"The secret to becoming a successful CEO is psychology. If you don’t understand what drives each person, especially yourself, the executive office is off limits."
Jason Kudlock is the Chief Financial Officer of Mrs. Property Solutions but started his professional life in the hyper-competitive world of baseball. After a lifetime of dedication, his time as a professional baseball player ended and he had to learn how to create a new career for himself. The discipline and dedication required to make it to the big leagues quickly translated to the business world, and now he offers this dedication and discipline to his customers and coworkers in the world of real estate investment.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Jason Kudlock: I am the Chief Financial Officer here at Mrs. Property Solutions, and a former professional baseball player, but all things must pass. The skills I acquired during my life in baseball quickly proved to be useful in real estate investment.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get to where you are today? Give us some lessons you learned along the way.
Jason Kudlock: I wanted to be a professional baseball player, and dedicated my entire young life toward that goal. Unfortunately, my professional career ended, and the identity I created for myself expired. I was forced to reinvent myself, but this taught me a very valuable lesson. There are no accidents, only opportunities. It all depends on perspective.
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Jason Kudlock: We purchase homes from people who are looking to sell immediately. They benefit by not spending a massive amount of time and energy selling their house, and not having to pay an agent. We benefit by renovating and reselling the home. Our company is unique because it has evolved into a family business. My wife is Mrs. Property Solutions, I am the CFO, and there are 3 other family members with roles within the company.
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Jason Kudlock: The traditional route to becoming a CEO is an MBA, but is definitely not limited to that. Many CEOs have stayed with a company and worked their way from the ground floor to the executive office. It all depends on self awareness. For someone who loves the company that they work for because their values align, and does everything they can to see the company succeed as well as themselves, they can become the CEO in due time. For someone who wants to skip straight to this, it takes an innovative idea and the drive to find the right people to fund it and see it succeed.
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Jason Kudlock: The secret to becoming a successful CEO is psychology. If you don’t understand what drives each person, especially yourself, the executive office is off limits. These mechanisms are the key to everything in the business world. My psychology professor taught me this, and inspired me to keep learning about psychology throughout the rest of my life. This has been vital to my success as a Chief Financial Officer.
Many CEOs fall into the trap of being all over the place. What are the top activities a CEO should focus on to be the best leader the company needs? Explain.
Jason Kudlock: A CEO must be a master delegator, and without having trustworthy people alongside you, this isn’t possible. It goes back to my mention of the importance of psychology in business. It allows an executive to choose the right people to work alongside them, and know how to delegate and motivate so that they can focus on the focus of a CEO’s work. Growing the business.
The Covid-19 Pandemic put the leadership skills of many to the test, what were some of the most difficult challenges that you faced as a CEO/Leader in the past year? Please list and explain in detail.
Jason Kudlock: The biggest challenge for me personally came with the uncertainties at the beginning of the pandemic. We could not meet anyone in person, and the world was at a standstill waiting to see what was going to happen. We quickly developed some processes to protect our customers and ourselves and got back into the swing of things, but the thought that something we can’t even see can stop the world stuck with me. It really put things into perspective. Time is in short supply. We have to take advantage of every single moment while we can.
What are some of the greatest mistakes you’ve noticed some business leaders made during these unprecedented times? What are the takeaways you gleaned from those mistakes?
Jason Kudlock: A mistake that I have read and heard about over and over during Covid has been giving bad behavior a pass. Executives had problems and frustrations piled on when dealing with the pandemic, and often took the added stress out on managers and coworkers.
We have all experienced it at some point in our professional careers long before Covid, and know that it is counterproductive. It destroys trust and just shows the company that you are susceptible to making poor choices under stress. After an experience working under someone very volatile I swore that I would never treat anyone in this unnecessary way by treating mistakes as learning opportunities instead of an opportunity to berate and shame someone.
In your opinion, what changes played the most critical role in enabling your business to survive/remain profitable, or maybe even thrive? What lessons did all this teach you?
Jason Kudlock: When we turned remote, it enabled us to stay safe and stay in business. Thankfully, the world turning remote caused the real estate market to boom during lockdown and our business grew much more than expected the past 18 months. The greatest lesson that we all should have learned from this is that people are resilient.
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Jason Kudlock: The biggest challenge that we are currently facing is sorting out how to expand our operation to a third city. We have looked at several but have not chosen yet. It’s important to wait until we are shown what the best move is here instead of trying to force our way into a new market. Patience is key.
You already shared a lot of insights with our readers and we thank you for your generosity. Normally, leaders are asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is the most useless skill you have learned, at school or during your career?
Jason Kudlock: Every quality is useless unless it is refined, and it is frequently used. We have all spent time and energy learning things that never proved to be useful in the real world for one reason or another. My ability to field a baseball in the past never comes into play on real estate deals today , but the discipline I learned from baseball has made me successful here.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Jason Kudlock: The most difficult decision I have had to make was when I was offered a promotion by a former employer at the beginning of the year. They offered to match my salary plus some, and bonus incentives. It would have been a steady, easily budgetable income, and I would have had a corner office in a gorgeous building. However, I could not bring myself to step away from my family, or to leave a business that belongs to all of us. Regardless of the money, I could never have the vested interest in that company that I have here.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Jason Kudlock for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
