Joe:   Hey, do you want to know the secret to real estate investing success? Here it is. Ready? It's follow the fat man. All right. Now, I want to explain why that's kind of funny. Maybe. Maybe not if you're fat, but. All right. Listen, I am driving right now to the airport. It's Sunday night. I'm kind of bummed. But there's a three day marketing conference down in Orlando that I'm heading to. So I'm just driving the night before, flying the night before to the conference. It's going to be good. A lot of networking, a lot of what's working now. And yeah, I'm going to be doing a lot of the follow the fat man at this conference. And so what do I mean by that? Well, let me give you a little back story. I was camping with my wife. This was, I think, before kids. Wow. This must have been back in 2002, 2001. And we were in northern Arkansas with some friends and we decided it would be a great idea to go crazy. Have you ever done caving? Where? Like, maybe they call it spelunking? I don't know what it's called, but like, it's freaky, right? You go down these holes in the ground, then you think, there's no way I could fit through that. And you get in there and you know, they tell you don't wear any kind of clothes that you want to keep because it'll get so dirty you won't be able to even wash them out. You have to wear a helmet or a hard hat. You have to have a flashlight on your forehead, you know, and you crawl through these really extremely claustrophobic tunnels in the ground for some reason for, you know, five minutes. And then you get into this big cavern. That's where you can stand up. And it's pretty cool once you make it. And so it's one of those where you got to like, you can't lift your head up, you're laying down, you go in there. So we started where the guy said, All right, this is where we go in. And you're thinking where? And he says, Right there. And you look down, that's called the corkscrew. And you're basically you go down headfirst and you corkscrew your body into this thing. And I'm thinking, there's no way, no, this isn't going to work. Like, I want to have kids someday. I'd only get stuck in this thing. And so sure enough, we're with about, I don't know, ten, 12 guys and one, two, three, four. They just disappear in this thing. They go down in there like they've done this before, like it's no big deal. And so I'm looking around thinking I'm not doing this. And I had a brilliant idea, an epiphany, like a light bulb. Follow the fat guy.

Joe:   So I looked for the fattest guy that I thought I was fatter than me. And I said, I'm going to get behind him. Right. And if he can make it down there, that I can make it down there. So I got behind him. I didn't tell him this, of course. Right. You know, I lost about 30 pounds about a year and a half ago and I kept most of it off. I'm trying to lose about ten more pounds now, trying to get down to 180. That's my goal. So, yeah, I'm getting behind the fat guy and I don't know if he's fatter than me, but he I think he is like, he looks a little fatter than me. At the time I was probably 220 and so all right, he goes in and he gets down into this corkscrew and gets down and his feet disappear. I'm like, All right, here we go. And I go down after him. And, you know, it's one of those you get in there and you're like, You got to just close your eyes, take a deep breath, Calm down. Tell yourself not to hyperventilate, not to spaz out and just keep on going. You keep on following the fat guy and the fat guy made it through. And I just knew. All right, well, if he can make it through, I could make it through. Well, it was pretty scary, but I made it. I'm still alive. This was 20 years ago. Would I ever do it again? No, definitely not, man. It was like you pull yourself with your fingers, you push yourself with your toes, you're laying flat. And there's just no. I can't imagine trying to go. Who is the guy, the first guy to go into these things? You ever think about that? Like, who was the idiot that thought this would be a good idea? I'm just going to see if I can fit. I'm going to try to go in this thing and see if I don't get stuck. Well, yeah.

Joe:   And so I learned a lesson that I think applies to real estate best because, you know, they say you don't want to be the pioneer in something. You don't want to be the guy or girl that first goes and does something because pioneers are the ones with all the arrows in their back. Now, God bless pioneers. God bless that guy, the first guy who went in that cave. Right. But I imagine there's a lot of people that died going into the wrong caves trying to figure out if it was a good like can you imagine the guys that go diving in scuba gear into caves and like, how do they know or the guys that just dive freestyle into caves, try to get through, hopefully on the other side? Well, with business, this relates to all of business statutes. Real estate, like success leaves clues. And you can follow people that have done things before and still have a lot of tremendous success. You know, sometimes we are always looking for the unicorn. We're always looking to be the next bright, shiny object, the next, you know, we want to find the next secret. We want to be the only one doing something in a brand new industry, in a brand new market. We want to be trailblazers. We don't want to be followers. We want to be leaders. I get it. I get it right. So but when you're getting started, you look at some of the most successful businesses out there, like Apple, like Tesla, they didn't invent the iPhone. They didn't invent the electric. Cars, you know. But they found that there was some interest in it. There were some people that had tried it before and failed. They watched them and learned how to do it better. And they built a better widget like Apple with the remember the iPod that came out. There were other MP3 players out there. In fact, there were I remember back then there were MP3 players that were better than the iPod that came out. But I mean the least in my opinion, because I was a Windows guy at the time, I didn't understand the artsy fartsy thing that Apple is trying to do. And but you know what? With Apple, at the end of the day, they built up a better battery player and then they built a better phone. They were not the first all touchscreen phone. There were other people that were doing that. I remember at the time, boy, this was back in 2003. I had a tablet from Compaq. Ah, HP is HP or Compaq. I got it was like an iPad. And it was okay. You know, kind of did the job. It was carried not as that practical, but it was pretty cool. Well, then Apple comes along after they see what other people are doing and they make it a whole lot better. So in business, one of the things that I always try to do, what I teach people is, listen, don't try to go find a new market and try to find a new thing that nobody else is doing before. There's a reason why nobody is doing deals in that area. There's a reason why nobody is flipping those kinds of homes in that area because it just doesn't work. They've tried it before, Right. There's a reason why we send ugly postcards. It's because they work. And we've tried other postcards that were pretty and glossy and photos and all that, and they just don't work as well. So don't try to reinvent the wheel. Just copy and model what is already work.

Joe:   So when you're looking for a market to flip houses or to flip land or whatever, find where people are already buying a bunch of land, find out where the money is flowing, where is the demand, and you just want to be a fly on the elephant's back and then get into that market, go to where the money is already at and just try to do it better than anybody else. Now, certainly there's a there's a there's a limit to that. Some markets may be too competitive in some areas. It might be too hard to make a normal 10,000, $20,000 wholesale fee. So in some of those biggest busier, more competitive markets, you know, you might be good if you make a $5,000 wholesale fee, but you don't want to go into the new markets or nobody's doing deals either. Right. Because there's just no demand. There's one of my clients found some tax deeds in a small town, middle of nowhere, Mississippi, and he thought they were a great deal because the counties assessed them for $10,000. But he's buying them for $2,000. And there's homes that have been built in the last 10 or 20 years in that area. But I dove into it. I was like, you know, maybe it is, but I'm not willing to lend money on these deals because there's just not enough demand. I don't see any other sold vacant lots in the last year in a 20 mile radius. There just wasn't much. Nothing against Mississippi. I've driven through there. It's beautiful. What's at stake? It's Mississippi, right? Like, whose are you going to buy If you're looking to invest in land? Are you going to buy land in Mississippi or in Florida, in Georgia or Mississippi, South Carolina or Mississippi? So if you're going to be picking a market, I probably wouldn't suggest Mississippi. Or how about this? If you did want to invest in Mississippi and, you know, go find the counties and the zip codes where there are or there is already a lot of competition, a lot of people already flipping land or houseboats because there are people in Mississippi that want to go hunting that, you know, are looking for recreational land. There are people building new homes in Mississippi. I get it. So it don't just go where the tax deeds are or the foreclosures are who people are paying their taxes. Go follow the money. Follow the money. You know that Jerry Maguire movie, right? Show me the money.

Joe:   So it's actually really, really simple. You need to stop thinking that you know what? I got to reinvent the wheel or man, everybody's doing that. I can't do that because everybody's doing it. There's a reason why everybody's doing it. Because it works. It works. I always have to preface this kind of stuff because it just it doesn't mean that you can go into like for vacant land, for example, Lee County, Charlotte County, those are the hardest two counties for flipping vacant land right now or buying vacant land. And there's just a lot of people buying land there. And the sellers are getting bombarded with offers and things like that. So if you were going to go into that area, you take a guess to be a little different, right? You got to be okay with maybe doing quick little 3000, four, $5,000 deals. You're not going to be finding the big $20,000 wholesale deals in those areas. So just be aware of that. But at the same time, I don't want you to go flipping vacant land in Vermont. Nobody cares about Vermont. I'm just kidding. Nobody is really buying land in Vermont when you compare it to other states. So follow the fat man. If the fat man is doing cold calling, then, baby, you can do cold calling. If the fat man is sending ugly postcards, send postcards. So there's things that you can after that, like you can test different kinds of ugly postcards. You can test different kinds of lists. But until you've actually done a deal. Just do what everybody else is doing. Don't complicated and don't think it's invalid because other people are doing it and you don't want to be a copycat or you, you know, you want to be original or something like that. Just model success. That's the secret formula and you'll make it out alive. You do a deal and then you start looking at, okay, well, let me test this. Now that you've got some money to test things with, you know, you can test a different market, you can test different kinds of mail, you can test different kinds of marketing. And this is why I am going to this conference right now in Orlando is because there are other people there that are having a lot of success doing what I want to do in the marketing world. All right. So I'm going there to find out what's working now. I don't want to know what's working three or 4 or 5 years ago, what's working now. And a lot of people that come to this stuff, you know, they don't mind sharing their quote unquote secrets because you know what? There are no secrets. Nope, there isn't. There are no secrets.

Joe:   So follow the fat guy in your industry, whether it's selling cars, selling insurance, selling websites, social media, marketing, real estate deals and commercial. A lot of guys I just interviewed a friend who's doing self-storage. You know, he bought a bunch of storage units, made some mistakes. That is making a lot of money. Guess what? He did try to figure it out on his own. He found a coach, hired a mentor who was fatter than him money wise and did really, really well. You know, related. Well, you know, I'll add to that another podcast because kind of related to this is another analogy that's. But that's it for now. I appreciate your I haven't been doing podcasts much lately, but I'm going to get back into it. I go through phases. I've been doing the podcast since 2011 and I go through times where I'm just like, Yeah, I'll do some podcasts, I do a bunch of them and then I will do much for a little while. And so I'm getting back on the bandwagon again. I appreciate you guys. Take care. See you. Bye bye.