Episode 23 – Stabilizers vs Accelerators

Welcome to the “InFLOW Podcast.” I am your host, Michelle Bosch. And at the time of this recording, I am relaxing here in my office. It is Memorial Day here in the U.S. and I’m looking out into the mountain. And I love the fact that when I’m sitting here in the office and I’m recording these episodes, that I get to look up. Sometimes when we are only focused on looking down, that overwhelms us and we cannot see the larger picture, have a higher perspective, have like an eagle’s type of perspective on our life and on whatever it is that we are dealing with or working on in the moment. So without further ado, I would like to talk today and introduce you to a couple of concepts that I believe are the cornerstone of strategic growth. And we actually share this concept with our high-level land investor clients at the Ultimate Boardroom. And I thought that this is a good time also to share here on the “InFLOW Podcast” with you listening.

And these concepts are concepts that I have learned from also other mentors. Believe it or not, Jack and myself, even though we’re very extremely successful, we continue to use mentors and coaches to really help us collapse time, normalized new levels of possibility, new levels of success, of course, whatever success looks to you, it’ll be a different standard for all of us. So what I’m going to share today, you know, we kind of like divide and conquer. He has mentors for certain specific things, I have mentors for other specific things because we are, of course, very different people and with different strengths, with different geniuses, with different just purposes and higher work. So those two concepts, without any more waiting, are the concepts of being a stabilizer and an accelerator.

So all leaders want growth. Whether you are leading in your life, leading in your family, leading in your business, leading in a path towards financial freedom, you as a leader need to be prepared to move from being a stabilizer to being an accelerator, and from being an accelerator to being a stabilizer, and/or finding people that are part of your team that compliment you very, very, very well because we all…everyone says that they want growth, but very few people are really willing to do what it takes and move between these two or partner or bring on board the whos that are going to help you really grow strategically. So if you think about yourself in the middle as the leader, and then on one end there’s this force, the accelerating force on your left, and then there’s on your right, there is the stabilizing force, this is how I want you to think of this concept.

And an accelerator, just to define what an accelerator is, an accelerator are the people, the processes, the things, the projects, the initiatives, the endeavors, the activities that give you change, that give you growth, that motivate you, that give you confidence, that change, that are constantly innovating, bringing new things and stepping into the unknown. And so that is an accelerator type of energy, yeah? That you have to embody, because at some point, you know, you can’t be over analyzing stuff. You just need to jump with both feet and move forward and bring progress into your life, and into your family, into your community, into your business, and you have to have this accelerator energy in you.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum is the stabilizer energy, and that stabilizing energy is what gives you security. It’s what gives you, or your company, or your team, or your family predictability, is what gives consistency. It also brings incredible amount of confidence knowing that the good things that you know how to do, you will continue to do and replicating. And that those things, that structure will give you predictability. And it’s all about what stays the same. So this stabilizing energy is all of what stays the same. And so if we were to bring this to, say, for an example, the level of a family, where you’re leading your family and either, you know, you’re married or you have a partner, and one of you is being the generator and is being the one that is either the professional, or the one with the job, or the one with the business, and the one that is basically in charge of the cash machine. You in this moment are acting as an accelerator, yeah? And you’re bringing innovation, new possibilities, new opportunities. You’re really creating new possibilities.

And then if you are a stabilizer in this situation, you know, then you perhaps are the person that is investing, that is allocating that cash into investments that produce cash flow. Like, in our example, myself, I oscillate between these two types of energies. But also, on a larger scope as a part of a team in my business, at my core, I am a stabilizer, yeah? And there’s other team members that are accelerators. As part of our leadership team, Jack and I, at the very top, we each embody one of these energies. He’s much more of an accelerator at times, I’m much more a stabilizer. And sometimes, those roles swap and he becomes a stabilizer and I become an accelerator. But know that these two energies or these two tendencies are always there and that you need them both in order to grow.

And on the side of finances, which is the second level I think that I wanted to talk to you about in conjunction with these two topics or these two concepts, are on the land flipping side, the land flipping business for us, land flipping, in general, has really been an accelerator for our financial growth. All the one time cash flips have created incredible amounts of profits. They have one time profits and also ongoing cash flow profits if we sell with seller financing, and that has brought some stability. But we have to agree that even when you do create cash flow with land, it is only for a specific period of time, and eventually, that cash flow will end at the moment that the person decides either to pay off their property, you know, ahead of time, or they pay it off in accordance with an amortization schedule and it takes them 5, 10 years. But at the end of those 10 years, you know, the cash flow will stop. So it’s really a temporary stabilizer, but not an ultimate stabilizer. And for us, that’s why we use our land flipping business to accelerate cash profits, and then move that cash into an asset class that is much, much more of a stabilizer type of asset class. And for us, has been in the form of homes that we buy, you know, as a buy and hold, with the buy and hold strategy, or apartment buildings that have been able to incredibly turbocharge, you know, that passive cash flow.

So that’s the second way that you can kinda like get an idea of these two basically tendencies, or these two forces that are really helping you with strategic growth. If you’re a business owner, you know, there’ll be team members, there’ll be the whos in your business that are much more having tendencies of accelerators and that help you basically create innovation and change. A lot of people in your team that are really creative with marketing initiatives, with promotions, with sales, opportunities, sales channels, a lot of these people in your organization will be accelerators, yeah? Maybe it’s your acquisitions team, you know, that is accelerating the number of deals and making sure that the pipeline of deal flow is always strong, so that then your other team, which is more of your stabilizer team has enough incoming or inbound deals and opportunities coming their way to basically close on a transaction, and are the ones that are looking at every detail, marking every T, but are also the ones that are identifying activities that you and your team are doing superbly. And they are doing that because they’re measuring and really in charge of metrics, and making sure that what you are doing well that you can replicate over, over and over and over again, predictably and consistently, so that you can continue to bring great things into your business week in and week out, month in and month out, quarterly, yearly, etc.

So there’ll be people in your organization or in your team that will be much more of a stabilizer. There’s also in the framework of a business in looking at these two tendencies, there’s also processes and systems that will be much more accelerator type of processes, and then there’ll be others that’ll be much more stabilizer type of processes. Like, for example, in our land business, the process of direct mail and identifying areas, new areas to go in and stepping into the unknown of finding new areas that are, you know, amazing areas to harvest with either deals that you can replicate very easily, or deals that are more on the higher end. This act of stepping into the unknown and the processes around that are more of an accelerator type of process. We also have in our situation, you know, when we want to…in our business, grow into a new level, or we wanna experiment, or we wanna try out and test out a new strategy, or a new plan, or a new project, you know, our I guess to-go strategy, or process, to implement that is to go hire a coach. Someone that is already doing it, that is very successful, that is able to help us collapse time and figure out things very quickly, and innovate and literally iterate in zeros in our businesses.

We also have the process of partnerships that we also use in order to accelerate certain projects in our businesses. So there’ll be also processes that are more designed to be stabilizing, and some of those have to do with how we manage our deal flow, and how each of our team members is assigned with specific tasks, and we have a software. And so for us, technology and our software, has been a cornerstone process for stabilizing our flipping business, also our educational business. You know, we leverage technology in order to be able to stabilize the innovation that is happening within our companies or within our investment projects. And then as far as, perhaps another example in the business side, if you are investing in land and you are perhaps focusing on a few bread and butter subdivisions that you know very well, valuation that you know very well how to sell, that you understand really well your sellers, where you understand really well the type of buyer that would buy that property, that maybe is a property that is oscillating between the $5,000 and $30,000 profit, that would be much more of a stabilizer type of property that you go out there, and that you wanna keep on pursuing and buying because you know really, really well how to buy them and how to sell them.

So it brings predictability into your business, yeah? And perhaps an accelerator type of property would be a property, maybe a larger acreage, or maybe higher price properties, where we’re looking at properties above $100,000, maybe in the $200,000, $300,000 level, or even higher. And they’re not as easily replicatable, but you can find them and you can at least count on one of these deals a quarter to bring an acceleration of profits and cash inflows into your business. And even there thinking about the exercise of just scheduling or thinking of them as going and pursuing one a quarter, that has a stabilizing agent within the accelerator. So as you see, it’s oscillating between these two tendencies that bring incredible, tremendous amounts of growth, or at least in my experience, has brought incredible, tremendous amounts of growth. And yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly’s strategic planning has been incredibly pivotal also in stabilizing our business.

So just as it is good to follow your intuition, experience new things, go for new possibilities and really step into the unknown, just as valuable as that is. It’s also to measure, to improve incrementally, to mitigate risks, to continue replicating what you know works. So, you know, the creative process itself and creating new possibilities, sometimes you will do quantum leaps forward and that will be the result of taking large amounts of risks and acting as an accelerator. And sometimes you’ll be wanting the fruits of those accelerator projects or initiatives. You’ll want to then pass on to a more, you know, stabilizing and figure out how to mitigate risks, and how to, you know, improve, like I said, incrementally, and do better the things that you do great, and improve every month, every quarter. Any activity that you’ll do repetitively, how can you improve it and make it better every single time that you do it?

So that’s what a stabilizer does. And it’s also incredibly valuable because it brings some certainty in an uncertain world, and certainty that you can continue to bring great things into your life. And so it’s kind of like, you know, accelerators, I always like to think of are more…it’s a tendency or force or an energy that is much more in your heart, where you follow your intuition, like I said earlier, and you go out there and take leaps and just are courageous, and go do things that scare you, and where you have to trust in yourself, in the goodness of others, and in the unknown that you will figure out what to do when the time comes. And the stabilizer type of energy is much more like a mental energy that if the heart is saying, “You know, trust,” the mind is saying, “Well, make sure you verify, and that you are measuring, and that you’re improving things, and that there is this process for continual improvement of the activities that you’re doing really, really well.”

So, I just wanted to basically bring awareness to this concept of stabilizers versus accelerators because it doesn’t only apply within a business, it applies within your family, it applies within you taking risks as an individual, as a person, it applies in how you go about strategically pursuing financial freedom. Like I said, we use our land flipping business as an accelerator, and we use homes and apartment buildings as a stabilizer because cash flow and passive cash flow is something that is incredibly dear to my heart. I’ve shared in prior episodes, you know, my father passed away when when I was very young. And that single investment in an asset in a building that throughout passive cash flow, whether he was there or not, was incredibly stabilizing from a financial perspective to my mother who found herself, you know, in her early 30s, all of a sudden a widow with a nine month old and having to figure things out pretty much as a single parent from there on.

So I hope this was of value to you. I’m actually going to share this tool with you. So if you go to michellebosch.com/growth, you will be able to download this tool that we use for our land investment clients that are in the Ultimate Boardroom. It doesn’t only apply to a land business, but it also applies to how you as the leader of your family are taking risks, are also creating predictability, are the cash machine and generator of stability, but also the creator of new possibilities. And so I think it’s a very valuable concept to think about and to know that you probably at your core are one of them, and that you will have to either move from one tendency to the other to grow strategically, or you will have to partner, or bring on board team members that are gonna be a little bit more of that opposite tendency. If you’re much more of an accelerator, you’re gonna need stabilizers. If you are a stabilizer, you’re gonna bring accelerators. And if you are looking at this from a financial perspective, know that perhaps a job in your mind is bringing stability, but it really isn’t. It’s much more of, I would say, disguised stability because the moment that you lose your job, that stability goes. And so you’ll want to move into becoming an accelerator and looking for alternative ways to create huge cash profits that you can then invest in assets or in things that will give you passive cash flow on the financial side.

So, with that being said, I thank you today for your time together. And you can follow me on Instagram @michelleboschofficial, also on Facebook @michellebosh. And if you would love to give me a five-star review, I would greatly appreciate it. You could go to iTunes if you’re an iPhone user and just give me a five-star review. And do a written review if possible. I would greatly appreciate, that actually helps me bump up in the iTunes charts and be able to reach more people and introduce them, you know, to some of these concepts that have been incredibly invaluable in my life, and in our business, and in our pursuit of financial freedom to understand and to basically integrate and bring them and have them be part of our life on a daily basis. Thank you very much and until the next time.