How to Build a Real Estate Business That Runs Without You | Jen Kolde, Minnesota Home Guys

Mike Hambright (00:33)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my good friend, Jen Kolde from Minnesota Home Guys. We’re gonna be talking about really how to build a business that enables you to live the life that you want. I’ve talked about this a lot, if anybody’s been, if you’re a repeat listener of the show, we talk a lot about the whole purpose of business is to enable, know, it starts off as like, I gotta pay the bills, right? But that’s not the goal. You could get a job for that. The goal with a business and why you might be willing to work hard is that it enables you to generate enough profit to live the life that you want.

But that’s very academic. So today we’re going to kind of get into like, well, how do you do that exactly? And Jen’s going to share a little bit more about that with us. So Jen, how are you today? Good to see you.

Jen Kolde (01:06)

Thanks for setting this up. This is great. It’s always fun to chat with you.

Mike Hambright (01:13)
Yeah, always good to see

you. We were just down in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago and we’re just talking about that. So, yeah, good time. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I’m excited to talk about this. I know that you guys have scaled your business up quite a bit and you’re teaching other people how to kind of do this now. You’ve been a huge giver inside of the Investor Fuel family. You guys have been members for a long time now. What we call OG has been around for a long time.

Jen Kolde (01:19)
Yeah, that was fun. That was a scene. But yeah, New Orleans is a whole thing.

Yeah.

Mike Hambright (01:40)
And I know you have a lot to share. So before we jump into kind of the topic of the day, tell us a little bit about you and your background.

Jen Kolde (01:46)
So, lives. was in nonprofits, development, customer service, all of the behind the scenes stuff. A lot of project management, a lot of special event management. more of that putting all the puzzle pieces together piece of it. So that’s kind of where I started out of college and…

Mike Hambright (02:02)
Yep.

Jen Kolde (02:04)
I’m originally from Kentucky and so even moving up here, that’s kind what I was into, the nonprofits and the organization piece of things.

Mike Hambright (02:14)
Yep, and then talk about when you got started in real estate. So just for some context, you work with your husband and you guys have a partner. So there’s three headed monster.

Jen Kolde (02:17)
Yeah.

We do, yeah, so, ⁓ you know, we

were just, yeah, doing the W-2 corporate thing. James was a firefighter. Jaden was an engineer by trade and he had gotten out of the W-2 corporate world probably a couple years prior and decided he was gonna dive into real estate. We had no background in real estate. Didn’t have any rentals, didn’t have…

anything like that. James was kind of handy. He’d done some projects and had been kind of dabbled in the construction and various jobs. But he and Jaden just, we were neighbors, got together in the neighborhood and.

James was working 10 days a month with his buyer schedule and board, because our daughter and I go to work and she’d go to school and so he’d be sitting around. So they got together. He helped Jaden out on a couple of projects and they sat down and went, you know what, we might be onto something here. We can maybe do something with this. And once they turned on the marketing, it kind of took off. So within a couple of months, they realized.

That was something they wanted to do. So James and I both quit our jobs and dove into the real estate industry. My dad laughed at us. He’s like, what do you guys know about real estate? I’m like, nothing, but we’ll figure it out. I don’t know. It was absolutely a leap of faith. We did not know what we were doing.

Mike Hambright (03:28)
That’s how it goes,

Sounds familiar. remember our family thought we were absolutely nuts. Like, why would anybody sell you their house at a discount? Nobody does that. was like, no, I know people do. We’ll show you. yeah. Anyway, yeah. So and you’re. ⁓

Jen Kolde (03:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and going this

route versus even just getting a traditional real estate license and going the real estate route is kind of a career change, which, you know, might have made sense, but we went a different direction.

Mike Hambright (03:57)
Yeah.

Yep.

And as far as the kind of the leadership team, I know you’re the operationally minded one, which is why we’re talking about this today, because you got to reel those guys in. but you know, one of the things that I talk a lot about is like, you know, I think.

Jen Kolde (04:05)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (04:12)
For people that spend a lot time on social media, there’s a lot of kind of gurus out there, people that are teaching, like, you can make a ton of money and buy exotic cars and do all this crazy stuff, and there’s nothing wrong with that. the first thing you should do is buy your time back and build a business that’s sustainable, that doesn’t require you to, as Gary Vee says, work your face off and stuff like that, right? And so I know you guys are lifestyle seekers, a lot like Lindsay and I are, and you want to be able to travel the world and do amazing things, which you do, and we’ve done

Jen Kolde (04:32)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (04:41)
together and all right done some cool things but just you know maybe share your thoughts on the purpose of business and how it enables you to kind of live the lifestyle that you guys want to live.

Jen Kolde (04:50)
Yeah, when we got into this, again, we didn’t know what it looked like. ⁓ James is just an entrepreneur mind. So we were excited to just be our own boss and kind of run it our way and not really answer to anyone. Jaden used to call the space soul crushing.

because you go, you clock in, you get your watch after what, 20 years, and that was kind of his. And so that piece of it is liberating in itself. You’re just kind of able to kind of set your pace to your thing. But yeah, for us, was, you know, the first few years as you’re getting going, and especially for us not knowing what we were doing and what building a business looked like.

Mike Hambright (05:12)
Yeah.

Jen Kolde (05:27)
it takes a little while to find your stride, but James and Jaden are the visionaries and You you need both you also need someone behind the scenes to kind of pick up the puzzle pieces for the visionaries and figure out okay How how does this fit together? How do we keep this moving forward? And build some of those systems because especially if you want to scale There’s a lot of chaos that comes with

having your own business, your own company. And so just having that piece behind the scenes so that the machine, like having the machine running so that those guys can continue to build. They realized quickly that they were not that and their minds were more of that visionary entrepreneur brain and that was not their skill set. So they brought me along with them to organize them.

Mike Hambright (06:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I think

there’s a lot of, as you know, there’s a lot of real estate investors that even if, so first off, there’s a huge, the largest section of want to be real estate investors never get out of the gate. They probably do zero deals and they just feel defeated and they give up. And there’s lots of reasons for that, maybe. And then there’s the people that start to have some level of success. Maybe they make more money than they would make in a W-2 job, but they still very much have a job. They’re still doing maybe a couple of deals a month and they still do a lot of

things themselves because they can’t, you know, in their mind they can’t afford to bring on an acquisitions person and an operations manager and an

manager and maybe they have an admin or they have something going on there but they don’t have like a true business that can operate even if they decide to go on a vacation or take a week off or take a month off or whatever that might be right so maybe just kind of share your you guys’s philosophy on I mean you guys have scaled your business up quite a bit but it would have been easy for you know the the path of least resistance is to just kind of do it all yourself right and some people get stuck there and then some people realize I don’t

Jen Kolde (07:11)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (07:16)
want to be stuck here. Those are the ones, those are a lot of the ones that come into like Investor Fuel and we like show them the process for how to scale so that your business can enable your life and not be a noose around your neck. But maybe kind of share your philosophy on the purpose of a scaled up business that enables you to kind of buy your time back.

Jen Kolde (07:33)
Yeah, and it’s hard to because letting go, you know, that’s kind of your baby. You’ve built this up. so finding the person you trust. So that’s why the three of us worked really well. We all knew we had each other’s back and we had the same goal and the same vision. As far as, know, people don’t know where to start with like, well,

They’re so overwhelmed with all the pieces. They’re wearing all the hats. So which hat do they hand off first? Where do I need to start? ⁓ So we’ve coached a few other people. We have a ⁓ team in Knoxville and it was exactly that. I’m doing everything. What do I need to do? And so breaking it down and okay, first we need to get you a leads manager or we need to get you, depending on their needs. And then it’s really having…

Having a lot of that documented too, like, okay, what are the different job descriptions? And you’ve done a great job with that. I know, Mike, we’ve borrowed some of your job description books and tailored it to our business, but it’s a great place to start and figure out, okay, what tasks can I hand off? Am I comfortable handing off? And then finding…

finding the right person for that seat too. So you don’t have to like hire an entire team, just start small and start handing off small pieces. And that’s kind of what we did.

Mike Hambright (08:43)
How do

you decide who to hire first? This is always a question and I have, as you know, have opinions on everything, but how do you decide if you’re gonna bring on, let’s just say there’s somebody with like no employees, like how do you decide what that first person you’re gonna bring on and the second one and you know, how do you decide that as a real estate investor?

Jen Kolde (08:47)
Yeah. ⁓

So for us, was really, what is taking up the most of your time? And you talk about $10 tasks. For us, it was, are you really feeling overwhelmed and bogged down? What piece can we hand off? And then for us, was the leads manager.

It was really finding someone and this was 10 years ago so we didn’t have AI and we didn’t have all the tools that we have now, which is amazing. But we, James was answering the phone 10, 11 o’clock at night.

Mike Hambright (09:22)
Right, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jen Kolde (09:28)
you

know, because that’s speed to leave. You want to make sure that they’re not, you know, waiting around. So that was a piece like first thing, like we need somebody in here answering the phones because James was also booking the appointments that he was going out there the next day. And then he’s doing the site visits and then he’s crunching the numbers and doing the underwriting scope of work. So then and I didn’t have the time to be answering the phones, which I was doing also. So everybody at the phone would bring anybody that was nearby is grabbing it like you’re just.

Mike Hambright (09:31)
It’s important, yeah.

Right. Yeah. It’s the hot potato

that like everybody knows that needs to be answered, but nobody wants it. Yeah.

Jen Kolde (09:55)
Exactly. Right. So

that was the first piece. And for us, was just what piece can we, is really taking up a lot of our time. And then it was, you know, obviously finding that right person.

And we went through the like, need a body. Hey, you’re breathing. Here, sit and answer phones. Which, you know, you panic. You kind of panic higher is what we were doing in the beginning. And you know, that doesn’t help the situation. Honestly, it can hurt more down the road than it actually helps. So.

Mike Hambright (10:14)
Yeah

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that challenge of finding out who to put on your team, and we’re all guilty of it. I literally used to have a catchphrase that I said, if I can find a good athlete, I always find a place for him on my team. And then that’s evolved. It’s like, no, I need to hire for, because what I would end up doing is, well, they’re loyal, or they’re a hard worker, or they have some things that are important, but they don’t have a specific skill, so I’m just kind of making a role for them.

them and inevitably there’s some things that that role requires that I’m like well they’re not very good at that so like I’ll just have somebody else do that task and it’s hard to run a business that way because like if you’re building the team around the skills of the people versus like the roles require a skill and if you don’t have these things then you can’t have this job right you can’t really scale it because it just ends up being this like it’s almost like a puzzle you mentioned ⁓ before you jumped on you said something about putting the pieces of the puzzle

Jen Kolde (11:18)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (11:26)
together. It’s almost like having most of the pieces but a couple of them are cut wrong and you just like get this mallet out and you start like just hammering them together. It’s like it kind of looks okay. It’s like this isn’t the right puzzle piece but I’m gonna make it fit you know. Yeah. Right.

Jen Kolde (11:31)
Yeah.

Just jam them together. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. We’ve got somebody in the seat. It’s fine. Well, they’ll

figure it out. Yeah, and we learned through trial and error and all the blood, sweat, and tears that that doesn’t always work. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (11:49)
Yeah,

it never works over the long term. Like it might feel like it’s almost like, I don’t know if you ever go to the chiropractor and like I go to the chiropractor and I was like, how do you feel right afterwards? I’m like, well, I have a bunch of endorphins running through me because you just like cracked my back. So it feels good. But did you fix anything? Like, I don’t know, time will tell. And, know, it gives you an endorphin rush because you’re like, I got it off of my plate, but it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.

Jen Kolde (11:57)
Yep.

Thank

Yep, exactly.

Yeah!

Absolutely and that’s so we have become you know a few years in it was very apparent and you know, just my background was I’m very like document everything. What’s the job description? What do we want this person to do? What are the expectations? Like what are some goals that we have for them? So and it doesn’t have to be that complicated. I mean Especially starting out

what do you want this person to do? Do you have so many calls or appointments or making sure you have those expectations set and communicated? And then that’s when it falls into kind of finding the right person. Yeah, you absolutely might have somebody in your network that we’ve threw out on Facebook, hey, looking for a marketing intern.

Mike Hambright (12:46)
Mm-hmm.

Jen Kolde (12:57)
to manage social media leads. It was kind of a catch-all position at the time. And that was seven years ago, Matt out of college replied and he’s like, hey, I’ll come in. And we laugh and he’s going to kill me for telling this story. Cause I was telling, but Jaden and I, came in and we were, you know, we’re casual. We’re in jeans, James in shorts and a t-shirt and got his hat on, shoes, whatever. comes in in a suit and

because first big boy interview out of college. But he’s been with us for seven years. He’s moved through different departments of the company. He’s learned different things. And he’s one of our top acquisitions agents ⁓ now. he had those initial skills, but also finding people that can grow with you that are adaptable. Because that is one of the big keys in this industry, too, is it.

Mike Hambright (13:21)
Yeah.

That’s great.

Jen Kolde (13:43)
even for an accounting position where it’s very black and white, they just need numbers, they’ve got to be able to pivot, as we always say, because this industry is not, this industry moves. So there are a lot of pieces to finding the right person, especially in this investment industry inside of things. It’s a little different than a normal industry and job. ⁓

Mike Hambright (13:52)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jen Kolde (14:05)
Yeah, those are, you know, I would start out just saying being very specific about what the role is. I know I kind of wandered there, but that’s been a big thing for us is like, what are the expectations?

Mike Hambright (14:10)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. How do you, with your team, how do you manage them to…

you know, have kind of clear goals. How do you make sure they have clear goals like KPIs or whatever that you kind of tracking? And then also you kind of mentioned this word a couple times, pivot. And I know there’s been a lot of pivoting over the past few years as the market’s kind of shifted and it’s inevitable in every industry and every market. There are tweaks or things that are coming at us. It could be changes in the market. It could be, you know, adoption of AI. Like how do you, how do you kind of instill those things in your team so that they’re always looking for how to get better? Because quite frankly,

Jen Kolde (14:26)
Yep.

Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:50)
there’s a lot of people that have a, you know, that might be more of the employee mindset that just will do the thing over and over and over again. They’re not necessarily looking for ways to improve.

Jen Kolde (15:01)
Yeah, so we, you know, and also, you know, being a small company, most of real estate investors, they’re either mom and pop or they’re smaller.

offices, smaller teams. So staying connected for us is huge. We use Asana, WhatsApp. We have each department, each team has a morning huddle. We do Monday morning meetings. So we have everybody log in and we’ll review kind of what’s happening.

What happened last week in the business, the Monday morning meetings we’ll do what happened last week in the business, what’s going on this week, it’s kind of a quick touch base. Anybody have any, anything going on? But throughout the day, like the WhatsApp is blowing up. People are asking questions, they’re connecting, and in there we’re able to share information. Those morning huddles also are a good touch point.

for anything that the management team is like, you know, again, pivoting. hey, we’re gonna go this direction now. So those morning huddles like, hey guys, this is setting priorities for the day. And it takes 15 minutes. We jump on for 15 minutes. It’s not an hour long meeting. And I think this is just across the board. Communication is key. That’s keeps everybody on track, keeps everybody in the right.

Mindspace informed. So it’s just little things like that. Again, it doesn’t have to be a big production or a big meeting, but just making sure everybody’s kind of kept in the loop. And we use all the tools. Like people will use one, use Asana or I use Slack or whatever it is. We have all the tools. So people are getting it kind of multiple times. And then we also use it.

Mike Hambright (16:19)
Yeah.

Yeah. There’s no shortage of tools

you could use out there. That’s the next, we won’t talk about that today, but the next thing is like, how do you have just the right amount of tools, but not too many because it get overwhelming. Yeah.

Jen Kolde (16:34)
Yeah.

yeah, without overwhelming. Yeah, people just

getting bombarded with information. So we use a lot of that and just we check in with people. are those tools like we use the WhatsApp also for for us. a culture thing like making sure you’re building that culture out of the gate. And people that have been with us for a long time have kind of have seen it evolve. And newcomers are like, this is great. Like, wait a minute.

They feel like you’re being informed, but it’s also to celebrate wins. know, hey, great job Ashley on getting that contract signed or you know, happy birthday, happy anniversary to you know, whatever it is, it’s keeping people engaged.

Mike Hambright (17:15)
Right, yeah, yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about systems, having the right systems in place. And we just talked about that a little bit. There’s a lot of tools that we all use. And one of the problems with a lot of these tools is they all have a little bit of scope creep. They do a thing, and then all of a they start to add on some features. It’s like, well, I already rely on.

this other thing, like for example, we use Slack for a lot of our communications. I have a huge team, it’s all over the world. so Slack is an easy thing. Well, there’s tasks inside of Slack, but like Asana is way better. So we tend to use Asana for more tasks and projects and stuff like that. just talk about the importance of having the right systems and even not just softwares, but also just kind of your systematic approach or your processes for how you do things and how that’s allowed.

you guys to kind of scale up. Maybe talk about that and maybe even share some tips on what you do to continue to let that evolve because it needs to continue to improve over time, right?

Jen Kolde (18:08)
Right, and as we’ve grown and as we continue to grow and especially stepping in the franchise space, we’ve realized it’s very important. Again, it comes back to documentation, making sure everybody is aware of their role in the company, the piece of the business that they own and giving them that extreme ownership. We’ve been diving into that more.

this year, really, again, from the beginning, setting those standards, communicating the expectation, communicating the vision, and keeping those lines of communication open, first of all, besides just, like you said, the systems having the CRM in place, making sure.

they’re set up for success, as far, whether it’s training or whether, and even training like the managers. Here’s your onboarding process, like when you’re hired here, and again, it doesn’t have to be elaborate, but hey, we spend usually a day going through.

Here’s what the company looks like. Here’s the history of the company. Here’s our vision. Here’s our mission statement. Here’s how we approach every transaction. And just setting that from the beginning. then the tools are the tools. Whether it’s Asana or Slack or Pete or Salesforce or whatever it is you’re Making sure that they’re comfortable.

they’re trained and

For us, it’s very hands-on, especially if they’re from outside the industry. We’ve hired quite a few people from outside real estate. that learning curve is another piece.

But it’s not required. We’re working with people now that, no, you don’t have to know real estate. It’s fine. We can teach you that. It’s like we’re looking for people that they can connect with people. They can network. They can build relationships. That’s what this is all about. ⁓ But behind the scenes, making sure everything, like having SOPs, standard operating procedures.

Mike Hambright (19:45)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jen Kolde (20:05)
This is how our leads team handles a call. This is how our acquisitions team handles an appointment. This is how our transaction team handles once it’s signed, getting it closed. And so the machine, once there’s a handoff, they trust that the next

next step in the process is like, nope, they know what they’re doing. I’ve handed it off. can continue doing my thing and it’s going to keep moving through the pipeline. So for us, it’s, you know, we’ve been in business almost 10 years and I think Minnesota is running like a machine now.

Mike Hambright (20:36)
Yeah, Well, and

you just mentioned kind of franchising for some context there. You guys have built out a franchise, the Home Guys franchise system where you’re teaching other people how to use your systems and processes of place. And as you know, I had some franchise experience in my background as well, which I appreciated early on because we are, know, Lindsay and I are…

Jen Kolde (20:44)
Yeah.

Just a little.

Mike Hambright (20:54)
like she’s way more operationally inclined than I am, but I appreciate the value of, in many ways, somebody else showing you how to make shortcuts. mean, in fact, that’s the foundation of what Investor Fuel is all about is like, you don’t have to climb the learning curve on everything you do by yourself. You can surround yourself with people that can show you how to get there, right? so maybe just talk a little bit about, I mean, I think…

you know, talk about maybe some tips for smaller businesses, those that are doing a few deals, or maybe they’re, you know, not newbies, but have done a little bit, but understand they need to have a systematic approach to their business. Maybe you could share a few tips for those folks, based off of, you know, what you teach your franchisees to do.

Jen Kolde (21:30)
Yeah, so we found that as we’ve grown and stepping in this new franchise side, surrounding yourself with people that are gonna use their superpowers, like we talked about, I’m more behind the scenes, I’m more operational, organized.

having the people behind you that allow James and Jaden to continue to move forward. So finding those people and so now, you know, they trust that Minnesota is just gonna keep running. We’ve got Paul, we’ve got Anna, we’ve got people over there and we’re like, nope, that’s, they’ve got that. Allowing them to step into this new space. And yeah, with the franchise side, it’s, you know, we’re taking, we’ve got Knoxville, Home Guys, San Antonio and Orlando.

And I’m just saying they’ve been in our guinea pigs because we stepped into this going, OK, guys, we don’t really know what this looks like. But we have all of these tools and all of this information. So finding, and we talk about this all the time, especially at Fuel week, we use the predictive index to find as a tool. It’s not the end all be all, but we use that as a tool.

to gauge, you know, is this the right person for the right position? And so helping the franchises lean into those as well. When we talk to Knoxville, for instance, like we had all three of those guys take the predictive index and like, what is your role in the company? What is your superpower? And then how do we surround you with people to support that?

Mike Hambright (22:53)
Mm-hmm.

Jen Kolde (22:54)
And we’ve kind of that, taken the SLPs and taken the job descriptions and just kind of helped them build that team.

Mike Hambright (23:02)
Yeah.

Jen Kolde (23:03)
So.

Mike Hambright (23:03)
I think the

importance of some of the things you said there are that for all entrepreneurs, like you have a skill set and I think what ends up happening is a lot of entrepreneurs, especially, we’ll just talk about real estate investors, they tend to like try to find a way to do everything.

Jen Kolde (23:16)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:17)
And the problem is you’re not good at everything. And as an entrepreneur, sometimes we just are forced to adapt. We’re like, well, I’m going to figure this out no matter what. Because it’s a survival, like you have to to survive. But I think as you scale your business up, it’s like, OK, just focus on what you’re good at.

Jen Kolde (23:28)
Yes!

Mike Hambright (23:33)
and you enjoy doing instead of doing a bunch of stuff that you can figure out, but you’re not good at it and you don’t want to do it. I mean, that’s how you get burned out for sure. Right. So then it’s like, make sure you’re generating enough leads in the business to get enough sales, to be able to pay for the team that you need to make sure that you don’t have a job and you truly are a business owner. Right. And so, but I think a lot of times people focus on trying to level up the things they’re not good at or they don’t like doing versus find somebody else to do that. Cause I was talking to somebody

the other day in the past week when this kind of came up is like for some of the things that we like absolutely hate like let’s just say most real estate investors hate bookkeeping and accounting like they hate it but it has to happen but what was crazy to me it was an early epiphany that there’s somebody else that is like man I love being around the real estate space but what I really love to do is accounting and then just like there’s somebody that loves that and it doesn’t have to be you

Jen Kolde (24:23)
Yeah. It was not me.

Mike Hambright (24:29)
No, no, but they are out there. There’s people that just

love like, hey, ⁓ I know who I was talking to. So somebody that you know as well, but they’re like, hey, my brother does all the accounting and he like loves it. It’s just a puzzle for him. likes to put it all together. He likes all the tax planning. And I was like, that’s a rare breed. That’s a rare breed, but they are out there, right? And so as an entrepreneur, that’s your key. That’s your goal is to find those people that like to do the stuff that you hate, cause it has to get done.

Jen Kolde (24:43)
⁓

And early on, know, again, we were just throwing things out there looking, like, looking for that person, like, on your personal face. Anybody have any accounting background? Like, I need a bookkeeper, da da da. And we had someone jump in and it ended up, you know, being a mess that we were cleaning up years later. But, you know, so finding… And so you do have to be a little bit more deliberate. And I know, you know, James and Jane, like, we need them right now. Like, just…

Mike Hambright (25:08)
Right.

Jen Kolde (25:17)
like you know guys give me a week like I will find somebody but fine yeah like you just said like utilizing surrounding yourself with the people that have the skills that you don’t and I think someone was talking at the last fuel event that was I don’t know if it was their acquisitions or just boat or somebody but anyway there he said

Mike Hambright (25:20)
Yeah.

Jen Kolde (25:37)
They’re not proactive. They’re not doing it the way I would do it. And someone raised their hand and said, you don’t want them to do it the way you would do it. Like that position, that’s a different mindset than, you know, yours, then, you know, as an owner position or a visionary, like you want this person to be more deliberate. And they’re not going to move at your pace. They’re not going to do it your way, but that’s why you hired them. You don’t, if you had a

Mike Hambright (25:43)
Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Jen Kolde (26:01)
company full of James and Jaden’s and you know, we’d just be spinning in circles doing this and they’d be, you know, running all over the place. But, you know, putting people in those positions that’ll, that support you basically is, has allowed us to continue to move forward and, and you know, all the people we have to have grown with us, they’ve, they’ve kind of suffered through some, you know, some of the growing pains that we’ve had and

Mike Hambright (26:04)
Yeah. All right.

Jen Kolde (26:24)
They’re like, no, we get it, we’re in. What do you need us to do? during that interview process, and again, it doesn’t need to be elaborate, but we have gotten to the point where we’re very deliberate in our hiring process. You have the conversations, you do the predictive index out of the gate, make sure they’re even just a right fit for the job. And then we set up meetings with team members.

Mike Hambright (26:25)
It’s inevitable, yeah, has to happen.

Jen Kolde (26:45)
we’re very clear about our culture. Like here’s how we operate. Good or bad, know, whatever you’re used to or whatever you think. It’s like, this is our business. And if it’s not going to be a good fit for you, you know, you don’t want to force a square peg in a round hole and kind of try and kind of put them in a position that’s not going to set them up for success too. So,

Mike Hambright (27:11)
Right. Yeah.

Jen Kolde (27:12)
Yeah, that’s kind of how we’ve gotten to that point. And now we’re able to coach, and not even just our franchisees now, but other people. I’ve met people at Fuel and they’ve called up and they’re like, hey, what’s your hiring process? What is your screening process? What’s your communication process for the leads team? How do they hand it off? Or how does the acquisition?

some of the systems behind the scenes and they’ve been able to kind of step out and focus on other things.

Mike Hambright (27:40)
Yep. Yeah, that’s great. Jen, you mind, so you guys have been a part of Investor Fuel for quite a while now, five plus years, maybe, yeah, a long time. And we’ve done a lot of amazing things together. We’ve traveled the world together, done some cool stuff. Would you mind just sharing a quick testimonial on your experiences being a part of Investor Fuel?

Jen Kolde (27:40)
and kind of take things to the next level. So.

Five, six years, yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, and it was funny. We talked about this before we kind of jumped on here. But, you know, James and Jaden in the beginning, they did all the masterminds as people do when you’re starting out, you’re trying to get all the information. And for a couple of years they were running all over the country. And, know, they, they weren’t, they were giving a lot. They weren’t getting a lot back out of it.

because they were at a higher level. mean, they started out and they started running. We found Investor Fuel and I can’t remember how they found it, but found Investor Fuel and from the minute you walk in, everybody is just there to support you. I mean, yes, they have their own business. They have their own vision of success. They have their own life. Like everybody’s just, and we joke about this, but we call it just doing life with everybody.

But from the minute you walk in, everybody is so supportive. You’ve done a great job building that culture that’s like we talked about. You always say it at the fuel events, like you just leave your ego at the door and everybody does. No matter where you are in your business, we always walk away with something. Always walk away with a new tool, a new tidbit, a new friend, a new networking opportunity. Like, you we were in…

Las Vegas for a different convention, ran into a guy that I’m like, I think this would be a good connection for Mike. So we have built, you call it the Fuel Family, we’ve definitely built the Fuel Family. And we had…

Fuel member, you know, they were struggling in their business end of last year. They’re like, we’ve been doing this for a while. We’re kind of stagnant. like, we don’t know which, where to go next. And they came out to visit the office for a day, went home and, you know, just encouraging each other without, again, without the ego.

Mike Hambright (29:33)
Yeah.

Jen Kolde (29:36)
So that’s, it’s been a, not to sound cheesy, but like a breath of fresh air in this industry where everybody’s just out to hustle. We look forward to the events. We just take a minute and decompress and kind of connect with people in the same space.

Mike Hambright (29:49)
Yeah, that’s great. I appreciate it, Jen. If folks, and you’ve been talking about you guys are now franchising your model and helping other people take their business to another level across the country. If folks want to learn more about that or more about any of other things that you guys are doing, where can they go for that?

Jen Kolde (30:03)
So if they’re interested in the franchise opportunity we have homeguys.com So www.homeguys.com There are a bunch of videos reels out on social media Homeguys USA for the franchise opportunity. You can follow Minnesota homeguys on Facebook all the socials

For tidbits, you can see lot of James and Jaden out there truck talk with James. He likes to ramble as he’s driving around. whatever’s popping into his head at the time. And then if you want to reach out to me directly, it’s Jen at homeguysmn.com. Just to get information about whatever business systems, fuel, whatever.

Mike Hambright (30:49)
Awesome. Yeah.

Well, thank you for joining us. Always good to see you, Yeah, I appreciate you. Everybody, hope you got some good value from today. Again, I think your business really is at the end of the day.

Jen Kolde (30:55)
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll talk to you soon.

Mike Hambright (31:02)
As an entrepreneur, sometimes you just go hustle, as Gary Vee says, work your face off, right? To do whatever it takes to survive. The goal is not to survive, the goal is to thrive. And as an entrepreneur, there’s going to be ups and downs, but your business is a lot easier to ride those ups and downs if you’re not doing everything. So really important to learn how to build a true business that you can be the owner of and certainly step out to step out of periodically to enjoy life and the fruits of your labor. So appreciate you guys so much for joining us. We’ll see you on the next show.