Turning Points – Lessons From A Renegade’s Journey In Real Estate With Goose McGrath Of dashdot Buyers Agents

A lot of things are different in real estate down south in Australia, but the main challenges are fundamentally the same. In this episode, Jen Du Plessis brings in Australian buying agent, Goose McGrath, the CEO of dashdot Buyers Agents, a company that specializes in helping investors build profitable portfolios using their proprietary Holy Trinity Formula – a renegade strategy that challenges deep-seated beliefs and practices in the highly conservative Australian market. Tapping into an untapped niche on the buyer’s side, Goose built a profitable business with relatively less competition. It took Goose some time to find real estate, however. Right from when he was 17, he ran his own business organizing music festivals. When he started in real estate in his 30s, he had barely any knowledge or experience in the field and made some pretty serious mistakes. Goose may have achieved his own success now, but it was the turning points in his crazy journey that have given him the biggest learning experiences in his career. Listen in and learn a thing or two from his story.

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Turning Points – Lessons From A Renegade’s Journey In Real Estate With Goose McGrath Of dashdot Buyers Agents

I have a fun guest with us, Goose McGrath. Goose, welcome to the show. We are excited to have you here.

Jen, it’s a pleasure. We’ve been lucky enough to have had a conversation on my show as well. It’s been a real joy getting to know you over these past interactions. Thanks for having me on your show, giving me an opportunity to share my story and help other people in your world.

First of all, let’s make sure everybody understands. You are in Australia, which I love. You are a real estate agent. That’s interesting and a very unique way.

It’s a little different here. It’s quite interesting because in real estate investing, you would think that it’s all the same. You’re buying houses, selling houses. In essence, the Australian market is the same as the US. However, structurally and culturally, it’s slightly different. What I do here in Australia is I’m a buyer’s agent. In the US, I’m a realtor or a real estate agent. We can interchange those two terms because I’m technically a licensed real estate agent. A realtor could represent either or both sides of the transaction.

In Australia, that’s not the done thing. The done thing is that there are selling agents and they only sell properties. There are buying agents. Buying agents are quite new and there are roughly 75,000 selling agents and 1,200 buying agents. It’s an untapped market. We don’t do any selling of properties. We’d never sell any properties. We only meet with buyers and help them to find properties. More specifically than that, we only help investors. We don’t help homeowners.

Even more specifically than that, we’ve got a methodology that we call the Holy Trinity, which centers around cashflow positive properties in high growth areas with value-add potential. Because the market is slightly different in Australia to the US, it’s fairly common to get quite a high cashflow and high yields in properties. It’s less common in Australia because we have much more of a growth market. Finding that unique combination is like a diamond in the rough.

What ends up happening here is that realtors fall into those categories. They come in and they say, “I’m doing all things real estate.” They start saying, “I like working with buyers or I like working with sellers.” They fall into it, but it’s not mutually exclusive like it is there. What made that start happening? If there are only 1,200, is that something new? Is that something that, all of a sudden, everyone said, “Now there needs to be a representation on the other side or was it that the selling agents had all of the representation?”

I don’t know who the first buyer’s agent in Australia was. I read a story about him. He started many years ago. It’s not brand new. It’s not like in the last twelve months it suddenly became a thing. It was a fractional minority and the place where it sat within the ecosystem was for wealthy homeowners who wanted to take the hassle out of finding the right home and area. They would look for a local area expert who would be able to help them. It saves them from going to open homes. There’s been an inflection point and that’s the interesting thing.

It’s been there. It’s been a thing that’s been happening. There are some buyers’ agencies that are probably 10, 20 years old. There were the distinct inflection points. One of my mentors went to the US and realized that there was the whole buying representation side, which isn’t a done thing. In Australia, 99% of people who buy a property go to a selling agent and say, “Can you give me the best property?” They’re going to get sold to. My mentor came back and said, “There’s a place in the market here for this.” It was already some people doing it, but he built the biggest buying agency in the country at the time. Now he trains buyer’s agents. There are a few more in the market now. It’s quite a cool thing.

Why did you go into the investor space? What was the impetus for that?

My background is not real estate at all.

Dashdot Buyers Agents: So many business owners get so caught up in their business that they forget to build wealth outside of it.

We’re going to learn about that.

We can probably there now because the whole reason that I’m here stems back to where it all started. A little bit of context, I’m a high school dropout. I left school when I was seventeen. Not because I was no good, I was great at school. The problem was I was already running my own businesses and I didn’t have time for it. I said to my parents, “I know what I want to do. It doesn’t constitute me finishing my studies.” I left school early and I started organizing music festivals. That was my passion. To get back to that, I was going to be a soccer player originally, but I shattered my spine in a motorbike accident. I couldn’t play football anymore.

I moved into the music sector. I started doing that because that was my passion and got into that in a big way and started making a lot of headway in that whole scene. For roughly fifteen years, I organized music and arts festivals all over the world. I’ve done stuff in the States like Burning Man. I’ve worked on things like the Olympics in London, organized events for a million people for the Malaysian government, all kinds of different stuff all the way down to like nation and weird random, tiny little parties out in the middle of the desert and other places of the world and stuff as well. That whole journey was amazing. We had companies on three continents. At times, we’re employing up to a couple of hundred people on a contract basis for an event. It was a going concern. It was fun at the start, the whole travel the world, organize parties in your twenties.

As you can imagine, it was a wild decade or so, which was great and fun. However, I went through the whole got married, that didn’t work. My life was in chaos and I didn’t realize it. At the end of the day, I got to about 30 years old and realized that I was a drug addict and an alcoholic. I was broke. My businesses were failing and I had no way to live. I was sleeping on my office floor. It was grim. I’d pretty much hit the bottom. I had nowhere to go and no money. Things weren’t great.

Did you have your family around supporting you, trying to support you or trying to get you to realize?

I was disconnected by choice. I was high functioning. I don’t think a lot of people realized how big of a problem it was. I was organizing very large-scale events and managing large teams. On the outside, a lot of people thought, “This guy is crushing it.” He’s doing all this cool stuff and what a great life and everything like that. No one could see behind the scenes about what was going on. That was a big turning point in my life. It was around about that point in time that I met my now partner, Gabi, who I stumbled into my life. I was shaken awake like a bit of a jolt.

Somehow, she managed to see through the mess that I was at that point in time and believed in me. We started our relationship together. I started going, “If I want to maintain this relationship, if I want to keep this woman, I had to sort myself out.” I’d love to say that it was like a switch. I went, “I’ve fallen in love and now I’m sober.” That’s not true and it didn’t happen. It takes a couple of years of trying to turn your life around.

One of those big turning points was as a young couple, I was working 100-hour weeks in my business. Part of the reason I’d started drinking and taking drugs was because I was trying to numb out the constant noise. It becomes a vicious cycle and everything like that. I was burnt out, no money, the business wasn’t going great, Gabi and I were like, “Let’s try and make a better life for ourselves.” Most young people, we thought, “Let’s go and buy some real estate.” There’s a common phrase in Australia that property doubles in value every 7 to 10 years.

It’s the rule of 72.

The problem is it’s not true. I remember having a conversation with my business partner at the time. We’re looking at each other going, “Property doubles every seven years so it doesn’t matter what you buy.” “No. I used to buy property, any property.”

What’s the first property?

If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to get what you’ve always got. You need to be willing to challenge the status quo.

We’re like, “That’s how it works.” We were like, “Great.” Armed with that pearl of wisdom that it doesn’t matter what you buy, just buy something and it will double every seven years. We thought, “This is our pathway to living a better life, working less, making more, having more freedom.” You hear all these stories about people building wealth in real estate. All or anyone ever wants is more time, freedom, and money so they can live a life of passion. Armed with that amount of knowledge, Gabi and I went, “Let’s go buy something.” We didn’t have a lot of money at the time. We borrowed money off our families and then we went and bought an off the plan apartment right before a market downturn.

Was that an owner-occupied? Did you buy a house for investment or did you buy it for yourselves?

We told ourselves that we’re making a strict financial decision, but it was an emotional decision because it was like, “It’s not even built yet.” That property still has not even been completed and that was years ago. It’s like nice swimming pools, business centers and all the trimmings. It’s like luxury apartments overlooking the park. We’re like, “This is a great financial decision.” It was no good, wrong. The long and the short of it is we bought the wrong property in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was quite funny because the day that we were signing the contract, we had booked to go to a property education seminar.

You didn’t need to because you bought a house.

We were interested. We started getting the bug. He’s trying to talk to us like, “Sign here.” We’re like, “Hurry up. We’ve got to get to this education seminar. Sign. Enough of the chit-chat. Come on and let’s go.” We’re scribbling, signing the contract, jumped in the car, raced across the city to get to the other side of town to go to this property education seminar. It’s one of those ones that it’s like selling you into a course and whatever. Nonetheless, it was the first one that we’d ever been to. We went in there and sat down and then they started talking about things like positive cashflow and how to find areas of growth.

I was like, “We might have made a little mistake here.” That was great because it was a turning point for us. Bearing in mind, I’m still working at events, trying to navigate getting sober, doing all that stuff. It’s all part of that journey, but that was an inflection point for our life. It’s like, “We’ve made a mistake here, but I’m sure we should be able to work out how to get ourselves to where we want to go.” That started a big journey for us where we invest a lot of money on courses, good ones and bad ones. You deal with the best bits and chuck out the worst bits and all of that stuff. That was all good.

Over the course of a year, we built up a wealth of knowledge, skills, tools, resources, ideas and built our own processes for us because we were trying to work out how we can have more time, freedom, and money? That’s where we distilled down our core principles that we now call the Holy Trinity. It’s through that process that we realized, “There’s probably heaps of other people that are like us who would probably go out and make a mistake. What if we could help some of them? What if we could help a few?”

That’s how it started. From there, after a few months, I’ve decided I’ve got more passion for real estate than I do for events now because I’ve done that for fifteen years. We decided that we’d stuck into it and start helping people to buy the right investment properties. What we specialize in is helping business owners and entrepreneurs, which is something that’s close to my heart as someone who started their own business, worked for fifteen years, and ended up with nothing. I look at people like my brother. My brother is a farmer. He’s working hard, but everything’s in his business. I see many business owners that get caught up in their business that they forget to build wealth outside of business, and they get stuck on a hamster wheel. That’s what I’m passionate about.

We talked about that when I was your guest on your podcast that we both have that same passion for helping people realize to build themselves first. We talked about this is like, “Put your mask on first and then help others before you are out there helping others.” It’s not sustainable. You proved it. That’s the glass ceilings that you had been jumping through, crashing through and sometimes going the other way to those. When you break through a glass ceiling, it becomes your floor, but sometimes you had some floors you had to go down and rebuild up to some other ceilings.

Unless you’ve got a solid footing when you break through those ceilings, you fall back straight through.

There’s no safety net because you think you’ve arrived. You’re going, “I’ve arrived. I’m at the next level. I’m good.” It can take you all the way.

Limitless: The Renegade’s Guide To Building Wealth Through Property

In my mid to late twenties, getting flown around the world and consulting to governments and I was like, “I’m the king. What’s going on?” Fast forward a couple of years and I’m living on the office floor.

You bought your first house and it still hasn’t been built, which is funny. Was it a condo?

It’s an apartment.

It gave you the amp to say, “I have the passion now,” the fire in your belly for it. “We’re going to try it again. We’re going to do it right the next time we’re going to do it.” What gave you the ability to do that? Most people, we owe mom and dad, they gave us some money. They helped us out. We look like a fool. We look this. This is something that transcends in everything we do, not just buying real estate. It’s also in business. For the people that are our readers who are thinking about transitioning and going from being successful in one space and maybe making an impact, showing other people how to do this so they don’t have that same thing. What gives you that drive to want to do that even if you failed?

I’d love to say something like impact, which is true. That is what motivates me the most now. However, if you take it back to then it’s like, why didn’t we go, “That was a mistake. We’ll never do this?” For me, it was another turning point where I looked backwards and I said, “That’s what my life has been like.” I looked forward and I said, “What do I want my life to be like?” I was at that point where I went, “If I keep doing what I’ve always done, I’m going to get what I’ve always had.” I have to do something different. I have to be prepared to fail.

Everyone says, “Fail fast, fail forward, do as much failing as you can because you learn.” It would be a hell of a lot nicer if you didn’t fail. You get to learn the lessons, but I’d much rather short circuit that and not have to fail. That being said, when you’ve experienced getting close to the edge in terms of when you hit rock bottom, you know where that is and you have a benchmark. You’re like, “Now I understand what’s down there and I don’t want that again.”

If you’ve constantly lived on the median line, you would probably have less motivation because you’d be like, “What is worse than this? I’m not sure because everything’s been about the same the whole time.” If you’ve gone all the way down, I like to think that life is a little bit more like everything’s frequency and motion. Frequency waves go up and down. They oscillate. You tend to find this continuing pattern throughout all things in life, metaphysical, physical, think about the way atoms work, sound, emotions. Everything happens in a frequency in a float.

The depth of one line of the frequency, the depth that goes down is the polarization of how far you can go up as well. I tend to think that those kinds of things find balance. For me, I was like, “I know that I want better and more, and what do I want?” It was a big question about looking at me and Gabi sitting down and going, “What do we want out of life?” We didn’t start our buyers’ agency saying, “We’re going to turn into real estate agents. We’re going to buy shiny suits and go and get nice cars. We’re going to do all of that stuff.”

We said to each other, “We’ve done something here where we can help other people. What do we want out of life? If we can design a business that would allow us, to operate from a beach in Bali.” This was the benchmark of how we wanted to design the business. I’m not saying that’s the goal, we don’t want to move to Bali. We said, “What would that need to look like? How would that need to be? If we could do everything that we wanted to do, help other people to build wealth for ourselves, but also have the ability to live a life of passion for ourselves and to help other people to do the exact same thing. What would that need to look like?” That’s served as our guide for everything over the last few years.

I can’t even remember. Do you even have a course or anything? I don’t think you do. You sell real estate to real estate to investors.

It’s interesting because a lot of people are like, “Real estate guy, have you got a course or something?”

Success is not what everyone else defines it to be. It’s what really serves you. It’s what fulfills you. It’s what makes you happy.

This was leading up to the question about your book Limitless: The Renegade’s Guide to Building Wealth, how that is different. If I were living in Australia and I said, I wanted to be an investor. I wanted to have wealth. You don’t have a course, but I would come to you and say, “Help me find a house.” Why is it a renegade though? Help me out on that. Tell us, why is it a renegade? Why is it so different from what everybody else is doing?

First and foremost, I’ll go back to the start of that. We don’t have a course. We don’t sell property or anything like that. What we do is more like a professional services company. People will come to us. We don’t act like a shopping service aid though. It’s not like, “Go buy me a house.” It’s more typically like, “This is where I am. This is where I want to be. I’m interested in using real estate as that vehicle, but what does that need to look like? How do we do that?” That’s where we fit in. It’s a bit of strategy advisory, all of that stuff all rolled into one. With our clients to get them to the destination. It’s not like, “Here’s a house. Let us know when you want the next one.” It’s more like, “We’re probably going to need to get six. They’re going to need to have these characteristics. We need to do it in this timeline. We’ll work with your finance team and whatever, and get you to where you want to go.” It’s a little bit of a different structure.

It’s almost like a fiduciary for real estate rather than a fiduciary for brokerage.

That’s different from how other buyer’s agents work as well. Most other buyer’s agents are a bit more like, “Go buy me a house.” We don’t do any of that stuff. We don’t operate like that. It’s interesting that you said a fiduciary because that’s the way that we see our role. The book in and of itself, the renegade part is, let me try and unpack that a little bit. There are a few reasons that we use that specific word. Partly because in the real estate industry in Australia possibly I would say more than the US. It’s a stuffy industry where people typically tend not to want to step outside the status quo.

It’s a very bland industry. In the book, I talk about some big stuff. I talk about drug addiction. I talk about a lot of personal development stuff. It’s digging deep into, rather than like, “This is how you go and buy real estate.” It’s more like, “This is how you can transform your life and have a bit of life.” Maybe the goal isn’t to buy as many properties as you can, maybe it’s to buy as many properties as you need. It ticks into that stuff. The big pace that we challenge the rest of the real estate industry in Australia is the idea that you can get all three factors of the Holy Trinity. The common belief in Australia, even by senior experienced real estate investing professionals is that you can either get strong capital growth or you can get positive cashflow. You can’t get the two together.

We hear that here too, where if you get both, awesome, but generally, you’re not going to get both so pick one.

If we wind it back a little bit after when we realized that we’d made a mistake on that first property ourselves, we sat down and said, “What would the perfect property look like? It would not physically, but what characteristics would it have?” We were like, “We get good capital growth and it would be positive cashflow.” That would help us to replace our income and pay down its own debt and do all of that good stuff than having cashflow does. It had been a market downturn there as well, which is why the property is now worth less than.

We said, “We’d need to have some way to control the outcomes. We’d need to be able to add value to it in some way down the line, not straight away so that if market conditions changed, if the government and policies changed or whatever, if there was a natural disaster or a pandemic that we would still be able to control that outcome.” First and foremost, I don’t think people can get cashflow and growth together, let alone, when you throw in a third characteristic that you need to be able to add value to it and manufacture more cashflow and equity.

That seems like a bit of an impossible task, which is why it took us long to work out. How can we find these kinds of properties? If you know that you can find those kinds of properties, why would you settle for anything less? The book is about firstly, challenging people to think about where they are, who they are, where they’re going and why. Then challenging the notions that have been killing sacred cows, telling people that the only way to build wealth is to have negatively geared properties. Do you know what negative gearing is?

No, I’ve never heard of that.

The common belief in Australia is that if you’re going to invest in property, it must be negatively geared, which means it produces less income than it uses, and that it’s a tax minimization strategy. If you think about that from a business perspective, if you had a business that loses money, you would get tax breaks. The idea is that firstly challenges people to challenge themselves and then challenges the way that they think about real estate and what can be achieved, and then shows them how to do it. If you’re prepared to walk that path and first look at yourself and your why and then be prepared to challenge the status quo.

Dashdot Buyers Agents: If you can grow your business and then build a wealth strategy outside of it, you will get the best of both worlds and you can have what you want out of life so much faster.

The reason it’s called Limitless is if you get the metrics, if you get it all dialed-in correctly, if you get the right amount of cashflow, the right amount of growth, the right value adds and all of that stuff together, you can systematically build as big a property portfolio as you want, which in a country where 74% of property investors never get past property number one and 92% never get past property number two, there’s a big issue. Most people want to invest in real estate because they want to have it at retirement, do all that stuff. More time, more freedom, more money, and they get stuck at number 1 or 2. Most get stuck at number one because they buy negatively geared properties or they buy the wrong property, wrong place, wrong time. Whereas what we can show people is this is how you can buy 10 in 5 years, if you wanted to get aggressive about it. It changes the game.

It’s a mindset shift in how you’re looking at how property can grow for you. Even here in the United States, I’ve asked real estate agents when I’ve trained them in the past, “How many of you own your own home?” Some hands go up and then, “How many of you own investment properties?” Not as many hands. This is the product that you’re pitching out there and saying that is grandioso and great, but yet you’re not the one who’s using the product. It’s like a dentist saying, “You should brush your teeth every day, but check mine out, I haven’t.” It doesn’t make any sense. Have you become a disruptor in your world doing what you’re doing or is it more that it’s like an a-ha moment? It’s like, “That’s something cool. That’s impactful.”

It’s definitely mixed responses. For a lot of the old guard in real estate here that when you’ve got a big message and a big idea, and all of a sudden you realize you can help people and change stuff. You want to shout it from the rooftops. I would say that we’re an atypical model in the real estate industry in how we approach life and business and how we show up in the world. That has rubbed some people the wrong way. I would say that because their vernacular or their messaging for the last 5, 10 years or whatever has been around a single silo of like, “You must get one of these things.” That’s great and you can do it like that. There’s a completely different way you can do it. I’m not saying that the way that other people are doing it is wrong. They typically all works.

It depends on what you’re optimizing for. What is the outcome that you’re optimizing for in your life? What’s the goal? It’s shaken a few branches, particularly because by my inhibition, I don’t have a 50-property portfolio. I haven’t been in this industry for the last twenty years or anything like that. A lot of people are like, “Who are you? What are you doing? Who are you to sell these kinds of stuff?” To be completely honest, the results themselves, I don’t even need to justify it because our clients are getting over 65% return on investment in one year, which is insane.

We have some properties that we have 34, 43 and we think where the cat’s meow. That’s incredible to get those kinds of return. One of the things that people fail to recognize is that, and again, this would hold true in entrepreneurship, not just investing in property. We start here and I know that you talk about it and I talk about it too. Bridging the gap and knowing where you want to go and why you want to go. When people don’t take the time to do that, there is no end. It’s oblivion. There’s nothing there to look forward to. It’s more that I have to accumulate. It’s like a squirrel gathering nuts.

I don’t know why I need them, but I need them because if I get enough of them, then I’m going to be okay at retirement. Rather than looking and saying, “Winter is coming. This is where I want to be in 5, 10 years.” It’s opportune for now because of my birthday. Looking and saying, “That’s where I want to go by this time. This is what I need to get there.” Now it’s much easier to build that. It’s much easier to identify the need for. Wouldn’t you agree?

I 100% agree because I get many people that come to me and the common phrase that people say is, “Ten properties in ten years. That’s what I want to do.” That’s cool. Maybe that is good. Maybe it’s great but is ten $100,000 properties? Is it ten $1 million properties? What cashflow do you want out of it? What is the function? What is it going to do for you? Understanding that is huge because maybe you can get everything you want out of life in five properties and you could do that in four years or maybe it’s the other end of the spectrum.

For some people, gathering the nuts thing is a great analogy. It’s much harder in Australia to grow a big property portfolio. It is significantly harder to grow a multiple property portfolio. I know people that have got 30 properties and that’s great. By their own admission, they went through that whole phase of like, “I’ve got to try and get as many as I can,” whereas it doesn’t necessarily serve any. Don’t get me wrong, in twenty years it’s going to be fantastic.

Not without the pain and the heartache of buying the wrong one because it doesn’t have the cashflow or the appreciation. For a doorman, it’s not doing anything for a portfolio except that you don’t have the cash.

This applies to both property investing and business because you’ve got to think with your business as well, it’s like, “What are you optimizing for?” There are many analogies between property investing and real estate. Are you optimizing for revenue? Are you trying to grow and forgetting to optimize for profit? You don’t need more clients, you need the right clients. You need to think about where your money is going and why. You get negatively geared companies like Uber where it’s all about growth. They lose money all the time. They constantly get more investors. That’s cool if that’s what you want to optimize for. I see many businesses and humans that chase bigger and they think bigger is better where better is better. It’s got nothing to do with bigger.

This is why it’s important too. There are many seeds that are planted by everyone about what success is. Success is that you have to have 50 properties because that means you’re a successful investor, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that. In business, success is that you have to have 100 employees or you have to reach $10 million in revenue a year. It’s everybody else’s goal. Everyone else’s definition of what success is. We lose our individuality. We lose what serves us going back all the way to the very beginning when you said, “What do I want? What fulfills me? What makes me happy?” That’s key. My son went through this because he was accumulating some properties and doing well and all that.

Success isn’t a destination. It’s a journey.

He let go of some properties and said, “They’re not serving me anymore. It’s not fun to say that I have X amount of properties if it’s not serving me anymore. It’s painful.” We had a lot of investment properties. Over half of them are now Airbnb because they serve us better. The balance of them we’re offering the homes to our tenants in a subject to manner where it’s a wrap. We’re saying, “Instead of renting from us, why don’t you buy from us? We’ll hold a portion of the note. We’ll still pay the first note, but we’ll hold the portion of the second note,” which is everybody does it. Not everybody, you have to know how to do it. We got to the point where we didn’t want the phone calls.

Now you own it, you take care of it. With Airbnb, it’s different because it’s churning all the time. You’re not having a person in a property for a year, they make a mess and now you’ve got to clean it up. They’re in it for 3 or 4 days and you get to clean it. We change our tune because we are at a different place in our life where we’re saying, “We still want that cashflow, but we don’t want the hassle that comes with that cashflow.” Something that you probably talk about with people is how involved do you want to be in this thing? Are you handy or do you have resources? We all learned that from the gurus, get our team built.

Most people want a hands-off experience. At the end of the day, most people want the lowest impact way to get a good return, more time, more freedom, more money. Most business owners would love the ability to not have to go in. “I can work by choice. I’m not reliant on this business to feed me anymore.” If you can get these two things working in tandem, I think that’s where a lot of magic happens, particularly as a business owner. You can grow your business and as a good cashflow vehicle, but most businesses are not built to sell. If you can then take some of that in and then build an actual wealth strategy, wealth stream outside of it. You get the best of both worlds and you can have what you want out of life so much faster and easier.

You’ve done it for real estate. Who does this for businesses? Are you aware of a company that does this type of thing? I know that there are segments of the market where people will help you in getting your business to sell and to be able to position it to sell. My son is in the midst of that getting it there, but it seems like he had to get it to a certain point before anyone would even take a look.

You’re saying who can act like a business fiduciary and say, “Let’s look at this whole thing and how can we optimize this to get you to where you want? Is it to work less? Is it to get bigger and all of that stuff?” I know that there are some people, but they’re model specific.

For financial planners or something like that, where there’s normal succession, an attorney, those types of things, but not for the general business. Maybe that’s a new business model. You would grow your business completely different if you start with the end in mind. If you knew the end was not just, “I need to make money. I need to have this business going. I’m hoping to meet this certain income level and all that. I need more clients. I need to hire people because I want the time freedom and money, but where’s it going?” If you had that where’s it going from the very beginning, a lot of the decisions that you’d be making on the front side would be different. I also think there’d be a lot more successful businesses. I also think there would be more people getting into the business because they have that certainty of where they’re going to be heading.

Anyone who starts a business like, “We’re going to build $100 million company.” We’re at the point now where we’re like, “If we had 100 of the right clients,” you can optimize it in a different way. We tried to go, “Let’s try and get as many clients as we can.” We grew fast, but then we realized that’s not what we wanted. We said, “How do we build this for what we want?” If you think about how does this machine work for me? What do I want? Do I have to manage 100 people? Probably not. If I could have a team of 6 or 10 and if I could work twenty hours a week, if there was enough stability and continuity that I didn’t have to be worried about on where the next sale is coming from. If there was enough profit that I could live the life at the standard that I want and also build personal wealth, would that be enough? A lot of people don’t ask themselves the question, what is enough? They think more is better.

It’s different for everybody because of lifestyle needs and what people are. Geographically, it is different. I know, for example, I’m going to bring up my son again where I live. I live in what they call the most wealthy county in the United States of America. Per capita, we make more money than anybody. That doesn’t mean we have more money. That means we make more money. Our expenses are as bad. Our homes are expensive. My son moved one and a half, two states away. On the East Coast of the United States, you can travel for four hours and go through four different states.

On the West Coast, you travel for four hours and you’re still in the middle of the state. He moved to a couple of states away and ended up buying a moderate 3-bedroom, 2-bath house. Payments are ridiculously low. They’re like a third of what he was paying here for rent when he was renting, let alone his mortgage. What’s left at the end of the day is different. Now that we’re talking about that, that’s probably why he let go of some properties. He didn’t need to have those properties bring in more cashflows to sustain a different lifestyle that he has now. Kudos to him for doing that because why waste my time chasing down rent checks and water break.

I live in Sydney, which is beautiful. I live in the beautiful suburbs. I live in Bondi Beach in Sydney. It’s one of the most desirable suburbs in the world. It’s very expensive. We rent. We went for eight hours up the coast for a little trip. We were like, “If we lived here, our cost of living would probably be about half and it’s probably more beautiful. How would that change what we need out of life?” Once you start asking yourself those questions, it opens up a lot more possibility.

The premise of this entire show is everything from success to significance, but it’s also the shift from success to significance. That doesn’t have to be the impact you make on other lives. It can also be the impact you make on your own. That is key and critical. I love that message. I want to say thank you for sharing that. I’ve learned so much. I have many a-has. I’m going to study a little more about negative gearing because that’s a phrase that I’ve never heard of before. I’m versed in real estate and investing, but you always can learn something. That’s what I love about it. You have the future ahead of you and you’ve been involved in real estate now for 5, 10 years, something like that. What’s the future for you? What is the next ceiling that you’re looking at for growth for you?

I don’t think about it as a ceiling. I’m thinking about it more like a fulfillment level. It’s a fulfillment pace. What we’re working towards is getting ourselves to a point where we can essentially have a high impact business, but have more freedom for ourselves. We’re still in that phase of business where we are working quite a lot.

Dashdot Buyers Agents: A lot of people don’t ask themselves the question, “What is enough?”

We talked about the four stages of growth. There’s formulation, concentration, momentum and stability. Some people will say that there’s a fifth stage, which is success. I don’t like using it because it means that I got there, now what? For me, it’s always a perpetual thing. Success isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. I don’t want to ever see that it’s there. When you look at what you’re doing, you guys are in concentration and momentum. The next thing for you is getting from momentum to stability, where you’re saying, “It’s stable and now we can shift it. We can do some things differently and maybe look at something new.”

The next piece on the horizon is you summed it up well. It’s the stability and then going, “What’s next?” That’s the next thing for us. It’s exciting to be looking at that and thinking about that and going, “What could be the next phase look like?”

That’s what a lot of people who are reading this thinking, “What am I going to do? I’ve been sitting home all day. I don’t know if I want this. I don’t know if I want that.” That is pertinent to what we’re all looking at for the future. I call it the soaring twenties not the roaring twenties. This is the decade of soaring and becoming knowledge brokers. This gaining knowledge from everyone around us, not from books.

It’s an interesting thing you touched on about this decade is shaping up to be amazing, quite frankly. It’s interesting as well. You touched on an interesting point there about becoming knowledge brokers, which I think is amazing. It’s a great way to sharpen the world, impact more people. Where I want to sit is to be that quite hands-on. We’ve thought about do we do courses and all of that stuff, but where we want to be in the ecosystem is to say, “No, we’ll do this with you. We’ll hold your hand and we’ll take you there.” That in and of itself is a nice point of difference.

You’re going to learn so much more by doing that because we know that when we teach, we learn. When we’re in the grains of it and seeing the things that are happening with people, it’s cool to see that happening as well. I want to say thank you. How can we help you in your practice given that you’ve helped us?

It’s simple. I’m not here to sell anything so it’s all good. If you’re reading this, it tells me you’re probably interested in podcasts. If you’re interested in real estate, mindset, success, entrepreneurship, any of that stuff, I have a podcast and you’ll probably enjoy it. We’re not selling anything on that either. It’s a good opportunity to get to know us and learn some different stories. You can do that by heading to TheInvestorLab.com.au. There’s a whole bunch of free resources that you can learn about Australian real estate. You can get a copy of my book there or you can get a copy of my book on Amazon. It’s not a huge big profit center for us or anything like that.

Most authors are. They are a gift to the world.

The way to help me would just to help yourself and to enjoy what we put out in the world and to tap into that.

It’s been great, Goose. Thank you for sharing time with us. I appreciate it. I am excited for our relationship to continue over the years. This is the beginning of it. We’ve already been helping each other and sharing podcast guests and things like that together. It will continue to grow. I wish you all the best prosperity in the years to come with what you’re doing. Thank you for giving what you do to the rest of the world.

It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.

We’ll catch you next time. Don’t forget, go write a review, give us a great rating. We want to know what you want to know as well. We’ll continue to deliver exactly what you need. We’ll talk to you next time.

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About Goose McGrath

At dashdot – property buyers agents, we have a mission to help everyday Australians achieve financial independence and to build generational wealth, through the vehicle of real estate investment