Joe:  Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. All right, guys, welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. Glad you’re here. On this episode today, we are going to be interviewing a guy who’s running one of, if not the largest wholesaling businesses in the United States. Josiah Grimes is in the house. I’m going to be interviewing him and talking to him about his history, how he got into real estate, what he’s doing now, and how on earth do you wholesale as many deals as they are. And I think you’re going to be blown away by how simple it actually is. It’s not that complicated. It’s a really simple business. And Josiah has been in the business for a long time and he’s going to be sharing about how they’ve grown by keeping it simple. It’s not by complicating it, it’s by keeping things really simple. So I’m excited about learning from Josiah as we go through here how to grow a large wholesaling business without all of the bloat and overhead and stress and complication and all of that stuff. So if you’re interested in that, you’re in the right place.

Right. First, though, quick announcement. The show is brought to you by PartnerWithJoe.net. Yes, I am sponsoring my own podcast. If you go to PartnerWithJoe.net right now, you’re going to get my free offer software. And this is a software that helps you calculate multiple different cash deals. It’s going to give you a cover letter, a one page contract and a couple of pages after that, supporting your offer, showing the benefits of working with you and stuff like that. It’s completely free. Just go to PartnerWithJoe.net. And after you get that software, a little training video explaining how you can partner with me on deals. I’ll partner with you on deals, I’ll lend money on your deals. And it’s only seven bucks a month. You should check out PartnerWithJoe.net right now. And I think you’re going to like it even if you don’t want to work with me, even if you don’t need any new training, you’re going to get a lot of value out of the out of the software. The free version helps you calculate multiple different cash offers. It helps you figure out the ARV, the after repair values, the value of the house, it helps you figure out the repairs in just a few clicks. The pro version which you get inside PartnerWithJoe.net, that will give you two different lease option offers and two different owner financing offers that you can send to the sellers. And the cool thing about the reports that it gives you that you can send to the seller is that it does the selling for you. It explains what a lease option is for you. It explains the benefits of owner financing for you and you can now give the sellers options. So my intent with this is to show you and help you figure out how, instead of getting one out of 30 offers accepted, maybe I can get two or three out of thirty offers accepted. Double or triple your deal flow without actually even generating any more leads. Does that makes sense? So check out PartnerWithJoe.net right now. Cool. All right, enough of that. Let’s bring Josiah. Josiah Grimes. How are you man.?

Josiah: I’m doing awesome. How are you, man?

Joe:  Really good. Really good. I have heard of your name and followed you for quite a while now. You’ve been in the business a long time, very active in the business, but you’ve never been the front face. You know, the guy everybody knows about and has heard about. You’ve been kind of the secret ninja behind the scenes, as it were. Is that a fair way to say it?

Josiah: I’ll be a secret ninja. That sounds that sounds awesome.

Joe:  Yeah. And we’ve met a couple of times before at networking events and masterminds and stuff like that. But I’m glad to finally get you on the show, Josiah.

Josiah:  I’m glad to be here man. I have to check out Partner with Joe. I’ll have to look at that after this. I probably should have known that you had that, but it seems cool. So I’m going to look at that afterwards.

Joe: Introduce everybody to you like you’re in Phoenix right now, right?

Josiah: Yep. Yep.

Joe: Everybody is in Phenix. That’s a dumb question.

Josiah: You’re in here to St. Louis, right?

Joe: Yeah.

Josiah: Holding down the Midwest for us. I appreciate you.

Joe: I tell you, I love the Midwest, especially on days like yesterday. I went golfing. It was in the mid-60s. Just incredible. All right. So you’re in Phoenix. You do wholesaling. How did you get started in the business?

Josiah:  OK, so I’m making the story too long. Once you’ve told your own story multiple times, then it’s hard to know if you’re just going on for years or whatever. So I’ll try to keep it nice and short. So that’s fine then. But yes, basically, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur ever since I was four years old, something like that. So I had like lots of inventions. Lemonade stand, snack shop, sold snacks out of my locker, totally got shut down my principal in high school, sold science projects. Just a bunch of stuff. I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I was always driven that way. And so when I was 17, I went to what was effectively like a pitchathon, basically, right, and you can learn a ton at those events. So it’s pretty awesome, actually. And it’s just one hour long, or hour and a half long segment after the next where people are introducing you to new business concepts. And so I got invited by a friend. I went to that and one of the segments, they’re like a little kid in a candy shop because it’s so cool. There’s all these different ways to make money. That was really fun.

Joe: Was this Learning Annex by any chance?

Josiah:  I don’t know. The guy that put it on, I got to remember his name, Corey Sanchez was one of the guys and is a buddy of mine and he’s the one that put it on. It was something like Mojo Video Marketing or something like that.

Joe: OK, never mind.

Josiah:  Anyhow, so one of the guys that was there was talking about how he can take ten dollars and make thirty thousand dollars in real estate. My background, reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad and that type of stuff, owning rentals is a big part of the strategy for being wealthy. OK, ten dollars and you can make thirty thousand dollars. And I wasn’t one of the guys that raised my hand and asked questions a lot, but I got to ask. So at the end of the thing I’m like, hey, so you said ten dollars to make 30 grand. Was that ten thousand dollars or ten dollars? Ten dollars. I was like, what the……? Bro, how do you do that? The concept was obviously wholesaling and the ten dollars was just your earnest money deposit.

Joe: Yeah.

Josiah: So after that I was just talking to the guy that cuts my hair and I was saying, hey man, have you ever heard of anything like this? He said, well, actually I’ve got a client that does exactly that. Are you serious? Yeah really, he does it all the time. I was like, no way, man. I thought for sure it was fake. And I asked for his information and he said “I can’t give you his information. But he just launched a social media platform for real estate investors, and I can give you that and you can try to track him down from there”. So long story short, that was Cody Sperber’s when he launched, I can’t remember what it was called,  Clever Investor Social or something like that. So I reached out to him there. I bought his thousand dollar product or whatever it was.

Joe: When was that?

Josiah:  That was 2011. So I went through that. Then he was really dope. He gave me a support call and basically said, “Hey, I wanted to check in on the course, see how it’s going” and I was like, “Any advice you have for me?” And he said, “well, really, you should go down to the auctions and you should find someone that can mentor you and help you through the process”. Normally, if I sense that someone is indirectly telling me not to ask something or whatever, I’m not disagreeable enough to just ask the question or say what I want anyway. But this time I was just like, “Could you mentor me?” Or “Why don’t you mentor me?”, or something like that. He more or less said “Yeah, I don’t really have time to do that and I’m busy, but you should find someone. And best of luck”. So probably a month went by. I had watched all the training, reviewed it all. I bought like 150 bandit signs or something like that. The last money I had after the thousand bucks or whatever that I spent on the course. Then I texted him and said, “Hey man, I bought all these signs, I’ll put them out for you for free wherever you want. I’ll work for you for free. I just want to learn”. So about a week later he’s like, “OK, you got your shot. Meet me for lunch”. So I met him for lunch. My first assignment was to sell / lease a lease option property that we had in West Phoenix and God just hooked it up, literally. I put out a few bandit signs. I got one phone call. I cannot tell you how nervous I was for those calls. It was hilarious. But first phone call I got wanted to go see it when I was the property to go see it. I showed him the property. Cody had given me one line to use. He said, if they seem like they like it, then you say, “OK, do you want to see what this looks like on paper”. That’s the line. That’s what you use to get to the close. And so I was like, OK, got that. So after they were walking around the house for 35 minutes, I was like, “So, do you guys wanna see what this looks like on paper?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we’ll do that”. So that was my free internship where I just worked for free for Cody for a while, six months, a year or something like that, then was employed with Cody or whatever, employed at his education company. And then we became partners in the investment business, probably three years, three something years into it. So yeah. So that was my start into real estate. The other thing that I think is interesting is as I was going through to be an entrepreneur and different stuff, I didn’t think real estate was the one that I wanted to pursue. Right. The ones I thought were cooler was like making money online. I thought that seemed cooler than real estate at first. And God was like, no, I’m going to open the door here for you in real estate.

Joe: Real estate’s way easier.

Josiah: It is, bro, it is.

Joe: Way easier than making money selling info products.

Josiah:  It is, man, it is. But that was the door that opened and God left me with it and it’s been good ever since.

Joe: Very cool. So that was ten years ago?

Josiah: Yeah. Ten years ago that I started.

Joe:  All right. So ten years ago and then recently you’ve been working with KeyGlee and leading that engine. That machine. What what is that all about? What is KeyGlee?

Josiah:  OK, so I love KeyGlee, so I’m definitely partial, basically, so KeyGlee I started with Hunter Runyon, Jamil Damji and Rahema Athari.

Joe: So there’s three or four partners in that, is that right?

Josiah:  Yeah, technically four. Yeah, technically four in KeyGlee. And so we started working together about four and some years ago now. And we more or less we were struggling to get from where, I was struggling specifically, to get from where we’re doing more than three deals. This was pre-KeyGlee. And so I was really trying to figure that out. It was such a struggle to get past three deals a month. And if I had three deals, I can’t do anything else, I gotta focus just on these deals. And so that was kind of what we set out to solve. And a good chunk of that had been previously solved by Jamil. He’s a smart guy.

Joe: Had been previously solved by what?

Josiah:  Jamil. Jamil is just a wicked smart guy, and Hunter, honestly. But we kind of had this perfect marriage where Jamil was awesome on the acquisition side and then Hunter and I were great on the disposition side. Really, I should say Hunter was fantastic at finding and building the buyer relationships, or finding the buyer relationships. And I might have been that middle piece that kind of fits between because I was good at the relationship side of selling and things like that. Right. So I was really skilled there. And then Hunter was extremely operationally skilled. But Hunter’s focus is more like introverted type work. That’s what he enjoys, whereas mine is more extroverted. So Jamil would be the one bringing in the deals and then Hunter and I would be the ones that were filling on it. And we really realized that our strong suits were on the disposition side, like selling, selling the properties, building those relationships, finding those buyers, being very diligent at that. And then we found out that if we pair with people that are focused on the acquisition side, right, that are negotiating with sellers, we can make this a win-win because they’re oftentimes getting in a deal and there are one or two things that we could do for them. We could always sell higher for the most part, literally. We could always sell higher than what they were getting. So that was cool. And generally we could sell faster and more consistently. So that’s like a superpower, especially for someone that wants to do high volume on the acquisition side to be able to couple them or partner with them in that. And so that was really our model, right. We were able to jump in. The benefit to us was that we didn’t have to focus so heavily on the acquisition side. And then the benefit to them was that they didn’t have to focus so heavily on the disposition side. And so we started making strategic partnerships like that to the benefit of both sides where we both amplified our business because of it. And that was really our start to the framework that we used to really grow KeyGlee. And so I like what you said before as far as in a lot of ways, it’s very simple. It is not a ton of magic. I mean, maybe there’s some magic, but there’s the magic in the fact that it’s a repeatable paint by numbers process. And what you have to do, though, is paint. You have to be consistently going through the process. And now really the challenges and things that are the things that I’m focusing on are as we scale when we get larger. Right. We’ve got 56 franchises operating now as well. And so as we scale and continue to grow, businesses move from very creative at the beginning. This is your little graph, right, x, y graph, whatever, businesses are really creative at the beginning and then they need to become operationally efficient to lock in those gains. So if you come up with something creative, really, really smart, well then you need to create a process around it so that you lock in those gains and then you can continue to build on that foundation creatively. Whereas what a lot of people do is they do one to two things. They either get way too creative, but never operationally efficient. So they come up with something awesome, and then they need to start on this next thing so they lose the first thing and then they start in the next step. Right. So their business looks kind of like this, and they’re never in the same strategy. Whereas some people on the flip side of that, the other side of the road, in the ditch again but on the other side, is when you’re too operationally efficient and you take all the creativity out of it, and that’s where you get blockbuster Code X years, that type of stuff. And so finding that awesome balance where you can bring in the operational efficiency, which is always a challenge, but then not use it to lock in your gains essentially. And then you can still be creative to continue to be competitive and continue to grow. So that’s really my focus now and then heavily obviously on training managers and all the fun that comes with that.

Joe:  All right. So those of you that don’t know, and I’ve had Jamil Damji on my podcast before. Super nice guy, very smart. He started a company called KeyGlee and KeyGlee, everyone tilts their head when they hear that, K E Y G L E E, KeyGlee.

Josiah: Happy Keys.

Joe: All right, so anyway, how did he come up with that name anyway?

Josiah:  How did Jamil? First off, Jamil’s way cooler than I am, so you should go and watch his podcast. That guy’s dope. Love that guy. Biggest sweetheart in the world. Extremely. Jamil’s just, it’s freaking insane. Like if you listen to him on the phone negotiating, it’s just wild. He’s just so good and so lovely. It’s all good. It’s not manipulative, it’s not weird. It’s just let’s find the best win. I learned so much from that guy. OK, all of that to say the way we came up with it, we honestly, I don’t know the exact story other than we tried a bunch of names. Originally, we were going to name it Home Max, and then we found out that was trademarked. And so that wasn’t going to work. And we were like, we don’t know if we really like Home Max so much anyway. And so then we tried just come up with random names like I could probably find these texts and like some of them were like some pretty wacky names, honestly, like no that’s not gonna work. What’s the goal here? What are we trying to do? Well, our mission is there’s lots of kind of bad players in the real estate space, especially in the wholesale space, the types of guys that will fist fight you at the auction or will say, “Hey, I got a great deal for you. You write me the earnest check directly”, and then you write them the earnest check directly, but title can’t clear, so you can’t close the deal. And then they just keep your earnest check. And then they go do it again and again and again. Right. So there are some bad people in this space. Right. And so we wanted to create a good alternative where we’re extremely consistent. We’re a God fearing company, which is like basic Christian morals, and we want this to be good, like really, really good. And so what kind of falls into that? That’s also a little bit cutesy fun, modern type stuff. And I think I’m sure it was Jamil who came up with it. He was like GleeKey, KeyGlee. And we told ourselves we were going to end the search that night. And when he was like KeyGlee, we were all like, that’s that. I like that. Let’s do that.

Joe: That’s cool.

Josiah: The origin.

Joe: And here we are spending five minutes talking about it.

Josiah: Sorry. It’s probably not going to help your real estate investment business.

Joe:  No. It’s cool. So KeyGlee, the main thing you guys do is you provide the buyers for deals. So wholesalers are out there doing all the hard work, not hard work, but they’re doing the front end legwork of finding the deals. Right. They bring them to you guys and you have the systems and processes in place to bring the buyers to the deal. And I think, are you guys, to be an owner of a franchise of KeyGlee, do you need to have a broker’s license or does that become an issue at all in what you’re doing here?

Josiah:  There’s a couple of states like Illinois, where it’s probably best to get one. So there’s a couple of places where it’s advised to spend two weeks and take the test or whatever. Right. Spend four hundred dollars on school and six hundred bucks to get your association and stuff. So, I mean, there’s a couple of places where we would advise that. If you’re the owner though, being licensed really isn’t that important. It’s once you start to hire, once you actually start. And then obviously I’m not an attorney, can’t give legal advice. But educationally speaking, when it matters is when you have people negotiating on your behalf, because then that’s basically implied agency. So if they’re going to take the contract out for you, the contract’s in your name and they’re going to negotiate with the seller and sign, then that person needs to be licensed because they’re technically kind of representing you. And so that’s the happy medium. The owner doesn’t need to be licensed, but as they hire on and build their team, that team does need to be licensed.

Joe:  Yeah. All right. So basically, people bring you the deals, you have the best buyers. Explain how the paperwork works for a beginner who’s never heard of this or is new to the business. How does the paperwork work between the A-to-B, the wholesaler who’s got a contract with the seller and they bring it to you?

Josiah: OK, yeah, it’s easy. So they’ve got the A-to-B contract here.

Joe: I always get mixed up on videos, whatever.

Josiah:  It’s weird in my place. I guess they’ve got their A-to-B contract and then there’s a few different ways. So they’ll call and we can set it up for them. But generally what we’ll do is we’ll just do an assignment to us. So we have equitable interests to sell and then we’ll assign to the end buyer. The other option is they’ll give us an option. So we’ll do like a one page option that gives us maybe a five day window to sell it. And then during that five day window, if we sell it, we exercise our option. Then we decide on an assignment and then assign them to our end buyer. So two assignments, no extra title fees. The other option is based on what they’re making on the A-to-B side. We might choose instead to either double it, so A-to-B contract to a B-to-C to us, and then we assign to our buyer so that our buyer is seeing just the fee, the portion that we’re making.

Joe:  So you’ll actually close on it and buy it, then turn around and sell it immediately to your end buyer.

Josiah:  We’ll either do a simultaneous close or, absolutely, we’ll just close on it ourselves. So that’s the other thing, too, let’s say you have a deal and it was supposed to close and the buyer fell out, so now it needs to close tomorrow. And it’s a deal where, like, we like that deal, that deal will for sure sell. Then absolutely, we’ll just go ahead and pull down and close it for you.

Joe: Nice.

Josiah:  Which is one of those things I really wish I had more of when I was starting in real life. Because when you do that and you promise the seller it’s going to sell and then you realize it’s going to close and then your buyer backs out, you’re just like oh, this blows. This is not good.

Joe:  And that’s going to happen. That’s going to happen. So I remember so clearly, too, when we started doing that back in 2012 when we were doing a bunch of seller marketing and talking to Kent Clothier, who has a book called Reverse Wholesaling. And I’d recommend you guys go check that book out on Amazon. It’s called Reverse Wholesaling. And he said, “Bro, you need to know, how many buyers do you have?” And I said “I don’t know, five hundred buyers”, and he goes, how do you phrase it? He said it’s much easier to shop for what buyers want than to sell them what you have. Right. So if you have a bunch of buyers and you know they’re looking for three bedrooms in these certain zip codes, go shop for that, go get it and then sell it to them. So I started thinking about that. OK, that makes sense. So what we did is we started finding our buyers and asking them more specifically, what do you want? And then we started doing some direct mail to buyers that were already buying out-of-state properties in other states. So, for example, we went to Marion County, Indiana, and we pulled a list of all the buyers that were buying in Marion County from outside of Indiana. And we sent them the letters saying, “Hey, we’re the premier real estate investing company in St. Louis. If you’re looking for deals, call us”. We wouldn’t get a ton of calls. But the few that we did were really good buyers. And that phone number on that letter, I remember so clearly, went to my acquisition manager’s cell phone number. We wanted somebody to answer those calls. And so we started building up an active list of buyers already comfortable with buying deals out of state. And then we had about a good 10 or 12 buyers. And so then we just started talking to every wholesaler and investor we knew in the St. Louis area and telling them, “Hey, we’ve got a million dollars burning a hole in our pocket. We’re looking for deals, send us everything you’ve got”. And within a matter of a couple of months, everything changed. We stopped doing any seller marketing and we had people bringing us deals for our buyers that they were just happy to make. Five hundred dollars. Right. They were just happy. Some of them even said, listen, I just want to take care of the seller. I promised them I would close and I haven’t. My buyer backed out and they were just happy to get to save face with the seller. And so we would pay them something still. But like, yeah, there are so many people listening to us. There are so many wholesalers out there that your deal falls through and you have to go back to the seller to try to get another extension or renegotiate a lower price or something like that. It’s embarrassing. But if you had somebody like Josiah Grimes or if you were like Josiah, right. You got buyers now with money, it makes everything so much easier. These were the easiest deals. The wholesale we went from doing a couple, three a month to a couple or three a week within a matter of months, because we had the money. Right. And people started bringing us their deals. And isn’t that a much easier way to wholesale?

Josiah:  Yeah, I think so. I mean, yeah, I think so. I think one hundred times over and that’s supercool. That’s great. Yeah. The one bit there maybe that I would adjust slightly or actually no I think that whole thing is fantastic. As you grow that ,you grow your buyer base, really you want to get it so that any deal you’ve got a buyer for, that’s the ultimate thing. Because that was the one thing that we tried to do as well, is figure out exactly what the buyers want and then go source the property for that. And that works. But it’s more fun when you have a buyer for everything. I mean, then you’re just like, OK, send me whatever deal you’ve got and I can find you someone.

Joe: Yeah.

Josiah: But that’s I mean, basically that’s just the evolution.

Joe:  We were kind of pretending, as it were, not necessarily pretending because we were, but we were the new hedge fund in town. Right. That’s how we positioned ourselves. Right. Like we’re the big Wall Street money machine here in town. We’re looking for deals. We’ve got a million dollars burning a hole in our pocket. We need deals. We need inventory. And once people heard about that, they would bring us their deals. And it was fantastic. We had the best buyers. And the guy I was working with at the time, we split up as friends just because he was doing 90 percent of the work and I was doing nothing practically. So anyway, he’s still doing this has been eight years, still averaging ninety to one hundred deals a year.

Josiah: Bro, that’s wild.

Joe: Isn’t it awesome.

Josiah: So cool.

Joe:  He did eventually get his license, he just figured it was easier to have his real estate license to do it. He still gets paid through assignment fees, right. So what are some of the best ways to find these buyers for your deals?

Josiah:  I get your question, man. I thought about this, too, because I anticipated this question a little bit, because it’s the one that’s important. And so I was thinking about it. I mean, obviously and maybe it’s based on where someone’s at, where they’re starting. Right. But most of the time, people know where to get the buyers. Knowing where to get the buyers is not too tough. And then I’ll share a little bit how you rank them. Buyers that have bought in cash are good buyers. If they bought someone else’s wholesale property, then they’re a top tier buyer. Your second tier buyer is your tax record buyer that paid cash. Now, that person might have paid cash for their own personal property. Doesn’t mean they’re not interested in an investment property. Most tend to want an investment rental or something like that, which is cool. So that’s the second tier. And then third tier is basically like all of your social media buyers, all of your listing agents that might have buyers, that type of stuff. Right. And so you can you can reach them through conversations on Facebook, Facebook groups, stuff like this. In any social media platform you can think of, basically you can you can find buyers and then similarly agents. There’s lots of lots of ways you can go after finding agents. You just do a quick Google search and pull a bunch of phone numbers. If you’ve got the MLS access, you’ve got all their contact information. And there you can just go through your email and you got to be careful with that because you don’t want to just blast email, you don’t want to create a MailChimp, upload the list and then just email everyone. You’ll get shut down by MailChimp or whatever email marketer you’re using. But if you do it in, like, little drills, 80 at a time or something like that through your personal Gmail, you can do that and get some inbound agents that have buyers. But that’s like that part of it is not too complicated. Right. So you’re either grabbing them from, they’ve closed on another wholesale property, which you can do that in lots of different ways, obviously. Different ways from just looking at OK, this deal just sold. I waited two weeks. Now it’s closed. Who is the buyer? Sweet. Awesome. And if you’ve got some unspoken agreements with people in your community that you’re not going to look at their buyers, they’re not going look at yours. You want to respect others two, that’s cool. But those are your top tier buyers, then tax record buyers, you can find those. There’s tons of services that provide you with tax record buyers. You probably know these services better than I do. Might even have a link for special link for them or something like that where you can download tax record lists and basically it’s all cash buyers or some pretty fancy words that show that they flipped the property. So they bought and then within a certain amount of time relisted the property. So that’s an especially good buyer. But once you’ve gone after those buyers, it’s just consistency on going after them. The next thing that you want to care about is you want to rank them on how much you should care about them and you want to start to build a relationship with them. And that’s really where the magic is, right, because you can have an absolute rock. OK, sorry. Last bar you got to add is your institutional hedge funds, pensions, those types of buyers, and going after them is a little bit more complicated. So going after them, you know, you can find them. If you go to like Landgrid, you can look through it, see who’s the largest owner of property in your state. And then normally you’re not looking for the biggest hedge funds because those are the ones that want a three to seven to 10 day inspection sometimes. Right. And the agent that’s making the offer isn’t the one that confirms the purchase. So the agent says, let’s put a deal together and rights on it. And the agent maybe has a twenty five percent hit rate where they don’t cancel. So the likelihood that it’s going to go through the agent is pretty slim. The likelihood that they’re going to burn up some of your inspection period with their inspection period is pretty high. So the big hedge funds aren’t necessarily the ones you want to do business with unless you can get directly to the person in charge of their purchasing. Right. It might be their portfolio manager, might be their asset manager, might be the purchasing agent. There’s a few different titles for that person. If you can get directly to that person in a large hedge fund and get them to waive the inspection period, close all cash, it’s great. It’s amazing. You’re going to sell a ton of deals to them. They’re going to pay above what your other buyers will pay. And you’ll be a very happy person. With that, it has to be within their buy box. So you want to make sure you get their buy box, generally they’re only buying newer homes. But on those newer homes, you can still make a lot of money. So it’s pretty cool. The real hedge funds you want to find is you’re go into the Landgrid list, there’s a few others, I think, that will show you who’s largest property owners in your area. When you get to where they own like twenty properties, 10 to 20 properties, those are normally your favorite hedge funds because they’re a little bit smaller. They want to be more aggressive. They’re more operationally robust and there’s not a lot of bureaucracy. And so those guys can make the decision for themselves, no inspection period or waive inspection period, waive appraisal and just say I’ll buy that, and I’ll close in two days and I’m going to send you the earnest money check right now. So those guys are awesome. And the reason why they might only have 20 properties or whatever, is that most of those guys work on a two year cycle. They’ve got 20 to 40 properties, but likely they’ve got multiple entities. They’re not probably all in one entity to mitigate risk. So if you see an entity with 20 properties, there’s a likelihood that the same purchaser there might have three or four of those. Right. And they switch out entities after they fill the 20. And generally what they’re doing is they’re buying and then they’re waiting two years and then selling. And so they get appreciation. They get the rental income. If they want to take it, they can take depreciation, whatever they want, capital gains, fun stuff. And so they’re working on these deals that have a constant flow. And sometimes you can work on both ends of that cycle to start to bring you deals that they want to get rid of, like the tenant ended up being terrible and destroyed all their stuff. One or two out of the 20 homes that they’re like, hey, we’re not going to sell this retail. Just get us out for a little bit above what we’re into it for. But now you’re a year and a half later, so it’s a good deal if you’ve been in an appreciating market. So those guys are fantastic buyers that you want to find as well. So those are your four main categories of, four or five main categories of buyers. If you separate social media ads and keychain ads.

Joe:  So hopefully our video and audio is OK for y’all. Either me or Josiah’s a little choppy. I apologize. The audio is fine. From what I’m hearing. It’s all good. We’ve got a few more questions for you, Josiah. Why don’t you guys, because you probably get top dollar when you can stick a property on the MLS right now in this market, pretty much in any market, you can get top dollar by putting it on the MLS, right? So why aren’t you? Have you thought about this? Why don’t you just take these properties down, maybe clean it up a little bit, take the trash out and relist it on the MLS?

Josiah:  That’s a really good question. I mean, it’s definitely something to consider. Right. And I think that there’s an appropriate amount that maybe that’s where you said, OK, yeah, we should do that for this particular property. But the thing is, when you’re doing extremely high volume, that’s a lot of leverage or a lot of cash. In our case, we close everything in cash. And the other part of that is we want to make sure our buyers are doing well, like most of our buyers now are repeat buyers. A lot of our buyers are repeat buyers in our established markets, and that’s because we make sure they make money on their flips. That’s important. And because of that, it’s so much operationally easier. So you save all the operational complexity. If you just do a wholesale. And at scale, that’s really worth it. Really, really worth it. And if you consider risk, you consider operational complexity and you factor all that in and time frames. If you’re doing a rehab, you’re looking at, even in a hot market, you might look at three to four months before you get your cash out on a good deal. Standard, even in a hot market, you might be six months, right, if it’s pretty expensive. And so if you’re going to do 50 deals a month and just as you start that stockpiles and so you go, pretty soon, like holy crap, I’ve got tens of millions of dollars out in properties and you’re not receiving the cash flows until you’re six months out. So there’s that. And then you want to, of course, support your buyer base. Right. So it’s just the factoring all of that in and looking at it and saying, OK, cool. Yeah, maybe we’re going to make thirty five percent less or maybe we’re going to make fifty percent less here on this deal, but we’re going to be able to move it and replace it with another one. So in the time that it would take for me to complete this one deal, I’m going to complete four or five. And so just operationally, the wholesale model works fantastically well. That’s why it’s so cool, because it works. It really is the most operationally efficient thing for us. But then it allows us to bless our buyers with deals that they’re going to make money on. And that’s pretty awesome.

Joe: Well, it’s a whole quick nickel versus a slow dime, right?

Josiah: Yeah.

Joe:  And a lot of times it’s better to make the quick nickel, because if the market does shift, you don’t want to be caught with your pants down to your ankles, right? That would not be good. You know, all of a sudden you have ten million dollars out on the street with these properties and you can’t sell them then.

Josiah: Yeah.

Joe:  OK, I got a good question for you from Carl Glenn here in just a minute that I want to ask you. Let’s say, though, somebody just invests. They become a KeyGlee franchise owner.  How do you train them to go spread the word out to all the other wholesalers and investors and realtors that you’re looking for deals? Finding the buyers is easy, and that’s something that you just gave some great tips and advice for. But like, right, now they need inventory. How do you teach them to spread the word to find the wholesalers?

Josiah:  Yeah. When we bring on a franchise, we do two things. There’s a bunch of online training that’s completed before. And then we show up for an in-person week training where that’s here at the office and you’re working with our teams. And then sometimes people come back from Immersion Week where they basically come in as an active member and direct report to pretend as if they’re a direct report to one of our GMs over an existing. As far as how we do it, that’s how we do it, as far as taking them through that process to make sure that when they’re launched and they’re doing it themselves, they know bang on exactly what they need to do. And really, as they go into the training, we want to start to build that up. As far as how we go after that, you’ve got some very similar strategies. In some way it helps a lot that KeyGlee is pretty well known. When someone shows up in a market like Jamil’s, like I’m going to host a weekly event, we’ll have three or four hundred people show up and there’s probably going to be seventy five suppliers, 75 wholesalers in there that are wholesalers and folks on the acquisition side. And so that is maybe an unfair advantage because we can do that. And then people can just be like, oh sweet. Here’s seventy five suppliers. If you’ve got seventy five suppliers that already know your brand, it’s a lot easier, you’re just starting off easier. If you don’t have any of that, then you’ve got an absolutely, completely worthwhile road ahead or whatever. But that’s just fine. And what’s cool is as you’re building up your base, you’re going to do deals. But then you’re kind of in a similar spot. So you’re going to Google wholesalers in a certain area. Right. And go bananas on that and just go down there and get yourself to every single person’s list. Don’t be the type of person that’s like, I don’t want spam coming to my email. Like, this isn’t spam. This is your money. This is how you’re going to make money. But go through Google, St Louis Wholesale Property, St Louis discount property, St Louis auction properties and add yourself to every single person’s list. Right. Go to Facebook and join every single group that has to do with investment property that you can possibly find and post in there and say, “Hey, I’m looking to buy property in this particular area. I’m looking to pick up a deal here. I’m looking to pick up a deal here. Anyone have any inventory? Anyone have anything they’re looking to sell? Anyone have something to go in, anyone have whatever. Post that stuff in there and people go bananas on there and whatnot. To build your list, you can post in there and be like, “Hey, I just got a deal in this area. PM me if you want information or give me your email if you want info. People go bananas and add a million emails to those posts. So that’s how you can start to foster and build those relationships. The other thing that I would say is if you’re really going after it and this is if you’re really going after it, we see that there’s a tipping point about between three and six months where, if you’ve been hitting your numbers and you’ve been really, really going after it, between three and six months, three months, you’ve built up the pipeline and something tips over about three and six months, you really start doing well. You can do deals before that, but that’s not really the time frame.

Joe:  That’s a really, really good point. People quit and give up way too soon. And there’s this whole principle of momentum. It’s like you’re pulling a train and at first it’s really hard to pull that train, but as it starts gaining momentum, it becomes easier and easier and then it becomes hard to stop. And so you’ve got to be persistent and so many people quit and give up. It annoys me and bothers me and breaks my heart because you’re so close, but you can’t quit and give up. And here’s the other thing I’d say to people listening to this, if you’re just in this for like, I’m going to try it and see if it works, forget it. I’m just going to buy this program, give it a month and see if it works or not, then no, don’t even do it. Like, stop. Don’t even waste your money. Save it. Put it in a 401k stock market, something. Right. Like you’ve got to be committed to this business for at least six to 12 months before you’re willing to quit and give up, because it takes that kind of time, doesn’t it, to build the momentum, to get to do the networking, to find the buyers, to find the sellers, bring these deals together? I love it.

Josiah:  And I think if I can even just play off that, riff off that really quick, and then we’ve got to get Carl’s question, which we’re excited for, Carl, we love you, you’re awesome. Just like the reality that if you’re going to try to pass a final exam in college, you’re going to study a whole semester for that. That’s six months. Four and half months. Whatever it is, right. If you want to be a janitor, a good janitor, before you’re in rhythm, when you’re in rhythm, cleaning and you know what you clean next and you know what chemicals to use and you’re in motion, that can take six months. So give yourselves a chance because it’s freakin worth it. It’s way better than, you work six months to be a janitor. You work six months to pass a test. OK, well, there’s some gratification in that for sure, but this is way better. So just hang in there. Feel comfortable. It’s not bad if it takes a little bit of time.

Joe:  I used to work for my dad who has a cleaning business. It’s one of the largest cleaning businesses in the Midwest. And I have cleaned, I almost said hundreds, dozens and dozens of kitchens at restaurants, office buildings, bathrooms, movie theaters. I’ve done a lot of cleaning. I know exactly what you’re saying. All right. Here’s a question from Glenn. Let me see if I can pull it up here. Glenn asks “If you lost at all and had to start over, what would you do first?”.

Josiah:  I would pray. I would definitely pray so, yeah. I mean, God’s awesome guys, like, he is so dope. He literally is. And so I think that was a turning point for me, man. I was really struggling. And I think what I was trying to do is I was trying to do it by my own strength. You feel called like you’re supposed to be. It was so weird. Like I was driving kind of a car. I just thought, like, this doesn’t fit me. I’m supposed to be something else. I had set these really high expectations for myself. Like when I was 11, in my mind I was like, I need to be a billionaire by the time I’m twenty one, you know, because when you’re eleven, 21 seems old. All right. But I need to be a billionaire. And so I set all of these expectations upon myself and tried to fulfill them in my own strength. And when you try to do that, you’re going to get what you can do and you can do maybe not so much. At least, I couldn’t. There’s some people that absolutely can rock themselves, and that’s awesome. But that wasn’t me. And so there’s a moment where I just said to God, basically, like God I’ve been trying to do this with my own strength. And I’ve been basically saying what I want and trying to work for it. And instead I just kind of surrender to him and said, you know what, I want whatever your will is, right. And I’m good with that. And so that means you want me to be totally broke and be a missionary in India. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll do that. And so I surrender my will to yours. And when I did that, one I got a ton of peace, which I think is hugely important, and then two, God just started dropping blessings on me like boom, boom, boom, literally. I mean, I went back and checked the stats of it or whatever, and it was like tripled my income in six months. It was the weird stuff, you know, like when you hear a prosperity gospel person preach whatever and they just go bananas on that. That was happened. I was weird. No comment on that. But anyhow, I just thought, though, that’s what I’m gonna do, clearly,

Joe:  Sometimes God does that, doesn’t he? That’s a great answer. You know, I was half tempted to say, OK, what’s the second thing you do? But that’s it. The second thing will take care of itself. I feel like if you really do care about that, he’ll tell you what to do next. And I tell people all the time, don’t worry about step seven and eight, just two steps, one and two. Figure out steps one and two. Don’t worry about all of the rest of it. Yeah, I love that’s a great answer, Josiah.

Josiah:  And that’s wisdom on your part, too, because if I was listening to that, right, and I was Glenn, I’d be like, OK, so I would do exactly what you just said. You might have wondered so what’s step two? Because I wanted what I was actually going to use, like I want the next thing that I was actually going to use. And I like that you stopped at one, because literally that would be my challenge, is make that your one. Go do that and see what happens. So yeah, supercool.

Joe:  Love it and I’m not even. Yeah. I think that’s really, really good. Cool. All right. Let me ask you my next question, and I know some of your like, oK, but then what? But then what? No, I don’t want to ask that question right now. Just go do step one. And we’ve already told you what to do. Step two. Anyway, if you’ve been listening to this podcast, we’ve already told you.

Josiah: There’s plenty of other steps in here you guys.

Joe: All right. What are some good books you’re reading right now? Josiah?

Josiah: I just got done with “Ready, Fire, Aim” by Michael Masterson.

Joe:  Yeah, I have that book. It’s not in my office. It’s in my bedroom. I’m going through it too right now.

Josiah:  Better than I anticipated. I really like that book. I thought that it spoke to a lot of different levels of entrepreneurship which I also thought was good. Honestly, now looking back at our growth with KeyGlee, being able to see like, oh, cool, yeah, that’s what we did here, we struggled until we did this. And it’s listed in the book. So I was actually very pleasantly surprised with that book. And then other than that, I just read the book Drive, as a recommendation from our CEO and which I thought was very, very insightful into human motivation and especially important for your own motivation. I think what it’s illustrating and putting into words way better than I can, is that we’re most happy as humans and we want to do things intrinsically, we have motivation when our competency is here and the challenge is right here. And so it’s pushing us a little bit. And you find yourself in that state of flow where you’re working on a project and you actually are enjoying it most. For most entrepreneurs, that’s when they’re coming up with a business idea and writing out how it’s going to work, that first brainstorm session. And calculate how much money they’re going to make. And they probably got some cool music on something and they’re in flow. They really enjoy that. They like the building of the vision part of it. Right. And then when they go to execute, they’re like, oh, they don’t have that same feeling. And it’s because when you’re executing, you start at the bottom. You’ve got to be the CEO. That’s the visionary, which is the big idea, which is what you enjoy, which is the honestly potentially more complex thinking. But now you have to go down and before you can build the business, you have to be the executor. And that person might just have to just be texting the same text over and over and over again. And so that doesn’t put you in a flow state. So this is hard and you have to keep working at it. Right. But the reason why we do that and the reason why it’s worth it is because we’re going to build ourselves back up to being the manager. Right. And then ultimately back up to where what we do all the time is in that flow state, what you originally enjoyed where your competency is here, the challenge is here, and you’re the visionary. You’re coming up with the good stuff. So that was Drive and I thought Drive was a really good book.

Joe: Is this a book by Daniel Pink?

Josiah: Yes. That’s the one

Joe: Yeah, Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. Very cool

Josiah:  I don’t agree with everything in that book, by the way. But I agree with the general concept. There’s a couple of things in there where they talked about motivating that had to do with money. And I thought some of that was maybe a little bit improper for sales positions, but a lot of it was really good.

Joe: Another book you want to talk about?

Josiah:  I can talk about a lot of books. I mean, if you’re just getting started, probably read Never Split the Difference and Fanatical Prospecting. So if you’re in the first part of your business, where you’re the one on the front end, read Fanatical Prospecting and Never Split the Difference. Right. Those two books are going to make you lots and lots of money in this business. Fanatical Prospecting is basically work hard and gives you a concept of how building pipelines work, which is very important because that’s what you’re starting out. And then, switching into Chris Voss’s book, Never Split the Difference, that’s going to teach you how to negotiate and give you lots of amazing skills so that you don’t slip up and do dumb things and lose money on deals. So that’ll save you time and make you a ton of money. Right. That’s Chris Voss. If you’re in the part of your business now that you’ve got a little bit of a team, you should read Gino Wickman’s Traction. If you haven’t read that, the book’s phenomenal. And it’s actually sitting on my desk right now. Some of the stuff that’s in this book, if I can find this really quickly, I mean, this is such a good book, but this is when you start that change from being all creation, like you’re all creating. You’re just figuring things out. You’re being innovative. And now you need to be operationally efficient as well. You need to lock in your gains, solidify that foundation you’ve built. That’s when you’ve got to do Traction. And stuff like this is a checklist to show you, like how well you’re organized. Right. And make sure that all these components in there, so Traction is fire. It’s really good. Other than that, Proverbs. Right. People intrinsically think that you’ve got an archetypal moral compass that’s just built into you and then therefore, you know how to do business and interact. We don’t, unfortunately. And you need to know how to respond to certain things because you’re going to get into some challenging circumstance or things that could be challenging, that don’t have to be. The way I see lots of entrepreneurs get caught up is someone telling them that they’re doing something entirely wrong or that they’re being immoral when they’re not. And so especially if you’re a moral person, someone’s telling you you’re being immoral or you’re doing something wrong or you’re spiteful or hateful or whatever. Most of that’s gossip driven and most of that’s, you did something and they saw it, sent it through all of their insecurities and everything else and made it mean something entirely different. My God. I mean, I’ve got plenty of fun examples, right, where you called on the deal and said, “Hey, can I get a discount?”, and it was right before close of escrow,. And you were just calling because you feel like it’s part of your duty to get the best deal for your family, so that’s why you called right before to ask. And the other person doesn’t take it as you’re looking out for your family. They take it is like you hate them personally and you’re a terrible business person and all types of everything else. Right. And so you need to know when, if you’ve got a solid moral compass, you don’t get shaken up when people respond incorrectly to what you did. If they call and say you really messed up and you don’t know what you did, chances are that either you have a perverted moral compass or they’re just straight up wrong. And so to avoid that, make sure you don’t have a perverted moral compass. So that way you can stand on your own two feet and say, no, you guys are wrong. That’s why I say The Book of Proverbs.

Joe: I love that. I’ve never heard of it that way before. But that’s good.

Josiah: Those are my, I guess, current book suggestions.

Joe: I love it. Cool. The Book of Proverbs. I try to read one proverb a day. The other book you talked about was Drive by Daniel Pink, I believe. You talked about Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Great book. Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount from SalesGravy.com. That looks like a really good book. I’ve not heard of that. I’m going to get it.

Josiah: Jamil turned me on to that book, by the way.

Joe: Who did?

Josiah: Jamil.

Joe:  Yeah, really? Awesome. And then you mentioned Traction, which is a heavy, deep book. I read that book and halfway through I got overwhelmed by all this stuff I got to do. Some people love it.

Josiah: Yeah. Depends on where you got in your business. You need that operational efficiency once you get to scale. Before you’re at scale, it’s actually destructive.

Joe:  That’s a great point. So you got to decide. The other book you mentioned before, too, is Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. Great, great book. Cool. So Josiah, how can people get a hold of you, and if people want more information about KeyGlee, where can they go?

Josiah:  Good question, man. I guess probably KeyGlee.com is a great place to start, right. You’re more than welcome to email me. I will likely not respond because I love you to death, but just because literally I don’t get to my emails very often. But what normally will happen is my assistant will take the email and if she can respond to it, she will. Otherwise she’ll try and put it on my calendar and I will respond to as many people as possible, not purposely try not to respond, but KeyGlee.com, Josiah@KeyGlee.com and KeyGleeFranchising.com. If you’re interested in a franchise or you want to talk to someone, you can book a call to talk to someone there. Just figure out what it’s about, attend a Discovery Day where you can come out and actually see the office and actually show you what that looks like. And we’d love to have you out for that. So, yeah.

Joe:  Really good. I’m looking at your website right now, KeyGlee.com, and I put it on the window there. And when you go to that site, there’s a menu at the top for franchising and learn how to become a franchise owner. Really cool. You’ve got a franchise in St. Louis. I didn’t know that. Super cool.

Josiah: Oh Yeah.

Joe: All right. Hey, Josiah, thanks for being here. Sure appreciate you.

Josiah: It was a blast. Good to hang out. Good to see everyone. Carl, Glenn.

Joe:  All right. Good man. Well have a good rest of the day. And Josiah, we’ll see you later. Thanks everybody again for listening and watching the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. And we appreciate you. Again, one more time, go to check out PartnerWithJoe.net, if you want to work with me on deals and get my offer calculator. We’ll see you guys later. Thanks, Josiah.