Welcome to Action Solves Everything, the show for those who want to stop overthinking and start producing. I'm your host, Alex Montagano, broker, leader, and founder of Lockstep Realty. Around here, we believe movement creates momentum, clarity comes from doing, and the agents who take action are the ones who win. Every episode is built to help you grow your skills, your confidence, and your career. Now, let's get to work. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today. We got Jaben Makings in the house with Onnix Investments. He's based out of Scottsdale, Arizona. Onnix Investments is a wholesaling company, and they are absolutely freaking crushing it. Jaben, what's up, Yeah, so tell me, what are you doing right now? What are you working on? Yeah, so we are primarily focused on wholesaling. We're based out of Scottsdale, Arizona, and we do things a little bit differently than the traditional wholesaler. So we figured out what do the majority of homeowners do when they decide they want to sell? They're going to call a realtor. So instead of chasing around sellers with direct mail, cold calls, we decided to go directly to So go more into that. So like, you guys, your whole marketing strategy is built between a connection between your company and real Yeah, exactly. So we'll reach out to, we have three different ways we do it, right? So number one being, we'll just cold call these agents and we reach out trying to provide value as a cash offer resource for them. Number two is cold texting. And then number three being, we'll call actual listing agents of different properties and potentially try to lock them up, but more so just trying to build a relationship. But our biggest thing and biggest differentiator from a lot of other people in the space is they're reaching out, just trying to collect something from these agents. They're reaching out, trying to get a property, get a fix and flip. We approach it a little bit differently by trying to provide value and be a cash offer resource for any of these tough to sell listings. So what made you get into that? Because that is fundamentally different. Would it be fair to understand that the client in the instance for your business is less the homeowner, more the Yeah, I mean, we have three different clients, right? So number one being the homeowner. So we're helping them get out of a tricky situation. Number two is being the realtor. So we're helping them get paid a commission and then in turn, getting their clients out of a tough situation. And then number three is being the people that we sell the deals to, which are fixing flippers, which heavily rely on guys like myself to provide them deals How'd you get into this? So like, take us back because I think you've been around for two and a half years now. 2025, you guys saw exponential growth north of 300%. So like, take us back to the beginning, because for the listeners, Javen's a fairly young dude. And I think when you dive into your story a little bit about how you got here, I think there's some awesome things for the listeners to learn about you and then ways that they can make that about Yeah, so when I, I got started as a real estate agent. So I moved down here to Arizona from Nebraska at age 18, got into pools, had a little stint there and didn't like it. So I dove all into real estate thinking I was going to make a bajillion dollars right away. And that couldn't have been further from the truth. And so I did that for a couple of years. And my biggest thing as to why I wasn't a great real estate agent was what's called shiny object syndrome. And what would happen was every couple of months, I would think the grass is greener on the other side. So I'd go out and try and start a new business idea. So like Amazon dropshipping, like if you think of any trendy new business idea, I had probably thought about that or I had tried to start it. So I was doing that I could never get momentum going. And finally, one day I decided to go all in on wholesaling. So About two and a half years ago, I started Onnix Investments and I made a commitment to myself that I am not going to touch anything for at least three years. No business distractions. I'm not going to chase a million different things within the business. For example, I went over to another guy that has a decent-sized wholesaling company or a fast-growing wholesale company. And they had like 10 different things going on, it felt like, right? They were working on direct to seller, they were talking about doing agent outreach, they're working on a coaching program. I'm like, there's no way you guys can scale this sustainably by trying to do that many different things at once when you guys don't have the team or the resources quite yet. So my biggest thing now is just focusing on one thing and going all in. And then once you get to a certain point where you have the time, people and resources, then you can start investing in other things. you know, diversifying your So are you still all in, locked in on Absolutely. Yeah. And I said three years, right? I think it's going to go way longer than that, at least until I have the company running on its own. And the way I built it out was a little bit different than most people. So a lot of people will go in doing acquisitions and then dispositions, which if you don't know what that is, acquisitions is going out and acquiring the deals. So if you're reaching out to real estate agents, and then you got to have somebody that knows how to talk to buyers and sell the deals. So what I did when I first started, like I said, I was laser focused on one thing. I strictly focused on acquisitions. Right. I didn't even touch dispositions for the first year and a half. Right. I would use other wholesale companies with a big buyer's list. And then now here recently, we're finally building out Dispo and we're going to start hiring for that here soon. But that just kind of ties back into my whole motto of focusing on one thing at a time. And then once we have dispositions built, then we're going to build out co-wholesaling where we're selling other wholesalers deals. And then after that direct to seller, but it's all one thing at a time. I'm not trying to What like, look, it's really hard. Um, being a business person in any capacity of like helping yourself recognize what shiny object syndrome really is. Funny enough, I was hiring a coach recently and I was interviewing this coaching program. Guy was like, hey, just tell me about you. And it was like, I do this, I do this, I do this, I'm involved in this, I own this, I buy these, I do this. And he's like, man, what are you actually focused on? And I was like, no, I'm focused, man. He's like, no, no, no. Like, what are you actually focused on every day? And it's kind of that concept of like, show me your calendar, I'll show you your priorities, less about what you say, but what is actually scheduled. So like, how did you learn that? And like, What was Well, I want to touch on one thing real quick about focusing on one thing at a time a little bit more in depth. And although I was focusing on just like acquisitions, there's still a million different things you can do within the business, different projects you're working on. And I learned probably six months ago from my coach. that I need to dial it in even more. So every quarter he taught me that I need to just pick one project and like 80 or 90% of my effort goes straight to that one project. And then the other, you know, 10 to 20% goes to whatever. So I'm not bouncing around between different projects because there's a million things to do within whatever business you're, you're trying to do. So pick just one thing a quarter and then go all in on, on developing that and making No, I actually got mentored by a guy named Austin Zaback. So he has a really big wholesaling company here in Scottsdale. And this guy's name is Matt Verlach. So he's had a lot of success scaling software companies. So that's what's kind of cool about it. I've taken everything I know from wholesaling from Austin, and then I'm kind of intertwining it with these software guys that know how to scale companies really fast. And I'm kind of putting the That's incredible, man. I think it's a testament to you to be able to do that because look, like, how are you handling In the beginning, you don't know what you don't know. So your focus is like you're looking at the whole board trying to see everything. And then, you know, I'm going to focus here. How do you tame the noise of opportunity that, you know, bangs on the door every day to know, OK, now's the next time to open up the next phase and the next phase? How do you how do you create that balance? And how do you know when the moves are, you know, when Yeah. I mean, I think you saying that there's, there's noise constantly every day, right? That comes down to discipline, right? Because there's even today, like there's still a million different things that are coming my way. And I, I've really had to learn how to say no, which is really hard for me. Cause I'm kind of a yes man. I want to say yes to everything. I want to people please and make other people happy. So it's really been kind of like an art form, learning how to say no to people and reject You always been that way? Like some discipline been a characteristic of Yeah, not even close. So when I first started Onnix, I was still, I was partying almost every day, drinking all the time, partying, and I was just constantly chasing comfort, right? A lot of people in our society are chasing comfort, whether that's scrolling or drinking, drugs, food, right? And, and I, decided like I need to stop chasing comfort and I need to start playing full out here in my business. Right. So I made a commitment to myself that I'm going to quit drinking. So I haven't had a drink in over a year and a half. And granted, the business was still growing. It was growing like linear. And as soon as I quit drinking, everything in my life kind of took off. So I quit chasing that comfort and I started chasing discomfort and hard stuff every day, including, you know, the gym, cold plunge, whatever it may be. I'm just chasing the hard stuff. And that translated over into business. So as soon as I quit drinking and stopped chasing the comfort, You cold plunge all the time? I do a couple times a week. Oh my gosh, I do it every day. It's a little different. So in Indianapolis right now, it's like negative five degrees and my ice barrel is a huge chunk of ice that I break open with a kettlebell and jump in it for a couple minutes every day. It's not fun right now, but I started doing it And my first day was November 15th of 2024, and I haven't missed a day since. And people ask, like, what does it do for you? And what are the health benefits? And what have you seen? And it's like, well, every day you have to go face that. And it's like, you know, I love that you reference working out and lifting. It's like the iron never lies. If you feel like shit, you still have to pick the weight up and move it, and the weight weighs what the weight weighs. So dive into that a little bit more about your personality, just learning who So it's not even, like you just said, doing the cold plunge and stuff, there are a million different health benefits, but I don't necessarily do it for that. I do it because it sucks so bad and I don't want to do it, right? I've completely shifted my mindset into when my body or my mind tells me I don't want to do something, I have to go do that now, right? And it's the same thing with a cold plunge. I guess I'll sit there and look at it for five, 10 minutes some morning. It's like, I don't want to get in, but I forced myself to do it. And I continually So, I mean, dude, I think this stuff's so important. And I had a conversation with an agent today and proximity is such power. So you go from being a guy that's like drinking, running around, having a great time. dealing with the side product of like business is what business is, right? Like distraction mode all the time to all of a sudden, right? The overnight version of success being like, I get hyper-focused and disciplined on what do I want to accomplish? Who's helping you with that? Who holds you accountable to that? And then like, how do you stay Yeah. So I think a big piece of it. So when I quit drinking, there was, there was a multitude of reasons, right? I had was with my girlfriend at the time. Like I could tell that that wasn't going to go anywhere. She's not my wife. Like if I kept drinking and then the business side, I was, I was hung over, you know, several days a week. I wasn't 100% and like I had this multitude of reasons to quit, but I think my wife's been played a huge, huge part in that and being able to continue to not want to drink, like it was tough for the first couple of months because you're so used to it going out with friends and stuff. But she played a huge piece in being able to hold me accountable to not drinking and doing stuff like that. And then when I started the team, right, things changed a little bit more because I had these other people that were underneath me that look up to me constantly. And so if I'm not on my A game, they're going to look at that and think that it's OK to not be on their A game. So that's another huge reason or another I tell this story a lot, especially lately. Years ago, I was going through it, right? Like whatever that looks like. And I was complaining to a friend and talking about being exhausted and all this, that, and the other. And the friend looks at me and goes, there's a lot of people that count on you. And it was like, oh, so like when you don't show up right, or you're not on your A game, like these people count, like when they show up to work, they don't care about anything other than what your promise was to how you can support them and how you can help them grow the business that you want to do. So look, man, that's a testament to you. And those people are a driving force every day to hold you accountable, whether they know it or not. That's awesome. And that is the power of like, a successful business And if you're if you're younger listening to this and you don't have, you know, a girlfriend to hold you accountable or you don't have a team to hold you accountable, just start small. Start with little things. I'd say, number one, start with going to the gym because that's going to get you focused on your health. Like if you if you can just wake up a little bit earlier and stay consistent with the gym, it's going to be hard for a couple of weeks. But after that, you're going to feel so good. And that's really going to reframe your mindset into just kind of chasing the health aspect of things, which leads into a lot of other disciplined areas of your life. Yeah. Andrew Huberman says, if you claim you're not a morning person, you can change your circadian rhythm in three mornings. So like the concept of like, oh, I've done this forever. I'm not a morning person. It's like, man, if you if you just get up early three mornings in a row. that starts to get And a lot of people, my big issue with a lot of people is they always say they can't or they say they are a certain way. In my opinion, you can become anything you want to become if you constantly think about that. So I go deer hunting every single year up in the sandhills of Nebraska, right? And When you're up there for a couple of days, all you're thinking about is a big buck. That's literally all that's on your mind all day, every day. And after a couple of days, something weird starts to happen. All of a sudden, everything starts to look like a buck. So the rocks, the trees, the shadows. And maybe you realize that life and business are the same way. If you're constantly thinking about the what-ifs or what's going wrong or what you can't do, your mind is just going to continue to create evidence Power, man, that is insanely powerful. How often do you do that every year? Yeah. So when you're doing that, let's talk more about your business and those types of things. So we're finding out you're insanely disciplined. You got these characteristics that are driving force for you every day. What's a given day look like in the life of you? And then where Yeah. So it's, it's changed a lot over probably the last 30 days because I recently, um, promoted one of my salesmen to sales captain. So he's taken a lot of the management stuff off my plate and I was, I was getting really burnt out once I did that. And it made me realize something, right? Because when I was kind of in sales and then I was doing management, like my whole day would be structured and time blocked into 60 to 90 minute blocks, right? And I started getting burnt out after that. And I couldn't figure out why. And I realized it's because I was like constantly bouncing around between different things. My calendar wasn't as organized as it used to be. And it made me realize that burnout isn't always from too much work. A lot of times it can come from a lack of structure. Talk more about that. Yeah, so if you're constantly context switching, right? If you're changing what you're doing every 10 to 15 minutes, you don't have time to get into a flow state, right? So what I would recommend doing, and I got this from Dan Martell, is a calendar audit where you set a timer every 15 minutes and you write down exactly what you were doing, right? From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed and do that for a week or two, right? And you're gonna be shocked at how much different stuff is in there that you don't really account for in a normal day. And you're going to be able to get way more efficient. But when I first did that, I realized that I was switching tasks every five to 10 minutes. And I thought I was like the super efficient guy and I was getting so much stuff done. And I felt that way. I felt like I was super busy. But looking at the calendar audit, there's like no way in hell anybody could be efficient if they're bouncing around from task to Yeah, I notice Sometimes like when I stare at a day, like I'm looking at the next day, it's the evening and I'm like back to back to back to back to back. It stresses me out, not because of the amount of work that's associated with that, but because. What I've learned is without breaks in the calendar, you can't clear your mind, you can't give it your full energy, your best attention, and there's no time to give the critical thought. You use the words flow state. Hermosi talks about that for a while, where it's like, just start working and work as long as you can on a particular task. And look, I think as a business person, how I've got four salespeople, TC, VA, probably six Yeah. So like you lead those people every day. So like creating boundaries in terms of what creates the best version of you allows you to be the best leader for them. And I think it's like leaders, it's not that your doors always open. It's that When the time is available for them and the boundaries are there to be, the bounds are there to be played within, you're the best version of yourself at that time. And I think like those boundaries are so critical in business, especially like at your size you Yeah. And I think it's, it's funny. You kind of talk about the white space in the calendar, right? It's good to have a little bit throughout the day and take some small breaks in between meetings. But I was listening to this in a podcast the other day and they said most people are, are tired from, not doing enough and not having enough to do, then they are tired from having too much to do. And it made me think like on the days that I'm slammed and I have a ton of meetings and a ton of stuff going on, I have extremely high energy and I'm bouncing around all day and I'm just fired up. I can work 12 plus hours without flinching. And then the days when there's white space and I'm having to think about what to do and then I start context switching, I just, I get wiped out and I get tired from having a lack of stuff to do or a lack of Yeah, one thing I love to do when I have white space in my calendar, I like to write. It's something I've always enjoyed doing. And I write an email to agents every single week. It's just an agent blog. It's about business experiences or life experiences. And it basically is like, hey, we're all in this racket together. We're all human and we're all living this. But when I can sit there, Like i notice this thing it's like when i want to sit down to write if i have 30 minutes to write i'm like i can't even get in the mode to do it. Because i have to reset my brain and i have to give it some thought and i have to think about the context of what i want to do. And look, you could go in and punch some buttons in chat, GPT, and turn out a newsletter, no problem. But I think the real impact is made when you can, like, sit in your thoughts and put together real content and context for people that are actually reading your newsletter, blog, or whatever it is. And so the point is, like, you should have time blocked off to just sit and think. Like, your creative brain needs that. And, you know, for somebody like you that's running this business, That white space on the calendar, that critical empty time where you can sit and think, tells you I have a time slot on Saturday morning before my wife wakes up. I just sit there and I think. during the week. Right. And if I do it during the week, I have to put it in my calendar because if I me personally, if I have white space there, I'm going to be trying to fill it with something, something random. And so I try and I try and intentionally put that in there. But like all day, every day as a business owner, just go, go, go noise everywhere. Like we never have any time to rest. And then we get home and then we have family and then we go to sleep and then we wake up and it's the next thing again. So we never have time to actually just stop and and think for ourselves. And that's where a lot of my good ideas come from, is just being Write it right stuff down and think quietly yeah i think also like when you're experiencing growth in your busy. It's easy to ignore. the operation side of business, the fine print. It masks problems you may have. To them, when all of a sudden you're slow, it's like, hey, what the heck's going on here? So that time is just so critical. As you guys look and scale and grow, what are you doing to grow? You said you have four sales guys. How are you Yeah, so one of the biggest things, biggest hiring things for us right now is just Indeed. And the main reason I'm trying to grow my social media and get on different podcasts and stuff is to eventually have that recurring recruitment engine just coming from social media. But yeah, right now it's Indeed and we will set up We'll reach out to them. We'll set up a phone interview. We'll have a 15 minute phone interview with these sales guys. And then after that, the second step will be to bring them in for an office interview. And then we'll decide from there if we want to bring them in. But what's kind of nice about this is they're commissioned only. So I can bring in as many people as we can handle bandwidth wise, which is a lot more recently since delegating a lot of my managerial roles to my sales captain here. So we're going to really put the pedal to What, you guys have four sales guys I think we'll probably have, I'd like to have six to seven solid performers. And we might have more salespeople than that, but it just takes, you know, a good 60 to 90 days for people to really get ramped up. They have to build their book of business. Cause when you're reaching out to agents, I think of my entire career, I've only done one deal, just one deal from an agent that I had cold called and got an address on that very first call. The rest of my deals are all from followup. And I think I was looking at some numbers a couple of months back. And I want to say the average time from first connection to actually closing a deal with somebody was close to six months. Right. So that tells you, and it's similar to any other sales business, that the money is not made in cold calling. It's made in the follow The guys shoot for 20 qualified realtors a day. If they're newer, it's 25 to 30 because they don't have a lot else going on, but a good number is to add 20 realtors to their pipeline every single day. And then obviously you're losing some, but So talk a little bit about your team's culture and then how you, you know, you said you do this in person or you do a call and then an in-person, like what kind of culture are you building? And is it like, like I think. so many different sales environments, they all can look different. What makes you guys unique? I know some of it, as you said, like your process and who your clients are and how you attract opportunity. But talk about the culture and how that Yeah, so we like to work extremely hard. And we have, it's a little bit different where A lot of companies it's like coming from the top down where the boss has to hold everybody accountable constantly, what we're trying to do is have a lot more pure accountability like they know what they're supposed to be doing and if that's not happening then other people within the company are holding them accountable. Right and then another thing that it really attracts talent what you're just asking about is, massive growth opportunities here. So Nafis, he's my sales captain and I hired him back in April. So it's been less than a year and he is already promoted up to sales captain and kind of a managerial role where he's handling other people underneath him. And with how fast we're trying to grow this company and our big goals, there's going to be a lot more room for growth for anybody new coming in. Talk about those goals, if you would. So our big North Star, we have it written up on the whiteboard. We talk about it every Monday during our weekly meeting, is getting to a million dollars a month. Right. And in order to get there, we're going to have to have a world-class in-house dispositions department. We're going to have to be the best of the best at agent outreach. We're going to have to, um, have some direct to seller at that point, right? Cause we're going to cap out at what the agent outreach at some point. So we'll start doing direct to seller, but that's really our big North stars a million dollars a month. And we can't get there with a one man show or two man show, right? We're going to have to have executive leadership within the company to be able to handle a company of that size. How long does that take? We're shooting for two years. Have you? A million dollars a month in revenue. I don't know if I think I might have said a million dollars Yeah, a million dollars a month. Yeah, yeah. You ever looked into EOS, Yeah, I would encourage you to dive into a little bit. It's works awesome for small business, just based on how you're talking about putting people into promotional roles and scaling and growing and you're stepping in and you're stepping into new seats as well. Basically, the focus is like right person, right seat. And then Who has put like, what are the jobs of the person in the seat they're in and then what the meetings actually are? And it's like structured meetings, but also something that is really powerful in it. It's called a VTO. So vision. Traction optimizer. Okay. So like your vision. A million bucks a month in two years, and then everything that you do is centered around that. And I think what's so cool about it is. whenever, look, it's easy to lose sight of the North Star. Like you have it on a board, but if there's chaos, whether it's like in your personal life or in your family, or you got a car accident on the way in, or something happens with a deal, like it's easy to lose sight of that. Or let's say you got a rogue employee or something. It's like, all you have to do is go back to the VTO and say, how do we stay on track with that to solve the issue that we face today? And so I think you could really benefit from that. It'd be something that as you continue to grow and scale, we went without it for a long time and transition to it in the spring of last year. And it just like. took this wide lens that we were looking at through everything and just sucked it right in So is it almost like strategic? So we have these strategic operating principles. There's like 10 of them. Anytime we're making a big decision, we base Yeah. So basically, like the way that it works, you have your VTO. So like you create your vision, you have quarterly meetings centered around the vision. So like and then you create tasks and they're called rocks each quarter. OK. And so like, hey, this month, we want to implement this new lead generation system. And that's what we're going to do this quarter. And then every single week, We're going to have a level 10 meeting and talk about that rock and it's like, how are you moving things forward to accomplish that? And so, like, it helps you uncover, hey, I can't get this moving because I have this pain or this, like, we're short capacity here or. Hey i know you said you were gonna do that but you keep spending your time over here why is that happening and then how do we get you back on track and so what it does like from your lens of saying take one thing and give it 80 to 90 percent energy well that one thing is supported by particular other pillars within it there's other strategies and structures of that one thing and so it's more along the lines of that i think like a bit of your principle strategy for us is like, we have a mission, we have core values. When things come up, it's like, how does this fit within that? And so it gives context to where each thing goes, and then how you work through things. And then another really cool thing that goes on there and As a business owner, you can live in this, but there's an issues list. So you just take everything. Everything that's an issue. It could be my office. It could be, hey, we have to replace the carpet. It could be this guy's attitude. It could be branding. It could be just anything that is an issue. Your issues list should be a mile long. Then as you go through these meetings, you're like, what on the issues list can we solve today? Or what on the issues list is so big that it should become a rock? And then that becomes a bigger pillar for your quarters and for your strategy and your business. That's Yeah, EOS. There's a couple of books on it. One that everybody recommends is Traction. If you listen to it, They're really hard to listen to. It's like very slow, very boring, but just because it's like so systematic. But what it does is it takes a lot of the guesswork out and it just makes your business like A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D. So when people are coming into meetings, it's like. Talk to me about your rock. I didn't do it. What are you doing? I did this. That's not a rock. Get back onto what you're doing. Or do you believe what you're doing is more important than the rock we set? Yes. Well, then let's replace the rock and move this rock to the next quarter. It just gives direction and context to everything, which when building a business can be incredibly challenging. Dude, this is awesome. What else do you want to share with folks? Just about everything you got going on. What nuggets do you want to share? What makes you you? I think if you're looking to scale and grow and create more of a brand awareness thing, here's an opportunity to do so. The I want to share this with anybody starting a team. This is something I really struggled with. I didn't know anything about management. And when I so when I first started hiring, I really wanted to be kind of the cool boss. Right. I wanted everybody to like me. And what I found out quickly is that people will take advantage of that. People won't hold themselves accountable. So I had to shift things fairly quick and implement like a performance accountability system and implement standards and show people that I'm willing to fire you if you're not going to be hitting these standards. And as soon as I did that, things turned around. So if you're starting a business, make sure you have standards and you hold those standards, because if you're just letting that slide, then then everybody's going to see that and that'll Yeah, I am. It's hard early on because scarcity is a real thing. So like you hire your first employer, your first team member, and you're like, oh, my gosh, I have to do everything to keep them. And they come in and ask for more commission and they ask for more of this. And will you pay for that? And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then all of a sudden everybody gets their own deal and you're like, well, this doesn't work and we actually don't make any money and nobody listens. So like creating those standards are so important. I just saw a post on Instagram from a guy I follow and he said, I will take a hammer to an employee to be a shield for the rest if you will not follow the standards and what is required and expected of you to work here. And I think that matters so much as a What else, anything? I don't think so. Dude, this was incredible. I appreciate your time so much, and I think the listeners have been fortunate to take away so many great nuggets. Where can they find you online, or where can Yeah, follow me on Instagram. It's jaben.makings. And then you're always welcome to check out our website if you're an agent or Is that O-N-N-I-X? Yeah. Awesome. O-N-N-I-X-investments.com. Jaben Makings. Jaben, this was awesome, man. Congrats on all your success. And I can't wait to watch you continue to grow, brother. Thanks, Alex. Thanks for listening to Action Solves Everything. If today's episode pushed you, challenged you, or helped you even take one step forward, send it to someone else who needs that same nudge. We all get better when we grow together. And if you're looking for a partnership that actually believes in coaching, collaboration, accountability, and actually becoming the best version of yourself, shoot me a message. at all social handles, at Alex Montagano. That's A-L-E-X-M-O-N-T-A-G-A-N-O. Remember, success rewards the ones who move. Take action,