Joe:  Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. What's up, guys? Welcome to the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast, Joe McCall here. I've been doing this podcast since 2011. I love doing this podcast. It's so much fun. I get to interview and talk to people that are actually doing deals and are doing a lot of them. And our guest today is no exception. David Choi. Met him recently. I've heard about him. I seen his ads everywhere. I've seen his on his videos on social media like Instagram and whatnot. And this guy's doing a lot of deals and he's one of the premier guys that I know in our space that help people scale their businesses smartly. You might be doing a deal here or there, you wanna scale, you wanna grow, you wanna do more deals, but you don't wanna lose your life in the process. I have a friend, David, who wants to write a book called Should I Scale or Slip My Wrists? He's tried scaling several businesses before. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, right? So our guest today, David Choi, comes from the East Coast. And so it's interesting too, David, we didn't talk about this, but there are different kinds of investors. There's West Coast investors, Midwest investors. East Coast investors, there's even Florida investors, they're all kind of different, right? And you do have more of a New York style investment mentality. And you guys will see what I mean when I'm talking about that with David. David is, the thing I like about him is that all the rest of us, it's almost like we're treating this like a hobby, but David treats it like a business. You know what I'm saying? But David, I'm glad you're on the show. How are you, my man?

David:  I'm doing amazing, Joe. Thank you so much for having me on today. It's an honor.

Joe:  Oh man, I love it. You are all over Instagram, we could maybe have a whole podcast dedicated on how do you do what you do there on Instagram. But people don't know who you are, maybe talk to us about how did you get started in the real estate business?

David:  Sure. So, prior to getting what's called the real estate bug, I was just a really troubled kid. I grew up with a single mom who worked her tail off to put food on the table for me and my older brother, literally 80, 90 hours a week. And, you know, growing up without, you know, with a, with the single mom, you're, especially if you're me, you are a crazy kid. You're stealing. You are You're fighting, you're failing school, all that stuff. And so, it wasn't until I got some really big trouble, which I won't go into too much detail about here on this, it was until I had really hit rock bottom. When I got on my knees and I met Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, was a born-again Christian again, pretty much my dad, who had left me early childhood, found Jesus, came back into my life, became an active father, and was the main reason why I actually came back to Christ.

David:  And so I read the Bible with him every day while I was in my lowest point of life. I found the Lord and I asked God to change my heart, to give me wisdom. And the first piece of wisdom that the Lord gave me was out work. Mom until you retire mom and so mom working 80 90 hours a week. I'm 19 years old I'm working 90 a hundred hours a we you could imagine from going from a kid feeling every single grade every single class Feeling fighting all types of stuff to just completely turning his life around working 90 hours week. It was hard It was really really difficult. And so what year was it is this was? 2014 Wow, okay 2014 gave my life to the Lord man Worked my tail off, got like perfect grades in school, was a president of my real estate club, completely turned my life around, got a bunch of internships. But I started to Google how to retire early. Because I was tired, I was not trying to work 100 hours a week forever. I was trying to retire my mom, trying to retirement my family and live the life I never had, which was have a parent that would go to my football games, my wrestling matches. That never happened to me. Never. They showed up to one game my whole life. And I was like, you know what? When I have a kid, I'm going to show up to every rest of the match. I'm gonna show up every football game. The dancer said, I want to be an active father.So I started Googling how to retire. And that's when I came across podcasts, just like this. And, um, I would listen to podcasts after podcasts after podcasts, and I would find that normal people, just like you and me, Joe. That don't come from a ton of money was able to find true financial freedom at a relatively early age. And so, got the real estate bug. I never turned back and praise the Lord. By 24, I became a millionaire. By 26, 27-ish, I was financially free. Enough to cover my bills, right? And now my parents are retired and now I'm just doing this with the love of the game. I love doing what I do every day. I wake up, our company's mission statement, all four subsidiaries is creating millionaires through real estate and we're doing it for our partners, our employees, all of our students, all our clients and it's just like, I love the game of real estate. It's so fun for me to kind of help others achieve what Guy has been able to provide to me to help other people do the same.

Joe:  Wow, that's awesome. I didn't know half of that, but it's so cool. You guys see why I wanted it. In fact, we were right before this podcast started, I was starting to ask them a bunch of questions. I said, oh, no, stop answering. Stop answering my questions. Let's just save this for the podcast. Okay, so what kind of real estate did you start doing back then and that day?

David:  Coming from a family that doesn't have money, a track record, or necessarily believed in me, the, you kind of have to start with houses, right? You kind of had to start even with land, land or houses, a low barrier entry type of asset class. And so I always knew that I had to, start with homes to begin with. Now while I was learning the game, showing up to networking events and doing kind of taking small steps towards building up my own business, I had been interning and working for the Corporate America full-time job as an analyst for larger private equity firms doing various different asset classes between grocery and good retail, multi-family, hotel, self-storage, industrial, senior housing, medical office, you name it. I got to kind of dibble dabble in various asset classes and it was pretty cool. I got to learn a lot. But the first asset class that I endeavored in as an entrepreneur was homes. And I think the reason why the one to four family space is so cool is because it's a fragmented marketplace, which means there is a lot of distress. It's not like the stock market where you could just sell shares instantaneously. It's a kind of asset class where human emotions and circumstances play an impact on the value of the property and your ability to add value to property. And you see a lot more distress in the one to four family space significantly more than you do on other asset classes like large multi-family industrial where institutional, large private equity, multi-billion dollar companies own them, right? So you got of there's a there's an area to make outsize humongous returns in this space as compared to you know the spaces that I was underwriting as an analyst in corporate America.

Joe:  Okay, so what were you doing though? Were you buying and holding? Were you fixing and flipping? Were you just wholesaling?

David:  Yeah, when you have two nickels are up together, Joe, you wholesale the first deal, the second deal, and the third deal. And then you take that cash, and then you flip a property. Right? And then you take the flips and the wholesale money, you'll wholesale or flip five properties, and then you'll take cash and you'll buy a rental, right? So that's kind of how it began was wholesaling enough properties where I was starting to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in income tax. And my accountant laughed at me and was like, you know what's so funny? You're paying more in income taxes than some of the clients I have that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So he's like, You guys need to start building up a portfolio because this is going to just continue to get worse and worse.

Joe:  You're as you're making more profits, you're putting that profit back into actually owning assets. Correct. So you can get the write-offs in the income, right? And the write offs.

David:  Correct. Yeah. So the beauty about starting off, and not everybody has to start this way. You don't have to start as a wholesaler. But I think the beauty of starting off as a wholesaler, or even building a wholesale business, is that you've developed a business model that could bring in five, six, seven, I bring in 40 deals every single month that I get to choose from. Is this a wholesale deal? Should I innovate this deal? Should I flip this deal? Should I whole-tail this deal, should I hold this deal?” It's now my choice, right? And I get to pick best deals out of that litter every single month I put into my personal balance sheet. The safest deals, the best-located deals, and the steepest discounts. And on all the other transactions, I'm making on average $44,000, right, so I get to use that cash and then dump it into deals where I don't need to sink my money into them. I'm getting all my money out on the refinance anyway, so I kind of continue to defer and defer and defer my income tax year over year over years. So long as I don't sell, I'm good, right? But even if I sell and I 1031, I'll still be good. It's just the play is to defer it until I die and give it to my kids, right.

Joe:  Yeah. Okay. Yes, for sure. When you first started doing deals, were you doing them there in New Jersey or where were you're doing deals in? Yeah, right here in my backyard. And then at the time, were you going to meet the seller, talking to them in their house, or are you doing this over the phone virtually? What, how are you doing those deals?

David:  Yeah, a little bit. I'm a big in-person guy. On average, it takes, we convert in virtual appointments at a four to five percent conversion rate, whereas on an in- person, we're converting roughly at a 20 to 25 percent conversion. So I believe that this business is a relational business and if you could build a meaningful connection with the seller, where you truly understand their situation, what they've been going through and what their goals are, and you to go with you because they trust you and they love you, as opposed to somebody who's just making an offer on the phone. So I'm a huge advocate for in-person appointments.

Joe:  Now you're doing how many deals a month did you say?

David:  Joe, on my real estate investment business, my wholesale acquisition, we're doing about 40 deals a monthly. Then I have a lending company, we do DSCR loans. We're pumping out about $60 to $70 million of loans every month.

Joe:  All right, so those 40 deals you're doing a month, are you sending people to go look at these houses, meet with the sellers, talk to them in person?

David:  Oh yeah. Oh yeah, we have, um, eight setters and four closers.

Joe:  Andso these four closers, they're local in your market and they're going out on appointments.

David:  You can't see them, but they're all over there, yeah.

Joe:  That's awesome. I love it. You don't meet too many people that have operations like you do with like a real physical location

David:  I mean, sometimes you wish you don't, we didn't build it this way, but there's something cool about having an in-house operation, the raw rock, energy, it's really exciting. It's fun.

Joe:  How can people find you on Instagram? Cause I want people to go there to kind of see you as you're walking around your office and it's so much fun to watch because like, I don't know anybody here. I'm a guy that if you, if I were to show you my office, it would be embarrassing. Like I got stacks of books and that's about it. Right. And my staff, I've got three employees. They work in Illinois, Florida, and the Dominican Republic. No, it's just somewhere down there. Right. So it's like, Oh my gosh. And when I see this, I'm like, this is amazing. David, you gota real business, like a legit business, you know. It's an expensive business, Joe. That's what that is. Not everybody's going to get there overnight and you've got the chops to manage that kind of a thing, right? So talk about like, how did you grow into that kind of a, a full-scale operation like that? Is that something you, you knew you wanted from the very beginning because you kind of came from that kind of world?

David:  Well, yeah, yeah. Me and my business partner got together seven and a half years ago, fully with the intention to become, to create a multi-billion dollar company. There was no, we were not looking for millions. We were very much so on the path, we're gonna create a multi billion dollar company, why us? You know, we knew we had the capacity for it, the ability to do it. We knew we have the hard work. We know God's blessing was over our lives. We're like, why not? Let's just do it, we got no kids, no family, let's just get to work.

Joe:  I love it. Okay. So let's, I still want to go back to your journey of getting to where you are now, right? So you started, you started just wholesaling, then you started holding some properties because you needed, you're paying too much in income taxes. What was that like for you back then? Like what were you starting to buy and hold? Was it single family homes, smaller multifamilies?

David:  Small and multis, twos and threes. Believe it or not, those were the best. Still to this very day, I got a 70 unit. I just bought a 48 unit. I got bunch of six, 10s, 13s, 18s. I got to bunch of them. But from a yield, from a IRR, cash on cash, ROI, all those financial metrics, my two fams kick butt, they're the best! Are all your properties close to where you can go see them? I haven't visited a property in a very long time. But yes, they are all, Well, with the exception of, it's all within an hour and a half driving distance with the exception of a 48 unit that we just took over. We just foreclosed on a 48-unit premier Atlanta.

Joe:  So what does your portfolio look like now, if you don't mind me asking?

David:  No, we have about a $60 million real estate portfolio. We're about to all float a good chunk of it, but the cool thing is, is that the majority of the portfolio has not been syndicated, right? We went down the syndication route at one point and we're like. We're doing all this work, finding all these deals to just give away all the ownership and all the depreciation and just be a, you just create yourself a job is what you end up doing. You're supposed to buy real estate to create financial freedom and a legacy to take care of you and your family. And what you ended up doing is having to report to 10 million people. We did three of those and we were like, yep, never again. We're good on the syndication So, the vast majority of the portfolio, with the exception of a couple now, are just owned strictly by me and my partners to the to the our company, Leverage Companies.

Joe:  Which, and you're using bank financing.

David:  Yeah. Yeah. So we'll, we'll you know, we will put up the cash from our retained earnings from, you know we have, so we have leverage companies and then we have four subsidiaries, the lending company, the wholesaling, fix and put company. The buy and hold company. And then we have, we just launched an education community mentorship business line. And so we know as the retainer earnings trickle out. We have a treasury and then that money is often allocated to our portfolio. Again, mostly as a tax strategy, But it's nice to see the cash roll build and build and build over time.

Joe:  You've mentioned a business partner a couple of times, talk about who that is.

David:  You know, I pray, I thank God, like I really do thank God for him. He's my perfect partner. He really is. And I can't, you know, if you asked me like almost about three years ago, if I would ever say that, I would say you're out of your mind. Because you're married, this is what people have to realize. When you go into business with somebody, especially at 23 years old, 24 years old. You just got married buddy, especially if the goal is to create a billion dollar company, you have a lot of kids. You are hiring and hiring and your people's dreams and their livelihoods are dependent on you guys sticking together. Right. And so what we didn't know, getting, getting together at 23 and 24 years old, was that we were literally getting married. And boy, you put two traumatized, went together in a room, chasing after a dream. You have got a lot of ego. A lot of it, pride and testosterone and anger and yelling, cursing, man, you don't need it. And so by virtue of that, I mean, believe me, we had to do a lot of work. I mean therapy, coaching, couples counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy. We had to pray on our knees. And honestly, the only thing that really, really made a profound difference in changing it all was the Lord. And now it's so cool to be able to say like, we get to say we praise God every time there's something good going on in our county, praise the Lord, praise God is so good that that both me and my partner get to do that together. He is the exact opposite as me, naturally speaking, I'm very much a visionary and I'm flying off the handle, I got 10,000 ideas, Eric just pulls it all together. And, you know, by virtue of us starting so many subsidiaries, we've kind of had to learn each other's roles, right? He's a tremendous visionary as well. I've had to learn how to become an integrator as well, and so, but in the very beginning, and even to this day, he's always having some sort of opposing concept or thought that brings so much value to all our business plans and all of our initiatives and vice versa. So I always say he's my perfect partner. I wouldn't want to go to battle any other person but him.

Joe:  Yeah. So you're, you're the one I was going to ask if you're the, um, you know, the visionary, he's the integrator, I guess you could say, right? He's kind of the operations guy who knows how to make it all work. It's easy to say, yeah, let's do this. Let's do that. But you need somebody that says, now we could do that, but we can't do this and if we're going to do this, you are going to have to say no to these one of two things. So what do you want to do? Right.

David:  What was interesting is that like yeah he's very much a natural integrator and i'm very much in natural visionary. He's that guy for sure.

Joe:  That's cool. And soyou've been working together for how many years?

David:  Almost seven and a half years.

Joe:  Can you do, can somebody do what you've done without a business partner like what you have?

David:  Oh. no. I don't think that any of this would have been possible without each other, honestly. Not like, I really consider, I'm really thinking about this. Not even one company, not even, we have four of them. We wouldn't even have been, I don't think we would have even been able to get remotely close, even single one, without one another.

Joe:  The people that you've hired and you've surrounded yourself with, your team, your management team. Yeah, there is. So how many employees do you have now? We've got 100, a little over 100. In all four businesses? Yeah, across all four subsidiaries. Okay. And I want to talk to you about kind of what you're seeing, what's working now in this market today. But some people are listening to this and they've already checked out. Man, they're just like, I just want to do my first deal. Right? And you're talking about 100 billion employees and… And a hundred trillion dollars a year in a business, you know, like, but a lot of people are listening to this also thinking, man, I'm getting excited. I want a business like David. All right. I've got a business partner who's the yin to my yang, who is good at what I'm not good at. And so how can I make this work? But we could spend hours talking about what it's like working with a business partner. I would rather actually just focus more on what do you see as working in this market today, right? So let's talk about that. How are you getting 40 deals a month?

David:  Let me just take a step back because, you know, I want everyone here listening today. If you're listening to me right now, you have no idea. I was exactly where you were just 10 years ago. I was listening to this podcast and be like, oh my. I won't do that. I'm going to be that. And I had zero dollars, zero credit, zero track records, zero mentors. All I had was God and a dollar and a dream. That's it, right? So believe me when I say this, I look back today and I'm like, holy crap, what happened? I got 100 people. It's weird for me to say I got a hundred employees. It's where for me say that we have a $60 million real support. It's rare for me that we almost do a billion dollars of transactions annually. It's weir. It's been the compounding effect over years and years and years, hard work, dedication, and honestly, there's like luck, call it luck. Really, we got dad's blessings in our lives, right? But you could do it too. You could do a tune. You don't need to do it to this level. Guys, if you just stay down this path, the real estate path, for my opinion, you'll be fine. If you don't give up, you will be fine, you will end up in greener pastures for sure. Because this asset class has so many aspects to it, from leverage, to tax benefits, to fragmented nature of this vertical. There is opportunity so long as you're looking for it, so I don't want to discourage anybody. I don't want you to check out. What I want you do is get inspired because believe me, you could do it too, okay? So let's go back to, Lloyd, you said that. Yeah, look, I was just where they were. Not so, I snapped my fingers and Blake, I can't believe I'm 30, you know? I was just like 10 years ago. I was there. So anyway, what works? Look, here's what I don't want to do because I remember what I did when I was 19 when I listened to 200 or something podcasts and got what worked for tons of people and then saved up a bunch of money and then did all of it at once and I failed. I would listen to, I read the book, how to make big money in small apartments, I move folks bigger pockets, every single one. Everyone has a strategy that works. Text message marketing works. Building a call center operation. Cold caller works. Hey, door knocking works. Bandit signs, they work. PPC, PPL, Facebook ads, direct mail. Ladies and gentlemen, everything works. Going direct to the agent works. Everything works. But it's not about doing them all at once. It's about doing them in a systematic way where you're not burning through your cash. You want to take a step-by-step approach because it's so easy to lose money when you're spending money on marketing. Right before this call, me and Joe were talking about the headaches that come with spending money on advertising. You spend 100 grand, you spend 7 grand, oh wow, I'm making money. Then you spend 25 grand, I am making money, and then all of a sudden you blink, you're You're sending 100 grand and then you're down 100 grand. You're like, what the heck just happened? That's part of entrepreneurship, but if you take the wisdom that we're telling you now, you don't necessarily need to go down that path. You could be prudent and take a step-by-step approach, avoid the pitfalls and grow your business in a way where you're not going to be figuring out how to pay down a $50,000 AMEX bill.

Joe:  Okay, so here's what I reckon. Been there, done that.

David:  Yeah, been there, done that many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times, right? Any entrepreneur that tells you that that's not the case, they're lying, because this life is not for the faint of heart. You need to buckle down and especially if you're trying to scale. Now if you don't want, you don't t need to slit your wrist, okay? I might as well slit that and take that off, I don't know if that's, take that book.

Joe:  What we're talking about is I have a friend who wants to write a book because he's tried scaling businesses before and did not work well for him at all. And he wants to ride a book called, should I scale my business or slit my wrists? So it's kind of a not so funny joke.

David:  Yeah. If you want to scale and scale fast, very, very risky. But if you want to scale step by step, slowly and in the right way, your life could be good the whole way up. Okay, so this is what I wreck about. If you want to do what I did, I recommend starting with just building up the foundation. The foundation to me is finding the right market, finding the asset class and staying focused in those asset classes and in that market because it's really easy to go across the whole country and be a virtual and it's easy to say, I'm going to do five different asset classes from land to houses to multi-families, but what's hard is learning each individual asset class, and learning each individually market. So what I recommend is finding a market, I think any market across the country works, so long as you're finding the right county, finding the city within the state. So what i recommend is what I call a class C area, typically like 20 to 30% of the household median income on the county, you might drive that block, you wouldn't want your daughter or your wife going there at like 10 o'clock at night, but you're seeing that the area is appreciating, there's red growth, there is new development. It's an up and coming area. So class C, I like to find those areas. Those are… High ROI on your time and on your marketing efforts. So then you find your market and then you find your asset class. I recommend houses. That's what I did, so it's what I recommend. Then you find what you find. You decide on your asset class and then what I recommend is don't just call every single person or don't just market to every single person within that town, within that class C market, within that city, there is distress indicators from taxing to foreclosures to vacant houses, absentee owners, probates. They just inherited houses. There's divorce. There's, you know, deteriorating credit scores. There are so many things like empty nets. There're so many little niche lists that you could pull. In fact, Joe, what I'll do is for anybody who wants, you could DM me the word on my Instagram, davidchroy.biz. Just DM me the words step one. I actually have a step-by-step breakout on how to find that market, how to get that data, and then I actually even give you my script that you can use So that way you could start calling. So what's the DM? What's the word again? The DM me the word step and then numerical one. Okay. I just did. Yeah. Because for me, this is step one of growing your business, right? So you get that inclination, and then you start calling, guys, just call. You got to build the skill set of calling in the very beginning. Get the foundation down of how to talk to people, how to negotiate, how the underwrites. And then after you've done that, for just 90 days, I'm not asking for your whole life, just 90 day, pay your dues, pay the price, learn the skill, okay? Then what I want you to do is figure out, I want to get a CRM, which is just, there's so many built up business in a box CRMs that you could use now, and layer that in with text message marketing. The reason why I recommend text messageis it has the highest return on advertising spec. It's a high volume game, right, where the quality of the leads are probably amongst the worst leads that you could get from direct mail to call center and Facebook to PPC to PPL. It's probably one of the worst, but it's the cheapest and highest return on that. I wouldn't be surprised if you got a 20x return on advertiser spend on a text using a right text messaging marketing platform. So I recommend you start there, cut your teeth with low quality leads. But guys, you spend $1,000 and you really get your craft down on those leads, you're going to get a deal a month, maybe two deals a month. And then you just need $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000. Well, congratulations. Take that money and then invest into more text message marketing. Get that to the point where you're doing four deals a moth. After that point, you layer in the next form of marketing. I could talk about all the steps, Joe, but I don't want to overwhelm everybody with information here in this podcast. But it's a very step-by-step approach to scaling without wasting money because each marketing channel has its pros and has its cons I just have seen so many people waste money.

Joe:  Yeah. So what I see you're saying kind of when you're starting out is don't, even if you have the money, be very, very careful. It's better to invest a little bit of money and a lot of time when you're first getting started. Get some deals under your belt, right? And as you do more deals, as you reinvest more of your money, more of your profits, you can switch it around to spending more money and less time. In a certain sense, is that right?

David:  Correct. Because now your skillset and your systems are in place for you to start buying back your time.

Joe:  Yeah. And you buy back your time by maybe doing Google PPC or doing direct mail or hiring bird dogs or door knockers and things like that. Is that right? Yeah.

David:  Exactly. Exactly. Then you start scaling each, incrementally scaling more of your time back. Eventually you're out of the business. Praise God, you're done. You make money. I mean, look, the reality is until you're doing about $4 to $5 million a year annual revenue, you're not really out. That's true. You need a good COO and you can't hire good people where she make enough money.

Joe:  All right, so let's talk about where you see the market now, right? You're still doing 30, 40 deals a month. People are complaining it's too competitive. They're complaining that the interest rates are too high. Inflation is too high, it's still a buyer's or seller's market. Where are you seeing the markets going? Is it getting easier to do deals? Does it even matter?

David:  I think the market's coming back. Transaction volume is starting to pick back up. People will be holding out on rates dropping again, or it can't wait any longer, so they let it go. Overall, I think, the market is kind of softening in terms of, just overall, it's remaining pretty flat, at least where I am. Look, I you can make money in any real estate market. So long as you're, like now more than ever, back in 2022, you could be doing everything totally wrong and make money in this game, truthfully. Now you gotta be dialed. You need to understand the conversion metrics. You need to actually be tracking key performance indicators from every aspect of your funnels, right? From every marketing channel, to sales, to dispositions, to transactions, if you're not tracking your numbers and you're dialing that in, it is a little harder to make money. But luckily for me, I started in an era where it was easy to make the money and then grew my business and got dialed and dialed and dial what became pretty difficult. But presently, so many people have died out in my market, so many people I've given up that it's kind of opened up doors for me because now my marketing dollars are going a lot further.

Joe:  I've been hearing foreclosures are back, coming back up again in certain markets. And when you look at a per capita basis, Delaware, believe it or not, is one of the highest markets right now in the country for foreclosure filings. So it's, yeah, it's interesting to see what's happening here. I feel like I've seen it since, well, since I've been doing real estate since 2006. I've seen the high markets and the low markets, the hot, the cold, and there's always people talking about the good old days back where you can do a lot of deals. What if right now, these are the goodol' days? What if, right now? Are you just going to wait a couple years to see if today is a good old day or not? Maybe they're not as good as they were before, but they may be a lot better than they're going to be in five, 10 years from now. You might be looking back saying, what was I doing in 2025, Just farting around doing nothing when I could have been doing whatever, but you're worried about competition, you're worry about interest rates, you're worrying about inflation, you're worries about Venus. Those are all things outside of your control. You can't do anything about it, so why worry about it? Let's focus on revenue generating activities. Revenue generating activities is picking up the phone. And talking to people, right? And you do a lot of Instagram videos about cold calling. You've got a call center. You've guys on the phone, on the phone, banging on the phones. And I love that because it's one of the fastest ways to a deal, right? I often say, if you're not on this thing, you're not making money. Will you talk a little bit about what you're doing, what you guys are doing on the phone.

David:  I just want to also add to that, Joe, like what you just said, now is the time we'll make money in real estate, right now. You don't have tomorrow. There's plenty of people starting off in this game with no experience, no money, and they're crushing it. I just had a kid that's 23 years old, but his little brother, he was 19, who within his first month of cold call and locked up a deal that we just sold, he just came in and picked up a $30,000 check, Joe. $30,000 check from that deal, from a cold call, from a cold called where he sent me the lead, my team negotiating the deal, sent out the contract, locked it up, renovated it and sold it, and the kid came in and picked up a $30k check today. Every single week, there's a newbie in my office picking up a 20 to $30K check. Last week, we had Nishal picking up a $20k check. The week before that, we have Jamil picking up a$ 30k check, so guys, if you're not taking action, I'm sorry, like don't blame the market, don't blame the competition, don't blame the timing. It's now, it truly is, you can make money in any real estate market so long as you have the right, as long as your taking the right action. So to answer your question, Joe, on the phones, I have a team, on acquisition side, I have a team of eight people setting up appointments. So I have lead managers that are calling some of my older leads, not my freshest leads, but some of my old leads, they're calling my text message leads, they're setting up appointments for my closers. And then I have my senior lead managers who call my smoking hot leads, the direct mail pieces, the new ones that come to the pipeline, and they have their own follow-up lists. Then I have a follow-ups specialist that follows up with all of the opportunities that we made offers on, are out in the future that we said we'd call back, appointments that did not happen. And so I kind of have a breakout like that just to make sure that my entire, all my leads and all my opportunities are being consistently touched. And then I have foreclosures that take those appointments, convert them into in-persons or go on in-person, follows our sale process, locks up new contracts, and it's either good enough for us to buy and hold, good enough for both to fix a flip or a whole tail or no-vate or wholesale. So they're all trained on various exit strategies. They go out to appointments, they lock up deals. That's pretty much it.

Joe:  So they're on the phone. And by the way, IDM'd you the word scripts. No, no, I'm sorry. Step one. And you texted me back a link to download these assets, step one assets. So yeah, it's pretty cool. And you talk about being on the foam and you can listen to actually a lot of these conversations on your Instagram as you're walking around with your team, which is super cool.

David:  Yeah, I love getting on the sales floor. Nothing funner than the training of someone who sounds, honestly, to be crude, absolutely terrible, and then give him some coaching, and then within a week, just seeing him just completely change as a salesperson. And it's fun for me.

Joe:  So again, would you say, you know, smartest thing somebody new in the business can do is learn how to talk to people, learn how to pick up the phone and call people.

David:  I started off, actually, I started up door knocking and that's how I picked up my first deal. Whatever it takes, it's just sales. Unfortunately, if you don't like sales, you could hire a partner or someone who's good at sales. My business partner, not a sales person, but he partnered with me.

Joe:  So if you're not good at sales, find somebody who is or learn how to do sales yourself, right? Exactly. All right. We got a few more minutes here, David. You help people scale their businesses as well. Do you help people that are already doing deals or do you help them do their first deal? Where are you kind of at? Who are you looking? Who's your ideal client that you can help the most?

David:  It's so hard to say because really the easiest people to help are obviously those that already do like one deal a month. I could snap my finger and help that person do 10 deals a month in the next six to seven months. Six to nine months, give me six to nine month with that guy, he's doing 10 deals a month, you know? If you're brand new, there's something so gratifying about helping someone brand new that has never done it before and they just got their first $50,000 check. You know, and helping that person get to three, four or five deals a month. It's a tough question because I have so many students that became coaches that coach other students now, it's a pretty much an even split, right? Two people were totally brand new. Now they're doing half a million dollars plus a year. It was in like, literally on pace to do half of a million dollars a year, and then I have two people who are in the game. Stuck at one to two deals a moth. Now there are eight to 10 deals a mon, right, that became coaches, and I have one guy who was just entering the game, do it like a deal every other month. Now it's consistently doing three to five deals a month. And so the success is, man, my deal avatar is action takers. People who are willing to take action and they're not like completely, completely broke because you need a couple bucks to get into the business.

Joe:  Makes sense. And so your main focus of your program, your coaching program is to scale. Your main focus is not to get to get maybe if you haven't done a deal yet, get to it as fast as possible. But you're going to help people scale from one deal a month to 10 deals a month. Am I right?

David:  Yeah, I market five deals a month, not to be too exaggerating, but really I want to help like Danny get to like, get to where I am, 30 deals a month, 40 deals a month. That's what I would like, possible. But I would say the minimum I would, is five, six deals a month for those, those that started brand new. And then for those that have been in the business, I'd like to get them, those are about 10 deals a month. And then for those that come in, if you, once you get to 10 deals, a month you snap your finger, you wait a year and a half and you scale intelligently, you're 20, 30 deals a month. And you wait another year. Yeah. So, it's all… You could grow this thing out very, very large.

Joe:  I love it. I like the, the fact that you're honest with, Hey, you got to be good at sales. You need to either be willing to learn how to do it or be already know how to do it, or find somebody who is, who can do it. You got to learn sales. That's the million dollar skill. If you want to scale and grow a business. Awesome. Okay. So best way for people to reach you, David, is it through Instagram? You're everywhere on there all the time. It's a little annoying because I'm jealous. I wish I could view 10% of what you do.

David:  You've got a great team. The team does it all, honestly. But yeah, you can reach me at probably the best way to reach me is davidchoi.biz. That's my Instagram handle. That's like TikTok. I don't really look at my TikTok. This is just too much. But my Instagram DMs, you could message me there. I'm very likely to reply.

Joe:  And again, if you want to get the step one resources, those free resources, DM David, the word step one, and you'll get it. Cool. Do you have a podcast of your own, a YouTube channel or books or have you done anything like that?

David:  I have not. I did a podcast. I stopped for a little bit just because I got so busy. I'm gonna launch one up again But it's called the deals and dollars. It's called deals and Dollars. I don't even remember. I was I don't know, Joe. But it still is a dollar something.

Joe:  I love it. All right. David, thank you so much for being on the show, man. And I know there's somebody here listening to this who's going to be like, I want to be like David. They're in their young 20s right now and they're watching what you're doing. And they're like, I want what David's got right now. What do I have to do it? And in a year or two years from now, they're going to make it over a million dollars a year. I love. It's suchsuch good stuff. Thank you for being down the show man. I appreciate you, David. Yeah.

David:  Thanks, Joe. I appreciate it.

Joe:  We'll see you guys.