With greater uncertainty in the business world, is there a way to rise up and set yourself apart from the rest? Is NOW the right time to grow bigger than ever before?
Our guest, Gary Harper, shares how he’s helped businesses, including Money Ripples, expand and prosper when others are shrinking their workforce and profits. Tune in to find out how Gary is helping others expand!
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How To Rise Up In Business When Others Are Failing With Gary Harper
This show is for you that work so hard for your money and you want your money to start working harder for you right now. You want that freedom of cashflow today, not 30 to 40 years from now, but right now, so you can live that life that you love with those of you love. Most importantly, it’s not just about getting rich. It’s about living a rich life. As you are blessed financially, you have a greater capacity to bless the lives of those around you. That’s exactly what we’re here to do on this show, to create that ripple effect in your lives. Thank you for allowing me to be able to create that ripple effect through you as you’ve been reading, sharing it with others, and allowing this movement to grow bigger each day. Thank you so much for being a part of this.
As a reminder, if you haven’t done so already, go to our website, www.MoneyRipples.com, take our Passive Income Calculator, and figure out how much income you could create in the next 12 months. I’m going to give you a little warning here. Even if you put the numbers in, it doesn’t change your life. What changes your life is what you do afterward, but it’s a cool tool to try out. I’m curious to see how big those numbers are. I’ve had some people have a few thousand, and some people have hundreds of thousands of dollars. The question is, what’s your number? Check that out today.
I brought on one of my mentors, somebody who’s helped Money Ripples create a bigger ripple effect. In fact, almost all the expansion we’ve done lately has been because of this man that we’re talking about to hear. I am excited to be able to bring on Gary Harper. He owns companies like Sharper everything. They have lots of subsidiary companies. He has got his new company RISE we’re going to talk about. Specifically, what he’s helped me do, and I know it can help many of you, especially those who are business owners, he’s been the number one guy in the real estate space. Have you ever read the book Traction? He gets that EOS type of system implemented in people’s lives.
I know it’s changed my life and what we’ve done in our company as well, allowing us to be able to grow, and get the right personnel but also to be able to make this something more manageable. Why I want to pick Gary’s brain is to understand what he’s teaching now and what he’s seeing with businesses. Especially when everybody else is freaking out in the world, this might be the best time to get your business growing. Gary, welcome to our show.
Thank you for having me. What an honor to be on a show like this, moving people. Chris, we’re very proud of you and what you do and your heart for wanting you to get back and help other people. It’s one of the things that connected with you immediately. I couldn’t wait to tell you this on the show. One of the inspiring reasons why I called the curriculum or what we have now RISE is because people like you rose up again from nothing and had to reinvent themselves. It has a personal meaning to me because I had to rise up at one point out of my ashes. It’s inspiring to see and know your story in that. To be on your show is very much an honor.
It’s cool to see how things progress. It’s always fun because we all have our own stories. I know you have yours. Tell us more about your story and how you came to be at this point.
I was a janitor, got kicked out of school at a young age, and found myself in Corporate America in an entry-level position. I was able to work myself up to an executive in a Fortune 500 company. Through that, I learned a lot about how to build a business and how to build processes, systems, structure, hiring, leadership, engagement, brand, sales, and all the things about business. I was part of a company that had a division that was four Fortune 500 companies and helped them and their business systems and processes. I was able to grow in that and work my way up. I got into real estate in 2004. I learned a lot of painful lessons as we all did in 2008. It crippled me.
I lost everything in real estate at that time. I was pretty determined never to touch another real estate transaction again in my life. I was licking my wounds and said I’m just going to focus on what I’ve been good at, which was Corporate America. God had a different plan. I got bit by a tick and came down with Lyme disease. A lot of people know my story. If you don’t, I went back to a 5-year-old mental state for a very long period of time, like 6 to 8 months. I ended up walking away from my corporate job. I wasn’t able to perform it anymore. It wasn’t until after that happened and I regained my strength and mental clarity and healed from it that I went back into real estate because it was the one thing that I could fall back on and make money.
Me and my brother-in-law, Wayne Shaffer, partnered up together. He mentored me. He just poured into me, helped me understand, and then treated me like a partner. It was more one-sided than the other. I didn’t have much to offer him other than learning and being able to apply hard work to it. Over time, I was able to take my knowledge of Corporate America and building systems and processes and bring that component to the business. We were able to scale that company to over 300 deals in one year and help that business grow. We joined places like Collective Genius. Connections opened the door for me. I went on to being asked to help other people with their businesses.
It’s years ago now that we helped another company and they grew. We’re not planning on doing this. Where a lot of the great things are born is sometimes they’re not intentional. You find and feel a need, and then the need continues to ask for more. That’s where we found ourselves. Fast forward seven years later, we’ve worked with over 1500 businesses now. It’s been a blessing. I’ve been honored to do it. I’m very humbled every day by it. I never take it for granted.
You find and feel a need, and then the need continues to ask for more. Click To TweetI never take the opportunity to speak to people or be hired by people like you, Chris, as a for-granted thing. I take it very personally to some degree because I want to be invested in people. I want to see people grow properly. There we are seven years later and we’re helping many businesses now. They average 3 to 5 businesses new a week that we are able to work with right now with multiple coaches. That’s where we are, and that’s what brought us to this journey today.
That’s excellent. I love hearing about that. I wasn’t going to ask this question, but this popped into my head here because I know you worked with hundreds of real estate investors. It’s no secret that some of these real estate investors have been battling with market changes, especially in 2022. I know some are doing okay in 2023 or they’ve come back. With your systems, how have they worked with some of these businesses? Has it helped them navigate and pivot faster? What’s happened, in your opinion, of what you’re seeing from your outside perspective?
The teams that we worked with going into 2022. Because we were driving them down from their purpose into their profits and performance and then down into their process, they were able to see the process shifting prior to it affecting the profits. The cash conversion cycle goes from process to profits. Profit is very much a lag effect. Where you get guys talking like, “I’m struggling,” it’s already so far downstream at that point that you’re going to be in the thick of it. The key to a market shift is seeing the change happen in the process before it affects profits. I’m going to be transparent here because I don’t think that everybody we touch turns the gold either.
There are clients that your process is breaking. They were like, “We’re still making money.” I get that, but your process is breaking, and if we don’t fix it, you’re not going to be making money at the end of this cycle. It’s hard for some visionaries to make structural changes when the money’s still coming in. They’re scared. They’re like, “I don’t know. It could be temporal. What if we change too much? What if we change too fast and it affects us?” I’m like, “It’s going to affect you if you don’t because you’re not going to have the profits at the end.” Some of those companies started to struggle when they didn’t listen, when they didn’t heed that call and they didn’t make the adjustments properly, or they waited.
I had some of them still do it, and they waited. They still went through this suffering period and then lifted out again where there were others like one in particular is one of our bigger clients in San Diego who started seeing it in March. We saw it with them and they made the variety adjustments. They had a very small dip. Even with that, they still dipped. When you go through a market shift, you’re going to feel it. I don’t care how great your preparation or forecasting is. They still felt that. The key to it was they didn’t fill it for long and they were thriving again after they made the adjustments. The innovator of the company is not just a visionary.
Visionaries, once it’s created, they can see where it can be. Innovators create it when it’s not seen. The innovators tend to do a little better because they can see what’s not there whereas a visionary needs somebody else to show them the way and then create something better from it. In 2022 going into 2023, I said, “This is the year of the innovator. The person who innovates her product is going to stand out above the person who has to create a vision from the innovation.” That’s what we see.
If you’re an innovator, you already saw it coming, you jumped ahead of it, you saw your process, and you adjusted. If you’re a visionary, you’ve waited for somebody else to see fix it, and now you’re trying to improve on it. We’re seeing guys that are sitting back going, “Somebody, show us the way.” What tends to happen with visionaries is that as soon as they see the way, they’ll improve it and make it better, but only an innovator can see it before.
It’s the best way to stay cutting edge and pivot the fastest versus waiting for all the signals to happen. Usually, if you wait for the signals, it’s too late.
Business owners struggle with being in their business because there’s so much teaching that doesn’t work on it then in it. The truth is, you still need a lifeline to the inside of your business that tells you when to come back in. When you are swimming, you have that lifeline. If you get too far away, you pull on it, they know and they can drag you back in. The same thing with our business.
We got to have those lifelines or somebody can talk to and let us know that we’re needed again. That key process indicator is one of those lifelines that say, “I’m not working anymore. My process is broken. I need you to come and fix it.” This is why research and development are owned by visionary innovators because they need to stay on the cutting edge so they can innovate the process when nobody can fix it.
How do people do that in the real estate investing world? How do they do their own R&D?
Connections. I always tell people four reasons we fail to grow. 1) Fear. 2) People were too scared to change because they were making money. They didn’t want to hurt the business with change. They didn’t want to make a preemptive change. Mindset, they don’t let go. They stay too far from their businesses. They don’t empower others. 3) Connections. Research and development show up big time in connections. We’ve been a part of Collective Genius together. That’s a resource and place to go in research and development. To some degree, a business coach like Sharper allows for that as well. I’m in 5 to 7 offices a week. I’m with a guy today, I’m going for the next two days and then I’m in Tampa, Florida on Thursday and Friday. I was in five locations last week.
I’m seeing innovation and I’m seeing things that are happening before other people are. That’s a form of research and development. Also, listening to a podcast like Money Ripples being on here. One of the best ways of research and development is to bring it right to your earphones and have people like yourself who are going out and seeing whose subject matter experts are in the industry and bringing them in so you can see research and development. Connections are pivotal for research and development.
I agree with that. One thing you mentioned that piqued my interest is that even from the things you’ve taught, you’ve taught me a lot of great things. You’ve revamped your education and training too. It sounds like that’s what RISE is about. Can you tell us more about that?
RISE stands for Resources, Inspiration, Systems, and Engagement. Everybody wants to grow to 100%. When you talk about a business growing to 100%, we call it business maturity. That doesn’t always mean that a company’s going to be a Fortune 500 company. Sometimes it’s a small mom-and-pop company that grows to its 100%. It is the purpose of the organization. What do you want to achieve? What do you want to be remembered for? That could be granular or small, whatever that is. In order to reach that business maturity, we go through quadrants of business, which is the first one, the resource quadrant. That’s a quadrant in which we’re getting started. We’re trying to identify time, money, and people.
Once we have time, money, and people, then we have to grow into the inspiration quadrant. We have to inspire the people. We have to have a purpose that we’re chasing after that’s bigger than us not just money. That usually includes long-term, short-term vision, and the culture of the organization. That’s where we’re driving the culture in the organization. As a business owner, we hit these plateaus to our 100%. The first plateau is when we get stuck and we’re the resources. The second plateau is when we lack goals, structure, and inspiration. The third plateau comes in when we want to start letting go. We hit the ceilings of lack of systems, lack of processes, procedures, policies, good communication skills, KPIs, and how to track that thing.
The last quadrant we usually get stuck in is in that expansion or engagement quadrant. We get stuck there and we’re looking at it going like, “How do I engage more? How do I reach a bigger audience? How do I reach my bigger avatar, my bigger target?” That engagement is the last piece to that 100%. If we don’t do it right, and you’ve heard the statement before, they grew too fast, but that’s not a real thing. You grow wrong. You don’t grow too fast. Here’s what happened. A lot of times, people start a business and they don’t identify the time, the money, and the people, and they start to sell a product.
What they do is they start to make money and they perceive that as a business, but it’s their time, their money and they’re the person. They then go straight to engagement. The world is filled with everybody who wants to be on social media and push their podcast and all that, which, if you earn the right to do it, you have. What we got to be careful about is going to engage before we get the inspiration, the goals, and the systems in place, or then you grow too fast. Let people say that because you implode. If you do it right and you go in that order, we call that rising to your 100%. Going from resources, space, systems, and engagement, it is that engagement being the last critical piece to hitting your 100%.
That way when you are engaging with your customer, you’re ready to fulfill. More importantly, you’re not toppled with all the weight of the business falling down on you because you’ve done it properly if you’ve got the right people in place. One of the things I wanted to spell out with a lot of the operating systems that are out there was a lot of these cliché statements, “Right people, right seat.” How do we even measure that to some degree? There are tools. What does the right seat look like even? There have been other programs out there that ask questions about it, but I wanted a tangible objective way to review it. The way I looked at it was there are four things that are important. That is the person’s heart. When you put somebody in a seat, do they desire to want to be there?
The second is their mind. Do they have the mind or the behavioral traits that sit there? That’s where we used to bring in a predictive index. We’re looking at the cognitive and behavioral traits. There are the hands, the skills of the person. What is their experience from the past? What are they good at? Last is the feet, which is the mobility, their ability to grow with your organization. Are they limited in any way? I’ve created four assessments that have allowed us to measure each one of those areas. The second one is behavioral PI that’s in place already. Number three is skills assessment. What are the right questions to ask when you’re evaluating somebody’s ability to have the right skills?
The last is mobility, the right assessment of looking at, “Can they grow with the organization?” Why is that important? When we define the right seat, we’re looking at two components. We’re looking at, “Do they have the potential?” and, “Do they have the performance?” The potential is in the area of cognitive, behavior, and mobility, their potential to grow and not have to modify to do the job where the performance comes from desire and skills. I wanted to figure out a tangible way, and we’ve done that, to measure if somebody has a high potential and a high performer. In the resources area, that’s what I wanted to do. In the pro forma area, we brought in the ability to look at finances properly. What is your pro forma? What is your budget? What is your P&L? What are your variance reports?
When we were writing this operating system, we felt it was critical to bring that component in early on and not wait until you’re established. What happens is you want to expand, you want to grow your business, and you don’t have the money and resources to do it. We help you develop a pro forma, a P&L, a budget, and a variance report so you’re managing your finances properly to help you forecast that. That’s what we do with resources. Inspiration is key as well. Culture, for me, is one of the things that has been most elusive. How do we create a culture?
I found that after doing this for as many years as I have, that culture comes from somewhere. It comes from value alignment. We got to have core values. It comes from purpose alignment. Right now, the Millennial group is made up in the workforce of 52%. Purpose matters to people. More importantly, does their purpose align with yours? Can they see how their purpose is fulfilled by helping the company achieve its purpose? We have value and purpose alignment. We have long-term and short-term goals alignment. If we can get people aligned in those four areas with the company, we’ll create a great culture. That transcends business.
Culture comes from value alignment. We have to have core values, and they come from purpose alignment. Click To TweetI said this in your marriage. You better have alignment in values, alignment and purpose, and long-term and short-term goals or you’re not going to be okay. Your relationship’s going to suffer. Any relationship that’s ever ended is because of one of those changes. Great leaders will look at it and go, “I love them. I love that person.” You might separate and go different ways. I’ve had partners over the years. One of the people I admire very much is Eddie Wilson. I love the guy. Just because you grow apart in values, purpose, or goals doesn’t mean that you don’t care about the people. At some point, you respect who they are and you go the route that empowers them to be who they are. It’s important to understand that our business is no different.
Our employees, at some point, may outgrow our goals. Their purpose might shift. Maybe their values even change. People change. It just happens. We won’t condemn them for it, but we protect the business, making sure that there’s still alignment. When we have alignment, it creates inspiration. The third thing for us is the systems area. This is the area we grew the most. By the way, in the inspiration, we want to make sure those people are the right people when they align with us. Like in resources, we created another assessment that allows us to evaluate, “Do we trust them as a person, and do they align with us?” Trusting them as a person is we trust that because of their core values and because they’re purpose aligned.
Goal alignment becomes very important, and so does position alignment. When you get married, you have these ground rules of what you’re going to do for your spouse and what your spouse is going to do for you, whether you talk about it or not. Me and my wife, who’s going to do the dishes? Who takes out the trash? We all carry our own weight, but at some point, there’s an understanding of what role you’re going to play. That alignment is important. We’ve figured out a way, a tool that measures trust and alignment in those areas. We jump over systems. What it does is it helps us to measure the process, the procedures, and the policy so we can start to let go.
In this, one of the things we do is we are evaluating. We’ve created an assessment tool here that measures whether or not the process, procedures, and policy bring value to our customers and are essential to our business. The same thing, the nine-box chart we’re looking at, does it bring value to the customer? Each step in the process, procedures, and policies is essential to our business.
Anything that’s not high value and high essential, we need to eliminate and cut back on. If it’s low value, or high essential, then we need to automate it. For anything that is high value and high essential, I want a high potential and high performing person that’s high trust and high alignment during that process. We start to now overlay each one of these assessments to see where we’re driving with the right people, the right seat, and the right process.
The next thing we do with systems is we’ve brought in a measurement of four types of KPIs. The first KPI is your key purpose indicator so that we’re measuring purpose. We also bring in the key profit indicator. We brought in the key performance indicator and the key process indicator. That’s something we’ve done a little differently in ours as well. Last but not least, the engagement. We’re looking at making sure that we have the right branding, the right marketing, and the right advertising channels that lead to sales and what those sales look like. Our curriculum is written in four parts. There are four days to our curriculum, resource day, inspiration day, systems day, and engagement day to make sure we’re maximizing the business’s potential to its 100%.
I wish you had been around when I first launched Money Ripples rather than when I relaunched the purpose behind it. That’s the thing. I’ll tell you from my own experience, and you know this. When we hired Danielle, who was our Chief Marketing Officer as well as our integrator in the company, could not have been a better heaven-sent and somebody that we see long term in our company. That’s in large part because you guys helped align that and helped me get through 200 plus applicants to narrow down to the top, the few, and the proud. With her, we knew right away like, “You’re the fit.” It’s been awesome ever since. That’s all due to you in your company. It’s a great organization.
She’s amazing. I’m saying that because of the interactions with her at CG and other places, she is very much a huge talent to your organization. I like her. She’s phenomenal.
It still blows my mind that she was born when I graduated. That’s the thing. She’s incredible. She’s a great talent. Thank you to your company and your organization for helping us find her. I am grateful for that. If people want to get to know more about what you offer or how you guys work and operate, what’s the best way that people can find you?
SharperBusiness.com is our website. The way we approach things is we start every engagement with somebody doing a free business assessment. We talked earlier about a lot of different Sharper components and businesses. What we’re looking to do is not confuse our audience at all with what that is. We want to bring in one person through one portal, do an assessment, and then build a plan, utilizing all those resources and businesses to give you a comprehensive solution so you don’t feel the pain of jumping from one to the other. It’s a total one-stop-shop solution for business needs, but it takes into consideration that we don’t want to create confusion for you so we do it in a way that mitigates that.
Anybody who’s a business owner, I encourage you guys to check out Sharper stuff. For me, it was revolutionary in our business. I’ve been with multiple business coaches and consultants, but I’m telling you the system that they’ve got going is fantastic. From my own personal experience, I know that they’re amazing. Go check them out. Gary, I appreciate your time today. We can never talk enough about this stuff but thank you for being on so much.
Thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate your time.
The rest of you guys, this is the big thing. You can be visionaries about your own financial future and the things in your lives or you can innovate as well. I’m telling you, the innovators are the ones that are the winners, especially in times like these. You can either try to be the innovator, or if you’re not the innovator, always find support there. It’s always great to have that community around you.
Find those people who help you the best so that you can maneuver and be able to make the best of what’s going on right now. Despite all the fear in the news and all the worries, the truth is that there’s a better opportunity than there’s ever been before. The question is, will you take the opportunity to act? Will you be a listener of the word, or will you be a doer as well? Go and make it a wonderful process week. We’ll see you later.
Important Links
About Gary Harper
Gary is an Entrepreneur, Investor, Business Coach, Christian (Purpose is to do a good work to support God’s work), Husband & Father.
13 years of corporate executive
16 years of active real estate investing, at one time doing 300 deals per year.
Six Sigma Expert – built thousands of REI processes, Predictive Index Certified Partner, coached over 300 RE Investor how to build a business not how to do deals, and implemented EOS in hundreds of businesses, mostly real estate.
Owner of 10 Businesses and Author of:
Is Your Business Sick? – Amazon
Thriving Through Hard Times – Ebook
The Master Of Time – Time and Productivity – Ebook