Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Fri, 17 Jan 2025
Stuck in the relentless cycle of fluctuating commissions, I found a turning point in my real estate journey through a shared passion for lacrosse with Jason Griggs, a colleague whose friendship has been a source of inspiration. Together, we unravel the complexities of transforming your career by making strategic choices that align with personal values and goals. From our own experiences, we share how critical it is to evaluate the activities that truly propel us forward, both financially and personally. Join us as we explore how Jason's leap from a devoted lacrosse coach to a successful real estate entrepreneur showcases the power of transferable skills. His incredible story of growing from 12 to 39 rental properties is a testament to turning passion into substantial real estate success. Delving into the intricacies of balancing professional ambitions with family commitments, the episode highlights the profound satisfaction that comes from aligning business strategies with life priorities. Get ready for a conversation filled with insights on leveraging your unique strengths to fuel both personal and financial growth. 💬 Did you enjoy this weekly drop? Tell us all about it in the comment section below! ☑️ If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford ************* 💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space. ➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company. ➡️ Streamline Home Loans - An independent mortgage bank with more than 100 loan officers. The Simply Group, A national expansion vehicle partnering with large brokers across the country to vertically integrate their real estate brokerages. ************* ✅ Follow John Gafford on social media: Instagram ▶️ / thejohngafford Facebook ▶️ / gafford2 🎧 Stream the new Weekly Drop here: Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9 Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283 ************* #weeklydrop #johngafford #jasongriggs #realestate #career #passion #lacrosse #strategicchoices #personalvalues #financialgrowth #transferableskills #rentalproperties #businessstrategies #lifepriorities #consistentincome #success #coaching #mentoring #timemanagement #familycommitments #personalfulfillment #professionalnetwork
Chapter 1: What challenges do real estate agents face?
So many agents get caught on the commission hamster wheel, right? Where it's like they make a bunch of money and they don't do any work and then, yay, I'm rich, I'm rich. No, I'm broke, I'm broke, I'm broke, I'm broke. It's the rollercoaster up and down.
Chapter 2: How can you achieve a steady stream of income in real estate?
And if you can just work consistently in the business and put forth the right effort and the right amount of effort compared to what the market is doing in your KPIs balance, well, now you have a steady stream of income. And then you can turn those commissions instead of the end goal into the fuel that really fires the rocket ship.
from the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift this is the weekly drop with john gafford no matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on make sure you like subscribe and comment and now the drop welcome back to the program everybody this is the weekly drop this is normally my little solo pod that i do on thursdays
And this week, man, I'm doing it with somebody. I got a guest on the weekly drop. So I'm not doing a full escaping the drift. We're not going to go for 40 minutes. This is still going to be like 15 minutes. But there's something that I want to talk about that this dude is kind of the walking, talking example of this. And I wanted to bring him in.
And if you're somebody that finds yourself burning the candle at both ends, you've got all kinds of things that you do, all kinds of stuff.
There's an exercise that I do once a year, and I just went through this, and I didn't really sleep last night, not because I was still doing the exercise, just because when I get done doing this, it's such an introspect at your life, and it's such a way that you're forced to go deep
on looking at the things that you choose to do and whether or not they continue to serve you in the best possible way. And sometimes that requires some very tough choices and some choices that are still out there.
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Chapter 3: What important life choices should you evaluate?
For me, I ran numbers like crazy all day yesterday looking at the expenses I have in things, looking at return on time, how much time I spend on things, and whether or not those things serve me or continue to serve me. And this goes from I mean, you know, angles in my business. It goes from overall businesses that we spun up, auxiliaries that we spun up around the company. It's this podcast.
It's relationships with groups I go to. It's all types of different things. And if you are somebody that just kind of says yes to everything, which I like to say yes, I'm easily excitable. Man, that sounds a good idea. Let's do that. I definitely feel like I'm smarter than everybody else, unfortunately.
So when I hear somebody being highly successful at something, I'm like, if that dude can do it, I know I can do it. I know I can. And like I said, we're going to get a little more into my personal journey on it. But welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. This is one of the guys that works at our company, and he is one of my aces. This is Jason Griggs. Jason.
Round two.
Round two, buddy. You've been on here before. And again, I grabbed you with this. Um, I'm going to, I'm going to get to your story a little bit before I get to mine, but when we met, right, we met and you were essentially, I sent out an email, um, Actually, no. I got on Facebook because I walked in my son's room one night and he was watching lacrosse, like college lacrosse.
And I'm like, what are you watching? And he goes, I'm watching lacrosse. And I go, and he just randomly found it on a channel. And he goes, I think I want to play this. And I said, okay, cool. I've never played lacrosse. I'm from Florida, dude. We just...
play football baseball you know basketball like america we don't play these furniture sport yeah whatever it is so they do now obviously but back then i never played lacrosse so you know i get on i get on the interwebs and hey who do i know that could tell me anything about lacrosse And Jason hit me right up. He was a realtor at another company.
And he hit me right up and said, yeah, man, I can help you, dude. I actually coach the middle school team here. And he used to be the high school coach. And I can help you with that. And literally helped teach my kid lacrosse and got him into it and helped us. And I'll be forever grateful for that. You know, medically DQ'd Hayden. His career got cut a little short with the bad ankles. That's okay.
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Chapter 4: How did Jason Griggs transition from coaching to real estate?
That's all right.
um he had fun he did have fun he had a great time and when when we met you were you were doing you were running your lacrosse business as a business and it's your passion dude you've been doing this forever like you play lacrosse forever yep live eat breathe die lacrosse and still do because i see your sons who are like little still running around with lacrosse sticks right still but you know you were doing this chasing this passion doing this thing you loved and real estate was kind of something you did a little bit of yeah
And you made a very difficult decision.
I did.
To let go of the lacrosse stuff, to let go of it. And we were just laughing before we got on here because if we'd had a reality show with how some of these parents treated him, it was amazing. I saw some of the worst behavior I've ever seen in my life out of adults at some of those meetings. And I don't miss them. I don't miss them.
I mean, very rarely do I sit in a room and just kind of move speechless. There were times that I was just absolutely speechless in those rooms, but, but you took a lot of abuse from those folks and you let go of something you loved and you got headfirst into real estate and have just had, I mean, I'm talking about, nuclear results. So I want to talk about that.
What was that like giving up something you loved?
Hard. Very hard. I think you saw how you were there. You saw the emotion of it. But I had a conversation with some of the parents on the team who are mentors of mine, business owners, and they were like, you got to let this go. This is not going to get you.
to where you want to be at the top of your game of real estate and when you coach sports youth sports it's like you don't do it for money you do it for the passion of the game and i love mentoring kids that was the real reason why i did it but when I met you and I saw you, I wanted to essentially be you. I wanted to be what you were doing. Oh, look at that.
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Chapter 5: What emotions come with letting go of a passion?
Closing your 39th next week. So in a very short amount of time, you did that. And you took that passion for coaching. And what I love about your team in particular, your group, and this is not an infomercial for Jason's group, it just shows how he took his passion to something that makes more money.
when you took that passion for what you're doing and put it towards real estate your agents on your team like how to sell real estate because you're basically using the same systems and process i use which is great but you're taking it for your people and putting your own spin on it which is teaching them how to actually invest in real estate yeah and that's the most important thing
Because we see so many agents, they could do this business for 50 years. And if they don't own assets. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's the real win in the real estate business by owning the homes. I learned that very quickly. Right away, I learned that.
Well, so many agents get caught on the commission hamster wheel, right? Where- It's like they make a bunch of money and they don't do any work. And then, yeah, I'm rich. I'm rich. No, I'm broke. I'm broke. I'm broke. I'm broke. It's the roller coaster up and down.
And if you can just work consistently in the business and put forth the right effort in the same the right amount of effort compared to what the market is doing in your KPIs balance. Well, now you have a steady stream of income and then you can turn those commissions instead of the end goal into the fuel that really fires the rocket ship.
You nailed it. And you've taught me so much about just business of organization, numbers, KPIs. So what I did, I went back and I looked at how much my real estate portfolio has made me each year since I started. The number is staggering. It's like an extra half a million dollars a year that you don't even think about that you are just earning every single year as that real estate goes up.
What I'm teaching my agents is, look, we're going to be the best serving real estate agents on the planet. And what we're going to do with that compensation, we're going to go buy real estate smartly. And in my opinion, there's no better place to buy real estate than Las Vegas. Yep.
Got it. I love it. So, I mean, again, you look at all those things. And with my process of stuff, a lot of it is in the numbers as well. Because I think... You know, you look at things and unfortunately with me, like the decisions that I make, a lot of it is very intertwined. Like I do this because it needs to lead to this. And I do this because it goes with this and I do this.
And so it's these connected interwebs. And so, you know, for example, this podcast, this podcast is really designed and it's a lot of work to do this, man. It's not easy. Yeah. It's a lot of work, it's monetized, but it doesn't make me a ton of money, but the effort we put into it. But this is totally designed and totally put out there as an avenue to promote my book, right?
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Chapter 6: How did Jason go from 12 to 39 rental properties?
but the real thing that hit me was how could i go and be on a field all day and not be with my own kids yeah and that was like the real turning point where i was like you know what this is the right move yeah money aside real estate aside when you start your own family i'm like because there's coaches out there that don't that aren't with their family buddy you get 18 summers that's it 18 summers that's what you get and with the lacrosse team i have amazing mentors amazing over the years awesome
Not everybody, but some really good ones. You're included. And that decision was made partially on business, but family. I want to build my own family.
I think that's part of that, is this serving me? Is this particular thing serving me? And you look at, like right now, I've got some things in front of me and some things that are out there where it's like, you know, what you focus on grows always. And when your focus is too scattered, nothing grows right.
And there were some things I looked at last night that I've been maybe a little lazy at looking at numbers on that. I was like, Whoa, that ain't good. All right. Whoa. Yeah. Okay. We got to get this in line fast and we got, you know, and steer the ship and it's stuff that for years would have just been fine. Like I just assumed it was fine.
All of a sudden you're like, Whoa, I gotta, I gotta give that some attention. And yeah, you know, dialing back on the amount of things you're doing and going less wide and more deep sometimes. And this comes from like, I'm the king of vertical integration. I get that. But, but really going deep on certain things you're doing, focusing on and asking yourself, how does this serve me?
Not just financially, but like you said, with your family, it needs to be how much, like for example, all of the mastermind groups that I'm in takes me out of town four days at a click all the time, gone all the time. Like, am I getting a return? Like, I love all the guys there. I love everything that happens there. I love the information I get.
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Chapter 7: What are the key lessons learned from this journey?
But am I really getting enough out of it to justify not just the financial investment, but the time away from my now ticking down to one more summer on Hayden and two more summers with Roma?
Yeah. I think the scariest part for me was the lacrosse team was my network. That was my real estate network.
I remember you saying that.
I was like, I'm going to lose everybody. I didn't lose anybody. Not one person. No, they still come to me. I'm still the real estate guy at Henderson that everybody trusts.
Yeah, but here's the thing. But here's what people don't realize also. If you're scared to move out of one situation, because there's a lot of people in real estate too that work a job and they're like, well, that's where I get my contacts and my clients. That's my network. Well, dude, the only way it dies is if you let it die. Correct.
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Chapter 8: How can passion fuel your career success?
Just because you're not there doesn't mean you can't keep in the loop with people. It doesn't mean you can't have a checklist to interact with them mathematically through social media, a checklist to call in, a checklist to send them a handwritten note, a checklist to remind them you still exist. Checklist to drop in on people. That's on you.
And then the second part of it was I elevated the people I was working with too. So now you're working with, now that I don't have to, they're normal people. Right now, I like working with athletes. That's like one of my niches. So I like going and going to the UFC fights. I represent a lot of the UFC fighters now. That's my new network. I'm in those rooms every time. I'm going to L.A.
this weekend to watch Merab.
Is that fight still going to be in L.A.?
Still going to be in L.A. ? Wow. And so he's going to bring me in all these different rooms with Aljo. Love it. And that's my new network now, and I realize that. So I'm at every single UFC event, and it's been a game changer.
And you have time to do that. Yeah, time.
I've never gone to a UFC fight at a state with coaching.
It's hard. I'm telling you, dude. This week, listen. If you are, again, I'm going to sum this up because, you know, I think we just reached a point where we've made our point, which is, hey, don't be scared to say no to stuff. I mean, for me, like, I think of it this way. One of my New Year's resolutions, if you will, was if it ain't hell yeah, it's got to be hell no.
Like, if you think of like, think of like the yes on a meter, right? Where like you have like the green, like a meter in a car that you would see, like on a dashboard of a car, right? And over here you have the green where you have the yes. Right. And then over here you have the red, which is no. And like the very bottom is like, hell no. And the very far right is like, hell yes.
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