Joe: Hey. What's going on? Happy New Year. This might be actually the first podcast you hear after the first of the new year. For me, I don't know, but man, what a great 2022 it's been. You know, I always kind of am optimistic and glass half full type of guy when it comes to looking at the year past and the upcoming year ahead. I feel like it's just not worth I feel like it's not worth it, you know, to complain and to be bitter about the past or be pessimistic about the future. I like to look at the future with excitement and anticipation. I always believe this, that our best days are still ahead, and sometimes that's what annoys me with certain talk radio on the right, because I, you know, I tend to be more conservative and Republican, right. But what annoys me to no end are the people on the right, on political talk news and all that that complain. They all they do is whine and complain and it's just annoying. It's got to stop. So I don't want 2023 to be a year of complaining, right? Like, let's not do that. That's just one of my one of my daughters is in gymnastics. And we've always tried to be positive. And there's a power behind your words, right? Like it's important you don't say negative things all the time. So we're always kind of on them about that. Like it has to be positive. And so she's had some friends in her gymnastics class that sometimes complain and like say things like, I'll never do that. I'll never learn that skill or this is way too hard. And so she kind of has been telling them, Hey, stop being so negative. And she complains us a little bit about it. So we told her to say, Hey, what's that smell? What's that smell? Do you guys feel? Oh, it's just stinking thinking. And she's actually been doing it and she says they don't laugh, they don't think it's funny, but whatever. Right.

Joe: So let's not be stinking thinkers. Let's be let's put some cologne on. Right. I'm not saying let's try to make a dead horse smell good, but let's not be so negative. I'm excited about 23. I'm excited about 22. It was a good year. A lot of good things happened for us in our business. I know a lot of people still doing well, still doing a lot of deals in 22, even though things have changed. Now, here's the thing that you got to think about, and this is kind of what I wanted to talk about on this podcast with change, with disruption, with new market direction. You know, because we were in a seller's market, we're now in a buyer's market. Are we in a recession or not? I don't know. Feels like it. Inflation is high coming down. Maybe interest rates are coming down a little bit as well. And but where there is change and disruption in the market, there is opportunity. There's always opportunity and wealth never disappears. It only moves it transfers from one thing to another thing, one bucket to another bucket. Right. And so if you are of the opinion of the abundance mindset, like, okay, good. All right, so markets are just changing right now. Where is the cheese moved? Where has the cheese moved to? Where is the new opportunities that are out there? And it could just be subtle, little shifts. You know, maybe right now selling expensive homes is not the best thing to do. Maybe selling vacant land to homebuilders is not the best thing to do. But there are people still buying land today. There's still people buying houses today. So we need to find out who they are. You do a little bit of research, let the market tell you, don't worry about trying to predict it and figure out in advance in the future what it's going to do is the market moves slowly. And if you're excuse me, if you're a student of the market, you can see these trends as they happen and you will have time to adjust and fix whatever your methods of strategy are. Right. Does that make sense? So be careful listening to the hype of people that are complaining and crying that the sky is falling because it's not. Things are going to be okay. And there are still people that are buying properties right now with bank loans as investors buying investment properties that are still cash flowing. So it's not like it's the end of the world because interest rates have doubled. Still, historically, it's very low. Interest rates and homes are still selling. So take a look at your market. Find out what is selling, what's not.

Joe: And I also want to talk about this momentum. Momentum is going to be really, really important. If you want to dominate your niche, your space, your market, the city that you're in, whatever you're doing, you need to remember momentum. Momentum is real important. You know, it's like if you're pulling a train with a. Chain or a big heavy truck or something like that. Right. And as you're pulling this train or truck that's in neutral, I'm saying it's like really hard at first. But the more you pull it, the harder you pull it without quitting or giving up, the easier it gets. Y because of momentum. And as we come into 2023, I've always said the three M's to success are marketing momentum and getting a mentor. So you're my advice to you for 23 as we go into this new year is to be positive, put a smile on your face and start marketing. Put the pedal to the metal. Now is not the time to slow down your marketing. Now is the time to pour it on and do more of it. And that builds momentum because with momentum you start it's going to be hard at first, man. It's going to be real hard. You're going to get a lot of nos, you're going to get a lot of frustrations and you're going to be doing the marketing or whatever it is that you're doing, sending the mail, doing the PPC, doing the door knocking even now sometimes or cold calling or whatnot. It's hard at first. It's a slugfest. It's all it's brutal. But you give it 3 to 4 months of consistent effort without quitting or without giving up. You're going to find that because of that momentum that you've been building now, all of a sudden the leads are going to start coming in and in the end you're going to start getting that momentum where leads are coming in and your job now becomes disqualifying leads. Instead of trying to turn every lead you get into a deal and the leads that you start getting and the deals you're going to start doing it not from the new marketing that you're doing today, but the marketing and the follow up that you did three or four months ago. Because now you're doing so much marketing, you got more leads coming in than you can handle. And you're not chasing every seller. They're chasing you because you're not being a motivated buyer anymore. You're only doing deals with motivated sellers. So this whole thing is like people quit way too early. People quit way too early. I want you to decide today that 2023 is going to be the year that you build momentum in your business and you will not slow down your marketing. You've got to have a scorecard and a marketing plan where you track every day or every week. How much marketing is going out the door? How many text messages, phone calls, cold calls, dials, number of hours that your daily, whatever it is and however you track it, how many money, how much money you're putting into PPC? How many letters or postcards that you're sending for me with vacant land? That's all we do. Just send simple letters and it works. It works really, really well. Maybe there's cheaper things we could do. Better things. But, you know, it got it down to a science. Now, I just know that how many letters we need to send to do deals. So we just keep on doing the letters. We keep on doing the marketing. And I want to encourage you. If you want to succeed this year and if you want to do consistent deals, then you won't get a lot of good base hits. Momentum. Momentum. Momentum. Momentum. Because then what you're doing, the marketing are getting the leads. You're coming in and then you start talking to sellers. You start making offers, you start following up. And it becomes really, really easy. It's always hard.

Joe: Anytime you're in a new business, it's always hard to get started. The first three, four, six months are always the hardest because you're building that momentum and if you're in a competitive market, you have more momentum that you have to build. I remember early in my investing career, back in 2007 and eight, before I quit my job, I was getting so frustrated because was this is 2006, seven and eight. I would try to schedule the marketing on my calendar, but man, I was busy. I was working a 50,60 hour a week job. When I get home, I want to spend time with my wife and kids. And it was I would try to time block and schedule marketing really early in the morning, whether it was sending letters, I was doing handwritten letters or scheduling. I was doing voicemail broadcasts at the time and. Ringlets, voicemail drops or whatever. And man, I just could never get it done. And I would go through these vicious cycles of do a bunch of marketing, get a bunch of leads, get overwhelmed, right? And so turn the marketing off so I could work the leads and send the offers, and then I'd get a few deals under contract. And I would work real hard to try to sell the deals and turn around and make some money. Great, awesome. But it been two or three months since I did any new marketing and my pipeline is completely empty, so I was excited. Make some money. This is great, but I turn around. It's not like it's just a light switch that you can turn off and on and leads automatically start flooding in again. It's not like that. It takes time to build momentum. It takes 2 to 3 months to build momentum. Momentum is everything in this business. All right, so then I'd start doing marketing again. And then by the time the leads finally started coming in, I started getting offers accepted. I was out of money and I was stressed. And then I became this desperate, motivated buyer trying to turn non deals into deals and chasing sellers, you know, like they say, where you shouldn't be a deal creator, you should be deal finders, you should be out there finding deals, not creating them. Big, huge difference and smells as smell sellers can smell your desperation a mile away. And if you don't have, would it be nice not to be desperate for a deal? How do you get there? By being consistently marketing all the time. So I finally figured it out. I said, All right, I if I'm not doing this marketing every day, then it's just not going to going to happen. I need to get somebody else to do all this marketing for me and for me. That's when I hired a virtual assistant. They started doing all my marketing for me, and that's when the lead started coming in consistently, and there was a lot of leads. I was doing two or three different types of marketing. We had a scorecard, we tracked it all, and I was just making sure that it was getting done. And then I had a I knew what I needed to do. I had a virtual assistant to do it for me and it just got done. Then I got more leads than I can handle, which is great, right? Because when I talk to a seller, it's only a few minutes. If they're not ready or motivated to do a deal today, that's fine. I just send them an offer anyway and follow up with them every 30 days until they are ready. But I'm not spending hours with them on the phone trying to turn a non deal into a deal. All I'm doing is just sending offers. Making offers. Making offers. Making offers.

Joe: Well, anyway, I hope that encourages you maybe a little bit. We're coming into 23. If you're new to the business, just remember this man. You're not in the real estate investing business. You're in the marketing business. You're in the marketing business. And you need to have momentum. If you're going to succeed, you've got to get that momentum behind you because then it becomes easy, becomes easy, and deals start falling into your laps, quote unquote, because you've had that momentum. And sometimes, again, it takes 3 to 6 months. So don't give up. Don't quit so early. Be persistent with this stuff. Marketing is everything in this business and everything is marketing. It all comes down to marketing because if you've got a lot of leads, guess what? You're going to do a lot of deals. So anyway, I got to go. I am just driving home from getting a haircut. I got a big day tomorrow, I got a lot of work to do. And then my wife and I are flying to Texas just for one night, two days to hang out with some of my wife's family. And they're going to have a good time. It's going to be a lot warmer in Texas than it is in Saint Louis. It's going to be in the sixties there and maybe thirties, twenties and thirties here. So I'm looking forward to getting down to where it's warm. Might go to Turks and Caicos sometime this late winter, early, early spring. So I'm excited about that and appreciate you all. Okay. We'll see you later. Take care. Oh, by the way, that third arm, what was the third M again? Marketing Momentum Mentor. If you want a mentor, I'd encourage you to go check out my webinar on land investing. If you go to a simple land class dot com, simple land class dot com, we have a program. It's like a business in a box. Basically, we will do your marketing for you. You get coached and you get the course. There's a community and it's a pretty amazing it's an amazing system. There's nothing else like it out there. So go watch the webinar if you haven't already. Simple land class dot com, simple land class dot com and oh yeah, you get your money back after you implement the course, you go through it, you implement it, you make at least 25 written offers and you send me a video testimonial and I'll refund you the course. You don't even have to do a deal. But I do that for a lot of reasons and I talk about them in the class. One of the big reasons I do that is because some of you guys will bring me deals and I might buy your deal. I might invest with you and your deals. And I know that if you take massive action, you're going to have great success. And I'm doing whatever I can to help my students do deals. That's what this is all about for me. So go check it out. I know you'll enjoy it. Simple land class dot com. I do the webinar twice a day. It's prerecorded, but you'll learn a lot from it. Explain all of the steps from A to Z and how to do these vacant land deals. And you're going to learn how to build momentum. And I think you're going to find in 23 that these kinds of deals are the easiest ones to do, especially as we're coming into this market environment. All right. See you guys. God bless.