What’s holding you back from achieving professional growth in real estate? In this episode, we have Trevor Mcgregor, a high performance master coach with over 25,000 hours of coaching experience under his belt and a Master Platinum Coach with the Tony Robbins Group for 20 years. He is also an active and passive real estate investor. Join in as he analyzes the common problems and blockers we encounter along the way of our real estate journey. He shares that five things hold us back in growing, which brings us a list that we have to keep track of ourselves. We can break these blockers by keeping in mind the human needs that can fuel us in achieving our goals. Tune in for more!

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Five Things Hold You Back From Professional Growth In Real Estate With Trevor McGregor

Trevor McGregor is a High-Performance Master Coach with over 25,000 hours of coaching experience under his belt. He has worked with clients from around the world, including Fortune 500 executives, high-level real estate investors, entrepreneurs, world-class athletes and business professionals. They all come to him for one reason, life-changing transformation.

He is also an active and passive real estate investor holding assets in his portfolio that ranges from owning single-family homes to multifamily apartment buildings all over the US, self-storage units in Key West Florida and even an agricultural hemp farm in Colorado. He lives with his wife, Leesa, and their three amazing boys in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Trevor, welcome to the show.

What a bio. Thank you so much for having me on. It’s great to be with you.

Do you ever look at it and go, “Is that me or is that someone else?”

That’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where I’ve got to, but that’s the real deal. I’m blessed and grateful to have had quite a journey in real estate, in coaching and in life.

Let’s rewind to whenever this journey began. As you look at that journey, would you say, “I didn’t ever expect to wind up where I am or this is exactly where I had intended on showing up?”

This is unscripted. Growing up in Canada, all I ever wanted to do was be an NHL hockey player. That’s the Canadian kids’ dream. I played hockey to a very high level. I loved hockey. I loved all sports, but I soon found out I didn’t have the size to go any further. I traded in my skates for books. I went to university in college to study business and like everyone else, you go and you start your journey in the corporate arena. That’s exactly what I did. I studied business, went to work for this corporation and through my twenties and almost by the time I was 30, I was living paycheck to paycheck trying to climb that corporate ladder. That’s really where the story started.

What was the turning point when you said, “There has to be a better way?”

You get through college, your mid-twenties or late-twenties and you’re looking at where you want to be. You’re looking at the paycheck that comes in and goes out to pay the Visa, the mortgage, the car payments and feed the babies. I knew there had to be more, but I wasn’t sure how. That’s where I thought, “I’m at that age, about 30 years old, I better make some changes.”

Around that time, the owners of the business I was working in came to me and said, “We love the work you’re doing. We believe in you. We’d like to offer you to come in as a partner.” I thought, “This is my chance to get rich. I’m going to be able to become an investor and owner in a hospitality company.” That’s what I did. I scraped together all of my savings cashed in my 401(k) and I even convinced my parents to take out a second mortgage on the family home, a six-figure second mortgage.

You need to get up, dust yourself off, and keep on.

I dumped all of that money into this big restaurant and hospitality expansion and I thought, “This is it. I’m going to retire rich and young.” About a year and a half into that whole thing, the economy imploded around 9/11. We were expanding way too fast in five major cities in Canada. To make a long story short, we couldn’t hang on and I lost all of that money that I put into the expansion, every cent of it.

That’s a great way to start your thirties.

It’s a fabulous way, especially when you’re married and you’ve got two kids. There I was, broke. I gained a bunch of weight and I started to have a dust-up in my marriage. I don’t know if you or the audience have ever been broke, been carrying around a little bit too much weight or ever had a dust-up in their marriage, but I was at one of the lowest points of my life. I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay back all of these loans, let alone tell my parents I’d lost all that money.

Keep the story rolling. This is fabulous because this is not your life now.

That’s where the turning point happens because what do you do when you’re down and out? What do you do when you hit rock bottom? You seek guidance and thank God for me, I’ve found a coach. This coach was an amazing man. He said, “What happened to you is unfortunate, but you got to get up, dust yourself off and keep on keeping on.”

I started to read some books, started to work with him and started to listen to audios, but I still wasn’t sure how I was ever going to pay this back and then on one of our sessions, he said to me, “Have you ever thought of investing in real estate?” I said, “Real estate? I don’t know anything about real estate.” He said, “You can use other people’s money, buy a property, fix it up, either rent it out or refinance, sell it, move on and duplicate it.” That’s exactly what I did.

I started out scraping more money together and borrowing from other family and friends. I bought one little condo and that was a good experience. I took the money I made out of that and bought a townhouse. I took the money out of both of those and I bought my first duplex. I don’t know about you, but if you’ve ever discovered cashflow, it’s an amazing thing. That’s where I thought, “Duplexes are amazing.”

I went on to buy another one and another one, then I started to buy fourplexes and more fourplexes and then got into single-family homes. In just two and a half years, not only did I pay back all of those failed loans, but I had a nice cashflowing real estate portfolio on top of it. That was the start of my a-ha moment where I knew I was going to be in real estate and I was indebted to my coach, who made it all possible. That’s where the story gets even better.

That’s intriguing. I’d love to hear where the story gets better from that point forward because it almost seems at some point that the roads diverge where you ended up going into coaching and not so much as into real estate, but yet apparently, that’s not the case.

It’s both because around that time, people started coming up to me and saying, “How are you doing this? How are you buying these properties? How are you amassing this wealth?” I started to share it with everyone. It was my son’s baseball coach and my other son’s soccer coach, that I taught him and his wife what I was doing. Within one month, they went out there and bought their first rental property. Within three months, they bought their second and in that year, they had three cashflowing rental properties.

 

People would come to them and say, “How did you do it?” They’d say, “Go see Trevor.” I think that’s when the coaching bug bit. Around that same time, I was also working with a coach from the Anthony Robbins Corporation, and he said to me, “You’re so good at business. You’re so passionate about people and you know all of this stuff about real estate. Did you know that Tony Robbins is looking for more business coaches? Would you ever consider coming in and working part-time for him?”

I thought, “I’d love to, but I’m not an official coach.” He said, “We’ll teach you and train you. We’ll get you up to speed,” and so I put my resume into Tony Robbins. I did get hired. I went on to work part-time. Soon, fell in love with it because Tony started to give me all of the real estate people, and that’s when the coaching bug really bit.

I left everything I was doing. I went to work for Tony Robbins full-time for over half a decade, became one of his master platinum coaches and I fell in love with helping other people do what I was doing in business and real estate. Then in 2017, I left Tony Robbins to open my coaching practice, Trevor McGregor International and I’ve been coaching real estate investors all over the globe for the last couple of years and I’ve been building my real estate portfolio every week, month and year as we go. That brings us to now.

In 2017, up to that point, you were doing full-time coaching and not necessarily doing real estate and then you said, “We’re going to shift gears and go back to doing as much real estate and all the coaching that I can.”

That’s it. I was wearing two hats. I was married with three beautiful children, traveling, doing a lot of keynote speaking and joint venturing with people. I left that whole single-family and multifamily in Vancouver thing and started to go out there and buy multifamily apartment buildings in Dallas, Austin, Tampa and Memphis. All active and passively through some of these other real estate rock stars, like yourself, who do see real estate as one of the greatest ways to make an impact and income on the planet.

As I started to get more apartments under my belt, I thought, “Let’s diversify.” I went and did some self-storage. I went and did the agricultural hemp farm and started to play with resort property in Costa Rica. My wife Leesa and I have invested as far away as Brisbane, Australia. All real estate-related and all-knowing that real estate isn’t really about real estate. It’s about relationships. If you understand that, and I know you do, it’s amazing to see how you leverage those relationships and those people as professional pillars to help you win the game of business, real estate and life.

Was there ever a consideration for you of saying, “I’m going to hang up the coaching thing and just do real estate,” or is it that the coaching business or the coaching side of things is what fuels your real estate?

It’s the latter. I get fired up about seeing other people go out there and make things happen. Oftentimes, I’ll JV with a partner or I’ll throw some money into a syndication deal and it’s not so much about the deal. It’s that I’m betting on the person and I’m believing in that person. I’ve put a lot of real estate investors together. I’m coaching somebody over here that’s looking for a partner. I’m known as a connector, so oftentimes, I’m merging people and creating something out of nothing where three heads are better than two or two heads are better than one.

It’s been the sweet spot where I get to get up every day and coach people all over the US, the UK, Italy, Australia and even as far away as Asia. I watch them do something in real estate and at the same time, being a coach, a teacher, a mentor and a trainer because I’ve been through enough real estate deals that haven’t worked out, as well as some real estate deals that have worked out famously.

I do believe that there is no failure, there’s only feedback, and I do believe that sometimes we can learn more by taking that action and going out there. Putting in Letters of Intent, making offers, driving neighborhoods, talking to brokers, going to Meetups and listening to great podcasts where it compounds until we start to learn what not to do and what we should do to make things happen. What do you think of that?

Go out there. Make things happen.

You’re either reading my mind or telegraphed this somehow because my next question for you was going to be maybe not necessarily phrased this way, but now that you said it, the failure feedback loop. Walk us through that and maybe give us an example of a failure feedback loop and how you utilized it.

I think you know some of the people I’ve coached, so I’ll bring some real estate examples in. You might know my client, Joe Fairless. He is from the Best Ever Real Estate brand. I started coaching him before he could even think of buying an apartment. He had no apartments, no books and no podcasts. He owned four single-family homes in Texas, and fast forward, Joe has over 14,000 doors and $1.4 billion in assets under management. It’s mind-blowing. I didn’t just learn from my feedback, but I’d look at what he is doing, what Sally is doing and what all these other people are doing.

I soon found out that there were things you should do and things that you shouldn’t do. My feedback mechanisms have come off the opportunity to work with millionaires and billionaires because Tony Robbins says success leaves clues, and also some of the hiccups that Joe, Sally, Bob or I’ve gone through where you cross-pollinate. You start seeing again what to stay away from and then conversely, what to move towards. I think that’s been part and parcel of what’s allowed us to achieve a fairly phenomenal level of success in the last few years.

What are some of those success clues that you see across all disciplines?

Limiting Beliefs

I’d like to frame it backward because what I’m going to share with you and the audience is profound. There are only five things that ever hold anybody back from scaling in real estate. Once I share these five things, I want you to think about them for you or I invite the audience to think about them because these are universal. It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie, an intermediate or an expert in real estate. I don’t care who you are. You’re probably going to find them very familiar.

We kick it off with the first thing that most people are challenged with called limiting beliefs. You and I know that people have their cobwebs in their brains that stand in the way of them going from where they are to where they want to be. They’re like, “It’s hard to find good deals. All the good deals are gone. What if I lose money or what if I don’t run or manage the asset properly?” They’re focused on what they don’t want instead of us finding that the successful ones focus on what they do want.

They get clear on what they don’t want but they don’t camp out and focus on that. They shift it 180 degrees through the law of polarity and they go, “Here’s what I do want. Here’s the market I want to be in. Here’s the asset class. Here’s my price per door. I want to do it with these partners.” They get after it and then through cause and effect, they create their reality. Number one is to check in with your limiting beliefs.

Lack Of Strategic Plan

Number two is what I call a lack of a strategic plan. Most people spend more time planning their trip to Mexico than they do in their real estate world. What I like to do is start with the end in mind. What do you want and what’s preventing you from getting there? We then reverse engineer that all the way back to now, where we take a look at what do you need to do in the short-term.

That’s anything from now up to a year and what do you need to do in the long-term? Long-term for me is anything from 1 to 5 years and anything beyond five years is what I call your vision for your business and your life. Once we get rid of those limiting beliefs and we create the strategic plan, that’s the one-two punch that gets us on the way to success.

That’s so critical. Part of that strategic plan is also answering your why.

 

When the why is big enough, the how starts to show up. Lots of people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They think they’re doing it for the money when the money is secondary. What I always say is that money is secondary to the impact that you’re going to make because where there’s impact, there’s income. When you want to go out there and better a property, rehab a property, give a tenant a better life in that property or do some value-add stuff like swimming pools, dog parks or carports, that’s where we create value in real estate. That’s where we’re able to monetize it and then live a different lifestyle from.

That’s interesting that you bring up the topic of money. I was reading something about that and it’s a topic that I have a friend of mine that says and this may be divisive here when I say this but we’re going to get it out there, “If you want to know anything about anyone, know these three things. How they treat food, how they treat sex and how they treat money.”

It’s one of the three things that go down into your core and affects you in ways that you don’t understand. It’s a high-dollar business and you can get filthy rich doing it. How do you keep your focus in line such that the money isn’t necessarily the end goal? It’s part of the why, but not entirely. How does someone work around that and keep their hard-earned check on that?

I think it comes back to defining what you want and then seeing it in short-term, mid-term or long-term vision. If you think about going on a trip or driving a car, if you were trying to drive from LA to New York, that’s a pretty long ride. Sometimes it’s going to be at night and you need to remember that your headlights are going to shine 50 feet in front of the vehicle and when you get to that part, they’re going to shine another 50 feet and then another 50 feet.

Eventually, you can get to New York. I think real estate is the same way. You’ve got to measure your progress. You got to have benchmarks for success. You got to have goals, statistics and measurements that allow you to say, “Am I on track or off track?” If you’re on track, keep going and if you’re off track, we call that course-correcting.

We’ve got the first two limiting beliefs. Two is the lack of a strategic plan. What is the third one is?

Lack Of Systems For Support

This is a big one and this is what I call number three, a lack of systems for support. We can get rid of the limiting beliefs, we can create the plan, but if you’re not building out systems, not defining roles and responsibilities of the partners, and not leveraging technology, you’re going to be creating the wheel or trying to recreate the wheel on the fly and that’s not how real estate works.

We look for tried and true systems that are solid, repeatable and that give us measurement and data to help us go out there and win the game of real estate. That could be systems in finding deals, raising capital, running the asset or managing the business plan. There are a ton of different things that we need to do to put the right people in the right seats on the bus and that’s one of the things that I love helping people build out so that they don’t have to do it on the fly.

That’s a tough one because, in this business constantly, things influx. There are constantly new things that needed to get added on or taken off the plate and those systems are constantly evolving. I think that’s probably any business owners’ greatest struggle.

You bet, especially in this world. I’ll give you a nod for sharing that because it’s a very actively managed process. We not only do that, but we take a look at, “What are your strengths? What is your skillset? What are you good at? What do you love doing?” Conversely, “What are you not good at doing? What is something that you should be outsourcing to a partner or a virtual assistant?” To be transparent for me, I’m all about finding deals.

You have to have benchmarks for success.

I love to go out there to hunt for deals and to talk to brokers. I love to raise capital, but if you want to know, I’m not the guy you want underwriting the deal. That’s for some of you guys that can work the Excel spreadsheet. Can I do it? Sure. Is it something I love doing? Not so much. Is that good, bad, right, or wrong? I say nothing has meaning until you assign it meaning and I’d rather go out there and find deals and raise money any day.

That’s already 1, 2 and 3 beliefs, plans or systems. What’s number four?

Poor Time Management

Number four is what I call poor time management. Here’s the truth. After working with as many people that I have and doing 25,000 coaching calls, and that is an actual statistic, I’ve seen people take their 168 hours a week, and that’s what we all have, 7 times 24 is 168 hours. We sleep for some of those. We eat, pay the bills and play with the kids, but what are you doing with the leftover time you’ve got?

It doesn’t matter if you’re in a W-2 job and you got to do real estate on the side or if you’re a full-time real estate investor. I found year over year that the quality of the output of the time people were spending on their real estate didn’t yield what it could have because people get busy doing what we call busy work.

They’re making their website pretty, printing their business cards and playing around with market data instead of getting out there and doing what I call the high impact, high-income activities, like getting in front of brokers, making offers, talking to landlords and property managers, finding out how to get those off-market deals that got a lot of meat on that bone. Until people stop and take a look at how they’re using time and what their beliefs are on time, you can’t course-correct it. People love doing that with me.

You’re hitting home on that one for almost anybody. That’s an iterative process. You’re constantly going, “Put this on the plate, take it off the plate. Put it on the plate, now what do I do with this? This shouldn’t be on the plate at all.” Deep Work by Cal Newport is a great book on using your time wisely. If it doesn’t fit into that deep work block or work category, it’s like, “Why am I doing this?”

We call it your zone of genius. Some people are smart and have a good IQ, some have a big EQ, that’s the emotional quotient and some have a real creative flair. They love staging properties. It doesn’t matter what asset class you’re in. You got to crystallize or crystal clearly define what you should be doing and what you should be leveraging to other people.

What is the fifth point, please?

Lack Of Execution/Accountability

The fifth and final one is a lack of execution and a lack of accountability. We can get rid of your limiting beliefs, we can create this strategic plan, we can create systems for support and we can even help you with time management. If you’re not out there taking intelligent and inspired action, you’re fooling yourself. Intelligent means smart. Inspired means you get fired up to do it. You don’t have to do real estate.

I believe we all get to do real estate. It’s one of the greatest wealth vehicles known to man. People have been fighting over land for thousands of years and going to war over land. I hope we don’t have to go to war anytime soon, but I think the people that are smart and savvy enough to see that people need places to live and that’s never going to go away, can benefit from a time that we’re in now.

 

What would you say are some ways that you have found you keep yourself accountable?

It’s not rocket science. You sometimes not only have to define what you want but also define what we call duration of time or deadlines. Let me explain both. We’ll start with a deadline. A deadline is you drawing a line in the sand and saying, “By such and such a date, I will have identified three great markets. I will have looked at job growth, population growth or crime rates,” and you set a deadline to have something done and you hold yourself accountable to that or you and your partners hold yourselves accountable, or a coach like myself can hold you accountable to what we call a deadline.

Duration, on the other hand, is almost taking an educated guess about how long you need to spend time on something. If I was going to go into any major city in the US, I’d fly down there and I’d create a duration of three days to drive around, to talk to brokers, general contractors or property managers. I’d talked to the milkman and the mailman.

I’d do anything I could in that three-day duration to give myself what I call the competitive edge. I do believe that the best way to get proficient at this is to go out there and talk to as many people as you can knowing that sometimes 80% of what you talk about isn’t going to help you, but 20% of it is going to skyrocket your ability to make decisions and be successful absolutely.

I think that’s so spot on because of the 80/20 rule, one, and then I think back to my journey in real estate. I think about all the time at foreclosure auctions, all the time driving, talking and all seemed wasted. I have a few key memories from a few conversations that were like a-ha moments but you had to be there.

Hindsight being 2020, you got to go back and look at how do these five things affect you. If you had limiting beliefs, do you still have them or have you moved beyond them? I don’t think we are ever clear on all of them. Do you create a plan? Do you create systems for support? Are you open to seeing a better way to do things with your time? Are you executing and then holding yourself or having someone hold you accountable?

This is what I have seen my clients go out there and rinse and repeat over and over again to climb up that real estate growth curve or mountain to where they’ve built fairly sizeable portfolios in all facets, whether it’s single-family, multifamily, assisted living, mobile home parks, self-storage and agriculture. It’s because it doesn’t matter what asset class you’re in, it’s that those five things are applicable to all of them and more.

When you look to the future, what do you want your investing and coaching business to look like? You give this 1, 5 and 10-year plan. I’m sure you’ve got that figured out for you as well. What is that?

It’s constant and never-ending growth. Growth of impact, income and units, cycling through deals. Maybe we’ve got some five-year business plans on a property that we fully cycled. Some of them are cycling early because of this tremendous stuff going on in say, Austin, Texas where our five-year deals and performers are wrapping up in 3 to 4 years, so we’re getting out of those and putting our money to work in other markets like Florida, Indiana, Memphis and The Carolinas. We’ve gone in a fairly sizable way.

It’s seeing constant never-ending growth as well as constant never-ending learning and bringing more people into this space. I’m a big believer that it’s not all about competition. It’s about collaboration and that there’s enough real estate and enough piece of the pie to go around for all of us. The hungrier and the more passionate some people are, they’re going to get the piece of pie first, but it doesn’t mean that if you’re straggling behind or you’re up against a wall, you haven’t found the right partners or you’re afraid to raise capital that you can’t start going to more Meetups.

Where there’s passion, there’s possibility.

You’re listening to more podcasts, going to more real estate events, and eventually, that high tide lifts all boats because I do believe that we become who we hang out with. I know who some of the people are that you hang out with and you know some of the people I hang out with. I have a belief that we’re all better together. I can learn from you, you can learn from me or I can learn from Joe Fairless like he can learn from me and I’m telling you, that’s what makes this whole economy work.

I find that no more than in real estate. That was one of the things coming from other industries, about how collaborative this industry is. It’s still competitive. Don’t get me wrong. There’s still competition, and they’re still duking it out for a deal, but by and large, you can get on a show like this and what other industry are you doing that is where people are telling you exactly the blueprint for how to go do their own business?

Remember, competition is what allows us to roll up our sleeves, get up a little earlier, read more books and show up ready to play full-out. It’s like sports. It’d be terrible if a hockey match was going to be considered a tie at the end of the game. No one would go to watch it. It speaks to what Tony Robbins talks about called your six human needs. At the end of the day, I’ll share the six human needs because it’s really what’s fueling you, it’s fueling me and it’s feeling the audience. I do believe that real estate rings the bell for all six of these.

The first one Robbins talks about is number one, that need for certainty. We all need certainty and we want to be certain that we’re going to preserve our capital. That we’re investing in a landlord-friendly state and that we’re going to be able to execute the business plan. We definitely are all driven by that need for certainty.

Number two is the opposite of that. It’s the need for uncertainty, also known as variety. That’s why I invest in different asset classes, states and countries. At the end of the day, I think real estate gives us certainty and it gives us variety. That takes us to number three, which is the need for significance. It’s that feeling of being unique, important or special.

Some get it by calling themselves real estate investors. Some get their significance by owning 100, 500 or 1,000 doors. Some get it from having a certain net worth. Some get it from being a capital raiser and that’s their identity. Ultimately, number three is feeling those feelings of some uniqueness, importance and that you’re adding value to others.

I would tie that one back to your why as well. Your significance and your why like, “Why am I doing this?” Those two are very closely related, I would think.

I love you saying that because if your audience can get out of bed every day and sometimes people’s feet hit the floor and they go, “Oh God, it’s morning,” I want your feet to hit the floor and you get up and you say, “Good morning, God. Thank you for another opportunity to go out there and do what I love to do.” I think a lot of the people that are reading this, they’re not only hungry for more real estate, but they’re also truly passionate about it, and where there’s passion, there’s a possibility.

What’s number four?

It’s that need for connection. Not in about you, but I think that we as real estate investors, we’re connecting with people all day every day, whether you’re on this show, you’re talking to brokers, lenders, general contractors, insurance salesman or landscapers. What other business do you get to work with so many diversified people to win the game of real estate? Number four is what we call connection.

 

Five?

It’s the need for growth. Think about it for a minute. If I asked you if a plant isn’t growing, ultimately, what’s happening to it?

Dying.

We don’t want to die. We don’t even want to survive. Guys like you and I and the audience, we want to thrive. The only way you’re going to thrive is to continually grow every day, every week, every month, every quarter and every year. Sometimes, we might hit a speed bump and go down a little just like I did in my journey, but that’s an opportunity to get up, dust ourselves off and find a different path to go and grow with.

The idea of not just survive but thrive, that’s something I think that all of us aspire to but something we probably don’t think that much about very often is, what does thrive look like?

Thriving comes from getting inspired. Maybe having a role model or seeing somebody do something great and it’s not just in real estate. Maybe you’re an Elon Musk fan, a Richard Branson fan, a Steve Jobs fan, an Oprah Winfrey fan or a J.K. Rowling fan. I think that as we see other people going out there and growing and achieving phenomenal levels of success, there’s this little feeling inside of us where that fire that’s in our belly for success isn’t just kindling, we throw a log on there because we all are meant to go big. We’re all meant to grow and become more than we are now than we were yesterday.

What’s number six?

Number six is what we call the need for contribution. We’ve got to get out of bed every day and ask ourselves, “How can we give ourselves an opportunity to better the planet, someone else, the community, investors or a property?” At the end of the day, if you’re able to meet all six of these six human needs consistently, it leads to fulfillment.

That is what I’ve been able to find after doing as many calls as I’ve done and looking at my journey. At the end of the day, we just all want to be fulfilled. I believe that real estate gives us certainty, variety, significance, connection, growth and contribution, so if you’re really in it to win it and you’re thinking about those things and on an upward trajectory, I believe that you can be incredibly fulfilled from this as well.

A lot of times, we’ll piecemeal it together. At least I know I’m guilty of it. I had a vision I’d written out that’s like, “In 5 to 10 years, wouldn’t this be great?” I keep a daily journal and I read it every day, but then one day, I was like, “This is empty. If I hit this someday, I’m going to be disappointed when I get there.” I was like, “Scratch that.” It didn’t have in the end that fulfillment component. It’s neat that defining your why and going through those six things that you mentioned is the recipe. Follow this recipe and you will find fulfillment. I think that’s powerful.

It is. I love what you said there because I think that once we set a goal and sometimes people will set small goals, medium goals or gigantic goals, but the goal isn’t just about achieving the goal, it’s who you become on the way to achieving that goal. When you get to that point where you have achieved that goal, it’s the universe’s way of saying, “It’s time to set another one.” When we all worked in corporate, for most of us, we said, “If we could make $100,000 a year, that would be incredible.”

Don’t try to go it alone. You can learn a lot from people.

As some people make $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 or $80,000, if they could get to $100,000, that’d be amazing, and then what do you do when you get to making $100,000 a year? You want to make $200,000, and then when you make $200,000, you want to get to $300,000, $500,000 or $1 million. It’s the same thing for people in real estate. Once you achieve that goal, if you don’t sit down and define what the next goal is, you’re in trouble because you get into that place where we plateau.

It’s okay to take a breather and maybe rest and celebrate for a while, but if you’re a driven person and you’re a high performer, I bet there’s another level for you to get to. It’s almost like what I teach and you’ve heard me talk about this before where I say, “Why be good when you could be great? Why be great when you could be excellent? Why stay at excellent when you could be outstanding?” If you want to be somebody that goes to one of the highest levels, we go from outstanding to extraordinary.

I invite you and the audience to take an inventory of where you’re showing up on that level. Are you good, great, excellent, outstanding or extraordinary in looking for deals, underwriting properties, raising capital or running the business plan? If you’re lower down that ladder than you want to be, ask not what do I need to do, but who do I need to be to get into taking intelligent and inspired action to climb that ladder in all areas. You don’t need to be at the level of outstanding or extraordinary in everything, but certainly, you want to be playing above the line.

Let’s jump here into some final questions. If you were to help our audience avoid just one mistake in real estate, what would it be and how would you avoid it?

Don’t try to go it alone, folks. Real estate is not a one-man band. It’s you aligning with other like-minded individuals that have a passion and a purpose where you combine your efforts to go further faster. I always have the saying and it comes from Tony Robbins, that if you surround yourself with the right people, you can turn decades into days. It’s absolutely true because each of you is bringing a certain skillset, a certain mindset and a certain heartset to the deal.

When it comes to investing in the world, what’s one thing you’re doing now to make the world a better place?

We have a big charitable foundation that my wife and I do, not only in real estate but with her book publishing company, because she’s an author, a speaker and a coach. What we do is we take some of the money that we earn in real estate and we go back and we give to certain charities, and for every book she sells, she plants a sapling tree somewhere on this Earth. We planted trees in California, Oregon, British Columbia, Washington State, Australia and even as far away as Africa. It’s amazing.

For people that want to get in touch with you, what is the best way to do that?

Thank you for having me on the show. This has been an amazing conversation. I hope the readers get some real juice out of it. For anyone that wants to connect, you can either find me on my website, which is simply TrevorMcGregor.com or head over to LinkedIn. You’ll find me there. I invite anyone that wants to chat further to shoot me a message. I’ve also introduced something cool on my website, which is called a Private Podcast.

It is where I give eight weeks of absolutely unbelievable coaching for any investor that wants to go further faster and I give it to you at a ridiculous price where it’s almost a no-brainer. For anyone that wants to check out my private podcast, it’s called Rich Beyond Belief. It’s all about using real estate and a lot of these concepts I’ve spoken about to go out there and crush it in business, real estate and in life.

Thank you so much. I do appreciate it.

Thank you.

 

Important Links:

• Trevor McGregor
• Deep Work
• LinkedIn – Trevor McGregor
• Rich Beyond Belief

 

About Trevor McGregor