. I respect the stagers that do it well, but honestly, we didn’t do it well and we didn’t make any money at it other than the extra or the peripheral revenue that we made in our other businesses that did better.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah. Well, yeah. So your other companies are funding this company, and then you are funding the labor, which was crazy when you break it down. So in all this, you’re working 24 7, you’re selling houses, you’re building your real estate company with other agents, you’re doing the property management and you’re running around being a mover. You’re literally driving the trucks and moving the furniture. That was a lot, Mike.

Mike Bailey: Yeah. Well, you made me realize how much that was and how I couldn’t concentrate on the thing that I was good at was selling real estate. I felt very confident and very comfortable in real estate, and I loved working with people and building those relationships and helping them fulfill their dream. So you don’t want to let those people down. So you were in all aspects when 2007, 2008, we had 50 listings on the market, maybe even more at some points because they were sitting for a long time. It wasn’t abnormal for something to sit on the market for a year, sometimes longer. We had a lot of distressed property. Of course, EOS and short sales at the time. So those things were sitting on the market. You were constantly getting calls from disgruntled sellers, what are you doing to sell my house? That type of thing. So those things were going on at that time, and it was rough through those periods. We lost a lot of real estate agents during that time. So a lot of team members leave and so forth. But then during that, the whole premise of me telling you about the distressed properties in 2007 was because all those 50 listings, we noticed that they wanted to start renting them out and take ’em off the market and start renting it out to get some revenue coming in so they can pay their mortgage.

Steve Napolitan: Makes sense. Okay.

Mike Bailey: So when we started that property management company, it was because my mom and I had quite a few rentals of our own, and we were tired of, that was almost another job taking care of your own rentals. So you have to, well, we decided to make it easier on ourselves and start a property management company. We had the licenses to do it. However, that’s a job in itself too. I mean, if you’re not fully involved in property management, there’s a lot of legal laws, things that you have to look out for. And we weren’t on top of our game in property management either, even though we wanted to be, because we were managing our own rentals too. We knew what service we wanted. So we wanted to give that to our clients and give ’em a wow experience. But we didn’t.

Steve Napolitan: And it’s not like I know you and people are listening to this. Mike is a great guy and you really do care. And that’s like even when you said you want to do the greatest job in real estate and making sure people get in their dream home, what happened? And these are all great ideas because like, oh, I’m going to add more service. Oh, my clients need. So you were listening. You’re like, oh, my clients need to rent their property. We need more help. Oh, it makes sense. Let’s have a property management. The same with staging. We need to stage it better. Let’s do that. And then in the end though, building all those things at the same time, how can you give it the proper attention?

Mike Bailey: Right. That’s right. And we didn’t get in there to manage that process ourselves. We hired property managers and had offices and all that. It was a big, big headache, put it that way. But it served a purpose back then because we were renting out and retaining clients, we were retaining clients. So we got up to 300 doors, which 300 residential properties gets a little mesmerizing sometimes with all the calls that you get. And once again, you only get the calls from folks that have something going wrong with their house or renters have a broken pipe or something like that. Yes. But we did hire, but it’s hard to retain the good employees sometimes. And we went through our share of employees and ups and downs in the property management business. See, we even got audited. We kind of audited. And that was a thing by the DRE at the time. They would audit even small companies, because in the big scheme of things, we were a small property management company. 300 doors is nothing. But they came to us and said we were off on one of the trust account, but we really weren’t. We were just using an accounting software that they weren’t used to. And so in the long run, we were fine.

Steve Napolitan: But you had to prove it.

Mike Bailey: But we had to prove it for six months. We had somebody in the office. And so it was taking us out of real estate, out of everything else. We had to hire an accountant. We put an attorney on retainer, and the whole thing cost us $30,000 just to get audited. And then the DRE charges you too. Wow. It was self-funded at the time. They were auditing a lot of smaller companies. Wow. So that was my experience in property management. We even hired the wrong employees that would take money and not be as truthful as you would in that type of a situation, but it’s our fault when we look back on it because we didn’t push ourselves into that business. We kind of ran it from afar, so to speak.

Steve Napolitan: How many hours do you really have? I mean, add all this up. So you’re saying all this, look at what you’re saying out loud here. All this plus the staging company, plus you have 600 agents that you’re part of a bigger firm and you’re still out there selling real estate. So doing listing presentations, getting houses listed, and then also showing homes probably. I mean,

Mike Bailey: Yeah, that.

Steve Napolitan: There’s the 24 hours.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, those things were going crazy. I had a good small team at the time. I mean, there was only five people on my team at any one time. Keep it small. I trained new people to have all my bad habits.

Steve Napolitan: Thank you They follow us.

Mike Bailey: And then so that side kept it going. That’s how I ate. I mean, realistically, they were generating revenue and I would sell or list. And everybody was working together on that side. And I did have a partner in my business at the real estate company that handled, he was the CEO of the company, and I did some extra peripheral stuff, but I owe him a lot of credit for building the company up during those times. And I did it. I recruited through what I do.

Steve Napolitan: What you spoke at the other day was PAR and the Placer County Association of Realtors.

Mike Bailey: So I did the Placer Association of Realtors Marketing Committee, and I led those meetings for 18 years now. Wow. And after telling myself, I never wanted to get up on stage again and talk to people.

Steve Napolitan: And now you do it every week?

Mike Bailey: Yeah, now I do it every week. We tend to gravitate back. So I had staging, property management, the real estate company, my own real estate team. And I told you last night about an investment I made in Oklahoma that went totally crazy, but that was almost like another job too.

Steve Napolitan: And then volunteering for VCA, and that may not as much time, but still you had five or six different activities and no wonder you’re working 24/7.

Mike Bailey: And I felt like I look back on it now, and it’s almost like, why was I doing that? Why was I spread so thin? And I think back to maybe it was my own ego or me thinking that I had to run all these things so more people would need me and want to work with me or want to or think I was successful.

Steve Napolitan: So it’s not even necessarily for power. Sometimes when people think about ego, they look guy like power, greed, but in this way too for your heart, and now knowing you, it is just feeling like you wanted to be valued and needed, and that feels good. People need your help and then you can add value to their lives. So it is sipping on that cup in a good way. And again, another reason this actually makes more sense in that part of the ego because it makes more sense to keep adding. Like, oh, this feels good. I’m helping people. Oh, let’s add another business in another business. And I don’t know if this is true for you, but for me, I did very similar thing, and that’s why you and I related when we met so quickly, I did the same thing. Because when you start growing in business, everyone says multiple streams of income, multiple streams of income. But no one person ever said to me until I finally got the right mentor one at a time.

That’s the problem. You could do that. Let’s say if we were rewind and you built each of those one at a time. Let’s say you spent three to five years. Three to five, because that’s really what it usually takes to get a good business running. And now all the years you’ve put in, you spent three to five years building the staging company, rock stars, hiring all the right people, spending all the time in there, and then it’s making money and you exit. Then you build the property management and three to five years get all the rockstar employees and everything running, and then you can exit and just be advisor one at a time. But here we are, and I did the same thing, Mike. A lot of us are not immune to these ideas. It made sense at the time, but then when you look back at it, it’s like we’re building four things at the same time. So you’re building four skyscrapers with the same construction crew, so they’re only able to work 25% of the time at each construction site. Then it takes you a millennia to build four companies.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, that’s true. And one of the things that really hit home for me when I was working with you back in those times was when you drew it out for me, and I remember so vividly how you did this. You drew out two cliffs, two tall cliffs, and there was a big canyon in the middle of it, and you drew a line that said staging, and you drew it halfway over the cliff. We were building a bridge to the other side. The other side represented success, prosperity, fulfillment. I started with staging. I started the property management, and I got halfway over on everything I was doing. And so I was very vivid and very clear in my mind what I had four or five things going, but I’m only halfway over the canyon and I haven’t reached the other side. I’ve never built the bridge to the other side solely or looked at what I was good at and identified that and said, I’m going to stick with that and I’m going to put that on the other side, and then if I want to go somewhere else, I could. But I never did it until I saw that from you. And I probably still have the diagram that I probably still have the paper you drew it on.

Steve Napolitan: Oh, that would be great. If you have a photo of that, we could put it up.

Mike Bailey: We put it up in my office today. So this is nine years ago that we did this. And so when I talk to my agents now and I do my training and stuff, I relate that to a lot of different things.

Steve Napolitan: It could be Marketing, it can go micro.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, you could go micro, but it relates to, I’m still drawing out the cliffs

Steve Napolitan: Because even in one business, we could have four bridges going across in the same business. You could be building your marketing or making a new website, or we can distract ourselves. We’re so delusional. And then it’s like, well, what’s the first bridge to get across so we’re profitable? And then, oh, okay, now let’s do some more of this or do some more of this. So I’m with you. And you can even break that down into daily activities. You can say, what four bridges did I make today and not realize that none of them got across. Right.

Mike Bailey: That’s true. I mean, in real estate, if you’re breaking it down, some things that we’re talking about now, my wife and I, we

Steve Napolitan: So you’re not single anymore?

Mike Bailey: No, I’m not single anymore because I got out of the cave.

Steve Napolitan: Congratulations. Thank God.

Mike Bailey: Because she set me up. I mean, my whole life is totally different. Once I met Emily, Emily Lockhart, you know how our name is Lockhart Bailey Group? Lockhart comes first.

Steve Napolitan: That’s it

Mike Bailey: My wife comes first. But yeah. So yeah, I’m happy that I met her. And now we have two great kids as well.

Steve Napolitan: Congratulations.

Mike Bailey: Wealth and prosperity and fulfillment don’t always come monetarily. It’s more about what I was missing in life. I was older. I’m 58 years old now, but I had my son at 52, and so I was older, and I thought, gosh, when I met Emily, I felt like I was never going to have any kids. And I was sad about that. I wanted kids from when I was in my first marriage, but then I had my daughter 10 months ago, so I’m 58, I’m 10 month old daughter, and it’s been a life-changing event. That’s something I knew I wanted all my life. It was like, that’s what I want as a family to take care of. And now I’ve got another story on this.

Steve Napolitan: Go for it.

Mike Bailey: I’m kind of all over the board.

Steve Napolitan: No, it’s okay. That’s how this is. And I interrupted you. I wanted to say, oh, you’re not single and I derailed you. But I just want to say it fills me with joy to see how happy you are. I do remember how scattered it was, and you were trying so hard to make it all work, and it did all on paper. It made sense. Like you said, it’s not like you were being foolish and just throwing darts at a wall. Everything fit in kind of a puzzle, but no puzzle piece could get enough attention to fully be created, hence the unfinished bridges. So yeah. Anyway, so that’s why I was highlighting. But yeah, go for it. Go tell your story. Yeah.

Mike Bailey: Well, gosh, let’s see.

Steve Napolitan: We were talking about how the unfinished bridges in real estate work in a day-to-day, I think is that’s what we were.

Mike Bailey: Yeah. So when I was young, my sister and I are three years apart, so kind of close in age, but we were very competitive and we wanted to be very successful in our lives, but we really didn’t know how to define success. So we had a goal of success, meaning a lot of money.

Steve Napolitan: That’s always the first one, right?

Mike Bailey: Yeah. So that’s all we thought about. And so she went her life and I went my life. So I went into a corporate world and I was the yes man that said yes to every move. And I ended up moving a lot of times, and I went up in the company and I felt like I made a decent amount of money for what it was. Well, I looked back when I was 38 at my sister who really went a different way. She looked at life a little bit differently than I did after college. And she a great guy that they didn’t make a lot of money. They really didn’t have to make a lot of money to be happy. So these two get together and they decide we’re going to save our money and save every penny we got and keep on doing our job. She was a court reporter and he was a teacher, but at a private school. So he decided that he would make more money just by mowing lawns and landscaping for people. 

Steve Napolitan: On the side

Mike Bailey: On the side. But he actually quit teaching. He made more money mowing lawns, honestly. But he was happy because he only did that maybe two, three days a week. And the rest of the time they homeschooled their kids. And so their kids turned out perfect. I mean, they’re just beautiful kids. They went to a school back in, gosh, where is this now? Not Tennessee, but maybe South Carolina. Okay. Yeah, Bob Jones University. I think it’s in South Carolina, but both got master’s degrees and just really good, great kids. And so I’m looking back at this at 38, and they own their house outright. They saved their money and bought a hundred thousand dollars house. And I was not saving my money, but buying all these big houses and multiple, I tried to work up to having multiple houses.

Steve Napolitan: Again, another business, by the way, then that’s revenue renting, all that stuff. But it’s work. It’s all work.

Mike Bailey: It is. So I look back at that at 38. I’m thinking, who won this little competition we had going on in the back of our heads? And I realize that even though you make more money than she does, you really lost this competition because I don’t have kids. My marriage was on the rocks. I was traveling a lot. I had moved 13 times, 13 relocations around the country. And that’s wild. I said, gosh, I have nothing. I don’t even have friends in one state for longer than six months, and I couldn’t tell you who they are now because it was so in and out and quick. And I was a different person in that job. So when I looked at it from that standpoint at 38, I said, I have to make a change. I have to do something different because I am not, definitely not where I want to be at 38.

So that’s when I quit. UPS is where I worked, and I quit that living in Colorado, had no idea where I wanted to go. So I had in a lot of different places. So I felt like, well, maybe I can live anywhere. What’s my favorite place? But it kept coming back to California because of family was here. And so I felt like, well, I probably should be here. And I came here, bought a house, and my wife was still in Colorado at the time, and we finally moved out here and ended up divorced.

Steve Napolitan: During that move, she came and then in the next

Mike Bailey: Five years, I’d say

Steve Napolitan: Okay, so you tried to make it work.

Mike Bailey: But I was telling you last night that I was very closed because I didn’t want to be seen as failing or not rising to the level. I always felt like I wanted to be the person that people came to ask questions or I would do what I could to help them success, not get help ourselves.

Steve Napolitan: And I was the same. I can relate to you. Once again, I was embarrassed whenever I didn’t know something and I wouldn’t tell anyone. I would try to figure it out myself, even if I had to stay up late and read something or research, but I wasn’t about to ask anyone else, then they would look at me and see that I was failing, which now I have the complete opposite realization that people that are wiser than us or know a little bit, and it doesn’t mean that we’re not smarter than them. For me, I’m going to speak for my own thing. I found that it’s not about smarter or not smart enough. It’s just they know something about that topic more than I do. I might know something more about a different topic that they don’t know. So there’s no exact equal or less than or more than.

Ultimately though I made way more sacrifices in my life because I was delusional on that, and I thought that if I ask for help, then I’m a loser. They’re going to see me. They’re going to see that I’m not who I am and I’m a failure. But the reality is we’re all young men trying to figure it out, and we’re no different than anyone else. And once you realize that, I guess there’s a delusion in that, and I don’t know if I’ve ever said this out loud, but now having you say, it’s like we’re thinking that everyone else has it figured out and we don’t, and we better not let anyone else see that. And that’s ridiculous. Now knowing as we’ve gotten older, wait a minute, everyone has challenges, right

Steve Napolitan: So I’m just echoing this. So there you are in your marriage and in your work, and you’re trying to say, even though I’m challenged, I’m not going to let anyone know.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, I didn’t let anyone know. I didn’t even tell my sister how I felt. And she won in my mind. I knew she won.

Steve Napolitan: Was there really a competition or was it you? There was really a competition. No, you actually said it to each other. Yeah, we said it in college.

Mike Bailey: Well, she would say, I’m going to be more successful than you. And as kids, she said, I could beat you up if I really wanted to.

Steve Napolitan: Oh my gosh. It was that competitive

Mike Bailey: Competitive. Yeah, it was that competitive. But I would hold her head and she’d swing and swing. But anyway, she, that’s fun. She’s a great person and she’s got a lot of success in what she does now with thousands of followers on Wow. She just started making cookies to send her kids to school, to college, and she made ’em. And lo and behold, she has thousands of followers or come to her, she won the cookie, hon or hon or something.

Steve Napolitan: She’s a winner.

Mike Bailey: This is a big thing where she’s a winner.

Steve Napolitan: Well, yeah, people like cookies

Mike Bailey: You should see how elaborate they’re decorated.

Steve Napolitan: Wow, okay.

Mike Bailey: They look like the real thing.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, but that’s cool. And congratulations, your sister. And then also congratulations to you, because even though it felt like a loss, it was also a win because what we’re talking about right now is a massive life lesson about being confused of what a win is because there wasn’t a true scoreboard. It’s not like, oh, she made 10 baskets and in the hoop we’re playing basketball. It’s not that equal of a thing. It’s like, what is success is kind of what we’re pondering in this conversation, right?

Mike Bailey: Well, then I said, well, if I realized that she had won, because back then I was thinking, okay, maybe it’s quality of life. That is where you want more so than money. You could have all the money in the world and just not have quality of life, right?

Steve Napolitan: Yeah. And I think you could say you’ve done that. I mean, you full out tried.

Mike Bailey: Well, I didn’t have all the money in the world.

Steve Napolitan: Well, nobody does. Nobody does. But you’ve made more money than most people on the planet. And I’m not trying to make it a good or bad thing, but you have succeeded. I mean, each of the businesses we named had some success. I mean, it’s not like you had five houses on property manage. You had 300. There was a lot of people listening to this. They would love to have that. You have a staging company with all this furniture, 5,000 square feet trucks. You’re helping your company. You have a real estate company with 600 agents. You also have your team of five, and you’re making money there. And actually that’s bankrolling a lot of the other companies that were setting you back in that way. If we were measuring on that, you’re extremely successful. The thing inside though, and coming back to this conversation inside, you’re feeling horrible.

Mike Bailey: I felt horrible because in order to subsidize other businesses with real estate, we were spending a lot of money on marketing. And I think this is what a lot of people do in our business or our industry, is we spend on some of the wrong things or go about it the wrong way or with the wrong message, or not knowing what our clients want or desire. And we’re thinking it’s something else,

Steve Napolitan: Which you and I talked a lot about.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, just asking. Ask your clients, give ’em what they want.

Steve Napolitan: That’s it. Yeah. That’s my main thing. And for everyone listening, I always say, if you don’t have enough revenue, and the goal is you want, there’s usually, in all my years in marketing, there’s two things we need to inspect immediately. Are we talking to the wrong people, which I call my wow clients? And then are we saying the right thing? And the way to find out is not by being creative. And I thought this, I failed at marketing at the beginning because I went to film school and I’m like, oh, I can create this epic movie, and then no one bought from us. I’m like, what the heck happened? And then you find out, wait a minute, I have to go ask them what they want. And even if the commercial’s not as cool, but it was saying exactly what they wanted, then they bought you thought it was great.

So it’s finding that wild client, asking them what they want, then telling them that in the marketing, in our phone calls, in our conversations, which that was, I mean, besides right now, we’re stacking some things up. The first thing I recognized with you and your mom was that you had way too many businesses and they weren’t delegated enough. And so we rolled our sleeves up and said, what could we delegate more of? Do we want to try to save these companies? Can we hire more people and let that go so you could focus? Or do we need to let the whole company go? That was one conversation, and that’s not easy to do. There’s lots of stuff to do, and it takes time to sell a business or find the right employees, all those things. And then the second thing was the marketing. Like you’re saying, when I met you, there was also some hemorrhaging of stuff.

And this happens to a lot of people, a lot of business owners still to this day, many, many people look at marketing as a slot machine. We’re just going to try this and try that. And we’re pulling down on the lever when in reality, if we ask the questions, you can eliminate the whole slot machine and know that it’s working. And that’s where it comes back to knowing our wow client and then asking them what they want and using that language. So I think, I know there are other things we worked on, but probably now it’s having this conversation with you. Those are probably the two biggest things. Would you agree that we worked on?

Mike Bailey: Yeah, no, I definitely agree. I never asked a client, I never got so in depth with clients and really understood what they wanted. And here I thought it was good in relationships and building relationships and getting down to the bottom of what they wanted. But I never really went the root of asking all my clients, what are you looking for? What do you really want? What’s your goal? That type of thing.

Steve Napolitan: And what will having that do for you? Because sometimes even they’re delusional. They’re like, oh, I just want a house. Okay, well, what kind of house? What’s most important about the house? What’s the thing that you want the most? Oh, I want a beautiful yard. Okay, well, let’s put that higher on the list. Because someone can say, yeah, I want a house in this city. Okay, great. That’s pretty darn vague, right? I mean, there’s thousands of houses. One is going to be yours. So having those deep questions. So when I started giving you those mechanisms, they’re simple questions, but they dig really deep. What happened for you when you started using those? Well,

Mike Bailey: So one of the things that I realized way back in the beginning was that we spent a lot of money on marketing from the standpoint of online marketing, which was newer back then. And so nobody had this secret bullet to be, well, there were some people around the country that were pretty successful. At least we heard. We didn’t see any numbers or anything, but you hear all these people. So what I told you the other day was I went out and found the best of the best supposedly and went down and spent two days with him two times and learned his systems and then brought ’em back to us. But I brought everything he did up here, and I spent 30 grand a month just in online marketing leads. And it looked like we were successful at getting leads. We got 1600 leads a year, and when you have that many leads coming in, you have a lot of shots at the goal to take, and you were going to get lucky sometimes, but we really didn’t know how to close. And when you get into online leads, you need to know how to bring a conversation back around to what we do for a living housing. We could not just be their best friend.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, order some pizzas.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, exactly. So when you came in with my group and you were going through our group coaching, we learned the questions to ask and to identify their needs and asking those right questions and listening to them and then giving them what they wanted. We had zero going on, and then all of a sudden, a week later, we have nine escrows going.

Steve Napolitan: I remember that victory. We were so happy. I think I want to say it was almost two months with not an escrow in that division. I think again, you had other thing, this work that you’re talking about, so you’re spending 30 K on marketing, so you were like 60, 90 k into this, I think, and then we asked better questions, and then you got eight or nine in escrow.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, we just started ramping up the closed escrows, but we still can make that 30,000 go with the team I had, and I was a novice at this myself, and I realized the first thing I realized is that I don’t know how to close these leads. I was scared to talk on the phone because you never did it before. I mean, from some random person calling you online, that was all new to us.

Steve Napolitan: It’s like online dating, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I understand.

Mike Bailey: You don’t have to sound perfect. You just have to have a good conversation like we’re doing now with somebody and find out or ask the right questions and then listen.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, and even though that was a big victory going from zero escrow, but again, it wasn’t 30,000 that was already 90 grand spent at least something like that. And then even all your travel, I mean, if you add it up, you were already over six figures deep in this because everything traveling to this other person doing all the research and development, even you were paying me. I mean, this is all adding up, and then we were getting a run, but it’s like how much money can you make back and how fast before you out you are bleeding?

Mike Bailey: We were going bankrupt quick on that deal. I mean, it looked like being successful because we had a lot of leads coming in, a lot of people working. And when realtors get a lot of leads, they feel good about being on the team. They want leads.

Steve Napolitan: Now you have all these phone calls, and I do remember the meeting, and there’s a handful of clients. I’ve had this where I, I’m coaching you and then you open up your laptop. I remember being in your boardroom and you plugged in your laptop, and then you were showing me the numbers and you were hoping that I would give you a different answer. You were looking at the numbers too, and I remember looking in your eyes and I’m like, yeah, Mike, the numbers aren’t wrong. You were hoping that I would see something almost like you added it up wrong or something. And I’m like, no, unfortunately this is right. It just sucks. You’re looking at the spreadsheet and you’re like, so that’s why it wasn’t just me coaching you on how to close. I was like, we don’t know how long it’s going to take each individual to learn this. Everyone learns the difference speeds, and I told you, you have to call them back and you have to renegotiate your contract because it’s not advisable to keep spending 30 grand a month until we get everyone trained because that’s what you’re racing towards. How much risk do we extend? Well, because you’re getting 1600 leads, but how many are we losing until we get everyone trained up?

Mike Bailey: We lost a lot of leads, and I still have those leads. I still have names and numbers, and I look back to 2012 and thinking, gosh, man, they probably bought two or three houses by now. 

Steve Napolitan: You could. Yeah.

Mike Bailey: Yeah. And so you get the good with bad with those online leads. And some people are proponents of it and some people aren’t. But that’s where people are going to get or to look at houses first. So that’s where you kind of want to be number one in those areas. But we’re actually paying for our own leads. I mean, we used to put signs on a house, get a hundred calls a month on that sign. That’s when we first started, and that was our online back then. And now everybody with a cell phone. It’s really changed the dynamic. And I know a lot of realtors know that.

Steve Napolitan: And this is not just your industry, this is every industry technology is touching. I mean, it’s really hard to find an industry that’s not affected at some level with technology. It’s only going to become exponential in the next five years with everything happening with ai. It’s because you and I grew up in the age where the phones were attached to the wall. We didn’t have email, all this stuff. And then the internet came and it was like crazy, wild, wild west. And this is what we’re talking about, wild west of real estate online marketing. But then now AI is the next level of that. And then think about that. Most lifetimes, you might not even have two major things like that. And here we are, we’re having two or three major milestones.

Mike Bailey: That’s exponential now

Steve Napolitan: So in our lifetime, we might have two or three major changes, whereas you think back in the day, in the early 19 hundreds, they’re used to everyone riding around on a horse and then all of a sudden cars show up. That might be the only major milestone. So I guess I’m bringing all this up that again, this is life. These are things happening, and I think you’re doing the best you can and we’re figuring it out. And then there were a lot of costs. And so let’s be mindful too, everything you just said, that’s enough problems for one entrepreneur, figuring out your marketing, paying for all this, marketing training up your team, and then mind you, Mike, right here, you had three or four other companies at the same time, and each of them had their own problems. So I mean, just put this in perspective. I mean, you got to give yourself credit. I mean, I know sometimes you were embarrassed or felt like a failure, but you were doing all that plus running three other companies. You got to give yourself credit in a way. You’re kicking butt. It wasn’t delivering the end success you wanted because you were spinning too many plates. But it’s still pretty cool when you’re at the circus and someone’s spinning four plates. I mean, you’re like, wow, that’s great. But they’re not eating, not eating. Their plates are up in the air.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. I got to say though that I did this with my mother, Wendy, and so she started a lot of this stuff and was very successful in business. So it’s not just me, but together we’re completely opposite. So we think differently, and sometimes that helps, and sometimes it puts a roadblock for us. And so we had to work through those roadblocks with you because my mom’s ultimate goal was to retire at some point, and I wanted that for her because I care for her. And so it hurt when we felt like we were failing in these businesses

Steve Napolitan: Because then you felt like you’re failing your mom.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, I was failing my mom, so I wanted to, and honestly, she took out loans in her business. She went through a lot of up and downs in cycles of the market, and she kept her staff going by taking loans out on her house like he lost, but here, she’s one of the most successful women in real estate. Yes. When Rockland was only 200 homes behind Bel Air, that’s when my mom was here selling those 200 homes. Her first year or her second year, or maybe she did 125 homes alone by herself. And now you can’t even fathom that by yourself anymore. I mean, we all have teams to do that.

Steve Napolitan: Well, yeah, your mom is a machine. I mean, this one, I mean, I got this spend time with her in a good way, but again, there’s consequences. But yeah, she never gave up and she didn’t come from real estate. I think she was a dental hygienist, right?

Mike Bailey: Yeah. She was a dental hygienist when I was growing up for 23 years. And I came back from college and then she’s this rock star.

Steve Napolitan: She’s a rockstar real estate agent.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, Dental hygienists make good realtors. That’s what my determination is.

Steve Napolitan: Wow, But yeah, kudos to your mom. She went and spearheaded all this.

Mike Bailey: Well, she sacrificed a lot. I mean, we had to come out of pocket with a lot of money and a lot of it was hers. And so you don’t want to, what the hard part was when we were trying to break up these companies or get rid of those companies that weren’t getting across, building a bridge across.

Steve Napolitan: People are falling into the cliff.

Mike Bailey: Yeah.

Steve Napolitan: People are falling. And it was you and your mom.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, Pretty much. And I didn’t want to let her fall, so I wanted to try everything we could do to make the companies successful enough to support her in the long run and pay off and pay off the debt then. Yeah. And like you said, multiple streams. And I would say just a few years ago, we got done paying off some of the debt that we incurred back then is if you go 30,000 for nine months without making any revenue from that source, I mean a little bit, but not enough to pay the bills. You can only last so long. And that’s when you told me you got to get rid of that 30,000.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, it was an emergency. I was like, I see the idea and it might work, but how long is it going to take us to train your team? That was the thing. And then you look at how long can we bleed and stay alive.

Mike Bailey: That’s right. And I had to go to Zillow directly and just tell ’em I got to drop down. And ultimately we ended up dropping down to 9,000 and had a much more manageable expense.

Steve Napolitan: Correct.

Mike Bailey: And keep trained for the amount of revenue that we were generating then. So we started getting into the positives on that team or that aspect or department fixing the spreadsheet

Steve Napolitan: That was so ugly to look at, right? Yeah. Oh my gosh.

Mike Bailey: I used to sit and look at those spreadsheets constantly

Steve Napolitan: Hoping the numbers would change.

Mike Bailey: Well, I would put in formulas to say, what if we did this?

Steve Napolitan: How much money? And that’s a good way to dream. That’s almost like a vision board. I mean, all the things you were doing were not wrong. There was just a lot of layers and you’re running to make this happen. And then staging is hitting you at the shovel in the shins, and then, oh, and the property management’s getting audited. Let me hit you again. How many times can you get hit while you’re trying to run a race? It’s just circumstances. Again, it all made sense. You’re not the only one that’s made these decisions. I too, I’ve lost millions of dollars thinking that this is the best way, and I don’t take it back. At first, I felt like a loser. By the time I was 31, I had calculated over 4 million in losses in my twenties, and I felt like a failure. I was hiding it too.

I didn’t tell my wife I was getting depressed. And I was like, I’m a loser. I mean, I actually started to tell myself that, and I’m a pretty positive man. Me, I’m like super optimist. I was breaking down. I mean, I felt like I was dying. And then it took meeting my mentor how we met. And that’s why I feel so, I mean, I’m even emotional saying this a lot, but this is probably why. This is my purpose. This is why more business model, because someone saved my life pretty much. And now if I could save other people’s lives. But then the man that came into my life, he said, you’re far from a loser. Look at all the things you tried. And then he quickly said to me, he said, well, first off, would you do it? If you could go back with what you know now, would you go back and do it the same way? And I said, absolutely not. He said, oh, so you learned something already showing me the gratitude in it. And that’s where choose gratitude, create freedoms, comes from my first month of coaching because I realized, wow, I had a lot to be grateful for, and I just had to make some changes. And then that’s where the sucking up of like, okay, I didn’t do it in the best possible ways, and can I do it better? Yes. And then it’s like, okay. And then my thirties changed my life.

It is like, you’re not stupid, Steve. You just had, yeah, there’s some tough, everyone has chance circumstances, you’re going to get a flat tire or this or that. But then when you’re already running at red line and you get a flat tire, it’s already bad. So I guess I’m saying all this, Mike, because this is beautiful that you’re sharing this with the world on our podcast here. And also I can relate because I’ve been there. There’s not less, it’s not than anyone else. We just went and our families were on the line. My wife decided to stay home with the kids, and I totally accepted that. And I took it all in. And so maybe it wasn’t the story with my mom, it was for you. But the same, I felt the same. If I let this fridge fall, I’m letting my three kids and my wife fall, which was unacceptable, right?

The same for you. So we’re holding it all up. And what I found, and I think you found too, and then I’m going to ping pong it back over to you here, but I needed, I thought that I just need to save all those bridges that I had when in fact, I had to just make one good one. And once I had that mentorship from my mentor that I wasn’t a loser. I just learned a lot. And my other mentor, Carl Buchheit, he always says, there’s no failure. There’s only feedback. And once I received that feedback and then made a new choice, then everything was back in my grasp. And I actually now have a wonderful life with my kids and my wife and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. And I did simplify.

Mike Bailey: Well, that’s where my life changed too. I mean, once we took out the businesses, and this was when? This 2015? 

Steve Napolitan: 2016, Yeah. And how long did, and I might be interrupting, but how long did it take you? I mean, it’s not easy to let go for companies.

Mike Bailey: Well, the staging, it took a long time to sell because basically you’re just selling inventory and Inventory furniture.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, you’re basic furniture salesman.

Mike Bailey: Nobody really pays for furniture a lot. But my mom and I worked hard with multiple buyers on that and ended up selling it. And that took probably the longest. We basically, well, I shouldn’t say it took the longest. It just took some time to get through that process. And then the property management, we sold that rather easily. A lot of people out there to

Steve Napolitan: That want 300 Want the doors. Yeah, 300 more houses. Yeah.

Mike Bailey: And we should have done that a long time ago because there were people that could do it better than us.

Steve Napolitan: But again, you were holding on to taking care of your family.

Mike Bailey: Well, one thing we did though was I traded almost that property management company for more real estate company. So we purchased another company, real estate company, and part of that deal was property management going to them, to them. Wow. And they went off and took multiple doors and added ours to it. But I got their agents and their clients and their escrows.

Steve Napolitan: And then that added to your 600 agents that you had.

Mike Bailey: We just grew by buying other companies really. And then we grew organically through PAR and developing relationships that I had recruiting over years.

Steve Napolitan: So the staging and the property management kind of went first,

Mike Bailey: And then the company was 2019. What really changed my life was meeting my wife. So I met her in 2015.

Steve Napolitan: I know it was right around the same time we were getting deep, right?

Mike Bailey: Yeah, and then so she’s like a sounding board for me to keep me on track. I want to go all these different areas, but she’ll ask the question of me, why do you want to do that? And what’s it going to do for you? And all this stuff, and how much does it cost is a big one, because I would usually just go for it. So having that sounding board and having her in there to be another person that cares about me and our family and so forth, is really great. And I appreciate her so much. I mean, it’s like night and day compared to where I was prior to that.

Steve Napolitan: Well, yeah, just this week, spending some time with you and your family, it brings me so much joy to see how relaxed you are compared to 2015. Back then. Yeah. You were running on four treadmills at the same time.

Mike Bailey: Well, I had my son in 2018, and immediately that changed my life. I had never had kids before. So now I had a wife and I had one child, and I’m 52, 53 years old. And I said, gosh, I kind of want to spend all my time with him, of course. And all my priorities obviously were changing at that time. And I did know from you that I wanted to change my life and focus on something that I’m really good at and that I can get across that cliff and I can build that successful bridge. And that’s what I was striving for. Having a child kind of pushed me even further to say, now you’re my priority. My family’s my priority, and I want to build something good for you for the future. And so that’s where my focus and my love and my passion is to do something in that realm for them and for me as far as the family goes. And so Emily and I, having Grayson decided that, gosh, I was at the time for our real estate company, we were going around to each of the offices and we were putting in these online marketing training and teaching ’em how to close and how to be successful. But we were spending as a company, we were spending 20 grand in each of these offices per month.

And that was a lot of money at the time.

Steve Napolitan: So I mean, now you’re getting seven figure, adding all the offices

Mike Bailey: Correctly and the East Bay.

Steve Napolitan: I mean, it’s a lot.

Mike Bailey: I mean, yeah and so not everybody was trained up on that. So I would go around to there, and I was getting up at four because I didn’t want to miss my son. I didn’t want to miss my son getting up. So I would go to work, start making calls doing all this stuff, and get back to the house, see him as a baby, and then head back to work or whatever. But regardless of that, it changed my life. I wanted to do something for the family. And my whole focus has been different. And we’re only concentrating on selling real estate in our 10 person team, which includes my mom. And so we only focus there. We’re selling real estate with online leads and a few other things that we do, but being focused on that has, and I didn’t believe this to be true, I thought multiple streams of income, and I do have multiple streams within our team because the agents make money and we get a piece of that. The better I train them, the more it actually comes in, and the more they make, the more successful

Steve Napolitan: Everyone wins.

Mike Bailey: Everyone we’re trying to win. And now we’re just a family. The team is great, and I made a lot of mistakes there with teams, and that’s how I learned after 18 years or 20 years of being in real estate. But regardless, my focus has changed, and we’re solely concentrating on just selling real estate, doing it how we know how to do best. My wife is also a realtor, so she is a really good realtor, actually. I mean, she had all the training, even while laying in bed with me, we’d be talking about real estate on data, how to do certain things. So our revenue has increased so much. I make so much more money now without doing all those multiple things that I was trying to get across the cliff. And like you said, you can make a lot of money in this business, but it’s not all about the money now.

It’s about quality of life. And I don’t need to have the biggest house on the block or the best. I just need to be putting money away from my son and daughter’s college, which my wife is great at saving and putting it in a way, investments and different things like that, that that’s kind of what we do now. And I would say because we’re not concentrating solely on money, we probably make more than attorneys and some doctors just because we’re focusing on the one thing we’re good at. And that’s something that you kept drilling into me is get into something that you can get across that cliff, make it successful and meet your goals. And of course, my goals changed over the years, and now with the kids and the family, it’s all about them. But it humbled me out a lot. It probably did. You too, I guess. Yeah.

Steve Napolitan: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Because in my twenties growing up in Silicon Valley, it was about how big is your company? How many employees do you have? You’re counting all the things that actually don’t really, they’re not what gets you across the finish line. Yeah. So what if you have, and I’m not saying anything disrespectful, but in a way you could say, so what, you have 600 agents. What does that mean? Or how many employees I had? What does that mean? You have to get really real about what do we want and then create something around that. And that’s why I think I know, and I’m speaking for me, I’m not picking on you. For me, myself, I was delusional. I was tracking the things that I thought meant success, kind of like your competition with you and your sister. I was same. Yeah. You and your sister instead of what actually matters. And I did the same thing. I actually found when I put all my family first, I did less and I made more, and I was ready to make less. I actually said, forget all this. I don’t care if I make less money, I’m going to give my life to my family and not money. I did think that I’m the provider, I am giving to my family by bringing money, but that’s not what they want. They want us, they want the dinners, they want the hugs, they want the conversation. They don’t want our paycheck.

So then I had to learn all those things. And then when I did that, Mike, it was, oh my gosh. Then you look at your bank account and you’re like, wait, I’m actually making more. It was that delusional. It was like, how the heck is this happening? But because it forced me to focus on less things and be really good at those things.

Mike Bailey: Yeah. I mean, I was saying the other night, when you have my son asking this morning to go to work with me, he doesn’t want me to go. I don’t want to go. Sometimes I want to spend time with him when he asks. And now I can do that at an older age. I don’t think I could have done it when I was 20 or 20 in my twenties. I was a totally different person, and I know you were too.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah. It wouldn’t occur to you.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, and so I am happy that I’m a father now in my fifties, even though I feel like grandpa when I take him to school, I should be a grandpa by now, but

Steve Napolitan: I guess according to whom?

Mike Bailey: Yeah,

Steve Napolitan: According to whom, right? I mean, again, you’re judging yourself. Let it go be an awesome dad. 

Mike Bailey: And I do. That’s all I care about. I want to be around for a long time. That’s the goal. I want to make sure I’m healthy, and so I’m taken extra precautions to try and make sure that that happens. You never know, right? Yeah. Look at your situation.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, Tomorrow’s not promised.

Mike Bailey: Yeah. So I’ve had a lot of friends too that have just had strokes or heart attacks, and they’re younger than me.

So anything can happen at any time. So quality of life, working less, getting rid of the stress would be nice. I mean, I still have some, I mean, nobody’s perfect, and I’m not perfect by any means. I haven’t made millions and millions of dollars and I’m the wealthiest guy in the world or anything. I’m humble and happy to be a father at 50 something and have a great wife that we work together in this, and we think differently too. But it helps.

Steve Napolitan: And you can go buy good food. You can go swimming with your son. You built a quality of life, and that’s where you have to measure what do you really want? Because sometimes we’ll chase more and more and more when you actually realize we have all that we need. What’s better than a great dinner with your family? And then go sit outside and look at the view out of the back of your house. It could be enough. And then if you want something else, okay, great. How much does that cost? Let’s figure out the budget. I always tell people, did you get a quote? People often say, oh, I want a personal chef or something as an example. And I’m like, oh, how much does that cost in your area? And they’re like, I don’t know. And then I’m like, well, then how do you know you can’t afford it?

And they’re like, oh, that’s a good point. We assume, oh, only millionaires have personal chef. But I have six figure earners that figured out that they can do it. And even I was quite surprised, we have a family of five, and then when you actually get a and they’re getting the food, they’re preparing the food. And if you cancel out eating out and all your grocery and put all that into the budget, it’s not that much more to have someone do all that work for you. And they love it. If they love to cook and you love their food, you’re giving them a blessing. They get to get paid to cook and live their dream, and then you get to have your thing. So I always tell people to budget. I was with another friend of mine and he was saying they had made a goal to make 3 million a year, and then it was someone else, it wasn’t me.

They said, oh, well, what are all the things you want? They did the same lesson, and he was telling me this, and then he wrote down all the things he wanted. He said, now how much did all those things cost? And he put everything he wanted a dream thing, even private jet trips. At 5,000 an hour, he put all that stuff and he wanted 360,000 a year, 360,000 a year. He would’ve his dream life. And then there you are working for 3 million, basically 10 times, almost a little less than 10 times the amount, and you’re going to go work your butt off to get 10 times the income when you could actually make 360,000 and live the life of your dreams. So this goes back to this whole conversation. I know I did it and you did it too. We just went for the most. You’re like, okay, let’s go do all these things. And once I have all that money, then I’ll have my life. And the whole mission and more business for my life is to flip, flop it. No, what do you want? Design that. Then let’s go find the funding for that, because it’s rather almost every client I’ve ever had, it’s less than we think. And you kind of already said that. You said now in the bigger scheme, gross income, you’re less, but your net income’s higher and your life is better.

So I guess on my question for you is looking at all these things, just echoing some of the things that we talked about, one, having way too many businesses and working 24/7, being single, not having your family. By making these changes, you were able to have a life and have. And then the other thing is then communicating clearly. So you could do a better job with all your marketing dollars to close more, and then just refocusing on what you want in your life. I guess, without further summarizing, maybe fascinating to you, in all the work that we did together, what would you say are the greatest results? I know I’m naming some, but how would you put it in your words,

Mike Bailey: The results as a different mindset on how to attack different things in your life, whether it be business or personal, and finding out what’s important to you and having a different mindset in how to get there. Honestly, and I didn’t even realize this, I’m just thinking of it now, but with my son and my daughter, I’ll go to bed with them at their time just to snuggle up with ’em at eight o’clock or seven 30 or what have you. And most of the time, I’ll fall asleep first with them. But those are times when, I mean, I never used to go to bed till late early in the morning just working or doing something on the computer. And my life has gotten so much better because I just do different things, whether it be a conscious effort or going to bed with my kids, wanting to spend time with them. I feel like I’m retired. I feel like I’m retired, but that’s because of what I used to do, I think when I met you and just running all over the place, a hundred miles an hour, Being crazy. But I feel very much in control having a different mindset on how to do things, and sometimes Emily has to reign me in on some ideas that I have. I think that’s for everybody though.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, you get super creative. I’m that way too. I’ll have 18 ideas, but then one is good. Exactly. Exactly. It’s part of the creative process, but you got to throw a bunch of things out there.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, so you helped me with the mindset. You helped me with realizing what the bridges are and what I can do differently to get across the cliff and finally make it and continue working on making it better, developing new ways and new avenues to make that life better so you get more life out of your life. Yeah.

Steve Napolitan: That’s beautiful. And having all of this now, what do you think having this does for you?

Mike Bailey: Well, it’s definitely a happier person. I’m not stressed. I was back then, I was in a different place though, and I don’t know how to define depressed really clinically, but I felt like I was a depressed person living in that apartment and two desks and just working. Had nothing in the fridge from that standpoint to having two kids, a nice house, a great wife, and friends and family around me. That’s what I want.

Steve Napolitan: That sounds more like life.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, it is it life, and I appreciate you for everything you’ve done for me over the years, because whether or not we worked together nine years ago, you said the other day, and I couldn’t believe it, I was like nine years ago, but every day I’m thinking of some of the things that you talked to me about and what helped me get to where I am today with that mindset. And then having you come speak at my meetings has a big impact for me because it brings back all those things. I listened to you again and again, and it brings back a lot of things that we talked about before.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, exactly

Mike Bailey: Then having you over last night and almost burning my face off.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah. So what happens to you? Open the barbecue and the fire just came straight out of it.

Mike Bailey: I couldn’t tell if the propane was on the barbecue. Oh, no. Yeah, so I was looking down there and I couldn’t smell anything, but I took the lighter and I held it over the barbecue just thinking that it would kind of spark up a little bit. But that thing blew up in my face. Oh my gosh. I was thinking, gosh, man, a lot of stuff came out of my barbecue. Whatever it was, it was covering my arms and my face. It turned out to be my burnt hair, so I burned my hair up here

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, you can’t tell at all. You’re so lucky. Thats crazy, Mike. I mean, here we are.

Mike Bailey: You would’ve been a fireball.

Steve Napolitan: Oh my God. Yeah. It would’ve been all over, and then my wife would’ve been happy that I don’t have a beard anymore.

Mike Bailey: That’s true.

Steve Napolitan: Oh my gosh. Good thing I wasn’t there when that happened. I know. Oh my gosh. And I’m so glad that you’re safe. Oh, well, it’s okay. It wasn’t to self, don’t. Yeah. I mean, but still, yeah, note to self, don’t put the match like that.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, don’t do that. Because I was worried, okay, how bald am I going to be?

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, yeah. Well, you can’t tell at all. You can’t tell at all. Yeah. And that was fabulous. Thanks. Are having me over for dinner.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, it was great. It was fun. Thanks to Dustin for cooking for us.

Steve Napolitan: And I took pictures of him because, and maybe he’ll be okay throwing out there, but my kids watch and read one piece, which is a Japanese manga, and there’s a guy, there’s a character called Sanji and Dustin’s on your crew, and that’s how it is. So Sanji iss on the crew, and he’s the chef, so he’s the chef of the crew. And so I got to meet a real life Sanji. He could cook up a storm.

Mike Bailey: I’ll probably call him Sanji from now on, even though I don’t, I’ve never watched.

Steve Napolitan: I’ll send you a picture of the thing. I’ll try to find an episode that really showcases, they’re only 20 minute episodes, but there’s a couple that just really feature sanji and all his cooking, and basically they’re on your ship For those that don’t watch it, the whole idea of one piece is that it’s a whole world of pirates. The whole world is taken over by pirates, but these are conscious pirates, the main characters, and they’re there to go do good things, and they really treat people better, and they care for people. They care for them. And so they’re, it’s an interesting story because you think of almost like a conscious criminal. It’s like an oxymoron. But anyway, that’s a whole big part of the story. But Sanji is all about the food. And when you’re on a ship, if you do not waste food, you don’t know when the next time you’ll eat and all those kinds of things. And so it was just really cool to watch. And even after I said, oh, is this your sanji? Then there was a fly coming in, and Dustin quickly grabbed a napkin and covered the food, and I was like, oh my gosh, he really is sanji. He’s all about protecting the food. And oh my gosh, it was so tasty. It was amazing.

Mike Bailey: He’s a good cook, but he is a better realtor, I would say. He’s about even cooking too. I mean, he’s a good realtor and a good cook.

Steve Napolitan: Well, and that’s funny because pirates need to fight, and Sanji is a great fighter and a great chef, so he’s the same thing.

Mike Bailey: Oh, funny. Yeah. Yeah. We have such a good team now. It is like family.

Steve Napolitan: So yeah. Well, they’re cooking, but we’re all eating together and yeah, it’s so cool.

Mike Bailey: And we would do anything for each other. And we go on little, we have gone on little retreats. We need to do another one, but we’ll all go away together and spend some time. We were in Napa Valley a couple of years ago and just had a great time.

Steve Napolitan: It’s so beautiful.

Mike Bailey: Retention has been the key on the teams and not thinking you need to take every penny from your team. Just making everybody succeed or helping or striving for everybody to succeed. Retains people. Yeah.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah. That’s an old Zig Ziglar saying, do you ever remember Z Ziglar? Yeah. And his main saying, I think it’s probably his most quoted thing, he said, help enough people get what they want, and you’ll have all of what you want, help enough people get what they want, and you’ll have all of what you want. And it’s pretty straightforward when you think about it. If you helping enough people get what they want, then, whether that be real estate, helping enough people get the home that they want, that provides helping enough of your team get what they want, you’ll have all what you want. It’s a beautiful thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m curious as we start to get close to wrapping up, it’s a similar question, but I’m just curious, out of everything that we did together, what would you say was the most valuable if you were to pick one?

Mike Bailey: Well, obviously was getting rid of the businesses that were taking me off track of where I really should have been. And that goes along what I said earlier is that mindset of not having to be involved in every little aspect of all these extracurricular activities or starting businesses to make money for, I mean, multiple streams is good, but when you’re doing it to the detriment of everything else, it doesn’t work. And honestly, all the, I made a lot of mistakes and I came out of UPS with a decent amount of money. We had stocks and all that kind of stuff. If I would’ve just taken that money and put it under my pillow, you know what I mean, I would have more money today basically, because I wouldn’t have made all those mistakes that I made by spending here and here and here, bad investments or houses through the crash, different things like that.

Steve Napolitan: And I guess I’m just curious to piggyback on that though, but then you would’ve not learned a whole bunch of these lessons. So I don’t know. It is a trade off though. I could see where your accounting mind is calculating the zeros and all that, and it would probably be different. But would you honestly go back and move the magic wand on that? Or do you like all the things you’ve learned?

Mike Bailey: I think about this a long, for a long time when I got into real estate, I used to say I should have been in real estate from the beginning. I could have been so much further ahead. But realistically, the things that I learned from the first 20 years I used in real estate, and I wouldn’t have the skills or skillset that I do now if I didn’t have that first 20 years. So I can’t really wave the wand at that, even though I didn’t like a lot of those things. Of course. And I question, why am I getting sent to New York City or all those things were on my mind back then, but now I look back at it, and like you say, and what you said before, it’s feedback, right? Yeah. Feedback. The way I looked at it was same thing as feedback, but we’re always capable of producing results. It might not be the results you wanted or desired, but it was the result that I got and good or bad, I could learn from that result, or I knew what not to do. If it was a bad result, I know not to do that again, and I’m just going to go here and try this route.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, I really think you wouldn’t be the man sitting before me right now if you didn’t go through all, I mean, seriously. I mean, you think about it, we take any one challenge away, you wouldn’t be the mic that I know. Yeah.

Mike Bailey: I just wish it didn’t, wish it wouldn’t have taken me so long. I mean, it’s taken a long time for me to grow up, I guess.

Steve Napolitan: Well, and that’s probably why you have young kids now. Yeah. I mean, you think about, no, it gives you a forced reason to live a heck of a lot longer. So even though it came later, you’re going to just have to be an old man and a young old man. Go be healthy, live a long life, watch your kids grow up, because I really do look at you and I say, wow, life is not happening to you. It’s happening for you. And so you went through all this, you have all this experience. You get to be a wiser dad. Maybe change that word from an older dad to a wiser dad. Now you’re going to be able to teach your kids differently. My son is almost 20 as we’re recording this. And I, if I was teaching my son now at the young age, I would be teaching totally different, but it was the way that it was, the way my son was meant to be raised and all that stuff. So I’m not saying right or wrong, but there are some gifts that you’re going to be able to, and I’m just shining that light for a moment. And then also now you have something really, really amazing, like you just said in this podcast, what you’re living for this family that you have now. And so you have a lot to live for.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, definitely. My wife and my two kids, Grayson and Isla, and then my extended family or my parents and brothers, sisters. That’s what matters. Honestly, I, and I learned that losing to my sister, fake competition,

Steve Napolitan: But there’s a lesson in losing sometimes. One time I used to play hockey in my twenties, and I remember we were winning really, really well in this one league. And I played with my brothers too. I have two brothers. And so that was kind of fun. We all got to play together, but then we decided to go up to the highest league that you could like a pay to play. So we’re not getting paid to play. We’re paying to play, but it was the highest league that you could at that time in the area that we were playing. And we lost every game. Every game lost every game. And then I remember we didn’t make playoffs, and we’re in the locker room and everyone’s looking around and we’re beat. We got our butt handed to us every game that season, and we all looked at each other and we’re like, okay, what are we going to do?

Are we going to drop down to the other league that we were winning all the time? Are we going to stay? Is everyone up for playing? Some people were thinking about quitting. Maybe I can’t play anymore. Almost all of us decided. I think we only got one or two new players, but we all decided to play the same league again. And that next season we won the championship. And that always was a lesson in my life. It’s like, okay, that sucked losing every game. I mean, you started getting, you were like, did we suck that bad? But then we learned how to play better, forced us to play better. And I guess that’s what we’re talking about here, right? I mean, because you’re smart enough to know what was happening wasn’t working, and the dumb thing, or if we were really stupid, we would’ve kept doing it. But we were smart enough to say, oh, I need help. So I asked for help. You asked for help. We knew we weren’t going to do it the same. We knew something had to change, and then we did that. And here we are now living much better lives.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, that’s right.

Steve Napolitan: I don’t know, is there anything, I know, I was basically just making a statement there. It’s not really a question, but I guess in conclusion on all that, maybe just share with the audience, because again, we’re speaking this out to the world right now. Maybe other people have found the same journey we have. Maybe they’re in it, maybe they’re in the unfinished bridges and they have four unfinished bridges right now. What would you suggest to those people out there listening now that they’ve heard all this?

Mike Bailey: Well, I would say that if you’ve got multiple streams just going awry, it’s not good just to start something, to start something, just to have your name on it and be ego driven. Or I have a company and I’m the CEO of this company that makes no money and does really poorly, but my name’s on it, and I’m the man. It’s not important. That stuff isn’t important. If you have a niche or if you have something that you’re passionate about and you have, you’re passionate about where you want to be and the goals that you want to achieve, don’t be afraid to take a leap and get that result or that feedback from it. If it’s not what you wanted, go a different angle, but you know what not to do. And you’re always successful at achieving a result. You’re always successful at achieving a result.

So it may not be the result you desire, but there’s, you learn what not to do. And so I think that more life is more important, and it really dictates your success in life. And it’s not about the money or the income or the ego or the name. It’s about back at UPS, we used to use a term, what a person does when nobody’s looking, is the measure of a person, a measure of person, what he or she does when nobody’s looking. And so I always think about that too. Even the most simple things. Do you pick up the piece of garbage on the ground that’s outside and throw it away knowing that nobody’s going to be there to give you kudos for doing so, but that’s just who you are as a human. When you go to the bathroom, do you wash your hands before leaving? Because nobody’s around. You don’t wash your hands. I mean, you think of those things and think in that manner, and it starts to change your mindset into really understanding what’s important.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, it’s really good, Mike. Yeah. And what do you think, just a few other closing thoughts. After all this conversation and reminiscing on this path, what about, how would you share getting asking for help? Because I know you and I both experienced this, it was really hard to ask for help. Maybe share that to the audience for other people listening that because you and I are not the only ones that ever dealt with this, what would you say to that?

Mike Bailey: Having a coach or a mentor was really something I never used to think about. I always envisioned myself as the mentor or the coach playing sports all my life. I wanted people to come to me. But that’s because at a young age, I felt I needed that from people. I needed to be needed or wanted. But it really was a detriment to me because I didn’t work on myself, so to speak. I was faking it to on the outside, and I was somebody inside that didn’t want to let people down. So I would be like you. I would be studying and researching, and I had to have the degrees and all this kind of stuff just to make it look like I was held at a higher level or something.

Steve Napolitan: And it really was only for yourself.

Mike Bailey: It’s really for myself. And then you have to get past that to ask for help. But when it comes down to it and you start thinking about your family, and am I letting everybody down my mother, what am I doing with these businesses? I’m running around in circles and not achieving, getting over the bridge. And you get down to the point where it’s like, maybe I should ask for some help or mentorship because somebody’s been through it. And I realize that once too, when I read a book called The Nice Guy, and I felt like I was a nice guy, but the nice guy is not a good connotation if you’re always the nice guy because you want to be liked and you want to be needed. That’s more how that book went. And when I read that book, I said, gosh, this book is exactly like me.

And it was written in 1952, and I’m thinking, man, there is more people like me out there that are having these issues from maybe a childhood thing or whatever, how you viewed yourself as a child. And so I started thinking, gosh, there are a lot of people that have been through this. Why am I going through it? I’ve always been the one to go to the best person in the industry to find out what they’re doing, but I’m not doing that for myself because millions of people have already lived it. And here I am trying to reinvent the wheel. So asking for help from you or advice that you’ve given, or the mindset that you’ve changed or the bridges that we’ve crossed out and set on a success path have been invaluable to me. And that’s where everybody should go. You need somebody to be that sounding board and to give you that extra push to make it happen.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah. I won’t live my life without help ever again. Pretty much anything I want, I’m always seeking who is there and how can I learn. I found that it collapses timeframes. I look at how many years I’ve spent that I could have done faster if I would’ve. It’s like driving around a neighborhood to find the address, and you could just plug it into GPS. So mentors to me is like GPS, and then you just get right to the door that you want to go.

Mike Bailey: Yeah. I wish I would’ve realized that earlier. Me too. Because even last night I had an epiphany. But with you saying that and the age that I’m at, the age that you’re at, and you went out and asked for help sooner than I did, and here I am 58 years old trying to get down to the bottom of things, and you’ve made some leaps and bounds a lot quicker than I did. And if I would’ve asked sooner, I could have skipped all that and used some of the mistakes that a mentor made instead of me making the mistakes.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah. One of my mentors said, smart people learn from their mistakes, which is good wise, people learn from other people’s mistakes.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, that’s exactly where I was getting out without the right words.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, yeah, and I didn’t even write that, Mike. Someone else said those words. I’m just echoing it. Yeah. It is nice when someone is a good writer, but yeah. But that’s the essence of what we’re both saying. And for me, it’s interesting that you say that right now, because for me, 12 years from 19 to 31, I thought, that’s hard time. I felt like I was in jail figuratively. But I locked myself up in these businesses that I thought were, make me all successful. And I was overweight having heart palpitations, panic attacks. I was depressed. I felt like a loser. I was not being a present father by then. My first born was born by that time when I was 31, and I wasn’t being a good husband. In fact, I was not even cool. I mean, I had no energy left, no emotional bandwidth.

I wasn’t anything that my wife could really rely on in any kind of level of conversation. I mean, if anything, I just brought home enough money to pay the bills. And if that was barely two, there was sometimes I’m having this millions dollars come into the company and I’m wondering, oh, am I going to make the mortgage? I mean, I had all those moments you even shared now, and I still wasn’t asking for help. And so for me, I’m just saying all this, those 12 years of my life were forever. And I feel like at 31, I was late. And here we’re both saying, I think you’ll always feel late once you do this. And you find it’s kind of like a trap door. You’re like, wait, they had a door here. I always use that metaphor. When was this here? It was there the whole time. I think no matter how many years any of us spend, when you find that door is there, you’re like, darn it. But you have to just accept it for whatever reason. This was the time that you were meant to have that door open for you.

Mike Bailey: Yeah.

Steve Napolitan: So it’s beautiful. I so appreciate you sharing your life with me. I’m glad that we’ve become friends. I’m glad that I’ve been able to help you in your life and just to have this relationship and even to have this echo of a conversation, because even though our journeys have been different, there’s a lot of overlap, and it is just nice, and it brings me joy to see you and your family with all this happiness now. And you did that. This isn’t, I’m not taking that from an ego standpoint. Yeah. Maybe I point you in the right directions, but you did it. You took action. I never took over your plane. I might’ve been like, Mike Bailey, this is the tower. You might want to go a little few degrees to your left there. I look at it that way. I’m just giving you a little guidance. But you flew the plane, you did this. You changed your life. And so I think we did. It was teamwork, brother.

Mike Bailey: Yeah, it was. And I appreciate you too, my wife, my mom. We all appreciate what you did for us, and we look forward to a lot of years to come.

Steve Napolitan: Yeah, let’s go.

Mike Bailey: Okay. Yeah.

Steve Napolitan: Sounds good. Do it. Sounds good. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it’s my pleasure. And thank you for listening or watching this. However you’re consuming this podcast. I always say this, if you’re on our newsletter, hit reply. Let us know what the most valuable part of this episode was. And if you have questions ask, we actually read this stuff. It’s not a one-way communication. We want to hear from you, those of you that are on our newsletter. And if you’re not on the newsletter and this is the first time you’ve popped onto one of our shows, then all you need to do is text wow to 72,000. That’s seven two triple 0 – 7 2 0 0 0. Text the word. Wow. It’ll prompt you to join our newsletter for free. And then we give this information all the time because this is truly where my heart is More Business More Life®, helping you have the freedom you desire. So until our next episode, remember, choose gratitude and create freedom.