Joe:  What's up everybody, Joe McCall here, REI in your car podcast. I just dropped my daughter off for volleyball practice and I'm hungry, so I'm gonna be driving down the street here to this new place that just opened up a month ago and it's called Small's Sliders. Has anybody ever heard of this? Every time I drive by here, there's a huge line, very, very long line. And today there's only, I don't know, 30 cars in the line, so it's about the shortest I've ever seen. And I thought I would try it out. And here I am sitting in a line for some sliders and I don't even know what sliders are. maybe like little hamburgers. People going crazy over this thing.

Joe:  So anyway, I thought I would share something with you that I think you might find helpful, and it has to do with the two most important numbers that will tell you the health of your real estate investing business. And these are numbers that could probably apply to any business where, you know, we're all in the marketing business, right? Like we're not in the hamburger business, we're in the marketing business. We're not in the coffee business. We're not in the real estate business. We're in the marketing business, right? So I've always said in the past, the number one rule in estate is to make offers, make offers, make offers. And then I heard Rob Swanson say something that was really good. He said, the two most important numbers in any business that can tell you immediately or can tell him immediately the health of a business is how many offers have they made in the last week and how many offers have they made in the last month. And he's a hundred percent correct, but I want to twist it and tweak it and change it a little bit. I think there is maybe one more thing that you need to add to that. And, you know, If you're asking yourself or if I'm asking a coaching client or somebody like that, hey, how many offers have you made in the last week, every week, that's going to tell me the health of a business. So, right? So you don't need to ask if you're already asking every week, how many offers have you made in the last month? So I think I figured it out and this is kind of why I was scratching my head when I was talking about this or listening to him talk about it. I think the two most important numbers are how many offers have you made in the last week? And then second, how much follow -up have you done in the last week? Hmm, what a concept, right? Because this is why this is so critical. If you are making a bunch of offers, that's great, but if you're not following up with them, then you are wasting a ton of money on marketing and a bunch of money that you're just throwing away.

Joe:  So like 50 % of your leads or of your deals are gonna come from the follow -up. 50 % of your deals come from the follow -up. One time, my coaching business partner and I, Gavin, we used to do a bunch of deals together and we looked over a previous 12 month period and there were 58 deals, we did 58 deals that month. And of those 58 deals, only four of those deals came from that first conversation with the seller. And at the time we were doing a lot of cold calling, a little bit of direct mail. And so we looked at that and we said, all right, well on average, how many touches did we do over how many months? And over two to three months on average, we did seven to eight touches on average. Oh man, what a, this place is a disaster. There are so many people just going around anywhere there's no coordination they hire these people to come help with parking But the guy doesn't know what he's doing All right, so anyway, so on average, it took seven to eight touches over two to three months to do a deal. And if we would have not done any follow up that year, and that's 12 months, if we would not have done any follow up, we would have only done four deals. But because of the follow up, every time we'd call a seller, text a seller, email them or whatever, we would make a note of that. And we looked at all of these deals that we did. And again, seven to eight touches over two to three months on average. Now, some of the follow up was just maybe a couple of weeks. Some of it was, you know, six, 12 months, months and months of follow -up. So you've got to make offers, right? But if you're not following up with the offers, you're just wasting everybody's time because you are… Most deals come from the follow -up. I've heard other people say different things, but on average what I've heard from our own business and what I see other people doing in their real estate investing business, if 50 to 75 % of your deals come from follow -up, 50 % at least at a minimum will come from follow -up. And so the way I like to do follow -up is every 30 days, we follow up with the seller and when it comes to land, I send the same offer for at least three months, just send the offer again every 30 days. Then after that, I might send a postcard, a regular letter. I send sometimes a range postcard where it says, hey, I'd like to buy a property. I might pay you between this and this if you're interested. Then I might send a one -page letter that I have that has the offer included in the letter. I call it a blind offer letter. But the great thing about Freedom Soft is you can set all of this automation, a follow -up to happen automatically. Once I talk about marketing done for you in spite of you, and it's the same with follow -up, you need to get systems in place that all of the follow -up gets done for you in spite of you and you just don't have to worry about it and you can forget it, it just gets done.

Joe:  And what kind of follow -up should you do? Well, it's simple, a phone call, a text message, an email and physical mail. I think a lot of people forget that or they ignore it or they're afraid to spend the money. But here's the thing, Nobody else is doing follow -up with direct mail. You might say, well, direct mail is the most expensive type of marketing, it doesn't work anymore. Well, it may be as expensive, but it's got the highest ROI of any other marketing channel out there, especially when you're talking about land investing. Maybe houses is different. So yeah, bottom line, if I were to ask you if we were working together, hey, how's your business going? Yeah, I don't care about drama, I care about data. Have you heard that phrase before? I think my friend Mark Evans came up with it, data, not drama. And when you look at the data, what is it? How many offers have you made in the last week? And how much follow -up have you done in the last week? And you think about this too. If it takes on, for us, it takes about one out of every 20 offers to get one accepted. And that includes follow -up and all that, right? So it goes to say then, the more offers you make, the more no's you get, the quicker you're going to get to a yes, the faster you're going to do a deal. And the more follow -up you do, then the more deals you're going to get. Pretty simple, straightforward. So let me ask you, how many offers have you made in the last week? and how much follow -up have you done in the last week? How much follow -up is enough? How much is too much? You can't do too much follow -up. And if you set it up in something like Freedom Soft or maybe Follow Up Boss or something like that, you send a text message every two weeks, every four weeks, and you send an email every four weeks, and you send a letter or a postcard every four weeks, and you alternate it so every week the seller is getting an email or a text message or a letter in the mail. Oh, Joe, that's overkill. What are you doing? No, listen, the seller's not going to see all of those emails, right? Sometimes those text messages will go into spam. They're not gonna maybe, well, this is the reason why I love direct mail, because they are gonna see it, but just do the follow -up. And if they're, you know, if it's more of a colder lead than maybe, okay, just once a month, but do all the above. And people ask me all the time, well, you know, they said they don't want to sell. What should I do? Send them an offer anyway. Send them an offer anyway. They called you, they got your letter, your postcard or whatever. They said they wanted to sell. So send them an offer anyway. Send the same offer every 30 days and do it in the physical mail. Physical mail, direct mail works. It's not dead. Okay, so there's a few rules related to all of this. Number one, we're in the marketing business, right? So get your marketing done. Every single week, every single day, you should have something that you have as a goal to do. Maybe it's send 500 letters a week, 500 postcards a week, or do two hours of cold calling a day, or spend, I don't know, $1 ,000 a week, a month on Facebook ads. But you gotta have it down on a scorecard. So put your marketing plan on a scorecard track your numbers every day, every week, and make sure that if you're not doing it, somebody else is. So understand that marketing is the priority in your business.

Joe:  What does Tom Krol say? Revenue in first position, right? So if you're concerned about making profit, and we all should be, then the most important thing you can do to generate profit is to send marketing, to get leads. So rule number one, get your marketing done for you in spite of you. And if you're not doing it, get somebody else that does it for you. And then number two, talk to every seller that calls you back. Call them. All right, if they call you, they get it goes to mail, call them three times a day for a week until you get a hold of them. But talk to every seller that calls. And then every seller you talk to, rule number three, send an offer to every single seller you talk to, all right? And then rule number four, follow up with every seller that you sent an offer to every 30 days. That's the formula for doing deals. And if you don't like it, then that's fine. Maybe you hate money, maybe you don't want to do deals, but that's the rules of the game. And again, if you don't like talking to sellers, If you don't like doing direct mail, you don't like sending offers then or if you don't like doing a follow -up cool Right, but get somebody else to do it for you. And I promise you you're gonna do a lot of deals All right. So that's all I got for you guys. Appreciate y ‘all. Take care. Oh, yeah Hey one thing too. If some of you are interested in working with me I get people ask about my apprentice program and if you are interested in Working with me one -on -one. I do take on people once in a while for an apprentice program I'm looking to grow and expand in new markets and I just on boarded a couple people in the last few days And I will basically do your marketing for you. I'll pay for the marketing and I'll give you 60 leads in 60 days. And I do a lot of one -on -one and I just want to do more deals with folks. There is a deposit that is required and it is significant up front. It does require a lot of my time, a lot of my investment into you. And so I'm looking for you have to put an investment in it as well. And we split deals, we split profit, but we don't split the profits until after you get your deposit back. And if you qualify, there is a, we do offer free 0 % business lines of credit if you qualify. And if you want more information about all of that, just go to JoeMccall .com slash apprentice, JoeMccall .com slash apprentice. And I have a video there, check it out. And I appreciate you guys, we'll see ya, bye.