Building an Elite Organization with Don Wenner

Don Wenner is the founder & CEO of DLP Capital. His mission is to will serve the lord, leveraging DLP as his platform and utilizing my skills as a CEO and Leader to make a positive impact on the major crisis in the world of housing affordability, jobs, legacy, and happiness while being the best father and husband I can be.

He has been the CEO of DLP Capital for 15+ years, and He is proud of the incredible job our team has done, impacting more than 600,000 lives through providing solutions for our investors, sponsors, residents, clients, and team members. We have completed more than 5 billion real estate transactions, achieving the Inc.5000 list for 9 years. We are the 4th fastest growing company in America to make the Inc.5000 list 5 or more years in a row. We have grown 300-500% every 3 years for 15 years. We have over 2 billion in assets under management, over 15,000 rental homes, and are funding more than 2 billion per year in acquisitions as a lender and equity partner, driving more than 200MM in annual operating revenue.

He is also an author & speaker. Building An Elite Organization: The Blueprint to Scaling a High Growth, High-Profit Business, a best-selling book on USA Today, WSJ, and Amazon.. In it, I discuss my proven methodology, the Elite Execution System (EES), and how like-minded companies can develop this mindset to successfully scale and incorporate this highly motivational tool within their businesses.

Episode Highlights Here:

Don:

I read one book, and they tell me the key to everything is getting good at operation, and others used to get great at content marketing. And another is you just need to get good at hiring. And another says if you just had a clear strategy that would solve all your problems.

Brett:

What’s the number one secret to being able to a what is it elite execution system? And then what’s the number one secret that you found to help people to implement this?

Don:

Thank you.So, I wrote a book called Building an elite organization, which is on the elite execution system, which is the operating system that we run our organization on. And we now had the pleasure of a last number of years, helping implement and help a lot of other companies run their organizations on it’s a, I like to think about as it’s putting discipline into a business. Often entrepreneurs think of discipline as, you know, a four-letter word because it feels like work, which you know, is a four-letter word, and it is work, right? Putting discipline organization when the market is, you know, if you’re in real estate, as an example, we are you in the markets on fire. Property values are just soaring. It doesn’t feel like disciplines are all that important, right? You don’t have to do that great job to still make money. But when things get difficult, it becomes critical and important. So when I think about it fundamentally, every organization has four quadrants, strategy, People Operations, and acceleration. To get sustained growth time, over time, year, over year, month, over a month, you need those four quadrants to all grow together, part of a unified plan. And that’s how we’ve been able to grow, you know, 60 plus percent a year, every year for 17 years, 10 years in a row is one of the 5000 fastest growing companies in America, really, really consistent growth. And that consistent growth has come from running the organization and being part of one plan. We use a tool we call the compass, and anybody listening to your podcast here is probably like you and I. There are people out wanting to learn. I’m gonna grow and seek knowledge and information. And what I found in my career is I always consume all these books and all this knowledge. And I read one book, and they tell me the key to everything is, you know, getting good at operation and others using to get great at content marketing. And another is you just need to get good at hiring. And another says, if you just had a really clear strategy, that would solve all your problems. But the reality is if you get great at any one area of the organization and don’t focus on the others, you end up with a business maybe grow fast, but you can’t handle that growth, and you go down. That’s why most companies go up, and they go down, and they go up and down. And they struggle to consistently grow, consistently high growth, and high profits. So the biggest

kind of cheap way that we’ve been able to do this factory, the center of it’s we say our secret weapon at DLP is the 20-mile march. And we always say kind of half joking. So when somebody says, done, what’s been, the kid yourself always says two things. Number one, we have the very best people, which is leadership is where that starts would forget to do, and then we have a secret weapon, which is the 20-mile march. And the 20-mile marks that term. It’s one of our core values. And that term comes from the great Jim Collins. And then Jim Collins, the best book ever, in my humble opinion, called Great by Choice. He sets out to understand Alright, his first book is the most famous one called Good to Great, he sets out to say, all right, and he compares, you know, the Southwest Airlines, the Pacific Southwest. And he and he goes and studies all these great companies. And the second book, he says, Alright, well, if you wanted to run a great company, what do you need to do? Right? So he goes on to study for four years. What are all the great companies have in common? They’re all very different. What do they have in common? And the short story is he includes that all the great companies have one thing in common the 20-mile march. And the concept of the 20-mile march comes from the parable of it is these two Expedition crews set out to go to the South Pole. Nobody had ever been to the South Pole before, with similar experiences, similar backgrounds, and similar resources, and the one crew got there 31 days before the other Expedition crew and the group who got there 31 days later, not only did they get there and find out they lost. They didn’t, you know, they didn’t weren’t the first ever to make it. But they also all died on the way back. And the main message, the main thing that separated these two groups was the group who got there first they would march 20 miles, you know, no matter what the weather conditions were, whether it was negative 20. With the wind at their face or 50 and the wind at their back, they would force themselves to go 20 miles, so on really terrible days, it would be very hard to push themselves to go forward. But I’m having a really beautiful day. They would modulate their effort and not let themselves get over it. You know, So Austin, go for your 50 miles. So every day, they didn’t matter what happened around them. They mark their 20 miles. The group who died would go 40 or 50 miles on good days and would stay in their tent and wait and whine on bad days, right? So they let the exterior conditions of the outside world dictate what they do every day. And that’s what most organizations do when things are great, the economy’s wonderful, and so forth. And we’ll spend lots of money and we’ll, we’ll go, and we’ll hire lots of people. And then, as soon as things get a little bit difficult, right now, we want to hide under our table, and we want to stop marketing. We want to cut back, and we want to lay people off, and we get, you know, afraid we let what happens around US economy, competition, etc., dictate what we do. And the mindset 20. March is figuring out what we do as an organization, but also what each person in the organization does that produces their results and making sure that no matter what world wins going around us, we each focus our activities on things that generate results. And we do that day in and day out, week in, week out, month, in, month out, etc. So when I tell people this story, every when I welcome all our new employees, and I share this story and play a little video, I always tell people, what do you think the message is to the story? And somebody always says, well, it’s like the tortoise and the hare, you know, slow and steady wins the race. And you know, people will say, well, it’s about consistency. And it’s about, you know, you know, doing things again and again and not giving up and so we you know a lot they get we get a lot of it. But the tortoise and the hare are right in the consistency part. But it’s not slow and steady, right? So I wear a Fitbit and or a ring. And so I track my steps, my activity, right and, and I don’t many days go 20 miles in a day, right? Most days, I don’t hit 20 miles, right? So it’s not called a one-mile walk or a three-mile skip. It’s a 20-mile march. And it’s not about doing that at the beginning or the end of the year, or when you feel like it, it’s about doing it every day. That becomes a discipline, and the pace of going 20 miles every day feels normal. And when you can get the whole organization 300 plus people doing that. It’s amazing the kind of consistent results you get. And that’s part of our DNA. It’s part of our culture here at DLP.

Brett:

All right, let me show you unpack that. Well, it’s so much wisdom there. Right. So number one secret that you found to stay consistent is first of all uniting, you know, the kind of these four quadrants, right and uniting and not just focusing on one or being against or the other, and then coupling with amazing people right to help that. But then this is the secret of the 20-mile march where we’re you’re not letting the exterior dictate what you’re going to do every day, like your convictions, your values, your practices, your habits. And having having having that mindset and having those disciplines in place, and getting everyone to be doing that is been the number one secret to your growth. Is that a fair summary?