Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. This is a weekly podcast video series that I’m doing, talking about the simple, basic things in real estate investing. I have a real passion for real estate. I have a real passion for helping people succeed in real estate, quit their jobs, find financial freedom. My big goal is to help you guys increase your cash flow and decrease your overwhelm. How does that sound? Wouldn’t it be nice to make more money? Have less stress? You know, we want a a goal of all of this is to have a a business that is working for us, not us working for our business. And this is a really important principle to understand and I want to talk about this here. Before I jump into the main content, because so many of us have our business or our job kind of the center of our life, right? And we kind of fit in the things that are really important to us around the job or the business. And sometimes, you know, many people will quit their 40 hour a week business to start a business. You know, they’ll quit the 40 hour week job to start a business working 60 70 hours like, we don’t want that. We’re not starting our own business to work harder and to work more hours. We are starting businesses to work for ourselves to find more financial freedom.

And it’s kind of that remember the the cash flow quadrant circle, right? I don’t remember the exact letters. Maybe somebody here on the chat can help me, but there’s the employee, there’s the business owner and then there’s I can only think of three of the four. Somebody on the chat help me here. There’s the employee, there’s the business owner. And then there’s the investor. The investor is the main one entrepreneur, but one of them, like, even though you’re working for yourself, you really are just you own a job. And so that’s not our goal, right? Our goal is to find financial freedom so that we can work when we want, where we want, how we want doing, what we want to do. I often tell people, Listen, if you were to burn it all down and you had nothing and you needed to start all over from scratch. What kind of business would you create? And if let’s say money wasn’t an issue, wasn’t a concern? What kind of business would you create? What do you love to do? And that’s the kind of business you should build back up. So instead of having business or our job in the center and then life fitting in around that, what if we create a vision for our life first and then design a business around that we all have, you know, maybe goals a vision for our life, kind of what we want, but how many of us are really actually living it right? For me, I didn’t want to quote unquote retire and then go, finally live, have a good life, travel the world and play a bunch of golf and have this all this free time after. I’ve worked hard for 40 years, right? Because then who knows what happens? You might die like the day after you retire. For me and my wife, we decided let’s create a vision for our life. First, let’s design what we want our life to look like first and then build a business around that. Let’s build a business that supports the life. Does that make sense what I’m saying?

So for us, we wanted to homeschool our kids. Not necessarily because we’re so anti public school, but we’re so pro homeschool and there are a lot of good public schools out there despite of what is going on right now, right? So but we wanted the freedom to travel we wanted to instead of just teaching our kids about ancient Greek history, let’s take them to Athens. Let’s take them to Rome, let’s take them to Eastern Europe. And so we’ve done that. We’ve had the privilege of taking our kids on long extended trips. Now I’m not on there taking vacation. I’m working. I’m actually taking my business with me. I have the freedom to work from home. I have the freedom to work from Starbucks called these coffee. If you’re here in St. Louis, I have the freedom to work wherever I want. So I’ve had I’m not saying this to brag, but to tell you it’s possible. I’ve flip deals from a chateau in southern France, from a cafe in Prague, from an RV in Yellowstone like I have been able to do and run my business. So I wanted a business and I’d encourage you to write this stuff down. What do you want your business to look like? What do you want your life to look like? How many hours a week do you want? I know guys at work four hours a day, four days a week. They put it in their calendar when they’re going to work, actually. They put in their life in their calendar first and then design the business around that. So you may only want to work 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week, four days a week. You want to take Fridays and Mondays off. Right? I know lots of guys that are doing that. That’s the great thing about this is why is so I’m so passionate about this? Why I kind of teach this stuff is if you want to do that yourself, you can. It all starts with designing it and being intentional about it in your business. So I wanted a business that was simple and easy to run. I wanted a business that had very little overhead that it could be run virtually from anywhere in the world. I wanted a business that could that could benefit people, help the communities, you know, really actually be helpful and beneficial to people, to the communities where it was a win win. I wanted the business mainly that would allow me to spend more time with my family. So those four or five things that I just mentioned, that’s just a start, kind of. Where do you start from that right? Most of you probably don’t want to have a business with a ton of overhead and a lot of employees, right? I mean, you do, and maybe that’s that’s in your gifting. That’s your wheelhouse. Well, then let’s go for that. But most of us are like, Man, I just don’t have to work that hard. I want to be able to spend time with my family. I want to see my kids grow. I want to go travel the world now while my kids are still in the house instead of when I’m 60, 70 years old. Maybe I can’t bring them to come with me. You know, I’m saying when I’m traveling around Europe, then so why not go see the world now and take your kids with you, take your dog with you. So you’ve got to be very intentional.

And when, as we’re talking about being brilliant at the basics in your real estate investing business? Think about with your spouse or significant other the family, your kids or whatever. Think about what kind of life do you want to have and then make sure you design a business around that. Does that make sense? And I want to talk about this thing called stress free abundance. I heard this first from Frank Kern, and it’s the whole idea of having an abundant business. You don’t make it a lot of money, but without the stress, I can’t tell you how many people I know who have the big businesses and you think, Oh man, they’re doing awesome. They’re amazing. I want to be like them. But when you sit down and talk to them, they’re stressed out. They’ve created a monster. They’ve created this huge beast that they have to feed every single month. And it’s no fun when you’re making $100000 a month and your expenses are ninety nine thousand dollars like that is no fun at all. In fact, it’s more stressful, I would say, to make $100000 a month and then have 100 one hundred thousand and one dollar and expenses and then be short a dollar every month. Then it would be. I’d rather be making a thousand a month and having a thousand dollar and one dollar in expenses. You just know what I’m saying. They’re super stressful, so we don’t want an abundant business with a lot of stress. I like this phrase stress free abundance. Let’s design a business that is making a lot of money, but without all the stress in the house. Again, I go, see these guys, they have twenty five people working for them, 50 100 people. And on one side, they’re bragging about how successful there are. But when you sit down with them, give them a couple of drinks and just hang out with them. They’re like, I get this all the time, Joe, how do you do it? How much money do you make again? How many employees do you have? You don’t have an office. You work from home. How do you do it? I’m getting guys that I look up to that are making 20, 30, $50 million a year and they’re, you know, I don’t make that much. I’m not going to go into details about how much I make, but like, I’m doing really, really well and the amount of money that I make with the small overhead that I have, it’s the envy of a lot of people. One guy I remember I was, this was probably eight years ago. I was traveling a lot with my family. At the time, I was right about the million dollar revenue mark, you know, a year. And this guy was probably seven to $8 million a year. And I looked up to him as like, Oh man, I want a business like him. He had a big office, he had staff in the office, you know, he was doing tons of ads, you know, so he was all over the internet and he said to me, Joe, our trade, your business in a heartbeat. What? Why? Because you get to and you’re not you’re traveling. You’re not worried about what’s going on in the office while you’re done. No, I don’t. I only have one or two people that work for me, and I talk to them every day and I trust them and pretty easy. It’s pretty simple. So this guy told me I would trade you for your business any day of the week.

Oh my gosh. So I think I’m on to something here. I think maybe I know what I’m talking about. So let’s not design a business, real estate investing business, the publishing business, whatever it is that you want to do where you’re a slave to it, you want your business to be a slave to you. You know what I’m saying? We’re not trying to. We don’t want to serve money. We want money to serve us. And that’s, I think, the way God intended it to be. So for us, you know, we want to be real generous. We give a lot, we give away a lot of money to our church until other ministries that help feed the poor. And you know, we do like I don’t want to talk all about all that, but like that was important to us. We wanted, I believe, God’s given us these blessings so that we can be a blessing to others. So what? What are your values? You need to write down these things that are important for most of us. It’s spending time with family. It’s not being that guy on the deathbed who says I blew it. Like Samuel Sam Walton, if you Google Sam Walton, I blew it. You’ll find an article in the American Express website on the American Express website written by the guy Mike McCalla. It’s who, by the way, wrote profit first. And it’s really good. It talks about the tragedy of Sam Walton when he died in his famous last words. Or I blew it. Built a successful multibillion dollar business. But on his deathbed, he’s like, I blew it. You know, what did he blow blow like? He was successful. He got a lot of money passed on this huge inheritance. But I don’t know, maybe he was working too hard. Nobody on their deathbed says, Man, I wish I would have worked spent more time in the office. You can’t pull a U-Haul behind a hertz, but they still call him this days. So guys, like even if somebody here just message, even if it’s you would be, you would be more happy and satisfied. Just making six figures a year, right with low overhead than seven figures a year with high overhead. You know that story of the famous fisherman, right? And maybe I should link to this in the mind map.

But there’s a story of a guy, a businessman who’s on vacation in South America. Some of you have heard this, and I’m going to butcher it, but I’ll do my best. OK, so he’s he’s fishing. He’s. On vacation down in South America, and he sees this this guy fishing and he says, Hey, man, what are you doing here? He’s in we. He was a retired guy or something like that, and he’s fishing and he says, I’m already know I’m going to butcher this story, so I’ll butcher at the least amount of say as possible as I can. And so the successful businessman is telling him, Hey, you know, you’re catching a lot of fish and you could. Why do you do it? Is that why you’re doing this? Well, I just like hanging out with my wife and fishing all day. Why did I even start this story as embarrassing? So anyway, the guy says, Well, listen, you can start a business and you could. I should just read the story. OK, listen, let’s do this. I’m going to go to the Google Fish Fisherman Story Retirement, OK, because I’m getting the comments here. Come on, Joe. Get it right. Here it is the story of the Mexican fisherman. You guys ready? I’ll share my screen here. This is so good. And if you’ve not heard this yet, you’re going to be glad I did. All right, so let me zoom in here. I just googled this. Be more with less. I don’t know anything about this website, but let me make sure this is the right story. OK, OK, this is it. This is the story that started the more with less movement for me. Blah blah blah. An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked inside the small boat were several several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied only a little while. The American then asked, Why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, But what do you do with the rest of your time? The Mexican fisherman said, Well, I sleep late. Fish a little play with my children. Take siestas with my wife. I love siestas with my wife Maria. Stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life. The American scarfed. I’m a Harvard MBA and I can help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. The proceeds from the bigger boat. You could buy several boats. Eventually, you’d have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the processor. Eventually, opening your own cannery, you would control the product processing and distribution. You would need to leave the small coastal coastal village and move to Mexico City and then L.A. and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise. The Mexican fisherman asked, But how long will all this take? To which the American replied, 15 to 20 years. But what then? Ask. The Mexican American laughed and said, That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company’s stock to the public and become very rich, and you would make millions millions. And then what the American said? Well, then you would retire. Move to a small coastal village fishing village where you would sleep late. Fish a little place. Your kids takes siestas with your wife. Stroll to the village in the evenings where you would sip wine and play guitar with your amigos.

OK, you heard that story. That’s a great story. That’s not what we’re in this business for, and it’s not why I’m teaching this stuff, this real estate stuff, right? So you can work really, really hard and, you know, just ruin your family. That’s that’s not what you are going to take with you to the grave. OK, so I want to talk about this thing called stress free abundance, designing a business around your life. And so you may think you need to make a million dollars a year to be happy, successful and content. Maybe it’s one hundred thousand dollars a month. Maybe it’s 10. Ten grand a month is where most people start. But let me ask you why and how did you come up with that number? Most of the time, it’s just because that’s a good round number that sounds like what I should be doing to be successful. Well, you may be surprised to find out especially. And this is I don’t want to get into the whole debate of debt, but debt can ruin and destroy a life, and it can ruin all your plans. Because if you have very little debt or little to no debt, you can live very, very comfortably on just five to 10 grand a month, and you could do that in your sleep. Once you understand how to do deals, it’s not that hard at all to do five or 10 grand a month in real estate. All right. Not being on when you’re when you’re just beginning. Yeah, it’s hard. But when you’re on the other side, after you’ve done tons and tons of deals, you’ll look back and think, Oh my gosh, that’s easy. I can do one or two deals a month in my sleep, maybe one or two deals every couple of three months, and you can live very, very comfortably. You could be living your dream lifestyle on just five or ten grand a month.

So, well, I’m going to give you this. All is in the context of it’s it’s all about what I’m talking about here, but about being brilliant at the basics, designing a business that supports your lifestyle. So let’s say you decide, you know what? I only need to make 100 grand a month or two hundred. I mean, 100 grand a year or 200 grand a year, and I can live very, very comfortably. So I want to help you design a marketing plan that will help you find and design to live the life your lifestyle design. That makes sense. So I’m going to share with you here this mind map. And for now, I’m just going to share my screen because I don’t just want you guys to focus on this and. Let me open it up here. I’m actually going to backtrack a little bit and explain kind of what it is I’m talking about. These are the main rules for success in this business. And if you want to do have a successful real estate business, real estate investing business, you need to be doing what your competition is not doing. You may think it’s competitive and you know, I’d granted it is, but it’s not that hard to stand above your competition in a competitive market when you are really good at these basic, simple things. Right? And this business is really simple. It all comes down to these four things, and people complicate this all the time, don’t they? It comes down to marketing, talking to sellers, making offers, and I added a fourth follow up. The follow up could be part of making offers, but let’s just keep it separate here. But it really comes down to these three or four things marketing, talking to sellers and making offers. And, of course, following up. Forget about everything else. Let’s keep this business simple, and I promise you this if you are really, really good at marketing, talking to sellers, making offers and you do that consistently, religiously, you’re going to have a great business. Forget about everything else. So let’s talk about marketing because I like to work from our revenue goals and then backwards from there. And when you look at the scorecard, you’ll see kind of what I mean in terms of designing a a stress free, abundant lifestyle. So when you take your revenue and work backwards, from there, you can break down your your goals into things you can control. And the goal of this then, is to look at how much marketing do you need to do every single day to have the business that fits your lifestyle? Because I’ve said this before, yesterday or last week when I did this. We’re not in the real estate investing business. We are in the marketing business, so it all starts, begins and ends with marketing. Marketing is everything and everything is marketing, right? So let’s design a business. But thus what starts with marketing?

Now I have in here, I must show this to you a thing called marketing plan or scorecard, and this is a simple spreadsheet that I have. If you’re watching this on video, just pause this and kind of take some screenshots and you can see what I’m doing here. So let’s just say for a stress free abundance, an average household income in the United States, I found this on Google. So it’s on the internet. It must be true is sixty one thousand. I did a lot of research and I went to deep, deep scientific research and I went to Google. So let’s say you double that average salary. You get an executive salary of one hundred twenty two grand a month a year. I’m sorry and monthly, that’s only ten grand. Oh my gosh. Like, that’s one or two deals a month. I just talking to a guy at the gym, one of my coaching students this morning, and he was talking about how they did a flip recently a rehab and made $50000 on one deal. That’s five months worth of salary right there. OK, so let’s say you’re making 122 grand a year. How many of you would say that’s pretty good? I could survive off of that right now. The average price of a home in the United States right now is three hundred seventy five thousand dollars. Now that will buy you a one bedroom studio shack in San Francisco. I get it, but let’s just say you were living in a normal place in the United States and you double that. So let’s say you got a $750000 house, so your mortgage payment, you put 10 percent down, your pity would be about $3700 on that. OK, so your executive salary of ten grand a month, your mortgage payment of a really nice house, thirty seven hundred bucks a month, let’s say you get a $75000 car and I think your your payment on that would be like 4500. And you’re taking four nice vacations a year and about five grand each. So you’re spending twenty grand a year on vacations, you know, really more than for vacations a year might be too much for a lot of people. So that’s $600 a month, right? You total all that up. That’s about 17 grand a month. Don’t forget the tax man. You’ll get your let’s just be conservative. You have to add thirty five percent for taxes. That’s about six grand, so you need to make twenty two thousand nine hundred and forty five dollars gross per month or two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars a year to live a very comfortable, executive style salary. You understand what I’m saying. Executive House Executive Car Executive Vacations Very nice. Comfortable two hundred seventy five thousand dollars a year. Now what I like doing is breaking this down into goals you can control. All right. Maybe two seventy five is not enough for you. That’s fine. Double that. Five hundred grand. But you need to break this that you can’t control. Like, what’s your average profit on a deal is how many sellers you need to talk to, how many offers you need to make before you do a deal you can’t control, like the average response rates or whatever type of marketing you do, but you can control how much marketing you’re doing every single day.

So what is your stress free, abundant lifestyle plan like? Have you look at the things that you want to do if you want to start traveling more? You want an RV, you only want to work 30 hours a week like looking at, then how much debt do you have, right? What kind of business do you need to have? What kind of annual income do you need to make? Do you need to write that number down? Yellow pad of paper doesn’t have to be on a spread. What is that number you need to be making every single month to live a stress free, abundant lifestyle, then I want to challenge you all to work backwards from there as we scroll down and look at the spreadsheet that I have here. So let’s say your average net profit after marketing is $6000 on a deal. Let’s just and we’re just using wholesaling deals. Traditional wholesaling, it’s going to be different if you’re doing lease options or sub twos or whatnot, right? Well, let’s say your average net profit after marketing is $6000 per deal. That means you need to do three point eight deals per month. All right. Now, let’s say you need 30 leads to do one deal. Now I count a lead as somebody that responds to your marketing. So if you send out letters or postcards at somebody who calls the number, if you’re doing cold calling, it’s somebody who says, Yeah, I might want to sell my house. That makes sense. So that means you need 115 leads per month. And if you’re working an average of five days a week and there’s I don’t remember how we do this, but that’s about four. I’m sorry, it’s about 5.2 leads. You need per day, five leads a day, and let’s say you make offers on 75 percent of your leads. That means you need to make four offers a day. Now you might get better at this. You know your net profit if you’re in California might be eight grand per deal. I know we’re averaging gross profit on each deal right now that we that we wholesale about 13 grand. So I’m just trying think I’m being conservative here, by the way, don’t listen to people that tell you that you can’t make more than three or five grand on a deal that’s complete B.S. you should be making a lot more than that. So you get whatever that number is, you’re going to need about three to five leads per day means you’re going to need to be making about three offers a day. You see what I’m doing here. We’re breaking it down from backwards, from revenue down to what? What are your daily activities? This is the brilliant at the basic stuff that you guys need to learn and pay attention to if you want to have a successful business. Again, you can’t control making twenty three thousand dollars a month. You can’t control your average profit is eight grand that you need 30 leads to do a deal, but you can control how many leads you’re getting per day and how many offers you’re making per day, you understand.

All right. So looking on this next tab here, what I kind of like to do is, let’s say your monthly income goal is, you know, $15000 and your average net profit after marketing is $7500. So that means you need two contracts or deals per month. You put that in here. Deals per month. How many leads per deal? Let’s say it’s 30. And by the way, that depends on the marketing that you do. It depends on the market that you’re in. Maybe if you’re in Nashville where it’s super competitive, maybe you need to. You need 40 leads, but you know, some markets you only need 20. The more that you need generally, the bigger the profit on the deal is going to be. So one of the benefits and advantages of doing deals in California or competitive markets is Nashville is you may need to do more marketing to get a deal, but your profit for deals is going to be much higher. So let’s just keep it on averages here. So you need 30 deals. That means you need three leads per day. Now I’m going to tell you you should be getting a minimum of five leads per day. That should be your goal to get five leads a day. And I’m going to talk about this later in the mind map for your goal of talking to sellers. You should be talking to five sellers a day. All right, so now let’s break that down. How are we going to get five leads a day? Well, let’s just pick three different things of marketing that we’re going to be doing. No one is going to be Zillow. Number two is letters in the next one to be cold calls. So I always recommend you should have at least two or three different types of marketing that you’re doing every day or every week. You shouldn’t have all your marketing eggs in one basket. So let’s just look at this to see as an example what we need. So we need 60 leads per month to make our monthly income goal of 15 grand revenue goal. So let’s say 20 percent of our leads come from Zillow, and that means what I talk about that is that that means texting or phone or calling landlords and property managers and for sale by owners and making them offers on their house. So that means 20 percent. You need 22 leads per month and if your average response rate is about two percent. So in other words, if I send out 100 text messages, I will get about two responses back like, yeah, I might want to sell it or maybe tell me more. I think I’m pretty conservative. There might be four percent or three. Let’s make it three percent. So that means I need to contact seven hundred and oops, I need to contact seven hundred and thirty three people on Zillow every single month. Break that down into 22 workdays a month. You need to contact three rentals or fist bows on Zillow every single day. Cool. Now, let’s say the 40 percent of your leads come from letters. These are handwritten yellow letters. OK, so let’s say 40 percent. That means you need 44 leads from that. Let’s say your average response rate is about two percent now. Depend. Anything on the market that you’re sending it to, it might be half of the percent, it might be one percent, it might be five percent. The marketing that we do with our yellow letters, I’ve seen students get it as high as five to 10 percent response rates. OK, so let’s just say two percent. That means you need to send 20 200 yellow letters a month or five hundred and eight a week or letters per day. Weekday, what 100 letters a day?

So now we’re getting down, we’re getting somewhere. Let’s say the other 40 percent of your leads come from cold calling. What we like to do is we will cold call old leads. In other words, our old leads in our database. Old leads and another investor wholesalers database. Absentee owners with equity in small towns like those are my favorite lists to call and target. So that means we need to lead today. And typically you get between one or two if you have a VA doing cold calling, which we recommend or you doing it yourself. On average, you’re going to get about one to two leads per every hour of cold calling, and that’s hitting it hard. So that means you need to spend about one point three hours on the dialer every single day and you see what we’ve done here. We’re now breaking this down into things we can control. We’re going to be contacting 33 Zillow rentals a day. We’re going to be sending 500 yellow letters a week and we’re going to be doing one point three or two hours a day of cold calling. What I recommend you do is put that on here. Now, when I say Zillow, that also means Facebook Marketplace Go Section eight, which I think is they just updated that website. It’s not go Section eight anymore, but it’s like anywhere where you can find rental properties with phone numbers, right? Contact 500 of them a day, send 500 a week and spend two hours a day cold calling. That is what you can control. And I’m going to be talking about this throughout this whole series here. You’ve got to get this done for you in spite of you. Now, when I look at that, I’m like, I get overwhelmed. Like, Oh my gosh, I can’t do that every day knowing me. It’s not going to happen. I’m too busy, too lazy. I don’t know, but I’m not going to do it. So I don’t quit and give up. I say, All right, who can I get to do that for me? When we wanted to travel around Europe and in our RV, I was doing deals. I had an acquisitions manager. I was frustrated because we were making money, but I was only netting 40 50 percent of the deal, sometimes less. And I thought, this is, you know, why I didn’t sign up for this. I was getting to that point where my business was getting bigger and bigger, bigger and bigger mouth to feed at this beast that I had to satisfy every month. I thought, You know what? I’m going to write down all of the steps to do a deal and ask myself the question, How can I do none of this stuff? How can I get somebody else to do it all for me? So it’s asking bigger, better questions, right?

So looking at this marketing, you need to ask yourself, Cool, how can I do none of that? Well, number one, I look at this and think, All right, I can get a virtual assistant to do all of my Zillow and Facebook marketing, Facebook Marketplace marketing every day. I can get a VA to do that. For me, two letters. Well, I can get a mail company to do. I can get my list from this company and get my list every day. Or, you know, one time we were sending in this. I don’t know why I stopped doing this, but it works like mad, which really, really well. Download all of the evictions from the court, public records and the courthouse that’s online. Download all the evictions, download all the judgments, the unpaid utilities, the unpaid collections and judgments from credit cards and things like that. And the the evictions the least in Missouri, a lot of that is public record. Most a lot of states have those court things in public record. Download those every week, download vacant rental properties and send 500 letters a week. Or what is that? A hundred letters a day that’s going to cost money? Yeah, but it costs money to do VA. It costs money to have a mailing company do that. But would you spend? I don’t know. Would you spend a thousand dollars to do make six thousand dollars on a deal? Probably. There’s very few businesses where you can double your investment. Just doing one deal. It’s amazing. All right. So then cold calling. I don’t want to do cold calling. I hate cold calling. I’m going to get a visa to do that. In fact, I’m going to get a VA that likes to do cold calling. That’s already done a bunch of it. I don’t have to train them. They already know how to use the tools. All right. I don’t think I’ve heard this many times too, though. I can’t get a VA because where I do deals in the south or in the north, east or the West. They do not like people with accents. I’ve heard that it’s crazy. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that, but whatever it works for us, maybe you should try it. It works for our clients. Maybe it works, actually. So don’t tell me it doesn’t work unless you’ve done it and you’ve tried it, and then it doesn’t work. So we have virtual assistants with accents. They’re not like crazy heavy accents, but we do deals in parts of the country. You would think, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. So there it is. There is your marketing plan now that you have your marketing plan and this can be done on a napkin. This doesn’t have to be done in a fancy spreadsheet like this. This can be done anywhere. Then you go to a scorecard and this is really important. This is a simple scorecard. Let me zoom out a little bit that we’re just going to try. You can put the person’s name who is responsible for this, but you need to track the marketing that’s being done every day, every week and track your numbers. Maybe in these columns, it’s not weekly numbers, it’s daily numbers. By the way, you shouldn’t be updating this yourself. You can if you want, but that this is five dollar an hour activity, you need to get a virtual assistant that is updating these things for you. So track how many ads are you contacting every day? How many Facebook Marketplace messages are you sending every day? How many letters are you sending every week? How many hours of cold calling? Are you doing whatever? And it may be other things you might want to add in here, like bandit signs. I don’t know. Driving for dollars, two hours of driving for dollars every week. Maybe it is Facebook ads you’re spending, you know, a thousand dollars a week on Facebook ads or something. But whatever the marketing is that you’re doing, you need to have it written down on a scorecard.

And here’s something that’s really important. You need to be held accountable to the scorecard, or you need to hold your team accountable to a scorecard. This is really, really simple, and it doesn’t need to be on a spreadsheet. If you’re not comfortable with spreadsheets, you don’t know how to do them. Put it on a yellow pad of paper, but your you and your team need to be held accountable to a scorecard. They need to know the most important thing they have to get done every day. If your goal is to talk to five sellers a day, you’ve got to have leads. If you want to make money, you’ve got to do deals. If you want to do deals, you’ve got to make offers. If you want to make offers, you’ve got to talk to sellers. If you want to talk to sellers or have sellers to talk to. You need to do marketing. And if you’re not going to do it, you need to get somebody to do it for you in spite of you. Mike, I didn’t start having success in my business until I figured this out. And when I figured it out, the angels were singing and heavens opened wide. I started doing deals and what I started doing deals consistently. So when I’m working with a coaching steward and they this is the first thing we take everybody through. You need to have it. Show me your marketing plan. That’s step number one. Come up with a marketing plan. I don’t care what your lifestyle plan is. You know, it could be ten dollars a year. It could be $10 million a year. It’s fine, whatever it is. That’s what it is. So then come up with a marketing plan like, what are you going to do every single day or every single week? You’ve got to have that written down. It can’t be vague. You can’t be in your head. It’s got to be written down on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet or something. Because again, if you look back six months, I guarantee if you haven’t done a deal yet, it’s because you’ve not done this. I’m trying to stop you from being in the professional student mode for years and years like I was. You know, you already know what you need to do. You already bought enough courses. You already have enough knowledge. You’ve seen enough podcast videos and YouTube videos and you know what you need to do. You just need to get off your butt and do it. I mean, I don’t know unless you hate money and you just like studying and you just want to, you know, go and buy as many books as you want. There’s there will always be those students that you can never graduate and go out into the real world and get a job. You’re just going to sit in graduate school forever and then they’re going to teach. And why? How on earth would want to learn how to make money in business from somebody who has just been in college their entire life? I don’t know. That’s the problem with our education system today, by the way, side tangent here, it’s filled with people that have never been in the real world and made any money. They were just stuck in college and the comfort level of being somewhere familiar, never going out into the real world and practicing what they are learning. And they’re just comfortable with being a scholar.

Well, that’s a big problem. No wonder people are straddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and making $30000 a month a year. All right, so you need a scorecard. This is the first thing you’re going to do if we work together and I’m your coach, give get your scorecard. We’ll have our first coaching call after you show me your scorecard, after you create one. You know what I’m saying? I’m maybe I’ll have. I have a coaching call with you to teach you how to do one of these. But like, our second coaching call is going to be your marketing scorecard. Don’t worry about it getting it perfect and just right. It means it’ll never be perfect. This is an evolving document. This will change over time because what you’re going to do is you’re going to find out, OK, well, this marketing works, and this one doesn’t. Looking at all these leads I’ve gotten. All right. Well, ninety five percent of my leads came from this strategy. Maybe I need to do more of that. Maybe I need to do less of this. You need to track your numbers every day and you notice nowhere on the scorecard is designing a business card, building a website, learning how to do the CRM and learning how to raise private money and find buyers like that stuff is all important. You need buyers, you need private money, you need a business card, you need a website. That’s all important, but that’s not what’s going to make your money. What’s going to make you money? Our leads are offers are deals. So this is your most important document in your business, whatever it is. Pick two or three or four things and don’t. This is also important here. Think like you got to start implementing all of them at once. Start with one. Get that implemented. Get that outsourced. Create a silo out of this. Learn how to do it yourself. Do it a couple of times. Get a virtual assistant to do it for you. All right. You should be having all of this. I’m showing you here. You can get virtual assistants or accompany an outsourced vendor to do for you. But you’ve got to get this done for you in spite of you. Right? This business is all about leads. If you don’t have a bunch of leads coming in consistently, you’re going to become the motivated buyer. You’re going to start begging for deals, and the sellers are going to smell your motivation and desperation from a mile away, and it’ll be repulsive to them. Right? They’re not going to you’re not going to get any deals because you’re so desperate and you’re trying to turn a non deal into a deal and then you’re going to make a big mistake. You’re going to lose thousands and thousands of dollars because you bought a deal you shouldn’t have bought because you didn’t have enough leads coming in. So it all begins and ends with marketing, right? I know that makes sense.

So here we’ve got three or four things that you’re doing. You get the Zillow ads going. You got a value in that, then you move on to the next one. Facebook Marketplace All right. You get that going. You figure out a system, you create a spreadsheet where you start tracking the things you know, and then you get a VA trained on doing that, then yellow letters. All right. Well, who am I going to send the yellow letters to? I’m going to send them to expired listings. I’m going to send them to evictions or utilities, shut off utilities or driving for dollars. You’re going to, you know, are you going to send 20 letters a day for to the rundown houses that you find while you’re driving for dollars and then you design, you get that built up and going without your involvement for you in spite of you. Then you move on to the next one cold calling. All right. I’m not going to do that. I don’t like cold calling. So who can I get to do that for me and you? So understand now now you’ve got Vas for companies vendors that are doing this marketing for now. You’re saying, Joe, I don’t have the money to do that. I can’t hire people. I, you know, I’m just trying to make my first five grand a month so I can. So you have to do it yourself. What do they call it? A buckle up or, you know, pull up your pants? I forget the phrase, you know, but like you, you got to do it yourself. So what’s the phrase? Somebody can help me in the Zoom chat, but pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get some big boy panties on and do it yourself? OK, now you also need to be tracking this. The sellers that you’re talking to, your goal. This is really your main goal. This is the most important goal of all of this is sellers talk to. Now you might think, well, it offers. Yeah, that’s important. But you know you need to talk to sellers. I see some students make the mistake of just having a VA, find potential motivated sellers and then just sending them an offer without talking to them. First, you’ve got to talk to sellers first. So your goal is to talk to five sellers a day, but you need to know where the leads coming from, which campaigns are working. The postcards are the letters there’s texting. Zillow rentals are Zillow Facebooks, the sending Facebook Marketplace messages to cheap properties or rental properties. You understand what I’m saying? Yes, Christopher, thank you. The phrase is you need to man up and do this yourself. Stop whining and complaining and looking for excuses of why this can’t be done and you need to do it yourself. The cool thing about sending letters or sending messages on Facebook Marketplace, you can do that at three a.m. in the morning. You need to get up early and do it yourself. If you can’t afford to hire somebody else to do it for you. All right, so you need to track the sellers that are that you’re marketing. What where are your leads coming from? That’s what this is all about. And you’ll start seeing a trend like, Oh my gosh, I’m getting more leads from this, less leads from Matt, and that’s a pain in the butt. And that cost way too much money. So maybe stop doing it. Now you’d also be tracking your offers that you’re making and how much follow up that you’re doing. OK, your VAS should have a scorecard like this as well, and they should be updating it. And every day when you talk to them, or once a week, like when I say every day, like literally when you first hire your VAS in your first trading them, you should be talking to them every day and you should be pulling up the scorecard and you should say, Alright, show me va what you did today. Why didn’t you send 50 text messages? What’s the catch? What’s the holdup? What’s the bottleneck? They’ll tell you, Well, you know, I can’t get in there and there’s not enough time it takes me too long or I can’t find enough properties in these five zip codes you gave me. Well, you need to know that, don’t you, yet? So you can then give them more zip codes or give them other counties that they can go into.

So you need to be communicating with your virtual assistants and your team every single day to make sure these things are being done. And don’t come to me three months after you’ve had two or one or two months after you’ve had this, VA frustrated that they’re not doing their work. You should have known on day one that they weren’t doing their work. It’s a common problem. I have people that are complaining like my VA is not working out well. How long have you been working for you two months and you’re just now figuring this out? So if you have the scorecard every day with your VAS, this will show you what’s working. What’s not and what you need to do more of what you need to do less of? All right. Offers. You need to be making at least three offers a day talking to five dollars a day, making three offers a day. What if it’s six o’clock, seven o’clock at night and you’ve not talked to five sellers yet? I’m telling you, just pick up the phone. Go to Redfin. Let me show you. Go to Redfin. Somebody type in a market in the Zoom chat right now. Or I’m just going to guess one. Look at this beautiful house right here in Birmingham, Alabama. All right, Kansas. Let’s just go to. How about Kansas City? All right. It’s seven o’clock. And I’ve not talked to five sellers yet. What am I going to do? Let’s look at Kansas City here. Let’s go to all. They’ve changed this. They’ve updated a little bit here. Let’s go to all filters. I want houses only for sale status on time on Redfin. More than 90 days. All right. Let’s make sure it’s not new construction. So had it been built before 2020, there are 350 homes in this view, 322 that have been on the market over 90 days. Houses only. And let’s say, all right. Well, I don’t want anything more than 300000. You’re going to remove the really expensive homes. 146. Cool. Right here in Redfin, you see all these homes. You can sort of buy time on Redfin and start with the new ones. So every day when you’re doing this, you go to the new 90 days. All right, let’s look at this house. Why isn’t this house sold yet? Two hundred and nine thousand dollars it hasn’t sold yet because they’re asking too much for it. All right, so let’s open it up and guess what you’re going to find. You’re going to find the listing agent. Tammy Parrish Platinum Realty. Let’s google her if it’s a lady. You never know these days and there’s a number right there. Eight one six seven two eight 14 44. Yeah, she looks like a lady or click here. Well, there’s her cell phone number right there. Nice. All right. She looks like a nice lady. Tammy, how are you doing? Joan McCall here calling about your house there at 30 407 Forest Avenue? It looks like a nice house is still available. OK, great. Can you tell me a little bit about it? All right. Nice. Yeah, it looks like a great little. I mean, the basement. Wow, looks like it’s really nice. Why isn’t this house sold yet? Is this a rehab? Is this somebody? Did somebody purchase this house and fix it up and and is trying to sell it? OK. Hmm. Boy, this thing says 42 homes accept an offer within a week. This one’s been on the market for how long? Oh, OK. Ninety five days. All right. So it says, Oh, big price drop. What’s going on here? OK. All right. Cool. Yeah. Boy, I don’t know. I mean, they’re not negotiable. Those those those rehabs, those clients, yours, they’re not negotiable in their price, are they? They’re pretty firm on their price. OK. Maybe I’ll make an offer. OK. You know, have any idea what’s the least they would take? By the way, realtors can’t tell you that, but I ask anyway. Sometimes I’ll tell you what’s the least they would take. Did they get any other offers? What were some of the other offers that they rejected? I’m sure they got a lot of time on their hands, right? Like they don’t have to sell it right away. What are they going to do? Do you know what are they going to do if they can’t sell it? Are they going to rent it out? Oh, that’s a great question. Great question. Right?

So I’m just asking questions. I’m talking to the realtor. I’m an investor. I’m looking for a deal. I’m not trying to pretend I’m being somebody that I’m not. I’m just asking questions. I might even open it up on the map and go to where’s the satellite satellite zoom in a little because I want to see what’s going on in the community, right? Like, Oh, there’s a U-Haul dealership right across the street. What’s that neighborhood like on that street forest avenue? Are there a bunch of U-Haul trucks? You know, there’s an empty lot here. Look what’s going on there? I don’t know what that is. Bunch of heavy equipment. It looks like some newer homes. Nice. OK. Let’s look at Street View. Yeah. So this is an older area. This is a great area. Looks like it’s kind of being re gentrified. Maybe nice, OK? And then look at nearby homes for sale. I just clicked on a map nearby homes for sale. I’m sorting this by price. Let’s go to filter’s. I want only houses. There’s four homes here and there’s one that sold for one hundred and ninety nine. Ah, that’s listed for sale right now for one hundred and ninety nine. That’s similar size. Oh, it looks completely new inside. And so let me ask you something they’re asking two or nine nine for this house, but I see this other one that’s a little smaller, but they’re asking only 199 is completely rehabbed way nicer. What’s the difference between your house in this house, right? And then you can go here and turn on for sale off sold on last six months. Click See. Sort this buy price. OK, there’s a house here that sold four hundred and five hundred and twenty nine one 40. You know, I’m sure these are your houses are a lot nicer. But why? Why are these other cheaper homes here? You can zoom out if you want more, if you don’t have enough comps. Zoom out and look at these other homes that are sold in that area. So I’m just asking questions to the realtor. Why? Why isn’t this household yet? What are they going to do if they can’t sell? Do you see what I’m doing here? So if it’s four or five six o’clock at night in the evening, you’ve not talked to your five sellers. All you need to do is go to Redfin and start looking up some older listings, right? Go to Zillow. Kansas City, going to Kansas City. Kansas City. Here I come. I look at rentals, three plus bedrooms, let’s do two plus bedrooms. House is only up to two grand. Let’s just go, that’s fine. Whatever. Let’s zoom in a little bit and we kind of sort this by newest. So I’m going to go here to the very bottom and go to like Page Six. And these are houses that have been listed for a week or more. Here’s one. And I’m going to call Tina Calvert’s Express Real Estate. Looks like an oil change thing or something, and express oil change. Jiffy Lube. And I’m going to ask Tina, Hey, this house looks real nice. You tell me a little bit about what’s going on. Is it still available? Does the owner, the client? Do you work for them? We have a bunch of properties. Are they? Well, they wouldn’t be interested maybe selling this one, would they? OK, so. And by the way, also what these other houses I’m looking at like this one, I might ask the the agent, Listen, I don’t know if I can. If I’m want to make a cash offer, it’s going to be like closer to what these other properties have sold for in the area. You know, one hundred and fifty or something. But like if I can get them something to, they’re close to their asking price. Would they consider maybe seller financing or lease purchase or something like that? All right. Just asking the question, So why am I? Why am I going through all of this? Because you have no excuse. Your goal is to talk to five sellers a day and make three offers a day, because that’s what your scorecard says and you don’t want to go. You don’t want to have that call with coach Joe and tell him you’ve not met your numbers because it’s going to be a short coaching call. I’m not going to try to make you feel better and wipe your tears and make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I’m going to ask you, show me your scorecard. How many offers have you made in the last week? How many sellers have you talked to in the last week? If you’ve not talked to twenty five sellers in the last week or made 15 offers in the last week, I’m going to say, why not? What’s going on? Maybe you’re focusing on the wrong things. Maybe you should stop spending so much time doing that and start spending more time doing this.

Here’s the point. You need to be focused on revenue generating activities, revenue generating activities. And if you’re Zillow, marketing is not working for you. Facebook marketing your yellow letters aren’t working for you. That’s not an excuse. You can pick up the phone call all realtors of older listings called property managers of rental properties. Just call them. Talk to them. All right. And if all you get is voicemails, keep on calling. Call them back three times until they answer the phone. All right. This is it. This is what you need to be doing. Hope I’m not beating a dead horse, because does this make sense to you guys? This is making any sense at all. You picking up what I’m laying down? All right. So always, always, always be marketing and you need to think about getting your marketing done for you in spite of you, and eventually get a virtual assistant to do all your marketing, right? You shouldn’t be doing this yourself. This is all stuff that you could be doing. It’s five dollar an hour activity, getting a virtual assistant to do it for you. All right, so that’s it. For now, I’m going to wrap this up the next few videos. I’m gonna be talking about talking to sellers and making offers and following up. I’m kind of be breaking that stuff down and how to keep it super super simple, because this is what the business really comes down to marketing, talking to sellers, making offers and following up. And you can create really simple systems to get all of that stuff done for you in spite of you, and you can work on your business. Not in it. Make sense. All right. I got to make like a tree and leave time to go. So we’ve been on here about an hour. I appreciate, y’all.

Listen, if you have not subscribed to my YouTube channel, please go do that right now. Go to YouTube, do a search for Joe McCall and subscribe to my channel and come out with videos like this couple three times a week. I’m trying to get to a million views. I’m at about seven hundred and twenty something thousand views. I’d love to get a million views so I can get that famous YouTube plaque. So anyway, go to YouTube, subscribe to the channel. I would really, really appreciate it. Give me a thumbs up on this video if you like it and let me know what you think. If you got any questions, type them in the comments. Subscribe. And also, if you’re listening to this on an audio podcast, thank you so much for listening to my podcasts for so many years and been doing it for over 10 years. I’ve over one hundred and thirty something thousand over ten million downloads and over a thousand thirty episodes. It’s been a crazy, wild ride, been doing it for a long time, so I just appreciate you all very much. Thank you so much. We’ll see you guys later. I’m going to continue this brilliant at the basics series for the next few weeks. My goal is to turn this into a book and you get to see it before you read it. So stay tuned. Appreciate you guys.