Slow and Steady to an Amazing Online Business with Joshua Dorkin

Founder & CEO http://www.BiggerPockets.com – Living and breathing real estate, politics, tech, startup life. – Joshua Dorkin

Joshua has a diverse background, in stocks the entertainment industry and teaching special education. His brother suggested he try real estate, and so he jumped in! But the amount of information you needed to do it right, and the amount of crappy guru’s selling information in that space is ridiculous. Joshua scratched his own itch and created a non-scammy site calle BiggerPockets that answers real estate questions. It’s grown into a huge business that has over 144,000 people in the community. Learn how Joshua grew his online business while having a day job, how he quit, and is building his company bigger and better in a non-scammy way!

Check out BiggerPockets.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today I have Josh Dorkin on the show. He's a friend of mine that I met in person - everybody told me that I needed to meet him and I didn't know why and now I do. He runs a site called biggerpockets.com, it's all about real estate investing, education, networking, all that fun stuff, and he's done an amazing job. I can't wait to dig in today. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Josh.

Josh: It's nice to know I'm needed.

Jaime: Exactly! I was impressed by how many times people told me about your website.

Josh: That's great.

Jaime: You're huge.

Josh: Apparently. That's what she said!

Jaime: Family show! Actually it's kind of not. Let's talk about, because it's all about real estate investing, give me a quick synopsis of how you got into that industry.

Josh: Sure. After school, after college, I got into the stock trading business. I was a property trader, traded for myself, and ended up burning out a little bit, moved back to New York and got into the entertainment business which actually brought me out to California, so I was dealing with all of those fun folks out in sunny SoCal. I got burned out on that as well, you know, as an entrepreneur we can only stick with one thing for so long. My brother suggested to me that I start buying real estate. He had found a book and gotten excited about real estate and jumped in and said "Why don't you do it?" I had some money sitting around on the side and I said "Okay, why not? Let me go and pick up some property. I'm a smart guy, I can figure this out. Let's do it!" So I did, and very quickly learned that the basics are great, the basics are pretty simple, but there's a lot of complexity involved in the industry. The books that you can get at the library or the book store or whatever, they don't really dig intoall of those details. I found myself looking for a place to get those answers and I went online. Online, I found lots of "Get rich quick!" and "You're going to make $1 million next week!" and all of that crap. As a New Yorker, my BS-ometer is finely tuned so I wasn't into it. I realized that there wasn't really a good place to go. There were a couple of sites that existed but it seemed like they were in bed with the gurus and while I think some of those guys have good information I don't love the constant upselling, I don't love the fact that somebody needs to spend $50,000 before they can get anything and so I thought "What can I do here? Let me build my own website.? Just to rewind a little bit - I had been building websites since 1994, just kind of playing around in college, nothing major, it was never some mass online success or anything like that, I literally did this on the sideline at the time that I was teaching high school. I was teaching special ed in Los Angeles and this was kind of a way to get answers for my own personal questions as an investor without feeling like I needed a shower.

Jaime: That's insane, though. So you weren't this crazy guru real estate guy when you started the website. It was more or less you trying to figure it out as you went too and you thought this would be a good way to figure it out.

Josh: At no point have I ever or will I ever claim to be the be-all, end-all of real estate. Granted, I probably, academically, know more about real estate than most people on the planet by virtue of what I do and what I read every day but I'm not the guy who's going to go up on TV and hawk some kind of, you know, "I'm the genius real estate guru man!" That's not me. Bigger Pockets was created as kind of a counter to that. it was created to establish a place where the community can be that expert, as opposed to one individual, because I don't care how expert you are, if I take 1000, 5000, 100,000 people and put their brains together, they're going to crush you. That's what we've got and that's what's happening.

Jaime: That's amazing. When you first started that, because now you have 144,000 people subscribed to the site, did you know it was going to get that big or were you looking at it as just another small thing that you did?

Josh: I didn't have a clue. It was "Hey, this seems like a good way to go. Let me play around." So, again, I was teaching high school, I was doing this on the side, nights and weekends, and people were coming little by little. I was starting to get the e-mails - "Thanks so much. This is a great resource. I love that there's an alternative to the upselling, the get-rich-quick, the sleazy kind of stuff that's out there," and word just spread. We've grown, I would say, almost 99.999% organically. It's been word of mouth and just hustle.

Jaime: Considering I heard about you I don't know how many times from other people that's extremely impressive. Especially in the day and age of pay per click and advertising dollars and getting people to see your site that way. So, first of all, how long ago was it that you started your site and take me through its growth and how it went.

Josh: We started nine years ago last week, I believe.

Jaime: Happy birthday!

Josh: Thank you very much. Sing to me!

Jaime: Oh gosh, no!

Josh: So nine years ago and, again, the first couple of years I was doing it while I was teaching. So I taught high school, I was doing this thing, and eventually I was done with the teaching thing. The burnout rate on special ed teachers is extremely high and so it was very rewarding but tough - it takes its toll. So I stopped and, at that time, I was actually getting married and we were also moving from California to Colorado. So there was lots of transition happening and part of that was "Let's focus on Bigger Pockets." So, to get from the beginning to here, when I first build the site it was just a forum, an open source forum using phpBB open source software.

Jaime: I remember that.

Josh: I created some HTML pages that were going to be these resource pages and then we just kept going and going with it, building more resources, adding stuff. This predated WordPress; this was in the Myspace time.

Jaime: Oh, Myspace!

Josh: Yes, I know you had a Myspace.

Jaime: I totally did. There are probably some people going "What's Myspace?"

Josh: Exactly. Did you bling it up? Did you bling yours?

Jaime: I wasn't very good with Myspace, to tell you the truth. I had a lot of friends, though. That means something.

Josh: I didn't. No friends. So Myspace was hot, right? I looked at it and I said "Listen, so we've got this cool community. Let's really go to the next level with it and turn it into the Myspace of real estate investing." So I went and hired this team, a project manager in the States and the team was in India. I was super excited and we were going to kill it, it was awesome, and month after month passed and I was getting back, little by little, not very much and, eventually, when I was supposed to have something of sustenance, I got back a big pile of crap. Seriously, I had spent a ton of money and I got back a completely unworkable, unusable chunk of code and had to chuck it. I had to chuck it. I could have fought and all that jazz but, you know, it just wasn't worth it.

Jaime: Huge learning lesson. Sucky feeling.

Josh: I learned a lot of things and realized, okay, well I should probably hang up my shoes now and walk with my head between my legs or let me go kill it and just find another way. I'm kind of a guy who doesn't like to lose.

Jaime: When I met you a couple of weeks ago I realized that. That's funny. Very competitive. In a good way, not a bad way!

Josh: Thank you for clarifying that for your listeners! So I went back to it and said "Okay, what can I do here? How can I transition this into something successful? How can I build it out?" I still wanted to go forward with that social network, but what was I going to do? At that point everything was built in PHP and HTML and I said "You know, the technology is starting to move in this other direction, all the hot companies are going into this language called Ruby on Rails. Let's try it - it's supposed to have this cool framework, we can do all of this stuff. I went and hired a guy and said "Okay, let's go piecemeal and build it a little by little. Take this phpBB forum and build profiles in Ruby on Rails and tie it to it." And he said "You're out of your mind. You can't do that; that doesn't work. It's not okay." I said "Don't tell me it's not okay. Is it possible?" He said "Yeah, it's possible. You just shouldn't do it." And I said "Okay, we shouldn't do it. Let's do it!" And so we did it and it was a big mess. It was glitch, it broke all the time, it had tons of problems, but little by little we would add new parts, phase out the forums and build our own proprietary forums, we built our blog network, we built this, that and the other. Eventually we kicked out the PHP and now we're completely on Ruby on Rails. Great idea, it was fantastic. Except for one thing - I cannot code in Ruby on Rails.

Jaime: You shouldn't need to, right?

Josh: You shouldn't need to if you come in and you've got the budget and money to handle a whole team of highly qualified people. Of course, as a bootstrap, I didn't have that, so it was a challenge because any time something needed to be done, I had to hop on and make tickets and have somebody else do it, even if it was a tweak of language. Any little thing I had to have somebody else done; my hands were tied. That's been a frustration. It's funny, it was one of the positive and negative tipping points - positive, now we're on this great framework, the site is fantastic but I have no personal capacity to affect the site other than through somebody else.

Jaime: Good and bad.

Josh: Pluses and negatives, exactly.

Jaime: Sometimes it's a good thing because sometimes, especially if you're a programmer, getting into the code is fun - well, I think so, but sometimes I screw things up!

Josh: So really quick, I'll fast forward - we've got it, we start building it on Rails and we're just kind of moving through time, adding stuff to the site, more and more people are coming, we start to get little press mentions and things like that so things are starting to move. About seven years ago now, maybe eight, we built a blog and I was one of the early real estate bloggers. At first it was all me writing and I realized I just can't. if I'm going to build an audience I need to build this into a magazine;I need to build a team. I started to bring contributors on and little by little we started to get more contributors. Today we've got, I think, 30-plus contributors writing for us every week, we've had hundreds of people write for us over the years. The blog is definitely one of the most popular in the space. Otherwise, we've built a podcast, earlier this year, which is killing it, it's going really well. We're plugging away. I'm sure you're going to ask me more questions so I'll dig in when you do.

Jaime: I totally will. You know me; that's what I do. Tell me a little bit about what the growth was like because a lot of the time people think word of mouth is slow. You've been doing this for a long period of time - can you benchmark your year one, year two? What was your growth like? Did it start doing an exponential curve later or was it slow and steady?

Josh: It has been the little engine that could. It really has. We've seen pops. We see a pop almost every January, which is the "Hey, I'm going to get rich this year!" kind of pop, I think. But the cool thing is, you'll see a pop and a nice gradual increase. So the pop is kind of a boost and we don't really lose a lot of those folks, which is kind of cool.

Jaime: Nice, that's huge.

Josh: It's been pretty steady. We haven't seen the real rounded growth but that's fine. Granted, I've had the sustainability, the ability to stick around for nine years. Had I quit after four, clearly there wouldn't be this amazing community today.

Jaime: Let's talk about that, though. Especially when you're working on your own and doing it nights and weekends. How did you go for years doing that? Because you said you did a couple of years of that.

Josh: It was a couple of years, yeah. First it was all about me. I mean, ultimately, I created this as a solution to my problem and my problem was that I needed information to help me resolve my own personal problems and my questions about real estate - and it did that. When it did that, when I actually started to get that resolution and when I had problems and blogged about them and people came in and were supportive I was like "This is unbelievable. I have to stick this through. I want more people to be affected by this." I saw that, even though people weren't flocking in by the tens of thousands, I saw that I was affecting one person at a time, two people, five people, twenty, and so I knew that if I stuck it out, we were going to continue to grow if we stuck to our standard of quality, not selling out, just trying to create this pure, cool place where people can get together and help one another. So, in terms of milestones, along those lines, I remember my first member that wasn't me. I remember my fifth, my tenth. I would call my brother and say "Hey, I just made 10c on AdSense!", "Hey, I just made $1, cool! What a great day!" I don't want to forget that stuff because you do get jaded and when you're making X-amount on a day, suddenly you're like "I'm not totally happy until I get Y or Z." I think that's good because it keeps you hungry but I think what I see a lot of people do is they forget about their roots, so I make sure to always get out there and be part of our community, welcome new members, reach out to them personally as often as I can and get feedback on what they like, what they don't like. I'm really big on quality control from our users. I want to hear what we're doing wrong because we could fix it if they tell us.

Jaime: That's awesome. It's really cool because if you have 144,000 they just become this mass, normally. Our brains just can't handle thinking of that many people in one specific space. So 10 probably doesn't sound like that much more, but if you actually care about them, they're real people. It sounds like you actually care about those 10 people and what they think and if they're using it and if it's good for them.

Josh: I do. We can't please everybody. That's something that we all learn. Anybody who's got an online business, you're going to have haters. I've got a lot of them. There are a lot of people who really, mordantly hate me.

Jaime: Really?

Josh: Well, yeah, because I've thrown a monkey wrench in their plan. Now there's an alternative to them where there wasn't before. Or people won't like me because we'll throw them out of the community because they come on and all they want to do is spam, spam, spam, pitch, pitch, pitch. They can do the pitching but they have to do it under our rules in the place that we designate, they just can't do it outside of that. Because when you go to places like Facebook or LinkedIn or other places it's a free-for-all. Most communities don't have strict policies or enforcement and moderation and we're very, very strict and always have been. They come and start getting angry and having hissy fits and threatening and doing all sorts of silly stuff.

Jaime: Let's talk about that. Because I know a lot of people are starting forums now and, especially at the beginning, going "How come I'm not getting much engagement? I don't know how to do this." Give us some good forum tips, because you've been doing this for a long time.

Josh: Don't do it.

Jaime: Oh, thanks, good! Tell me more.

Josh: Seriously, if I could do it again, I would not. That said, because it's very time intensive. In order to get a forum up and running and active you have to put in a ton of time to get those first users. Once you have them, who are they talking to? They're talking to you, so are you the guy who is always answering them? Do you have to hire a bunch of people to comment and answer, to get involved in that? How do you seed the community? You can do it by creating fake users, you can pay people to comment, you can do it a dozen other ways, but at some point you have to seed the community and if you don't do it, there's no energy, there's no life. I spent the vast majority of the first few years on the forums all the time. That's a lot of work. Most people don't want to work that hard. I don't want to work that hard. One of the best moments in the history of Bigger Pockets was the day that I realized that I could go a day without going onto the site and things would continue to grow. It was that freedom.

Jaime: Business owner. Not manager of everything. That's awesome.

Josh: Yeah, let's get out of the business and start to let it go on its own. You make a good point - owner versus manager. It was a hobby at first, so it wasn't a business first. Had I come to it from a different perspective, if I knew what I know today, I would have come in and said "I'm going to start this, I've got to hire people to do that annoying job of being on there constantly. Somebody needs to be in there, they have to continue to moderate the way we've been moderating but I'm not going to get my hands dirty." Then again, I didn't have the budget so I had to do it.

Jaime: What do you think about free versus paid forums? That way you're at least getting paid for your time. Not that you're not getting paid for your time, because you totally are with the model that you have, but still, do you think there's a difference between the two?

Josh: When I started it I don't think the paid forum model existed. I think I started to see that a couple of years later with some of the webmaster forums. Today, obviously, you've got all of these paid communities. I have hired consultants and I have talked to a lot of people who are very smart who have said "Josh, close it down. You're out of your mind having this open community that's free. The information is free, people would pay like crazy." And I agree - they would, they absolutely would, but they would because we built the community to size. I think starting a community from scratch and saying "You've got to pay to access this," I don't love that idea and, for me, the whole thing with Bigger Pockets is that I said very early on that the information in this community is going to be free, period. If I don't live by that, if I don't stand by that, I feel like I'd be selling myself out.

Jaime: Because you don't want to be like those gurus.

Josh: I'm not saying anybody who has a paid community is a scummy person, what I'm saying is, because of my dedication, because of my commitment to create this place where they can get the information free, as an alternative, I can't do that. That does limit my model a little bit and forces me to find revenues from other streams.

Jaime: That's exactly what I was going to ask next. Thanks for that segue, that's perfect.

Josh: I knew where you were going.

Jaime: So what are your revenue models?

Josh: We get paid from advertising, so we have an ad model. Google AdSense is a nice default. We do direct ad sales as well - so anyone listening who wants to market to real estate investors, call me!

Jaime: Actually I can connect you with someone, by the way. Remind me later.

Josh: Nice. But if you're one of the shady people, don't call me because you're not going to advertise on my site. I won't let you.

Jaime: I appreciate that. So you're really hardcore on who can and who can't?

Josh: I turn down probably 70% of the people who want to advertise on my site.

Jaime: That's awesome. Because for you this isn't really about the money.

Josh: I need the money - I've got three kids to feed! This is how I support my family, but it isn't about the money. I could very easily turn it on and sell out my users and I would probably double, triple, quadruple, quintuple my revenue, but I don't want to do that because, again, I really, strongly feel that what we're doing and how we're doing it is the right way to do it. So advertising, that's direct sales and AdSense on the site. We have a newsletter that goes out to, I think, 83,000, and that is going out twice a week, Thursdays and Sundays, and we sell ads on that as well. We've got a podcast now, as I talked about, and we have advertising on the podcast as well, sponsorships. So that's the ad model. We've also got partnerships, so we'll find companies in the space that have products or services that we think our users are looking for, that we know our users are looking for, and we'll partner with them and offer discounts and things like that to get access. TransUnion is one of our big partners, they've got a tenant screening process and we use that Rocket Lawyer. We've got a whole list of partners, so that's another line. Partners/affiliates, it's kind of that fuzzy line. We'll do a little bit of affiliate stuff for products that we really believe in, but it's mostly tools. We have paid memberships we currently have $5 per month and $14.95 per month paid membership, Pro and Pro Basic, and those give access to, not the information, but they give access to tools. We've created tools like a flipping calculator for house flippers, a calculator for buy and hold investors. Both of those give you the ability to print out reports. At the lower level you can print out a report and it has our branding and ads but if you pay the $14.95 you can print out the report, put your logo on, take that, give it to a lender and you've got this nice, professional report that you can use to get financing. We have access to analytics, who's looking at your profile, so you can say "Hey, you're checking me out. Cool, what are you interested in? Let's network - what can we do?" and things like that. That's the paid membership. Then we also created a publishing company that we launched earlier this year and we have published two books.

Jaime: Congratulations!

Josh: Yeah, we self-published through CreateSpace. We've actually sold over 5000 copies of the books in the past couple of months which, as an independent publisher, is pretty damn good, I think.

Jaime: Totally.

Josh: So that's another steam we've got. We've got another book in the works and we're planning for potentially two more in the next 6-8 months.

Jaime: Nice. So you have a lot of different streams of income, which is great. As it was first a hobby site, how did you feel when you started charging money for something that wasn't ads? Because putting ads there just makes sense, but when you actually started going "Hey, buy this thing!" was it weird for you? Because it sounds as though, in general, the guru model is "Hey, buy this thing!" and you didn't want to be sleazy about it.

Josh: Let me quickly look at the guru model. The guru model is "Hey, come to this free training." Well the free training isn't free training, it's a sales pitch for a course or a boot camp or something else where it's going to cost you money. The course is $997 - it's got to end with a seven.

Jaime: Yes, it does.

Josh: It has to. The course is $997. The bootcamp is $5000. The bootcamp is quite good, but you don't quite get everything. If you want everything you have to join my one-on-one mentoring. That's $25,000 or $50,000 or as much as I can squeeze out of you. I think I became really jaded about it when I started the site, because what I noticed was that people who had spent $25,000 and $50,000 and $997 would come to my site and they had questions. Why the hell would they come to my site to ask questions if they had just spent all that money? Well it was because they weren't getting the answers from those people. They needed a place to get all the answers despite all that and, to me, that sucks. If I'm going to spend $997 on a course I'd better get all the answers I need. If I'm going to spend $5000 on a bootcamp or $25,000 for mentoring, or whatever it is - come on, man. So that's what really put me over the edge. That's what gave me a bad taste towards that. that said, I'm not saying that every person who does that is bad. I want to clarify that, because some people are going to say "Hey, I've got this, yo think I'm a jerkoff?" No, no, no. I think it's the folks who pitch, pitch, pitch and never deliver. If you deliver consistently along the way and give me what I need - great! I wouldn't do it. I would never spend my money on that. However, some people need that, some people want that, and that's fine. No problem with it whatsoever.

Jaime: If someone's delivering $25,000 worth of value, that's awesome. But if they're not and they're charging for it, that's a problem. For you, specifically, then, charging $5 or $14 or whatever, that's not a big deal, because of course 1000 times over they're going to get the value.

Josh: They're going to get the value. It's affordable, it's reasonable, it's actually underpriced.

Jaime: It sounds like it.

Josh: We're planning on doing a price increase pretty soon. I'm preannouncing it; you're the first to know, actually.

Jaime: Right here on Eventual Millionaire!

Josh: What we're going to do is those folks who are paying what they're paying now will get to stay there, unless they cancel or something else and the new folks will pay the new price. But I never had an issue because we weren't selling access to the information, that continued to be free, it's all value added. So if they don't see the value in it, they don't have to upgrade. Anyone can join, it's free, they can network, they can connect. We have people doing millions of dollars in business because of our site and they are not spending a dime on us.

Jaime: That's an amazing thing.

Josh: It's nuts. I wish I knew the actual size of the Bigger Pockets economy because I know it's easily in the hundreds of millions, potentially more. I talked to a guy the other day who said "Josh, I've done about $1.4 million in profit in the past couple of years." That's profit, not revenue, because of Bigger Pockets and through relationships and partnerships that he's made through the site.

Jaime: That's insane. Did you ever, in a million years, when you first started the site, ever think it would be this big?

Josh: No, no, no. No. The irony is that there are hundreds of millions of dollars coming through the site and we're collecting $5.

Jaime: Ding, ding, ding = higher prices!

Josh: Higher prices and there are other ways that we're going to look at to monetize the community. Just yesterday, actually, I had a guy who's a hedge fund kind of guy who joined the site and started spamming. He was like "Hey, I've got this and that," and he's pitching it and we knocked him out, we moderated him, we said "If you're going to market, market in our marketplace. That's what it's for. It's $5 a month." This guy got such an attitude and he was like "I'm just networking. This isn't marketing, this is networking. You guys suck. I'm not going to spend $5 to market," and I'm like "Dude, seriously? You're not going to spend $5 to market millions and millions of dollars of real estate? You cheap bastard!" You know, it's like come on, man!

Jaime: Have fun with that!

Josh: Good luck when your clients find out what you just said.

Jaime: That's the one thing that I find really interesting that I liked your opinion on too - there are a lot of people in this world and some of them have their own problems that have nothing to do with your site or my site or whatever, and that's fine, and it's funny because they can still find a spot there and be mad about it, and the haters are something that people are scared of, especially when you're first starting a site. When I started my site, I remember I was going to be talking about money and I didn't know if people would like it. there were so many issues, especially because I'm the type of person that wants everybody to like them. That's one of my faults.

Josh: Aww.

Jaime: I know, isn't that sad?

Josh: Get a puppy.

Jaime: I have one. Well, she's 11 now but, yes, she loves me no matter what.

Josh: There you go, that's all you need.

Jaime: But it's hilarious, because that stuff at the very beginning really impacted me. If anyone said they didn't like something I was like "No,let me fix it!" and now you're like "Oh, yeah, internet." It takes all kinds.

Josh: I think that's a big part of it but even so I guarantee you, Jaime, that there are people who are starting their own sites, kind of like yours, or they have one and they see you and they're like "That Jaime, man, she's good. She's good and she's a threat and I need to watch out for her."

Jaime: Good. I know karate; you know that, so I'm fine.

Josh: Black belt, right?

Jaime: Brown. Second kyu. So not yet.

Josh: Ah, you know. There are a lot of people who are going to be threatened by somebody who's starting to become successful and people do and say bad things, there's not really much you can do, you've got to get a thick skin.

Jaime: Do you have a tip to get a thick skin if you don't have one already?

Josh: Become an actor.

Jaime: Oh, really?

Josh: I am a former actor. If you go out as actor and audition, you're going to get rejected left and right and so you very quickly learn to develop a thick skin. So become a singer, dancer, actor, something in the arts and try. Most of us can't do that but even taking a class, an acting class, will make you get up there and do something and your acting teacher will be like "You're not quite doing that," and you have to focus and say "I'm not going to let this affect me." I'll tell you a very quick story - one of my best friends from high school who continues to be one of my best friends today told me something back in high school that really stuck with me, and I think this philosophy is guiding me through my business. He said "You want to lead your life in such a way that when you're lying on your death bed you can say that you're proud of what you did," and you think about who's with your at your death bed - maybe your kids, maybe your spouse, just your very closet people, and if you lived good by those people and did right by them and you can run your business and life in a way that they would be proud of, then anything that anyone else says about you is meaningless. Look at my name - my name is Josh Dorkin. There's an elephant in the room.

Jaime: I didn't say anything.

Josh: It's okay. There's a big elephant in the room every time someone finds out my name. Dorkin, right? Yes, dork. Everybody listening, you guys can laugh - dork. Yes, I went through that a lot when I was 12 years old. You get a thick skin. But the key is, and I tell this to my kids, it doesn't matter what people say. It really doesn't matter. As long as you're happy. As long as you know that you're a good person and are going to do good things, who cares what other people think?

Jaime: I agree. I get Tardy jokes all the time, by the way, so I totally understand.

Josh: I am sorry I was tardy for this call.

Jaime: You totally weren't. I usually try to preempt it. I hate being late no matter where I am and then I try to make the joke so that I don't have to hear it a thousand times from everyone else. You do too - you bring it up.

Josh: I actually usually don't but you left an opening.

Jaime: I did, I tried. I really, really appreciate this. This has been really awesome. We have to start wrapping up and I always ask the same last question - what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Josh: The one action is to stop daydreaming about a dream. Stop daydreaming about what you're going to do and how cool it would be to stop working, to get out of the 9-5, take an opportunity and write down what you want to do. Write down what your options are. We tell this to the folks on Bigger Pickets all the time because we've got all of these guys who are daydreaming - they want to become real estate investors and they want to stop 9-5 jobs and they want to become a full time landlord or house flipper or whatever. Write down what your options are - "I want to do A, B, C, D, E, F, G," then look at it. Because there isn't one option that's going to work for every person - you need to determine what's going to work best for your financial situation, your familial situation,your personal situation. What's going to make you happy? Go through the pros and cons of everything on that list and then start plotting it - write your business plan. It doesn't have to be a formalized plan, but write down what you're going to do. At least getting it on paper gets you something to look at. Then the next thing I would do is share it. You have to share it with somebody. A lot of people talk about these accountability partners and I find it a little cheesy but I think, in theory, it makes a lot of sense. If somebody can say "Hey, you said that you were going to do this. Do it. What have you done today? What have you done lately?" Find somebody who can call you every week, every two weeks, and just find out how it's going. That little bit is going to get you moving.

Jaime: You might have some friends who are happy to do that too. "Hey, did you do that thing yet?" That's definitely good. I really appreciate that.

Josh: I could see you doing that, Jaime.

Jaime: I am a coach. I'm like "Did you do that thing yet?" It is amazing, being able to put the priority. A lot of times, when we're in 9-5 jobs, we don't put the priority, because it's not our top thing. Even if you've had that goal, that dream, it just stays as a goal or a dream, so taking that action is huge. That's exactly what you did -you went for years doing this thing as a side hobby, which is amazing. Most people won't even put that dedication into it but you did and now you're able to live the life that you want to.

Josh: Absolutely. The one quick thing that I would add to that is that what I don't want people to do is to half-ass their job. I think that speaks volumes about who you are if you do that. You have to find a way to continue to do your job in the manner which you promised to do it. find a way to do this on your lunch breaks and in the evenings and things like that, because if you're going to do that to somebody else, I don't know, I'm a big karma guy so I think it's going to circle back and when you have people working for you watch how quickly you get pissed off when they're dicking around on your time. You're not going to like it, so do yours on somebody else's time.

Jaime: Definitely. Well, that's the whole integrity thing, right? So when you're on your death bed you can have that. I really appreciate that.

Josh: Exactly.

Jaime: Thanks so much. Everybody should check out Bigger Pockets, which is biggerpockets.com. Check out the podcast, for sure. Where else can we find you? Is all that information on Bigger Pockets?

Josh: It is - facebook.com/biggerpockets, twitter.com/biggerpockets. YouTube, Pinterest - we're global, we're everywhere, but really biggerpockets.com is the best place to come and hang out with us. We have so many great people who are getting together, connecting, doing business and helping one another out. Check it out and I'll see you around.

Jaime: Become part of the Bigger Pockets economy. Go now!

Josh: Do it!

Jaime: Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Josh. I really appreciate it. Take care.

Josh: Thanks so much.

Jaime: I loved meeting Josh in person and I was so happy I was able to bring him here so that you guys can listen to his story too. It's kind of incredible how small he started out and how much it's snowballed since. I hope you enjoyed that. If you like interviews like that, make sure to check out EventualMillionaire.com because you can sign up and be notified every single Monday, Millionaire Monday, when a new interview comes out. I've got some amazing ones coming up soon so make sure you go to EventualMillionaire.com and sign up. Thanks!

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: internet business, joshua dorkin, millionaire interview, online business, Real Estate

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Starting A Business

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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