Real Life Planning Podcast Episode 24: Get More Done in Less Time with Kathleen Boyd

In Episode 24, I have a great conversation with work process coach, Kathleen Boyd, CFP® from the XY Planning Network team. We talk about getting more done in less time with the help of workflows and tech tools for automation. Listen to learn valuable tips on creating effective work processes that will save you time and money. Later in the episode, Kathleen shares her take on the future of cryptocurrencies and the challenges she has faced as a woman of color in the financial service sector.

“...having refined processes and workflows is critical because ultimately, if you want to scale your business, you can't be doing different things for different customers or different clients.” - Kathleen Boyd

This week on Real Life Planning Podcast:

Takeaway Quotes:

“If you have bad processes, hiring is not going to fix the issue. You're just hiring somebody to train them on bad processes.”- Kathleen Boyd

“Get focused on one thing and master that and move on to the next thing.” - Cynthia Meyer

“Don't be afraid to leverage technology where you can.” - Kathleen Boyd

Connect with Kathleen Boyd:

• www.xyplanningnetwork.com
• Kathleen on LinkedIn
• Email: kathleen.boyd@xyplanningnetwork.com

Connect with Cynthia Meyer:

• Cynthia on Facebook
• Cynthia on LinkedIn 
• Cynthia on Twitter 
• Cynthia on Instagram: 
• Cynthia on Pinterest 
• Email: cynthia@reallifeplanning.com  
• Duolingo: CynthiaCafe

About the Real Life Planning Podcast

Host Cynthia Meyer welcomes fascinating guests to share real life stories of how they are realizing their financial potential. Each episode explores practical, realistic steps to create results.

Transcript - Real Life Planning Podcast - Episode 24

[00:00:06] Cynthia Meyer: Welcome to the Real Life Planning Podcast. I'm Cynthia Meyer with Real Life Planning, and today in honor of the season that we're in, getting ready to finish up 2022 and starting 2023, we're going to talk about getting more done in less time with my very special guest, Kathleen Boyd. Kathleen, can you tell us a little about yourself? What's important to know about you?

[00:00:31] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, first of all, Cynthia, for having me on your podcast. It's an honor. A little bit about me. So I work for a company called XY Planning Network. We are a national membership organization of almost 1700 financial advisors. We've developed a turnkey process for helping advisors strike out on their own. Leave, you know, traditional in what I call oppressive wealth management businesses like brokerages, wire houses, and become their own registered independent advisory firm.

At XY Planning Network, I work as a financial planning and process coach. What that means is essentially I am helping members refine all of their business processes so they can create stronger ties with clients and create a more fulfilling planning experience for both themselves and most importantly for their clients.

[00:01:27] Cynthia Meyer: So Kathleen, one of the reasons that I wanted to come on and have this conversation with you today is because the clients that I work with are real estate business owners, and often these are individuals or couples who own multiple rental properties, and they're getting to the point where they're saying to themselves, "Okay. I really want to scale what I'm doing so that I can eventually, just walk away from my corporate job and be completely financially independent and real estate full-time." What does the developing processes to optimize the financial planning systems that- I use my firm that other people do in their own firms -How does this apply to any business? 

And I really was thinking about who did I want to have this conversation with and I wanted to have it with you because more than anybody I know you are the most organized and efficient person possibly that I have ever met. So I want you to share your secret sauce with people and talk about how we should be thinking about this as a paradigm, right?

And then I want to give some specific examples of where people who do own businesses that are not financial planning businesses, can take those precepts and apply them to their own work in making it more efficient.

[00:02:54] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, absolutely. And you're exactly right, Cynthia. Processes. Workflows. It applies to businesses in all industries.

So some of your listeners might be asking you what's a workflow? So workflow essentially is just a series of activities that are necessary to complete a task. Sometimes, they can be sequential, sometimes they're not. But every business has processes and workflows, whether you understand that or not. You have a series of things, repeatable things, that you do over and over again to serve your clients or your customers. And the reason why having refined processes and workflows is critical is because ultimately if you want to scale your business, you can't be doing different things for different customers or different clients.

In the beginning, perhaps, you can get away with that when you have a small number of clients that you're working with. But as your client base grows, you're going to find that doing different things gets old really quick and it becomes cumbersome and ultimately it's just not an efficient way to run a business.

So have processes in place, what it does is it enables the business owner to identify what's working; what's not working- especially if you have these processes documented which I highly recommend. I think it could be easy to- especially in our industry, operate a business with the mindset, "Oh, it's all in my head." Right? 

[00:04:24] Cynthia Meyer: Yeah. But what if you get hit by bus? Sorry, to be grisly but if it's not written down, it doesn't exist, really. 

[00:04:29] Kathleen Boyd: Exactly. Exactly.  So when it's written down, it's documented. You're able to identify what's working. What's not working? What are the bottlenecks I'm experiencing? Where can errors be reduced? When can completion times be shortened? Where can we eliminate duplication? And all of this, it has an impact on business performance and the ability to scale and ultimately grow revenue. Also find that it can save you a lot of money. 

So oftentimes, when business owners come to me and they're feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with their processes, their first solution, their first go-to solution is, I need to hire. I need to hire somebody to help me. That could be the solution, but it's not always the solution and I encourage our members to not always get- look to that as the first go-to solution, but to look at your processes. Sometimes that feeling of being overwhelmed, it might have to do with your processes.

So it might be worth looking at your processes first and seeing what you can refine and automate. Because if you have bad processes, hiring is not going to fix the issue. You're just hiring somebody to train them on bad processes. 

[00:05:47] Cynthia Meyer: Right, to go and work in the own emergency room that is your business, right?

[00:05:52] Kathleen Boyd: Exactly. When the real solution should be to fix the processes first. 

[00:05:56] Cynthia Meyer: So what makes a great process, in your opinion? What makes a great business process? 

[00:06:04] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah.  A great business process has all of the steps outlined that you need to achieve whatever it is that you're doing. It's well defined. It's well understood. It's easy to do. It's very efficient. It's very streamlined. They're very minimal bottlenecks. It saves you time. It saves you money. I think those are some of the key characteristics of a good process. 

[00:06:29] Cynthia Meyer: It's really interesting, on a plane I think to the XY Planning Conference a couple of months ago, I reread a book called The Checklist Manifesto, which for those people who are listening, if you haven't read it and you have a business, I would highly recommend that you read it. It's by a physician named Atul Gawande, and he- hopefully, I'm pronouncing his name correctly. It's just a brilliant book about how checklists are used in a variety of fields, not just medicine to- what makes a great business pros- you know, a business checklist and how a great checklist can really catapult an organization forward. It's really really helpful. It got me thinking, I'm at this stage in my own business where it's starting to grow beyond what Cynthia and my virtual assistant can do. And so we're trying to get everything down digitally in an operations manual. So it can grow, right?

How is this process- these processes going to be repeatable over time? 

[00:07:26] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah. 

[00:07:27] Cynthia Meyer: And that's what really got me thinking what do you do in terms of the folks that I work with in my business, what are the kinds of processes that people have in their businesses? So for example, screening for tenants, right? What to handle when you have a vacancy? If you have an eviction? If- how do you prepare your taxes? How do you keep your books? All those sorts of things are areas in which my clients need to have processes. Anything else that you would add to that? What else should people be thinking about when they're trying to get these things documented?

[00:07:58] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, so I would think of the tasks that are taking most of your time. Okay. So in the context of...

[00:08:05] Cynthia Meyer: That would be email, right?

[00:08:07] Kathleen Boyd: So yeah, it can be email. In the context of real estate investors, real estate businesses, as you mentioned, tenant screening and applications takes a lot of time. Processes for collecting rent, especially if you own multi- 

Y 

[00:08:21] Cynthia Meyer: eah, a good point...

[00:08:22] Kathleen Boyd: Perhaps an apartment building or condo building with multi-units collecting rent is a process. Processes for room booking. So if you're doing the Airbnb or you , no thing, perhaps you're renting out a room or an entire property, that's a whole process from booking the client, making sure they have the information they need to access the keys to the property to check out and all of that- that's a process. Processes for property maintenance and handling property maintenance requests. That's also a process. 

[00:08:52] Cynthia Meyer: So you work with thousands of small business owners. Our financial planner network of which I'm a member has become very large. I think it's double the size from when I joined in 2019. From working with all of these small and growing businesses- these entrepreneurships what are some of the tools that are not expensive that people can use to create and document good workflows or processes? 

[00:09:18] Kathleen Boyd: Great question. Pen and paper. 

[00:09:25] Cynthia Meyer: Pretty inexpensive, right? Yeah. 

[00:09:27] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah. I tell this to members all the time, it doesn't have to be fancy. I think we're so quick to get to the fancy tech tools. That's not necessary. Especially at the beginning of building your business. All you need is a piece of scratch paper and just start documenting. And then once you have all of your processes written down, perhaps you can start looking at some task management tools. Some of the things that you know, that are very common within our industry are tools like Asana, which is a task management, right?

[00:09:57] Cynthia Meyer: Yeah. I like Asana. I use Asana. Yeah. 

[00:09:59] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah. There's Airtable. There's just a litany of tech tools out there for documenting. It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be some expensive piece of tech. Piece of scratch paper and a pencil. It works just fine to start off with.

[00:10:14] Cynthia Meyer: So taking a step back for a second, Kathleen. How is it that you ended up being this person that helps other people think more clearly and get more organized? Were you the kid, like when you were three, your room was clean and your toys were all lined up in a row like how is it that you turned out to be this person who ended up being the person who naturally like declutters people's minds?

[00:10:38] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, that's a great question. It was not my goal to become a financial planning and process coach. Finance in general was not even on my radar. Growing up I was really into sports and art. I played a lot of basketball. I did a lot of sketching and painting and such. When I started college, I was an architecture major and I thought I would...

[00:10:59] Cynthia Meyer: Well, that's organized. Uhhuh.

[00:11:01] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah. But 2000, back in 2008, the financial crisis hit and it got me really intrigued about what was going on in the markets and investing in things like that. So I decided to take a basic Econ 101 course for fun, fell in love with it and ended up switching my major from architecture to economics.

Did my undergrad in economics, went straight to grad school; a master's in finance. I started a internship with the major bank, JP Morgan and their commercial bank as an analyst. . And at the end of the internship, they offered me a full-time role, which I accepted. And so before I even finished grad school, I had this great full-time job lined up with this big bank and I thought- I had my whole future planned out until, like the final semester of grad school, I got bored and so I was like, I'm just going to take a class for fun. I decided to take an intro to financial planning course that was taught by a Wells Fargo financial advisor, who's also financial planner and I just fell in love with the course. I think the instructor really liked me. He liked the fact that I was engaged. I asked a lot of questions. I always sat in front of the class and just showed real interest for the subject. He asked me, "Have you ever thought about becoming a financial advisor?"

And I was like, no, that's not for me. I already have this job lined up and my perception of advisors at the time were- they were salespeople. 

[00:12:33] Cynthia Meyer: Because a lot of them are. 

[00:12:34] Kathleen Boyd: And I watched, at the time, I watched a lot of Suzy Orman. Yeah. Now I cringe when I say that, but at the time I was a huge fan of Suzy Orman.

[00:12:43] Cynthia Meyer: No, she did good work.

[00:12:44] Kathleen Boyd: Stay away from financial advisors. They're salespeople. And I'm like, so that's not me. I'm not a salesperson. That's not my personality. And he's, " No, it's not just about sales. You can do real financial planning without product sales and you're smart. You have a great personality. You draw people to you."

And I was just like, nah, that's okay. But the class ended and we kept in touch. And he just kept reaching out to me. He is like, "I think you should really consider this as a career choice." And so he ended up connecting me with the private bank side of Wells Fargo and they had this two year post MBA investment management program which I ended up accepting.

I interviewed and they offered me the role and I accepted. All of a sudden I was in a cohort of other MBA graduates from Yale, from Cornell doing this portfolio management development program; learning the ins and outs of managing investments for institutional and high net worth clients.

That was my first foray into wealth management in the investing world. But soon I working for Wells Fargo, it's all about sales. In fact, the first week of the job, they flew us out to the headquarters in San Francisco and the chief Investment officer, and I still remember this to this day, one of the first things he said to us is, "If you are a janitor working at Wells Fargo, you better be selling."

So that's when I realized this might not be for me long term. I end up finishing the program. I moved to back to Southern California where I'm originally from. I was in Utah at the time and I got really intrigued about the independent RIA side. I just got disillusioned with banking and product sales and all of that.

I got connected with my local FPA chapter- Financial Planning Association. That's really where I really got introduced to the RIA space. So, I got my CFP®. I worked for a few RIAs. 

But I also started to get disillusioned because as a woman of color in this industry, it is hard. Let me tell you, navigating it. This is an industry that is still predominantly- would they say male, stale and pale? Unfortunately.

[00:15:02] Cynthia Meyer: Do you know, Kathleen? I'm a couple generations ahead of you, but it hasn't changed that much in terms of what the face of financial planning and financial advising is. Hasn't changed that much in my career, unfortunately. It's changed a little, but not as much as we would certainly like, right? 

[00:15:19] Kathleen Boyd: Even the CFP® numbers, the number of CFP®, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERS™ in the industry, the number of black CFP®s, the needle has not moved very much. I think that the percentage is like 1.5%.

And that's terrible. 

[00:15:34] Cynthia Meyer: Yeah. 

[00:15:35] Kathleen Boyd: That is terrible. So we still have a long way to go in this industry to make it more diverse and more welcoming. And that's important because if we're a people profession, if we claim to be a people profession, that means we need to be a profession for everybody. Not just...

[00:15:51] Cynthia Meyer: For all people. Yeah. Not just people that look like the stereotype of what a financial planner or financial advisor is. 

[00:16:00] Kathleen Boyd: Exactly. Yeah. So to answer your question, because I was so disillusioned with the industry the universe works in interesting ways. So I've connected with Alan Moore, who's the CEO and founder of XYP years ago at an FPA conference and we just stayed in touch. He had been trying to get me on board to join XY Planning Network.

A few roles my way; they ended up not being a good fit. But he just kept sending roles my way and then ultimately he informed me of this financial planning and process coach role that was opening up. At first, I was a little hesitant because it's a 180 from what I had typically done, which was work as a client facing advisor. I was tired of the people that I was working with, to be quite honest with you. I was tired of battling. I was tired of being the only woman on the advisory team and the only person of color. And Alan was like, " This is a more diverse company. You're free to be yourself. We support you. And so I made the jump and that was almost two years ago. I am so glad I did that. I've been really happy here at XY Planning Network and happy with the members that I get to work with. I feel like I'm able to make a bigger impact than I am as an advisor. Because as an advisor, there's only a limited number of clients that you are able to realistically serve, right?

At XYPN, I'm working with almost 1700 members in helping them support their 50 to 100 clients. But I have a much bigger and broader impact in my role now than I was as a financial advisor. 

[00:17:33] Cynthia Meyer: You're leveraging yourself, right? Because there's only so many one-to-one conversations that you can have. But by creating this whole new paradigm for the rest of us, for all of us who belong to XYPN, you've had a humongous impact and you've certainly had an impact on my business processes. If I were to give you a magic wand, Kathleen, and you've got Harry Potter's magic wand, right? And you wave it and in 10 or 15 years, everything turns out exactly the way that you wanted to what does that look like in terms of the impact that you're trying to create? 

[00:18:04] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, that's a really hard question, especially coming... 

[00:18:08] Cynthia Meyer: That's why I asked. 

[00:18:08] Kathleen Boyd: Before the pandemic, I had all of these plans lined out about what I was going to be doing and yada. And that all came crashing down when the pandemic hit.

It's like that saying goes, "You plan and God laughs." Like I don't know what is going to happen in 10 to 15 years. But broadly speaking, my goal is just to continue to have a big impact in my industry, whether thats continuing to work with advisors and helping them with their business. Or maybe perhaps it means me starting my own business one day that is not something that I'm opposed to. Entrepreneurship is something that my parents have really pushed with us as kids and especially as kids of color because I personally believe that entrepreneurship is the key to closing the wealth gaps and closing a lot of the inequalities that we're seeing. 

[00:19:00] Cynthia Meyer: Yeah, I, oh, I really agree with that. Like creating generational wealth. Creating opportunities to bring your whole self to whatever somebody's doing for work. And then just the economic impact of creating businesses that feed a family and your employees participate in their local economies and helping their families. That would be very exciting. 

[00:19:22] Kathleen Boyd: Yes. 

[00:19:22] Cynthia Meyer: So what would you say then to somebody who's just getting started in their business, whatever that is, what guidance would you give someone in terms of how they should be thinking about documenting their creating efficient processes and documenting them from the very beginning.

Yeah. Yeah. So what I would recommend is just to start small. Identify one single process that you feel like needs improvement and then set a business goal for improvement. 

Asking yourself, what will optimizing this process achieve for me? What do I want? Am I trying to save time? Am I trying to save money? What is the ultimate goal here? And then create a map for that existing process. I'm hoping to implement this more with members starting in 2023, but really utilizing like mapping tools like Lucid Chart. I don't know if you've heard of that. But I'm seeing the value of visually drawing out processes and defining them and then using them to identify weaknesses where the bottlenecks, communication breakdowns or the time sucking tasks. And then, once you have that documented, identified and refined, perhaps start thinking about automation tools. I think automation can be great for eliminating those manual tasks that are creating bottlenecks. I'm a huge fan of Zapier. I don't know if any of your callers have heard of that. It's basically an automation tool that connects common work apps and then moves information between them to automate repetitive tasks based on the rules that you set for it. I'm a huge fan of automation tools and incorporating that in processes. Only once the processes and workflows are documented and areas have been refined and you understand what you're automating -And that's another thing I find our business owners are so quick to want to jump to automating or quick to want to get to the fun toys, the tech toys to automate. You gotta know what you're automating first.

And automated can mean different things. Do you want to automate triggering tasks? Do you want to automate the actual execution of the task? So figuring that all of that out I think is really important. 

Tell me a little bit about what you listen to or read right now to help you up your game.

[00:21:51] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah. That's a great question. I'm not doing a lot of reading right now, to be honest. In addition to my role at XY, I also teach college courses. 

[00:22:01] Cynthia Meyer: Oh, I didn't know that. Tell me more about that. Yeah. 

[00:22:04] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah. So I teach CFP® courses; graduate level... 

[00:22:06] Cynthia Meyer: Ah, so cool. 

[00:22:07] Kathleen Boyd: That takes up a lot of my time. But in between semesters when I have breaks, like this next break coming up I just bought the book, the Lean Startup and I'm going to be reading that. It's a book that basically- it offers a principled approach to creating and managing startups in a way to get a product in the hands of a customer faster. Oftentimes, when we're just starting a business, we're focusing so much in investing so much time and making sure the product is perfect but how do we minimize that time that we're spending and...

[00:22:38] Cynthia Meyer: ...time to market? Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:22:41] Kathleen Boyd: I'm looking forward to reading that book. 

[00:22:43] Cynthia Meyer: Yeah, I recently- I was on a long drive a couple of days ago and I listened to Hero on a Mission by Donald Miller; the Story Brand guy. And that's his latest book. I have to say, I really recommend it. Hero on a Mission. Definitely worth it. And there's a little workbook that goes along with it, too. 

[00:23:01] Kathleen Boyd: Okay. I'll check that out. 

[00:23:02] Cynthia Meyer: But it's about how to think of how to think of your- the life that we're designing for ourselves like how to think of it as a story, if you will, and putting yourself as the hero who transforms, right, during the course of your life.

So the Lean Startup, who's that by?

[00:23:19] Kathleen Boyd: The Lean Startup. That is by...

[00:23:22] Cynthia Meyer: We'll have to put in the show notes. That's okay. We can move on. 

[00:23:25] Kathleen Boyd: Eric Ries, I believe. Yes. 

[00:23:26] Cynthia Meyer: Eric Ries. Okay. Okay. And what are you most curious about right now, Kathleen? 

[00:23:32] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, so I'm really curious about what is going on in the crypto markets. So I've been doing a lot of self-study around crypto the past couple of years.

You, Cynthia, might be familiar with the DCFP®, the Digital Assets Council for Financial Planning. They've come out with a lot of educational content to help support advisors in expanding their knowledge around this asset. I did their certificate a couple of years ago. Highly recommend it if you're interested. If you're an advisor interested in learning more about crypto. And then, I've also incorporated a crypto week in my investments class that I'm teaching, but it's really interesting to see what is going on. Right now we are seeing the implosion of prominent crypto exchanges, like FTX, probably you heard of... 

[00:24:21] Cynthia Meyer: Right, right. Well, it looks like it could just be good old fashioned, actually, I don't want to, I don't want to make too many judgements on it, but it certainly looks dodgy. And possibly the reason it's dodgy isn't because of the crypto, it's because of other behaviors.

[00:24:35] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah. So much. Yeah. So I'm just about to say that I feel like people are using that as an excuse to demonize this asset class. It's not crypto. It's not crypto that's inherently bad. It's the nefarious people who are opportunistically taking advantage of investors who are interested in this novel... 

[00:24:54] Cynthia Meyer: And it's unregulated, right? Like it's completely, it's unregulated. Yeah.

[00:24:58] Kathleen Boyd: Exactly. And what we're seeing right now is the high market volatility; it's exposing bad actors and shaking them out. And I think that's a good thing. Oh, for the long term, that's a good thing. We want to shake out bad actors. In the short term, it's not good, of course, for the investors who were scammed out of their money; their life savings. That's a horrible thing. But I think over- ultimately, shaking out bad actors is a good thing. I'm also really curious about digital assets because of the way that the underpinning technology, the blockchain, how it's revolutionized some industries like real estate, for example.

[00:25:35] Cynthia Meyer: Oh. I think it's got a huge potential impact in real estate and that's probably a whole other topic of which I'm not necessarily, you know, I'm not a crypto specialist by any stretch of the imagination. But there's lots of opportunity, right, in the terms of transfer of title, for example, right?

That it could completely change the way that we buy and sell properties in the future. 

[00:25:54] Kathleen Boyd: Oh, absolutely. And in addition to that, I've been reading a lot about, I don't know if you've heard of real estate tokenization. 

[00:26:02] Cynthia Meyer: Tell me more about that. 

[00:26:04] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, so in the same way that private corporations who want to raise money can sell shares on a primary month, and then have them traded on secondary exchanges so that retail investors can get a piece of ownership in that company, you can do the same thing with real estate through something called real estate tokenization. It's basically an innovative way to get cash from a property by dividing it into multiple tokens. So instead of shares like a stock, 

[00:26:38] Cynthia Meyer: Right, or partnership share is like in a syndication. 

[00:26:40] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, exactly. You're getting digital tokens and you can either rent out those tokens or you can sell those tokens to investors. Those tokens represent fractional shares of ownership in the property.

And so what you're essentially doing is you're creating a mechanism for generating income off the property. You're turning on illiquid asset on a balance sheet to a liquid asset. And so it's revolutionary what they're doing with digital assets in the real estate space. Of course, there's risks and rewards to that strategy.

I'm not your advisor. I'm not advising anyone to do anything, but yeah...

[00:27:17] Cynthia Meyer: No, of course not. 

[00:27:18] Kathleen Boyd: ...sharing some of the innovations that are happening. Real estate space, it's incredible. 

[00:27:22] Cynthia Meyer: What are some of the characteristics of the successful business owners that you see as part of our financial planning network, XY planning network or in general, in your life, among your peer group? 

[00:27:36] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, so some of the most successful characteristics we're seeing among our members is niche. They have a niche and they have a niche from the beginning. And that's, you know what...

[00:27:48] Cynthia Meyer: I'm a big big evangelist for that as you know.

[00:27:51] Kathleen Boyd: And that's easier said than done because when you're starting a business from scratch, it is very tempting to take any and everybody; especially when, you know what I call when you're in the rent-and-ramen phase. You're just trying to make money to pay your rent and feed yourself. It's very tempting to take everybody. 

[00:28:08] Cynthia Meyer: It's the rent and ramen phase. I like that. Yeah. . 

[00:28:12] Kathleen Boyd: But it's also harder to scale a business that way when you're taking any...

[00:28:16] Cynthia Meyer: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:17] Kathleen Boyd: ...find that when firms are more focused on who their target client is, they're able to grow their firm faster. 

[00:28:24] Cynthia Meyer: I think that's well said, Kathleen. And just translating that a little bit to people who are building and scaling a rental property business; knowing your why and your who is also important, right? 

Sometimes, people who are just getting started look at real estate investing as the Bellagio buffet. They love watching HGTV or other types of shows and they think, oh, I would like to do some rental properties and some vacation properties. Maybe I'll get a syndication of an apartment building if they're an accredited investor and oh I can, buy some REITs and maybe I'll do a triple net lease and do this multipurpose property here. And it's just too much, right? 

Like we have to focus on one thing at a time, right? Get started with one component of this very broad area which has a gazillion different manifestations, right? Get focused on one thing and master that and move on to the next thing, right? It's not the Bellagio buffet, right? You have to order a la carte to begin with, I think. 

Yeah. Let's take that analogy down the road. 

[00:29:28] Kathleen Boyd: I love it. 

[00:29:28] Cynthia Meyer: So what guidance would you give to the business owner who's trying to scale- what one thing would you tell them to do to optimize processes? 

[00:29:42] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah. The one thing to do to optimize processes figure out what those processes are in the first place. 

[00:29:48] Cynthia Meyer: Yes. 

[00:29:50] Kathleen Boyd: Document processes. Figure out why you're trying to optimize. Spend some time refining and that's an ongoing process. Ideally, and this is what I recommend for members, is you should be reviewing your processes once a year for updates for continual refinement. And then don't be afraid to leverage technology where you can. 

[00:30:09] Cynthia Meyer: Yeah. Yeah. That's very good guidance. So what's the best piece of advice that you've ever received?

[00:30:15] Kathleen Boyd: The best piece of advice I've ever received. Best piece of advice? I think in general, just being careful about the people you surround yourself with. , making sure that you have a support system of people who value you and who believe in you and who make a positive difference. In your career and in your life. I think that's especially important as a business owner.

Especially if you are a sole entrepreneur. Occupational loneliness is a very real thing. So making sure that you have a support system in place of people who are rooting for you, who are empowering you, believing in you, uplifting you, motivating you, I really think is a huge key to success.

It's definitely been for me. 

[00:31:01] Cynthia Meyer: Oh, I love that. I love that. 

Thank you so much for having this conversation with me this morning. Is there anything else that you want to share?

[00:31:11] Kathleen Boyd: Yeah, I don't think so. I really enjoyed my time on the podcast. Again, grateful to have been invited and this is just such an honor. Thank you, Cynthia.

[00:31:21] Cynthia Meyer: Thank you Kathleen. And where can we find you online? 

[00:31:24] Kathleen Boyd: LinkedIn. Yeah. I'm not a huge social media person, but you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. 

[00:31:30] Cynthia Meyer: Okay. Wonderful. And we'll put some notes in the show notes about some of the resources that you mentioned and your social media links. So thank you so much for this conversation this morning. I always enjoy talking to you. 

And for everybody listening, if you've got a comment or question please email us at podcast@reallifeplanning.com. Don't forget to subscribe for notification of the next video.

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