Joe: Welcome. This is The Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast.

Joe: Here we go. We are live. Hey everybody, welcome. This is The Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Got a special treat for you today. His name is Dan Duran, the marketing man. And a lot of you guys know Dan from way, way back and we're going to be talking about this. So Dan reached out to me out of the blue the other day and it's funny because I had been thinking about him and it just kind of happened and I think, you know this is going to be a really good interview. And so I'm excited about this because I owe a lot of my success to Dan Duran and Richard Route when they were working together. A lot of what you hear me harp on all the time on this podcast, we're not in the real estate business, we're in the marketing business, right?

Joe: Get marketing done for you in spite of you, that's from Dan Duran. He's the guy. So I am super pumped and excited about this podcast and I don't want to waste any more of Dan's time because it's really valuable and I'm glad you're here. Dan, how are you?

Dan: Joe, I'm doing fantastic. Thanks so much for having me on and I'm glad you're, you're getting use out of all those things that we taught you.

Joe: Man I can't tell you how many hours and hours I spent listening to your CD's in the car, burning them onto my MP3 player and listening to them over and over and over again. I remember, you know, some of my best memories were the, you used to have on your boot camps like a panel of experts. And you would always joke like how, um, people don't believe what you say, but when you put the panel of experts, they'll say the same thing and they get all excited about them.

Dan: That's an excellent marketing lesson yes, the tendency of everybody to want to brag. You know what I mean? You want to know about me? Oh, let me tell you, I'm listening to this and this, Eh, don't brag. Get someone else to brag about you. That's much better.

Joe: Yes. Well, I realized that later on as I've started teaching and coaching and doing workshops and events and things like that, it's like I can, when I say I've done a deal, yeah, people maybe don't believe it or don't care, but when I can show them a client that's done a deal, I get so excited because I know the impact that's going to have on other people to inspire them and get them excited about the business. So anyway I'm glad you're here, Dan. Some people don't know who you are. Some people do. Would you just please give us a quick introduction. You've been in the business a long time. You're one of the people that I look up to and I've learned so much from you, but how did you get started in the business way, way back in the I don't want to date you, so…

Dan: It's okay. Hey, you're getting older or your dead, you know, so I'm proud to be alive. Well I started out in the early 80's as a sales trainer of all things and that was great because anything you do has two things in it always, well, three sales, marketing and mindset. And so those are the three things that I really specialized in throughout my life. Got into marketing in the 90's with Dan Kennedy and it was through Dan Kennedy that I met Ron Legrand. And it's kind of a cute story about Ron. I think he's great if you haven't taken his course you should, you know, the basic one.

Joe: I'm sure you have a lot of cute stories about Ron.

Dan: Well, listen, you're going to love this. So this is first time I met him, I went up to him to the back of a Kennedy's workshop and I said, Hey, Dan told me I should talk to you about the real estates. So he gave me about, I don't know, one minute picture. He goes, but it probably won't work where you live. And he turned and walked away and I said, oh my gosh, what an arrogant sob more arrogant than me. I got to go through all this, so that was the, that was the initial would be in wrong.

Joe: Yeah. I had Ron on my podcast. I like Ron a lot, but he could sometimes be just a, he's one of the most smartest guys out there, right? Like I give him kudos, but he can be a little grouchy.

Dan: Just a little bit, just a little bit.

Joe: That was in the 80's is that what you said?

Dan: I started in the 80s with sales training and a read over 900 sales books by the time I was 29. Which is a little bit, we're going to talk about that, that's called overachieving and you think that's good, it's really not. And then the third book I could've stopped. And then in the 90's I got into marketing and then I also got into coaching at that same time. I've be coaching since about '92 and then I always wanted to get into real estate for a long, long time. I took my first real estate course back in the mid 80's, but didn't do anything with it, you know, some ring a bell. Uh, and, and then in '02 there was a course or whatever it was, '01 , 9/11. As soon as 0/11 happened it was a really good time. You know, my business kind of took a dip like everything did because it's slowed down and I said, we're going to get into real estate.

Dan: I did. And I go in for one reason and one reason only, I wanted to teach sales marketing and personal development training, you know, for real estate entrepreneurs. And then I ran into a Roop accidentally, Richard Roop was great guy. And let this be a lesson to anybody out there who's got a partner. If I could go back in time, every argument we ever had, I would have ended with yes sir. As opposed to we just kind of, you know, butted heads because we were too much alike. But anyway, he was a great guy and we had a lot of fun together and helped a lot of people.

Joe: Yes you did.

Dan: And then you mentioned the panels. Interesting thing that happens, over time all we did was panelists. We would do just like hit a bit of content and then we'll say, okay, let's, let's see the practical application of this. Because we had all the detailed content, you know, on CD's and stuff like that, so interesting.

Joe: That is great. I love panels as well. Like when I go to an event, I remember at the time when I got your courses and stuff, I couldn't afford to go to the boot camps and but I bought the courses and devoured them. I probably, well you guys came out with at least two or three. I bought your Door Knocking course. Do you remember that course?

Dan: Yeah, how to use door to door marketing.

Joe: I think I have it over there some where.

Dan: Pick up a ton of deeds without ever knocking on the door yourself. And I taught you how to go out and train someone else and I would do the training for it, yeah. I knocked over 26,000 doors as a sales trainer.

Joe: Are you serious?

Dan: Yeah. Let me tell you about it. So there's probably some realtors on the line. What we did in the early eighties everyone in California, I was in California at the time. Everyone in California turned out to either work for Aerospace or was a realtor. And I'm not kidding you, it was very popular. So my sales trainer that I originally learned from, a guy named Al Thompson, really fascinating guy. He'd had over 40 years in the business at the time. And so what we'd do is we'd go out and we would, here was our USP, we can teach any real estate company how to double your business in 90 days guaranteed, okay. So we've got a lot of business. What we would do is we would take them out in the field, knock doors after a two day training and we would actually show them how it was done.

Dan: Well, the good thing is they would all do it for a little while and business will go up and then they would do their typical realtor thing, which is not too different from the investor thing. A lot of similarities between investors and realtors. For example, they both are really good at not paying their taxes on time. You know what I mean? We'll stop it right there.

Joe: Let's not talk about tax.

Dan: I am one of those too. I used to be, so, anyway, they would stop doing it after about a month. So every six months we would go back in and train them again. It was, it was a great gig.

Joe: So one of the cool things that you did with that is, you trained them how to not just learn how to do it themselves, but how to get other people to do it.

Dan: No, I absolutely positively didn't want you to do it because I knew you wouldn't want to or you would want to, but you wouldn't do it. So I literally had two CD's in there, this was to train what we call the researchers because he couldn't call them door knockers because that's technically a little brass thing that goes on the door is the door knocker. But these were researchers and just give them my CD's and I did all the training for you. It's pretty cool.

Joe: Which I thought, I thought it was really, really good. I'm starting to see more people do door knocking now.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah me too.

Joe: I'm starting to do, see more people do post it notes. Do you remember those post it notes?

Dan: I remember we were blasting them with post it notes. Yeah. Big ones, little ones all sorts of them. Yeah.

Joe: I got a list of questions I want to ask you, Dan, and I first want to ask you about, what was, can you talk a little bit about the philosophy of get it done for you in spite of you, you know, marketing is the most important thing and like that changed my life, that thinking, changing the mindset of like, how can I get someone else to do all of this for me?

Dan: Yeah. Well done for you marketing was just the thing I saw. Do you know Boomershine right?

Joe: Yeah, we've had him on the show.

Dan: Yeah. So Gary, great guy, good friend. When I first saw his presentation, we came, I came in late because Richard Roop and I didn't like to have too many outside speakers because we wanted to use our content. Well we had them on and I said, well I should probably check on this scale and see how it's going. And there was, and Gary would tell you the same story, whoever was on state, I don't know who it was, but they had an Excel sheets showing like, you know, 50 sales. It was just the most complicated, non simple presentation ever, which of course, you know, keep it simple is the first law of selling.

Dan: So I talked to him afterwards like, Oh hey, I got some ideas and how you can simplify this. And we worked together and we came up with this program and Gary and I took that all across the country, all different kinds of people. But done for you. I mean, think about how many things are done for you. I mean, like your hat that you're wearing, good looking hat. Did you make that yourself or was that done for you?

Joe: It was done for me.

Dan: Have you ever been out to dinner?

Joe: Yes.

Dan: That's food done for you. Do you ever, do you ever do grow a lot of plants or do you just go to the grocery store, which is groceries you know, done for you? The more you can do for someone, the better it is. So if there's anyone listening who's in the information business, that's very important what I just told you. You can get a higher price for a done for you than you can for trying to teach it to them.

Dan: And I did both. We used to set up the done for you by teaching them what they need to do, showing them how difficult. It wasn't say, well you can do that. It was like 74 things you had to do, or you can just go back and see Gary and give him a check. So done for you.

Joe: I so appreciated that. Can you talk a little bit about what you've been doing since then and, you know, we, yeah, so I know you don't work together with Roop anymore. But like what kind of, what happened just at a high level summary during that time and what have you been doing since then?

Dan: Yeah, well we were both stupid idiots, okay. My good friend and a guy we brought in to do coaching for us, Willie Hooks, maybe some of the people on the call know Willie. Willie said, hey look, you guys are like Shaq and Kobe, you know, he was a big basketball fan and still is. And he says, yeah, you both can be on your own, and you can win a ring or two, but you're not going to have a, you know, the real dominance than you would if you stayed together. And we just didn't. And like I said, one of the biggest mistakes of my life, but I, it's really, I've been able to overcome the vain regret and put it into just a great lesson. And I matured a lot from them too. So, first of all, I don't need to be right all the time. And it's very common for people to be in partnerships in this kind of business. And it's very common for people to break up. Listen, just, you know, just think about the longevity of that you'd like to have and realize that it's like a relationship like your marriage, you know, you can't always get everything you want in your marriage. Likewise in a partnership. Good words.

Joe: Yeah. Okay. What have you been doing since then?

Dan: Well, all sorts of stuff. Afterwards I went out and did an infomercial which was fun. My whole goal, Joe, was just to be here I got to show my view. Isn't that pretty?

Joe: I love that. I want, can I have one of those too?

Dan: Yeah. This is my elevating desks. I've had this for like 20 years. I love it. By the way, always stand when you need more power when you're on the phone.

Joe: Yeah I'm standing right now.

Dan: You got a stand up, you're standing up. I'm standing up. We have so much power. It's incredible. But what was the, what was the question? I'm sorry.

Joe: I do want to talk about how to talk to sellers because you were so good. You know, just this morning I was doing my group coaching call and I was talking about how to handle objections, Dan. And I remember how you had like a simple three or four step formula for handling objections.

Dan: Yeah Law number five, six and seven.

Joe: Law number five, six, seven. Yes. Okay. That's right. Yeah. But so I was asking you like what have you been doing since then? You did an infomercial and then what did you do?

Dan: Well, let me get back to answering the objections though. So they don't leave them hanging, okay. I have Laws and principles that apply to me the practice of sales is an art, but the true working of sales is really more scientific. In fact, when you know the laws and principles, you can actually cause a sale at will. And I think I was the only guy who really talked about this in the space.

Joe: This is deep. We could do a whole podcast on this and maybe we will, maybe we'll do a part two, Dan, great talking about this because this is so important what you're going to be sharing party just a little bit right now.

Dan: And maybe it motivate me to actually update the course, t's still classic. But yeah, so anyway, when someone gives you an objection the typical this is to fight with them, that's not good. You know what, what I used to do is I pick out like a bunch of big guys in the front row and I go over and say, hold your hand up like this. And then I'll hold their hand out and I'd push on, push on, push on and every one of them, guess what? As soon as I pushed on them they pushed back, it's a natural human thing. So when someone gives you an objection, if you push on it, they're going to push back. So they'll push back. It's real simple. What we do is we call him my name, agree and ask a question.

Dan: We call them by name to a rest of the brain. Joe, I ask you a question and I call you by name I've got your attention for a brief moment because see when I'm sitting there talking to you and you're the seller, I think your listening to me, but they're going, let's see, I'm got to get some dry cleaning picked up this afternoon. Wife wants me to go pick up the groceries, they're out there. But when you call them by name, ask them a question that you're reasonably sure that, they know the answer to, they can't help but answer at least mentally. And so anyway, call them by name, arrest of the brain, agree with them, the most difficult law. Always agree, always agree.

Joe: And sometimes the best way to agree is just to repeat what they said.

Dan: When you can't think of stuff that's a good thing. So Joe, I think I hear what you're saying, blah, blah, blah. Is that right? Yeah. So the idea is you like me because I've agreed with you. I've asked you a question so I have control. Wouldn't you agree? Those who ask questions have control.

Joe: Exactly.

Dan: There you go.

Joe: That's another thing that I've learned from you. All this stuff's coming back. Like I learned the whole thing about, and this is common sales knowledge, but like, when you're new in the business and you're hungry, just devouring this stuff, like I have pages and pages of notes from these audio CD's that I used to have of you guys.

Dan: Well the biggest mistake people make in selling in this business is they think it's about the numbers. Hi, what do you want for your house? $300,000 I'll give you a $200,000 your move. I say, look, if that's what, if that's the extent of your sales skills, do this I'll save you some time. As you're driving out to see this seller in your truck, just take the offer, crumple it up and toss it out the window, it gets about the same return as that little song and dance instead. If you remember, what I taught you to do, is find their pain. Because it's not a logical thing, it's an emotional thing. And if I can solve your problem, your pain, then we've got something. And if I can't, then I don't deserve your business. Make sense?

Joe: Very good. All right. So talk about what you've been doing since then. Go back to that.

Dan: So I did the infomercial it was a lot of fun. I know now why movie stars are so vein because I mean, people just kiss their butt, but it was fun to be in that situation. But unfortunately 2010 and the Obama economy kind of crushed it. In fact, here's, if you remember the time, real estate wasn't in such, such a negative, real estate that can't work. We couldn't. So we we're on a 28 minute and 30 minute infomercial about real estate. And guess what word we couldn't say? Real estate because they would change the channel because they knew it doesn't work anymore. Just like when everyone knew the world was flat, you couldn't convince them otherwise.

Joe: Isn't that something.

Dan: When everyone knew that you couldn't break the four minute mile. Everyone agreed to that.

Joe: That's when most investors are making the most money.

Dan: My guys, I went back and did a whole bunch of research on my guys and by the way, over 70%, 70.6% of my top clients from coaching are financially free today.

Joe: Seriously?

Dan: Yeah, exactly. Isn't that amazing? And one of the, one of the main reasons is, is, well, first of all, they kept doing it, okay. But yeah, during the, when the crisis happens, when the credit, credit squeeze, you know, the ultimate strategy, the thing that Roop I created together how to buy a house with no cash, no credit, borrow 0%, put $30,000 tax free in your pocket the day you buy. Yeah, that was what was born there.

Joe: Did you create that with him or was that…

Dan: Yep, we sure did. Would you like to, would you like to know the origin of it?

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. By the way, this is an amazing course. You guys, it's called The Ultimate Sales Machine. Is that what it was?

Dan: US Ultimate Strategy.

Joe: The ultimate strategy? It was all about mainly, I mean big in big picture terms, finding free and clear houses and making owner financing offers.

Dan: Exactly. It's the ultimate owner financing category.

Joe: It was phenomenal. I still, no, I don't have that course anymore. Maybe I do. I got it around, because it was so good and I was one of the first guys who bought it. I remember when it was updated, like Roop kept on updating the spreadsheet.

Dan: Right, he loved those spreadsheets.

Joe: So I kept on trying to get the newest spreadsheet, you know. But yeah, that was a fantastic course. Talk a little bit about that. How did, how'd you guys come up with that?

Dan: Let me first tell you about Roop and spreadsheets. I really, truly believe that, we're out having a party one night I said, you know how Richard sends love letters to his wife says, Darling, how I do I love thee, let me count the ways G17, he everything into spreadsheets. But, anyway, how do we come up with it? I was standing on stage in California somewhere and it was talking about the difference, which was just enlightening to these people, illuminating the difference between cash flow and net cash flow. Because you can only spend the net of anything and it's a big, big difference. You know, you've got to take off for, you know, all of your vacancies and repairs basically 25%. So this guy asked me this question, he says, Hey Dan, I was showing him how you could make any house cash flow at the time he was, he was, this guy was living in San Francisco and he says, Dan, how do I make that $830,000 house cash flow?

Dan: And I said, you know, so objection. Well, Sam, call him by name, that's very interesting. Do you mind if I get back to you on that? So call him by name if he asks a question. So I had lunch, we break and I started thinking about it. I came back and said, hey Sam, tell me about this house. Is it free and clear? And it happened to be free and clear. I go, oh, real simple. Just go in and offer them your price, my terms or your terms, my price. And that was it. And it was born. And that's basically what the ultimate strategy.

Joe: This is so exciting too because, oh, what was I going to say? It's about giving the sellers choices, right? And when you give them a choice, you always, it's always win, win. But when you put, I loved how you used to position it or phrase, teach it where it's either price or terms, I'll give you yours or that. And but you can do this in high expensive markets. I remember what I was going to say, what percentage of all homes in the US are free and clear?

Joe: Exactly. Most people would guess. Go ahead and friends at home, take a guess and we'll pause. Wrong, it's not 12% it's not 2% it's 35%.

Joe: Can you believe that? When I heard that from you guys, like, Whoa, my brain exploded, 35% and that's from the US census.

Dan: Yeah. And it actually it's probably more than that because there's a lot of stuff you can't get data on, you know, that doesn't show up in that. And so yeah, there's a bunch of them out there. You just got to know how to go find them. And we figured out how to go find them.

Joe: And so who owns the rights to that course anyway right now, do you know?

Dan: Me and Roop. Yeah.

Joe: Oh you both still do?

Dan: Yeah, we both still do.

Joe: Thought about doing, releasing that again or…

Dan: Well now I am. Yeah. We probably should.

Joe: by the way, if you have, if you'd talked to Roop tell him hello for us.

Dan: I will, I will, I'll call him this and tell him about when this is going to be played so we can go listen to it. But yeah, he's a, we're still, we still stay in traction and he's a great guy and I wish him well.

Joe: Yeah. Such a good strategy though because it really taught the importance of marketing and picking up the phone, answering the phone, talking to people, getting the, if there's motivation or equity, go equity.

Dan: If there's equity, go. Yeah, I totally destroyed this whole thing about, you know, motivated sellers. And my favorite thing would be is I pick someone out of the front row said, okay Joe, you like motivated sellers?

Joe: Yeah.

Dan: Is that all your going to say? Let me ask, are you married?

Joe: Yes.

Dan: Okay. And what's your wife's first name?

Joe: Victoria.

Dan: Victoria. So you remember when you first met Victoria how excited you were?

Joe: Yes.

Dan: Okay. Could you imagine calling her back and saying the following? Hey Victoria, this is Joe. We just met, we're going for dinner tonight. Assuming the meal is good and you like the movie, how about a little hug and kiss and afterwards. There's no man who would ever be that stupid, right? We say, show me your motivation I'll come see it. No, what you want to do is you want to go see a qualified prospect, which is someone who could buy if they are properly motivated. Only thing is can you motivate? And you do that by going through the sales process in the home looking for emotions.

Joe: Yup, Yup, Yup. And you should only do that, but the people with equity because, and you need to have, you need to be more than a one trick pony. You can't just have a cash offer that you can give them. You need to know how to creatively structure deals. Well, if you don't take that, then maybe this and structure different options.

Dan: Yeah, and basically what I did with sales mastery for real estate entrepreneurs was I was like created a bunch of laws that I just created and one of them was like the law of pricing terms and it's a great one. The goal was to make you make us not look like crazy seminar goers who just read a book about no money down offers because they do look kind of crazy sometimes. I made them look completely logical.

Joe: Can I go ahead and get you on the books for another podcast? Because I have a bunch of questions I want to ask you here.

Dan: Sure.

Joe: I want to ask you some more questions about sales mastery. Because that is so good and people, you know, need to hear this. I think it's important for the audience and these principles and these laws that you teach about when you're talking to sellers and meeting with them. Can I get you, there's only like 5 million trillion people watching right now.

Dan: Sure.

Joe: Can I get you on? Well good.

Dan: I'll be glad to, I'll be glad to.

Joe: You, I want to ask you a little bit more about your story here. Um, you, you had an issue with your throat.

Dan: Yeah, I had throat cancer. But I'm all recovered and healthier than ever. And it was kind of…

Joe: When was that?

Dan: What was that? I think it was a 15, 16, 17. Yeah.

Joe: Okay. So two or three years and you make your income from talking.

Dan: I know, isn't that an irony? Yeah. Yeah. And I wasn't a smoker or anything like that. So yeah, it was just there, but it has like an 86% recovery rates. So if you've got to get one that's a good one to get. And it was really a great spiritual experience for me to go through there and you know, look at my mortality and my mission and purpose and all that kind of stuff.

Joe: Well good, good for you.

Dan: And I got people praying for me and I appreciate that.

Joe: Nice. You had a stint where you were consulting and working with some really high level internet marketing companies for a…

Dan: Yeah I worked with Digital Marketer. I was just with them down at the TNC traffic and cover. These guys are hot. It's 7,000 people in the audience, man. I would love to be on that stage. But yeah I did the, I did a program for them, they had a couple of years ago called The Number One Book System. It was basically how to write a book in a weekend and it attracted a really cool crowd, you know, kind of older crowd, very successful. And boy, they had some very similar problems that I'm going to talk about here today that real estate entrepreneurs do as well. But it was a lot of fun.

Joe: Good. And you've always been a coach at heart and I wanted to ask you some questions about that. Like why coach, you know, there's a lot of other things you could be doing, I'm sure Dan, why do you like to coach? What is it about that that kind of attraction brings you back to that?

Dan: Well, you know, it's interesting and I can tell you a true story about that. So I'm sitting in my office one day with my staff huddled around me in this, it was a house and it was, we're kind of busting at the gills, because we were growing too fast and my family still live there. So I had to buy a new house for the wife and then we stayed there. But anyway, I'm sitting there on the phone and my wife comes up to me and she hands me a piece of paper and I read it and says, ah, you know, something to the effect of $1.1 million, that's how much we made. It was the first time I had individually broken $1 million. And I should have been really excited because I mean, ever since I was a little boy, for those boomers on the call, do you remember Yogi Bear, Yogi was even smarter than a millionaire, right. So I wanted to be like Yogi, smarter than a million, hey there boo boo. So I had this goal forever. I got this evidence that I achieved it and it didn't do anything for me. Fast forward, about three weeks later, I go to one of our boot camps and they were five day affairs.

Dan: You know, we do a inner game, you know, mindset on day one and then the boot camp the rest of four days and literally had this walk up to me, Hey Dan, your program saved my life. Really? Tell me that story. Hey Dan look at this beautiful house I bought from my wife. This guy lived in a single wide and now he's in this like 8,000 square foot house. Hey Dan, because of you, I just gave 80,000 to my church on and on and on. And that's where I find fulfillment. Not in money. I mean, money's great, okay. You got to have it. It's the lubricant of life makes things go easier, but it's not the thing I grabbed fulfillment from, it's helping others and you know, I want to make it look to do a survey like I did recently and find out that better than 7 out of 10 of my own coaching client are basically if financially free today that's fantastic.

Joe: That's phenomenal. That's really good. And I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised if people just take what you teach them and do it and implement it they have success.

Dan: Exactly. Implement. That's the key. And that's a big, big message I have for anyone listening, especially anyone new, you don't need more information like you think you do. You need more implementation. Implement? Not more information. In fact if you want the easiest gig in the world for real estate. Just learn how to find great deals. There's lots of ways to do it. I mean drive up and down neighborhoods. If you just found great deals, you could drag them down to the local REIA, guess what, someone will do the rest of deal for you. So you don't need a whole bunch of whole bunch of knowledge.

Joe: Good. All right. One of the things you like to coach a lot of people on it, and we've talked about this on the phone earlier, is productivity master skills. Can you talk a little bit about what, what is that and how do you help people be more productive and master these skills?

Dan: Yeah, so I'm a master coach because I've been doing it forever and I've created a couple of coaching programs. I created the program that Roop and I use and several others since then. And so recently we've come up with this thing called master skills, their skills which you need to have to be effective. And then there's these things called master skills that kind of a turbocharge even more. They're little tiny bite size trainings that are ready to implement. And I'll share some of those with you today.

Joe: Yeah, please do.

Dan: Yeah. So…

Joe: What are some of your, what are some of the favorite master skills that you talk about and you, we were talking before about it. That's a little two minute exercise I think that increases your productivity. Can you flesh that out a little bit too?

Dan: Well, let me first talk. You were starting to ask the question of productivity. So productivity, I can tell you what it's not, it's not being busy and it's not even getting a lot of stuff done. So if you're one of those people who was always saying, I'm really busy and I am getting a lot of stuff done, I would, I would dare you to check and see are you getting the right stuff done? And what is that? The right stuff is anything that ties directly to your highest priorities, your number one goals. Because otherwise what happens in life is you'll just be reactive and you'd be very busy reacting to all of the stuff. I mean, you know, it just goes and goes and goes.

Dan: And then you know, every time you expand your business a little bit, it goes bigger. So productivity is getting stuff done relative to your most important goals. And you want to know about a two minute, two minute drill?

Joe: Yes.

Dan: So the first master skill is called a focus. And I've got a story for each one of these skills because it's kind of fun. This lady that I was coaching A type personality, hard charger, she'll come in and just bang right into work. The only problem is on the way to work, of course, you might have had a fight with a spouse. You definitely had problems with traffic. I always, I don't know if you heard my solution for not having problems in traffic, but to wear mittens. Get it?

Joe: No.

Dan: It's, what's the sign language for I don't like you? You can't see it in mittens. So you've got traffic, you've got, you got stuff that comes when you're at the office, you've got all your emails and texts and then the news, all of it, negative, negative, negative. So I taught her, I said, look, just take two minutes before you begin and take a pause and reflect, why am I doing any of this anyway? And you want to be able to tie it back to your goals. So what I tell people to do is don't concentrate on the task, but get fascinated by it. And people said, well Dan how do you fascinate? Just again to the time when you were in love. You know, when you first meet somebody, you say everything about it, is just fascinating. You just look at it and you feel good, that's what you want to do with your task. And then after you've done that, then what I have you do is visualize the successful completion and feel that joy. But then I also have you turn and visualize failure and yes, there is a lot of power in failure and then make a choice. Which one do I want? I'll pick the success and then, and then this is a cool trick. Try this with me. Go ahead and smile for about 10 seconds. You Ready?

Dan: I dare you to think of anything negative, you can't do it.

Joe: I'm still smiling.

Dan: Exactly. Exactly. So that is, and a smile as a modest form of enthusiasm and enthusiasm is contagious and it comes across on the phone, it's just a great thing to do. So if you just…

Joe: What a great, that's a great exercise to do like right before, because I've been doing this for 10 years now and I still get the butterflies when I get ready to pick up the phone and call sellers.

Dan: Right, right.

Joe: What are some of the tricks that people can do in their head to kind of get over those little fears and be more focused and in it and you know, excited.

Dan: Well, you can take some time to focus so you can get rid of all that negative stuff I just had you, you can't help it, it's like jumping into a pool. You're going to get wet, you know, driving to work or get out of bed, stuff's going to happen. So by focusing on what you're really doing is you're looking at the end result and once you see the end result, then they're your friends. You've served them well, they're happy, you're happy. What's not, what's not to smile about.

Joe: Okay, good. What are some of these other master skills?

Dan: Well, let's see here. What are we covering today?

Joe: How many do you have, by the way?

Dan: I've got seven of them? Let's see here. Oh yeah, here's one. This is great. Do you know Mike Samsky?

Joe: Yes. From Seattle.

Dan: Yes.

Joe: Is he still in Seattle?

Dan: Yeah. Yeah, he is. And I live just north of Seattle. So this one came from some work I did with Mike one day and it's all about repositioning your work. You want to be able to reuse your work because you're going to be like, you've been in this business what, how many years? 10, 15?

Joe: 10 years.

Dan: You're going to use the same stuff over and over. So you might as well not make it just for one thing, but make it over and over again. And there's a lot of fear in this business, especially in the beginning, because when you make a mistake in this business, it can cost you, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. When I first started I said, well, let me just for fun I'm going to keep track of my mistakes. And after I got to about 500,000, I quit counting, okay. Because it adds up fast, so one of the problems he was having was, and he's a real sharp guy, but it was taking him too long to decide on to buy or to not buy, you know what I'm talking about?

Dan: So I said, well, let's make a decision tree and it's really cool looking, but maybe I can send you one, you can get it out to people. But it basically says, what are your, what are your most important thing? So the first question is it in a good neighborhood? Is it in the ideal neighborhood that I want? And you know, is it in good shape? Because is it a light rehab in other words? Light rehab in the right place, you know, location, location, location. And so if it says if yes, you move to the right, if know it goes down and out and you're eventually going to just get rid of it. Then the next one is does it have enough equity? You know, at the time he was looking for 30% equity. I think he's looking for a slightly more than that now.

Dan: And then would just go across and you ask all these questions and would say yes, move this way no, move this way. So he could literally Joe, by the time this thing is done and it took a while to build it, but by the time it's done, you could literally hand it to a newbie and they could go out and buy houses for you because they just, they just follow, follow the arrows.

Joe: That's good. Yeah. That is good. We talked before about Shiny Object Syndrome. And I love how you look at this and we all suffer from shiny objects, some of us more than others. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dan: Yeah. The care for the Shiny Object Syndrome is completion that is, do not even put a thing on your plan if you're not going to complete it. Now, I don't know if you were ever any money time management days that we did. But when I teach time management, it's an all day thing. And I can guarantee anybody in there, I can find them at least 20 hours they're wasting. And the idea is if you could take those 20 hours and maybe give 10 to the family and tend to marketing, imagine how much wealthier you'd be. It'd be great, you know, doing, you know, seeing salaries or whatever.

Dan: So but the biggest thing I'm talking 20 hours is nothing compared to this one. The Shiny Object Syndrome can actually cost you not only hours, but weeks, months, years, sometimes. And what that is you know, I'll give you an example. So this guy came to me and he said, Dan, I'm having trouble and I said, okay, well tell me about your business. And I was listening and everything sounded good. All of a sudden I said, ah, I got it. This guy had switched strategies from a wholesale to fix and flip to a pre foreclosure to some…. It was like three or four different things. And they were all in real estate so he thought he was still on his path, but he wasn't. Every time you make a change to your strategy, you know, that wipes out everything you've worked for. You can't do that midstream. You can do at the end of the year, but you can't do it mid stream. And just that one thing, well in this one case, the guy who made an extra $57,000 the next quarter, just because he stayed the course stayed the course. So that's the problem is jumping around too much. So don't put it on your plan unless you fully intend to complete it. I mean, think to yourself. I mean, if you've done any of those kinds of things yourself.

Joe: Yes. All the time, I'm the worst at it, you know. But one of the things I started doing was thinking not how can I do this, but who can I get it to do for me? And relates to what we were talking about before with the whole marketing thing. Like, there's been a couple of courses that I've bought that I've given to my virtual assistant and I said, all right, go through this. One of them was how to make offers on Hud's, Hud properties, HudHomeStore.com. And she was a local assistant and I said, here go learn this and start doing it. And another time I did this with land investing, I wanted to do some flipping vacant land. I had some students that were doing houses, they didn't like houses.

Joe: I said, Hey, do you want to do land with me? They said, yeah. Said let's partner. I said, gave them like three courses and I said, go read these and implement them. I'll be the marketing guy, I'll pay for the marketing, I'll do the marketing, I'll provide the VA's, I'll provide the systems, all the techie stuff that I like that I'm good at. You take the calls, get them under contract and flip them. and we split it. We had a I think at 55/45 split and after expenses and oh shoot, we've done 20, 25 deals together, it's great. So for me, I guess what I'm looking at shiny object, I stop and I'll say, you know, how can I get someone else to do this for me? The other good question I like to ask is, can I make $1 million with this new idea?

Dan: Yeah, that's a really good question. And you should ask that. And does this really linked to my most important goals and desires and lifestyle?

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. So not everything obviously is about money, but that's a good way to determine whether you should do something or not. Like, if you're going to spend a bunch of time doing this thing and it only the end of the day might make you a few dollars. Well is that worth your time is when it comes to your business and stuff like that?

Dan: Yeah. And you can't help but come up with good ideas and I recommend to everyone to do the following. So grab a pen. If you're not taking notes, you should, write this down. Create a folder called good ideas. And then when it comes time toward the end of the year, when you really want, ready to get doing your next year planning, you can pull those out and they're all ready to go. All of these brilliant. But in the meantime, stay the course, make the money.

Joe: Focus. There's so much power in focus for sure. I wanted to ask you, we were talking about this on the phone the other day. And I don't understand this. So I wrote it down here. You prefer to motivate by pain instead of pleasure. That sounds kind of weird. What do you mean by that?

Dan: Well pain just is according to neuroscience, brain scientists. It's more effective and it works better for me. But there's two kinds of motivation. Constrictive and excuse me, constructive and restrictive. I just made a new word there that was good. So the constructive motivation says do this for the joy of this right here. Do this and I'll give you this thing. The restrictive says do it or else, it's the carrot and stick. And I don’t know about you, but you know, when my wife shows me, you know, the bank balance and it's not where I want it to be, man, I am motivated, okay. And that's pain. And if you said it the other way, I say, well then, you know, if you go out and do this, you know, we can have an extra million dollars, not so much. But when you hit me with a pain point that's when I wrapped. How about you?

Joe: That's interesting. Just last night and with my boys, I have a 15 year old, 13 year old boys. My 13 year old loves the mission impossible movies. And all the marvel comic, Avengers movies also. And he keeps on asking me all the time, can we watch them can we watch them? And, no later maybe, I don't know, ask me later. And so lately though, he's been having a hard time getting up and he's just a typical teenager, right. And I said to him that we will not watch another movie until you wake up three mornings in a row at 7:00 AM and we homeschool our kids, so it's not like they have to be out the door and hit the bus, right. And so he was almost in tears. He was almost in tears. I was like, you know how bad you want to watch these movies, you know, this is one way to get you to stop asking me all the time.

Joe: And so guess what happened this morning? He got up and did his schoolwork. So we homeschool, right? I think I said that. And he was done by 12 o'clock, like two hours ago, done with all of the school. And he's now, he's like, what am I going to do now? But anyway, I gave him is a little bit of pain and pleasure there. Like, you know, but it was the pain of we're not going to watch another movie until you learn to get up at 7:00 AM every morning for three mornings in a row. And I think you'll do it. I know he'll do it. I said…

Dan: That's good. Yeah. And so what I encouraged people to do is literally take a page, a full page and say, if I fail at this goal, here's what's going to happen. And I mean like, it's not like me, the wife would be upset, uh, we could end up in the street and lose the house, you know, lose the dog. I mean, just all sorts of terrible things just to run through quickly, just to get me in touch with it and, okay, I see. And then I have you choose which one you'd prefer and of course your always going to chose the good one. But that pain boy, it'll get you going, it'll get you going.

Joe: Yes good. All right. One of the things that we talked about also was how do you plan your weeks and you execute the stuff that you plan for the week? You call it winning in the week and the power of three. What does that mean?

Dan: Winning in the week and the power of three really, really good stuff. We are always trying to teach people or do teach people how to create what we call a cap critical action plan. And quite simply if you don't do this, it doesn't mean that your business doesn't require it. It just means that, well, let's still be friends after I say this. You're not quite competent, okay. In other words, you're incompetent at your job if you're not working off a plan. Let me, let me give you an example. So it's visualize, make a plan, plan your work, work your plan, and then you know, check your results and repeat. Imagine what your house would look like if that didn't happen, if there was no written plan for your house.

Dan: See everything on the plane that man has made comes by that process. Your automobile, okay. Your pants, you're wearing your shoes, everything you see around you. Someone had a vision than they made a plan and then they plan their work and they work their plan. So when it comes to weekly, and this is a whole bunch of training, just condensed, you want to take time every week to do your weekly planning. I recommend Sunday night, you can do it Friday morning, whatever you like at the end of the week, just before the beginning of the week. And what you do is you look out at your week and you want to identify and create open spots in which to put things to do, called time blocking, which by the way, turns out I actually got coined that term, I didn't even realize it, it wasn't a word.

Joe: Time blocking. I remember you talking about that.

Dan: So block your time to be a time blocker. So what you're doing is creating all these time blocks all you need is three for 45 minutes each, okay. Can you do three?

Joe: I think so, yes.

Dan: Everyone can do three. So you're going to take your big pile of stuff. So imagine that you chopped down this giant tree and you can't do anything with a giant tree. So if you want to use it too to make, would you need to cut it up into little bite size pieces, right? So that's what you've got, these little bite sized tasks. So you might say, okay, I've got a spot at 8:00, I'm going to do one then. And the reason you want to do 45 minutes, if you want to work for 40, have the alarm go off in the last five minutes. Guess what you do? That's when you make sure you're ready to go next time. Because if you just leave it, okay, it's kind of like, you know, rode that horse hard and put away wet. It'll take you 15, 20 minutes to figure out where to start next time.

Dan: So you want to work diligently with no interruptions. What kinds of interruptions? No interruptions. So that means, if there's smoke coming out of it or, or flames, then you can pay attention to it. But other than that, you keep your door locked, you just head down and get this thing done and again, only 45 minutes. And then what you'll find is that if you can just do three a day, everything is good. And the reason we say it's winning in the week is because instead of winning in the day, anything can happen in a day. You can have some sort of emergency blows your day away, but there's no reason to ever blow way a week. So what you do is you get down to the end of the week, whatever that is for you, and you'll look at your stuff. If you haven't got them all done, guess what? You got to work extra because otherwise it'll slip and then the next one slip and next will slip. In fact, if you look at, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, probably in the old days, but not lately. You ever look back in January and said, oh my gosh, my key goals that I wanted to get done this year didn't happen.

Dan: You didn't lose it in December, you lost it in the third week of January, in fact, speaking of January, there's this annual time of year that the entire country goes out and sets new goals, right? January 1st. How many do you think actually achieve their goals? Any idea?

Joe: Oh, that's really low.

Dan: One out of 12%, 8%. And in fact, three out of four people don't even remember their goal by February 1st. Don't even remember it. And I used to say this is like, I used to show this, set and forget it. You know, those are the rotisserie. Just set it and forget it that's good for chicken but bad for goals, you don't want to do that. You want to always have it in your face. And that brings up the last one we want to talk about, and that is the Gig. I don't know if you ever saw the Gig. It's the golden implementation graph and it guarantees…

Joe: Yeah I remember that.

Dan: You remember?

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Talk about it.

Dan: Well, here's the guarantee. You can achieve any goal in record time guaranteed if you use this technology sounds a little bit boastful, doesn't it? Well, it's true. I've yet to have any of my goals. Not, when I say achieve, I mean like within, you know, you hit the 90-95%. It doesn't have to be 100%, but 90-95% close enough, you know, it's an A 90% gets you an A. And what it basically does is it takes advantage of the way the human mind works. It's actually known as a cybernetic mechanism. You don't need to know that, but I like to say because it sounds cool. It's going to ask three questions. What's my goal? How am I doing? What's my appropriate action? So you don't even need the graph if you just take those, those three questions, once again, what's my goal? Oh yeah, I want to get three houses sold this month. How am I doing? I haven't sold any yet. What's my appropriate action? Get to it.

Dan: And what happens is as you go and you do this every single day, it takes a minute or two to fill it in every day as you get out there towards day 27, 28, guess what happens? You get really creative. Why? Because the creative subconscious part of your mind goes to work and it's going to remind you stuff you're going to wake up oh yeah remember that guy who called three weeks ago had the house and we didn't do it, but let's go see him and it's amazing. So use those three and you too can get it done.

Joe: Very good. Very good. We're winding up here, but do you have any other master skills you want to talk about? This is good.

Dan: Oh, all sorts of fun stuff. I think that you're probably causing more trouble other than I planned on. Right now we've got, okay, recreate the ultimate strategy, great sales mastery.

Joe: You should definitely recreate Sales Mastery and when we're offline here let's, let's schedule another podcast.

Dan: You got it.

Joe: You had those seven rules, I think they were right?

Dan: Seven laws. Keep it simple, keep them saying yes, showing and tell.

Joe: Let's just do a podcast on that. I mean, that is such good stuff.

Dan: If you only have the seven laws, you will sell much, much better than you do without them.

Joe: Sales is the most important skill in this business.

Dan: It certainly is.

Joe: And it's the million dollar skill and I wish there was a university I could send my kids to that just taught sales.

Dan: Yeah. Unfortunately, universities don't have the division of millionaire either. So what should you do?

Joe: It's the most important skill in any business, no matter what venture you're in, learning, learning how to use sales with your kids, with your wife, at church, you know, in a good way, right. Not talking about slimy manipulation and stuff like that, but right.

Dan: Well, yeah, because there were a lot of people reject sales because they don't understand it. I mean, the word itself comes from a very old Icelandic word Selja, S E L J A, which means to give service. So if your giving service you're salesman. Yes.

Joe: That's a great attitude to have. I liked that a lot. So we will do another podcast about that.

Dan: Great, great.

Joe: Now, Dan, you've been gracious enough to offer something really cool to our folks that are listening, do you want to talk about that?

Dan: Yeah. So you know, does anyone out there and need some help with their business? I'd be more than happy to give you a free call. So I'll give you my email, Dan W as in winner, winner chicken dinner, Dan W Duran, D. O. R. A. N. I say it like euphemism, you know DanWDuran@gmail.com or you can call or text me at (360) 631-1075, (360) 631-1075 and yes…

Joe: We will have that in the show notes for all of y'all that are on the road, you're driving, you're walking, you're running and you're listening to this. We will have that in the show notes, at RealEstateInvestingMastery.com if you go to RealEstateInvestingMastery.com and in the search bar, do a search for Dan or Duran D. O. R A. N you'll find that. But could you give us the email and phone number one more time?

Dan: DanWDoran@gmail.com or (360) 631-1075 and let me give you a couple of tips. So if you're brand new in the business and you don't even know how to spell marketing, probably not a lot I can help you with all right. But I'd be more than happy to talk to anybody. But if I can, this is normally a $500 value, you're going to get it absolutely free and I can guarantee that you will get a breakthrough or your money back.

Joe: That's good. It's free I think that's awesome Dan and I sure appreciate that I know a lot of people listening to this, watching it are going to take you up on that. Hopefully it don't overwhelm you with too many phone calls and emails.

Dan: Well we do what we can do and then we put them on a waiting list. But yeah, we'll give it a shot. Because I just love to give and to help people change their lives for the better.

Joe: Nice. All right so guys, stay tuned. We're going to have Dan on again for talking about sales mastery. This is going to be a really, really good, I'm looking forward to that and again just in case you need that phone number again, Dan's phone number (360) 631-1075 or his email is Dan d a n w Duran d o r a n@gmail.com and thanks Dan. Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate it.

Dan: I had a blast man. Thanks for taking me back in time and let's get together and do some more stuff.

Joe: I'll follow up with you and we'll talk soon. Thanks everybody. Go get the show notes at RealEstateInvestingMastery.com RealEstateInvestingMastery.com and leave us a review. If you like this show, go to ITunes, go to Stitcher, leave us a review, let us know what you think. I'd really appreciate it. And if you're watching this on YouTube or Facebook, give us a thumbs up. Give us a like, please share it. Comment down below as well. Let us know what you think. Do you have any questions for Dan? I'll send them to him. But comment on the video or on the Facebook here or on the podcast website. There's like three or four different ways you could be watching this or listening to this right now. Appreciate you all very much and we'll see you guys later. Take care. Bye Bye.