DGS 334: Be Willing to Suck: The Key to Rapid Improvement

When starting something new in business (sales, leadership, outreach, or growth strategies), have you ever caught yourself thinking, “I need to figure everything out before I try this” or “I don’t want to look bad if I’m not good at it yet” 

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull explore why every entrepreneur begins at what they call “Level Suck.” They discuss why many business owners resist feedback, avoid practicing in front of others, and stay stuck repeating the same actions instead of improving through experimentation. 

Jason and Sarah break down how humility, rapid testing, and consistent feedback are the real drivers of mastery, and why the fastest way to grow is to be willing to start imperfectly and get better through iteration.

You’ll Learn

(02:05) Practicing New Skills and Getting Feedback 

(06:10) Ego, Humility, and Why Growth Requires Both 

(10:30) Sales Mastery: Volume, Testing, and Iteration 

(15:10) What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Children 

Quotables

“Anything new that you start with, you're not going to be amazing at it right away.”

“This is the worst that you're ever going to be.”

“It doesn’t mean that you’re bad. It just means that the test failed.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason & Sarah Hull (00:01)

Five, four, three, two, one. All right. I am Jason Hull. This is Sarah Hull, the owners of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry.

 

eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. Now, let's get into the show. Today's episode, what we're going to be talking about, our topic is, we all start at level suck. All right. Where do we start? We'll get rid of this. level suck. I'm sucking right now, I guess. Here's a good example. Okay, we all start at level suck.

 

Anything new that you start with, you're not going to be amazing at it right away. And a lot of times we don't even want to start because we want to figure everything out first. want to figure out how to be amazing already because we don't want to fail or look bad or not know what we're doing. And so most people are unwilling to fail. And one thing I've noticed about children is children just try stuff. They just do shit. They just want like they'll just

 

play and it's experimentation and it's fun and they learn incredibly fast what works and what doesn't work. so a lot of a lot of people don't don't act like children in that way. And so we've this is one of the things we coach clients on is be willing to suck. So that's the topic today. So we've been teaching BDM. So what are we noticing? Well, today was the first time that they actually got to practice.

 

and role play. they weren't that bad, actually. It's not like they started at suck. The first time they looked at the script. Yeah. But for the first time ever saying it out loud and practicing it in a semi real mock situation. Yeah. You know, it's not like they were so horrible. And then we went, wow, this is to take you a really long time.

 

figured that out. No, they weren't. I mean, they were not amazing at it. But for their very first time ever trying it, and I was throwing a couple curveballs at them. Yeah. They were they were doing they were doing well. They were handling themselves decently well. And it wasn't amazing. But I said to them, this is the worst that this year ever going to be. Yeah. That's great news. This is

 

the first time that you're doing it and this is as bad as you are ever going to be at this. Yeah, they were willing. They're willing to do it. And yeah, you can see the trepidation or that it was a little awkward at first to step into that and get started. So. But we've all felt that we've all I felt awkward for them. I'm like, ⁓ let's see how this goes, right? And they did fine, right? The first time, like you said, this is the worst you're ever going to be.

 

is what you told them. So that's the good news. You're going to get better at this. And ⁓ they did OK. And then we can give them feedback. our goal initially, my goal was to encourage them, because you don't want to be like, you're the worst. I can't believe. No. So we want to be encouraging and point out the good they did, and then offer some constructive ways they can take things to the next level or step up. And that's the other piece to this is.

 

You have to make sure that you are willing to suck in order to in front of others in order to be able to get the feedback you need in order to improve consistently. so a lot of a lot of people we coach initially, they don't want to. Look like they don't know something, even though they're here to learn.

 

They don't want to look bad in front of others. They don't want to give us a call recording of their sales call. They don't want to, know, and really what you're saying is I don't want to improve. I want to improve if I can figure out myself, but I was already trying to figure it out myself before I came to you. So I'm not going to be able to figure it out. And, and I've learned that one of my most valuable ways to get as much out of a coach or a mentor as possible is to say,

 

Here's honestly where I'm at. Here's what I'm dealing with currently. Here's the challenges I'm experiencing. What feedback do you have for me? And sometimes if you're opening yourself up to feedback, it can feel pretty uncomfortable. It can, but that's, think, really how we grow is, all right, don't sugarcoat it for me.

 

Don't tell me I'm amazing if I'm not because I won't be able to improve. If I already think, ⁓ I am so good at this. I'm so amazing. This is going to be awesome. it doesn't leave any room for improvement at all. If you already think, hey, I'm amazing at this. And if you actually are amazing at it, great. Then you'll get the results that you want. But if you think you're already amazing and

 

the results are telling you a different story, but you still think, I'm so good at this. Then there's a disconnect. And if you're not leaving any room for growth or improvement, then that's how we get stuck. And then I almost feel like it snowballs because a lot of times I think when people, don't, I don't know why, but I feel like so many of us have been trained to try to not look stupid.

 

in front of other people. They're like, I don't want to look dumb. I don't want to seem like I don't know something. I don't want people to think that I'm not great. I don't want to be raw and vulnerable in that way. I want everyone to think that I'm amazing. Even if I don't think I'm actually amazing, I want other people to think that I'm amazing. And I understand that. really do. But there does have to be a part of you that is able to separate your ego enough.

 

You don't have to completely kill it, but separate the ego enough to say, where can I get better at this? Because no matter how good or how bad you are at something, there's still room for improvement. You never really get to the top and you're like, well, right, I'm on the top of this mountain and there's nowhere else to go. You can be amazing at something and still have a lot of room for improvement.

 

you can still get better. Yeah. So there's a scripture that says pride cometh before the fall or something like this, this truism. And so, you know, a lot of times we in business, we fall prey to our own blind spots. And that's where we learn some really strong lessons. I've experienced that. Many of you listening probably have. And so

 

The secret to really making progress, to really learning, to being able to grow is humility, which is the opposite. And humility isn't debasing yourself. It isn't putting yourself down. Humility is just recognizing honestly where you're at in relation to maybe others or in relation to the goal, or it's just having a more accurate view. That's humility. I think also humility, we create that naturally by recognizing others' hand.

 

in our accomplishments and what we're trying to do and in our own success. Because the opposite of humility is like, man, look at everything I did. I did this all by myself. The opposite of that would be, hey, look, God definitely had a hand in me doing all of this. know, Sarah's had a huge impact in helping me with these results. You know, my different team members have, you know, so I can, others hand in what we're accomplishing.

 

That's how you create humility. And really humility then is just reality. It's just actually getting connected to reality and saying, I'm so great. I did all this stuff. ⁓ And so that means if we are humble, then we're also open to being able to get feedback. We're willing to be able to get feedback from others. If we're not willing to absorb or take feedback, which can be uncomfortable, it means you might feel a little bracing for impact.

 

Like, hey, can you give me feedback on this? And yeah, it's uncomfortable, but it's good medicine. And then you have actionable ways to improve. And some feedback that you get from some people is not useful, right? Somebody says, well, you're really, you're a jerk. You always do this thing. And you're like, I never do that thing. So they don't know me. Maybe they don't know you. So the feedback's not valid. you got to be careful who you're taking feedback from. Generally, the rule is you take feedback from those that you're paying.

 

like your mentors, your coaches, or from those that are paying you. They get you paid. And so those are two great sources for feedback. And then family, they're the people close to you. And so the wisdom comes from knowing, being able to take feedback and being able to analyze it and figure out, is there some truth to this? Where could I improve? How can I change this? And the worst thing you can do, for example, is a BDM.

 

is that you're just doing outreach. You're making calls week after week, month after month, and it's not working. And it's not that what you're doing can't work. It's that you're not good enough yet. It's not working for you. If it's working, if it can work for anybody else, it should be able to work for you too. But you're doing something that isn't working. And so you're stuck. So you need to get feedback rather than just continually doing something that's not working.

 

wasting weeks, wasting months without significant progress. You could be making progress every day. You could be getting feedback every day. Feedback on your calls. can leverage AI to get feedback. You can use coaches, get feedback. You can role play and work with others and learn and get feedback and just learning and seeing others that are experts to do something well also is a sort of feedback for you to recognize gaps between how you would do it. Like, oh, well, that was different.

 

I would have said this, that was very cool. I could see how that'd be useful. And it felt very natural. It didn't feel awkward or pushy. So this is the process of just doing the work. A lot of times is its own feedback mechanism. And so sometimes just doing the work is what makes you good. For example, at sales, you just do it and you feel the pain of things not working. And then you make changes and you adjust. And the real skill is how quick can you adapt?

 

Yeah, it's always testing. I feel like sales really comes down to two things and it's volume is one of them and it's A-B testing. Yeah. the other. So any sales issues that you're having can be solved with those two things. And the whole thing is a process. Yeah. And really when you break it down, you can A-B test just about everything that you do in the sales process. So...

 

What day am I calling people? What time am I calling people? Who am I calling? What am I saying in the first few seconds? What am I trying to lead with? What script am I using? What's the close or the ask that I have? How am I presenting that? How am I pitching the offer? Am I offering value? Am I saying this

 

word or that word? Am I flipping things around? Maybe the order. Every single little thing can be tested. And it's all about trying and seeing what is working and what isn't working. And both are really good data to have because when you know what isn't working, then it points a finger at where you need to focus. ⁓

 

So a lot of times people will go, oh, this isn't working. I should just quit.

 

I mean, you could, but then you're not going to get the results that you probably were looking for if you just quit, right? Yeah. So if you start driving a car and you're like, wow, that was way harder than I thought it was going to be. I ended up going 70 through my neighborhood. That was bad. All right. Well, that doesn't mean you need to never drive. It just means you learn how to do that differently. So it's all just...

 

tweaking and testing and tweaking and testing. And in that process, you're going to find, that really, that was bad. didn't work. That was not a good thing. And that's okay. It doesn't mean that you're bad. It just means that that test failed. It doesn't mean that you need to own the failure because if you look at it more objectively, you're just testing data points. Yeah.

 

The idea is rapid iteration. And if you want to collapse time on doing all the experimentation yourself and you find other people that have already been doing this quite a bit, that have already figured out from hundreds of guinea pigs that have tried different things and heard and listened and figured out what is and isn't working like at DoorGrowth, we've generated over $10 million in sales revenue and ⁓

 

I've probably, maybe we'd have to crunch the numbers. I've probably done at least half of that personally myself. Yeah. And so conservatively. so I would, I would say, ⁓ and I wasn't a natural salesperson. I just needed to take care of my family and I wanted to take care of clients. And I was just trying to figure it all out. And so I had lots of experiments, but I also.

 

I studied stuff, I read stuff, I figured out which things were good. I experimented. If you want to collapse time on the experimentation, you listen to somebody that's done a lot of sales, especially if it's related to the industry that you're in and you're going to collapse time significantly. You don't have to do every experiment. We can give you this works, this strategy works, this works. And then it's just a question then of, I good at that strategy? Where am I falling short of what they're teaching?

 

and getting that feedback. then you're, then it's like a rocket ship. You're going way faster. So we'll share a quick analogy and then maybe wrap up, but analogy I like to share, there was this, this test that they did and they would take these teams and the goal was to have them compete and figure out how they could build a structure to put a marshmallow up at the top of this structure. And whoever could build the highest structure quickest that stood and didn't fall apart was the winner.

 

And one of the highest performers, people were really surprised to find out, were children. It was just kids. They had these sticks, they had marshmallows, they had tape, they had whatever to build. And they would just try stuff right from the beginning. And it was failing and they kept doing it. And then they would build something eventually that worked much faster in the time allotted than usually college students were the one of the worst performers because they would sit there and think about it.

 

and analyze it and talk about what and theorize and plan and draw it out and argue with each other. And by the end, they didn't actually know what worked and whatever they tried would fail. Entrepreneurs were consistently pretty decent performers. They were. And so entrepreneurs tended like try stuff and experiment. But children, one of the top performers, the absolute top were structural engineers. Unfair advantage, right? Like, you know,

 

That's there. That's if they do poorly at that, they probably should not be helping us build anything. Right. Right. So please don't build anything if you can't do that. Right. But children, right. Children. And why children? Because children don't aren't caught up in in looking. They don't care about looking bad. They just like, let's try it. Let's do this. Let's try this. And it doesn't work. They're not like, man, I'm a failure. Look at me. I did something that didn't work. They just move on. They're like, let's try the next thing. And so there's a lot you can learn by watching how children

 

kind of go about doing things. There's a reason why children learn so rapidly and their brain is so, you know, able to absorb information so quickly because they don't have a lot of stuff in the way. And ⁓ as adults, we have a lot of stuff in the way a lot of times. So be a little bit like a child, not childish, but be a little bit like a child in that you're open, you're willing to explore, you're willing to try things, you're willing to experiment and be smart. Like if a child listened to a structural engineer, they would probably go way faster.

 

Because they'd be like, yeah, I'll try this. Whereas you might get some college student with an ego, and this guy says he knows what he's doing, but I don't know. Let's draw this out, because that doesn't make sense to me. And maybe they don't listen. Everybody's tried teaching somebody something that has a lot of ego and resistance, and that's really annoying. So don't be that person. Cool. Anything else we should share? No. I think if you're looking, though, if you're looking for a BDM, we have something really exciting.

 

If any of you follow us on social media, you may have seen that we've been dropping some little hints about it. We've talked about it a little bit on the podcast and it is in the background in the works right now. ⁓ We'll tell you it's called The Door Machine and we're going to be taking all of the pain, all of the friction, all of the annoyance, all of the hard parts, all of the challenges, all of the I'm s-

 

ducks and I don't know what to do's, we're taking all of that out of sales. And it's going to be incredible. really do think it's going to change the property management industry as a whole, which is great because I want our clients to take over the entire industry period. And I also think that any bad landlords, and you know who you are if you're out there, the ones that

 

don't care about taking care of the properties, they don't care about maintaining things, they don't care about doing things maybe the right way or the legal way, and they're willing to do things a little bit shady. I've had a couple of those. Let me be clear, there is no place for you in this industry, and our clients are going to simply eradicate you. So I'm really excited about that.

 

If you're on the good side of property management, as many of you are that listen to this podcast, I don't think there's anybody that I just alluded to. don't think they're listening to this podcast. everybody who doesn't fall into the bad bucket, who's probably listening right now, ⁓ you guys, that's who we want to win. We want the good property managers to win and what we're going to be launching with the BDMs.

 

is going to allow you guys to do that much, much faster and much, much easier. And it's really exciting because this is week one for us of making it happen. it will be live soon. It is coming. If you're slightly interested in getting more information or learning about it or going, well, what is she talking about? That kind of sounds like something I might want. I would like to dominate my whole market. Cool. Then

 

go to doorgrow.com, talk to one of our sales team members, and ask them about the door machine. You cannot buy it yet. I have people that are really mad that they can't buy it yet, but it's not even live yet. We're still doing the foundational work that we need to do in order to get you what ⁓ results you're looking for. However, you can join the wait list. So if you're interested in doing that,

 

talk with our team and then it will be, when we're ready to launch it, the ones on the wait list, you will get priority access. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we already have people that are trying to figure out what it is because I have people texting me and they won't tell me who they are. like, what's the door machine? Give me the details. So that's interesting to me. So.

 

I like I don't know if I want it, but I think that I might. Can you tell me what it is? mean, real simply, most people are paying for leads or they're paying for exclusive leads or they're paying for maybe somebody to try and do sales for them. We are going to handle that whole front end and give you deals. That's the idea. We're going to build out your property management business. Yeah, we basically will be partnering. for you, not done with you, not coach you to do it, not show you how, not give you the things. No, just...

 

Do it. Yeah, we're building a win-win-win sort of partnership idea. So it's going to be awesome. All right. So to wrap up, if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your property management business to the next level, reach out to us at dorgor.com. We can help for free training on how to get unlimited leads for free because you probably think that's your bottleneck because everybody does. I call it the leads myth. Cool. I'll show you how you can get unlimited of those and you'll realize that's probably not the issue. Just text the word leads to 512.

 

648-4608. Also join our free community for Facebook, just for property management business owners by going to doorgrohclub.com. And if you want tips, tricks, ideas to learn about our offers, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgroh.com slash subscribe. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on YouTube. Click the bell.

 

We'd really appreciate it. Until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone. All right, five, four, three, two, one, we're out.