Guard This at ALL Costs in your Business

Alright, so the year is 2021, and I’m going to these local real estate meetup events, and one of these events is put on by a group here in the cities. I’m not going to name their names, but they put on a really good event. They bring in some really great investors, great operators to share some insights. I learned a lot from that. But at this event, I met this gentleman who worked for this company. He was a realtor and he, he was new, young, just stepping into this career. He’d come from a world of, I think, software sales before that, so he’s just getting his feet wet. He’s just very earnest kid, and I liked him, so I help him out with a couple of projects and make some connections to some people who were looking to buy and buy a home, see if maybe he could help them.
And a couple months later, six, seven, eight months later, he makes a connection to this other gentleman who also worked at this company that he was working at. And he’s like, hey, this is a really great guy, you should meet him, take the time. I think you guys could bring a lot of value or whatever. So he connects me with his friend and he connects me and my business partner with this guy. And we are in the emails, we’re like, hey, yeah, I love to meet up. Here’s our calendar. Go ahead and schedule a time whenever you want and we’ll look forward to it. So this gentleman schedules time on our calendar and then does not show, show up on the day of the event and where we email him back like, hey, what’s happening? Just checking to see if everything’s okay.
You know, we had a time scheduled here. What’s up? He never responds. So, you know, this is actually pretty par for the course in the world of business. This is pretty common. A lot of people want to do business, they want to grow big, amazing businesses, but at the end of the day, they don’t do the simple action of simply showing up and doing what they say. This is why. Those are two of our core values at Invictus, which is we show up, we do what we say. Just by doing that, you, you legitimately put yourself ahead of 80% of the competition.
Now, we wrote this off because we’re like, this was just a young kid who didn’t understand that there was an opportunity here to make a connection, a relationship. This is how networks are built. And he missed the opportunity. No skin off of our nose. I have a firm rule that if you waste my time, once that’s on, that’s on. You. If I let you waste my time ever again, that’s on me. So you have, my first experience with this guy is that he wastes our time.
And so I’m like, I’m never gonna give you. I’m never gonna give you more of my time. That’s just how I am. Right. I have to guard my most valuable, my most precious of resources, you know, our time, because other people will waste your time if you let them. So keep this in mind. This is 2021. Let’s fast forward now to about a week ago.
About a week ago, a gentleman hops onto an investor call with Reed, who, who is our investor relations over at Invictus Capital. So he handles onboarding, all new investor leads. Anybody that wants to come into our funnel maybe wants to invest with us in the future, they have to go through Reed and have a conversation and get to know us and see if there’s a fit there. That’s Reed’s job. So make sure if they’re, they’re a good fit for what we do. And this gentleman, first of all, had rescheduled or missed his previous calls, I think, two or three times. So this was like, the third time, rescheduling the meeting. And finally, he, you know, day of the event, he’s gonna show up, right.
That’s usually a pretty bad sign when somebody’s reaching out from the cold to get on our calendars. But, hey, you know, we’ll, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. We deal a lot with high net worth individuals, and so a lot of times they’re very busy, so we want to be accommodating to that. So the third 3rd call comes around last week, and this gentleman is 15 minutes late to the call, which is very, very late for a 15 minutes call because we only do 15 minutes onboarding calls. So effectively, you missed the whole thing. So Reid shoots him an email and says, hey, just, you know, had us down for this time. What’s up is you want to reschedule. Here’s the link.
And the guy has a very terse response. He’s like, oh, I’m ready now. And so Reid accommodates him and hops on the call. And this guy is just the biggest jerk. He is being very condescending and degrading to Reed. His impression was that he was going to get to talk to me or to my business partner, Dan, on this call. And so he is a little bit slighted by the fact that he has to go through this lowly peon. Those aren’t the words he used.
But that’s. You can. You can understand the vibe that he’s bringing across. Well, Reid leaves this call, and he is very upset. He is very distraught because this guy was just such a condescending asshole to me. He was such a dick. And I was like, you know, in the future, if you ever have an investor call like that where they’re just coming right out of the gates being a jerk, just tell them, hey, this isn’t going to be a good fit. We appreciate your time, and then get off the call.
Yeah, you don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t have to justify yourself. Just, we don’t do business with jerks. And so if you get that vibe, just walk away. That’s okay. So, great. Well, fast forward a week or so. Just a couple days ago, I get this text message out of the blue from somebody.
It’s a number I don’t recognize, and I’m like, what is this? So I read it, and it’s this gentleman who had hopped on this call or who our friend had connected us with back in 2021, reaching out and saying, hey, I’ve been trying to work through read to get to, you know, the chat with you, but blah, blah, blah, blah, x, y, z, the sat and the other thing. I want to sit down and talk to you. I have some money. I want to. I want to invest, but I’d like to, more importantly, talk to you as peers. Those were his words. I’d like to talk to you as a peer. Okay.
So I reach out to Reed. I’m like, hey, can you explain who this guy is? What’s happening here? He said he’s dealing with you, and this is the same guy who was a dick to read on the call last week. So this is the guy who ghosts us back in 2021. This is the guy who ghosts Reed multiple times, shows up late to the call, and then is a dick to Reed, and then has the audacity to go around Reed straight to me and want to talk to me as a peer. So I’ll just say this right now. That dude is not my peer because I show up and I do what I say. And I share this with you because this is one of the things I think people take for granted in the world of entrepreneurship, is that your reputation takes years to build, and you have to build it with diligence and consistency, and you need to guard it, because one little thing can tarnish your reputation, and it will take it years to rebuild. It’s the most precious thing that you have.
So you need to guard it, and by all means, cherish that thing. And I share this because I see far too many people being lackadaisical about their reputation and they do things. I am guilty of this. I’m telling you this as a person who used to have a really terrible reputation for being flaky, for being inconsistent. I would call in sick, I would not make the phone call. I would show up late. I would do all of those things because I had this internal anxiety. Truthfully, showing up for meetings, showing up for calls, causes me a lot of stress.

And I used to not be able to handle and direct that stress and say, despite the fact that I don’t feel like doing this, I’m gonna do it anyway. I didn’t have the discipline to make myself do that, and it cost me a lot in the reputation department these days. And this is why two of our core values at Invictus is that we show up and we do what we say. That sounds so basic. But for me, that was 90% of the battle. I couldn’t get myself to show up and do what I said. And as soon as I started doing those little things, as soon as I stopped missing meetings, I started showing up for the things that I committed to, everything started getting better in my life. I shit you not.

It can be that simple. Just showing up and doing what you say is 90% of the battle. So I share this with you because there’s probably a little bit of you, maybe, that struggles with the same things that I did. And I don’t want you to end up in the position of this other guy who has done just nothing to help his reputation. And now listen, the community of investors and operators here in the Twin Cities is very, very small. Anybody ever asks me about this guy, I’m not going to have nice things to say. So that, you know, a lot of damage to the reputation there, my bro. So I have no idea if you’ll ever hear this.

Hopefully, hopefully it does. And hopefully it’ll set him on the straight. On the straight and narrow of like, oh, yeah, I need to get my shit together, start respecting people’s time, because there is nothing worse in my book than abusing somebody else’s time. Don’t do that. Be better than that. My people, now, I love impression. I love and value you guys, and thank you for being here, giving me a bit of your time. Hopefully, this was a good exchange.

I hopefully did not waste your time. If so, let me know. Shoot me a review. Shoot me a DM. Shoot me a comment, whatever it is that you feel like shooting me. And I’ll catch you guys in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.