Using DiSC Assessments for Real Estate Investing Success

Darlene and Gary Hibbert

Daniel: You guys have been partners for over 20 years. They work at financial institutions through most of their early career and then want wealth and freedom in their lives. They transitioned into real estate investors. They purchased their first investment property in 2008. During this process,

I realized it wasn't fortunate to create an enterprise that encompassed all aspects of real estate investing.
They work together to build a successful real estate education company with a strong focus on business partnerships. Gary also has a popular podcast series called Real Talk with Gary, hosting different experts, monthly from wealth, health and everything in between. However, I want to add something to that.

One of the reasons why they have the success that they have is that if you meet anybody anywhere and you ask them about Gary and Darlene, here's what they'll say. Oh yeah. They're so nice people, not the reputation you have up there to be so nice people. You're friendly, you're welcoming, you're outside of everything else to do with the business. You are real nice human beings, solid, and welcoming.

Gary: Thank you very much for that intro. That was beautiful. You guys are great people as well too. Everybody that I talked to say, you know what, if you haven't met Daniel and Laurel man, they are the nicest people as well too and you guys are doing great things. Thank you very much for having us here, we appreciate it.

Daniel: What's not to love about real estate investing. Tell us a little bit about your story. Try to throw in there, those things that leverage vision, execution, whatever, but you know what? You do it and we'll be happy with whatever comes out of your mouth.

Gary: You know what, why don't we start off with Alvin? Leverage, leveraging each other as experienced. For the couples that are listening this evening, one of the things that we had a difficult time within the beginning was how large it would be one to grow, what type of properties that we want to acquire? Because of that, we started butting heads. We didn't have the same vision. I had certain strengths, Darlene has certain strengths. One of the best things that we ever didn't, you guys may have seen some of this stuff online.

You've got Myers-Briggs, you've got Colby, you've got DiSC and DiSC, a lot of real estate agents use that. I'll go through DiSC because DiSC is the one I think that really helps solidify our roles in our business. There's four acronyms DiSC and what I'll do is I'll go through the ones that I actually got, because usually you get two, one's more of a dominant letter and you have a subordinate one.

For myself, I was an "I" which is more inspirational, interactive. I'm more impulsive, like I'll jump in and I'll try to figure out how to swim. That was me and the other one that I had was the "S" which was more supportive. I was more sincere right now, sensitive and stable, like systems and processes, so that was mine. For Darlene, Darlene was the "D" which is more of a doer. I'm a driver, very decisive, demanding. She had the "C", which means I'm more cautious, more calculating, and careful.

Once we understood that when we started looking at properties, I was like, okay, I understand what she needs to see. She needs to see the numbers for me. It was like, okay, it's going to cashflow. It makes a little more sense. Let's dive in. We'll figure it out as we go. Once we figured that out, we were then able to divide up the roles within our businesses. That allowed us to really have clear, defined goals and know what our roles are. That helped a lot.

As we continue to grow our business and we bring on additional real estate agents and other partners, we now make them do the DiSC analysis to say, yes, you're a good fit. This is what we can actually assign for you to do within our business. That really helps us, so that's the leverage.
The next one is, how do we manage to work with each other? We don't, if you take a look at the camera, I'm in another part of the house and she is in another part of the house. But I will say this though in the beginning, when we first left our full-time job back in 2014, we actually worked in the same room.

For anybody that's listening, sometimes you have to do that because you don't just have all of a sudden two open spaces in your home or in offices. We had to figure that out in the beginning, but once we realized that this was a viable business and we really were going to make a go at it. We then had to figure out, okay how do we maybe carve out some space in our home. The other thing as well, like I talked about earlier, is that we have different roles within the business. Martin. Darlene, I'll pass it over to you.

Darlene: Thanks for having us again. It's such an honor to be here tonight. I guess for the vision, Gary and myself, you can see like in the back there of his screen, there's a whiteboard. We have a couple, but that's our whiteboard that we basically do every single year. What we do is we have what we call our winter hiatus. For the whole month of December and a couple of weeks in January, we actually take these little mini retirements. We take a break and we do some planning.

One of the things that we do is we take a look at the different segments of our businesses. For example, maybe our personal goals, like our personal and family goals, another one would be your smart home choice goals, or maybe even Gary, on the realty side of things, what are the goals? It's a time for us to just do a little bit of reflecting and take a look at our accomplishments. Basically, what we do is that's how we roll into the next year. Having a very clear idea as to how we're starting our year. For the "E" on the execution, what we do is we transpose those goals into let's say, monthly tasks and then move those monthly tasks into weekly or daily agenda.

That's like a big thing, because I think a lot of times we get so caught up in our businesses and we have all these big projects, little projects, partners. We want to bring on board. I think once you chop it up and you have a very clear picture of what it is that you want to do. It's much easier to assign each other the roles and just keep moving forward.

Sometimes what happens just like any business is some of the ideas make it. Some of the ideas don't. What we do is we call that our six months or six months mid-year correction. We take a look at the goals and we say, okay, these are the ones that we want to keep. These are the ones that we don't want to keep. We're going to delete them and take them off. In December, I take a picture and file it away. That's it for execution

Laurel: You know what? I can actually see that even as you're talking about the DISC, like how you split it out, even just to talk about this. It's really interesting how that came out, because you're doing exactly this assessment.

Gary: "R" which is regret. This might sound silly to say, honestly, there's been no regret in anything that we've done any of the mistakes, like looking at it now. Obviously, mistakes are what make who you are today and they give you new skills, new tools that you can put in your toolbox. However, I know people want to hear the bad story. I'll share one that really helped us to learn more, but the Landlord and Tenant Board and how bad things can get.

Back in 2009, when we were new to this. We didn't know how to screen tenants. Instead of looking at the credit score and looking at their income properly and everything else that you're supposed to look at, they strummed our heartstrings so beautifully and the music was amazing that they hypnotized us and we then move them into their home, which was a bad mistake, but it was a good mistake. What I mean by that was that we then learned the Landlord and Tenant Board inside out because we were there, every few months.

We almost got to the point where we got them evicted and then they paid it all up and then we had to start all over again. Three months of hell, but you can say, and finally they made a midnight run. I go and check the property out. There's nobody there, but it's just wrecked full of garbage. I remember going into the bathroom, those big green flies, those ones, where if they land on your food at a picnic, you will not eat it.

I opened up the bathroom door and literally 15 of them flew out and they flew out because the city had turned the water off on them. They couldn't flush the toilet for months. It was a disaster. Anyways, our contracting team came in two bins later of garbage, cleaned it off. I put it on the market. It costs us about 25,000. It was back in 2013, 2014, 25,000 back then is private. It feels like a hundred thousand today.

With inflation and everything, but we ended up selling that property and you know what we were doing. We came up, came out on top a hundred thousand plus. Even though it was a bad experience, it was a great learning experience. For anybody that's listening, don't be scared to do this especially when you've got The REITE Club in your corner. They've got the resources, they've got the partners, they have the experience and they're there to help you. This is not a single sports game. This is a team and a team sports game. This is what it's about. Even though you will make mistakes along the way, at least you're going to have people along for the ride with you to help you and guide you.

Daniel: That was a very inspirational story. Thank you very much for that. I want you to add one thing though. You also have an educational club. What's the name of your club?

Gary: The name of our club is Smart Home Choice.

Daniel: What's the URL where people can find you?

Gary: They can go to smarthomechoice.ca.

Daniel: Thank you very much, Darlene. Thank you very much, Gary. It was really nice having you, we learned a lot.