From Fast Food to Real Estate Success

Justin Bosak (00:00)
Yeah, I mean at that point it was kind of pushed on us and honestly at that point I was like, ah, I’m not sure if we’re ready for it. But I mean we were way ready for it. And it’s just again, you have to know how to buy your time back and what your value is. And I tell agents this all the time, right? If you’re a $150 agent, how are you gonna make it to $250 an hour?

That’s a hundred dollar gap, right? Are you going to either spend more time doing more work? That does not increase your hourly wage. That actually probably brings it down. And the theme is, can you get experts to come in to help you?

Like my transaction coordinators know the backend of a transaction way better than me. Like I don’t know which town and which CEO and this and that. Like I don’t need to

Dylan Silver (02:17)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is a New Jersey based realtor and investor who is launching a mortgage company and expanding investment operations down into Florida. Please welcome Justin Bosak. Justin, welcome to the show.

Justin Bosak (02:33)
Thanks for having me, Dylan.

Dylan Silver (02:35)
I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking folks how they got into the real estate space.

Justin Bosak (02:43)
Yes, ⁓ quite some time ago, 2003. ⁓

Got into real estate knowing that I wanted to do it early on. did a report in high school and thought it was a really cool job. Kind of just going through the process. I was not a guy that was ever going to do great in school because I was just bored with it. I was good until high school and I just, you know, I figured out I don’t need English class and, you know, I hate algebra. So I’m not going to college, you know, if, you know. So I was in management for McDonald’s. got out early from high school work release. ⁓

that I moved on to a company called Aldi Foods. As a manager, I quickly worked up to running a store for them. At that point, I’m like 21 years old and I kind of reached the top because in order to become a supervisor, I needed a four-year degree, which is ridiculous because I knew more than the guy that was supervising the stores.

Dylan Silver (03:23)
Yeah.

here.

Justin Bosak (03:40)
I was making good money, but I knew that at 21 and working 78 hours a week and the salary and commuting so far that there was no way that this was going to be life for me. So I jumped out, got my real estate license, did construction for a little bit while I was going through the process. 22 years later, here I am.

Dylan Silver (04:02)
What was that first year like hopping into the real estate space? know a lot of people have different journeys and sometimes people don’t know what to expect. Did you have mentors? Did you have family in the business? Did you have friends? What was the first year like?

Justin Bosak (04:13)
Nobody, nobody, ⁓ which is crazy. I lucked out because ⁓ I landed with a company that allowed me to come in and work kind of behind the scenes. So I was picking up calls to begin with, booking appointments and stuff for the company. This was a company called Fox and they were discount brokerage back then. So they had a few agents and had

big team back office, and they just did a lot on the volume. So then I learned that you can make more money doing cold calling, so I jumped over to that department, was cold calling for a little bit. At that time, they didn’t even have buyer’s agents. They were just listing agents. They were listing for like 2 % back

Dylan Silver (04:56)
Alright.

Justin Bosak (05:47)
But then they opened it up and they had buyer’s agents. So I started doing that and that lasted until 2007, you know, when the company closed. But it was great because I got to learn the business and got that experience, you know, early on from the system that was set up the right way. It was kind of more corporate the way it was ran, but it was also kind of set up like a boiler room because like all the management was young.

Dylan Silver (06:08)
Sure.

Justin Bosak (06:14)
You know, there’s a lot of company events, a lot of company trips, great culture. So kind of doing that. then when the company closed and then going into traditional real estate, was like, what is this? Like, this is terrible. Traditional real estate in 2008 and 2009 was, you know, was trash. Honestly. mean.

Dylan Silver (06:35)
Let’s talk about the juxtaposition here. So you were in a non-traditional space versus traditional. What were the deals like in the non-traditional space? Because I come from a non-traditional real estate background as a wholesaler, right?

Justin Bosak (06:48)
Mm-hmm.

So I mean I was a buyer’s agent so I was really a traditional agent in every sense because I was really handling all my deals but like the listing agents for our company they just went out they got paid to list the house and then you would never talk to the listing agent again. There’s three different people on the back end you know you’d call into so if you got an offer you talk to a negotiator if you you know got the deal closed or under contract and it’ll go to a closing coordinator and they they would kind of walk the client through so you kind of passed on to a

different people and a listing agent really wasn’t there anymore. were just, you know, signing paperwork and pretty much price reductions and then that’s it. They were gone after that. ⁓

Dylan Silver (07:29)
Hmm.

Justin Bosak (07:30)
Cool thing about the company was that back then, and again, this is 2003, four and five, ⁓ they had professional photographers, which traditional real estate companies did not have, even the best agents weren’t using them. They were doing floor plans for the houses as well, and this was all included, there wasn’t an extra fee to do it. So once we got into traditional real estate, we were like, we’ve got to keep doing this stuff, this is really good stuff, this is how most properties,

Dylan Silver (07:46)
Yeah.

Justin Bosak (08:00)
or a lot of properties are getting more than asking because you’re just exposing it the right way. So the company knew how to actually expose and market properties. There was some disconnect, I guess, a little bit about the process with them. ⁓

Yeah, it was a great system and we just kind of took that. Me and probably at that time it was five other guys. We all had different roles within the company. So we just wanted to continue to do real estate. We know we needed each other because we didn’t want to do each other’s jobs. So I was a buyer’s agent. had a listing agent and I was getting the leads from the listings obviously. So ⁓ I needed the listing agents. And then we had the back end guys doing cold calling, two guys doing cold calling as well. So ⁓ yeah, we came together, formed a team.

from the company and went in and ⁓ negotiated an awesome deal. We walked in the door, like, want laptops, want cell phones, we want sign-on bonus, and they were like…

We don’t do this. What are you talking about? But we broke down our system and now it worked and we actually got it. Not knowing that that wasn’t normal because our company, our company was only paying us, I think, you as a buyer’s agent, 18 to maybe 30 % of the commission. But I had a company car, health insurance, I had a base salary, I had a laptop, cell phone, all included. So again, like we didn’t understand the difference between traditional real estate. We just knew how to do deals.

Dylan Silver (09:13)
at

So that really must have been the heyday or maybe the tail end of the absolute heyday of cold calling. mean you had to probably get everybody was picking up, right?

Justin Bosak (09:36)
yeah, it was normal for people to pick up the phone. Yeah, I mean there was no texting really back then. You know, or if you had texted it was like, you know, had to hit the one three times to get the C. ⁓ Nobody was texting back then. Yeah, email wasn’t really that big, you know, back then. Everything was legit cold calling and people would actually answer the phones back then.

Dylan Silver (09:40)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Different

time, different time. I want to ask you about the pivot points along your journey as a real estate entrepreneur. You talk about getting started a lot of time on the phone and that probably continued. But then scaling to where you are today where you’ve got the investments, New Jersey, Georgia, Florida, opening the mortgage company and I believe you mentioned the title company as well. What were the pivot points on your way to get to where you are today?

Justin Bosak (11:00)
It was always just pushing so hard and wanting to do so much, like almost breaking the system and kind of continuing to like reach a ceiling. You know, so we had tried to do a ⁓ combination brokerage with our former brokers and ⁓ they didn’t want us to leave. We were talking about doing our own thing. And we said, you know what, we just want to do business. You take care of the back office. We don’t want to learn about finance and all that stuff or run compliance or deal with all that. We just want to go out and do work. ⁓

But then we learned that once we were scaling and we wanted to bring in different things to the office, that that broker was like, oh, well, we have two other offices. if we allow you to do that here, then we have to offer it to the whole company. And we’re like, well, we should, we’re going to beta test it. We’re going to show you that it works. know, things was bringing in a closing coordinator. So this is back in like 2016. That wasn’t really a big service back then. know, now it’s, you know, transaction coordinators, you know, they’re definitely

Dylan Silver (11:47)
Yeah.

Justin Bosak (12:00)
caught on, but we knew that that helped us scale and it allows us to do what we do best, you know, get out there in the field, meet clients, you know, and get deals done. ⁓

Dylan Silver (12:01)
Yeah.

Justin Bosak (12:10)
Field services as far as like delivering signs and delivering marketing materials and stuff like that again, know Another thing that I don’t want to do I don’t need to be the guy that does that, you know I can be there and make sure the designs are good, but that’s it I don’t need to install the sign, you know a guy back in the day I used to have to buy a car and that made that you know would fit signs in it You know, that’s it’s kind of ridiculous as a real estate agent to kind of your business like that But if you’re a brokerage doesn’t offer somebody to install signs, you know and then

Dylan Silver (12:35)
Let us know.

Justin Bosak (12:40)
you have a client that wants to install a nice white post, what are you going to do? You can’t put that in a convertible. So these services we knew were going to just make us more efficient, more effective. And we opened a company that offered these services to the regular agents that wanted to come in.

Dylan Silver (12:49)
I’ve got to go for something right.

Justin Bosak (13:04)
And then all of a sudden, we went from a team of 10, now the team’s 25, but more independent agents were impressed by these services. So now we have 160 or 70 agents across three offices.

Dylan Silver (13:20)
And talking with you here briefly, Justin, not to cut you off, but I just get a sense that you’re both a systems guy and a people guy, which I think is rare. A lot of times people are kind of one or the other. I say, I have this, I have a lot of friends who are great on the phone, of great face-to-face salespeople, but then I say, you know, they don’t like processes at all. And I say, it’s almost frustrating because if they do the processes and the people, would just be a game over.

And then of course you see the inverse where you see a lot of people who love the systems and the processes, but maybe they’re highly analytical almost to a fault, right? You seem to have meshed both of those well. And I even asked you before I put on the podcast, you know, did you decide to become a broker yourself? And you said, no, I’m partnered with it, but I didn’t want to be in the office all day and I have other businesses. Is that something that you’re very intentional about as far as being in both worlds as

Justin Bosak (13:59)
yeah.

Dylan Silver (14:17)
the people guy and the systems guy or has it always been that way?

Justin Bosak (14:21)
It’s known your strengths. So I learned early on that I was a leader by example. I was not going to be, and this is going all the way back to McDonald’s days, you know. So I would not tell anybody to go sweep and then never sweep.

I would always know how to do everything and they would see me helping out. Like nothing was beneath me. And that carried through throughout my career. ⁓ Nothing that I’m telling somebody to do is nothing that I’m not willing to get my hands dirty and actually do. And I feel like a lot of ⁓ leaders, let’s just call them brokers, they’re telling agents what to do and they’ve never done it before.

So then when there’s follow-up questions, they don’t have any answers. They just heard it from somebody else, but they haven’t went through the process to kind of feel it, touch it, and kind of navigate through, all right, this is the best way to do it, and this is how and why, and these are the metrics that I looked at to kind of make these decisions. They’re just saying, no, just do this. I just heard this from, no, you can’t tell somebody to just do something without kind of deep diving. ⁓

So again, I like to my hands dirty and then the process, you know, that’s everything but I learned that Through Haring’s an assistant back in the day that I didn’t have to touch everything I didn’t need to have that I’m more of a creative

marketing and advertising like I love that stuff But I learned that hey if I can just create the template and then have somebody else plug and play like I’ve done my job I can walk away and then I could say well just send it to me if it’s something really important I’ll take a second look at it, but that’s it like I don’t want

Dylan Silver (16:22)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Bosak (16:38)
micromanaging, know, know, templated stuff. And now it’s kind of like I’ve taught, so we have a marketing team too. I have two marketing people. ⁓

have two transaction coordinators and the marketing team is now learning how to use a virtual assistant to take the template stuff off of their plate and to plug and play so they can be more creative and that’s kind of the space you want your marketing person to be and at first they were a little fearful of having a virtual assistant like, no, is my job safe? I’m like, trust me, your job’s safe. I need somebody to quarterback this stuff but the stuff that is taking up your time, I know you’re busy, I don’t need a third marketing person. We just need somebody to kind of

Dylan Silver (16:54)
Ryan.

Justin Bosak (17:18)
handle the template stuff.

Dylan Silver (17:20)
You know, I think a lot of ⁓ people are unaware of how much there’s kind of menial tasks that are taking up their time. And I think we’re becoming more aware of this as mass adoption, especially in the real estate space of AI and chat, GPT, right? But you mentioned having an assistant years ago and you saw early on and then you’ve implemented it into your teams. And I love teams that do this. part of a team that does this where everyone

is trying to be most efficient with their time. So you can focus on, you know, the signal and not the noise, right? As the saying goes, right? What was it about having an assistant and about making sure that everyone on your team is locked in where you decided, hey, this is really worth the expense and yeah, we’re spending maybe more money on assistance, but it’s worth it in the long run.

Justin Bosak (18:13)
Yeah, I mean at that point it was kind of pushed on us and honestly at that point I was like, ah, I’m not sure if we’re ready for it. But I mean we were way ready for it. And it’s just again, you have to know how to buy your time back and what your value is. And I tell agents this all the time, right? If you’re a $150 agent, how are you gonna make it to $250 an hour?

That’s a hundred dollar gap, right? Are you going to either spend more time doing more work? That does not increase your hourly wage. That actually probably brings it down. And the theme is, can you get experts to come in to help you?

Like my transaction coordinators know the backend of a transaction way better than me. Like I don’t know which town and which CEO and this and that. Like I don’t need to

that stuff. I don’t know what the price is. I don’t know about the utilities. I don’t need to know any of that stuff. You know, they know that. And if you can pay them, you know, a solid wage, you know, let’s just say it’s, you know, they’re making 30 something dollars an hour, but you’re buying back your time.

You know, so you can go do the more productive things and efficient things that are going to make you $300 an hour. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a rules game. It’s it’s habits, routines, and then rules in order to get into the right habits and routines, you need to create rules for yourself. And I learned early on in order to get a raise, I need to create rules to stop doing the things to make less money. You know, so back in let’s say 2000, I think 13, I was like getting maxed out. was like, I know I don’t have more time in the day and I know maxed out at like 50.

Dylan Silver (19:20)
Right.

Justin Bosak (19:44)
You know running, you know helping them run the team and doing deals So how what do I have to do? All right? What if I just stopped working with buyers under 200,000 like and back then obviously that was that was cheap There’s there’s no $200,000 by surely anymore, but but back then, know and for inflation, let’s say it’s 450, right?

you know, and then you cut that off and you create that rule, right? And you can break that rule, right? If it’s somebody that you know, friend, family, something like that, you know, you could always still do that business. It’s not all about money, but it’s about time. Because if you’re, you’re taking away, all right, I have a team member that can work with that, that lead, I’ll just go on text with them. I’ll be on the email chain with them. I’ll make sure they’re taken care of, but I don’t have to go run around and shove them 50 or 60 homes because I want to focus on getting listings. I want to focus on getting higher end clients, you know, because, know, that time away means that

I could miss out on an opportunity for a million dollar buyer.

or a million-dollar listing. And that’s how you raise your salary or your average wages by focusing on, all right, if I can do 50 deals and they’re all million-dollar deal average, right, that’s the same amount of time for the most part. Yeah, you’re gonna spend more money in marketing and advertising, but I mean, you’re extremely gonna get a raise upon maybe a six or $700,000 average, or even most agents that are starting out, their average is probably like that 450 price point, so.

Dylan Silver (21:07)
This conversation reminds me actually about the importance of this because yes, it’s a logistical, you’re buying back your time. There’s certain tasks that can be delegated. But also if you’re

personality and your time and your brain literally is focused constantly on the tasks that are going to be the highest level problems that really only you can solve that cannot be delegated than anything else that is like not crucial. You’re thinking, wait, I shouldn’t be doing this. And then at the point where you’re at Justin, which is where I’m trying to get to is, you know, how can I open up businesses? Where’s the best use of my time?

Who can I partner with? What are the strategic relationships? Instead of like, you know, I’ve got to send this contract out, right? And so when we start to get into that other mindset, then it’s a matter of, okay, these are the most important tasks. Which ones do I have priorities among these? And then that’s when really I think the magic happens.

Justin Bosak (22:10)
Yeah, it allows you to kind of focus on, like you said, the things that matter the most or where you want to go, right? Because I always have thoughts on how to expand and build on the foundation, right? you know, I tell people build the foundation first, make sure that’s strong, make sure it’s all operational, right? And then it’s stacking the bricks on top, you know, and once you do that, like now you’ve got a strong foundation and a strong building to, you know, a healthy career. And there’s a lot of different bricks and I kind of go through all those different things, you know, with clients, but if, you

The first thing is the foundation and understanding habits, times, know routines the hours you’re working, you know, so

One of the things that could free you up, know, when dealing back in the day without a transaction coordinator, you know, like I was chasing all my emails and following up from like seven o’clock to like 10 o’clock at night. I was watching TV. was telling myself like, okay, this is kind of like downtime, but I was missing out on family experience and family life. Like now I don’t have to do that because I have somebody that’s really proactive where I was reactive during that time. And I’m almost sending emails for the next day knowing that I’m going to be on the road all day. ⁓

and hey, can you do these things, but I’m not gonna be able to read the response for maybe like 12 hours? Like that’s not efficient, that’s not productive. If I have somebody that is gonna be literally in the office all day and can respond like that, you know, they need a commission statement or they need to see a book or whatever it is. It’s like within five minutes they can get it done.

Dylan Silver (23:37)
makes a huge difference. It makes all the difference in the world. think that, you know, time kills deals. Everyone knows that, right? And so having that offloaded and then also having that faster response rate, it just is tremendous on so many fronts. ⁓ Justin, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if they’d maybe like to reach out to you, if they’re thinking of getting a shore home or would just like to reach out to you?

Justin Bosak (24:01)
Yeah, JustinBosak.com, J-U-S-T-I-N, B-O-S-S-and-Sam, A-K, dot com. All my links and handles around there and just all kinds of different things. If you want to download anything from there too, I’ve got stuff for you.

Dylan Silver (24:15)
Justin, thank you for coming on the show here today.

Justin Bosak (24:18)
No problem, Dylan. Thanks for having me.

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