Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Hope everybody’s doing well, this is Joe McCall, and somebody is giving me a hard time about when I do my videos, I raise my hands all the time, so I’m just going to do that now for you. Hey, how are you doing? I’m Joe McCall. Welcome. This is my REI Secrets special webinar, and today I want to be talking about I’m not going to be sharing my screen or doing anything fancy like that. I’m going to be talking about what separates successful investors from everybody else and tell you a little story, how I got behind, how this all came to be. I was at the gym this morning and luckily not luckily by the grace of God is not luck because I certainly can’t do this on my own.

For the last five months, five months, almost religiously, six days a week, I have missed a few. At five a.m. in the morning, I go to the gym and work out with some friends from church, and it’s been really good. It’s been fun. It’s hard, and that’s kind of why it’s fun. But I’ve been going to the gym and working out with some buddies, and one of my students and friends were there and Terry and Pamela from St. Louis, and I didn’t even know it was like, Oh my gosh, I felt so stupid. Now, granted, they kind of bought my course. I sold hundreds, if not thousands, of courses in the last year, so I don’t know everybody who buys. And then in the coaching program, they’ve been more active with Gavin. Gavin is my coaching business partner and Gavin has been working closely with them. I knew them and I interviewed them. But when you see somebody on Zoom and you talk to somebody on Zoom, it’s they’re completely different than what you when you see them in person. And they probably saw me. They didn’t even recognize me. They thought it was me, but it was probably like, Wait a minute. Joe looks taller and skinnier on video. He’s shorter and heavier than in real life than he is actually a video or something like that. But like, we saw each other were like kind of looking at each other, tilting our heads, you know? And finally, Terry came up to me, said, Are you what’s your name? And I said, Joe. And then it clicked like, Oh my gosh. And so we had been working out at the same gym on the same times. I do get there earlier than they do. I just have to put that in there. But I do get there earlier than them, and we were working out and I think, Oh my gosh, they’re you guys are. And you know, it’s a big gym. It’s not a small little gym. It’s a big gym. So maybe we didn’t see each other every day anyway. That’s not my point at all this.

My point is this I was thinking about this because I was talking to Terry and Pamela, and they’re killing it right now. I mean, 50 to 100 grand months, 50000 to $100000 a single month every month. Not. I don’t know what their exact numbers are, but let me just tell you this you have all of the wholesalers and investors in the St. Louis area. They’re definitely in the top one percent of income earners. They’re probably doing close to five hundred thousand dollars a year on the low end for wholesaling deals. And I was talking to them about what they were doing, and it dawned on me again that the reason why they’re so successful is because they’re really, really good at the simple, basic things. That’s it. And it reminded me of things that I’ve been talking about for a long, long time, and I’m going to be updating a book that I wrote with a friend of mine, Peter Vekselman, in about seven years ago called Brilliant at the basics. And I’m going to be updating that book and I’m not doing it with Peter, Peter and I don’t work together anymore, but I’ve thought about this a lot. What makes somebody successful like Terry and Pamela and doing a lot of deals in a competitive market when so many investors I know in St. Louis and across the country are struggling, they’re struggling to make money, they’re struggling to do deals, and it really comes down to it’s not rocket science. There is no secret. In fact, this is the number one secret in real estate investing.

You ready? You want to know what the number one secret real estate investing is. There is no secret. There’s no magic formula. There’s no secret list. There’s no magic course that you have to buy. It’s just the people that are doing deals are good at the simple, basic things. And so this is what are the simple, basic things? The simple, basic things aren’t of what I’m going to be talking about in this video here. And I’m also going to be talking about this in future videos going forward. And I’ve written, I mean, just on the way home, I what do you call it when you’re talking into your phone? So I’m not texting and driving, I’m dictating notes into my phone. But I dictated these notes this morning after I got home from the gym about again, people that I see that are successful and I’ve had the privilege now of doing this podcast, doing these videos and teaching and coaching and helping people. For almost eleven years now, ten years over a thousand episodes on my podcast, 15000 YouTube video subscribers, which I just passed the mark. Awesome. Thanks, guys. You know, I’ve got hundreds of thousands of people on my email list. I’ve done over 10 million podcast downloads. I’ve had the privilege of getting a platform and sharing my story, sharing the things that are working for us in our business and doing deals and what I see a lot of other students doing. And so I’ve also had the privilege and the the struggle, the challenge of helping people and pouring out like giving them everything they need, like, OK, this is what you just do this and this and this, and they never succeed. They never do anything. And it’s. I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but I do know that only less than five percent of people actually ever go through a course and complete a program that’s just double that. Let’s say it’s 10 percent, 10 percent of people actually even go through a course. How many people who go through a course like, you know, go through the complete course or read the entire book or watch all the videos, how many of them actually do deals? It’s I don’t know, it’s probably half. So we’re looking at on the high end, maybe five percent of people that buy one of my programs or read one of my books actually go out there and start doing deals and start making money. It’s frustrating to me. I just don’t get it, but I understand because I used to be that way. And sometimes you don’t get, yeah, people need to buy several programs, or maybe what I teach isn’t for them. Maybe my style doesn’t resonate with somebody. Maybe because I’m more of be more technical and like, OK, do this stuff. You know what? I’m really good on the computers or whatever, and then that’s not what somebody needs.

Somebody needs another coach who’s more raw mindset. Yeah, yeah, you can do this, right? Like I tell people, Listen, if you want mindset, if you want the rah rah and you want to believe in yourself that you can do it. Go to YouTube and look at Tony Robbins and watch all of his videos and he’ll get you in the right mindset or something like that, right? But I never felt like I’m good at that. I’m not good at teaching the mind stuff, although it’s super important I understand that I’m more into who cares how you feel if you want to do deals, do this and then this and then that, and I might show you how to do a technical thing of go. Look at Zillow to find leads, and I’m going through it fast because I’m thinking, Listen, if you don’t, you don’t have to learn how to do everything like this. Just give this video to a VA and they’ll do it for you. But anyway, I’ve seen a lot of people struggle and definitely by far more people struggle in this business than actually succeed and make money. I think this is not just true for real estate, it’s true for everything. You know, the vast majority of franchise owners fail. Vast majority of people who start a business fail. You know, vast. Even going out and getting, you know, spending 50 to 100 thousand dollars on a college degree is no guarantee for success, either. I mean, how many people do you know who go get a degree, get a ton of college debt, finished school and are out there making barely living, making hardly any money, right? It’s just it’s frustrating. It’s sad.

So what is the difference? What is it that keeps people from succeeding and not succeeding? I think it’s more than just the mindset, although maybe that’s a large part of it because I think we all know what we need to do. We just don’t do. We all know what we need to do. We just don’t do it. I had one time in Denver, Colorado. I had two students on like one or two days apart. Call me and complain about not working for them. It’s not working. And this was probably seven eight years ago, and back then everybody was complaining about how competitive and hard it is. And I’m hearing the same thing today. So I’ve been through the market high, the collapse and the climb back. So almost one or two market cycles, whatever. And I’ve heard the same complaints and I’ve made them myself. The market’s too hot. It doesn’t work. It’s too competitive. It’s too hard, right? So I had one student call me and say, this isn’t working. I’ve got tons of buyers. That’s the easy part. I can’t find any sellers. There’s no sellers out there willing to sell. And then, like the next day, another guy called me from the same market and said, Listen, I got tons of sellers. That’s easy. I got lots of selling, but no buyers. Did I get that right? It’s the opposite of what the other, whatever the other guys said, it was the opposite. One had plenty of buyers, no sellers. The other one had plenty of sellers, no buyer. And I was like, Oh my God, I cannot believe this. I wish I could have recorded their phone calls. So obviously I put them together. I said, You two need to talk because something is there’s some kind of disconnect here. One of you is having lots of sellers and one of you isn’t having any sellers. So figure it out. You guys need to talk in, which reminds me there is no such thing as competitions business. It’s only collaboration. And so I’ve been thinking about this like, OK, why weren’t those students successful? Why are Terry and Pamela crushing it, doing deals in a competitive market? Even St. Louis may not be as competitive as Nashville or Denver or San Diego or Washington, D.C. or whatever, but it’s the same thing. I mean, people here in St. Louis is more competitive than it’s ever been. And I can give you people and I do this all the time. Somebody in Nashville says it’s too competitive as hard as, OK. Really, like if we go into LA source or property right now, if it’s too hard, we’re not going to find anybody doing deals, are we? We’re not going to find any absentee owners or new investors buying properties in Nashville if it’s really that hard and that competitive. And if what you’re saying is true, there are no deals here. We should go into the county record right now and not find any investor transactions, right? And so when we do, it’s amazing. Every time the person I’m showing this is to like, Oh my gosh, what can I pull up? Hundreds, if not thousands, of transactions in the last three to six months that were purchased by investors. Now who’s finding those deals, right? The people who get it, and I’m telling you right now the people who are finding those deals, who are making the money when everyone else is complaining that it’s hard, they are the people who are brilliant at the basics. That makes sense.

So I’m thinking about this, and as I was driving, I was dictating into my phone all of these thoughts and ideas, and I’m wanting to write a book about this and I’m going to. Right now, all my notes are not kind of they’re kind of disjointed and I’m going to be combining them. I’m not sure how there’s going to be a simple book. It’s not going to be that hard for that complicated or that sick. In fact, somewhere I have in my notebook, my shelf, the first version and it was, you know, just a quarter of an inch thick. But what are the simple, basic things that people need to know and people need to do? Well, a lot of things. I think number one, understanding that you can do it, it’s not. It’s not the market. It’s not that we’re in a seller’s market because, you know, if you’re complaining about a seller’s market, when it becomes a buyer’s market, you’re going to be complaining that it’s a buyer’s market. I guarantee you if you’re that kind of guy or gal that complains about the outside the city, the things outside of your control, when they change, you’re still going to be complaining. You’re going to find something else to complain about. Makes sense. It doesn’t matter if it’s a buyer’s market or a seller’s market, it does not matter at all. There are still people today doing deals. Maybe it’s harder than it was a year ago, two years ago, but there’s there’s still people doing deals today. How are they doing deals? They’re still, you know, it’s illegal to wholesale. It’s illegal, immoral and fattening to wholesale in Illinois right now. But guess what? There are still people wholesaling deals in Illinois. It’s going to be soon illegal, immoral and fattening to wholesale deals in probably all 50 states in the union. But guess what? There’ll still be people wholesaling deals. I’ve heard it for years. You know you can’t do lease options in Texas. Yeah, you can. I’ve read the law. You can do lease options in Texas. You can’t do sandwich lease options longer than six months, but you can do sandwich lease options in Texas and you can do wholesaling lease options all day long in Texas. And I have friends that have been doing them for 12 15 years. So don’t let anybody ever tell you that you cannot do deals. Don’t let those people tell you wholesaling is illegal. I had I had an attorney tell me one time wholesaling is illegal. So what are you talking about where he says no? Listen, any time a seller would want to sell you a property at fifty six or 50 to 60 cents on the dollar? It’s got to be a scam. Something is wrong. Nobody in their right mind would ever sell a discounted property with that kind of equity and just walk away from it. It has to be a scam. It’s illegal, I’m sure somewhere. And I said, Show me where in the law it’s illegal. Show me chapter and verse in the law case, study, court cases or whatever it says that you cannot buy a property at a discount and sell it for a profit. Well, it’s just that’s too much profit. Where does it say that in the law, how much profit you can make and how much you can’t make? It’s like people are ignorant. Some people are stupid. Most people are ignorant and they just don’t know. They think, Well, it was on an late night infomercial. It’s too good to be true. It must be. It’s just not. We just we all know that’s not the case, right? But you’re always going to find the naysayers out there that tell you, you can’t do it. You’re going to go to the local real estate clubs and you’re going to find somebody that says you can’t make more than $3000 profit on a deal, OK? Nobody in our town can make over $5000 in wholesale. Don’t listen to those late night gurus. Don’t listen to those webinars or those people on podcasts that tell you you can make twenty thousand dollars on a deal. That’s that’s a pipe dream. You can’t like, why do people do that? And I’ll tell you why. Because it’s easier to pull somebody down than to lift them up. That’s I think my I think it is a conspiracy. I mean, somebody who maybe had that dream that tried at one time to make $10000 on a deal and then kept on hitting the wall, hitting the wall and like, Oh, you know what? Didn’t work for me? It must not work for at all. Or people think I heard of somebody, I saw somebody and they failed. So it must not work, must not be right.

It is easier to pull people down to your level. That’s why it’s so important to surround yourself with like minded people is so important that you find somebody who is doing what you want to do and model their success. Emulate them, copy them, find somebody who is successful and believe that you can do it. I remember when I was getting started, I found somebody who was flipping lease options from a beach condo in Florida, in Atlanta, and I thought, Man, that guy can do it, then I can do it. I found somebody that was doing lease option deals in Chicago from the country of India using a bunch of telemarketer. And this is way back before everybody was doing cold calling. This is way back before people were talking about virtual walls like, Oh my gosh, I said, if that guy can do it, I can do it. Maybe I was gullible enough to believe it, but then God, if I could see somebody else doing what I want to do. All right. I’m going to hone in like a missile, and I’m going to find out what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. And I’m just going to model it. I’m going to copy it. I’m going to do what they do. So I remember when I hired one of my first or second coaches like I’ve gotten to a point where I’d spent tons of money on programs and courses, and I needed to hire a mentor who could just kick me in the butt and tell me what to do. And I flew down to his office and I said, Listen, can I just spend a day with you? And I just want to learn how you do what you do. And I knew in my mind, All right, I’m not going to treat this like a hobby. I can’t. If I want to make money in this business, I can’t treat like a hobby. I have to treat it like a business. As I said, can I just hang out with you and see how you do this, how you treat this as a business? So yes, I gave him some money, a lot of money. I hung out with him and I thought. Oh, my gosh. It’s not that hard. It’s really that easy. Remember, it’s such a huge revelation to me, like how easy this business actually is and how simple it is to complicate it. So let’s just let’s just keep it simple.

Let’s get good at the basic things. So what are the basic things? I think it all starts with understanding the numbers. I think, well, I think it starts with your mindset, obviously, right? Like, you’ve got to believe that you can do it. Don’t let people tell you. No, you got to believe that it can be done and that you can get it done yourself. There’s nothing special about Terry and Pamela, although they’re awesome and they work out a lot in their ripped right. Even Pamela, like she, she could probably beat me up and turn me into a pretzel like, all right. But there’s nothing special about them, except they they just believe that they can do it. And they’re like, if that pudgy guy Joe do deals and there’s no reason why I can’t do deals, you see what I’m saying? You pick it up. What I’m laying down. Are you smelling what I’m stepping in as they say, right? Like, OK, so they just believe that they can do it. That’s number one. You’ve got to believe it. It can be done. You’ve got to believe that you can make $10000 wholesale profit on a deal. On average, you need to believe that you need to start expecting it and asking for it is if you’re like, you know, wholesaling is illegal, immoral and fattening. And I can’t do it because so-and-so said, you can’t. Well, how much money have they made in business, period? How many deals have they done? Have they ever wholesale the deal if they ever tried? What are they doing now? How much money do they make a year? You got to be careful who you get your advice from. Makes sense. Don’t get advice from broke people. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would you do that? Don’t take advice from family and friends, even though they love you and they have the your best interests at heart. Don’t take advice from them on when it comes to business. Come on. Right? So you got to believe that it can be done and you have to believe that you can do it. You’re not. You don’t have to be special. You don’t have to be college educated. You don’t have to be good looking. You don’t even have to speak English if you can. Like, if you’ve got a brain, you can do this business. It’s really is that easy. There is no other business that I don’t know where you can double or triple your money and make such a fantastic rate of return on your time and money and then real estate. And I tell you, I’ve seen so many people that I brought him on as coaching students and like there they were begging me to take them on. I said, No, I don’t think it’s going to be a good fit for you. I mean, one guy in particular, I won’t mention his name. Super nice guy didn’t even know how to turn on a mouse. How do you turn on the mouse? Like, he had zero technical skills, right? And I was like, No, I don’t think this is going to work for you now. I know he was persistent. No, I could do this. A friend of ours in Ohio and I give him a hard time. He probably knows who this is if he’s listening, but his wife is super smart. And he went and got a virtual assistant, and they’re killing it right now. They’re doing lots of deals. And he knows, OK, that I’m good at this. Then I don’t need to know how to do all that. I could do this and I can get somebody else to do this stuff that I’m not good at. So I was worried like, Oh my gosh, they can’t do it because they can’t. They don’t even know how to use a computer. Now, you know what? We took him on. We’ve helped people that are elderly, single widows, and you just think they’re not even good on the phone. But you know what they do deals. They find somebody who is good at the phone. And then I’ve had people begging like, Oh, and then I’m begging them to let me coach them because I think they’re going to be amazing, right? They’re charismatic. They’re smart, they’re they’re a go getter. They’re aggressive, they’re good salespeople. They just got it together. They and they got money and they’ve already have some success. I don’t know what it is like. Like, Yeah, you’d be awesome. And they never do anything with what they learn in this real estate stuff. And I’m just I’m trying to scratch my head. Why are some people successful and some people aren’t? So it doesn’t matter. Your ethnicity doesn’t matter your race. Your skin color doesn’t matter where you were brought up from. Doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are. Which side of the tracks she came from. Who or what you believe in. Although I recommend you believe in God because he’s real and he wants to bless you. He likes you. But it doesn’t even matter if you’re an atheist. OK. You can do this business. And don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t your man or woman.

You know, this reminds me to one of the things that they did a college study like a university led study, one time to find the difference between those who were successful and those who weren’t in a large international sales companies in large international sales companies. And so they looked at all the people in this, in these organizations that made over 300 grand a year and those that made under 30 grand a year. And they were just asking themselves a simple question What is it that makes these people the difference between these people? And they thought maybe it was college. Maybe it’s the real man or woman, white or black or whatever. And it wasn’t any of that. It was not how old they were that made the difference. They are white or black, male or female, good-looking or not college educated or not fat or skinny, ugly or pretty. None of that mattered. You know what it was? You know, the one thing that made them different was this the speed of implementation, the speed of implementation. So when they learned a new strategy or a new tactic on how to follow up with new leads or you know, how to sell something or whatever. They were quick to implement it when they got a new lead in. They were quick to call that lead. They were quick to follow up with leads. They were quick to send, like when you’re talking to a lead and you say, All right, I’ll send you some information. They were quick to send the information on to that lead. They were fast implementers. That was the number one differentiating factor, the speed of implementation. And I would say this your the speed to success and the speed income is directly proportional to your speed of implementation. How quickly do you want to make money in this business? Well, how quickly you’re going to implement what you learn. We all kind of know what we need to do already. And you’re watching this video, you’re on these calls, you’re listening to podcasts, going to books and buying courses and all this stuff like, you know what you need to do already. You just need a kick in the pants and you need to say you need somebody to tell you, like, what are you doing? Why aren’t you doing this stuff yet? For me, it was my wife. Like, I had just spent thirteen thousand dollars on a critic on two or three credit cards to buy some coaching program that wasn’t even any good. And six months later, I had not done anything with it. I had not made a dime. I was embarrassed. I was humiliated. My wife was asking me, like, what’s going on, Joe right? Why haven’t you done anything with this yet? And we eventually fast forward a year or two. I was a professional student for almost three years, buying course after course of the course and not doing anything. I’d done a few deals here and there. They were bad deals, you know? But I had not been making any money. I finally got to a point where my wife is like, Joe, come on. I mean, she’s awesome. She’s amazing. She would never threaten to leave me or anything like that. I mean, she’s awesome. But like, she probably felt bad for me. Like my back was finally against the wall, and I was at a point where we were hemorrhaging cash. One time my wife was with our kids driving through at a McDonald’s to buy them food, and the debit card got declined, not the credit card, because the credit cards are all maxed out and the debit card that goes from a checking account denied. And she didn’t have enough cash, so we had she had to leave the drive thru with the food there and the kids in the back like Mommy, why did we leave it there? Like, we’re hungry? Why did you leave the food in the drive thru? Or how about the time when she called me and she’s at the target with the kids in the cart? Chaos. She puts everything on there and it all brings up. There’s people behind her and the card gets declined right. She can’t write a check and she has to leave the stuff there on the counter and walk away humiliated because this guy here wasn’t providing for my family. And somebody asked me at this time who and your family is suffering because you’re not making the money they deserve.

So maybe you need to ask yourself that question. Who in your family and your life is suffering right now because you’re not making the money they deserve? Here’s my point. You know what you need to do. Why didn’t I do any deals when I, after spending 13 grand on that coaching program? It’s your simple I didn’t implement. I didn’t do what they said to do. I kept on saying, Well, what if this? What is that? What if this happens? What is the seller says this? What if they can’t find a buyer? What if it’s a bad deal? What if I actually? What if the seller says yes? What if they say yes to my art? Or what if I look like an idiot when if I look like a fool, all these what ifs? I felt like I had to have all my i’s dotted, all my ts cross and I need. I needed to have the blueprint for the exact step by step with all the different scenarios for of a deal from beginning to end. There were just so many unknowns and I couldn’t handle that. And so I wasn’t taking action because I was afraid of failure and I was afraid of success. Well, finally, though, my backs against the wall, we’re hemorrhaging cash. We’re getting our electricity turned off. My phone is lighting up with bill collectors calling me all day. I had a I had to ask the bill collectors. I had to beg them to stop calling my wife at home because it was waking up the kids from their naps. I said, Here’s my cell phone. Please just start calling me on my cell phone. And then then at work, my phone’s lighting up at work. And, you know, at the time when the iPhone just came out, you couldn’t have like, you couldn’t hide your notifications. So like when somebody called and I would. I’m pretty anal about Caller ID, right? So I want to see if it’s Chase or Citi Mortgage or a Discover card or whoever my banks and creditors were at the time. I wanted to know who it was, and so I had to constantly leave my phone face down on the tables or the day I used to work as a civil engineer and I was in a lot of meetings and so I’d constantly put my phone face down because I didn’t want people to see Chase and Citibank and all these debt collectors calling me utilities. I mean, we’d come home one time on a Do you mind me sharing these embarrassing stories with you guys? We came home from church one night on a Friday night and I hadn’t paid our electric bill and we pull up in the garage door. Opener doesn’t work in the car. We got the garage door just open and then I realized, Oh my gosh, all the lights are off in the house and the doors are locked. And by the way, you should make sure if your garage, if the electricity goes out, you always have a way to get in mouse. So luckily, one of the windows we were able to shimmy through the windows and we come in and we’re like, OK, kids, we’re going to have we’re going to go camping inside the house today. And we lit candles and tried to make it fun for the kids, but like my wife’s looking at me like Joe, what’s going on? And I was at the time to try to do real estate, doing more studying than I was doing the stuff. And as like I had to make the decision. If I’m going to be a real estate investor and make money doing real estate, or am I going to be an employee civil engineer for this company, I need to make a decision. I have to do one or the other. I can’t do both anymore. So I decided, All right, I’m going to do deals. And I remember about one more course. I’m saying all this because we’re talking about implementation, right? The most important real estate you’ll ever invest in are these four inches between your ears. All right, that’s true. But you’ve got to get it out of these four inches in between your ears and onto your hands like you need to actually start doing what you’re learning. So my back was against the wall. I’m like, All right, I’m going to buy one more course and I’m going to do what this guy says to do. I’m not going to change anything. I’m just going to do what he says to do. I’m not going to try to like, match it up with this course and matched up to something I like from this course is something I like from that course. In this strategy in Australia, I’m going to do it. I’m just going to do what they say. I’m going to stop asking, what if I start asking, what next do you get that? Write that down. Stop asking what if? And start asking, what next? I mean, I don’t know if you can ask what if all day long? If you don’t mind being a professional student for the rest of your life, go ahead and ask, What if I mean, there’s a place for that we need to know. But like, do you want to? Do you hate money? Or do you love money? I mean, you shouldn’t love money, but like, you shouldn’t hate it either. You know what I’m saying? Like, Do you want to make money? Or you just want to learn about how to make money? You want to sit on the bench for the rest of your life and be a bench warmer? Or do you want to be actually in the field playing and making money contributing? You want to be a producer or a consumer. You got to decide you want to be a producer or a consumer. And I said that day, I want to be a producer. I’m tired and frustrated sitting on the sidelines and just hearing about all these other people doing it. So I bought one more course and it was Chris Chicos course. At the time, he called it absentee. Owner profits, I believe, was all about sending postcards to absentee owners. This was 2008. And by the way, I did a video of I actually went to this house. Thirteen years later, I went to this house for the first time that I did so anyway. I bought it and Chris said, Send a postcard to this list. He sent this postcard. Use this script. Make this offer, use this contract, and I didn’t like it. Honestly, I thought, Oh man, this sounds too simple. Like it’s got to be more complicated than this and everybody’s doing that. It won’t work in my Marky Mark. It’s too competitive. Everybody is sending that postcard out. Everybody’s sending mail to that list. So you know what Chris says to do it, I’m just going to trust the system. So I did it. I sent the postcards to who he said to send it to. I started using. I started answering the phone. These are all things I’m going to be talking about in future episodes of this book, the chapters of this book or whatever.

I said, All right, I’m going to do what he says, and I may not like it, but I’m just going to not going to mix it up with other things that I’ve bought other programs. I’m just going to do what Chris says, started getting calls, started using his script, making his offers and then, I don’t know, maybe a few weeks into it, maybe a couple of months, I don’t remember. I got a call from a lady and she left me a message. I’m not sure how I got the lead, but I somehow got the lead and it was for a property that was in a town about an hour outside of St. Louis. And it was a three fam. So there’s three units in there. I freak out like, Oh my gosh, because I wasn’t sending postcards to people who owned properties way out there. I was sending postcards to people who own properties in these popular zip codes. And it turns out this lady had an expired listing in one of the popular zip codes, which she didn’t want to sell that property. She wanted to sell another property that she owned, and now we’re outside of St. Louis. So I said, No, I’m not interested. But she kept on calling me back. I don’t know. She called me three or four times and was practically begging me to make an offer for this house. That’s how bad she wanted to get rid of it. And this is what the people that don’t understand this business when they tell you it’s illegal, immoral and fattening to make 10 $20000 profit on a deal. It’s not that that’s crazy. Thinking is so crazy, ridiculous and why this lady wanted to sell this house so bad because she had tried listing it with an agent and it wouldn’t sell. All right. She needed a ton of work. She had tenants in there that were paying her weekly. She had to go knock on the doors of each of these three tenants every week and get paid rent in cash. She had no leases. You didn’t have any signed lease. She was a month to month. She was week to week with these people. And, you know, they were not. I don’t want to say they were not productive members of society. They were. But like, I mean, they weren’t. They were on anyway. Now I won’t say anything like this. She needed the money for. She wanted to pay off some debts. She wanted to give her kids some some stuff for medical attention and care that they needed. And she was elderly. She had inherited these properties from her dad. She didn’t want them. She hated them. They were stressed. She needed the money, so she had. Listed with an agent, and I was like, no, I am not interested because I didn’t have any buyers out there. But you know what Chris says make an offer to every seller you talked to. And so I said, OK, oh, another thing Chris said was because these were like the what ifs and the unknowns. I was like, I was afraid of the unknown. Well, what if I make an offer? And she says yes, and then I can’t sell it. But my coach told me, and maybe this was Chris. Maybe it was somebody else. But like, you find a good deal, the buyers will come. And the great thing about this business is, let’s say you can’t find a buyer, then you know, you don’t have a good deal where you can go back and renegotiate the contract even back out of it if you have the right language in the contract, right? So I shaded listed the year before for like one hundred and forty or something like that, and it expired. And I said, Ma’am, I don’t know. I think I can offer you. I forget the exact numbers, but I think maybe I can offer you. I think it was like sixty grand sixty. And she said, OK. And then I freak out six and she says, OK, so now I’m nervous. She’s an elderly lady, and I said, All right, well, let’s meet somewhere in a public place. I didn’t even want to go look at the house I had even at back then. I knew enough from that area from Google Maps and MLS history. I didn’t want to go out there. So let’s meet at a public place with one of your sons. The new she had some kids. She said, OK. So I spent hours agonizing over this contract, and by this time I didn’t do it, Chris said. I got all of my other courses and I pulled out all of those contracts and I I looked at all of their contingency clauses and I added them all into my one big contract. And I had so many clauses, contingencies clauses in there, they probably cancel each other out. And I had this big, fat long contract like multiple pages, and I was so nervous because I may have to understand every language, every word in this contract, because she’s going to ask me a question about this. And if I don’t know the answer to it, then I’m going to look stupid and she’s going to walk away and and our son is going to be there and he’s going to think that I’m I’m this investor that is just taking advantage of all people or, you know, this crazy stuff.

And I sat down with her. I gave her the contract and she signed it without even reading it. And her son is there like, is this? Is this all right? He says, Yeah, whatever, dude. You know, I don’t know. He’s just like, whatever, dude. So she signed the contract and I don’t know what to do next, so she needed some earnest money. And so I think I don’t remember the exact steps of that, but it turned out I gave her a thousand dollars earnest money deposit in cash. So no wonder you never give a seller earnest money to them. It goes to a title company, the title company holder, right? And he’d never give them cash. I gave this seller a thousand dollars in cash. Earnest money. Well, anyway, I bought it for like 60. Now I’m freaking out. What do I do when I start? I remember this stop asking What if I start asking what next? All right. Well, next thing, Chris says, stick a sign in the yard. So I stuck a sign in the yard. I think I also called a flat fee discount broker and we put it on the MLS or something, but I didn’t even need to do that. So I got it for 60. I sold it for like seventy five. The next day, I put a sign in the yard and I had a friend do it, actually. And I got a call from a realtor. Oh my gosh, now I’m freaking out. A realtor is involved. Like, I don’t remember reading this in the course. I told the realtor, I said, Listen, I got to explain something to you. I don’t actually even own this house yet. I hope it’s OK. I’m just I just thought, you know, by the way, you should always be honest with sellers if you’re new. And with your buyers, like, tell them you’re new. It’s like because once I told them I’m nervous and I’m new, they’re like, Oh, OK, well, we’ll help you. And they said this relaxed dude. He said, This is such a good deal. It’s not a big deal and my buyers paying cash. We don’t worry about all of the bank financing regulations or rules and all that. And I was like, really? He said, Yeah. And I said, Well, I don’t have any title companies out there, so don’t worry about it. We’ll just use ours. I said, Well, give me their name, ID number so I can call them and give them a heads up. I said, OK, so I called the title company. I said, Listen, I hope this is OK. I have this deal in a contract for sixty. I’m selling it for seventy five and I don’t even own the property yet. I hope it’s OK. The title company said, Relax, it’s OK. Right? And so we did, and I didn’t. Even we did a double closing at the time where I didn’t. And I told her title company and the realtor, I don’t have the money to close on this thing. And he said, I will figure it out. And so the title company took care. It was a cash transaction, wasn’t a big deal. It was in a small town. This title company is just good old boy title company, and they’re like, We’ll take care of it. And so I walk away a week later whenever the closing and also, by the way, the seller asked the realtor asked for because they have to, you know, the sign leases the rent rolls. And they wanted all these fancy documentations like the seller disclosure statements. I didn’t have any of that. And I told the guy is just honest with them. I said, I don’t have that stuff, and the seller doesn’t either. He said, OK, don’t worry about it and didn’t need it. The seller understood buying this deal. There were no rent rules. These people were paying cash every week. There were no leases. And some of these people didn’t even have telephones, so he couldn’t even go into the house to look at them and inspect them. But it was such a good deal and they were worth maybe one hundred. He’s buying it for seventy five or something like that. Well, it turns out I made. Thirteen grand and change after closing costs and all of that stuff. And I had my check, they call it the shut up money, right? The shut up check and I wasn’t telling anybody else to shut up, but it was mainly my unbelief and doubts. It was my shut up check. I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, this actually works. I wish I would have kept a copy of that. Check to it. Maybe it was a wire I don’t remember, but like, I thought, Oh my gosh, like all those people I saw in the webinars and in the boot camps and in the seminars where, you know, the guy is selling his course, you know, and they have the picture of the check and I’m like, Oh my gosh, I’m actually one of them now. I actually am one of those guys with the check. This actually works that changed my life, that changed my life forever.

So again, coming back to why, why was I able to finally do a deal after three years of studying and being a professional student and making so many stupid mistakes? It’s because I understood that the speed income is directly proportional to your speed of implementation. And I would take it even a step further, and I’m talking about those later, and your income is directly proportional to the number of offers that you make. So I had to get it through my head that this could be done and I could actually be one of the ones that do it. I got the course. I said, I’m just going to implement, implement, first, ask questions later, right? I heard one guy say, I’m going to you need a jump off the building and almost you have to almost like figure out how to fly as you fall. And so, so many of you are stuck in this ready aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim ready. Buy another course. Aim, aim, aim, aim, get so close. Like, Oh, I don’t watch another video loser podcast by another book. Get another course coach coaching program. Watch another webinar aim, aim, aim or I’m going to do the strategy doesn’t work. I’m going to do notes, I’m going to do short sales. I’m going do the BR strategy. I’m going to do these options on the wholesaling and vacant land. You never get to the fire ready. Aim, aim, aim, aim, ready, aim. I need to get another coach. You understand what I’m saying to be successful. I finally did the ready fire aim approach. All right, ready. I got the stuff. I know what I need to do. I got to coach. I got a mentor. I know what I need. I see other people doing it. If they can do it, I can do it. It’s nothing special about them. They’re just massive action takers. Massive, imperfect action. Massive, imperfect action. All right, I’m going to do it. Ready fire. I made a mistake. I can’t find a aim again. Fire again. Missed it. OK, let me rename it again. Boom finally hit it. Finally, did a deal. Finally made somebody. Cool, do you guys understand?  I’m hoping that this inspires you because again, I’m on this. I’m on this journey right now to figure out what is it that separates the successful people from the unsuccessful people, from everybody else in this business? And I think it’s a few simple things no. One, it’s a mindset. They believe they can do it.

Number two, they take massive, imperfect action. They just take action. They’re massive action takers. That is one of the most important things in this business. You need to be a decisive action taker. You cannot build a business sitting on a fence, right? You can’t make you can’t drive a parked car. You need to get it in gear. You need to get off the fence, you need to get the car in gear and you need to push let go of the brake, push the accelerator down. OK, you guys know what you need to do. And through this series, and maybe it’s a good time to end right now because I’m gonna do more of these as we go forward. But you need to understand right now that I’m off the fence now that I’m in the car and I’m driving, what are the simple, basic things that I need to do to succeed in this business? What are the simple, basic things I need to do now that I know I need to do it and I believe it, and I trust it, and I’m going to start ready, aim firing. So I’m going to start ready. Fire aim. What are the things I need to do? And then just in a nutshell here, kind of giving a preview of what I may be talking about in the coming weeks going forward here is there’s certain things that these investors that are successful and do a lot of deals with some of the things they all have in common.

All right. Number one there on the phone. They answer the phones. They talk to sellers. They talk to buyers. They’re accessible. Listen, if you’re not on the phone, you’re not making money. Now, maybe it’s not you who’s on the phone. Then you’ve got somebody on your team who is on the phone, but you need to be on the phone. You need to be talking to sellers. Number two, the reason why they’re so successful is they understand marketing, and maybe I’m getting this isn’t the right order, but understanding that it’s it’s all about marketing. We’re not in the real estate investing business. We’re in the marketing business, OK? We keep this business really simple. If you want to make money, you need to do deals. If you want to do deals, you got to make offers. If you want to make offers, you’ve got to talk to sellers and you want to talk to sellers, you’ve got to do marketing. So they do consistent marketing every single day. Whether they feel like it or not, they’ve got somebody else doing the marketing for them in spite of them. The marketing is a machine. It’s a system that’s going on autopilot leads, always leads coming in, so you’ve got to get somebody else to do the marketing. We’re not in the real estate investing business, we’re in the marketing business. They understand that number one, number two, they’re picking up the phone, they’re answering the phone, they’re calling sellers, they’re talking to sellers, OK? Number three, they’re making offers. In fact, let me go back a little bit. This is another big thing, and I’m going to be diving deeper into this stuff. They’re talking to at least three to five sellers a day. If if you could just talk to five dollars a day, I’m telling you, I promise you, and you do that consistently for a few months, you’re going to start making lots of. This was talk to five sellers a day, and the next thing is they make offers to every single seller they talk to, and many times they make multiple offers. Finding out their situation to make a cash offer or owner financing subject to offer lease options, whatever it is that is going to fix the problem. We’re talking to sellers are making offers and then the next thing is they’re following up. Ninety four of ninety five percent of your deals, 90 to 100 percent of your deals are going to come from follow up plain and simple. And nobody’s doing it. Nobody is doing it. So if you don’t get discouraged, OK, OK, I’ve done the marketing now. It’s been two months. I don’t have any deals. Well, first thing I’m going to ask you is how many offers you made and how much follow up have you done? How many sellers have you talked to? How many offers have you made? How much follow up have you done? We looked like I’m getting way ahead of myself, so I want to be talking a lot more about these things as we progressed, OK? The it’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m excited to share these principles with you. This is all for this book that I’m writing called Brilliant at the basics, and I want to share with you what those simple, brilliant, basic things are that people who do deals understand and do. And so then you can just take what they’re doing and do it yourself. Makes sense. All right, good.

I’m looking at my my comments here in the Zoom chat, and you guys are awesome inspired. Watch me go. Nick has a good point here. Don’t be upset by the results you didn’t get with the work you didn’t do. Oh, that’s good. Write that one down. Don’t be upset by the results you didn’t get with the work you didn’t do. Myles says. We always have a bachelor in our head that creates doubt, don’t we? Isn’t that true? There’s always somebody there in the back of our head saying, You can’t do it. You’re not worthy, you’re not good enough to do. Somebody here says, I appreciate you sharing your early money issues. This describes me. I bought a $15000 in coaching and then I was afraid of the course, even though I attended the live weekend trainings. I appreciate your vulnerability, Lori says. Yeah. Marvin says to do deals, you must just do it as soon as you learn the basics. This is a real good point, and we’ll talk about this, Mary. I’m finding out there is a steeper learning curve. Even though the requirements are so basic. There are so many basic things to learn, though. Also, the courses over deliver and you only need to know a few things. Well, I understand that you. It reminds me of when I was in school and I remember this every single year. I loved math. I was good at math. And I remember every single year, though, looking at next year’s math book and being freaked out, totally intimidated and thinking, Oh my gosh, looking at the math that the other kids did in the next grade up. And that was. If I have any phobia, it’s math and calculus. I mean, I love it. But like, I’m looking at this thinking, holy smokes like and I remember seeing the math problems in the math book for the next year. I asked freaking out. And that was in junior high school, high school and through college, and I went and I got my last math class. That I took was differential equations or something like that. So I took multiple calculus courses and I had two and everything is the same thing. But then at the end of the year, when I looked back, I was like, Oh my gosh, what was I freaked out about? That was actually really easy. That stuff was easy. And so you may, as a beginning investor, look at this huge giant mountain and think, how am I ever going to get up there? Well, you got to understand there’s just some real simple steps. Think about it like Mt. Everest and you have it’s the tallest peak, but what do they have there? They have like base camps, every few thousand feet that you go up and you just need to worry about the next step. All right. Don’t worry about getting to base camp No. Eight when you haven’t even got the base camp No. One yet. So my goal here is once you get to base camp one and two, the rest is easy. You’ve got Sherpas that can carry your stuff up there. Now, I’m not. Obviously, this analogy goes so far, it’s not easy reaching the top of Everest. I can imagine that right? But like sometimes the first few steps are the hardest. And this is important. Understand you don’t need to know how to do steps one through eight, like in exact clarity. You just need to trust the system and do steps one and two. That’s it. Worry about step one, then worry about step two and then worry about step three and say what I’m saying. Go to first base camp. That’s all you need to worry about right now. Go to the first base camp. Don’t worry about bringing all of the stuff now.

Can you imagine as a coach? Or let’s just say you wanted to climb Mount Everest? And I say to you, OK, great. Here you go. You’re going to need this. All these six maps, you’re going to need these 20 different pairs of boots. You’re going to need these five different backpacks in these 20 different tents and all of this food to get to mountain. This is all the stuff you’re going to need. I give it all to you at once. Well, sometimes we as coaches are guilty of that because we give you everything you need, but you don’t need all of that stuff to get to the first base camp, right? You just need one pair of boots. One tent. And you know what? Sometimes there’s Sherpas who can, like, bring you the stuff. And so that’ll be there at the camp when you get there, when you need it. So don’t worry about like if you have a course program, you have great education. That’s awesome. But just save some of that stuff for the third or fourth or fifth base camp. What do you need to do now to start doing deals? It’s real simple. Doing deals comes down to a few simple, basic things. Marketing, talking to sellers, making off. That’s it. Don’t worry about raising private money, setting up an LLC. Getting a website, hiring a ton of VAS or just like marketing, talk to sellers, make offers and I might add follow up, but that’s part of making off. OK. That’s how you do deals. It’s really that simple. So the first thing you need to worry about, we’re not worried, but do an implement is marketing. Get some leads. Maybe for some of you, it’s like, You know what? There already are people with deals. I just need to find the buyer. So maybe it’s marketing for buyers. You go out there and find the buyers. You’re looking for deals, find out what they want. Go to the people who have the deals and bring it to them. So keep it simple. Just worry about market. That’s like the number one foundational thing of all. This is marketing, so you need to have a scorecard and you have a simple marketing plan of two or three things that you’re doing every single day. And I’m going to talk about that in future episodes, the simple marketing that you can do. I’m going to talk about how to find out where the demand is and follow the demand. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel or try to figure out how to create new demand. Find out where the demand already is. What are people already looking for and then go find it for them? I mean, that’ll shortcut your success by years. You just find out where the demand is and go supply it. And we’re going to be talking about a few other things that are important that I see successful people doing. Cool.

Let me just look to see if there are more comments here. Joe, I’ll get to that question again in a minute. Thank you, Mandy. Yes, there are times when you have to tell the battler in your head to shut up and do it anyway. Somebody here says, I’m trying to do the implementation without overthinking. I’m doing at least better than I was a few weeks ago. Progress over perfection. That’s right. That’s absolutely right. Progress over perfection. If you’re just making progress, that’s good. That is awesome. Start thinking what next? Not the what ifs. Forget about step seven and just focus on step one and step one is mindset. I think maybe step two is marketing. OK, this is a good question from somebody here. I’ve been giving your courses and I have not pulled the trigger yet because I’m thinking I would not know how to talk to sellers. I need more knowledge on how to talk to sellers and what to say. I want to be talking about that because this is something that we also overcomplicate way. Too often when we talk to sellers, you should be listening 10 times as much as your talk. So if all you’re doing is listening, then you don’t need to really worry much about what you’re going to say. Do you? You just need to ask questions. You need to ask really good questions. And one of the things I’ll be sharing with you are some of those good questions to ask, and you need to think of yourself as the guy or gal with a million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and you’re looking for a house to buy. And you just need to ask the sellers, why would I? Why should I buy your house and not somebody else’s? So you’re just asking questions like, can you can? Can I ask you a few questions about your house to see if this would be something I would be interested in? And you get the seller to tell you to sell you on the house. Tell me about your situation. What about the house? Is it a nice house in a good area? Why do you want to sell it? Why not just keep it? Why not just listed with a realtor? Why not just fix it up and sell it? Why not just rent it out? Keep on renting it out to tenants? You see what I’m saying? I’m just asking questions. Find out what the seller wants or needs. That’s really hard. I mean, it’s really easy. It’s not hard. Makes sense. Is it possible to complete a deal without a coach? You know, yes, of course, right? Eventually, I think everybody needs a course and I’m putting my money where my mouth is because I spend a lot of money on coaches. I believe in coaching. You need a coach. And one of the main reasons ways a coach is going to help you. That’s a good way to wrap this up.

One of the one of the best ways a good coach will help you do deals is by helping you keep on refocusing on what’s most important. Any time I have a coaching client, the first thing I work with them on is their marketing plan. All right, so you know what you need to do? How are you going to get there? All right. Let’s figure that out. You know, you’re going to do deals here or there. What kind of deals are you going to do? All right. So how much money do you want to make a month? Ten grand a month. OK, good. How many deals is that? Two deals a month. OK, great. Now let’s say you need 30 leads per deal. That’s 60 leads a month. How are you going to get 60 leads per month? Well, I don’t know. That’s why I hired you as my coach. All right, cool. Maybe let’s do. There’s 20 things that you can do here for marketing. Let’s do these two things. All right. Great. First, just do this one first. And after that’s going, then let’s add this. OK, great. So now we’ve got a scorecard. We got a marketing plan. All right. You need to do this marketing every day in this marketing. Every week, you need to send out 200 letters a week. You need to send out 20 handwritten letters a day. You need to send out five emails. You need to do an hour cold calling a day or whatever it is to start tracking your numbers and then look gray. Now you’ve got to talk to sellers. You’ve got to talk to five sellers a day. How are you going to do that? How are you? Talk to five sellers a day while you do this marketing? And how about if you haven’t talked to five by the end of the day, you just call a couple of realtors, call a couple of property managers and ask if you have any deals. I’m looking for. You see what I’m saying? Now you’ve got a scorecard. You start tracking the numbers. And the number one thing a coach is going to do, in my opinion, is help you overcome your limiting beliefs, but then also hold you accountable to the action steps you need to take to get to where you want to be. Otherwise, we’re just wasting each other’s time. Does that make sense? So somebody asked a question about lease options from Joe. Why use a lease option on the A-to-B side as opposed to a purchase and sale agreement? A land contract. I think, Joe, it depends on what you’re trying to do. Like I’ve done lease options with a regular purchase and sale agreement, so that kind of doesn’t matter what what it is. If you have a purchase and sale agreement, what I’ve done is I’ve said the closing date will be in two years and I reference the attached lease, I reference a lease and then we do a lease. And in that lease, it says we’re going to Lisa for two years at this price. Yeah. So I don’t know if that answers your question. You can do one document that’s a lease lease option agreement that has a lease and the option in there. Or you can do a purchase and sale agreement and a separate lease, or you could do an option agreement and a separate lease. There’s different ways you can do it, and you may be in a market where land contracts are more acceptable, more common. So do land contracts instead of lease options. I think Michigan maybe is one of those states. OK, Miles, I don’t understand your question here. Why they sell or why the need for cash. I’m not sure I understand that. Why they need to sell. Why do they need the cash now? Remember the story I just told you about the elderly lady? She needed the money now. She needed the cash now for health reasons, and these properties were a huge pain in the side. They’re adding tons of stress to her life. She tried selling it with the realtor couldn’t be needed. Too much work. There were no leases there. Tenants, deadbeat tenants. They weren’t deadbeats. Like there weren’t your standard typical tenant that you like to have in one of your properties, right? But like, she needed the money, she just wanted to get rid of that pain in her life and in exchange for a discounted price, I gave her the speed and convenience of selling a property quickly. In exchange for my low price, I’m giving her the speed and flexibility of a fast, seamless, painless close. You got a problem. I’ll take care. Here’s my price. If you want more. Go listen with an agent. She’s like, I tried and it didn’t work. I said, If you want to sell us for more, fix it up, get the tenants out and get some real tenants in there. Fix it up and sell it on the MLS and the realtor. She did not want to do that. She couldn’t do it. OK, that’s good for now. Is that right?

I’m going to be doing more of these as we go on, and I’m going to be talking more about some other simple principles for success that you need to master. You need to be good at these simple things, and it’s not complicated. It’s not rocket science. You need to learn how to become brilliant at the basics. And when you can do that, there’s nothing stopping you. You can do deals. You can do one two five 10, 20 deals a month. It doesn’t matter. You just got to be. Learn how to be really good at these simple, basic things. All right, guys. That’s it. We’re going to call it a day. Appreciate you all.