Joe: Hey guys, welcome to REI in Your Car. This is Joe McCall.

Joe: Listen, I'm going to do a two part podcast series here where I'm going to be talking about the five things I used to say yes to, but now I say no to. And then next episode, I want to talk about the five things. I used to say no to, but now I say yes to. And it's funny because I did this podcast originally seven years ago back in 2018 and I looked at my list back then and the things that I would say, it's still true, but there are more important things that I say no to now, which is a really interesting exercise. So I would encourage you as I'm doing this to create your own do not do list. We all have our to do list, how about having a to don't list? I would to encourage you to do that. So here are five things I used to say yes to, but now I say, no to, all right? And if you see me looking down over here to my right, I have notes, I'm actually driving my awesome car. I love the Tesla Model X, just dropped my daughter off at school. I have my little DJI Mobi mobile camera here that is on my visor. But anyway, so first thing, let me just say to you that these little changes here really helped me create, find more focus, gave me more time, which helped me make more money. So when you have focus, the combination of focus and time is amazing because those combined can give you more money, and so if I look at this, especially over the last seven years since I first created this list, I'm making way more money now than I used to. So I would encourage you, if you want to make more money, if you wanna have more time, you really need to be careful on what you focus on. I think that's the general theme that you're gonna see through all of this, okay?

So first thing is I used to do, used to, sorry, I used say a lot of yeses to $5 an hour activities. You know, there's $500 an hour activities and there's a $500 hour activities and it's easy to think that you have to do everything yourself. And, you know, for example, marketing. I used to do all of my own marketing where I used to be the one to handwrite the postcards. I would be the ones that would, I used to do a lot of, I'd go to Craigslist and I'd look for rental properties on Craigslist and I would scrape that information manually from Craigs list and then I found a software that did it for you, but then I would also go to the eviction court records, the court records and look up evictions and I would manually write down the landlords that were doing evictions. By the way, this is a great list that hardly nobody is targeting. Most counties across the US have court records that are all online. And you can go, not you, this is a $5 an hour activity, but you can have somebody go to the court records online, look for the evictions, and send a letter to the owner of the property, which is, in other words, the owner, the address of the tenant.

Usually they're the defendant. That's the property that's having the eviction in. And you go to county records and see who the owner of that property is, all right? So anyway, I used to do my own marketing. I did that kind of stuff and I stopped. I started getting virtual assistants. I started to get in other people to do this stuff for me because the problem was it was killing my momentum. And because I was not consistent with it, cause I got busy. A lot of my marketing stopped was like stop and go. It was very hesitant. It wasn't consistent because I wasn't consistently every day doing what needed to be done. So when I finally hired somebody to do my marketing for me, everything completely changed. And that's still true today. I don't do as many deals as I used to do. We still do deals. But back then, it used to be my full-time thing, right? Just doing deals. Now, we have my business, we sell market, gun-free marketing services, we sell software, we cell coaching, we sell info products, we sale services on top of doing deals, and now I'm doing a lot more lending money on deals, partnering with people on deals. Et cetera, et cetera, right. So, Anyway, everybody has those $5 an hour activities and you either need to hire somebody to do it for you or train AI to do that stuff for you. And so now when I want marketing done, I just have my kids do it or I hire an assistant to do it, or I just use AI. Very simple. All right.

So the second thing that I used to do a lot of, and I'm still learning to say no to, but is chasing shiny objects. I used to chase every new hook, every new strategy, every little tactic and trick. I bought tons of courses, thinking that each new strategy that I was learning in real estate was the secret, that it was the next thing that I needed to have. I was a professional student, and I learned real, I shortly learned out of that. I heard somebody say this one, shiny objects will make you go blind, focus will make you rich. And so when I stopped chasing shiny objects and started focusing on one thing, I started making a lot more money. Let me give you an example. Well, I had dozens and dozens of courses. I'd go to boot camps and stuff like that back in the 2005 through 2008-ish time frame. So for three or four years. And I kept on buying more and more courses. Well, then I got so frustrated. My back was against the wall. We were hemorrhaging cash. I was losing my house to foreclosure. I was losing rental properties to foreclosure. I was trying to be a jack of all trades, but I was a master of none. I was trying to learn multiple strategies. I was trying to learning rehabbing and buy and hold and short sales of foreclosures. I didn't like wholesaling. I thought wholesaling was for beginners. I thought it was for rookies. I didn't think that real smart investors did wholesaling, and I think part of the reason why, cause that book Rich Dad Poor Dad, he talked about real intelligent investors do long-term buy and whole, right? Anyway, another story for another time. So I chased all these shiny objects and it wasn't until my back was against the wall and I was hemorrhaging cash. And I said, I've got to learn wholesaling. But this time I told myself, and I remember telling my wife this, I want to buy one more course and I'm not going to change anything. I'm just going to focus on this one strategy. I'm going to do what this guy says to do, and I am not going change anything, and I’m going do it until it works. And I gave myself a deadline. I am going to this for three months. It was either three or six months, I forget, it might've been six months, because I knew at this point that there had to be long-term focus on this, not just short-term, if I don't do a deal in the next 30 days. So it was like, you'll say this three to six months. And when I focused on that one strategy, I bought two courses, I didn't want to buy just one. I bought 2.

So listen, I believe in education. It's really important. I believe that. But in this course, I brought Chris Chico, great guy, he's still out there doing deals. Chris Chico, he had a course called Absentee Owner Profits, and Steve Cook, who's He was also one of my coaches and mentors back in the day, still active in the business. Go check out Steve Cook. Just Google him and see. He has a ministry slash business called Life and Air. So anyway, I bought their courses on wholesaling and I read through both of them and I liked Chris Chico's course better because Steve Cook was teaching on how to find deals on the MLS. I wanted to do what Chris Chico was talking about just doing postcards. So he did, you know, he did the cheap ugly postcards to tired landlords. And so anyway, I decided I'm going to do what Chris Chico says to do and I'm not going to change anything. I'm Not going to question anything. I'm just going to do it. And guess what? It worked within a couple of months. I did my first deal after making all kinds of mistakes. Even though Chris like, you know, I was making the mistakes because I wasn't doing what Chris said to do. But anyway, made my very first deal. Did a video about it once. I made like 12 or $13,000. And when the deals became consistent was because I stopped chasing shiny objects. I focused on just one strategy and the same is true for my education business. I used to have a ton of different courses and a ton of different services and products. And, you know, every couple of weeks we were creating a new promotion and it was frustrating. A lot of people, it was confusing my customers, and it was frustrating my team. They were getting burnt out. So about a year ago, I said, Hey, listen, I love the land business. We're doing a lot of land deals. Our students are doing land deals, I'm just going to create one program and I'm not going to sell anything else. And that's what we did. So about a year ago, we created simple flips and then we changed it to dirt flippers and it's been amazing since I've focused on just one thing and we're focusing on the five-day challenge and it just giving getting tremendous results for our clients and for us. So the power of focus, stop chasing shiny objects, start focusing related to the previous thing I said, stop focusing on $5 an hour activities, start focusing on the $500 an hour, activities.

But one of the other things I eliminated was unnecessary meetings. I used to say yes to every meeting everybody that I wanted to get on my calendar now I'm a lot more selective and I have to say no most meetings that you go into are not productive fact They're counterproductive. We need to start protecting our time more people used to save me Hey Joe, can I pick your brain and I always said yes, right? I'm just want to be a nice guy but most people that I spent time with never took action and it turned out to be just a huge time drain. You know, not everybody, but some people are just, if you let them, can be giant leeches that just suck you dry. They suck your energy, your time, and people who pay, pay attention. And so a lot of times, people will want to just pick your brain, and you got to stop doing that. So I started charging for my time. I started saying, hey, listen, if want to do deals, cool, I would spend a little bit of time with them. I'd say, go do this and this and, and this, and give them like three or four things to do, go watch these videos or whatever. And after you do that, all of those things, after you talk to a hundred sellers or you make 100 offers, then bring me the deal and I'll look at it and maybe we'll partner with it. And when I did that, things changed. I stopped giving away my courses for free. I started charging people for it, even if it was just a few dollars. When people wanted to pick my brain or take me out for coffee or I'd say, yeah, you know what? I'm sorry. I'm just kind of busy. And, but how can I help you? I would still try to help them, but maybe do something over the phone. And then I would say if they still wanted more help or whatever, I'd say, Hey, listen, there's a couple of books I'd recommend. Here's some videos I recommend. So when you after you watch those videos and do what that video says to do or do what the book says to do, then hook me. Yeah, call me back and let's schedule a time to meet because then we have something intelligent to talk about. There's so much free information out there. So stop wasting your time with tire kickers. And the amazing thing, what this was happening was I started getting my time back and with certain meetings like this. And so one of my, I remember one guy in particular, I told him, Hey, go. He wanted to, I was a friend of mine, also a and I said, listen, go find somebody with old leads. And after you go, just go to Facebook groups and find somebody who's got a bunch of old leads and I think I was talking to him about cash wholesaling at the time, just making cash wholesale offers. I said after you make 35 to 40 offers, then, oh, I get a free coffee, check this out. After you make 35 to 48 offers, let me know, and we'll have coffee. You know what happened? He got a deal out of that. And so when we did have the meeting, it was more along the lines of, okay, now what do I do? I got this seller that said yes. So very simple, take massive action and you'll see massive results. Okay.

Now the fourth thing that I used to say yes to, but now I don't anymore is taking on too many projects. I used say yes, to everything kind of related to what I was saying before. But a lot of these projects, these bigger projects, these new initiatives, I would get bored, right? Like, I told my team when I was gonna just focus on flipping vacant land and teaching vacant land, they were like floored. They were absolutely, they, I remember when I first told them, there was stunned silence on the Zoom. Like, and I said, I'm gonna do this just for a year. And what I found out was like they were really getting burnt out with all the different projects and things that I would share with them. When I'd go to a mastermind or when I'd got to a workshop or a boot camp or something like that, or I'd learned something new from a new book, I would always be giving them new things to do. And so since we stopped doing that, we focused just on these one projects, one project here, maybe in any new project that we do is like an iteration of that. We've been seeing our revenue really increase and get bigger and bigger. So this all kind of relates to what I was saying before with the $5 an hour activities. But now I ask myself this question a lot. If I can't make a million dollars on this idea, then I'm not going to do it. It's a great question. You need to be asking yourself, even though you may not even be like anywhere near a million dollars. Those are bigger, better questions you need to ask yourself. If I can't make a million dollars on this new strategy or this idea, is it really worth your time? And you got to be focused on that, realistic.

Okay, finally, low value tasks. I used to waste a bunch of time on little tasks that didn't grow the business. Now I delegate and automate everything possible. I focus on the highest impact activities. You say these are all kind of related to you, but I'm talking about like little tasks like tweaking spreadsheets, working on my CRM, doing busy work, updating websites, and doing busy that didn't actually produce deals. And I started looking at, okay, in one year, how many deals did we do? We did about 58 deals. I know those 58 deals, where did they come from, right? Almost all of them came from direct mail postcards. All of them come from when actually we were talking to sellers. We were actually making offers. And this is the big thing here, we were just doing follow-up. So I decided, you know what, I'm gonna stop doing all these other types of marketing. I'm going to focus on the marketing that's actually working. At the time it was direct mail. It's still direct mail today. And we're just going to focus on not trying to make the sellers jump through a bunch of AI automation hoops and stuff like that. We're going to actually talk to sellers, we're going to make real offers, and we're gonna do follow up, we are going to do a massive amount of follow up.

So here's the takeaway from that. Okay. If it doesn't generate leads, if it doesn’t make money, then do not do it. Is this a project that you're looking at that can make you a million dollars? Then don't do it there are everybody you these million-dollar ideas. They are out there, and you just need to make sure you're focusing on them, okay? Students who adopt this principle that I've been working with over the years will see the same thing. Revenue jumps when the admin work is outsourced. So like, again, focusing back to those $5 an hour activities. Outsource that stuff. Focus on the $500 revenue-generating activity. I guess that's the whole theme of kind of what this is about. And as I'm kind of reading my notes here and talking about this, this all kind of relates to this. It all comes back down to focus, what are those things that you are doing that is sucking and draining your time? You need to be focusing on revenue generating, put revenue in first position in your business. Does that make sense? All right, we'll see ya, bye bye.