Joe:  What's up? Welcome to the Real Estate Investing Mastery Show. I haven't been this excited in a long time about a podcast because I'm interviewing a good friend of mine, Bill Allen, who's been on the show before. This guy. He's got an amazing story and we only have 30 minutes and I wish we had more time. And this Bill, maybe we'll do a part two, but he's got something really cool coming up and I wanted to get him on to talk about it with you all. He's got a challenge coming up on raising capital, raising private money for your deals. And I've learned a lot from Bill over the years. One of the things I do but I think we've talked about this Bill, but it's been a long time. Like one of the things in my main land flipping courses, I tell them, hey, if you want to learn how to flip vacant land, go to Bill's thing here and I give them a link to that class. He did. And so I know you've helped literally thousands of people raise money for their real estate deals. And I know this is so important. This is such an important topic. I talk about it a lot, digging your well before you're thirsty. And so you've got to learn how to raise private money. It's there's probably the two most important skills in a real estate investing business are how to find the deals and then how to find the money. Right. Because you might have a lot of money, but you start doing enough deals that that capital is going to be deployed and you're going to need private money from other investors so that you can do more deals if you want to grow and if you want to scale your business. So this is a really important topic. Bill, I'm glad you're here on the show. How are you, man?

Bill:  I'm doing great, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe:  Would you agree that one of the most important skills in real estate is learning how to raise money?

Bill:  Yeah, and use the right word. It's a skill. And I think a lot of what we're learning, especially when investors are early on, are you're getting the edge to become an investor and try to figure out, do I flip land? Do I and do I wholesale, do I flip houses? Do I go be an apartment investor? Whatever you're learning a skill, you're learning skill, underwriting a deal, you're learning a skill of negotiation. You're learning how to look at a deal very quickly and say this is or is not something that I want to spend my time on. And I look at money the same thing when I try to figure out what my focus was going to be in 2025. Coming into this year, I have taught about hiring. I've taught people how to negotiate deals. I've talked about sales, marketing, running a business, the operational side of a business. But when I come back to it, like everything that I do, revolves around being the guy who talks about money and having the skill of just having a conversation with somebody around money. So once you have that skill, the cool thing is you never lose it. You learn a skill. So you're right that I think that skill is the number one, the number one skill in real estate investing. If you have that, you can get into anything. If you do something all the time. They want me to raise money for their deals all the time. They don't want to learn it.

Joe:  Well, guess what comes to you when you have the money?

Bill:  Yeah.

Joe:  Opportunity deals, the deals and the opportunities. So if you have the money, the deals will come. So sometimes if we wait till we find the deal and then you're, like, panicking and freaking out, Okay, where am I going to get the money from? But imagine if you've got the money and you just start telling people, Hey, I'm looking for deals. Who's got some deals? You're going to get so many people that will bring the bring you there deals. This is interesting because this is why this is so important. Back in 2012, we saw a bunch of money coming back from into the market, from hedge funds, and all of a sudden we stopped. Well, I was doing a lot of seller marketing and I was getting frustrated because I got I got frustrated trying to sell deals that we have instead of deals that people wanted. And there's a big difference in that. Right. And so I started thinking, what if we became the hedge fund in town, right? And so I started contacting all the buyers who had a lot of money. And I started asking them, What do you want? And so now then I became I was the guy with all the money. And I start I stopped all of our seller marketing and we had tons of people bringing us deals because we had access to the money. Now, they weren't private investors necessarily. There were hedge funds and other buyers, but I was bringing them deals and acting like a middleman because I had the money and I remember people bringing me deals. Bill They were just happy to make $500 on this deal, Right? And some realtors were happy They didn't want they said, listen, I don't even want any commissions on this. Just help my client with this, sell this property because I promised them I would sell it. And I had and we got two days left or whatever. And so I had people bringing me so many opportunities because I was the guy with the money.

Bill:  Yeah. The thing that I see is I got a question the other day as well. I'm a wholesaler, like I need money or I had another guy. He was like, Well, he was flipping land and he was like, Tell me how pretty much I just I put this in our contract and I just sell it to somebody. I make five grand. I said, So tell me your business model. And both of them. I said, Well, a capitalized wholesaler will always be a wholesaler with no money every single time. Not only are you more confident when you walk in, I don't mean you have to have $1 million in your bank account sitting there paying interest on it. I mean, you just have a list of potential private money lenders that you can call if a deal comes up. And so I gave him an example of a house that I was a volume wholesaler. This was in 2017, 2018, right around that time. And I had had somebody call me and they had a house that was worth about $170,000 is in Pensacola, Florida. About seven years ago it 170 grand. It was brand new. It got built a year before they were building an apartment building in their backyard and they hated it. And so they just wanted to move. And there. Are willing to take $100,000 for this house. That was $170,000 value. And we didn't even have to clean it. They moved out. We bought it, and we just put it back. We put a sign in the yard that day and sold it for 170 grand. And so I could wholesale that deal to somebody else if I didn't have the money. But all I needed was about 105 grand to buy it, close on it and then hold it for I think we sold it and probably closed in 40 days and we made about $50,000, maybe 55, after paying a realtor somewhere around there. But I probably could have made 20 on it, 15 or 20 if I was a wholesaler. So that's what a capitalized wholesaler can do, is it gives you options, like money gives you options. Same thing if you're flipping land. If I can, I can buy it and then maybe owner finance it over a period of time instead of selling it to somebody for cash. Then I have the opportunity to make a lot more money over that time. Owner financing that in the end. And that opens up to a lot more buyers, right?

Joe:  Especially with the anti wholesaling regulations that are coming out of the industry now. Right. Like you've got to learn how to you've got to have the funds to close on these deals. And when you're competing in a competitive market, everybody else from YouTube, university wholesaling is like competing against these deals. You can actually close. You can close in two weeks if you want, and it's not a big deal. And so being it gives you so much more confidence when you're talking to the sellers where you can come in and say, You know what? I know you're getting some other offers, but ask them if they are going to actually close on the deal or are they going to wholesale it. Ask them, are they do they have some kind of clause in their weasel clause that says they can get out of it if they can't find another buyer? Or do they say anything on there that says and or assigns? Now you should take their offer. But let me just give you I'm playing the devil's advocate here. Right. Because, like, you can warn that seller about these other wholesalers out there. These are you know what I'm saying? Like, they don't actually close on their deals. Right. They're just going to assign it. And if they can't find another buyer, they're going to cancel the contract. So if you've got a better offer, you should take it. But just ask him these questions. Would you ask him to show you the HUD statements or the closing statements of the last five deals they've closed? Right. Or look them up and ask them, what do you do with this deal? So like when you have the money and you can close on these deals, it's so much you're going to do more deals and you're going to do bigger profit deals because you've got that confidence behind you. Does that make sense, what I'm saying?

Bill:  Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I think if you're new and you're listening to that, you're like, Well, but you know, I don't have a lot of confidence. Like, I'm just getting started. I don't have a track record. I don't have the HUDs, so it's hard for me to say that if that's you. What I would say to you is I look at the real estate business. You're running like two tracks. Like a train, right? A train runs on two tracks. One one. I'm like, okay, I'm trying to figure out how to raise capital now for a potential future deal. And that's just having conversations is planting seeds and watering seeds over time to build up somebody who might be interested in investing with me and making a great return in the future. The other one is finding those deals. So usually what I get is I'm brand new. I don't really know what to say, like, why would anybody invest with me? And so the biggest piece advice I have for you if you're new, is you might not be able to talk like that with the seller, right? You might, But you might say ideally you're walking in and you have some investors, right? So if you think about having those conversations around money, they just give you a lot of confidence walking in. I figure if I have $1 million in my pocket or a couple hundred grand in my pocket, a lot more confident walking into these appointments with the sellers than I am if I'm not sure if I'm going to get it closed. And they can smell that desperation like desperation has a smell to it for sure. Whether it's raising money at the last minute, right where you're like, just okay, can you wired over today, like, I need it right now. Nobody wants to invest like that. Or a seller can feel that. You're not sure if you can get it done. Not overly confident. Right. So when I tell new investors, new people who are raising capital is you've got to find people that already trust you. So trust is the reason why people invest with me and why I don't mess with you. Whether that's trust over time of building a real estate empire or have you done a lot of transactions or you've made people a lot of money before and you can transfer that trust from other experiences. But if you're new, what do you need to do is you need to think about all the other things that you've done in your life. Like what other areas of your life have you been successful in and who was involved with you around that time? So when I got started in real estate and I was raising capital from the very beginning, I realized that I took a lot of my experience from the military. I was a Navy pilot, and so most of my investors were either family friends or flew with me in the military early on. And what they did, they saw me as a winner in that area. And they were like, you know what? Bill's done really well flying. He's had a great career. Or my family who has seen me come up, have been successful in other things that I've done. They said, you know what, He's been successful there. I think he'll be successful here. And that's what you have to do early on, which is the number one question I get on the challenge or anytime I teach raising money, it's I'm just getting started. Nobody's going to believe in me or trust that I'm going to do a good job. And so you're right. Like I probably wouldn't invest with you so well.

Joe:  The other thing that's important is you could find somebody who does have the money and JV with them on your first few deals. Right. Because if you had somebody that you knew what their criteria was, what kind of deals they were looking for, you could go to that seller with. That same confidence knowing. All right, so if I get this deal under contract, I'm going to be partnering on it with this guy or gal and they're going to provide the money. So there are different ways and I know you're going to cover this in your five day challenge, but there are other strategies to gain that confidence, to borrow somebody else's confidence, if you for sure can't raise the money right now.

Bill:  For sure, there's going to be like, we'll talk about deal structure, like the whole structure, all the paperwork. But like what Joe's talking about right now is the JV. So very early on when I just when I started, I had done my first house. I took a loan out of my for A1K and I got a bank loan for my house. That's how I did my first flip, right? And then after that, I met a guy in a mastermind. He had a bunch of money, he had a couple of million dollars, and he said, I'll finance everything for you. You don't have to worry about money, but I want 50% of the profits. So what? Joe Sorry about Joint Venture JV is that's what we did for the next six houses. So I was buying it courthouse auction and I was giving up half the profits. And so what I learned it was easy though is like the easy button. So I was hitting the easy button, but I was giving up 20 to $25,000 in profit on each deal. We were making 40 to 50 K on each house. I was doing all the work. This guy was like wiring in the purchase and the rehab costs. I was even pans the utilities and little things. I didn't want to bug them for the little stuff. I had some money and so what I learned was I think that works. But what I want to teach you is how do you avoid that from the beginning? Because I think a lot of people start there, but they give up. The only reason that I would say do that is if you're if you feel like you want to share some of the risk and so you share some of the downside with that. So that can put you in your comfort zone. But when I want to when I want to help you do is be confident about raising money, because I all of you have relationships in your life of people that believe in you and trust you already. And all you need to do is be coached up a little bit on how you transfer some of that trust and how you're confident in what you're doing. And then it's about running the numbers and all the other things that Joe teaches you that are totally fine running the numbers, understanding that it's a deal, protecting yourself have some risk protection by offering the right price and understand the exit strategies and all the stuff that you learn here with Joe. But if you can bolt on the money piece, I mean, I've got money at 6% interest, okay. On a balloon, not even a monthly payment on 6% interest right now. It's insane. And you don't have to give up the farm to the investor. I feel like all real estate investors, they work so hard to negotiate the deal with the seller, but then they lay down for the money person. Those are like, yeah, I'll give you half for sure. Bring the money, I'll give you half. I'm not doing that. And if I look back, it was a part of my story. It was a part of me learning. But I want to teach you how not to give away like the first $300,000 in profit that you could keep and pay your lenders like 40 or 50 K and you keep the other two 4250 that I gave away.

Joe:  Yeah. That's important again is it's maybe I could get it out of your new and you've not done a deal before. This sounds a little intimidating, but let me tell you something. It's not that hard. It's not that hard at all. And we all know people that have some money that they would love to invest. And you can and you're going to talk about this. You can set it up where they their money is safe. It's protected. Right. It's only lent on good deals because one of my fears when I was getting started borrowing private money was like I would lose the my friend's money. But you can set it up right where you know, it's secured against a property, right? You're only borrowing the money on a good deal that has a lot of equity in it. So sometimes, though, if you set it up right, the worst thing that can happen would be that investor gets the property back and they get their capital back plus a bunch of extra money because it was such a good deal. Does that make sense?

Bill:  Absolutely. It's funny when you think about it, you said something that that I feel like is another kind of limiting belief that people have a lot of this a lot of this is just your belief system. And honestly, it really starts around like your background with money, like your upbringing. I remember when I was a kid, my dad would I had these friends that we lived in Southern California in Thousand Oaks and I had these twin friends that lived up the hill in this really like big house, like the bottom of the hill, and these like, little dinky house we could barely afford. And they were up there. So my dad was like, I was like, Hey, how come we don't have a pool, Dad? He's like, My friends have a pool, but they live up there. And we lived down here like they're the haves. Were the have nots a little bit or money was tight, like money doesn't grow on trees. We never went on vacations as a kid, things like that. So my mindset around money and my dad was very good with money, like he was smart and he was investor. But I feel like he always had this thing with people that have money and people that don't have money. And that kind of got instilled in me and it was something that I had to break. So I think all of us, we start from somewhere, right? And having those conversations around money are the key. Like understanding that this is an opportunity for people, that there's more money out there than there is deals. Like if we can believe that there's over $40 trillion with $1 trillion in retirement accounts, over $40 trillion in retirement accounts, and 28 trillion of that is making little to no interest right now. A lot of it's in cash. There's $5 trillion in retirement accounts. That's just in cash right now. It's just not even deployed anywhere, Not in the market. Not anywhere. And so. What I realized my job became was how do I educate people that, like you said, Joe, they can be secured to real estate. They can have a fixed return. That's not variable. It's not frustrating. And give them an opportunity to invest with me without having to do any of the work. And what's cool is when I look at all my investors right now, they love me like they're there. I try to give them the money back. They don't want it back. They're like, Don't give me this back. Like you keep this. I do not want this back. Like, I want my monthly payment. I'm on my quarterly payment. I want my annual payment, whatever. I just keep growing it. Don't give it back to me. I don't know what to do with it anymore. And that's what I want to help people build. I want to help people build like an investment team with them as they grow inside their real estate company, an organization that they can bring this capital in and feel really good about and not be scared that they're going to lose it. I mean, when I hear the word lose, it's, I misplaced your money. That's not going to happen. We're going to build a system like a repeatable system of capital raising that brings in money on a regular basis. And people are so grateful and thankful that you help them. So it's a little bit different like view and look on it than I think a lot of other people are teaching. Number one, I'm really important. I emphasize to be yourself and you don't have to be anybody different than you. You don't have to be you don't have to say the same things as me. And it's not selling. I do not sell anybody anything. All I do is open up an opportunity and let them walk through the door just like a seller. Can you imagine? You walk into a house and you're, like, convincing somebody to sell their house? Like, we don't do that. Nobody does that.

Joe:  Well, it's important to have a plan, right? Like a program to. You can tell the investors and this is where a lot of the confidence can come from when you've got a good plan that you can show the private investor, this is our program, This is what kind of debt deals that we do, This is what we pay. This is how this works. This is our marketing plan. This is I have this little one page. I think I got this idea from you a long time ago. Like a real simple business plan that I give to my private investors that is very simple and laid out. But what you don't want to do is go to the private investor and say what I'm doing. I'm doing these kinds of deals and these kinds of deals, and I'm thinking about doing this. You got to have certainty and confidence, right? And you need to tell them what your program is. And so I want to give everybody because I'm doing it. I wish we had more time, Bill. I want to talk about this challenge you've got coming up and you're doing it multiple times throughout the month. And I want to give everybody a link right now at Joe mccall.com/money, Joe mccall.com/money. And it's a five day class masterclass or a challenge on raising private money. Day one is the flip funding process why most people get it wrong. Day two is how to find deal funders who will beg you to use their money. I love it. Day three is how to set up and structure the deals without complicated paperwork. Day four is creating an automated and repeatable deal funding machine and day five is how to max out your capital and get more actually more capital than you need. This is crazy. Talk a little bit more, Bill, about what you're going to be doing in this challenge.

Bill:  Yeah. So day five is like one of my favorite days actually. So I've done this a few times and every single time I do it and my whole goal this year is just to perfect this thing, to just put capital raisers out in the marketplace because I know I cannot people like, why are you doing this? Why you teach other people how to raise money? Why should just raise all the money as like $40 trillion? I got This is no possible way I can do that. And most the people that are going to invest with you are not going to mess with me. That's just how it works. And so day five, I recorded a call with an investor, a potential investor that I had met in a reIa meeting. He did not know I was recording the call and I recorded the call and I went through my entire script and process. The consultative approach, not salesy, just asking questions is very much open ended questions that I ask, just like you're talking to a seller and what I do on the fifth day. It's been so fun. I just pause it at different points along the way and I say, Hey, 99% of people would go this direction at this moment, but this is why I'm about to go this way. And I'm actually like breaking down the call of exactly why I said what I said and why I was doing what I was doing. And each time I do this, it's a little bit different. So and people can actually you can actually hear the conversation. You can put yourself in that position and learn from that. So that's why my favorite is like scripting and how to like you don't have to have sales training, you don't have to have a huge sales background. You do have to care about people and be yourself on those calls and you'll see people that have gone through this are like, that was the most transformational thing that I've ever seen. Like that's helped me. That's exactly what I need. I go through all the paperwork. So promissory notes, personal guarantees, mortgages, deeds of trust. I demystify the paperwork. That's usually what stops people's so confusing show you like the easy button to hit for the paperwork. It's not difficult. It's not challenging. I talk about IRAs and four one case and how to unlock retirement accounts. That's impossible. You've got to shorten marketing strategies about how to find leads. I actually have a full this I call. It's got a much longer name. But this matrix that I build of people in your life to actually build out, there's a lot of tactical stuff on there where we actually had workshop and you go through with me and I show you exactly how I build out all of my potential investors. I go back through like my Rolodex, my history, my upbringing, like different times in my life where I actually find investors and I rank them. In a scoring system so we can know most likely to have money and invest with us. And really just it's a very simple structure. I'm an engineer, so I like to format something in a system that can be repeated and then hand it off. So like my assistant is watching, going through the trainings and things like that, and then she's helping me raise money now. So using the same framework that can be repeated. And so those are few things that we do on the event.

Joe:  Well, I'm going to be on your next one. Again, Joe mccall.com/money. Joe mccall.com/money. I'm not sure what you charge for it. You probably should be charging a few hundred bucks it.

Bill:  It's 47 bucks for some bucks right now. Okay. Yeah. So cheap and so I don't know that price might go up. So if you listen to this later, it might be higher. But right now it's 47 bucks and then VIP is 47. Also, you can come on VIP and ask me a question. I stay on for an hour after the session, so just open it up for any Q&A. You can ask me direct questions people were asking. They were having conversations with investors and then asking me what they should have said or could have said on those VIP sessions that I leave out. Very valuable. I would highly recommend it. I don't usually do like it's been a year since I've done like one on ones or even group coaching, so it's been a lot of fun. And I love I can talk about money all day, obviously. yeah.

Joe:  Well and your VIP, is it like when you do the VIP coaching calls.

Bill:  Yeah, right after. So it's somewhere between an hour and a half sessions for the day. And then right after we do VIP, the only difference is Thursday we do the VIP right before. But yeah, I just do it right after and we just stay on jump on another link and then we go into Q&A.

Joe:  Super cool five day challenge and it's Joe mccall.com/money. I wish we could talk more Bill but I got a coaching call in one minute.

Bill:  Hey let me leave them let me keep them real quick like five seconds. One thing Joe said something. This is what we offer. I shifted a little bit. You'll see it over the five days. But really what I do is I ask them what they want, and then I try to figure out how they fit into my vehicle and how I can structure it for that good. So it's a little different than a lot of people where like, this is my offering because then it's just yes, no, I don't ever want to be yes, no, I want to bring people into my world. I want to understand what they want and what they need. And then I want to figure out if they can fit into one of my vehicles or I can structure a deal for them so they feel like it's more like custom suit versus off the rack. That's how I think about it. So I try to create custom suits for my investors and I'll teach that throughout the five days. And I think it really help you even if your race, if you're brand new or you raise millions of dollars, I guarantee you will get something out of this. Yeah.

Joe:  All right. John McCall, dot com slash money. Show me the money. Thank you, Bill. I want to have you on again some more. We'll talk offline after my next call here, get you back on. But this is really important. I'm going to be on this challenge with you all. My alarm is going to go to a Joe Mccall.com/money and join Bill's five day land or flat land funding, land flipping flip funding challenge. All right. We'll see you guys later. Thank you, Bill. Bye bye.