Joe McCall: Hey. What's going on, guys? Joe McCall here with the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Glad you're here on this episode today. We're going to be talking about business credit and a lot of you guys need funding for your deals. And it could be land deals or house deals, commercial deals, multifamily. It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter, actually, what kind of business you're in. But I've got a good friend on the show today. His name is Joe Lawrence. We're going to be talking about a workshop that he does every two weeks where he teaches people how to get business credit. Now, it could be lines of credit. It could be business credit cards. It's a bunch of different things. It's a big topic, but it's an important topic that I think a lot of people need to hear about. And I've always said it's important to dig your will before you're thirsty, right? Because when you need the money, that's the worst time to start finding it and going ask for it, because you become a desperate, motivated investor that needs the capital, right? So it's much better to have your well dug and access to the funding before you need it. So now is an important time to start thinking about this stuff. And I met Joe a few months ago at a mastermind workshop event thing that I was that became friends. I actually created some special modules with him for my students in the land investing course. So we're going to be talking to him today about what it is that he does, how you can get more information, how you can get some just get some real practical things right here from this podcast as we go into that. All right. So first, this podcast is brought to you by my new book, Simple Land Flips: How to Make 10K in 10 Hours. How to make 10K in 10 hours. What, what, what? Yeah, it's my land investing strategy, and it's the simplest, fastest, easiest way to make money in real estate today. And I'm not just saying that because I've done all kinds of deals. I've done almost every kind of deal. You can do houses and vacant land. And I have found right now for vacant land, it's easiest. It's a business that I've done with my kids and it's a great way to get fast cash and streams of cash. So if you're interested, you can get the book for free. Right now, if you go to simple land class dot com, simple land class dot com, if you register, that's a page where you go to register for a webinar. When you watch that webinar at the very end, I'll give you a link to get this book as a PDF for free. It's a legit book, so get it for free, no strings attached except well, there is a string attached. You've got to go to simple land class dot com, watch my webinar. I do this webinar twice a day. It is prerecorded. I do it twice a day and get it on your calendar. Watch the class. I promise you'll learn a lot from it. And then at the end of the webinar, I'm going to give you a link where you can get the PDF of that book. All right, simple land class dot com. And by the way, too, we are going live right now as I'm recording this. We're going live in Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. So I want to say hello to you guys. And if you're watching this, like Ed and Laurel are from Reno, Nevada, what's going on? Hey, guys, please type in the chat, type in the comments, say hello. Tell us who you are, where you're from, if you've got questions, because I know you guys are going to have questions as we're doing this right now with for Joe, I want you to please type the questions in the Facebook or YouTube chat wherever you are and you will get we'll get your questions answered. Is that cool? All right. Let's bring Joe on. Hey, Joe, how are you, my man?

Joe Lawrence: I'm doing great. How are you?

Joe McCall: Awesome. Glad you're here. Thank you so much. Appreciate you being willing to come and share with our audience. We're doing this podcast all over the world right now. I'm just kidding. But it is actually literally all over the world. Anybody could watch this on YouTube and Facebook, but we also put it out on our podcast audience, which is huge. And I sure appreciate all of the people that are listening to this podcast as well. But good. I'm glad you're here, man. So tell us a little bit, Joe, about your story. How did you get started in business? How long ago?

Joe Lawrence: Oh, well, it was a little while ago about Twitter, right around when the call and now the Great Recession occurred. So typical story like was working for someone else. I had a full time job and I didn't love it. I didn't feel free to kind of do what I wanted to do. You know, inside the box, like breaks and stuff like that had to be a certain amount of time. And I wanted freedom and I wanted more. And so this kind of kept my ear to the ground. And a friend of mine, ironically, whose name is Joe, I guess that's Joe's a good name. Good thing. My buddy Joe from Pennsylvania, he, he, he told me about some, like, real estate club meetings or something that he had gone to and some guys that he had met. And I was like, Hey, man, that sounds too good to be true. You know, these guys making quick, quick people like that. But, you know, you got to put yourself out there sometimes. So I joined my local real estate club meeting and that was May 27. And then I had with then like within like seven months I was able to quit my job and go full time as a real estate investor. Wow. Obviously, there's a lot there's a lot that happened right around that time. I did my first deal which I put on a contract and. December 27. I closed in January 2008. I was only making 35 grand a year plus commission at the time, so it wasn't too hard to leave. I put in my two weeks and I'm like, Hey, this is it.

Joe McCall: What kind of deals were you doing?

Joe Lawrence: So the first thing I did was I bought this book called the Pre-foreclosure Property Investors Kit.

Joe McCall: I had that book. Was it Jerry Conti? No, Peter Conti and Jerry Finkel. David Finkel. Who wrote that?

Joe Lawrence: No, this is Tom, I think. Thomas Lucier.

Joe McCall: Yes, I have another one of his books. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Great book.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah. And so. So I was reading it and was like, okay, send letters to people that are in pre-foreclosure status. And so I went on the sheriff sale was to my county, Somerset County, New Jersey. And there's a lot of people there. And I didn't necessarily have a lot of money to spend on direct mail marketing and stamps and letters and all that stuff. It is quite expensive to do direct mail. I don't know if people still do it anymore, but that's how I love it.

Joe McCall: Yeah, it's a huge for vacant land. At least it's the fastest, easiest way to get leads.

Joe Lawrence: Oh, nice. So I use the business credit card I got from Chase, my first business credit cards for 25 grand. And at the time, the highest credit card limit I had was 29 grand. That was pretty impressive. But that's how I figured business credit, like this thing called business credit. And then when I use that business credit card, it didn't affect my personal credit. And I liked that a lot. So I did two things. I, I ramped up my marketing very heavily so I can get a lot of deals under their contract. And I also got as many business credit cards as it could possibly get. So it kind of just put me like those that the two directions both businesses are pretty much launched at within the same year. The real estate investment company, the company business credit workshop.

Joe McCall: Which unintentionally you were in, you were planning on starting a business helping people get into business credit.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, I was out and about with that same guy, with that guy Joe. Okay. So, so we're at there's a real estate investing event. And I was just telling him about the business credit stuff and like I ended up buying all these courses on business credit and some of them were good and some of them were not good. And I ended up kind of creating my own process, my own way of doing it. And I did clear 100 grand in business credit for my real estate business pretty quickly. And so I was just shooting, just telling them what's up, and the guy running the event was like walking by and he was like, Hey, come here for a second. We're on a lunch break. And he goes, Lunch is done. And I think it was only like 5 minutes or something or something like that. When lunch is over, I want you to actually go up and just everything you just shared with Joe, I wanted to share with the audience. I was like, I don't do public speaking. I'm not going to do it. So he goes, We'll just go think about I'll come back to in a minute. So I thought about it and I was like, All right, man, you got to put yourself out there. So I was like, I'll do it. And he goes, Okay, one more thing. And this is the magic of it is what made it a for profit business. It goes at the end. I want you to tell them, because I want to learn more from you, that you're doing a workshop next month and it's $1,000 and you're going to ask everyone that wants to join the stand up, go back to the room, give the credit card. And I was like, all right, I'll do it. I was I was good in sales, so I knew how to sell, but I had no public speaking experience. And he he jinxed me and blessed me at the same time. I didn't believe him at the time, but he goes, I closed. It was like 27% of the live audience.

Joe McCall: That's pretty good.

Joe Lawrence: It was my first time speaking. I know what I was doing. And he goes, You'll never be that close ratio ever again. I was in public speaking at a live event. That's really good. I mean, I've seen people beat that now, but anyway, so I kind of got hooked on this education aspect of of teaching I ended up creating. Then I only had a few months to create the company. That's why it's just the real basic name business credit workshop. So I created a company and then we put people together in rooms, mostly all real, the investors and then banks. I called a lot of banks and I found a few that will actually meet with us vice presidents of business lending. And we put them together in these little hotel rooms in Somerset, New Jersey. And we did an in hour workshop where I would teach, but then I would have people come up and like Joe the guy, my friend Joe his last name is Tunsall by the way, just personal credit repair. He would teach credit repair and then I would teach business credit and the banks would would just talk about like the programs that they had. Because the issue I saw in the community is that not a lot of people know like what business credit is or that banks have like these no doc programs where you can get a lot of funding without showing tax returns or financials, which for me was great. I was a startup, I didn't have revenue to show. So from there, yeah, to just so this is.

Joe McCall: What really interested me when I first heard you talking about this, I thought, this is something my audience needs to hear because there are banks out. Especially the local regional banks that are still giving today no doc or low doc business lines of credit to investors. Right. And you gave it a real simple trick on how to find them. We'll talk about that in a minute here. But there's also several six or seven right now, at least six or seven different credit card companies that are practically begging businesses to apply for business credit cards. And they'll giving. And if you don't have the perfect credit score right now, you can still get at least a little bit and then build your credit score over time. So I really like what Joe had to say. And so that's why I wanted my but let's first talk about let's rewind a little bit. Joe And what would a real estate investor do with a business credit card or business lines of credit? What are some good and good ways to use that?

Joe Lawrence: I think the best thing is, is to put it if you look at I was reading Rich Dad Poor Dad at the time, Robert Kiyosaki, and so I really fell in love, but I really fell in love with the idea of good debt versus bad debt. And so good that would be anything where you can buy an asset. And with debt and the income produced from that asset is, is giving enough money where you're not only paying down the debt, but also putting money in your pocket. And so for me, I like putting business credit into marketing because usually every dollar I spend on advertising, I can earn 2 to $3. So it's making that debt is making me money or assets. So for example, I do a lot of buy and hold property and I don't care if I have a $200,000 mortgage on a property that's worth $400,000, that makes $4,000 per month. It's enough to cover the small cost of debt and then some. So those are be two great, great areas as real estate investors. But to look at putting business credit plan marketing, sales, advertising testing different things because right now you might learn about direct mail networks, you might learn about Facebook ads. That's working. I do a lot of YouTube ads. Friends of mine are running local Google ads in their area to get houses. So there's like all these different methods of advertising you might want to test. And if you're using cash only, which is fine if you want to do it that way, but then you're limited to maybe like whatever is in your accounts, you might only be able to do one campaign and it could take you it could take a very long time to find a campaign that works. If you're using debt, you could try five campaigns at once, find the one like I did, the one that worked really well, and then doubled, quadrupled, tripled down on that. I ended up getting 20 houses under contract within 60 days of doing my first real estate deal was one because my belief system changed. I suddenly believe this is possible. So now I acted as if this was going to really happen, which is really the whole magic of anything I could possibly teach anyone listening would be that right there. But to it's now I had business credit to do things like radio advertising and direct mail marketing to get deals because I knew I could turn the deal over in a very quick period of time. It was a pretty much just like we talked, like you learned, if you were to pick up the book, some of it might still be relevant today, but it was all about the whole pre-foreclosure investing model. And the first thing that I did, they were hugging me at the closing table and the wife was crying and the wrote me a testimonial letter and I was like, This is cool because you get a lot of heat from people. Like, I've had stuffy old men in suits. Tell me something about like, rats picking up the scraps or something really stupid like that, right? Oh, that's right. You're a foreclosure investor. Like bro, what do you take? Something that was once beautiful. I got jacked up and you make it beautiful again. That's as America's favorite story, first of all. So.

Joe McCall: Yeah, I wanted to bring this up because there's a lot of good things you can do with using credit the right way because you could screw this all up if you use it to pay off for personal things or don't use it for business, for investing, for creating, helping you create assets that produce cash flow. That's when you can use good debt, right? What I have found, there's a lot of opportunities specifically in land investing where you're buying these little lots for three or four or $5,000 and selling them for 15 to $20000. And when you do that, you can pay that land off in 6 to 12 months. Right now, you have an asset that's producing you 2 to 4 or $500 a month in cash flow. Right. And you keep on turning that money over again. You can buy more and more land to sell with owner financing, or sometimes you just want to wholesale the land so you can buy it, close on it. It's in your name. Now you own that piece of land, that three acres that you bought for $5,000, and you turn around and you sell it for 13 to $15000 and you don't have to worry about double closing and all of that. The other really good thing about this that I want to make sure you guys understand there are a lot of people out there. Maybe you're doing houses, maybe you're doing land. There's a lot of people out there that need help with. Now, I'm not going to give you legal advice here. There's other guys like more be that. This called I don't remember what he calls it, but there's other ways that you can do this, where you can lend money to somebody else for a certain percentage of the profits for their deals. For example, let's say there's a wholesaler out there who is is buying a house, but they have to double close it to resell it. Or maybe they need to put down a $3,000 earnest money deposit to tie up this property so that they can double closed on it or do whatever they have. Later on, you might have that $3,000 in business credit or a credit card that you could lend to that guy. And with the right paperwork, maybe through a joint venture agreement or something like that, you could have an agreement that they'll pay you back out of the profits, double what you gave them. Right? Right. So you could give them three grand. They have to give you six grand back from the deal, but that's okay. They'll pay that if they're going to be making ten, 15, 20 grand. And that is still less than what you would they would probably have gotten if they used a hard money lender or whatever. Right. And they help them close the deal. So there's a lot of things you could do like that. I love it for land because we're buying these small rural vacant lots for just a few thousand dollars. Sometimes it's easier. We have three months to close, but sometimes they're such good deals, it's easier to close them right away. You can use incentive credit cards, right, to do that.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, it gives you the confidence to where if you find a really good asset, you can actually close on it if necessary as compared to just putting it under contract and trying to find a buyer and then wholesaling the contract, which is a great way to do it, of course. But there when I go to the table knowing I also have the option of saying I got the cash on it.

Joe McCall: It's a mindset, isn't it? Because now you have the confidence when you're talking with a seller or a realtor or a lender. So whoever. Right. You know, you can close that deal and you're not in the back of your mind hoping that you can hopefully maybe find a cash buyer or somebody to sell this deal to. Yeah. When you know you've got $50,000 burning a hole in your pocket right now, you can make an offer. You can actually close on this deal. It changes the game, doesn't it?

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, it does. It really does. It's and I remember when I was doing my first wholesale deals, you know, I would just tell them straight up, like know I'm putting this on the contract. My intention is to properly resell it, find a buyer. And what was amazing too is with the people you're talking, if you're talking to your right audience, then they're good with it because they're like, Well, I'm losing the house on Monday and today's Friday, and you're the only guy here, so you know you seem trustworthy. Let's give it a shot. I mean, yeah, so. But now, years later than then, the mindset, the confidence kind of changes to where like, hey, listen, I have the option here to buy it and fix it up and sell it, make lots of money. But I might also just sell the contract. Okay, here's your options. I like lending money because my biggest lender, private money lender, only two people I work with has a large business line of credit and he gets equity on the deals that we do. And what's cool about the way we structure it, because I'm more of a big picture guy, so, so I'll give up half the deal or whatever the percentage is that makes sense for us if I have a long term relationship with someone. So when you mention like doing that one deal, you put out three, you get back six, they mean 15 that you now have potentially if it went well, you're done dating, you can move to the next stage, right? Which is you could do a deals with them every single month. And even though there are many times when I don't need to use private money, I would still work with my partner because there's more value to having partnership and having assistance. So what two people bring to the table as far as having more free time than just me doing it all and trying to get 100% of a deal.

Joe McCall: Yeah. All right. So let's talk about, I want to talk about two things, how to get business lines of credit or, you know, small business loans from a bank. Let's also talk about business credit cards. And you had a you have a real nice little trick about just searching Google for top SBA. Go ahead and, talk about that, would you?

Joe Lawrence: Yes. So there's when I went on this journey of finding the one bank that you know, which is to chase a well-known bank that got me to 25 K, I started to think, well, how many other banks are out there in the business? Credit courses I was a part of only introduced me to four or five banks. So like First National Bank, Omaha, Chase, Amex, like all the banks, like the big national banks, everyone knows about Citibank, all that. So, so I thought I was done like, okay, I got all the credit I could get. But then a back cook back story is right around this time during my journey of trying to get funding, my father got a loan from a local community bank in Ocean City, New Jersey, for a deal he was doing in Ocean City. And it was a one bank, one branch bank. And he said he met with the lending committee and they actually he basically met with them in person, old school, and they decided, yeah, we'll go with this this deal. And I was thinking, how, how is that possible? My dad is self-employed. He doesn't have a two year W-2 and we don't have lots of assets and stuff like that. He was like, Well, they believe in the deal. They went with it. So when I talked to the bank and I talked with other banks, I learned there are things like lending committees and individual banks that will actually look at your opportunity and whether or not they want to fund it. So I learned that phrase. Those types of banks are called portfolio lenders. I later learned that's like the phrase for it. And then I call them local banks or local community banks and credit unions. And so we went through every database that we could find. The easiest for anyone listening to this to duplicate is the top SBA lender trick. So what you do is you get the SBA. We're not looking for an SBA loan, but the SBA, the Small Business Administration, has already ranked all the top lending banks in your state. So who's got the most money to business owners in your state? So you find that list, you just Google top SBA lender and whatever state you're in.

Joe McCall: How about this? Here we go. Look at my screen. You're some of you guys on the podcast right now. You can't see this. But I just went to the Google and I did a search for top SBA loans, Missouri or Iowa. And this website come up now. I don't know what SBA lenders dot com is, but guess what they have here? They have a chart of the top ten loans, small regional banks that are an active SBA lender, and they sort this by the number of loans they've done for small business loans. That's right here on Google. And then I just also did a search for New Jersey. And here's some local regional banks. Some of them are bigger banks. But a lot of activity. Okay. So now what do you do with this list, Joe?

Joe Lawrence: One other thing, too, is just be lenders accounts are good site there's the SBA logo is a good site too. And they have local districts in every state and in many counties as well. So. So I also Google top SBA lenders Iowa just for fun and the and the SBA website came up and there's local offices in like Cedar Rapids in Des Moines. So you can actually call them or email. The SBA I think is like a halfway down which up it right here Iowa district. And email them and call them if you scroll down a little bit and actually ask them, hey, I'm trying to find an up to date database here. You know, can you can you share that with me? So by doing that, we'll find not just ten or 20 banks, we'll find hundreds of banks. And in total, we found 4200 banks all across the U.S., local community banks, credit unions. And, you know, the majority of the banks on the list no one's ever heard of. And that's what you want. You want these little local banks with one branch where they have a lending committee and they and what's cool about these banks is they lend their own money to portfolio lenders. And what that means is that they make their own decisions, their in-house underwriting. I had a client today. He texted me he had 15 business I'm sorry, 15 personal credit cards from Synchrony Bank. Synchrony is a we'll call it an underwriter, a third party bank that does underwriting and servicing for different banks. Okay. And that's, for example, Elan Financial is another third party underwriter or service or however they want to be qualified. But the point is that if you go to a local bank that that lends their own money and you get their business credit card. It's not tossed to some third party. So my client texted me only a few minutes before we jump out. He was I just lost 15 cards from that one underwriter. I don't know why or how or what, but we'll figure it out. But to my point, when you work with the local community banks, credit unions, portfolio lenders that offer their own product and it's not offered through a third party like Synchrony or Elan Financial, you can get as many business credit cards as you want. And a lot of these local banks and portfolio owners in this community, banks, they do 75% of them new to third party, but 25% do keep it in-house. That's what I like to get all the business credit cards I have. I wouldn't get 15 cards from third party underwriters. I would get 20, 30, 40, 50 cards, which I've done through the local community banks, credit unions that offer their own in-house business credit card. All right, good.

Joe McCall: So you find the top banks that lend the top regional banks in your state that do a lot of SBA loans. Yeah, right. And then you call them. And what do you say?

Joe Lawrence: You just say hi. I would like to know if you offer a business credit card and they say yes and you go, great, how do I apply? And they tell you now here's the part that most people give up on. And usually the thing on the other side of the resistance is the reward. So if you quit right here, you don't deserve the reward on the other side of it. So they say come into the branch and grab an application. And then most people say, I'm too lazy, I'm going to go to Bank of America dot com and apply. And there's nothing wrong. By the way, getting credit from other banks and third party is national banks all. By the way, I still do it. But the magic here is if you are willing to call or visit and network with local community banks and credit unions, then you're going to find programs that no one else knows about. So they say, come in the branch and you can apply for a business credit card and then what you ask and whatever some of them still do online, sometimes they'll email it to fax it, whatever. We find out what the process is to apply. And then and then what you do is you would say, well, quick question, is this your own business credit card or is it offered through a third party? Can you wait for an answer? And some of them have to go find out the answer. Some of them know the answer. Like PNC Bank, it's their own business credit card. Look, I know that some other local banks here in New Jersey, they use online financial, which is a third party. So I'm looking for the banks that are offering their own business credit card in-house. And if I found that, it's definitely worth driving. I've driven up to 2 hours. It could be either longer than that, depending on how big your state is to meet with the bank and then look at the application and build a long term relationship with that bank. Because if there are portfolio lenders are lending their own money, then you have an advocate at the bank who's going to try to advocate for your approval. So like, if you if you go apply for some of these national banks and you get the people say, Oh, I got denied this, okay, we'll try for reconsideration requests or call them up, see what you can fix. You know, they'll take a personal happens. But if you have that guy at the bank, Bob, who's the vice president, business lending, he's worked there for 20 years. You're friends with the. LinkedIn. You've already grab coffee with him or you met him at a local networking event, which is another great way to meet banks. Then you get denied. Bob said, You know what, man? Let me go to bat for you. I had good news. I couldn't get you the 25. I got you the 12. So that's what you're looking for is these local banks that offer their own business credit cards that are portfolio lenders. And then about I'm a numbers guy. So like I said, about 25% of these banks, that's what you're going to find. But if you make 100 phone calls, then about 5 to 10% of them. So a little bit less do business lines of credit as no doc. No doc means you don't have to show financials, tax returns, balance sheets or anything. Know, even though I'm sure you and I, Joe, we could we could show docs.

Joe McCall: It's a pain in the butt. It's a hassle. And I hate doing it.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, it's like it takes three months. They're right back to you because they're too heavy. They're looking at everything. It's just annoying. It's too much to look at. So I'll do. I'll say, Hey, how much can I? Oh, 10% of your revenue will be for good. Okay, great. So if I made $1,000,000 in sales last year, I can get 100 grand business line of credit. But then I'll ask the bank, is there a certain number where if I apply at that number or less, that I can do it as a no doc? Like I don't have the transactions. They go, Oh yeah, up to 50 grand is no doc. It's a two page application. We make the decision in 24 hour. I'm like, I'll take that one and then you can move out. And usually it's unsecured, which is good because if you're going to work with more than one bank and get lots of business lines of credit, then that would be the product you would prefer is is to not get tied up. So when you own it's unsecured, there's really no limit to how much funding you can get because the next bank actually, if they're no doc, they don't ask you about the debt that you have. If you were to get asked about, Hey, what's your balance sheet look like? You have to tell the truth, obviously. But if they're purposely not asking, they're purposely not asking. They want to lend you money. A lot of these banks want to lend you money. They can only stay in business, that they lend money out to business owners. They're out of business. They have all these deposits from their customers. We can't put it out there to you. The market.

Joe McCall: Yeah. So very good little trick there. I guess you could call it where you're just going in. You're looking for banks that are already lending to small businesses in your community. Yeah. And calling them and asking them about business credit cards and then also asking as long as it's not a third party. Right. But then also asking them about do you have no doc or low doc business lines of credit.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, exactly.

Joe McCall: I love it. Okay. So now we explained to me they are going to pull your personal credit score, right, to see if you're creditworthy. How much of an impact does that make, though, on how much you get approved for?

Joe Lawrence: It makes a big impact. So there's a little misconception because of other business credit companies out there that are saying things like you get 100 grand with no PGE, no personal guarantee. And the last bank that did that was called Swift Financial in 2006 and they went out of business. So what's happened over the last six years? There are some banks that'll do cool things like soft pulls on your personal credit scores. It doesn't hurt your personal credit score. There are some banks that do deposit based lending like PayPal Loan Builder or the Kabbage program, which just came back through American Express and Lending Club in there. So there are programs where if you have strong deposits, which many of us will say people probably do have strong deposits, then your personal credit isn't as relevant. So I think a more accurate, honest way to explain this is as follows If you're going to get what's called a no doc business line of credit or credit card, which means they're not taking tax returns, financials, collateral or anything, then you do need to provide a guarantee, which means you can't just go get 100 grand and not pay the bank back. They'd be out of business. So but when you give a personal guarantee, it doesn't show in your personal credit score other than the inquiry at the time of application. So as long as I'm paying my debt on time, my personal credit isn't jacked up. I could maxed out that business line of credit. It's not screwing up my personal credit score at all. So what the banks do, and this is a good thing for everyone to write down, is they pull a blended score. Okay? It's a blended score between your personal and your business credit score. So what I try to share with you is let's do everything we can for a few weeks leading up to your application to boost up your business credit score as high as you can, boost up your personal credit score, either you or credit card. Personal business credit score are very highly relevant. The blended score is called SPSS Score. That stands for a small business scoring service, and you can get it from a company called NAV. And NAV is N A V, by the way. So you're listening to us on audio it's N as in Nancy, A is an apple, V as in Victor, so NAV dot com so it's a website that tracks and monitors your business. And personal credit scores. It also boosts up your business credit scores, too, if you use their paid program. And so if you want, I could go into detail like what needs to look like, but at least now you know, yes, it's relevant. Yes, they pull it in personal and business. Credit scores are both full at the time of application.

Joe McCall: Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Lawrence: So as far as like what's important, so the business credit side, that's actually quite simple. You just need to have positive reporting tree lines on your business credit profile. Probably. Maybe it's simple for everybody else. But what that means is that there's three business credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and Dun and Bradstreet. And these are the business credit bureaus they track. They monitor your business credit score. When you get the NAV account. They'll actually tell you what your business credit score is on Dun and Bradstreet, Experian and Equifax for your business, which is great. And then they can also share with you what your personal credit score is in case you don't know what it is. And then they'll tell you what the blended score is. So. So a magic question might be if I was listening, like, what do you do to boost up your blended score, your business and personal credit score? On the business side, you just get you get accounts with the vendors that report to the Business Credit Bureau. So NAB is one of them. They can boost up your business credit score gas card. So if you would have BP gas, Valero, Exxon. Even companies like Staples or Home Depot, Office Depot, ask them if they have commercial accounts, if you can get a business account with them, and then if they'll report your payment history to the business credit bureaus. And what they'll do is by giving you this small little account like BP gas. Usually you do a $500 deposit that'll get you a gas card in your business name, and they usually give you up to a 1500 limit. And for some people, you won't even have to give the deposit. It just depends on the history of your business. But so that's one example. So you use the gas card every week and it reports and boosts up your business credit score. And on the personal credit side, it's a little bit more complicated. There is actually no minimum score. That's the first question. Will, just tell me the score. If it was that blind and simple, we wouldn't need any. There wouldn't be a complex underwriting process. Right. So there's a lot of things banks look at beyond your personal credit score. The biggest thing, though, is utilization. And utilization is just like, are all your personal credit cards maxed out or are they not? When I first was getting business credit, they were all maxed out. I was using personal credit cards to pay for the workshop. I told you that I attended where they put me on stage to pay for the real estate investment class, to do my first direct loan working rate. And that's the problem with personal credit cards with the personal credit, unlike business credit cards. So I had a utilization problem in the way to fix that utilization problem. The easiest thing would just be paying down debt all of your any money. So what you can do is you can do credit limit increases which sometimes will work where if you get more credit available on the personal revolving debt side, that'll open up your purse. Liquidity, equalization. You could also do balance transfers. If you happen to already have a business credit card, you could you could transfer your personal debt to your business that opened up your utilization. But I always say as a caveat, just tell your CPA that you're doing that, because there's that's a there's a taxable consequence of doing that because you're basically is basically income, as I understand it. So that's one other options, transferring your debt from you personally to your business. And that or the last option, which is my favorite option, is the authorized user technique, which I like, which I love, and what I did there as a quick story, my wife here was looking to get a business credit from KeyBank, KeyBank is a great bank. And what we need to do is open up her utilization first. So I have this American Express card with a $0 balance and a $20,000 limit to personal credit card. I just went online and I just added her as an authorized user and she hasn't even used the card. But within a few weeks, her credit report now shows new card with a $20,000 $0 balance. So that opened up her personal credit utilization dramatically. It did result in her getting approved. By the way, if you happen to be on the East Coast, you could. And I think perhaps someone in the central, you look at key banks available in your area. They do a no doc business line of credit up to 50K and that's exactly what she got. She got approved for that. So yeah, boosting up your business credit score and at the same time doing the little techniques just to get like quick boost to your personal credit score so that you can get approved for the business line of credit. And then now she can use that money for her real estate business happens to be a realtor.

Joe McCall: Okay. Now, bank like KeyBank, does it have to be you have to be local in that area.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah. So when you do this process, you need to work with local banks that are in your local area. You can go outside of your local area, but then they would need to be lending in the state you do business in, which is a very low probability. If you're a little nutty like I am, I called every single bank 4200 banks. So I know what banks in California lend to businesses in New Jersey, but it cost me $50,000 and it took me an entire year to do that. Right. So a more simple, usable, easily implementable step that you could take right now is just what we talked about. Google the banks near you and find the local banks in your area and then just call them because you already happened to be in that physical location. But if you want to go a little crazy, a little advance, then. Call banks and surrounding states where you live and start asking them if they lend to your state. For Florida, you can call banks in Texas and say, Do you lend to banks in Florida? And it happens all the time, like Valley National Bank's in New Jersey. They just did a buyout or they just got bought out. I don't remember which one it is, but the buyout contained all these branches in Florida. So now you have a New Jersey location that also plays well with Florida. So it is if you want to go out like beyond a half a million in funding and start getting like seven figures in funding or more than you're going to want to unlock that new skill set, which is to start calling banks in other states surrounding you and to see if they want to the state that you're physically in.

Joe McCall: Okay. By the way, I should mention this right now, you have a challenge, like it's a class that you do every two weeks that, what, a 150 bucks or something like that, right?

Joe Lawrence: That's exactly right.

Joe McCall: And if you go to Joe McCall dot come slash funding, you can see when the next one Joe is doing. When that starts again, go to Joe McCall dot com slash funding and talk about it's a how many this is a class not just like a one hour class it's a talk about what's in this it's a two or three day thing.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, it's a five day challenge. Every day in the morning, you get a lesson. It's about an hour long that's unlocked. Video on demand unlocked around 6 a.m. that morning and then you have 24 hours to complete the challenge. And so that's five days in a row. So that's five lessons and that's five challenges, right? So you block off an hour a day and you can watch it whenever you want. You can be in bed at 2 a.m. if you want and do it. It doesn't. It's all good. And what makes this different than just a course is that you have tasks that I know you can complete within the 24 hours, that if you do, are going to have a dramatic impact on you getting funding very quickly. And it also includes chat support. So while you're in the challenge live, I'm there with you live as well. And so we're all the other students, hundreds and hundreds of people in the chat room. So we'll help you out if you get stuck on something. And then oh, and then there's a leaderboard. And this is what makes it different than just a course is that if you complete the tasks that you do, the challenge that you had a day to complete, you get points. And the cool thing about this, guys, is that it's just the way we're wired as humans. Like it'll make you do things you maybe were too chicken to do, but it's going to have a great impact on your life. It's going to force you to just slightly out of your comfort zone, nothing major. But it's going to give you a little kick to do something that's really going to help you out tremendously. And then you get there's a leaderboard that tracks like Who's out there doing these tasks? And you can earn free courses that I have. You can earn free coaching, T-shirts, shirts, coffee mugs. It's really a lot of fun and it's the best program I have and you got to check it out.

Joe McCall: I'm curious how I like that idea of having a leaderboard and the track that activity, because it kind of gets the competitive juices flowing in some people. What platform do you use to track that?

Joe Lawrence: It's Google sheets.

Joe McCall: Ah, nice. Okay, so.

Joe Lawrence: And so it's been and we looked at a lot of different options. But it's as simple as you can open on your phone or computer. You type in your name. Joe McCall did. I did. I watched today's one hour lesson. Yes, I did. Okay. That's worth three points. Okay. I put a number three and we can all see it. And so the next day will be like, hey, shout out to Joe. You know, he's on the top of the leaderboard. You know, you can do it. You're doing great. Who else is going to join him? I'm going to take you out tonight. You know, let's go in. And it just keeps them on the front of your mind because you could just drop a buck 50 on this course and know it's amazing. But it sits on the shelf because you have other stuff, it goes away, but a challenge makes you do stuff. It's why I created the most impactful courses I ever took or not the most expensive courses I ever took. By the way, there were challenges because they made me do something. And then I made a little caveat, like through like chat support, you know, you get basic basically free coaching. For me that we said you're taking the challenge so that you can get results and people I don't say that this is a result you're going to have, but people have many times even watching this podcast, I'll give you some banks just like I do in the challenge people have got. Approved for funding during a that that five days as well.

Joe McCall: Yeah. I'm looking here at this page how to finally get approved for funding without getting denied due to bad credit or low revenue get funded. Challenge. You'll find how to get all the business credit cards you could ever need, even if you have failed before. Three ways to boost your personal and business credit score with less hassle. What to do when banks deny you and won't say why? And I love this too. Because we've talked about this before. You don't just say, okay, I'm sorry. You come back to them and you ask them other questions and there's a really active community. And once people get into your program, which is one of the things I love, there's a lot of at different times, there's a lot of these business credit card companies that pop up that are like, for whatever reason, they're almost begging people to apply. Right, because they want to give business credit cards out. That's how banks make money. They lend it out, right? Yeah. And so you guys in your community keep an active what do you call it, an active database. Database of who these kind of companies are, right?

Joe Lawrence: Yeah. And a lot of times I learn about bank. You think 4000 doing it brings it a lot. But as we're talking, new banks are going out of business, the new banks are being created. So a lot of times I learn from my students using the process. I share with them new banks I had never heard of. Yeah, and I'll just go online to apply. I usually get approved because part of the challenge is getting you ready. Even if you don't need the funding right now, just go get ready so that if you need to pull the trigger on something, you can you can pretty quickly get approved. I'd even go as far as saying consider getting the money ahead of meeting it because like you said at the beginning of this, if you need money badly, it's hard to get. But when you don't have it so bad, it's very easy.

Joe McCall: Can you talk a little bit about just give us two or three different companies, I'm example, that are lending right now.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. I actually have a few here. So the first thing I'll tell you about is one of my favorite cards is called Capital on Tap, which is not Capital One, but it's Capital on Tap. And they are they're basically a fintech company, like a financial technology company. And they use web bank, by the way. That's their underwriter. Those are things we like to look at, like what are they pull underwriting all that. But anyway, so you can you can just go to capital on tap dot com and on a soft pole you can apply and I've done many, many a podcast before where people that are watching live just got it for like 25, 35 grand while we're talking. So we there and they happen to be in a good lending mood and that's a big part of it. And then you have this there's a Marcus by Goldman Sachs business credit card. It has the GM logo on it. Some of these are kind of funky, said, I don't drive GM, I drive Ford All right. It doesn't matter. Like you can go get we had two approaches with them recently, 18 and $20,000. And it's a business credit card. And it's one that you may not have heard of. I could easily tell you, just go to Citibank dot com and apply. But you knew about them before today's podcast. So I want to tell you about some fun ones. Another one is the PayPal business. MasterCard. Whatever time you log into PayPal, it keeps dropping in your face. That's because they really do need to get that card out there. So they're kind of pushing for approvals. PNC, I mentioned them earlier. They're really good. I really like them. They're portfolio lender. They're a regional lender. So they're in other states other than just New Jersey. They're in the Midwest as well. And then Citizens Bank at Citizens Bank dot com, Citizens with a Z, they're in a lot of different states, guys. They're doing 0% PR right now and it's 0% for a year. And they also do no doc business lines of credit. So there's a double right there. You know, one of my students, Craig, for example, he got 50 K business credit from them. No doc. And then the vice president business that we work with at the bank said, do you want to try for the business credit card? We're doing up to 50 K right now. Okay. Sure. Another 50 K, so it's $100,000 you got from one bank without having to show financials, without tax returns. And he's invested into buy and hold real estate with that money, which is always cool.

Joe McCall: All right. So it's funny to somebody doesn't know, let's say you get a $10,000 business credit card and you need to buy this this vacant lot for 3000 bucks or you need to put down $3,000 earnest money deposit or $500 earnest money deposit. And you want to use this? How do you use a credit card or business credit card to buy real estate when you have to send the money to a title company or whatever? Know.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, no problem. So, it's easier of course, if you get the line of credit like we talked about with Citizens Bank because you could literally pull a cash out in person, you could write a check to yourself, you can do a balance, you can do it online transfer, no problem. But what do you do if you just have a business credit card, which is an easier product to get if you just start it like you just started your business a week or two ago. There are websites that you can use that will. Charge your card and then they'll mail a check to the vendor. In this case, if you're using a title company to do your closing, then it would be to the title company as long as it's a legitimate company where the check is going to. So if it's a registered title insurance company, then you're fine. And there's title companies, by the way, that do all 50 states. I just wanted to mention that because if you're thinking outside the box, that might help some of you, but you could send the check straight to the title company. Now they have the money and now you can use it for your closing. What does that cost you? If you did a cash advance on a business credit card, it would be more expensive. But in this case, there's a website you can use it where it's not a cash advance. It's only instead of like 25% cash advance fee, it's only like a 3% transaction fee. So as of the time of recording, this is the website that students of mine have used is one of the big one is Plastiq. Yeah, that's the biggest one because they'll charge they could charge the whole card to the max limit and it's Plastiq with a Q which is kind of funky. It's P L A S T I Q. And there's competitors. So Plastiq that you could also use like Melio? I haven't used Melio personally, but I know people in our Facebook group have, that's Melio payments dot com.

Joe McCall: M E L I O, M as in Mary E L I O payments dot com.

Joe Lawrence: Yeah. I mean, the other one is Plastiq with a Q. Now what did we do before this existed? We would go to the banks and ask for checks and then some banks will allow you to go on a business credit card to have a check, and you can write the check out to whoever you want. Some of them you would have to do cash advances, which again, could be expensive. But if you're actually making hypothetically three grand acquisition cost and you're selling that land for 15 K, then paying 25% on the three grand is $750 if it if you had it out the entire year. Right. So that's to me, if you guys analyze your deals properly and you have a CPA kind of double check things, then you're you should be okay if you're making that great of a return. But now you're spoiled because here we are 15 years later and you got these sites like Plastiq, Melio payments that will just charge a card and then mail the check out, which is pretty cool.

Joe McCall: Yeah. Okay, that's amazing. And I'm looking at some of these right now. Super easy to apply. You guys could probably at noon as we're done with this, go and do it. Any tips that you want to give for people that are applying for these kinds of business credit cards?

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things I would say a quick tip would be make sure your company is presented the way that you want the banker to see you. So when you're if you're in real estate and you're applying for business credit, there's a percentage of banks that are like that. Real estate is not like it's a restricted industry now. It's not as restricted as other industries like cannabis industry or stuff like that, but or crypto and all that stuff. But when you apply for business credit, there's different options that you could different ways that you could set up your entity. So the first company I set up was called JTI Real Estate is obviously a real estate investment company, but the next company that it created because when I do deals, I'll create an LLC for that group of deals. So create your company with a neutral name and a neutral line of business, and it opens up the door to, in case I tried to decide to use that LLC for coaching or for asset management or property manager, construction manager or whatever. Whereas if I name the company like Joe McCall's real estate flipping business, I'm so restricted to that one line of business. So if, if you are creating an additional entity for a legitimate purpose, like if you're, if you're doing another venture or a new exciting opportunity or buying another property in your portfolio, try to create it with a neutral name and a neutral line of business. And then what? And then whether you're up and running already or this is your first time creating company, then the next step I want to share with you is get the companies presence out there on the Internet. Your business does need to be Google-able. We got we got to find you online bankers. We'll look at third party databases. There's automation in A.I. tools and then there's manual processes as well. So if you get your business phone number listed on 411 Yellow Pages, Yelp, Super pages, Facebook, whatever it is, make sure you have the name, address and phone number of your business and basic information out there on the Internet. Then you're in good shape. You don't need a big pretty website to apply for business credit, but at least have it doesn't hurt if you have a website of course, but at least be findable online and you can do that for free with yellow pages and super pages. And all of those are databases.

Joe McCall: That's interesting. I, I need to see if I'm on yellow pages dot com. I don't know if I am, but. Okay, very good. And again, guys, if you want more information about this, this challenge that Joe does, he does it every couple of weeks. So if you go there right now, it may not start for a few days, but go to Joe McCall dot com slash funding, Joe McCall dot com slash funding to go see when his next workshop is. It's a challenge. And the cool thing again about it is it breaks it up into five daily videos that they release and you just go do it and you just go do the stuff and you report back. I did it. And you be at the top of the leaderboard and you're going to learn how to build your credit profile. You're going to walk away with a lot of other resources, like the ones we've already talked about here. There's an online community that can be in there to ask questions. You can get questions answered from Joe himself. Go check it out. So what, $147, I think, right? That's then you're going to get way more than that in credit funding just by doing what he talks about and teaches you in that class. Cool. By the way, Marty, does this name ring a bell?

Joe Lawrence: Yeah, I just saw that. What's up, Marty, man? He knows me. Back in the day when I was telling the story about my first seminar in 2008, and him and I, we used to go to, like, Barnes and Noble's and, like, brainstorm on business ideas and stuff like that.

Joe McCall: So anybody I love that I spent many hours at Barnes and Noble going through their real estate books because I couldn't afford to buy them. But he says, Joe, here is the GOAT. Carlos has a question. T Bank. I'm not sure what that means. Where do we talk about?

Joe Lawrence: It will most likely. I dropped a bank name and I said it fast. I know we said KeyBank, K E Y? Oh maybe that's what.

Joe McCall: Oh, M&T. The letter M and T.

Joe Lawrence: M&T is a great bank.

Joe McCall: We didn't talk about that.

Joe Lawrence: I don't think we did. But while we brought it, since it just came out, check them out. There are local banks. They do in-house underwriting. I have over a quarter million dollars in funding with them. No doc and they're a great relationship community bank. So it's a great bank to build a relationship with.

Joe McCall: Okay, cool. Thank you, Joe. Any final words?

Joe Lawrence: I just want to say, you know, you listen to a lot of things and everything sounds exciting. If you could just take one little baby step, whatever it is, and please implement it, because it does have a huge impact on your life. If you just take that first step, whatever it is, whether it's getting a nav account, whether it's jumping on the funded challenge, or whether it's just calling one bank in your area and asking if they have a business credit card, take action. It will lead to the next step. And that's how you find freedom in life, which you deserve.

Joe McCall: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Joe. Appreciate you being on the show. And again, guys. Oh, yeah. Carlos says here. Yes, later you said it again. Key. All right, cool. Go check out Joe's page. Joe McCall dot com slash funding. Thank you, Joe. We'll see you all later. Bye bye, everybody.