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Real Estate Investing: Insights with Jaben Makings of Onnix Investments · Built by Margin with Laurie Chen

• 0:04
  Welcome to Built by Margin, the podcast where strategy meets the spreadsheet. I'm your host, Laurie Chen, fractional CFO and tax strategist, here to help you make smarter financial decisions, build a profitable business, and keep more of what you earn. Let's dive into the numbers that actually move the needle. All right, welcome to Built by Margin. Today, I'm joined by Jaben Makings, founder of Onnix Investments, a real estate investment company known for wholesaling off-market properties, building a strong team, and growing through an agent-first blueprint, basically a way of partnering with agents that strengthens the ecosystem instead Your bio mentions that you originally had aspirations of owning a pool company. Then you became a real estate operator and team builder. Walk me through your pivot. What happened? What did you Yeah, that's a great question. So I moved out to Arizona at age 18 from Nebraska, a small town. And I had my eyes set on a pool company, right? I was going to come out here and start working for a guy to kind of learn the ropes and then start a company eventually.
• 1:19
  And as working for that, while working for that pool company, I realized that this isn't what I wanted to do forever. And then one of the big reasons being was because the owner was like in his 60s and he was still having to get out there and clean pools whenever guys would call out sick. And I'm like, I don't want this to be me for the rest of my life. And knowing what I know about business now, I know that if you set up the business properly, it wouldn't be like that. But that kind of scared me away from the pool industry. So I'm like, how can I go out and make a ton of money and get super rich and buy investment property? Because I ultimately wanted to buy rental houses and get the passive income eventually. And then I'm like, I'm just gonna go be a real estate agent. And that couldn't have been further from the truth, getting rich quick. But I did that for a couple of years before finally making the pivot to go all in on the investing side, because it gets me a little bit closer to my goals of investing and getting passive income. So I dove all into Onnix Investments about two and a half years ago now. And we've been scaling it like crazy.
• 2:20
  I was talking to the team the other day, and in December of last year, it was still kind of a one-man show. I had a virtual assistant. And so in the last 12 months, we've been able to almost 4X our revenue and Wow, that's amazing. What was the first proof moment where you thought, okay, I think within the first 30 days when I nailed that first deal and I had a $10,000 check to go pick up from the title company, I was like, wow, this is awesome.
• 2:51
  I'm already a real estate agent, so I know how to talk to all these agents because that's what we do. We're agent-facing. So we talk to agents all day and then we get them to send us their off-market properties. And so I'm like, this is definitely a repeatable one. If I can do this once, I can continue What is one thing that you underestimated about the business early How much effort it would take. Right. When first getting started in something, I've noticed that myself and a lot of people think it's going to be a lot easier than it actually is. But the amount of brain damage that comes with owning a business is a lot more than the average person thinks. And I was just talking to somebody about this the other day. It's like I have so much more respect for small business owners than I did before I started a business because it's just crazy the stuff that you have to go through every single day over and over and over again and for a lot of times it's without any Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's a lot of financial obligations, tax obligations with becoming a business owner. Like, that's something that's completely new territory. How is navigating that for you? Like, understanding taxes, cash Thankfully, I had a pretty decent accountant. He wasn't super in-depth with stuff, but I knew enough where he would get me to an S-corp versus an LLC, which if you guys don't know what that is, it saves you a bunch of taxes if you're self-employed. I still don't know all the ins and outs of that. I let the accountants take care of it. But it was definitely kind of a shift, especially when I started hiring people and I started getting overhead, because when I started the company, I was just a one-man show working out of my bedroom. And so when I got an office and started getting a CRM for multiple team members, the revenue numbers started mattering a lot less than the profit number. Because before I'd look at revenue and that was essentially my profit, except for a couple hundred dollars, maybe for my own CRM and some small miscellaneous stuff. But other than that, I was keeping all of the revenue. So as I started to grow the company and grow the team, I really had to start looking at what the actual Yeah, I'm glad you touched on profit margin, because I was going to ask you about tracking your metrics, because I'm going to put my CFO hat on and say, if I opened your operator dashboard or your financial dashboard, what numbers or metrics are you watching and tracking weekly? And how does that make a difference in your business Yeah, so we track several key things for all the sales guys, which all spits out to how much we're going to make. So we track a number of qualified realtors, right?
• 5:34
  So how many people we're talking to on a daily basis that end up knowing us and liking us and trusting us that we can add to our pipeline and follow up with.
• 5:41
  We're tracking conversations. So how many conversations are we having every single day? We're tracking our talk time. right? Which we can track it on our CRM. It's not just time spent on a dialer. It's time actually spent talking to people. And then these are arguably, these next two are arguably the most important, but they're a little bit less in our control. And that's deal leads. So how many off-market properties are getting sent to us? And out of those that we're getting sent, how many are we making offers on? And right now it's about, the numbers are we get 20 properties sent to us, we'll offer on about half of those, so we'll offer on 10 of those, and then we'll lock up one deal. And our average deal size is right about What systems or tools or resources are you using to help you in your operations, both from a financial perspective and operational perspective?
• 6:27
  And how does the implementation of AI One of the biggest tools that I got into early last year when I was first starting to scale was Precision. Matt Verlack owns that. And that's really opened my eyes to being a lot more data-driven company than I was. Like I knew I needed to track some numbers. I really didn't do a great job at that until I joined Precision. And then they helped me lay out the entire dashboard of a lot of the stuff that we should track. And I obviously tweaked it. And now I track those religiously. We go over the numbers every single morning in our huddle as a team, what happened the day before, what happened the week prior, and then what happened a month prior in all those several meetings right there. And then as far as AI goes, we are trying to become an AI first company, right? I'm working on a AI texting platform that'll text and build relationships with our agents and qualify these properties before passing them off to our sales reps. which that should hopefully be done here in the next couple of months. And then every single person on my team should be using ChadGBT or some other AI like that almost on a daily basis, whether it's trying to get a response on an agent or what they should do in this situation. So we're trying to use AI as much as we can, because if Yeah, that is so true, because even AI in the past years is still changing, right? Like they're coming out with new thinking models, updating the legacy models, like that's, it's still, you know, simplifying our work, but also we have to adopt to the technological It's crazy how the AI has changed just in the last year, because I was looking at some of my responses when I was asking it questions last year compared to right now. It's like night and day difference. And that's because the AI model has gotten way better, but also because my prompting has gotten much better and I know how to use and work with the AI a bit more.
• 8:25
  So if you're getting into AI, that'd be my biggest tip is to learn how to prompt the AI. So go on YouTube and watch some videos, because if you're just punching random stuff into the in the chat, GBT or whatever you're using, you're going to get, you know, average responses. But if you prompt it correctly, you're going to get night and day difference Oh, that's a good point. So you're saying go to YouTube and learn like what what's a prompt chat, GBT or whatever AI YouTube. And then honestly, you can just ask the AI how to how So, for example, I had a real estate agent that was texting with me the other day, and it was hilarious because I could tell that it was 100% just copied and pasted from ChatGBT. It has the M dashes. It's using a bunch of different stuff that the AI uses.
• 9:16
  And so I quickly went to ChatGBT. I'm like, hey, write me a prompt. So that way, anytime I need a text message, it sounds a lot more like me instead of AI. And it spits out a quick prompt right there because it knows how to prompt itself. It knows what it wants to hear. And so I copied and pasted, I copied that and sent that over to her. I'm like, hey, use this prompt next time before you copy and paste this over to Oh, that's genius. I love that. So you Shachi Claude, I've heard is great. I've used it a little bit, but I use ChatGPT on Okay, great. Yeah, I'm a big fan of ChatGPT as well, but we had a podcast guest recently who's saying that he uses Claude all the time. And so I was like, okay, maybe I'll try that out. But yes, I'm a big fan of ChatGPT Pro version. It works wonders in Let's talk about team building. So you mentioned that you have a team of seven now. How did you grow it to that size team? Like what were your learnings? What was the first hire that truly changed The biggest thing I've learned since hiring people is that you teach people how to treat you.
• 10:34
  Right? When I was 1st hiring, I wanted to be that cool boss. Right? I wanted all of them to like me.
• 10:40
  So I'd let stuff slide and as you keep letting boundaries slide and different things slide, it's going to continue to get worse. So, 1 thing I implemented in the last 6 months was a lot more accountability and actually inspecting what I expect out of them. Because a lot of times I just give them stuff and tell them to go do it and I wouldn't micromanage. I almost gave them too much freedom. Whereas I've had to reign that in later last year because I saw a lot of. stuff was being taken advantage of.
• 11:10
  So if you're just now hiring people, make sure you have key metrics in place, stuff that you want them to hit, and then you need to inspect what you expect. So don't give them a project and then just go tell them to do it, and then just meet with them when they're done. You gotta be checking it along the way, and not like in a micromanagement sense, but just checking to make sure Does everyone on the team report directly to you? How is Yeah, everybody reports to me except last week. I have a guy, he's in a sales captain role. I promoted him recently, but I've started shifting a lot more of the focus for the sales guys to be reporting to him. So they're coming to him with a lot more of the tedious questions. He's in charge of making sure everybody hits their numbers, people are making the meetings on time. So that's taken a lot off my plate just in the last week alone. So now I'm starting to refill my time because it's kind of like Dan Martell's buyback loop, where you kind of hit your pain threshold, where I'm getting bombarded with questions all the time and getting slammed with all sorts of stuff that I don't have a bunch of time to go out and actually focus on growing the company. Well, now that I've done that, he's taken quite a bit off my plate. Not so much that he's underwater, but I'm still taking some of that heat. But now it's freed up a lot of my time that I can go focus on hiring and actually growing the Great. So today's January 9th. We just began 2026. What are your goals, dreams, visions for this year? What are your growth Yeah. So we have been mainly an acquisition focused company, right? Where we go out, we find the deals and we send these deals to other wholesalers with big buyers list to help us sell the deals. Well, now that acquisitions is starting to get stabilized, we are going to start building out the disposition side of our company. And it's taken me, you know, two and a half years to really build out the acquisition side of our company. And I think we can do this in probably six to 12 months. And so once we get that done, then we're going to start doing other pieces of our company, such as direct-to-seller and co-wholesaling, which is where you sell other people's deals. And co-wholesaling or direct-to-seller, for those of you that don't know, is just sending out mailers to sellers. you know, they do Google ads. It's just essentially getting actual homeowners to reach out to you to sell their property. Whereas over here at Onnix, we do agent outreach. So we figured out, you know, what do 80% of homeowners do when they decide that they want to sell their house, right? They're going to go online and they're going to look up a realtor or they're going to call a friend and family member and ask for a referral to a realtor. And that's where we come in at. We're sitting here talking to these agents all day, every day. And when they get these leads that come in and the house is trashed, or maybe the sellers need to be out in two weeks because of a foreclosure or they have tax liens, or maybe they just inherited the property. They send those properties to us and we make a cash offer. We get the real estate agent paid, we get the sellers out of their tough situation. And then we provide a really solid property to an end buyer. That's going to go in and make money flipping What has been the biggest financial lesson that you've learned in your years working What I was talking about earlier, differentiating revenue versus profit, because when I started getting overhead, I was still calculating my revenue and thinking that like, oh, wow, I'm making 20 grand a month now. No, I'm not, I'm making 10 to $15,000 a month because of all this overhead. So I'm like, I was spending like crazy based on my revenue. So it took me a couple of months to be like, hang on a second, we gotta figure out the actual profit margins here and figure out what Do you work with a fractional CFO or CPA that helps you I haven't gotten that far yet, no. Okay. It will Yeah. And definitely with, you know, you seem like you like to implement AI into your processes and systems. That's something like if you do AI fractional CFO or bookkeeping, like that's something that you could really implement And I did just implement a bookkeeper because I was still doing everything myself and keeping track of it all in QuickBooks. So I did that probably two weeks ago, which is so nice already. So I think something like an AI fractional CFO would definitely be beneficial here Something I think was on one of Martel's AIs that he has where he can go in and ask any question. That looked really, really interesting.
• 15:51
  But when he presented that and showed it, I didn't feel like Yeah, no, I just started working with a client that made the investment to utilize Frank. So I'm going to definitely be involved in overseeing the bookkeeping there, because I'm very curious in how the AI for bookkeeping works. because one of the companies here in Austin, it was called Scale Factor, they raised like $100 million to basically do AI bookkeeping, but they basically crashed and shut down and had to return money to an investor. So I'm curious how this particular bookkeeping platform is different in what they're able to produce versus what Scale Factor was able to produce. So that's why I'm really interested in this Um, well, the articles that I read said that they weren't delivering on the product on the side of the product. Like, they said, you know, is going to use be your bookkeeper and categorize all these transactions. So you don't have to, but they ended up just being your regular accounting firm with, like, you know, 30. there are tons of clients and like 30 clients per person, per FTE. So they basically were an accounting firm masquerading Yeah. So scaling. Where was a season of growth where you had to rebuild a system or a role or even your identity as the leader and CEO Well, number one, the identity, I think the identity is constantly changing, right? I'm trying to get to that person that I need to be to hit my goals, which, you know, I'm obviously not there yet. I don't, I don't think a lot of us are there. You can't, the person I am today, isn't the person that's going to be making the amount of money that I want to be making five to 10 years from now. So I'm constantly changing and evolving in that sense. And then, you know, big, big hurdle that we had a big setback where we kind of rebuilt everything was back in July. So I had 2 sales guys working for me at the time. And I had gone through a few, right? I had a lot of turnover while I was still learning the systems of the business. Whereas now I found I got some good, solid guys in here. But back in July, I had 2, it was actually June, I had 2 sales guys working for me. And I didn't really know how to systematize the business and what I was the sequencing essentially of it, of what I'm supposed to do next. So I'm like, okay, these guys are producing, we just had a good month in June. And revenue, this is about as much revenue as we're typically doing. So I'm gonna get out of sales, right? It's the first month that this happens. So I start backing off of sales and start focusing on other stuff in the business. And then I lose one sales guy.
• 18:49
  And one of them, he's still with me today, but then we go into July and he doesn't have any deals in July. I don't have any deals because I'm trying to get out of sales, not doing anything. So in July, we had $0 in revenue and I'm like, okay, that was a really bad idea to get out of sales right there. So I had to restart and get to hiring again. So I learned that mistake the So on this podcast, we talk a lot about taking risks and being risk worthy because I'm currently working on a book about decision making. What is a risk that you took recently? I think within the last six months or so that felt really scary, but The last six months, it was. Continuing to continuing to hire, even though I was kind of underwater. But I knew that that's what needed to be done in order to continue to scale the business, because a lot of these guys are commission only. It just it's basically just my bandwidth that's getting eaten up trying to hire them. So I continue to press on and. I'm glad I did because we finally got a solid group of guys in here. But I think in business, it's like constant risk taking. But you have to measure the risk to the risk ratio. Does this make sense? What happens if I fail? And try to reduce the risk as much as you can. But when you own a business, especially in the first couple of years when you're still a startup and you're still scaling, there's going to be a lot of risk with a lot of the decisions that you make. So it's What about if you think about your personal non-negotiables, you know, in Dan Martell's group, you know, we have, you know, daily non-negotiables. What's something that you've implemented that, that has really helped you make a difference in scaling and growing your business That's a great question. There's, there's too Like, I guess, but daily non negotiables that I don't miss is, is working out. Right. And then reading and listening to podcasts, right? I have to be consuming as much information as possible to continue to grow. And then another thing that I did this year is I implemented a word of the year, which my word of the year is discipline. So I look at that as my screensaver. And anytime I'm like, I feel like I'm slacking off. I look and I'm like, this is my identity for the year. I'm extremely disciplined, which I already was. But I want to get to that next level. I have to be even more disciplined.
• 21:31
  So it's little reminders like that throughout the day and checking different stuff. I have different talking points that I practice throughout the day, which I was talking to my sales guys about this and they're not practicing their scripting very frequently. And I'm like, you guys, I own the company and I'm still practicing different scripting every single day, every single morning. And those are different stories that I've crafted, different stories that have happened to me to be able to explain them better to other people.
• 22:00
  It's different podcast talking points. It's all kind of scripting, right? And I practice those every single day. And I've got some of my sales guys that weren't practicing these other scripts. I'm You mentioned reading every day. What's a book that you would recommend It depends on what stage you're in in your business.
• 22:26
  If you're just getting started in sales or maybe just starting your business, I would say a good one is How to Win Friends and Influence People. I make everybody that comes in here read those books. Another great one is The Dichotomy of Leadership. I'm making the guy that I was just telling you about, that's my sales captain, I'm making him read that right now. And that's such a powerful book because it's not all business facing or learning, right? Half of the book or half of each chapter is like a war story. And those always interest me. It's talking about different stuff in combat. And then the second half of the chapter is talking about a business lesson or just a lesson in life that they took away from that combat experience. But it's a phenomenal leadership book. He's Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink, and then the Great. What is the best use Me personally? Mm-hmm. I right, continue to bring out more people and put out more A lot of it is through Indeed. Right now, I have a couple-step process. And we're trying to really grow the Instagram right now. And the number one reason for that is recruiting, right? Because in order to grow the company where we want it to grow, we're gonna need a ton of salespeople coming in through here. But on Indeed, it's a couple-step process. So they apply, we get hundreds of applications. We'll go through and then text them. What I'll typically do is I'll go through and text the ones that I like. I'll review the resume and I'll text them in a group chat with my assistant and asking if they have time for a 15 minute phone interview. Right? We're not doing an in person interview yet.
• 24:27
  And then she's going to reply asking 2 different questions. Number 1, being that they have reliable transportation to get to our office and work here daily. And then number 2, since it's a commission only sales job. that they have the ability to go without pay for 60 days just in case it took them a while to learn everything and they couldn't get any deals going. Although we see a lot of guys making money sooner than that, we just want to double-check so we don't put anybody into a bad position. Then once they reply to that, then myself or her will get on that 15-minute phone interview. We'll ask them a handful of simple questions and then make sure that they're a good culture fit. And then we will bring them in for an in person interview. And then after that, it'll be a 3rd interview, which will be So, you mentioned that you have an office, so is it 5 days in office It is, yeah. Five days in office and we're in sales, right? There's pretty much no days off in my opinion. There are days off, but you're still gonna be getting texts and stuff, which if you want to make the most amount of money possible, you should be able to respond to those texts. And I'm not saying not to have a bad work-life balance where you're responding to texts at 10 p.m. at night and stuff, but on Saturdays and Sundays, you're probably gonna be working a little bit. It's not gonna What's a mistake that you've made that you're actually A mistake that I made that I'm actually glad that I made? That's a I'll say like for me, since I'm thinking from like a CFO CPA hat, like, One year I didn't pay my taxes on time and the next year I made sure I put some guardrails in place to minimize those taxes and penalties. So that was the jolt that got me to put a new system in place that Yeah, 1 of the biggest mistakes that I made in my it was actually my career, but I'm actually super glad that it worked out the way it did was that when I was a real estate agent, I had what's called shiny object syndrome. So, if you don't know what that is, it's where you every new idea that comes to you, you are wanting to go and try that. Right? So, you know, I had. pretty much any business you can think of I had thought about or I had actually tried it. So drop shipping, Amazon, FBA, solar, I mean, you name it, I had looked into it. And so I was trying something every couple of months and it kept me sidetracked from being a good real estate agent. And had that not happened, I think I probably would have stayed a real estate agent and been making a crap load of money and never took the jump out to start my own company. So because of that, I, you know, I felt I could, I should take the risk and, and go and start my own business in which that never would have happened had I not had shining object syndrome, but bringing that kind of full circle, that's. one of the things that I absolutely never do now, right?
• 27:39
  When I started this company, I said, I'm going to get absolutely laser focused on this and not touch anything else until this, this business is stabilized. And you kind of saw that in a different form of just doing strictly agent outreach acquisitions, where I see a lot of new guys doing, trying to do direct to seller. They're trying to do dispositions and it's, it's hard. to do that many things at once. Right. You should just focus on one thing and get really good at that and master that before moving on to the next thing.
• 28:06
  Right. And I saw I went over to some other another company that's that's nearby and they're kind of newer in the game. And my head was hurting with how much different stuff they had going on. Right. The podcast, of course, you know, four different types of wholesaling. Like my head was spinning because it's such a small team. Like, Is there any last piece of financial or entrepreneur or operating advice that you want Yeah, I think people underestimate how dangerous unfocused thinking actually is. Right? So I go out deer hunting every single year. All right, back in Nebraska up in the sand hills. And when you're out there, it's all you're thinking about is this deer, right? It's all that's on your mind all day, every day. And after a few days, something weird starts to happen. All of a sudden, everything starts to look like this deer, right? So the rocks, the trees, the bushes, like it all looks like this deer. And I see the same thing happen in business and in life. If you're constantly thinking about the negative, you're constantly thinking about what's going wrong, then your mind's gonna continue to feed you evidence to justify that focus, right?
• 29:19
  So you need to make sure you're filling your mind with positive stuff because if you let your mind wander and think for itself, it's typically gonna Good words of wisdom. Where can people find you in Onnix and what's the best way to connect with you? You mentioned Instagram. What Okay, well, great. We'll definitely link your links to our show notes so people can find you. Thank you so much for joining Built by Margin. And listeners out there, it would mean a lot if you would share the episode, subscribe, that helps to grow the show, and people who need to hear this. So until next time, protect your margin, build your systems, and make decisions that support your best possible future. Thanks. All Yeah, of course. And sorry, I kind of threw that back at you. You can cut that out where Oh, yeah. I'll definitely edit it to make it more smooth. But yeah. So I hope you have a great weekend and Yeah. Fill me in on, you know, some stuff I could have done better there. I'm always I mean, I think it was fine, I didn't really I didn't send you the questions beforehand, so I think it probably would have helped if I gave you the questions beforehand, right? But I think it was more just like, you know, back and forth conversation. I I would say maybe some of the answers were a little bit short. So Do you think having more stories to fill in with some Yeah, absolutely. Because, yeah, you definitely have knowledge and insight to share. I think probably, yeah, having a little bit more examples OK. That's phenomenal. I Yeah, I'm trying to think what else is I'm looking at my questions here. No, I mean, I think it just would have helped if we had if I sent you the questions beforehand. But Yeah, it's like 50-50 for me. If I have time, I'll be able to send it ahead of time. But if not, I just like to have that conversation. But yeah, I would say probably the only feedback is probably if you had a few examples or Hey, you too. Take care. And then let me know when you go to post this and stuff. We if you want, you can send over the unedited stuff and I can have my video guy chop up some stuff on our end as well. And And lately my views have been going up a lot. The algorithm that is really favoring my reels right now. So yeah, right now is a good time to post on Instagram to I love it. I love it. Well, yeah, let me know if you want to email over that unedited Thanks for tuning in to Built by Margin. If you're ready to turn insights into income, subscribe and join me each week as we break down the numbers behind smart business growth. I'm