Joe:   Welcome. This is the real estate investing mastery podcast. Hey, what’s going on, Joe McCall, this is the real estate investing mastery podcast, and we got a special guest on today’s show. We’re going to be talking with one of the guys who started a company called the Joe Home Buyer franchise, and it’s an amazing company that helps investors systemize their business. And we’re going to be talking about the basics more than just the Joe home buyer franchise, which I love the name. Right. We’re going to be talking about the basics of building predictable revenue in your business, and we have a great guest on the mark. We’re going to be talking to him about it, and you’ve probably heard of his business partner before he’s been on my show.

Joe:   But first, I want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Freedom Soft Joe. And if you didn’t know this, I actually have custom built a Joe McCall signature edition of Freedom Soft. Now, Freedom Soft has been around a long time. Good friend of mine Rob Swanson purchased the company five or six years back. Has made some incredible improvements on freedom. Soft, it’s incredibly fast. I’ve looked at almost all the Sierras, and honestly, in my humble opinion, it is the best database CRM marketing manager tool out there for real estate investors. I love it. Use it every day. My sons use it for our land flipping business. We use it for lease option deals. We use it for wholesaling deals. It’s a great way to manage your entire business, your buyers, your seller leads your properties and you’re going to love it. If you want to watch a free webinar that I did with Rob Swanson about freedom soft, how it works, and you want more details about the Joe McCall signature edition of Freedom Soft. I want you to go to hundreds of leads dot com on that webinar and hundreds of leads com. We show you how, in just a matter of, I think, eight or nine minutes, we literally got 100 a couple hundred leads and records that you could then start marketing to from all right, inside of freedom soft. And with the Joe McCall Signature Edition, you get all of our custom workflows, contracts, marketing pieces, follow up emails, the templates, the letters, contracts and workflow automation. All that good stuff. It’s there, so you should check it out. Hundreds of leads dot com.

Joe:   All right now, enough of that, should we bring on our guest? His name is Mark Mark Stubler or, as I say, right? You got it. Nice. How you doing, Mark?

Mark:   Fantastic, Joe. Thanks for having me on. And how are you doing?

Joe:   Doing real good, doing good now. Mutual friend Cody Hofhine. Yeah, introduced us a little while ago and he’s been on my show once or twice, maybe a couple of times. We go back to with the mutual friend of mutual friend Tom Cole. And you’ve been in the business a long time with Cody Hofhine and you guys started a company called Joe Home Buyer. So I want to get you on and talk a little bit about that. But would you introduce folks to who you are and what is it that you do? How did you get started in the business?

Mark:   Yeah, thanks Joe and I appreciate the introduction and grateful to be on the show and visit with you here. So, yeah, Mark Stubler been in the real estate game for several years now, but I’m not. I’m not your typical real estate investor. I or maybe I am. I guess you’ll tell me, Joe, but I love the entrepreneurial route that we took, and I still super fortunate to have found real estate. But I came from 10 12 years of selling fencing and decking products, so I had nothing to do with real estate but did well, work for a fantastic company. But the opportunity for me to become an entrepreneur surfaced when I went from being an outside sales rep, having lots of freedom, coming and going as I please. And all of a sudden they said, Hey, why don’t you come in once a week for six hours and feel the inside sales rep position? And for me, it’s suck the life out of me, Joe. It was all of a sudden that autonomy. I thought I had that freedom. It seems so simple, but yet it was so impactful to me that dawned on me Oh, wait a minute, I don’t work for myself. I still have to respond. And I called it the pencil sharpening position because I literally went from being autonomous, set my own schedule, come and go as they please to. I had to schedule a few hours a week in the office and put all my thumbs. I felt like and it was enough to trigger that. All right, I got to do my own thing and Cody Hofhine and I were good friends. He’d actually worked at the same company several years previously in Salt Lake City, right in Salt Lake. Yep. And so Cody and I have rich history in fencing sales. So if anybody a sideline knows Cody, ask him a little bit about fencing. You’ll wonder why that where that question came from. But anyway, we partnered up and realized that we shared a lot of the same values that a lot of the same work ethic and ambitions. And fortunately, Cody introduced me to what he had just recently started doing in wholesaling, and it was perfect. We teamed up in twenty sixteen and really got after it in the Utah market, you know, that year and the rest is history, I guess.

Joe:   All right. So you would you had not really done any real estate before meeting Cody talking to him about it?

Mark:   No, I was one of those serial entrepreneurs to be meaning I had done one rehab. I had had a rental. I was I had the ambitions of being an entrepreneur and flirted with real estate, but no, when it came to wholesaling and, you know, marketing for deals. Yeah, I’ve done very little and knew very little about real estate.

Joe:   OK. I’m looking up that podcast I did with Cody here. He got started. Well, I did a podcast in April 2018 with him and then another two podcasts 2016’s was five years ago. Holy smokes! You started working with him when?

Mark:   In 2016, January of 16 is when we partnered up.

Joe:   All right. So it was June 2016 that I started interviewing him, and he was already doing a seven figure wholesaling business. At least he says he was.

Mark:   We were. We hit the ground running that year. We did some pretty special things and took some market share in Utah. So yeah, we were definitely on track for that.

Joe:   Nice. So I interviewed him in 2016 as episode. If you all want to check it out. Episode 147 and 148 and 147, we talked about how to build a seven figure wholesaling business. We talked about how he was doing it. And then in the next podcast, we talked a lot about systems and teams, which I imagine Mark, you had some role in that.

Mark:   Certainly.

Joe:   Okay, cool. So you started doing wholesaling now. Sometimes I mean, people look at who or especially who are live in Salt Lake City. I know people that do. They complain that it’s a expensive, competitive, difficult market to wholesale deals in? Is it?

Mark:   I feel like it is a joke, but it’s fun because there’s four of us franchisees Joe home buyer franchises in Utah, and to see all of us are getting results and having some of the best year we’ve ever had is really exciting. But I’ll tell you, I’ll I’ll add my name to the list of people that complain about it being a competitive market. It’s it’s tough out here.

Joe:   It is in every city. I know investors who are in, they say the same thing. So, you know, it was competitive back in 2016 when you were getting started, but you guys were doing deals, right? What was it back then and what is it now that is going to make the difference between somebody who’s struggling in real estate and somebody who’s consistently doing deals?

Mark:   Yeah, great question, Joe. So the funny thing is is that that epiphany came to me recently here in 2021, the tail end of the year. Here we are most successful. When we keep it simple, we’ve overcomplicated it at times, Joe. I’m guilty of that where, you know, you maybe get a little bit heavy on your labor in terms of team members, you know, you overthink different processes. And the truth is, Cody and I did have fantastic results that first year, as you alluded to, and we had a team of four me, Cody, he did disciple, I did acquisitions. We had somebody helping with the phone and admin. And then if you count VAs, we had the admin manager VAs and we were knocking out of the park with four of us just behaves and now we have a team of quadruple that. Maybe not quite. And obviously, our team is a lot bigger today because we support the franchisees through our team. But sometimes I think we overcomplicate, well, maybe I’ll hire another person to do this, or I’ll bring on this additional software and system and process. And it really is going back to the basics that I think would be, you know, the answer to the question is, you know, because this business is super simple, it’s just not easy. But we can also be victims of our success or wanting to streamline things better. And if we’re not careful, we can overcomplicate the process. It’s really just a process of managing a lead meeting with the seller putting under contract. And then obviously, you know, what are your exit strategies from there?

Joe:   Mm-Hmm. Yeah, it’s not that complicated. I wrote a book called Brilliant at the Basics. I need to make sure I still have that domain. No, you know what? I don’t. Somebody else had it, but it was a great book called Brilliant at the Basics, and it was all about keeping it simple. And the people that are most successful in the business are the ones who are best at the basics. Simple things and as crazy as that sounds, it goes against our human nature wanting to complicate things, especially as as entrepreneurs and business owners. We feel like, you know, well, that’s already been done before. Somebody is already doing that. You know, I don’t want to do the same thing they’re doing, but it’s so true. I don’t know. But that’s sometimes the best way to make money is to do what you know is working and not to be feel like you have to be the trailblazer. All right. So Mark, let’s talk a little bit more about those things that are working. You know, things change, though too. Back in 2016, you were probably doing a lot of postcards and direct mail, right? Sure. Are you still doing that today?

Mark:   Yeah, actually, this year, direct mail is our leading. So a little nugget for people. Yeah, direct mail is doing best for us. You know, we have other marketing channels doing very well, including web and prospecting, but direct mail is really come on strong.

Joe:   Why do you think that is?

Mark:   Well, I will tell you, we’ve refined some of the things and we’re always split testing, so we’re trying to figure out, right, is it a messaging thing? Is it a color postcard? Is it a sequencing in terms of frequency? Know what is it that drives the highest call rate response rate? And then ultimately what translates to the most appointments and contact? So we’re really tracking that carefully. But we really became disciples of this idea that the messaging does make a difference and maybe disciples are the wrong word, but we really became students of the idea. All right. What is it that attracts these, you know, motivated sellers? What is it? The messaging that catches their eye but also speaks to their to their minds and hearts are like, Oh, if I call this person, I can thrive or I can survive or both, right? You know what’s going to help me move on to Plan B. So we’re really becoming students and of the art of what messages speak to our clientele. And in fact, one thing that we’re we’re doing is we’re going to bring. Some of our clients in our office, Joe, and we haven’t done this yet, but we’ve got schedule. We’re going to be bringing some of our clients in our office and asking them, What do you think of this message? What do you think? That’s what speaks more to you. Because we really want to, you know, define the art and also we owe that to our franchisees. We want to be able to give that data back to them and say, Hey, here’s the messaging that works the best. And so we’re really excited about what direct mail has done for us and obviously still students of best practices to figure out how we can master it

Joe:   Alright so give us some examples of what is some good messaging then.

Mark:   Yeah so we found that. And again, we’re students through, and I’m not necessarily trying to put a plug in for this group, but story brand, it’s a book. Oh, yeah. Really, folks? Yeah, OK. You know, so we had a go. Obviously, we all read it, but then we had somebody on our team actually go through the course and get the additional training. And then collectively, we, you know, tried to adopt those the logic. But it’s it’s this idea of how do we make sure that the seller knows that if they work with us, that they can not only survive, but they can thrive. And so, you know, for us, it’s, you know, do you start with the question and a question that might be specific to what’s going on in their life? You know, something like, do you need a fresh start? And then addressing the things and obviously there’s nuances within their training and their strategies that talk about, you know, making sure that they’re the hero and it’s not us. We’re not making it all about us. There’s little nuances and we’re trying to figure out how to get those key points across as far as you know, cash and simple and close quick and all those things, but yet not make it, you know, because we all use those techniques. But what is it that actually speaks to the hearts of those that need our service? And so it’s refining those, those things over time?

Joe:   Yeah, it’s keeping it simple to, I imagine, right? So you’re saying your your letters, your postcards, the old messaging just doesn’t work anymore. So have. How have you changed that in your direct mail, for example?

Mark:   Well, interestingly enough, Joe, I don’t know that the old messaging doesn’t work. We found that if you get good content and you stay consistent and then there’s another component, and that is how well you manage the opportunities that come in. And I think that’s an interesting equation that you have to consider because I found that some of our franchisees that spend little on marketing but manager leads with extreme precision yield fantastic our ways where others will invest more, but yet not manager leads quite as well, or is with as much urgency and they are not getting as good as results, although they spend more. So I’m not certain that that the message, you know, the old message marketing that a lot of us have seen is not working, but we’re trying to master it so that we can take the collective data that we’re capturing in several markets because we’re in several markets with the franchises now we’re joined. What’s the heart of it? What is it that gets that extra one percent or that extra half percent in response rate that then gives us an opportunity to share our service with that many extra people.So believe it or not, we’ve had success from some of the vintage postcards that that all of us have seen and used, but we’re not settling on that as being the only way to capture our clientele.

Joe:   OK, so let’s say you’re sending out a postcard campaign. What are some of the simple, basic things that are part of that direct mail campaign? Do you have a phone number, a toll free number? Does it? Is it local? Does it say 24 hour recorded voicemail? You guys answered the phone to talk about some of that.

Mark:   Yeah. And I love your very specific question. Your listeners are going to get some solid nuggets, hopefully from observing these. You don’t mess around. You’re getting right down to the nitty-gritty. Yeah. For us, you know, we haven’t done, you know, we’ve done the gimmicky stuff like 24 hour prerecorded voicemail, and we found that that got a good response rate, but it didn’t necessarily drive more contracts or more appointments. They were intrigued by it. So they called, but it didn’t yield us more revenue. But as it relates to just simple messaging, yes, we’re very call or text us this number. We’re very big on live answer Joe. In fact, we track it. Last week we were at 99 percent in one market. Ninety eight percent in the other market. It’s with its venue, nine percent. So of the calls that came in, we answered 99 percent of them live. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe:   Yeah. Smart

Mark:   So we yeah, we’re big on. Well, think about it, Joe. You save time, obviously, to answer the call for a motivated seller. But imagine all the time you say from the person that was just calling to tell you to pound sand. Take me off your list. If you’re able to take that gold, you might call text, you know, five, 10, 20 times over the course of a few days and all to find out that they wanted to be removed from the list. So it’s is valuable to remove people as it is to move on with those that are motivated.

Joe:   That’s really good, and nobody else is doing this now. Nobody else is answering the phones.

Mark:   We’re big advocates of it and we help our franchisees navigate the world of the best practice to answer as many of their calls live. In fact, we spend time encouraging our franchisees, Joe, to work on their responsiveness and their activity level on the management of their leads before they increase their marketing budget. Because you can do a lot if you manage your few leads, well, that’s kind of our philosophy. Joe few leads managed well is better than an abundance of leads managed poorly.

Joe:   Oh yeah. You know, we say this all the time to you, if you’re not on the phone, you’re not making money. I mean, it would be nice if you could just send people to a website, they could put their information in. You can have a computer software, calculate an offer, you could send it to them, email it and text it. And they respond back, Yeah, I like it. And then you send them a digital signature for a contract and then you put it on your website and you email blast to your buyers when you sell a deal and you just email everything to the title company. It just just doesn’t work that way.

Mark:   If you get a few of those when you get those, you know that the problem is that becomes a curse because then your acquisition guys, if they’re not careful, they’re looking for those laydown, they’re looking for those. And that ends up being almost a curse because you set a mindset of older. I’m looking for more of those, and that’s not the standard practice.

Joe:   If you were, I’ll just say this. I want to ask you this question of mark if you were to start, if I were to start all over again from scratch and are to be dropped into a new market that I’d never been to and I had to do marketing in that market and I couldn’t go back home to see my family until I started. I made 10 grand. This is exactly what I would do. I’d have to have a phone or if I didn’t have a phone, I’d go steal, steal one from somebody I don’t know. Sure. But I would find a phone and get on the phone, and I’d start calling every realtor and property manager, wholesaler and investor that I could find in that market and just start talking to them and saying, Hey, I’m looking for deals. Do you got anything? And then I would find out if they didn’t have a deal, I’d be finding out, do you have a deal you’re looking to buy? Are you looking to buy some deals? And then as soon as I made some money, I would invest it in direct mail, probably handwritten yellow letters. I would do them myself and every single call that would come in, I would answer it myself, not answer it myself, and it would go directly to myself. But I’ll put my cell phone number that’s on the right. Reminds me I interviewed a guy. His name was Zach, whose last name escapes me. But his dad, his dad, created the handwritten postcard system. so his his dad is a successful real estate investor. But the son? I don’t want to do it. Dad does, and he’s bagging groceries at a grocery store senior in high school. Yeah. And he got annoyed with his dad that he because he kept on seeing these big checks for 20 30 grand, just sitting on his dad’s desk for weeks and his dad wouldn’t deposit them. And it wasn’t intentional. His dad just kind of forgot it was busy. Sure. Yeah. What are you doing? This is significant money. And finally, he realized, You know what? I don’t want to be bagging groceries for the rest of my life. I want to do what my dad does. So he said, Dad, what do I do? And his dad didn’t want to give them. You don’t want to make it easy for him. So he said here, read these books. His dad didn’t think you’d read the book, so the kid did. And then he said, OK, well, read these next three books and the kid did. And he’s like, All right, so go, stick out some bandit signs and go cold call. So this kid would drive for dollars is what this kid did. So you went out and put bandit signs and he put his cell phone number on the bandit signs. OK, hey, come on. And then he would drive around looking for beat up houses and would write their address on a yellow pad of paper and would come home. And just Google says Dad wasn’t even helping him teach. It wasn’t even teaching this kid how to do skip tracing right, and the kid would go to Google and try to find the owner from public records and then go to some one of those white pages. Free people search websites to find the owners and start calling. And it’s funny. He tells the story of how like he would get phone calls during class from his bandit signs, and he would race out of the classroom to get the calls made his teachers mad. I think teachers homes anymore. Right? But anyway? Sure. Fast forward, I forget. But his first couple of deals, he did 30 40 grand or something like that. That changes everything. Oh man. And so I look at that and think we why do we complicate this stuff so much, right? We have to have now I’m a big I talked about freedom stopped at the beginning of this thing, right? But you don’t have to have these big, expensive, fancy technical tools, right? You just need a cell phone.

Mark:   That’s right.

Joe:   And well, I don’t know, people. That’s not what people want to hear, right? They want. They want to push easy button my guy, right?

Mark:   That’s exactly right. And you just actually summarized if everybody just takes that last two three minutes and almost just evaluates their current operation or if they’re just getting started and they just say, Am I doing those very elementary pivot, pitiable, pivotal activities consistently? And you could probably determine how consistently you are producing revenue based off of how religious you are. Just those simple functions day in and day out or your team is I mean, that blueprint you just gave is beautiful. The seminary activities done consistently.

Joe:   Oh, you know, you want to break it down even simpler. Talk to five sellers a day, right? Just talk to five people a day, if that’s all you did. Made five calls to landlord property manager realtor. Follow up with five old leads. If you just talk to five people a day, think how much of a difference and an impact that would make in a new investor’s business, right? Even if your experience and they’ve done a bunch of deals before, nobody’s doing that these days. It’s like old fashioned. Here I am. I’m already talking. I’m forty seven and I’m already. Talking about back in the days that, like it’s not old fashioned unless, you know, unless you hate money, I guess don’t forget about everything we’re just saying here. Would you agree, Mark or what?

Mark:   No, you’re spot on. And you know, one thing that that may be I would just compliment to your thought there is a lot of its mindset, right? Maybe the concern or the practice with some people is they get stuck in analysis paralysis. This idea that they got to know everything. And you know what I liked about the story of the Zach, you know, kid is you just got after it. You know, he just, you know, he didn’t have a perfect plan per se, but he just knew that action. He was going to default to these activities. And that’s one of the things I talk about with our franchisees or general. Any time I’m having this conversation with somebody getting in it is it’s just the mindset. All right. What am I going to do consistently and and am I going to do it with? Am I going to default to action? Am I going to urgency? I find in our business that when we default to urgency and action, you know, we were having lunch recently as a team. Our acquisition team had one of our guys had a birthday and a web read came in true story. We take the web and we call it no answer. We sent a text five minutes later, another guy calls text, no answer. So we literally we’re done with lunch now. It’s been 15 20 minutes and our guy hops in his truck and drives over the person’s house calls us an hour later with a contract, and he wasn’t invited to the home. And here’s the beautiful thing about that, Joe is she was happy to have him come. She’s like, Oh yeah, I filled that out and I set my phone down and I walked away. Thanks for stopping by. Yeah, let me give you a tour of the house.

Joe:   I bet you that same seller, if not heard that many of them do, filled out that same form on five other competitors website.

Mark:   That’s exactly right. And had he not showed up, maybe she returns. Everybody calls that appointments later on for other people. But because our acquisition guy defaulted to action and got out there, it made all the difference. It really does. And that’s what I loved about the story of Zach is he was just getting out there. But now bandit signs. I mean, that’s an awful idea to put your cell phone on a bandit sign, but they don’t do that.

Joe:   And this was in South Florida Palm Beach area somewhere out there. Very competitive. All right. So what are some of the other simple, basic things mark that investors need to be hyper focused on?

Mark:   Well, we alluded to it a little bit before, but the first one I always talk about is mindset. You have to be default to action. The other thing is in my mind, if you’re focused on the property and the price and worried about the logistics of repair costs and all those different things, you’re missing the point. This is a people human to human connection business. The two things that I think you need be focused on is solving problems and building relationships. I mean, we’ve sat down with people, Joe, where they committed to sell their house, and we have even talked about price and they said, Yeah, let’s do it, let’s get this done. And we hadn’t even settled on it, but they don’t even know if we’re fifty thousand per 100000. But they’ve committed and I kid you not. This has happened, you know, a lot of times where we’ve been working with sellers. Now, obviously, that’s one extreme, you know, extreme example, but the principle is is true. One of the most elementary things that we overthink is, OK, you know, how do I evaluate the repair costs? How do I evaluate the ARB? How do I negotiate the price and all these things? And sure, those things are important. You need to become in it, become sufficient at those things. But really, at the end of the day, don’t lose sight of the most important thing solving the sellers problem and building a connection with them and doing it in a genuine way. You don’t become a chameleon. You have to genuinely be interested in helping them navigate through whatever they’re going through. And I believe that’s one of the most elementary concepts that have done well. You make an incredible impact and you’ll in turn the money will follow. You’ll make lots of money in real estate. If you focus on serving them and you know, connecting making a real human to human connection, people want to be led. They want to be guided to a solution out of their distress situation or home or both. And if you can be that guide and you can only be that guide if you’re genuine there to help them and to solve the problems.

Joe:   Really good. All right. So what are some other things like I’m thinking about going on appointments, right? That’s something that you guys still do. That sounds pretty old fashioned these days, doesn’t it?

Mark:   We do. Yeah. Joe, you’re exactly right. I am a huge advocate of need, any face face-to-face human connection. In fact, that’s the only way you can differentiate yourself against AI buyers and everybody else. They’re not going to be able to provide that for me. You know, there’s some appointments at 15 minutes long. There’s some that are an hour and a half and there’s some of the three or four hours. And at the end of the day, either one of those is worth the investment of time. Because I’m planting a seed, I’m discovering their needs and I’m going to stay in touch with them until they’re ready to sell their home. For me, appointments are an ailment of activity that will never, you know, for me and my operations and the Joe Home Buyer franchise system. We’re always going to invest the time to connect with people because that’s the differentiator. That’s where the satisfaction comes that I’m providing a real service and I’m providing meaningful solutions for these families. Our mission at Joe Home Buyer is improving lives by delivering creative real estate solutions. That’s the idea. Yeah, I’m going to make a lot of money in real estate. Yeah, I’m going to do a transaction, but I’m going to make sure that it very much does improve the lives of the family that I’m working with and that I’m going to put their interest as a major part of the equation. They have to benefit. They have to have an improved life. Does that a. Experience, so yes, you know that going on appointments, making sure that you’re getting that human connection. And I would add to that, you know, an element of activity that we alluded to with the live answer. I would just emphasize like, you spend so much time and energy marketing and, you know, money and time to organize everything, you owe it to yourself to do the most elementary things. Just you have to be a hound dog on all the leads, because if you you know again that the light but of your appointments is your leads and you have to exhaust efforts, we actually had a training on that as a team this morning. What are we doing to turn over every rock with every opportunity we had to have for a quick story? I’ll make it quick. Your job, it I. We had a seller the other day call up and set an appointment, and then two hours later she canceled it so we couldn’t get a hold of her for the next two or three days. Finally, three days later, we get a hold of her, she says, Yeah, I’ve already sold it to a realtor listed for me and we have offers coming in and we’ve got it under contract so we could have let the lead die right there. But when I’m talking about turning over every rock, we looked up on the MLS and sure enough, it was listed, but it wasn’t under contract yet. So we actually called the realtor. And sure enough, the realtor said, Yeah, I’m expecting a bunch of leads and you’re going to have to be at 280 to 300. Pick up this home. Well, we could have let it die there too, but we stayed in touch with them. Did your offers come in the next day? The next day, the offers come in? Sure enough, he says, know why don’t you make it offer? We make an offer of 240. We end up settling at 263 and we anticipate making thirty or forty thousand dollars on this transaction because we didn’t give up when the seller canceled. Our appointment is the first. No. Then she wouldn’t answer our call. That’s another no. Then she told us she had us under contract. That’s another no. Then we, you know, had to stay in touch with the realtor and we eventually got it. We’re going to make a healthy profit, but that’s what I’m talking about. That’s the elementary activities of managing leads. Getting yourself opportunities is just a forgotten principle that you have to live by.

Joe:   So what are you doing? Mostly now you’re wholesaling or you hold tailing putting the properties on the MLS or fixing them up? What are you doing with your deals?

Mark:   It’s a very methodical process. You got to, again, all the invest in the time and energy. So for us, we wholesale still somewhere around 60 percent, but there’s 40 percent that we’re hoteling selling to any buyer or doing any form of rehab. We’re not big into major rehabs, but we’ll spend 20, 30, even 40000 on rehab. If you know, if the as we run a pro forma, we can see that that’s going to be the highest yielding return. But for me, that’s that’s a very methodical process. So on the acquisition side, your urgent, urgent, urgent on the disposition side, I think you have to be very methodical and calculated to capture as much revenue as possible.

Joe:   OK. All right. You’re talking about following up with these customers. So what are some of the tools you guys use to do the follow up to remind you to do the follow up if you’re dealing with a lot of leads? What do you guys use?

Mark:   Yeah. Well, a couple of things. I think personnel is important. Do you have somebody that is engaged with all the opportunities and is not just incentivized, but is culturally as part of the team? That is something that brings them fulfillment that they love being the guy. We call it the smoker. So if you think you’re Trager or you’re a smoker, you know, we we call it our smoker, they’re in the smoker. And who is it on the team that you know is calling all the not ready is the due diligence type leads. So obviously, we have a very systematic way where we set tasks for each one of the clients, each one of the sellers, and then we have somebody on the team that is always working on those in the smoker. When are they going to be ready? And then they team up for the acquisition team. But when I say, manage those leads you. We also don’t here know very easily, Joe. For us, if it’s a technical take me off your list, that’s that’s a definite no. But if it’s a yeah, I don’t see myself selling anytime soon, we are going to put them in an incubator to maybe call them six months later. For us, a lot of the responses are, no, we actually pulled some data. Now this has been some, some time ago, but we do prospecting web and direct mail, and we have a relationship manager working with the investor. So we have lots of channels in our company. But what we discovered is one month we were looking through our deals that were yielding revenue and believe it or not, Joe of the contracts. Half of them had told us no at one time, which is an interesting data point, right? At some point we’d either call them or something and they said, Yeah, not ready. And yet they don’t use the word not ready. They just said, Yeah, no, I don’t. I don’t think I’m going to sell. And sure enough, half of the contracts that pulled in that month and again, I think it was a a month we did nine contracts and four or five of them had told us no previously. So it’s just important to evaluate it from that perspective. And that again goes back to the mindset of you’ve got to manage these leads extremely well because, you know, even a know, it doesn’t necessarily mean, you know.

Joe:   We looked back in 2019, Gavin and I and his team did about 58 deals in a 12 month period and they looked inside the CRM. How much? How many of those deals came from that first conversation with the seller? Only four of them did. Of the 58 deals, 54 of them came from follow up. Some of them it was just a couple of times. Some of them was a couple of years. But the the consistent follow up on average six or seven touches over three to four months on average was the follow up process. From that, and again, some of them were right away. Some of them are wrong. But if we would not have done any follow up, we would have only done four deals that year. And you believe that?

Mark:   Yeah, that is bonkers.

Joe:   It’s crazy you. The simple, basic things of following up.

Mark:   That’s exactly right. Well, we all have had acquisition guys, or maybe it’s even our minds who are really good at the hot deals like they came in today. They’re good. Good, good. But you have to find and create a culture within your company. The follow up is really a critical component of the longevity of your company. And we’ve had acquisition guys. If it’s a hot lead, they’re as good as anybody. They’ll get it. They’ll sniff it out and they’ll put it on a contract. But you have to condition your team in that mindset. Just to complement your point on, I mean, really, ninety somewhat percent of your transactions occurred because of follow up and you just can’t undervalue. That is very much if you’re talking about four or five basic principles of our business practices that that has to be in that top three or four or five. You just have to get good about.

Joe:   So I would add even too, if you want one of the fastest ways to a deal, if you’re new, you don’t have any money for marketing. Find another investor with old leads and offer to follow their old leads. But that is, I learned that I’ve kind of known that for a long, long time. But then Gavin Timms my coaching business partner. He has a story and I love telling it where he was in Phoenix super competitive market and the guy he was coaching with being coached by the time at the time said, you know, do direct mail so We did not one lead. I literally spent a couple of thousand dollars, not one single lead. And he was like, Well, what I do now. And he recommended going to a local real estate investment club, so he went to the local area and stood up when it came time for What do you have, what do you need or whatever? And he said, Listen, I’m good on the phone. If anybody has some old leads, you need somebody to help follow up with your old leads. Let me know and I can call them for you and we can split the deal in two or three people come to him. One lady in particular gave him it was. I forget the numbers, but it is staggering, like only 30 or 40 leads. And the next day, he called all of them and got two contracts, two or three contracts within a couple of days, and he had no idea what he was doing. He just he just was tying them up for the other investor. And the lady was like, Oh my gosh, can you just take all of my leads? I’ll do all the marketing, you take all the calls. And but there’s so much opportunity out there of these old leads sitting in a woodpile somewhere of some investors database that if you’re listening to this and you just want to make a quick buck, find somebody with old leads and make them an offer, say, Listen, I’ll call all of your old leads and you give me whatever contracts you want. You tell me how to make the offers, whatever. I’m going to get on the phone and I’m going to call all of them. I’m going to follow up with them. I’m going to be your hound dog. I’m relentless going to follow up with these old leads and you’ll find people with old leads and you will do deals that guarantee it.

Mark:   Oh, wow, that’s actually that’s. I think we might just crack the code together here, Joe, or you did. And I’m just an audience member here. But I mean, if you’re going into a new market, I love that idea. Go to every meeting, ask for old leads or even just make some calls and say, Hey, what do you have? Just give me the worst. Yeah, tell me the words.

Joe:   And tell you one more story. I’m interviewing you and I’m doing most of the talking. Sorry, Mark.

Mark:   No, this is good.

Joe:   You know, if you like this podcast, come on. Subscribe! Leave me a review and go to my YouTube channel. All right. So there’s a guy around here, and I don’t really even know who he is, but I’ve heard of him, and he’s a guy who just kind of hangs out in his man cave and comes out every six months when he needs to make some money. And this is all he does. He’s got a Rolodex, and maybe it’s on. It’s not an actual Rolodex, but it’s what he’s got a list of 100 200 phone numbers, and every time he wants to make some money, he gets through that. Then he calls everybody on that list and asks him two questions. Number one, do you got any deals? Number two, are you looking to buy any deals, right? And eventually, by the time he goes through those 100 or 200 names, you’ll find somebody that has a deal they’re looking to sell and somebody else is looking to buy a deal. He puts them together, makes his money, goes back into his man cave and plays video games or something like that, right? So like so, so simple.

Mark:  And again, that goes back to that best practices. I love it. It’s the idea that it’s it’s going back to the basics. Again, it’s not easy, though, because what we’re forgetting is who’s willing to hop on the phone and make those 200 calls? We may say that we are, but you might be 30 calls in and realize this is wrong or I’m not enjoying this. And so a lot of people don’t see through all 200, and I’m telling you that’s the difference between those who succeed and those that don’t is again, it’s the easy part. It’s simple. It’s calling through 200 people. It’s calling your friend investor’s list of of bad leads. But most of us won’t say it through all the all the leads because it’s not fun. It’s not easy. It’s hard. It’s time consuming.

Joe:   And I’m not saying I like to do it either right now. But you know, it’s not easy to have somebody send you to voicemail to call them immediately back right away and to send them a text and call them a third time right because you’re going to offend them and make them mad. Right? Somebody you don’t know. So somebody is listening to this. Some somebody listening to this right now is going to be, Oh my gosh, lightbulbs going off and you’re going to be like, That’s not me, that’s not going to be me, and you’re going to take the advice that we’re telling you right here and you’re going to go make $1 million.

Mark:   I hope so. I believe that, Joe.

Joe:   So I bet you this. I’m going to hear a testimonial back from somebody five years from now, within five years. Now they’re going to tell me, Joe, I listened to that podcast with you and Mark and I went and did what you did, and I made a million dollars. Thank you very much.

Mark:   I love it. do it.

Joe:   Come on, let’s get it. Let’s make it happen. All right. So Mark, talk about Joe Homebuyer. Why did you guys decide to start a franchise?

Mark:   You know, it’s that ambition, right? It’s, you know, I will tell you, we weren’t perfect with all of our expansion ideas. We went to Indiana. Indiana, one year after being in business thinking, Oh, we’ve got it all figured out, Joey. We’re one year into business. And although we were fine in Indiana, we were making money. It was a distraction. We weren’t ready to expand well. Thankfully, over the last three or four years, we realized we want to have strategic partners all throughout the country, and that is how Joe Homebuyer the franchise was born. Is what’s the best way to expand. It’s to have strategic partners that we’re invested in their success. And we build out a business in a box strategy that they can employ all of our activities that have helped us be very successful in franchising or in real estate so that they could own a piece of that. They could basically be us in their market. And so that’s how Joe home came together, as you know, all the goods and bads that we experienced over the course of time. And thankfully, we have some very successful franchises now, and it’s become a very there’s a lot of momentum and a lot of excitement around your home buyer and success that our franchisees are having.

Joe:   So talk about why franchise, though, I mean, what is it that people get in a franchise that they don’t get in a course and a coaching program or anything like that, or some of the other franchises that we won’t mention names year on, but.

Mark:   There’s only one other that I know of. And you know, I will tell you that there’s a lot of great coaches and a lot of good systems out there. One of the biggest things is I really like to think of ourselves as a strategic partner in the sense that the only way that really a franchise succeeds is if they’re franchisees are getting results, you know, sure, there’s a royalty, there’s a set-up where the franchisor receives a share of that. But at the end of the day, there’s no share if the franchisee is not experiencing success. And so you ask what you know, what is a franchisee get that they wouldn’t get through coaching? And the truth is, we have some franchises. By the time this airs and at the end of day, one franchisee might just like the mastermind group that we’ve created. One might like the acquisition training that we provide. All the our franchisees come to us to be trained and they send their team to us to be trained so they can leverage these things and they have a repository of content. But at the end of the day, the universal theme is We’ve got a community of successful franchisees that collaborate. They share best practices. We’re able to capture data. That data alone is incredibly valuable because we’re marketing in several different markets and we can say, here’s the best practices that are working. And then at the end of the day, they know they have a partner that they can go back to and help navigate their next 90 days and build out a roadmap. And that’s what the franchise is. It’s helping them navigate, build out a road map so that they’re on a trajectory for success.

Joe:   OK, very good. What are what are some of the qualifications? You don’t just take anybody, I assume, even if they had the money? What are some of the qualifications that you would look for and what are what are some of the things that you’d say? No, we’re not going to we don’t want to work with this person.

Mark:   Well, culturally, they have to adopt this mission of improving lives by delivering creative real estate solutions. Now that’s hard. But at the end of the day, I have to feel warm and fuzzy when we make the final decisions on who we sell franchise to, that they really will put the seller and their best interest in mind first. And I just I’m convinced that money follows the successful. But there’s there’s so much enjoyment in providing value to the families that you work with, and I just have to have confidence that the franchise owner is going to adopt that mission and create that culture within their company. Interestingly enough, as far as criteria goes, you know, that’s the first one you have to pick culturally. And we’re very clear on that. But you don’t have to have any real estate experience because for me, I didn’t have any real estate experience when it came down to it. But you have to have either business experience or sales experience or both because you know, what I found is people want to come into this business, but they’re not, you know, a lot of franchise systems like a subway, for example, you spend your money on building out a store and hiring pimple faced teenagers and buying inventory like bread and sandwich meat, and that somehow feels like normal to them. Or OK, at least I get a shipment of that sandwich meat coming in the middle with, you know, marketing for wholesaling and distressed properties. There’s no inventory that you’re buying and there’s no tangible product, and that can be disheartening for people. So we found the most success with franchisees that have some experience with business or have some experience running things and understand that you, you know, you actually have to spend money on marketing to get results or you have to be, you know, at, you know, there’s minimums you have to hit. So helping them navigate that and those that have more experience in that, you know, provides value. And then, Joe, I have to tell you those that are comfortable or willing to hire an acquisition person if they’re not naturally driven that way to, you know, strengthen sales, they have experienced immediate success as well. You know, the sense that they’re used to sitting down with families enjoy interactions in that way. We have some guys, though, that you know, they come from corporate America in the oil business and never had much interaction with the. Directly with the consumer, and so they hire an acquisition guy, but they have lots of business experience and they’ve done very well for everybody across the spectrum, but we’re looking for people that understand that this business isn’t real estate, but it’s a marketing company and you have to spend money to make money.

Joe:   One of my most successful coaching students was a guy who owned at the time. Five Jiffy lubes might not have been Jiffy Lube. It might have been a one of those fast oil change things, you know? And it was so refreshing. I only had maybe two or three coaching calls with them. Right? Like I could tell the minute I was talking to him, this guy gets it and he’s going to kill it. And sure enough, he did and just exploded his business. He’s still doing really well. So great. But like, there is something real true to that. And also, I want to say this too. I’m not that sales guy that wants to be on the phone all day and meeting with sellers belly button, the belly button like, Oh, I’d rather just get a new I need that. Like, I need another hole in there, like I know how to find those people. I’ve had two acquisition managers and they were both former pastors, not former pastors have to qualify that because, like what? They have a moral failing or no, they just retired. Sure. Right. They were people people. Yeah. And they loved hanging out and sitting and talking to people. And they weren’t like high pressure salesmen. But they just loved people and they were so good at their job, right? Because that’s what this business is all about. So anyway, I don’t think if you’re listening to this thing on me, I’m not this high pressure sales guy. I hate sales. I don’t want to be that guy who is talking to five people a day that gives me the heebie jeebies. You can hire those people. They are out there and you don’t. Well, anyway, where does that make sense?

Mark:   Yeah. And actually, you complemented well articulated a better than me, but you’re just a little lube example. You know, he’s experienced success, not because he knew anything about real estate or came in with that experience, but he understood business principles. He understood that. You know, again, if there’s 100 success principles and when all of those things are, you know, hard work, diligence, discipline, you know, again, you go down and down the list. You know, we have found the most success with franchisees that already have an operating system in their lives, that they are successful, that they’re that they’re functioning, you know, they’re striving to be a learner and to develop and grow as a leader. And you know, it’s hard sometimes to determine if that’s true of an individual, but you do the best you can and you want to trust that, you know, because I believe that those are most those that are most successful are true learners, right? They’re not done in learning and they’re teachable. And so that’s, you know, another, you know, success principle being a true learner and that’s very contagious for us or attractive to us. And that’s what we’re seeking when we’re thinking of who’s a good candidate for a future Joe home buyer franchise

Joe:   And what do you tell somebody you feel like is not a good candidate? Where do you send them? What do you tell them to do?

Mark:   They fizzle out. You know, it’s a pretty natural fizzle out process in the sense that, you know, we find that if we stop the engagement, they generally stop engagement. It’s almost it’s natural that they, you know, the water kind of flows where it naturally goes and those that don’t fit, we’re able to just kind of distance ourselves and it works out. So, you know, at the end of the day, we don’t want to ever deliver hard news to somebody, Hey, we just don’t like you as a Joe home buyer franchise. But we found that those that just don’t be culturally kind of weed themselves out.

Joe:   It’s kind of funny, too. Probably the more you tell no to people, the more they want it. I’m looking at your website, Joe home buyer franchising dot com What is a good way to get in touch with you guys?

Mark:   Yeah. You know, you can find me on LinkedIn, Mark Stubler. But the truth is, that’s a great way if you want to talk with somebody on my team or myself. Definitely reach out to us a Joe homebuyer franchising dot com. And if you just want to learn more about the franchise and how our system can help you grow and thrive in the real estate space, we’d love to talk with you and explore the idea.

Joe:   I love it. One question to you real quick before I forget when you’re making offers to buy houses, are you strictly cash? Just buy your house. Dp you get into the creative side of things?

Mark:   We definitely do. Yeah, like we say, we had a real estate summit with our franchisees over the last week and a half year, spent several hours on, you know, best practices for creative financing. And yeah, we understand the art of that. I know that’s a strength of yours, Joe. In fact, I would be lying if I said, I’m not a student of some of the best practices you’ve used. Cody has been exposed to some of your strategies with lease options and things like that. So.

Joe:   And one more thing. Two more things here. When your franchisees do, you help them with, you know, if they want to fix and flipper, they want to buy and hold? Is that something you kind of can help them with navigate through how that all works as well?

Mark:   Yeah, we help them line up financing and strategize, you know, run a proforma on best practice or, you know, risk reward type tolerances. And, you know, they have to determine their own risk reward. We have some franchisees are really aggressive and others that are, you know, very conservative. And that’s OK, right? But we help them navigate the pros and cons. And then obviously, you know, we’re very much advocates of this. I. Of a life cycle of an investor, because somebody that’s new into, you know, this business, you’re not going to want to take on a rehab if it distracts you from managing your leads well and moving your business forward. So there’s a time in the season to add those additional exit strategies to, you know, your business or, you know, obviously the strategies to do it right out the gate. But you have to be make sure that it’s not a distraction to to the company.

Joe:   Speaking of distractions, Joe Landbuyer dot com, do you guys have that?

Mark:   I’m not sure if we have that. I don’t know that we do. Joe Landbuyer dot com. We need to get it if we don’t.

Joe:   Well, it’s taken. you can get Joe Land buyers dot com for five bucks a year. But yeah, I was just wondering because vacant land is something that we’ve been doing a lot more of lately. Sure, it being vacant land. Lots of opportunity out there for that.

Mark:   Well, we have a lot of URLs. I’m not aware of them, but I would suspect that that one is one that I don’t have.

Joe:   Maybe you can get Joey Land buyer and are there cool marks so people want to get a hold of you? LinkedIn is one way. Mark Stuber, Stu B L e r on LinkedIn. You can also guys go to Joe Homebuyer dot com. There is a link there for franchising opportunities, and I would encourage you to go look at their site and just see some of the best practices. What’s working today? And I would encourage you all as well to go back to this podcast. Listen to it again. Some of the things that we’ve said on here are million dollar ideas that if you can just it sounds so simple, you probably just skipped over it. And like I heard that before. I love talking about the simple, basic, foundational, fundamental things in this business because it works. It really does. All right, Mark, cool and any final advice tips?

Mark:   Hey, I just appreciate you having me on Joe. And maybe the only quick tip or advice that sure is, you know, kudos to those of you that are investing the time to listen to this podcast, to other students of, you know, Joe McCall and and applying the principles that he’s, you know, earnestly trying to share with you. You picked a great industry and a great mentor. And I just love to see people learning and growing and succeeding in real estate. So just compliments to those that are investing the time in themselves and specifically in this industry.

Joe:   Thank you very much, Mark. Appreciate it and say hi to Cody. Do you guys work in the same office?

Mark:   He’s just he’s just through the wall here. Yeah, in fact, I’m surprised we can’t hear him. He’s pretty loud. But yeah.

Joe:   Give him a hard time for me. Is a good dude. All right. Thank you. We’ll see you guys later. Mark, hang on for one second. We’ll see you guys later. Take everybody. Bye bye.