Joe:      Hey everybody, welcome this is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast and we are back with the Brilliant at the Basics series, and I'm with my business partner Peter Vekselman in Atlanta. How are you Peter?

Peter:  I'm doing great.

Joe:      Awesome.

Peter:  How are you doing Joe?

Joe:      Really, really good. Today we are going to kind of continue our series of just being brilliant at the basics, you know how to dominate your market by being simple, keeping it simple, being really, really good at the basics things. First, I want to tell you that we did write a book. If you go to freebasicsbook.com you get the copy of this book freebasicbook.com, but Peter and I have a marketing done for you coaching program that we actually set up the same business that we are doing in our markets.

Peter in Atlanta, me in Saint Louis and a multiple markets across the country. We just duplicate our systems and create the same marketing, the same websites, the same CRM systems that we are doing in our marketing, we will set that up for our folks in their own markets, and so if you want more information about that, you just go to Peterandjoe.com, peterandjoe.com. Learn more about the opportunity that we have. We have students all over the country that are crashing here right now. I just talked to somebody recently, Peter he's done 11 deals with our marketing in his market.

So anyway, today we are going to talk about, you know, what do you do if– and we will see where this kind of goes, it might take a different direction but you know, a lot of Peter, a lot of folks have– they do the marketing, they get a ton of leads and they have a hard time handling the volume. It's just like a lot of call me in the marketing the we send out works right, and so what do you do– and I will give you this question peter, what do you do when you are doing all the marketing and it is working, you are getting a lot of calls, and you are just getting overwhelmed with the volume of calls that are coming in. How do you handle all of those leads?

Peter:  Well you know it is interesting you ask me that because you know, usually a lot of times when you are talking to people that are in this business, they promise the opposite, right? They are like, how do I get my phone to ring? How do I get the marketing to work, and those are usually the things that you have to work through with, but in reality sometimes it's totally opposite happens. You are right.

Sometimes it could be an overwhelming thing. I mean, in this business there is different parts of this business that if you are not set up correctly, could be overwhelming and it could be actually too overwhelming to a level that I've seen, I know you've seen it, it literally drives people out of business– this is just too much, this is just too crazy.

And so you know one of the things we always talk about is that you want a business of leverage, and not only leverage from a financial stand point of leveraging money, you want a business of leverage from a stand point of people. And the great thing about this business it really doesn't matter what market you are in. You could be in a market that's got you know, 10,000 investors around you, or you could be in a market that's got a couple dozen investors around you, but one thing that we always know is there is always people that are looking to get more leads into their pipeline.

There is always investors out there, always wholesalers out there that are looking to do more deals. So one other thing I always tell people, look if you got the marketing down, let's say you are working with us and if you are working with us I promise you are going to get the marketing down. I mean we are going to get you more leads and more potential opportunities than you could look at.

And so if you ever get to the point where you're feeling overwhelmed, all you do is you connect with the local wholesaler, or a local investor. You know one of the things that these individuals do and need to run their businesses, they always need more deals, they are transaction people. They need more and more and more deals. So they are always looking for different opportunities in different ways to get deals and get leads coming in.

So the one thing I always encourage people, if you got too much coming in, all you do is you go to your local rear group. Go to a couple more local rear groups and you do have to spend more ten minutes there and you could find out right away who the top investors are, who the top wholesalers are in the area. Okay, so step one, find out who the wholesalers are.

Step number two, contact them and just let them know– look my strength is marketing, I'm doing that really well. I have more leads than I know what to do with, so how about you and I do this, I'll be the marketing arm of this partnership, you do the– let's see the flip in the whole selling side part of this, and you guys can figure out who actually structures the leads.

Most of the times these wholesalers will actually take a raw lead and they'll walk the deal all the way through. They'll go meet with the sellers, they'll go structure the deals, and they'll actually flip them back in. So you tell them look, I'll get you opportunities, I'll get you leads, and that's what you do. You do maybe a 50-50 split, maybe if they are doing more of the work, you do a 60-40 split, who cares? Bottom line is this; you got a machine that's generating leads.

You got somebody in the back end that is handling the leads. You are pretty much positioning yourself in the middle, talk about leveraging this business. They do the deals, they negotiate, they get the contracts going, then they final let to their investors, they final to their buyers, they flip the deals and you basically split in the lead, and you know, you are splitting the profits. I mean what a great way to do that.

So again leverage, leverage, leverage. Anytime you get in a position where you are getting overwhelmed, it doesn't matter what, you know we happen to be using this marketing angle right now, but at any position in this business that you are overwhelmed you could always leverage off other people's talents and resources.

Joe:      And you don’t have to– it's not a big expense, I mean even if you decide to bring in a negotiator to take the calls you can pay them on a commission basis, right? So it's not like you are adding anything to your bottom line. I mean it’s not like you are taking anything from your bottom line, it's what I meant to say. The- I forget what I was going to say, yeah, the biggest complaint we get from our partners that we are doing the marketing for is, I got too many leads, I'm overwhelmed, how do I keep up with this volume of leads, and we are just keeping it simple. We are just doing some basic direct mail marketing and we are going into Craigslist and we are scraping leads and then sending text messages for our clients.

I was thinking why you were talking of a book I read called “The Pumpkin Plan.” Really, really good book, everybody should read that and I wish I could remember the guy’s name, but it's an excellent book and it's called “The Pumpkin Plan”. It's about growing giant pumpkins, and if you want to- if you look at what giant pumpkin farmers do, they buy these really expensive seeds that they know will produce large pumpkins, and they are like a 1,000 or 2,000 dollars per seed right? So they are investing in marketing that they know that works, right?

They plant it in the ground and then let that vine pumpkin plant grow and then they look because that one seed will produce many different pumpkins right, and they look to see the best, most promising pumpkin, and then they cut off everything else and focus all of the nutrients in that pumpkin plant, to that one pumpkin and they nurture it, and they grow it, and they cultivate it and it grows into this giant pumpkin.

He relates that to business real simple because we all have — we needed our goals to find our sweet spot, and some of us are not just good on the phone talking to sellers. Maybe you have a full time job. Maybe you are just overwhelmed with all of the family responsibilities that you have and you are doing the marketing, the leads are coming in but you are just not good at talking to sellers, or you don’t have the time to call them back as quickly as possible. There is three things in this book that I thought were really, really fantastic about finding your sweet spot.

One of them is, in any business you need to offer a service that's if you have these three things you have your sweet spot. Something that's unique, you are working with your best customers, and it's automated, and it's hard for me to describe in this short little podcast kind of what I'm talking about, but you should read it.

With this model of doing the marketing and then sending the leads to another local wholesaler or someone like Peter like we will talk about in a minute, what you are– that's for me that was my sweet spot, and when I read that book while we were on our RV trip, that's really kind of just blew my mind because what I'm offering now is pretty unique. I have a system of marketing that really, really works well. It gets the phone to ring, I get a ton of calls, and I have a follow up system that's really unique too, that generates a lot more business even after that first lead comes in.

I'm working with my best clients; my best customers are these wholesalers. Guys that are already doing a bunch of things and I can automate this whole thing. I can have the VA or local assistance send out the marketing and have it come back. So I don’t know if all that really makes sense, but find out what your sweet spot is and Peter– we have one of our clients actually that was in a similar spot right? He was doing a bunch of marketing and getting a lot of leads and he wasn’t able to keep up with them, so what did he do?

Peter:  Well, that's the unique thing we do for our partners that join our partnership program, is we go even above and beyond that. So we got one of our partners, Travis, he's in California, and so what he's like, you know what, when we are doing marketing I can't really get to all the leads and I don’t have the time to go there and find the wholesalers, but so because he's not a part of our infrastructure already, so here is what we did.

We said okay, once you go ahead and divert your marketing into the Atlanta market which is obviously where I'm doing my business. So he took his marketing dollars he was spending with us and he actually funneled it into Atlanta market, and my office did pretty much everything for him. We did the direct mail in whatever marketing we were doing, we took the calls, we negotiated the deals, we did the inspections, we put together the marketing packages, and we flipped the deals.

Joe:      And you have the buyers?

Peter:  Yeah, and we flipped the deals and we have the buyers, and so– Travis did do one thing, he showed up in my office and he collected the check. So basically, he literally– I mean this is pretty crazy what we are able to do for our partners that join our program. We– all he did is put some money in, we did all the work, as a matter of fact it was a one to seven ratio. For every one dollar he put in, in the end he got seven dollars out.

Joe:      Yeah.

Peter:  So, you know I actually did a video with him. I called him Travis the genius investor. He really figured it out, but that's the cool thing they get, leverage, finding out people whether it's in your market place or another market place that are better that you, have the ability, have the time, have the where what thought to do it. Connect with them, structure some kind of a deal, whether it's a financial deal or whether it's a deal structuring deal, and then off you go, I mean you know, I kid you around about you being driving around in a bus all the time but that's it.

I mean that's how you are doing your deals right now, I don’t know last time you went out and looked at a deal. I don’t know the last time that you know did the kind of the day to day steps. You are all about doing that. We do the same thing and you know, for people that work with us, that's who we show them how to do, how to leverage their operation and how we could be debt leveraging piece actually.

Joe:      Peter always gives me a hard time about being lazy and I never do any work. It's like where is the love, you know? Come on. I do work, I work really hard. See it's all about working, this is an over-used phrase, it's all about working on your business not in your business right, and I think I found that the less you work the more you make. The less you work there in the middle and all the details, and the more you can outsource it, the stuff that's important to the right people who are good at it, the better off you are.

With Travis, you know, we are not making any income claims, we are not guaranteeing that you know, those results are not typical. We just got to be real clear about making income claims, but it's really, really important that you look at what's the best use of your time? What are you good at? Because when you are partnering with another wholesaler, you may actually be making more money per deal than you would if you were on your own, even though you are splitting the profits.

Let me explain it this way, Peter and his team they have excellent negotiators, I mean they have like 10, 12 people in Peter's office that are negotiating all day everyday with dozens and dozens of sellers for each person, and these guys are good at negotiating deals, right? They are probably better at it than Travis is, so they are going to get it at a lower price than Travis can probably buy it at. And Peter has better buyers than probably you could probably — you could find on your own, I mean he's got guys that are willing — because his buyer's list is so big, he's got buyers that will pay more for the properties.

So not only then is he negotiating a lower price, he's also selling it at a higher price than what you could probably do on your own. And when you are working with a good wholesaler you got to a look the big picture, I mean if you are looking at the return on your time, you are going to make way more money with partnering with the right people, bottom line.

So very good Peter, I can see your window is open there in the back, it must be warm in Atlanta or you are just having– you had a huge big ice storm recently, didn’t you?

Peter:  We had a big scare, now most of it did not materialize but they did forecast it and based upon the forecast we shut Atlanta down, but yeah it's awesome here today, I'm actually in my home office still here and it's probably about 56 degrees outside and perfect weather.

Joe:      I'm looking at snow and 20 something degrees, you are right.

Peter:  That's why we look south.

Joe:      That's right, listen guys, go to Peterandjoe.com, Peterandjoe.com to get more information about how to work with me and Peter. How we can do your marketing for you, set up you systems. It's basically a simple business in a box so we can duplicate– we've duplicated it all over the country. It's working, it's working really, really well, and on there you can also find more information about how you can possibly work with Peter in the Atlanta market. It's not open for everybody, it's an application process, we want to make sure that you are going to be a good fit. All right guys got to peterandjoe.com to get more information, thank you Peter.