EP89: When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Appear

Market Dominance Guys

This week, the Market Dominance Guys’ dynamic duo of Chris Beall and Corey Frank are back together again, talking with Henry Wojdyla, the dynamic Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. His company’s special business niche? The direct acquisition of healthcare facilities, particularly medical offices and surgical centers around the country. Recently, Henry was introduced to ConnectAndSell’s sales-acceleration system, and from there, he discovered Chris’ blogs and then this podcast. He is now taking the theories and techniques of marketing domination, which he learned from listening to every Market Dominance Guys’ episode and employing them to dominate his own market.

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Listening in on their conversation, you’ll discover that Chris, Corey, and Henry are kindred spirits and speak a similar business language: the laws of sales thermodynamics; the self-referential dynamics of markets; feedback-loop dynamics; and tactical empathy. What these men also share is a true belief in the practice of having real conversations with prospects over what can often be a prolonged period time, so that when a prospect is ready to buy, the relationship that has been developed will lead to a sale. Borrow ideas from their insights in Chris and Corey’s three conversations with Henry Wojdyla, beginning with this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Appear.”

About Our Guest

Henry Wojdyla is Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. RealSource Group is retained by institutional real estate investors, enhancing their speed and surety of execution through “off-market” acquisitions of medical office buildings and surgical centers.

Market Dominance Guys is sponsored by:

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Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (02:08):

Okay. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and Chris Beall, the sage of sales. Today, Chris, it's a special episode. It is the two-year anniversary of the Market Dominance Guys. This little exercise, where we stumbled upon a litany of my problems that I wanted to solve in the sales universe and I went to you, the sage of sales, and you systematically checked the box for me. It turned into an idea for a book, and then a podcast and then, oh, so much more. Then our new friend, our guest today, Henry Wojdyla from RealSource Group here up in Colorado, right Henry? I think that's where.

Henry Wojdyla (02:51):

Denver.

Corey Frank (02:52):

In Denver. Henry is the principal of RealSource Group and is on the buy-side of real estate assets and helps focus really into the capital placements into a really tight niche. We always talk about the riches and the niches on this podcast. Henry's got a great story about how he is employing the theory of market dominance into practical market dominance today, using some of the techniques that we've talked about for the last couple of years so welcome, Henry.

Henry Wojdyla (03:22):

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Corey Frank (03:23):

I think it's helpful, Chris, how did Henry come into our little market dominance universe? Cause I think we have your family members, your son, and I got my mom. I think we got about seven subscribers, eight subscribers. Henry was the eighth that just stumbled into our world here. How did this happen and how did Henry come to be a guest here today?

Chris Beall (03:45):

Well, first of all, I have to correct you and thanks so much, Corey. Thanks for being here, Henry. There was a doe walking out here in my fiance's forest, as we call it, the next door lot. I call it Helen's forest because a queen should have a forest and she has two fawns so I signed up all three. We're now up to 10 people listening to Market Dominance Guys. I don't think they will ever be guests, though. They seem to be very, very quiet and they've got a lot of work to do out there. There's a lot of stuff to eat.

Corey Frank (04:15):

[crosstalk 00:04:15] ethereal too. Wouldn't you say? Through the thermodynamics of sales, they let that do the talking for them.

Chris Beall (04:23):

Exactly, exactly. So how Henry and I came together from my standpoint was pretty simple. Somebody said, "Hey, we got this Sandler deal. We have a deal with Sandler so we have a Sandler client. He seems a little different." I said, "What does that mean?" "Well, he wants an integration. An integration? We don't do those. "Should we charge him for it?" Yeah, better charge him for it. We don't want to do integration for something like 5,000 dials for a dollar 398. Are you kidding me?

Chris Beall (04:52):

Well, I looked a little bit closer and then thankfully for me, Henry said he wanted us to talk and I had a conversation with him and he just blew my mind, just totally blew my mind. It was like wait a second. I'm wandering around and looking here, I'm doing, I'm looking at, oh, there's the Tower of Pisa, there's this, there's that. Then I wander into this place and there's Michelangelo painting the ceiling. It's like holy Molly. I didn't know anybody knew how to paint ceilings like that.

Chris Beall (05:20):

He's painting the ceiling by basically taking over an industry that we at ConnectAndSell have done more than blunted our pitch on. It's actually been maddening for me. I've done a test drive at a very large, commercial real estate firm and it went spectacularly well. I won't name the firm because God knows, I might have to talk to them again someday, but it went really well. They're calling in these places in Manhattan and basically saying, "You want to sell your building and pay me a commission to do it?" Which Henry is going to tell us why they say that. And it's just, boom, boom, boom. Things are happening. They're really professional.

Chris Beall (05:55):

They're on message, everything's great. We get to the end and they say, "Well, what's next?" I said, "Well, this flight school thing is next. It's going to cost you 9,500 bucks." They just looked at each other and went, "How do we ever get 9,500 bucks?" I'm thinking you can sell two of these chairs. But that was my experience with commercial real estate. Suddenly, I meet a guy, Henry, who's got not only just a plan, but he's executing already on something that when I hear about it, I go, "Oh my God." We spoke and then we've done some work together.

Chris Beall (06:29):

Then he was kind enough to fly up to Seattle and we spent the better part of a day together, not socially distanced properly in a hotel lot. Well, we were half and half. Discovered that he drinks Lagavulin so he's a stronger man than I but I can drink it, but I'm a weak guy so I'm here with my little Macallan. Anyway, what I realized in talking to Henry was he's taken something that could have been an idea but I never managed to articulate it about what we've been talking about with market dominance, which is time-shift your efforts into, I'll call it the closing past.

Chris Beall (07:09):

That is take your anticipated closing date, whatever it is, time-shift your activity so that they're well before that closing day. Build a relationship, build trust, and gather information. Do this systematically across the market because each potential prospect has got a different closing date and you get the famous portfolio. We talk about running overtime, I'll call it the John Jackson portfolio, but you get it with an information flywheel attached to it that lets you dominate in another dimension.

Chris Beall (07:41):

You dominate in time and relationship with trust, and you dominate with information by using your sales activities to gather information. The combination, as you can tell, me being the old mathematician, I'm always looking for something that multiplies together because through multiplication we make an exponentiation and the really big stuff happens. I was blown away so we've been working on something. That's how we came together. That's my story. Henry's story is from a different perspective.

Chris Beall (08:09):

Henry, would you mind telling us the story? Why are you on this crazy podcast with us? You got a Lagavulin and I've got a Macallan. We're ready.

Corey Frank (08:19):

Well, I think essentially, it's almost a bit of a mirror image of what you just described, Chris. It was again, a somewhat Securitas path of referrals that led me to you. The origin point of the initial referral was me looking for ways in which to speak into multiplication. Multiply myself in a way that I can cover this niche that we've built this business around, which is specifically the acquisition, direct acquisition of healthcare facilities, particularly medical office surgical centers around the country.

Corey Frank (08:53):

Although that is a very finite niche, there are still enough assets, prospects, and people and things to know that for one individual to cover on a national basis, it can be a bit challenging. I was determined to figure out a way to multiply myself. The initial thinking was, well, maybe we'll get a contract. Someone that's got some senior sales skills and has some experience working with large value increments of investment and use them to leverage myself. That steered us somewhat in the direction of Sandler.

Corey Frank (09:28):

Ultimately, what it did is it got me in your orbit because I was fortunate enough to have someone at that organization say, "Hey, what would the best thing be essentially for you just to make the call yourself?" I said, "Well, precisely that's what I'm doing, but I'm at my throughput limit right now." That's when the introduction to ConnectAndSell was made. After quickly understanding the mathematical implications, what was a lot more exciting to me, although that was impressive, was really the foundational aspects that you and Corey have been talking about because I came across your blog.

Corey Frank (10:02):

I came across Market Dominance Guys, and really, quickly began to understand that there's something far more profound here than simply a way to make more dials per hour.

Chris Beall (10:12):

Yeah. Tumbling to that is not easy. It's that you managed to do it pretty darn quickly. The thing that amazed me is you've done all this work. When we first met we were talking actually at this fairly low technical level. I mean low in the stack about certain things about making outreach work with ConnectAndSell. We've made outreach work with ConnectAndSell in some very interesting ways for some pretty big companies and it's done just right. We call it talk to sequence and it's pretty magic, but you had turned outreach into an air traffic control center for you.

Chris Beall (10:46):

But when you think about it, this is what really got me, is your concept was, and nobody's ever attempted this before, as far as I know, which is one man, one market, dominance. That is truly the Iron Man theme. I think back to the Iron Man comics, the movie, the whole bit, as it's one person with the Iron Man suit can go do so many things so fast, and they're so precise that person can dominate an entire movie, so to speak, or the villains or whatever. The idea of one person dominating all by themselves a significant chunk of the economy that's identifiable, that you can put a name on, you can put a number on.

Chris Beall (11:31):

I don't know how big that number is, Henry, but I'm suspecting it's got to start with the B because the folks behind you with the capitol don't do stuff that doesn't start with at least a B and sometimes they have to put other words in front of the B, commas and all sorts of stuff like that, right?

Chris Beall (12:28):

So it's not a tiny market. It's not like a banana stand. Yeah, I could probably go, if I really put my mind to it and dominate the Port Townsend Farmer's Market for hard goat cheese. Actually, I couldn't because I know who does that at the Chimacum dairy place and she's so good. No, I couldn't displace her but I could come up with something that's tiny, but you're not talking tiny. You're talking how many interesting assets are out there to be acquired?

Henry Wojdyla (13:01):

Well, in our universe and we control for a lot of things. So again, right off the bat, we've definitionally siphoned down the commercial real estate world into a property type or asset class, if you will that is healthcare-oriented again, as medical office and surgical centers. That definition area begins to cordon off quite a bit of the inventory that would be under the broader commercial real estate umbrella. From there, we then began to control for certain factors, in terms of size of assets, quality of assets, ownership or counterparty types.

Henry Wojdyla (13:33):

I can give you some specifics. In our world, we don't particularly care about properties that are less than 20,000 square feet just because you're probably never going to get to evaluation that is going to be large enough to make sense for our book of clients. You don't get any economies of scale, in terms of the capital placement. As it relates to the quality we're looking for, generally speaking, higher-quality assets, which is a fuzzy term, but we know what to look for. It's a combination of just the physical infrastructure, the quality of the tenancy.

Henry Wojdyla (14:01):

Then we also specifically look for the type of counterparties we don't want to interact with. In our world ironically, what we don't want to do is actually be calling upon health systems or hospitals. The reason for that is that they, like many large institutional type owners, frequently have two factors that don't work in our favor. We've identified that early on in this business. One is they are slow to move, generally speaking. They also, typically for many institutional reasons, don't tend to make, what I'll call, more entrepreneurial-driven decisions.

Henry Wojdyla (14:34):

And what that means in this world is they are not going to sell in an off-market basis. Somebody in accounting and somebody in finance needs to have some version of a CYA where they can say, " Well, we went out, and we made a market, and we got X number of offers and we feel comfortable with the price." It doesn't mean they couldn't have gotten the same price directly, or frankly, probably for the better price, when you began to think about all the frictional costs we take out of the equation.

Henry Wojdyla (14:57):

Setting that aside, we quickly learned that was a type of counterparty that didn't work well for us. None of this is negative and says that this doesn't speak ill of those institutions or groups. It's just we had to quickly distill down where is our fertile ground? When we do all of those things, getting now back to your question, there's really only about 5,000 properties across the country that we care about, maybe a little bit more. That's about it.

Corey Frank (15:22):

Yeah. It's interesting, Henry, I think you're leading the witness there, Chris, about how tight and small this market is with Henry, right? We led off by saying the riches are in the niches. I think when one of our earlier episodes, and this has got to be in the first six, eight months or so and Henry has them all categorized so you probably know this. Remember this, Henry, is we talked about how entrepreneurs oftentimes make the mistake, repeatedly encouraged by VCs, by the way, to describe their TAM, their total addressable market, as really vast, as some sort of advantage.

Corey Frank (15:58):

But it's really a huge disadvantage, right, Chris? Because the tighter your market, your first market, the better off that you are because you actually have a better chance of your product actually solving a problem that your market has. Correct?

Chris Beall (16:14):

Yeah. The problem with big markets is they're generally not markets. A market is defined as a set. Essentially, you can reduce it to a list and order it in whatever way you want, but a set of entities, folks, whatever, that if you sell to one, it reduces the cost and risk of selling to every other one in that set. As soon as you come to one that doesn't fit that model, that if you sell to one, that one is not advantaged. You don't have an advantage selling it out. When you have to kick them out of the market, they don't count.

Chris Beall (16:50):

This is a Jeffrey Moore definition of a market. It puts a skin around it. It's almost surface tension. Actually, the math is identical to surface tension, but thank God most people listening to this podcast don't know the math of surface tension so they're not plagued with the dreams I have at night. How surface tension works it holds itself together because every molecule in there is attracted to every other one in a certain way. Water is funny like this. It's this polar molecule, that one water molecule gets close to another one, it orients itself so they like each other.

Chris Beall (17:24):

Well, if you drop them from the sky, they make little balls. It's called raindrops. It's cool. They're not actually shaped like this. They're shaped like little balls because it holds together. Markets are like that. And by definition or by effect, it's hard to make a raindrop above a certain size. You can't make a raindrop the size of a 747, much less the shape of one. It just doesn't work. It breaks apart into pieces and then the pieces hold together. That's how markets behave. Almost by definition, true markets are always relatively smaller than people think.

Chris Beall (17:57):

So to your VC, what you should be saying is, "There's a set of markets that we've identified, if you need a huge investment, and they're related to each other by a common set of needs that aren't perfectly overlapping, but are similar enough that one product with small modifications can jump from market to market." And that market dominance is key because I can't get to all of them unless I can take one because the only safe position in a market is dominance so I have to go take a market.

Chris Beall (18:26):

We had a whole episode on this. I was talking about it with somebody today. Take one and then go, "Okay, what's next?" Then as soon as the boulder is rolling downhill. And by the way, the guy I was talking to, Matt Forbes, who you know well, said, "You've never used the boulder analogy on the Market Dominance Guys." I said, "Well, Forbes, your memory tends to be pretty poor so maybe I did, maybe I didn't. I really don't know but here's the analogy I think I used. I think I know where I was walking in the San Francisco Airport when we were talking about it."

Chris Beall (18:54):

But the idea is when you are trying to dominate a market, it's like pushing a boulder up a hill. At the beginning, you're at the bottom and the hill's like this. It's super steep, and super hard, and you got to work like a dog, and you keep thinking it's going to roll back on you, and all these things are going on. Your feet are slipping. Your hands are sweaty, you're afraid. As you start to get farther up the hill, the hill gets a little, the hills are like this like these volcanoes we have here like that. Then it gets a little less steep and a little less steep.

Chris Beall (19:23):

Then you start to feel like, "Hey, I can move this thing." There's a point where it starts rolling downhill by itself. Don't run next to it. Go get another boulder at the bottom of another hill because you were strong enough to do one. The key to markets' dominance, maybe we should have called this Markets' Dominance Guys, but I think people would have just... They already look at us funny, Corey, so it's not going to help to do that stuff. But markets' dominance is the key because unless you're offering, can address at some level or provide leverage at some level across multiple markets, you were an idiot to build it. That's the definition of a product.

Chris Beall (20:03):

A product is something that can have currency or meaning in multiple markets with some modifications. Now, maybe the modification is too big or that the resulting product is too low value. A Tesla as a doorstop is a weird cross-market move. They make great doorstops, by the way, but so do a lot of other things. A Tesla to tow an electric airplane in up to 60 miles an hour to reduce the amount of battery you need in the airplanes, the airplane could go 600 miles instead of 400 miles. That is a pretty cool use of a Tesla. Now, that's a very defined market.

Chris Beall (20:41):

How many electric airplanes do we need to get going 60 miles an hour so that we know we don't have to use that heavy battery to get them going? The battery can stay on the ground and the plane can go in the air. We don't know yet. That's a nascent market but it is an adjacent market to the electric automobile market. The product itself would work fine with a little hook on the back for the cable and stuff like that. People tend to think of markets, I would say funny or not very precisely. Henry thinks of markets super precisely.

Chris Beall (21:11):

What I just defined is I'm sure of this following fact. The more buildings he buys, the easier it's going to be to convince somebody to sell a building through him. Right, Henry?

Henry Wojdyla (21:22):

Right. Absolutely.

Chris Beall (21:23):

Because they see themselves like each other. It's actually the same principle when we say tactical empathy and a cold call. We want the other party to know that we see the world through their eyes. A market is a means by which each sale causes everybody else to see the world through the eyes of the person who bought and it makes it easier for them to buy. [crosstalk 00:21:43] It's powerful stuff.

Corey Frank (21:48):

Well, we've talked about one of the laws of sales, thermodynamics and market dominance is that the more traction I get, the less there is for my competition, and the more friction my competition in essence has, especially when I do proper follow-up. I'd imagine, Henry, that as you started this process that the exhaust or the signals, not the noise, as Chris talks about oftentimes.

Corey Frank (22:14):

But the signals that you're getting from these folks, who aren't quite ready to engage in a conversation yet, but they may be ready next month or next quarter, is that's part of your market dominance process, correct?

Henry Wojdyla (22:30):

Absolutely. That actually ties into the broader concept that Chris mentioned a little while ago of the air traffic control piece. Part of the reason I needed the air traffic control was actually to really helped me manage in two completely different capacities, two ends of the pipeline or the spectrum. On the one end, we've got the top of funnel, if we want to call it a such, which is the out there, in the trenches, engaging with market participants at a high volume of number and speed.

Henry Wojdyla (22:58):

On the other end, because of the caliber of the people I typically deal with, they're usually fairly sophisticated. They typically are high-net-worth individuals. The value of the underlying assets and question, I can't let any ball ever drop. I have to figure out a way to operate in both ends of the spectrum and the air traffic control piece was a big way to get there. You're right. Getting signal out of noise is a huge piece of it. We are very cognizant to always try to harvest data, either be it directly, which is of course, the best, by way of having real conversations with people over time.

Henry Wojdyla (23:38):

But also be able to begin to infer data, which speaks to a little bit, although maybe a different point that Chris was making, about the self-refer self-referential dynamics of markets. And as you began to more tightly define them, you begin to identify not just trends, but you can begin to understand what the cohesion is across cohorts. That helps us begin to if we can't get direct data, make some pretty intelligent, some cases guesses or assignments, if you will, of what I call metadata that we can then begin to overlay upon our TAM. That lets us really get precise in how we cross-cut that, which again, lets us then better message and better address concerns with folks.

Henry Wojdyla (24:21):

If we still haven't necessarily spoken with them directly, we can begin to partition that messaging in a way that's meaningful for them. There are all these feedback loops. Chris and I frequently are discussing feedback loop dynamics in many, many different ways and this would be one flavor of that.

Corey Frank (24:37):

Yeah, I like that. It'd be interesting, I think, for the sales nerds who are fans of this kind of show and these types of discussions that we get into a lot, without disclosing too much of the IP. What surprised you being a seasoned real estate asset acquirer in the marketplace for many years when you started looking at one man's trash is another man's treasure? And when you looked at this residue, what surprised you that maybe they never taught you about real estate in the past?

Corey Frank (25:05):

They never talked to you about acquisition strategies, or sales or pipeline management, et cetera, that now you can't unsee it. I think that's the thing about these laws of sales thermodynamics that we talk about is once you understand in our world, dial to connect, sales ratio, list size, who picks up the phone. Once you see it, you never unsee it, no matter what market you go into. What are some of those that maybe you now see you with these predator goggles that maybe you didn't in the past?

Henry Wojdyla (25:35):

It's an interesting question. It's both specific and broad at the same time. I guess at a certain level, a lot of this has been organically figured out over time by ourselves, myself specifically. There wasn't really a specific roadmap to get there, per se. As on a somewhat related but separate topic, Chris and I have also had many conversations, including with some other individuals, about really the lack of any sort of guidance or training in this particular industry. A lot of it has been bootstrapped over the course of my career to figure out the signals to look for and the indicators.

Henry Wojdyla (26:08):

It wasn't really a formalized, in terms of training, no really real training. It was really the necessity being the mother of invention was really the driving force here. I'm not really precisely answering your question, Corey, but a lot of it I think is what's driven me to get obsessive about capturing and harvesting data. Really beginning to understand our market in a way that is both specific in the aggregate, but also finite in the ways that we can cross-cut it, because it begins to give me the type of traction that I need.

Henry Wojdyla (26:39):

Not necessarily in terms of the engagement with people, but to really understand them even before we ever speak.