How we did a year's work in a month.

Most people walk out of a long, grueling business meeting drained, in need of a nap, and ready to file the takeaways in a drawer they'll never open again.

On February 3rd, I walked out of an 8-hour meeting with our consultant, Neil, pulled out my phone before we got to the car, and texted the woman who would become our Head of Operations (which is either decisive leadership or wildly irresponsible hiring depending on how you look at it).

That was three months ago. Since then, we've raised another $450K, opened conversations with seven banks for warehouse lines of credit, signed our Head of Ops to start May 26th, and gone from"we'll spend 2026 learning about STRs and maybe try one in 2027"to having four short-term rentals in service by the end of this summer.

A year of plans. A month of execution. None of it was luck.

The drift

I've written about some of this before. For six years, Scotty and I have been chasing one prize: as many long-term rentals as we could buy. The flips funded the dream. The lending company helped us scale capital. Everything else was a means to the same end.

We hit 75 rentals.

And then I got bored.

Not because the business is bad because it's not. The machine works. Tenants pay. Rentals appreciate. Equity accumulates. But what I'm actually good at (vision, strategy, brand, pushing us into uncomfortable, bigger new things) wasn't needed to keep the machine running. If you've read Traction and the EOS framework, this is the classic visionary/integrator mismatch. I'm the visionary. Scotty's the integrator. Integrators thrive in execution and accountability. Visionaries die slowly in it, like houseplants someone forgot to water.

I wanted to build something a lot bigger. Scotty was buried in operations and didn't have the bandwidth to even engage with "what's next", because "what is" was already eating him alive.

So we drifted. Six months of no shared answer to the question:what are we becoming?

That kind of drift is the most expensive thing a business carries, and nobody ever puts it on the P&L.

The day we stopped drifting

So we did something we'd never done before. We hired a consultant, Neil, and gave him a full day to put us back together.

8:30 AM to 4:30 PM. No phones. No escapes. No "let me just take this real quick." (And, surprise, the business kept going. There’s a lesson there.)

It was, as we wrote about in a previous newsletter, basically couples therapy with a cash flow statement.

Three things came out of that day:

1. We need a Head of Operations. Now. Not someday.

2. We need to scale the lending business. We're turning away good borrowers because we don't have enough capital deployed.

3. We need to seriously move on short-term rentals as our next growth lever.

That was it. Three priorities. Not twenty.

And here's where the cheat code kicked in.

What clarity unlocked

Head of Operations. Walking out of the meeting, I already knew exactly who we wanted. Her name is Nancy. She's a good friend of mine and is already in the real estate space. I texted her in the parking lot. We talked for weeks. She started consulting with us almost immediately. She starts full-time on May 26th. Many of you have already met her and if you know us and you haven't yet, you will soon. Nancy is going to be a huge part of what we're doing moving forward. She's competent, driven, systems-minded, and the kind of human who's going to give Scotty his life back (which means he might finally have the bandwidth to replace the Hyundai Sonata that produces metal shavings in the oil, but don't hold your breath).

Lending. Before that meeting, we were "passively raising capital." Which is a polite way of saying we weren't raising capital. After that meeting, we got aggressive. In three months: another $450K raised, seven banks engaged on warehouse lines of credit, and roughly $1M in soft commitments from people who plan to invest with us in the coming months. We have $6–7M in qualified loan demand right now and a deployed capacity of about $3M. The whole job now is closing that gap.

STRs. This is the one that still makes me laugh. We told Neil we'd spend 2026 learning about short-term rentals and maybe acquire our first one in 2027. Two days later we were elbow-deep in books, podcasts, and operators who actually know what they're doing. Two days after that we acted like we’d been doing STRs for ten years. We rebuilt how we run our existing STR, which we'd been operating wrong from day one and somehow still made a little money on, mostly by accident. We identified three more opportunities and got to work. By the end of summer we'll have four in service. We're hunting a fifth before year-end.

We compressed a year of work into a month.

How that's even possible

I read two Benjamin Hardy books this year that put language to what was happening to us:Time Is a Tool: How to Scale Your Company 10x FasterandThe Science of Scaling.Our son was just born so I read both of these while I was sitting in the hospital unable to sleep on the couch-bed, which I’m convinced was designed by a woman who wanted the man to feel as miserable as she just did during labor. Anyway…

Hardy writes about time the way most people write about money, as a resource you can compound, waste, or weaponize. His premise is that time isn't a fixed substance. It expands and contracts based on the clarity of what you're chasing.

When you don't know what you're building, every day produces a little.

When you do, every day produces a lot.

Same 24 hours. Different multiplier. One feels like progress. The other feels like being busy and slightly annoyed all day.

The drift Scotty and I were in last year wasn't a time problem. We had the same number of hours in 2025 we have today. It was a clarity problem. We were burning energy on a hundred small decisions because we hadn't made the three big ones.

The day with Neil cost us eight hours and some cash.

It saved us a year.

The cheat code

The reason most people don't move with urgency isn't because they're lazy. It's because they're not clear. And the reason they're not clear is because clarity is uncomfortable. It forces you to name what you actually want, what you don't, what's broken, and what needs to be killed off.

You can keep yourself busy forever to avoid that conversation.

We did. For at least six months.

And then we stopped, sat in a room with Neil for one full day, and the next 90 days produced more meaningful progress than the previous nine months combined.

Not because we worked harder.

Because we finally knew what we were working on.

There's a Proverb that's been in my head all spring:"Where there is no vision, the people perish."(Proverbs 29:18) Without clarity on where you're going, you wither in place. Even when you're working hard. Especially when you're working hard.

Your challenge

When was the last time you actually got clear?

Not "I have a lot of ideas." Not "we're working on it." Not "we'll figure it out soon."

A real, written-down, ranked, brutally honest answer to: what are we becoming, and what are the three things we have to do to get there?

If you haven't sat with that this year, you're probably not behind on execution. You're behind on clarity. And working harder won't fix that. It'll just produce a more efficient version of drift.

Block the day. Bring in someone who'll push back. Get the answer.

You’ll be shocked how fast things move once you finally have clarity on what matters.

— TJ Moe