Keep Learning With The Collective Clicks Podcast

Celebrating Brandon’s new baby! 👶 Tune in as we revisit the classic PPL vs. PPC debate with expert insights from Noah Parks and Brandon Bateman.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be talking with Noah Parks from our team all about the advantages of paper leads versus PPC."

"How are you doing today, Noah?"

"Good. How are you doing, Brandon?"

"Hey, good, can't complain. Excited to do another podcast with you. It has been six months, probably a little bit awhile, right?"

"Yeah, yeah. For anybody that wants some context, right now as we speak, I am looking out my window at Noah's house. Yet despite that, he has made one appearance in the office in the past six months. Is that it, just one, maybe two?"

"You come for our quarterly planning, for sure, leadership stuff."

"So anyways, great, great to talk with you. Um, you're the guy that every time you come into the office, people say, 'Whoa, does he still work here?' Which is kind of funny because to many of the people listening, they all probably know you fairly well, um, because you're such a big piece of our outward-facing presence."

"So anyways, I'm super grateful to be here with you and I'm excited for a cool topic today, which is paper leads versus PPC."

"Yeah, so this is an exciting topic for me because I feel like there's a lot of misinformation going around about this now. Obviously, before we get too far into this, right, we are a company that does PPC as a service for Real Estate Investors. Um, Noah works for that company as well, right? We're a little bit biased, so take it with a grain of salt. However, I think we're pretty level-headed, objective people, right? So, so I want to talk through like some of the different things we're saying and, spoiler alert, we're not going to say that one is better than the other. Um, it really comes down to what your goals are and uh, I had sales, so I may say it one's better than the other. All right, then I'll have to take the position of arguing for paper leads, you know?"

"I, I'll take a well-rounded approach. Okay, fair enough."

"So, so obviously, this has been a big topic of discussion. I think what prompted the creation of 'Advantages of PPL for New Investors' - Low Barrier to Entry, Can Buy Leads Without Full Marketing Budget - this podcast is that a mutual friend and client of ours named Victor posted on Facebook, 'Paper lead is a scam,' like prove me wrong or something like that. I can't remember exactly what the last few words were, and it started this conversation."

"Yes, a very lively conversation. Um, and I noticed that a lot of the strong opinions kind of against paper leads were in my opinion a little bit unfounded or maybe from a lack of understanding of those companies and how they uh, how they work. Um, but there's also a lot of truth to what was being said in that debate. Um, and I think it's worth kind of visiting all those things. So, so I think a good place to start would be in your opinion, based on what you're hearing because I know you're talking to probably like seven or eight investors every single day, which really adds up a lot over the course of a year and a half. A lot of a lot of uh context of what's going on. I feel like it gives me a pretty good pulse, uh, thumb on the pulse of the uh of the investor industry here."

"Yeah, I mean you hear the 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' of all the marketing and you're also really good at digging into why people feel that way about their marketing and what could be causing the result to be what it is and things like that so you can better understand."

"Um, so I think I honestly think you're one of the most qualified people in the world to speak on this subject just based on your exposure. Um, in your opinion, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing your own PPC as compared to buying leads from a pay-per-lead provider? Okay, um, yeah, I mean honestly, I see advantages to both of those approaches. One of the approaches that I pride myself on taking and having any kind of Discovery conversation or just understanding where an investor is at in their uh, marketing cycle, if you will, it tends to follow a pretty common thread. And that is new investors tend to take the route of marketing that provides the lowest barrier to entry, which is oftentimes outbound, right? But they hear all the all the upsides of PPC and they think, 'This sounds great, this is gonna be this magic bullet that's gonna solve all my problems.' And it can be a really powerful tool, but it also comes with a learning curve. There's a lot of moving parts, you gotta understand targeting, you gotta understand ad copy, you gotta understand landing pages, you gotta understand conversion rate optimization. It's a lot to take on, especially for a new investor who's just getting started."

"Absolutely, and on the flip side, with paper leads, they seem very straightforward. You pay for a lead, you get a lead. Here it is. And that can be very appealing, especially to those new investors."

"Right, and there are some reputable paper lead companies out there that are generating leads ethically and compliantly. But there's also a dark side to this industry, and that's where a lot of the skepticism comes in. There are some companies out there that are selling leads that are complete junk, that are just not qualified."

"Yeah, and that's a good point to differentiate. So with PPC, you control everything, right? You control the targeting, you control the ad copy, you control the landing page. So you can, in theory, generate very high-quality leads if you know what you're doing. But with paper leads, you're relying on that company to deliver and you don't always have a lot of control over the quality of those leads."

"Exactly. And some of the red flags to watch out for with paper leads would be, like, if the leads are super cheap, that's a red flag. Because a good, qualified lead costs money to generate. Also, if they're guaranteeing a certain number of conversions or a certain number of closes, that's a red flag. Because you can't guarantee those things in real estate."

"Absolutely, and it's an important point. PPC is not a silver bullet either. You can spend a lot of money on PPC if you don't know what you're doing and not get very good results. So there's a risk there as well."

"Right, so there's risk and reward with both options. And like you said earlier, it really depends on the goals of the investor and what stage they're at in their business."

"Absolutely. So for a new investor who's just getting started, paper leads can be a good option to get their feet wet, to start generating some leads and kind of see what works and what doesn't. But as they scale their business and they want more control over their lead quality and their lead generation process, then PPC might be a better option."

"There's also the time factor to consider. PPC can take some time to set up and optimize properly, whereas with paper leads, you can start getting leads right away. But like you said, the quality might be lower. So it's a trade-off between speed and quality."

"Exactly. And another thing to consider is your budget. PPC can be a very cost-effective way to generate leads, but it does require an ongoing investment. With paper leads, you can pay for a specific number of leads and that's it. So there's a bit more upfront cost certainty with paper leads."

"Absolutely. So really, there's no one-size-fits-all answer here. The best approach for you will depend on your individual circumstances. But hopefully, this conversation has given you a better understanding of the pros and cons of both paper leads and PPC."

"Yeah, I think this has been a really valuable conversation. And for the new investors out there who are listening, the biggest takeaway I would say is to do your research, understand the pros and cons of both options, and don't be afraid to experiment a little bit to see what works best for you."

"Absolutely. And if you're interested in learning more about PPC, we actually have a free course that you can take on our website. And if you're interested in learning more about paper leads, there are a number of reputable companies out there. Just do your research and make sure you're working with a reputable company."

"Great advice. And hey, thanks for joining me on the podcast today, Noah. This has been a lot of fun."

"Yeah, thanks for having me, Brandon. It's always a pleasure chatting with you."

"Alright, folks, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening to the Collective Clicks podcast. We'll catch you on the next episode."

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Are you unknowingly wasting money on branded Google Ads campaigns? Discover common mistakes and expert tips to optimize your strategy in our latest episode! 🎧

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman. Today, we're going to talk all about branded campaigns on Google. What are they? Why would you set them up? How do you set them up? What are the common misconceptions that people have around them? What are the best metrics to measure to know if they're performing well? Where do people end up wasting a lot of money on branded campaigns, or even worse, wasting money on your cold traffic campaigns because your branded campaign covers up a massive problem in your account? I'm excited to see you there."

"Alright, how are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing great, how are you?"

"Doing awesome. I'm excited for our topic today. We're talking all about branded campaigns in Google Ads. A lot of people don't even know that this is a thing, honestly. If you really think about it, it is a thing. But if you don't, then you might not. So for anybody who's unfamiliar with what a branded campaign or let's just say branded keyword are in Google Ads, how would you describe that?"

"Yeah, it is a campaign where you bid on the name of your brand, on the name of your company. Pretty simple."

"Yeah, it is pretty simple. So if you are Baitman Collective, this would be if somebody searches on Google for Baitman Collective, there you are, there's your brand new campaign. If anybody wants to see it, just Google Baitman Collective and you might just see it. But don't click on it because that costs us money. But the back off, but we need to click through rate too for our quality score."

"Yeah, maybe I'm just ruining our quality score, but anyway, that's putting that aside. There's a lot of debate around branded campaigns and it's one of the most weird parts of PPC, especially when you have a lot of volume. There are people that generally fall into two different camps. Here's the elephant in the room, so to speak, when it comes to branded campaigns. They come through your PPC campaign, your PPC campaign is their last interaction with you as a company. But I can tell you, nobody's searching for your brand online that didn't find out about you somewhere else. They must have found out about you through some other channel. There are some marketing channels that are really popular for this, like anything that generates a lot of brand awareness. For example, let's just say you're cold calling and you're not saying the name of your company. How much branded search traffic is that going to generate? Really minimal, not that much. Even PPC doesn't generate that much brand recognition because it's a small group of people that actually search. But where you start to get a lot more people searching for your brand is when you're doing channels that have a larger number of impressions. This is going to like Facebook ads, for example. For every person that actually fills out the form, you're going to have a ton that were exposed to your brand and they could actually end up Googling you. You're going to have like TV, radio are both channels in this industry that like most of our clients that do TV or radio, they have a ton of branded traffic. These ones are especially popular. The reason being like you might say a phone number on the TV ad, but people aren't going to remember it and they're going to end up just searching for your company online. Even some of our clients that send like massive volumes of direct mail will find that there's a lot of branded traffic from that because they'll get this postcard from this company and then they'll look up the company to see if they can find some more information. Regardless, one thing you'll notice about all that is every lead that you generate from a branded source came from somewhere else beforehand. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people making in their CRMs is they use their CRM as if every lead only has one way that it came to us, which isn't exactly true. I think the way to mark those leads in your CRM is either as the original channel with PPC being like a secondary channel that helped get the lead or just ignore PPC altogether but then throw the PPC spend with it. It's a weird situation because I think on average PPC takes too much credit for branded leads."

"Oh yeah, absolutely. It's so easy to get caught in the addiction of branded traffic where those leads are so cheap that you start to overvalue their true worth. Because like you said, you've already paid for that traffic most likely in other ways and by paying for it twice on paid search, there's a balancing game of what I have gotten this traffic regardless of me having that branded ad on Google or not. You have to do some testing to see where the marginal gain is with your branded campaigns."

"Yeah, and you and I haven't actually talked about how we do this and how we determine what can you pay for a branded campaign. I'm curious to see how our opinions differ. I can tell you my opinion of the ultimate way to do this is to do a conversion lift test, but you just can't do it in this industry. To explain, I know there's a famous study done on eBay where eBay did a branded conversion lifts test on Google. Basically what they do is they say every other day we're going to run a branded campaign and we're going to do that for a period of three months or whatever the case is. What we're monitoring is every time you turn on your PPC, you're going to find that you get less organic search because if you don't have a PPC ad there, then you're still going to show up most likely for your brand organically. If you don't show up for your brand organically, PPC is one of your biggest opportunities to show up really quickly for your brand organically. But most companies will show up for their brand organically. What they notice is every time you turn on the PPC, your organic traffic plummets and your paid traffic goes up. You can eventually measure if we turn on the PPC, then it increases the likelihood of the traffic coming to us by whatever percent. You have to recognize that a certain percentage of your traffic you get through PPC was going to come in organically anyways. The problem is if you're eBay, you can do that. If you're just like whatever wholesaler in whatever market that gets much less branded traffic than eBay does, you might be running that experiment for three years and all the while every experiment that you run has a bad side that's not working as well. You have to make some smarter judgments as to how you want to value the branded traffic. It's not always black and white, but the assumption that I use in my head, there's a couple things that I'll look at. The first one is are there other people bidding on our brand in our market? Because if there was theoretically nobody bidding on your brand, then a branded ad is not really necessary because the main thing you want to protect from is other people showing up above you for your own brand, especially on mobile devices where the seller might have to scroll a long way to find your ad. Then the other thing I do outside of that is I just assume that the brand cost per lead is about four times what it shows in platform. The reason for that is I just use this basic assumption of like 75% of the people probably would have found you anyways. It's a random assumption. I don't actually have great data for it, but it helps me understand that if I'm paying $100 per lead on a branded campaign, in my mind I want to think of that probably is closer to $400 because three out of four leads would have found me anyways."

"Yeah, I look at it in a very similar way. I look at a BR campaign as essentially like how much of the real estate do I own versus how hard is it to keep that real estate. If I have great SEO, there is no reason to run a branded campaign assuming that there aren't a large number of other people bidding on my branded terms. Likewise, if I have bad SEO but there's no one bidding on my terms, then again I probably will rank high still. Then the third thing I look at is the quality of who is bidding on my terms. If they're a business that I know I can beat on service or quality or they're not a true peer or they're not in market, I'm not worried about them being on top because I know that they're not a true threat. So those are the things that I look at: who's bidding on it, how many people are bidding on it, and then how's my SEO. With those three things, I use that to gauge how aggressively to bid on branded."

"Yeah, when it comes to SEO, what you basically want to look for is if somebody searches for your brand name, do you show up on the Google business profile and on the website number one. You could have really weak SEO across many keywords. If you at least have your brand, which having your brand is pretty easy, if you just launched a website today you might not rank for your brand, but most people without significant SEO investment can eventually rank for their brand just because you're actually the most relevant thing for that search. Google's going to try to get you there. I can tell you one time where this gets a little bit tricky is when we have brands that are a little bit more generic, which is very common in this space. I'll give the example of we even have one client that had two brands. For anonymity purposes, I won't share every detail, but one of their brands was like 'Sell To' and then the person's name that owned the company. Their other brand was 'Insert the Location Home Buyer' that they were in. So they had these two separate brands. They did a lot of direct mail in one of them and then they did a lot of TV for the other one. The issue that we ran into, we ran branded campaigns for both of those. What we found for this particular client, and this is true generally across other things, is when they had a name like 'Ut

ah Home Buyers' in one market and then 'Baitman Home Buyers' in another market, what we found is when they had a generic brand name like 'Utah Home Buyers,' when somebody's looking up Utah Home Buyers, that's an actual competitive search term. What are we seeing in that market? There's a lot of other people that bid on the term Utah Home Buyers because they're thinking of all the different home buyers in Utah that they can compete against, which is different than just one branded name. In that market, branded campaigns were really critical because if you're going to compete against Utah Home Buyers, everybody in Utah is thinking, 'I want to be a home buyer.' So they're bidding on those terms. Versus if you have a brand name that's just like Baitman Home Buyers, that means Baitman is pretty specific to the company. That means your direct competitors might bid on you, but you won't see a lot of general competition bidding on you. So that's one thing that I see very commonly is if you have a branded name that's very specific to your company, branded campaigns are less important. If you have a brand name that's more generic, like I said Utah Home Buyers, you're going to see more competition and you're going to see a lot more value in branded campaigns."

"Yeah, that's a really good point because I think the type of name you choose for your brand does impact how competitive your branded keywords are. And if your brand name is something common or generic, you might find that you're competing with unrelated searches or businesses, which makes bidding on those terms more necessary. So it’s not just about bidding on your brand name, but also understanding the landscape and how your brand name fits into it."

"Absolutely. And I think another thing to consider is not just the competition for your brand name, but also the cost of the traffic itself. Generic brand names can sometimes be more expensive because you're competing with broader search terms that can have higher costs per click. So even though it might seem straightforward to run a branded campaign, it's important to think strategically about how your brand name influences those costs and whether it's worth the investment."

"Yeah, and just to wrap this up, I think the takeaway for our listeners is that branded campaigns can be a powerful tool, but you need to approach them with a clear strategy and an understanding of how they fit into your overall marketing plan. Look at your SEO, check who's bidding on your terms, and evaluate how generic or specific your brand name is to determine how aggressively you need to bid. It's all about finding that balance and making sure you're not overspending where you don't need to."

"Exactly. It's all about smart spending and making sure every dollar you invest in PPC is working as hard as it can for you. Well, Garrett, thanks for diving into this with me today. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground on branded campaigns."

"My pleasure, Brandon. Always great chatting with you about these topics."

"Thanks for tuning in, everyone. If you have any questions or want to share your own experiences with branded campaigns, feel free to reach out. Until next time, this is Brandon Baitman, signing off from the Collective Clicks podcast. Stay savvy out there!"

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Stephanie Betters, real estate investor and creator of a powerful CRM system, reveals how to use data and persistence to generate real results. Tune in and learn the secrets to take your business to the next level!

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bitman, and today I'm joined by Stephanie Betters. Stephanie has done a ton of stuff we're going to dig into her background in just a minute. Stephanie is one of the people in this industry that I respect the most and really appreciate a good conversation with. In this conversation, we're going to talk all about how marketing turns into acquisitions, which is through lead management like getting in contact with leads, CRM systems for that, and what kind of metrics to hold your team accountable to. Then we also talk about how you measure your marketing metrics in your CRM. So I think it's a really good tactical episode that just digs into a lot of the weeds. So if you're interested in that kind of thing, I think you'll enjoy it."

"Hey Stephanie, how are you doing today?"

"Hey, hey, how's it going?"

"Pretty fantastic, thank you. I just heard you got back from CG this week. I didn't make it, but lots of traveling?"

"Yes, it was awesome. I was hanging out on the West Coast. Now I'm back on the East Coast."

"Yeah, that's cool. It's funny because I love it when events are on the West Coast because they're closer to me, and I hate when they're on the East Coast. We probably feel the opposite."

"I gotta tell you, you win way more often than I do on that."

"So I'd like to think that a lot of the people listening know who you are. If you would mind just sharing briefly like who you are, what you do, what your background is, so people understand the context of the conversation."

"Okay, yeah sure. I think I have kind of like a little weird story, so weird journey in the real estate space. I'll try to be super brief, but I did not start off being a real estate investor. I started off being a nurse, then nurse practitioner, and I thought like that was going to be it. I thought that was the dream, you know, where I was going to end up and retire from. And then I've gone on this beautiful journey that has led me a different way, which is cool."

"So super long story short, husband and I started with a house hack in 2007 that kind of gave us the real estate bug. Right after we sold that, we went to grad school, him to be a physician assistant, me to be an NP nurse practitioner. Then he really wanted to get back into it, and I was kind of on the fence. We went to school in Long Island, New York, and it was very expensive to live and to be a young professional. And we didn't have family there, so we decided to move to Charlotte for the real estate market, but also because it was great for medicine jobs."

"So we started working in medicine. Like I said, that was my endgame. I was like, 'We're good.' Two years passed and I was like, 'Okay, we can buy some rentals.' I see the picture here we're painting with long-term wealth building with buying rentals. And as I'm sure you've probably heard incessantly, it takes a lot of cash to buy rentals and you need a lot of active income to buy rentals. So we started building a residential real estate fix and flip wholesaling business to kind of fuel income so we could buy more rentals while we were still working full-time."

"Let's see, probably six or seven years into that business running, my husband left being a PA. Essentially as soon as we had financial freedom, he's like, 'I'm out of medicine. This is nuts. These hours are way too long.' And I sat in there and struggled with that decision for a while because I really loved my job. I was working in heart surgery here in Charlotte. I loved my colleagues, I loved my patients. Although I loved doing what we were doing with real estate, I just had a huge identity crisis and so much went into that education and getting that job. I was scared to leave, but two years ago I did leave. So I left after 10 years."

"But while we were working our W2 jobs and building our real estate company, we ran into lots of problems like lead management, data management, marketing challenges in general. And the one in particular that really fired me up was our CRM. There was not a really great CRM choice. This is like in 2018. We were spending $100,000 a month in marketing. We had... I couldn't tell you what worked. I was like, 'I don't know,' and I'm used to the medicine side where like I have data, we get lab work, we get vital signs and make decisions, right? And in real estate, I was like, 'I don't know.' I mean, the phone rang, we got a deal. That's basically all I could have answered. And I kind of hit a wall and got really upset and tried to find a better solution, which there wasn't one. So I made one."

"And now fast forward, like you know, 10 plus years in, we have a real estate company that still does wholesales and new build construction, about 200 deals a year. So here in Charlotte, about half and half between the two those two product lines, wholesaling and new builds. And then I run our real estate... our CRM company, which is based on Salesforce called LeftMain. So my husband runs the real estate company now and I run the software company. And I've since left medicine. Got three... I'm part of lots of fun groups."

"Yeah, that's super cool. And obviously through those groups that we know each other and I've gained a lot of respect for you. And yeah, I don't think we can overstate what you and your husband have accomplished. It's super cool."

"So and it's part of the reason I'm grateful to have you here. Better Path, I'm sorry, that Better Path as a customer of yours, super happy."

"Oh yeah, yeah. Wait, you... we work together?"

"Yeah, you do... We render PPC or something?"

"Yeah, yeah. That's very cool. I honestly, I honestly did not even know that. So I'm grateful that we worked together in that capacity too. That's hilarious. How did I not catch on to that?"

"I don't know. Team is clearly amazing."

"Well, that's great. Yeah, usually our best clients I don't have to hear too much about, so you guys must be pretty good too."

"So all you know, all that considered, I guess just being really open, like part of the reason I'm so excited to have you here is because you match like the theme of this podcast really well, which is this is kind of like... I feel like there's way too much BS in all areas of real estate and we like to use data, we like to use numbers, make sound decisions and kind of cut through some of the myths, some of the thoughts that people have about things that just serve them around, right? And we just end up like running in circles trying to solve a problem one way and really we need to go a different way."

"So this being the podcast, it's mostly about marketing. I thought it'd be a really cool direction to talk about the companion part of that, which is lead management, right? Something that you mentioned to me many times is oftentimes it's not the marketing channel that's the problem, it's the lead management that's the problem. So that's something I want to dig into, and I know that's a lot of the reason why you built the CRM product that you did. And to be honest, like nobody really used, in my opinion based on what I saw, I didn't see anybody really using Salesforce in this industry until you kind of made it possible. It was early before then, and now so many of our clients are LeftMain customers. So that's cool to see how it's come full circle."

"But anyways, that considered, I know it's kind of a broad topic to start, but I really want to just dive into the weeds and some of this stuff. What would you say is like the most simple way to explain how, in your opinion, most investors are failing at lead management?"

"Well, I think that the biggest reason is that they don't have a dedicated process after thinking about live answer. And so I think really to answer this question, we really have to go all the way back to the basics of what was understood about how to monitor if a channel is working or not. And you know, news flash, all the channels work, right? Like we can, and I... we have like 20 different channels at this point. We have so many. But the problem really began with how real estate investors in general started measuring where the things worked, and that was all based on phone calls."

"So and by the way, that's a great metric, but it's just not the only metric. So for example, you sent out a bunch of mail. Did you get phone calls in? How many phone calls did you get in? And did you live answer? And how many outbound phone calls are your teams making, right? It's very entry-level, like dipping your toe in this in the water, like measuring lead management, right? Is really just incoming leads, and it's less... it's more like defensive metrics than offensive metrics."

"So defensive metrics are things that like just come inbound, like I put my stuff out and I generated leads. But offensive metrics is what I did with that lead once I had it, right? So after the phone rang, okay, you live answered. What happened next? Or what if you missed the call? Or what if the lead was generated in a way that didn't answer, that didn't ring the phone, like they filled out a web form, right?"

"The next question that people or the next initiative that people say is like, 'Oh, we got to call that lead as soon as humanly possible,' right? So like a PPC lead comes in, they fill out a form, it didn't generate a phone call you could live answer, but what was that first attempt out? Right? So okay, we all know it's five minutes, right? The sooner we physically call a lead form, the better. But what if they didn't pick up? Now what? Okay, you made the first outbound call, you made that first activity within five minutes, but what's the rest of your lead process? And that's generally where people fail, right?"

"So the current metric of the number of attempts that it takes to contact a lead form, and this is across PPC, anyone who goes to your website and fills out a form, it takes approximately 14 attempts before you actually contact them. Like you receive a response back or they pick up the phone or they text back or they email back or what have you. 14 attempts."

"What I've seen, and I'm super guilty of this in the past as well, we would make that first initial phone call or maybe we'd even triple dial and they didn't pick up. And then we'd maybe call tomorrow, or you know, then we call tomorrow, they didn't pick up. Okay, we'll call in a week. Like we just all of a sudden just put that lead off in the future and we didn't understand that key metric of being contacted."

"So once I personally started measuring the percentage of leads I physically had a conversation with, everything changed. When I first started looking at that metric, it was like 60%, 70% of my leads were actually contacted, meaning like we had tried but then stopped or put them in a follow-up sequence. All of those leads were viable. I just stopped too soon, you know?"

"So the next metric to look at is yes, how many leads have you generated, how many phone calls have you generated, but what percentage of your leads have you physically talked to? And if you hold your lead management team accountable to that metric, everything changes because now it's about quality, not necessarily that quantity. Both are important, of course, but the end result is that we talk to people, right? Not just we like check the box, I made an outbound call within 5 minutes, I'm going to talk to them next week, right?"

"So that's kind of where this lead management conversation starts. How many attempts on average does it take for you to contact somebody? Because once you contact them, now you can actually qualify it. So when we measure our lead channels and we're trying to answer that age-old question, is it a lead source problem or is it a lead management problem? We look at what percentage of leads we contacted, and that is a lead management metric. And then what percentage of those contacted leads were qualified? That's a lead source metric, right?"

"Because once I've contacted you and we talked about your house and you have a house in Timbuktu, okay, you're out of buy box, you're not even qualified. So call or take me off my list, I hate you, I'm gonna kill your family, okay fine. You know, or they're retail and they're not qualified yet and they're a follow-up, right? Now that is giving me insight into the marketing channel because I've physically had a conversation. You can't blame marketing until you've talked to them."

"Yeah, that is super insightful. Thank you for sharing all that. I think it's funny because there's some things... I mean, all entrepreneurs kind of do this where like we kind of know better but we still do the same dumb things. Yeah, I can tell you one of those most common ones that I see across my clients is that like we'll ask them, 'Hey, how long is it taking for you to get to leads?' or 'How often are you contacting leads?' and those kinds of things. And they'll just tell us, 'Oh, we're always getting to leads immediately and we're super aggressive. This is what that looks like.' And then we just dig into it. We're like, 'Well, I found that this lead looked good but it wasn't contacted. Can we pull up your CRM and can we look at this?' And like first contact was made after like three hours, and then they've been called like once a day for a few days, and like that's it, right? And it happens all the time where like the business owner, the way that they're measuring this... like do you talking about actual like data and accountability in a system to measure these things? Unfortunately, what we see so many of our clients doing is the way they measure it is they ask their team, 'Hey, you were getting... you're getting to leads immediately, right?'"

"Right, and their team of course assures them that they are when they're not because the team, like whatever, no sales people do, they just like remember the best case scenario that's ever happened. Like, 'Yeah, I got a lead in yesterday and I called it immediately when it came in and I got in touch with the person. It was perfect, leading blah blah blah.' But they don't talk about the nine that they didn't call or something like that."

"So really hard because perception becomes reality and our own bias can change our mind when we are looking at something objectively. And I'm super guilty of this too. Like a good example for me that I'm always guilty of is, 'Oh, I feel so... like I feel so busy, like I've just done so much today.' And I'm like, 'Okay, what did I actually do?' I made one phone call, I sent three emails, and I spent the rest of the day like stressing out about something that didn't even move the needle, right? But I felt super busy and like I did so much. Why didn't I get the result I wanted? But if I actually look at what I did in an objective way, I'm like, 'Oh, well it's because I actually only did a few things.' Like I shouldn't stop wasting my time like... you know, pulling my hair out and it's... it's hard to be objective. It's super hard."

"And that objective feedback loop also needs to be in a non-confrontational way for you personally or your team to not shut down because you don't... you want data to help you. You don't want data to like be in your face, like slap you in the face, you know? So if we get used to looking at things together on a daily basis and figure out what actually does help you do your job better, then data is your friend and can make you feel empowered instead of being disabled, you know?"

"So a lot of those... 100% what percentage of your leads did you contact? That should be a daily conversation. Like, 'Okay, great, I'm getting towards that 90% metric. I want to make sure I get in contact with 90% of my leads.' Instead of like, 'Hey, when did you call that person first?' and it's like pulling them out of a meeting or pulling them out of a phone call to try to answer a question that's in... like, 'Oh no, you didn't.' Then it just... then it just feels terrible, you know?"

"Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. One thing, sorry to get maybe a little too nitty-gritty with this, but just talking specifically about some of the metrics I was talking about, I just want to share with some of the clients some of the issues that I'm seeing on my side. And one of them is like, let's just say you took gross leads and you look at how many are contacted, it kind of ignores the fact that not every gross lead really is a lead that can be contacted. Like there are some that are spam or whatever the case is, right? So how do you deal with those fan of situations? Like do you just assume that like works into it or do you like separate out those leads somehow on those metrics?"

"I can tell you what we do is we have two separate metrics for our clients. We have a gross to net lead rate which cuts out all the spam and stuff like that, and then we look at what percentage of the net leads are contacted. But even that's not perfect. Like we just had a situation with a client this week where they have like a really high percentage of spam leads based on the feedback that they're giving us, and we're looking at... we like can't figure out what's going on. And then we have the suspicion that like a lot of these leads could not actually be spam that they're marking as spam. And then one of my team called a couple of them and asked them like, 'Hey, are you trying to sell a house?' and they like answered and they said yes. And we're like, 'Okay, well that... whoever their lead manager is was just saying like because it's suspicious, it's like, oh all the leads are spam.' Or of them that aren't spam, 100% of them you contacted. That doesn't look right. How do you deal with those kind of things, I guess is what I'm asking."

"Very, very specific criteria. So I love this question. This is such a common thing and I love it, I love it. Okay, so a gross lead is anybody who's opted into anything. A net lead is anybody but spam, right? And so what is spam? Spam is like, 'Oh, I'm calling you about your car insurance' or whatever, right? Trying to sell you something, businesses to business services, right? Like that is what spam is."

"Unqualified is different. Like if somebody calls you and they don't have a house to sell, that's not spam, that's unqualified. They're like, 'I don't know, I thought I was playing a video game online, I filled out your thing.' Okay, that's unqualified. That's different than spam. Same thing with somebody who's like, 'Well, I'm not sure if I'm going to sell. I'm just trying to figure out what's happening, like what the value is of my house.' That is follow-up or potentially unqualified depending on how crazy strict you are, but that is not spam, right?"

"And I think that sometimes the culture we have of like turning, turning, turning and trying to call someone first can also lend to quickly disqualifying people when they shouldn't be disqualified or falsely labeling them as spam. Like spam is very specifically something that makes absolutely no sense, right? Like, 'I'm calling you about your tires on your car.' Like, okay, that's spam."

"And I even have a tendency, depending on how frequent it is, to just delete those. Like just delete them out of your system, don't even keep spam BS in your system. But to your point, if you have this huge uptick in spam, like maybe one of your numbers got placed somewhere or you know, you need to... you know one of your channels is infected in some way. So you do need to have a way of labeling that and tracking it, but spam is literally only that. And I think being specific with that and teaching your lead managers, especially if they're overseas and don't know what these things mean, that has to be number one, you know?"

"Yeah, yeah. I totally understand. Yeah, we had a client just the other day get like name... Lead: Tony Stark. Like, like those kinds of things you're like, 'Wait, that's... but that's... that's not normal,' right? And it's... it should be clearly identifiable."

"One other metric you might be interested in, I recently did like a study across a few of our clients and what we looked at is like on a lead basis, how quickly was it contacted? And we put those into different buckets and we looked at how the whole funnel progresses based on that data. And what was really interesting is our clients that got to the lead slowly, or another even way to say is the leads that were gotten to slowly, maybe even from the same client that sometimes gets the leads fast, those leads had a higher contact rate than the ones that we... I'm sorry, if we got to it quickly, then we had a higher contact rate than if we got to it slowly, which everybody expects that to happen, right? That's super standard."

"The thing that surprised me is looking deeper in the funnel, we had a way better opportunity to contract conversion if it was contacted quickly initially, and we had a huge number of opportunities per contract if it was contacted slowly. So I think there's this common bias that people have where they just assume like, 'Okay, maybe I wasn't super quick, but I still got in touch with the lead, then it's fine.' But I guess what we're seeing is the faster you can touch the lead, the greater likelihood that it becomes a contract later, even assuming you already got in touch with it, which is honestly not something that I expected to see until I saw the data. And then I thought that actually makes a lot of sense, like how it even affects your downstream metrics, which like reassures me like why it's so important that you hold people accountable so they respond to... like in or you know, you pay them based on the results or whatever the case is, or getting contact with the lead. But you still have to hold accountable to that process. Like just because you called after 10 minutes and you still got in touch with them doesn't mean that's okay if our standard is 60 seconds for new leads or whatever the case is."

"100% because what happened? They had had enough time to have a conversation with someone else, and then now you have competition, right? So okay, you got an appointment, but so did three other people."

"Exactly. Then that's exactly what my hypothesis was on when I looked at... I'm like, it's got to be... it's got to be a competitive thing, especially if you're looking at like a PPC lead. Like do you think anybody has a hard time finding a wholesaler on Google? Like type in 'sell my house fast,' you will find dozens and dozens on Google of all of your competitors. Do you think they only just reach out to you, or they only intend to reach out to you? No, they reach out to everybody unless they reach out to you and then you call them so quick that like they're caught in their tracks. And then you have that kind of conversation with them that makes them feel like they don't need to go somewhere else, and that that's the end of their search. But I don't think everybody thinks about it that way."

"But like these... especially with PPC, because let's just say we're talking like Facebook ads or something like that. Okay, they saw your ad, they could see someone else's ad. Let's say we're talking about TV. Like yeah, they could be seeing both ads, but PPC is the only place where they see your ad and everybody else's ad at the same time."

"Exactly, exactly. In an active search that exact moment, it adds a whole new level of urgency."

"100%. And I think if you... if you miss that, if you miss them on the first outbound phone call, you have... so not only like you're saying you have to have immediate action, but if you don't, and that's got a clock... like our standards, it's less than five minutes. You have to... and obviously the sooner the better. Don't hang up the phone if you're talking to somebody to call somebody else, but within five minutes you have to make that first outbound phone call physically from a human being. But you can text them right away automatically. You can email them right away automatically. Like you can do things minute zero that will help you when you make that first outbound call."

"Nothing's going to replace a human being calling another human being, right? Like that's definitely gold standard. But all those things need to happen within the first five minutes. But if you make that first outbound call, maybe it is five minutes and somebody called them at 60 seconds, or maybe you called at 10 minutes and they called at five and they don't... and whatever, whatever it is. If you, when you made your outbound call and they didn't pick up, the first 90 minutes of activity is extremely important. Like you... there needs to be massive outreach within the first 90 minutes."

"So you make the phone call within the first five, you call, you text, you email, and then you call, text, email again, and you do everything you can to get those 14 attempts done as soon as humanly possible. And I think that's the second piece that people drop in the management process. They're like, 'Well, I called right away. I'm off the hook.' No, you need to call 20 times within the first day because if you didn't get that answer the first time for whatever reason, maybe it came in after hours and now it's 8 a.m., whatever, right? You have to make massive outreach for them to actually respond to you, and then now you actually have a chance. But if you gave up and put it on for next week, like that lead is going to be dead. You're not going to be able to close it or qualify it even, you know?"

"Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I highly doubt that anybody's listening to this and thinking that's really dumb. I don't think anything that they're saying makes sense. Highly doubt it. But where we all struggle is like implementing and knowing exactly like... you know, my biggest pet peeve in business is when you have KPIs that don't actually ensure that things are happening, right? So all your KPI scorecards are looking brilliant, but still things aren't working. And I think a lot of people are there with their lead management."

"So, so like, I totally agree, right? Like first contact matters a ton, number of touches within 90 minutes for example matters a ton, number of touches within 24 hours. And I think everybody would generally agree that like you start out heavier and then you know, you're probably not going to call them 20 times a day after 6 months if they haven't picked up the phone, right? So there's like there's some type of like gradual decline of that. But help me understand like where the rubber meets the road here. Like what exactly is happening on a day-to-day basis? Like what exact numbers are you recommending that people use where you think like if they measure the numbers that way, then they're most likely to ensure that they have a gapless lead management process?"

"I think the number one most important metric is the percentage of leads that you've contacted. I think that is more important than the number of leads that came in or your even first outbound call. That's the most important. And then incentivizing your team and/or even just metric them to that. Like if you are a lead manager, you have a full-time lead manager, and you are having a hard time hitting 90% contact rate, then you probably need more than one lead manager. And generally, that is the case that you just have so many leads in your system that you physically can't do... you know, hit that 90% contacted ratio without additional help or additional automation."

"And I would not underestimate automatic text... text messages and even automatic emails. People are shocked... like emails do really well. And even mail. Like for example, a first... a step one form where people just put in their address, right? And then they never fill out anything else, or maybe you don't even get their phone number. Just send them a piece of mail. You can look up the address and get their first and last name. That's easy. And if you have, you know, CRM that can look that up like LeftMain, fine, look up who the owner is on record on that person and send them... send them a letter."

"Like 10% of our... of our step one forms respond to mail but never respond to calling or texting when we try to skip trace them. Like, riddle me that. I don't get it. You opted in on the internet. Why... I can't... why you don't want to talk on the phone, I don't know. But if I send you a check letter, you call back 10% of the time. That's wild, you know?"

"So sometimes you need to do some of these like companion channels where you introduce another way. Just like retargeting, right? Like okay, they went on your website, but they didn't fill out your form, but then they... you got them on Facebook. You can retarget with other outbound metrics too besides just a phone call, like texting, emailing, mail."

"Yeah, super insightful because I mean, everybody has their own way that like they like to be contacted, and it's not always the way that you like to talk to, right? Or your sales team likes to talk to people, right? And you know how some of these people are... like some are super financially distressed and they probably have a million people calling them all the time. They don't recognize phone numbers. So even if they filled out a form, they're not interested in responding to an incoming call. But they probably would open something that looks like a check if they're financially distressed, right? And so how quickly you get a check out to somebody or... or a letter out to somebody... kind of like when you get pulled over by the police and you get a speeding ticket. Like you get 17 letters from lawyers like, 'Yeah, we'll get you out of that ticket,' right? Takes a day or two, but then you get them."

"For whatever reason, people... feels like you're speaking from experience."

"I got a speeding ticket for the first time in 10 years recently, and I was like... I was just thinking you don't... you don't seem like the kind of person that gets speeding tickets to me. Maybe... maybe I read you wrong."

"Yeah, I got a Tesla, and the first week I got a Tesla, I got a speeding ticket because it was so much fun to drive. And I waited so long for the stupid thing to come, and then I was just like... it was totally clear, it was beautiful, you know? It was very safe on the highway. And anyway, I got a ticket, and then I got a letter like... then like two days later from a ton of lawyers that could get me out of the ticket. And I was like, 'Why aren't we doing this with real estate?' Like, why... obviously like, you know, people are foreclosures or whatever, but what about... what about if they fill out a form on my website? Or if someone I'm having a hard time getting a hold of, why don't I try to send the mail too? And I'm like, no lie, the response rate is right around 10%."

"Yeah, that's... that's high. That's really significant."

"So it sounds like to you 90% is kind of the benchmark for the percentage of leads that we should be contacting?"

"Yes."

"Over what time period is that? Is that like 90% measured up the... the first 24 hours or a week or a month?"

"Super good question. We... we... it's a rolling total over the quarter. So like essentially every week you should be getting to the 90% mark, but sometimes you won't contact someone until later, and that's totally fine. But for the quarter, you should be averaging 90%."

"Understood. Okay, that... that's super helpful and actionable. And I... I can tell you our clients average about 85%. Just for whatever reference point it is. And then our clients that are really on top of it often will be 90%, 92%, 93%. It's huge... that little difference, that little lever is so beginning of funnel that if you can improve that just... that... that one KPI, you're going to make a few more deals just because of how the conversions go down... down pipeline, you know?"

"Yeah, you know what... like makes my blood boil? From the salesperson says that a lead's not good because they don't answer the phone. Like they must not be that motivated, that's why they're not answering my phone call. And meanwhile, I'm just thinking like, if you... they're probably not answering anybody's phone call. If you could be the person that actually get ahold of them, like that's a good lead."

"Yeah, exactly. So try something else, bro."

"Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, turns out commission is not the only way to make sales happen, right?"

"I know, like a lot of people have that mindset of like, 'Oh, I'm paying them commission so they'll just do whatever it takes,' but like, no salesperson is going to think, 'Oh, let me just send a check letter,' right? Nobody thinks that. That's why, you know, there's a combination here."

"Okay, that... that's super helpful. I feel like I have a better understanding of like how you... how you view lead management. Is there anything else you'd say that's like a key thing where investors are just usually getting this wrong with lead management?"

"Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing is just being too quick to disqualify folks or screen them out if they don't seem motivated, right? So trying to be a little bit more objective with that is helpful. Like for example, 'Oh, I'm just checking the value of the house,' right? And you're like, 'Okay, well tell me a little bit about the property,' and they're... they're on the hook enough that they're going to talk to you about the property. I'm not talking about those people who are like, 'Oh, email me an offer.' Those people, put them in follow-up. But for the people who are like, 'Well, I... you know, I don't have to sell anytime soon. I'm just trying to figure out what I'm going to do next. I need to downsize,' or what have you. 'So here I am, you know, but I'm in... you know, I'm in no way in a rush,' and they're on the phone with you and you're able to talk to them a little bit more."

"I think that a lot of times these people can undersell their motivation but truly have like a lot of repairs. So one of the ways that we qualify people and set an appointment, especially if they'll let us, right, is if they have old systems. So if you... if you're on the call with us and you're like, 'Well, I'm not... no rush, you know? I... I have a mortgage but I have equity, you know, so I don't care,' but, 'My systems are 30 years old,' or 'They're original, this is a 1970s house, I've never replaced the roof,' or whatever. I'm going out to that house, right? No matter how cool they seem on the phone and not in a rush and maybe 'I'm going to list it.' I want to go out because those systems are old. And a lot of the times they... they... they're cool as a cucumber on the phone, but you get out there and they're... they're hoarder or they have so much distress and they just were... had a wall up on the phone because it was easy. You see them face to face and they just kind of crumble, you know what I mean? So, you know, obviously the hallmarks of motivation are personal motivation, financial motivation, but don't forget about repair motivation. Like that is important to ask."

"That's super cool. I totally... I totally agree. And honestly, I'm speaking out of my like area of expertise if I'm talking about like... like motivation. Like I've never been in a seller's house. I do notice some interesting things across our... across our data though. One thing I've noticed in particular is that there's a strong bias usually of companies that are coming from outbound channels to inbound channels with how they qualify leads because they're sort of used to assuming that a lead is unmotivated until you can prove that it is motivated. Versus with a lot of our clients are doing from the... the best ones, PPC and Facebook ads and SEO, we find that they're usually assuming that a lead is good and that it's motivated until they can really prove that it's not. And there's this like continuum you could picture like on one side it's like we go on every possible appointment that we could ever go on, and then on the other side it's like we're cherry-picking appointments. And everybody's just so afraid of being on the side where you waste time at appointments. But it... I can't even tell you how rare it is that we find a client with... with these channels that we manage specifically. Maybe this is super common across other channels, but it's so exceptionally rare that we find a client that has more than like five appointments to get to a contract. Like everybody they... like there's a... there's a happy middle, right? I'm not saying you have to go... like every single possible appointment, but they... we find it so much more common that our clients are like afraid to go on the appointment, afraid to waste the time. But all day, every day we have clients that are like over-qualifying leads because they're afraid of under-qualifying them. And it's so... so rare that we actually have a problem from under-qualifying leads. Just almost never happens."

"I couldn't agree more. I think... so I'm very triggered by 'waste my time.' Like nobody says that to me because I get so upset. Like nothing is... what do you mean waste your time? We just... especially after how much money we've just spent to generate a phone call or to generate a form. Like nothing is a waste of time. And if that's you saying it about yourself and... and you're the guy going out in the appointments, the girl going out in appointments, you're like, 'I don't want to go out there. I've got all kinds of stuff going on. I don't want to go out there just to waste my time.' That is a personnel issue. That is not a lead issue. That is 100% a personnel issue, and you need to fix that problem because it's not a waste of time. Like nothing... there is a waste of time."

"If you... if you are worth your salt as a salesperson and you go out there and they're not a great fit, like you just made a relationship. And birds of a feather flock together, and what do you think is going to happen next? Like all that is extremely worth it, right? You made a... you've made a connection. These people likely have friends and family. This is a person in your community. Like you can get a good review out of this even if you tell someone, 'Hey, I'm not... I'm not the right fit,' and ask them for a Google review. Like you can turn something into something, right? Just by even... not even someone you can't physically help, by telling the truth or being a human being, right?"

"So but like you said, what you'll find most of the time is that it's a deal. Like you just need to go on more appointments. And if you're burnt out and tired of going on appointments, then find somebody else to do it."

"Yeah, yeah. It's a... super fair... super fair thought. I think it's funny sometimes. I think like some of the best salespeople are like almost delusional. I... I... so we took our... our clients to have the best lead conversion, 'cause we measure this stuff full circle and how they're actually doing from a lead conversion standpoint. Everybody talks some big game, but like I... I took like a few of the ones"

‍

Aaron and Miquella Gaunt of Sellers New Day spent years grinding to build their wholesaling business from the ground up. They tried every outbound marketing tactic like blasting 30,000 texts per day and managing a team of 20 cold callers. But it was grueling work without sustained results.

That all changed when they made a strategic shift to inbound 'big boy' marketing through Google ads. This transformation allowed them to start closing hot, motivated seller leads consistently.

In this candid conversation, Aaron and Miquella open up about their journey from a bootstrapped startup to a 7-figure wholesaling powerhouse. They reveal the key pivots, critical hires, and million-dollar marketing strategies that fueled their explosive growth.

If you're a real estate entrepreneur looking to take your business to the next level, this is an insightful master class packed with practical tactics straight from the trenches.

0:00 - Introduction
1:12 - The Early Grind Years
3:48 - Outbound Marketing Tactics
6:22 - The Big Boy Marketing Shift
9:37 - Building Systems & Processes
12:15 - Ambitious Growth Plans for 2024
15:40 - Marketing Spend & Returns
17:55 - Closing Thoughts

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

‍

"Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman, and today I'm doing something a little special for you. I went to visit a couple of our clients in Southern California, Aaron and Michaela Gant. We talked about how they took their business from $0 in revenue from PPC to seven figures of PPC revenue in just a year. The first episode is about what kind of decisions were made to make that happen and an overview of the whole situation. In future episodes, we're going to dig pretty deeply into different aspects of their business and how they've been functioning with a national real estate model over the past year."

"Well, thank you both for being so welcoming and allowing me to stop by your office today. I'm really excited to dig into a lot of how your business works and what has been happening over the past year. I know you've had tons and tons of changes. So, if it's not too much to ask, let's just start with an overview of what you're doing now and what some of the biggest changes over the past year have been."

"Thanks for coming by to our office," Aaron said. "And, you know, obviously being a guest in our home, the team was really excited to have you here. Just in our short conversations, we've already been learning a lot and getting to know you a little bit more. One thing we did when we first started our wholesale company—we just ended year four, as you already know—was move along our journey. A lot of that four years was just learning how to do business. I was a blue-collar guy before then: fire department, military. We've just been learning how to do business."

"In 2022, we did a lot of scaling with text messaging, that cheaper form of marketing. We were sending out 30,000 text messages a day," Aaron continued.

"30,000 a day? Did I hear that right?" Brandon asked.

"Yes," Aaron confirmed. "At a $5,000 fine per text message. We had about 20 cold callers, and we didn't just have them; we tried all different types of cold callers. We had cold callers in-house. We built our own team of cold callers. We hired a bunch of VAs and trained them up ourselves. And we've had outside companies, obviously, use their cold callers. So, we've tried and scaled other types of marketing channels that a lot of people come into this space and try."

"Now, obviously, there is a graduation phase where we should be going from outbound marketing to inbound marketing. That's what we're doing now. Other people call it 'big boy marketing.' So, I tell my team, 'Hey, we're doing big boy marketing,' which is PPC and direct mail. This upcoming year, we're going to be really perfecting direct mail. We've always seen a great return on direct mail, but we're going to do it at a high level. But, obviously, what we're here to talk about today is what we did last year, which has been PPC and some Facebook, and we'll get to that as well."

"We went with you because we were very attracted to the idea of hiring a PPC company that had multiple clients. You knew how to scale your campaign because of all the clients you have and all the past experience. Rather than us just jumping in and figuring it out, we knew to pay you handsomely so that we could excel a lot quicker than we would if we were doing it by ourselves. And also, we'd probably crash and burn because I'm trying to scale the team, run a business, and don't need to worry about this one marketing channel. But the cool thing is, this past year, we were only doing pretty much PPC and a little bit of other types of marketing. We can talk about that later. But it was primarily PPC and trying to perfect that."

"I'm trying to lay out what I understood happened, and you tell me if I'm getting this right," Brandon said. "So, in 2022, it was texting, cold calling, everything outbound, every way you can imagine. And it was right at the end of 2022 that we started working together, I think it was like September or November, something like that. And then in 2023, you had a year where you're still operating as a business, maybe a little smarter, a little bigger team, but things are completely different in your marketing. Did you phase the cold calling and texting out slowly or quickly? Tell me about what the business accomplished in 2022 versus 2023."

"I think we talked about this," Aaron replied. "And again, this is just me hypothetically talking. It really comes down to—it almost doesn't matter what type of marketing you do; it really does come down to what you're spending on marketing. But for us, and the way the cash conversion cycle that a lot of people like to talk about definitely changed. When it comes to phasing out cold calling and text messaging, we really phased out cold calling—we almost did a hard stop on it. We were sick of it; we didn’t like the leads. We made a good chunk of money through cold calling, but it wasn't the type of leads I wanted to give my team. Also, I'm not a big fan of lead managers. With inbound marketing, the 'big boy marketing' we're talking about, those leads go directly to your acquisition people. They can get right on it and follow up. It's a different type of sale."

"Yeah, I think I heard a podcast with you," Aaron continued. "You were talking about the type of salesperson. You had a client, and his whole team was based on text messaging and cold calling. They knew how to close those leads with a lot of follow-up. Then they got PPC, and the owner tried to close the deals. He was the only one closing them. He had to fire his whole team and retrain."

"That's what I love about having our team," Aaron said. "When those leads come in, we make it a whole fiasco in our office. When a PPC lead comes in, we ring the bell. We’re shouting from the rooftops, 'New lead, new lead,' and everybody is calling that lead, trying to be the first to contact it. We're about contact rate here. We know we’re spending a good chunk of change on that, and we know it’s a great opportunity because of the type of motivation for somebody to type in 'I need to sell my house' from a Google PPC lead. Whoever answers the call or gets a hold of that person has a higher chance of closing that deal rather than the 50 cold call leads that came in that day."

"Yeah, that makes sense," Brandon said. "I'm curious to hear your perspective, Michaela. What’s different about how the business looks today versus a year ago?"

"I think with changing it from outbound marketing to inbound leads, our team is putting efforts into better channels," Michaela replied. "They’re not spending time calling the 50 leads that came in from text and cold calls and getting beat up. Now they’re spending their time on those inbound leads and having better conversations because these people want to sell. Are they sometimes unrealistic? Sure, but at least now they’re actually having conversations instead of just getting yelled at. We still do text messaging, but we scaled it back dramatically. There were changes with the vendors we were using, so the pricing plan was completely different. We decided to put those funds into PPC instead. You can see a different attitude in our team because they’re not getting beat up all day. They are, but in a different way. We're just making sure our efforts are in the right spot."

"Yeah, that makes sense," Brandon said. "So, team morale is a little bit different. Based on what you told me before, Aaron, it sounds like revenue is in a similar place to where it was the year prior with a similar amount of marketing spend, but you’ve completely changed the way your business is doing it. You have pretty big plans for next year. Do you feel like you’re in a more scalable spot now than you were a year ago?"

"Yeah, when you talk about scalability, one thing we did for 2023, and I'm so proud of it, is that by bringing on your company to help our company grow, we wanted to make sure we took care of these leads. We value these leads. I don’t think a lot of people value the leads like they should. At the beginning of this year, I focused on leadership. Like John Maxwell says, I needed to raise that ceiling. The second focus was culture. With just those two things, we built levers in our company to hire, retain, train, and onboard. Those are vitally important to ensure that as we bring on new people, we can scale. By focusing on that, we also worked on building a solid foundation for processes and procedures, accountability, and scorecards. We call them our stoplight report to keep everybody accountable. The numbers are in front of everyone all the time, and they know what metrics they need to hit. By having more visual aids, it's easier to monitor people. We've seen that as long as you hit those numbers, the results will come. This year, we built such a strong foundation that now we can throw people in those seats because we even have a process for hiring. The people we've brought on with this new recruiting process have stuck. When they come in, it's just hit the ground and go."

"That’s crazy interesting," Brandon said. "I’ve always thought it was interesting how businesses grow. We think it looks like this straight line, but really it's kind of like this—flattening for a minute and then growing a little bit more. It’s not always reflected in the revenue how much you’re growing. I know I've been that way with my own company, growing your capability, growing your people,

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Brandon is back with Miquella and Aaron Gaunt to explore how they successfully expanded their business from Southern California to operating across 14 states nationally. In this episode they are also joined by Stephanie, one of the key players responsible for managing the Gaunts' disposition process as their Investment Sales Director. In this conversation, Stephani and Miquella provide a behind-the-scenes look at how their team has adapted to handle dispositions at a nationwide scale.

"Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today is another episode in our series with Aaron and Micha Lant, who took their business from local in Southern California and expanded it nationally and had to figure out the dispositions portion of that. We're going to talk with them about what they did, who's on the team, what kind of processes they have for dispositioning deals in a variety of markets, and I think you'll learn a lot. Stephanie, Michaela, thank you both for joining me to talk all about dispositions."

"Yeah, um, I have no doubt this has changed a ton in the business over the past year or so since we started working together, because obviously a year ago you started just in Southern California. That's where you're doing dispositions, and you've transferred from that to how many states?"

"I think we're at 14, 14 states."

"Yeah, yeah. So I don't even know where to start. Like what, maybe you can help me understand like what are some of the biggest things that have changed with you trying to figure that out over the past year?"

"We realize we need a lot more. You know, we've changed from being order takers. You know, we had the how the market was in 2021 and 2022 where pretty much anything you blasted out, you just had people, you know, calling in and they would sell pretty quickly. And so with the market shift, you know, we definitely saw that there was more work that needed to be put into dispo a property. A lot of people that, you know, they may see the post, they may see the email blast, but they kind of get hesitant on it. So it really takes our team cold calling them, getting them on the phone, talking more in depth about it for them to realize like, 'Hey, this is a deal and this is worth it.'"

"We were able before to have two to three acquisition people per one disposition person, and now like Aaron mentioned earlier, we're one to one. With our acquisition guys getting two to three contracts a week minimum, you know, that's a lot on the dispo side. And when they're having to spend more time on them, they really need to not be bombarded with too many deals. So, and with nationwide, I mean, that adds a whole other fun aspect into that."

"Yeah, um, that's a maybe a good place to start is exit strategies. So you're mostly doing wholesale, you're doing novations?"

"Uh, yeah, wholesale, novation. We kind of... the goal is always to get it on market, you know, that's really and do the novation route. That's where you're going to get the biggest buyer pool. But we'll start once we get the property, you know, we do start by blasting it out on Investor Lift and kind of cold calling the area while they're also looking for an agent to list it. So you got about a few days to see if we can move it off market, but if not, it's ultimately ending up on market."

"Okay, so it's kind of like work at wholesale first and then only move it off market if it makes the spread that we're looking for. If it doesn't, then it's like, 'Okay, yeah, then we put it on market.'"

"Okay, so it's sort of sequential, and obviously the best-case scenario is you find a super high offer off market in two days, and then you just go there. But if you don't, then you can novate it. And it sounds like with the seller, you could go either way. You're generally putting together agreements where you can novate it or wholesale it?"

"Yeah, yeah. They always go into it and they kind of get all the contracts signed ahead of time and have that conversation with them ahead of time of 'We're, you know, bringing in a third-party buyer.' So we set the sellers up from the get-go that that's the route that we're going to take, whether we take that one or not. If we do move it off market, we have the situations where some sellers don't want that, and so, you know, you just price it accordingly. And then some we only move off market, but they're pretty much set up for novations."

"Got it. That makes sense because a lot of people that I've worked with, they kind of say like, 'This is a novation deal' or 'This is a cash deal.' You sort of say it's a deal and we're going to move it however we can. You set expectations up front, and if you set the expectation that it's going to be harder for the seller, it ends up being easier. That's fine."

"Yeah, because it is... we found it's hard to go back to the seller and then change the premise of how we got under contract. You know, that's much harder. There's much more resistance on that versus just upfront being transparent and saying, 'This is what we're doing. We're bringing a third-party buyer.' There you go."

"Yeah, totally understood. Uh, and Stephanie, I understand you work... yeah, what do you call it, dispositions agent? Is that actually..."

"We call it um, investment sales director."

"Investment sales director, okay. And it sounds the way it sounds, you know?"

"Yeah, 'cause you know, it's all about stroking people's egos in this business. I've noticed, so you know, when you tell them that big, you know, title, they seem to really like, really respect you, especially because of the title, I think."

"Yeah, fair enough. I think it does definitely go a long way."

"Yeah, so this is what you're doing on a day-to-day basis?"

"Yes."

"Um, help me understand your process like start to finish. Um, somebody gets a contract locked up, then what happens?"

"So it comes over to the disposition side. Uh, we connect with the seller, introduce ourselves, kind of get a little bit acquainted, build some rapport with them, uh, because we are going to be in contact with them through the entire process, uh, once it goes from acquisition to dispo. Um, and then after that, we also try to get photos from them. If we can't, then we have other means that we're able to use in order to get those photos, either with, uh, you know, um, an outside source or the agent that we're going to work with."

"Um, for some properties or states, uh, we already have an idea of who we're going to work with as far as an agent because we've been doing this for a while now. Um, so we kind of have the agents' list built pretty well."

"Um, so after we talk with the seller, uh, that's when we get going on marketing. Uh, we get it blasted out on Investor Lift. During that period of time, we already start working on looking for agents. Um, of course if the seller is not okay with listing the property, which doesn't really happen too often - usually they're pretty okay with it - um, unless of course they have like a time frame or speed. Um, if they have more time, then of course novate it. Um, but yeah, so and then once we get the agent, we can usually tell within the first two to three days whether or not we can sell it off market, um, because we'll get a lot of action, you know, on Investor Lift. If it's, you know, kind of silent, um, then that's when you know that you need to get an agent on it. Um, also based on the spread too as well, whether or not we can novate."

"Yeah, yeah, understood. Um, if I could just ask a few questions about that. So you start with, uh, it sounds like Investor Lift is kind of one of the first things, um, that you look at. I imagine you're just kind of throwing it into the system, letting it be listed there, and then it sounds like you do some cold calling to buyers and stuff like that too. Is that something you do personally, or do you have like separate cold callers that work in the company to be calling buyers?"

"Do personally."

"So that's like part of your job for any deal that you have, as you're going to be calling the buyers. How many buyers do you call?"

"You want to make 75 calls a day. So at least 75 buyers, sometimes that could actually just be 35 because of course I multiply. I call, you know, five times."

"Get those pick up. We triple tap."

"Yes."

"Okay, okay. So so that's the, that's the goal overall is 75 calls a day?"

"Yeah, and then depending on the number of deals you're working, that kind of determines your capacity, how deep you can be going with each of those deals. And we like to double tap because even, say that like, like this morning I got a call three times from a buyer. That just goes to show me how much interest they have in the property. So, you know, other buyers may have properties that they're selling also as well, so just it says a lot when you're calling multiple times, um, you know, for someone there. It sounds urgent, it creates that urgency."

"So well, nowadays everybody thinks it's spam."

"So yeah, exactly. That if you're calling the same, if you're getting the same call from a number two to three times, it's like, 'Okay, maybe this is something I need to answer.'"

"Yeah, fair enough. Do you text them as well, or no?"

"Mhm, yes."

"Okay, so you call, cold call, and text basically your buyers to try to get the deal. What, what, what do you say to them? What does it generally look like?"

"Just let them know, 'Hey, I'm calling you in regards to a deal. I seen that you were a VIP investor on our buyer list, and I wanted you to get an opportunity, you know, to jump on this deal. I didn't want you to miss out.' So, yeah."

"Okay, got it. Very cool. So, so it starts there."

"Yes."

"And then you'll kind of know within a few days how that's going based on are these people actually interested. Of course, you've blasted it out too, and how many, uh, how much interest do you get there. Then you look for agents?"

"Yes."

"And how do you look for agents?"

"Um, I go on Zillow, I'll use Redfin, PropStream. Um, I like to work with agents that have already sold a property within that area within the last few months. Um, and I'll narrow it down that way, and I call about five agents at a time. Um, kind of just first come, first serve, you know, whoever gets the CMA to me. I like to get at least two to three CMAs. Um, that way I know what I'm working with. And they, if they all kind of, uh, meet in the middle or at the same, then that's when I determine, you know, how my conversations went with that agent, you know, how confident they sounded, what kind of strategies that they use. I like to work with the ones that are very creative, how responsive they are."

"Yeah, responsive too, uh, proactive, um, you know, how much urgency they have behind them as well because, uh, time is of the essence. We want to get this sold as soon as possible, and also realistic too as well."

"Okay. I understood it. CMA, what does that mean?"

"Um, comparative market analysis."

"I saw the pause. I'm probably the only person..."

"Thank you."

"I'm the only person here who doesn't know what that is."

"Okay. Um, okay, so you get that, and that kind of tells you sort of how they think about it, and you could probably tell if they're, how qualified they are."

"We like to look at it too because I want to see how knowledgeable are they, you know. Are they going to send me something and say, 'Oh, you can list your property for $200,000,' but I go and I look at the comps in the area and I'm seeing that a fully renovated, all fixed up house sold for $190? Then they don't know what they're doing, you know. It's not common that they overshoot. Uh, some, some tend to, some of them because they forget that they're... you know, a lot of agents, I'd say 50-50, aren't used to dealing with investment-type properties and fixer-uppers. They're just, they're in their mind thinking retail, top of the market, most for the property. It's like, yeah, we want to get the most for the property, but we also want this to move fast, you know."

"I know there's some people that they say, 'Well, we have the contract for 60 days, so we're going to wait the whole 60 days to move it,' but we don't want, we don't like doing that to our sellers. We don't like stringing them along. Um, you know, within two weeks, our goal is within two weeks. So we're making sure that we're pricing it aggressively to move fast and not sit. Now, some areas are going to sit. We had the conversation with the sellers ahead of time, 'Hey, based on this area, everything's sitting for 60 to 90 days,' you know. So we have a lot of those conversations up front with the seller as well. Um, but even with that, we've, we've make sure that, okay, well if things are moving at X price, drop it down a little bit lower than that so that it's looking even more appealing, you know. Everything is to get it moved and get it moved fast, and that's what I meant by realistic."

"Yeah, I want a realistic price point, not something that, you know, it looks good. Um, I need a realistic... 'cause I would... we want an offer within two weeks or less."

"Got it. And how many of these properties end up selling to a cash buyer, um, through like Investor Lift, for example, versus through novations? Do you know what things have looked like this year?"

"Um, I was just looking at that earlier today. I want to say it's probably like a 70-30, 70% novated, 30% um, off market."

"Yeah, got it. And I imagine a lot of those ones that you're novating, you're getting offers even off market, but it's just not at the, like, you know, you could do better on the market."

"Or it's like at what we have under contract for, so wouldn't make sense."

"Yeah, understood. Okay, so about 70% novations are how your business functions right now?"

"Yeah."

"Was that true last year?"

"We really didn't even implement novations until this year, so we were strictly off market last year in 2022. And then with that shift, we realized we have to change how we're... how are our exit strategies for the properties. And so this year is when we really dove into the novations a lot heavier."

"Understood. One of the things that I've heard negatively about novations is that there's more moving parts. It can be a little bit more, uh, more difficult to get the deal done. Um, I'm super interested to hear from your perspective how true that is. Like, does the realtor do a lot of it, or is there, um, is there still a lot of work required on your end? And, uh, does that take a significant amount of time? Is it hard to scale?"

"There's a lot that we try to... you know, you're going to have like inspection time frames, appraisal time frames, um, but we have those even, you know, up front when we see the offer. We try to counter out, counter those out, you know, wave them if we can, take it as is. Um, but it, it can have more of a fallout. But as long as we're talking to the buyers and the buyer agent up front and making sure they all realize like, 'This is a fixer-upper, there's... you know, make sure you're talking to your lender that there... it's not going to have... um, things aren't going to be perfect,' they're usually okay with it. Um, there's a little more steps to it, a little more coordinating of getting an inspector in there, getting the appraiser in there, um, but I wouldn't say it's so much more that it makes it not worth it."

"Yeah, that makes sense. So there's a lot of people that, uh, that I speak to that are afraid of going into multiple states as a business, primarily on the dispositions side. That's where a lot of the fear comes from. Um, and I know you've been through quite a journey this year. Uh, I'm, I'm super curious to hear about some of the challenges that you've had that you had to overcome throughout the year, and, and how you were able to fix those things to, to get it so you're actually still moving deals in markets that maybe you've never been in before."

"Yeah, yeah. I know what I have, but I think it's just making those small tweaks, you know, figuring out those markets. Um, you know, not being afraid to take that risk and explore a market that you've never, you know, been in before. Um, I mean, there's no pain, there's no gain, right? So I mean, as far as, uh, you've seen, it's, it's possible."

"Oh yeah, absolutely. Think maybe a lot of the, uh, a lot of the scariness of it is kind of in your head?"

"Yes, yeah, it's, it's... it's fear of because you don't... the fear of the unknown, you know. You don't know what possibly could happen or will happen, but it's just... you just have to just go into it and take that risk."

"I guess I would say I'm, I'm, I'm okay with taking a risk, though. I think, I think the fear comes from people feeling that they can't physically be there, you know. When you're in your own market, you can go door to door, you can be there, um, when the buyers go and walk in. So there, there is some added challenges when you are in a different state, but it's also, you know, the fear of the buyer talking to the seller, you know. We, we... but you got to vet the people beforehand."

"There's a lot of vetting we do with the agents, with the buyers ahead of time. We're not just sending random people. It's actually talking to them, asking them for, if, if it comes down to it, to proof of funds, how serious are you, what flips have you done, are you really a flipper or an investor, or are you just kind of window shopping? Um, and had and telling them like, 'Don't talk price with seller, don't... you know, any questions, call me. If you want to ask them about the structure of the house, fine, but call us back.' And we really have not run into very many people that have gone behind us and talked to the seller. I think it comes up once every few months."

"Okay, so it's... yeah, it's really just in your head. People are really afraid of... but in practice, like, there's always going to be those bad players that are going to do whatever they want to do, but..."

"Yeah, I mean, you'd probably still run into that in the local market."

"Oh, we have."

"I'm sure you have."

"We did, yeah."

"Fair enough. Um, let's talk about contract fallout. Um, where has that been this year? Do you, do you happen to know like where you're at on a percentage basis and how it has shifted over time?"

"I, I don't. I want to say we're probably around a 50-50, um, but it's a mix of fallout. I mean, there's a mixture of sellers just, yeah, being sellers and, you know, I think changing their mind, not being cooperative, saying that we can get in, then not getting in. You know, I think that that's where a lot of some of the fallout has been. Um, as far as not selling it though, that if we look at just that, like those ones aside, I'd say we're probably closer to like, like a 70-30ish, um, just looking at that aspect because with novating, that's upped our close rate a lot because we're opening it up to a lot bigger buyer pool. Um, and so properties that we probably never would have been able to move before strictly off market, we are now moving them on market. Um, so that has definitely drastically helped, and, and next year, it's only going to be even better, especially as we grow the dispo team too."

"I think that was one thing we realized this year is, is doing the one-to-one ratio of acquisition to dispo. Um, because we were looking at, at one point, each, each person had, you know, 20 properties. You can't focus on 20 properties in a day. It just, it isn't physically possible. Um, so now with the added team members, it's allowing them to really put a lot of time into each property for the ones that take, that need a little bit more work. Um, and now we're, we're able to move them at a, at a much better rate."

"Yeah, that makes sense. What would you say to somebody who says that you won't be great at dispositions unless you focus on a single market?"

"That's a limited, limited belief."

"So what if... I'll just paint a picture for you. Sorry, you know, you know I'm just giving you a hard time. Um, let's just say I, um, let's just say I'm a wholesaler. I've been in whatever city for 10 years. I've got my list of all my buyers there and stuff, and, and basically dispositions to me is calling up the people that have already bought deals from me or people who are already on my list or I met at the REIA or, you know, something like that. And that's how I'm dispositioning properties. Sure. Um, I look at that and I think, I... to go into other markets, that's really difficult because my advantages are my relationships in my market, and I don't have those in other markets, right? Um, how easy is that to overcome?"

"I mean, it, it will take a little bit of time to build some of those relationships, um, but it's all about, you know, building them, building themselves up as salespeople, you know, growing in our training, growing in reading books, um, having, knowing how to have better conversation to build that rapport, you know, really, um, asking the buyer like, kind of boosting their ego in a way, talking to them more. Um, just all sales skills, talking to them more about what are they looking for, what are they wanting, how, you know, things like that. And then we found that they open up a lot more. Um, yeah, it's not going to be an instant overnight like, 'I know I can move this,' um, or build a relationship with somebody right away, but it's just with time. I mean, even when you're starting in your own market, you didn't have those relationships ahead of time. You had to build those relationships. So, um, but even buyers, I think down here and where we're at in Southern California, half of them I've never met face to face. I've only ever talked to them over the phone. Prob... a lot more than half, honestly."

"Yeah, it's got to be. But, but I've been able to build those relationships with them myself, and so it just is taking that same concept and into another state."

"Okay. So do you feel significantly more comfortable in states that you've already done business versus a new state, or have you gotten so used to dispositioning in any state that it could be Texas where you have more experience, or it could be some, some other random state? As long as you know it's not like an attorney state, for example, compared to a title state or whatever the case is. I'm curious, are those really different to you now, or is it just kind of like dispositioning of property in the United States is kind of... you follow this certain"

"It's not like an attorney state, for example, compared to a title state or whatever the case is. I'm curious, are those really different to you now, or is it just kind of like dispositioning of property in the United States follows a certain process and it doesn't matter if we've done 100 deals in that city before or just one? It's kind of the same process."

"Yeah, yeah, I think one big aspect of that too is that we have a good title company that covers like 30-something states."

"So I'm not really worried about finding a new attorney or title company in each state. That definitely helps."

"Okay, same title company. What's the name of that title company?"

"Clothline Settlements."

"Okay, yeah, 30 states. Leveraging a title company across states, absolutely. Her and her team are absolutely amazing. She's been in title for, I think, 20-plus years, so she really helps us work through a lot of the issues. But I really feel like it's the same process for you guys?"

"Yeah, definitely. For me, it's just being comfortable talking to people regardless. It doesn't matter what state you're in. I can do dispositions anywhere. I can usually figure out how to work with somebody pretty easily. It's just asking those right questions, really making it about them. I like to ask, 'What's your style of investment? What do you do with your properties?' That way I can figure out whether or not the deal I have is a good fit for them or not. I'll also be upfront and honest with them as well, and I found that really does help. Being honest and transparent with people definitely helps."

"Yeah, totally makes sense. If it's not too much to ask, what does a compensation structure for somebody like you look like? Is it commission-based, salary-based, or a combination of both?"

"It's commission-based. Are you 100% commission-based in the role, and is that based on the spread at the end of the day, I imagine?"

"So acquisitions get paid on the spread, and then dispositions get paid on the spread as well."

"Yeah, exactly the same."

"That's pretty simple. Interesting. What's the biggest mistake you've made moving from one market to many markets for dispositions?"

"Not starting novation sooner."

"Okay, so you started with wholesale?"

"Yeah, we were seeing that where we were having trouble is in the more rural areas. You're not going to have a lot of buyers on that. Those properties really need to get on the market versus off-market. So I think that's one mistake we made, not getting some of those early in the year on the market fast enough."

"Got it. So maybe you had novation on the tool belt somewhere, but you didn't have a great process for it and didn't really know exactly how to do it."

"Exactly."

"That makes sense. And as for doing dispositions, do you also dip into TC, or do you have a separate TC team that handles that?"

"Yeah, especially for my own properties that are already in escrow. I'm still working with the seller and also still talking to the buyer, getting anything that escrow needs, making that communication. If they need me to, actually, not even if they need me to, I take that initiative myself."

"So a lot of the coordinating?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Okay, fair enough. This actually seems really simple. Tell me if I'm over-simplifying this: deal gets under contract, next step, we're going to call some buyers, blast it out, have some conversations with people, use InvestorLift for that. Do you recommend it?"

"Oh, yeah, definitely."

"So InvestorLift works, you can find the right buyers, call them, blast it out, get some offers through the system here and there. Then you look for agents, the agent puts it on the market, and hopefully, you close in the next 60 days. About 70% of the properties you get under contract work out that way. And then, of course, sometimes the seller backs out for whatever reason. But in terms of finding a buyer, is it really that simple? I mean, simple doesn't mean easy, but is it that simple on paper?"

"Yeah, of course. Not that easy sometimes when you're going back and forth, negotiating a lot. They also post properties everywhere on Facebook, Facebook groups, Marketplace, Craigslist, setting the bait by getting the property on as many platforms as possible to get eyes on it. But in all honesty, it really is as simple as that. With novations, it's made it a little simpler. We're leveraging somebody else's time, an agent's time. They're the ones out there doing the marketing, showings, which frees up our time to work on other properties because somebody else is now working on the property for us."

"That makes sense. Have you tried using a flat fee listing service instead of an agent?"

"We did, and that's why I think for a while we were steering away from it. I think we also didn't know that you could use agents to put it on. In hindsight, it was like, 'Oh yeah, duh.' But I think we thought there might be something special with the flat fee services, that they had some special agreement with the MLSs in the areas. I don't know what we were thinking. It is cheaper, but there are issues with a flat fee service. No one is monitoring it, especially when it's in a different state. There are things we may not know, certain disclosures that need to be done or uploaded, and we're not in that area. With the agent, you're paying more, but it's like paying a fee for anything. Aaron always uses this analogy: 'I could go buy my sandwich, but I'm using DoorDash and happily paying double because of the speed, convenience, and ease of somebody else bringing it to me.' So we are paying more for the agent, but we're utilizing them for their expertise, boots on the ground, and knowledge of the area and paperwork."

"Yeah, that makes sense. With a flat fee service, you have access to all the documents you need, but I don't know what documents I need. With an agent, they know the area and the necessary documents. We're utilizing someone else's expertise instead of trying to figure it out ourselves. You can, but when we are in as many states as we're in, an agent is the way to go."

"It's interesting because a lot of barriers to being in multiple markets are exactly those things: not knowing the streets, not having boots on the ground, not being able to see the property. Good agent relationships fix that problem. If you're good at finding new agents in areas where you haven't had one before, you have that covered. I imagine you've worked with some agents that didn't work out. What do you do in that circumstance?"

"You try to keep the line of communication as open as possible. If it gets to where let's just get it through the finish line and close, then we just don't use them again. We take initiative ourselves when it comes down to it. I'm not afraid to step on somebody's toes respectfully. If it gets down to it and our agent hasn't responded for five days, I'm calling the other agent. With all due respect, I have to get this to the closing line for our seller. Sometimes you have to take initiative. You have to be proactive. If you sit back and wait, it will all fall apart."

"Yeah, I imagine finding the right ones in the beginning is crucial. Things like how quickly they respond, what their CMA looks like, all give you a pretty good idea."

"Yeah, even over the last six months, I've figured out better ways to vet an agent, what questions I should have been asking from the beginning, and where not asking those questions hurt me."

"Definitely. Do you find agents are more hungry for your business with the craziness in the agent world right now?"

"Some are. You want to test their fight, how much they want that listing. If they're just doing you a favor, I don't want to work with them. It's finding agents who know how to work outside the box and understand investment sales. Many we come into contact with say, 'Yeah, it's normal, it's investment stuff, I get it.' Finding those agents, not the ones who don't understand, is key. You can't just Google an agent and go with them. You have to dig deep."

"Understood. Anything else you'd add for the dispositions process?"

"I've worked with my agents on novation and off-market deals. Building that relationship with them and going back to them, like 'Hey, can we sell this off-market?' They're like, 'Yeah.'"

"And you offer them, in that circumstance, just like their one side of the commission or both sides of the commission or a flat fee?"

"Flat fee."

"Okay, so if you can find me a buyer for this, I will give you how much money?"

"It depends on the spread, what it's going to be. If it's in a market where we're only selling it for $5,000 or $10,000, we'll say, 'Hey, we can give you $1,000 or $2,000.' If it's a bigger spread, we'll compensate accordingly. The good thing is, you already have a relationship with them, so they don't get offended. They know you follow through."

"Exactly. They also know you'll come back to them for more. I think they like the off-market stuff because they don't have to do any of the paperwork. Off-market is all our assignment contracts and agreements, really easy. They're just connecting you, and they get paid."

"Fair enough. Well, thank you both for taking the time to dig into the dispositions. I think I learned more than a few things and hope this is valuable content."

"Hire Dispo Girls."

"Yes, Dispo Girls. You just have girls on the team?"

"All our acquisition side is

"It's not like an attorney state, for example, compared to a title state or whatever the case is. I'm curious, are those really different to you now, or is it just kind of like dispositioning of property in the United States is kind of you follow this certain process, and it doesn't matter if we've done 100 deals in that city before, if we've done one, it's kind of the same process."

"Yeah, yeah, I think one big aspect of that too is that we have a good title company that covers like 30 something states."

"Yeah, so I'm not really worried about finding a new attorney or title company in each state, so that definitely helps."

"Okay, same title company? What's the name of that title company?"

"Clothline Settlements."

"Okay, yeah, Danielle is leveraging the title company across states. Absolutely, her and her team are absolutely amazing, and she's been in title for I think like 20 plus years, so she really helps us work through a lot of the issues, but I really feel like it's the same process for you guys."

"Yeah, definitely. For me, it's just being comfortable talking to people regardless. It doesn't matter what state you're in, I can, I can dispositions is dispositions. I can usually figure out how to work with somebody pretty easily. It's just asking those right questions, really making it about them. Like, I like to ask, 'What's your style of investment? What do you do with your properties?' You know, and that way I can figure out whether or not the deal that I have is a good fit for them or not. And I'll be also upfront honest with them as well, and I found that that really does help. Being honest and transparent with people definitely helps."

"Yeah, totally makes sense. If it's not too much to ask, what does a compensation structure for somebody like what you do look like? Like, what kind of, like is it commission-based, are you paying a base salary, is there salary and bonus potential?"

"Commission-based, so it's, are you 100% commission-based in the role and that's based on the spread at the end of the day, I imagine?"

"So, acquisitions get paid on the spread and then dispositions get on the spread."

"Yeah, all right, exactly the same. So that's pretty simple."

"Yeah."

"Interesting. What's the biggest mistake you've made moving from one market to many markets for dispositions?"

"Not getting them on, I think not doing starting novation sooner."

"Okay, so you started with wholesale?"

"Yeah, we were seeing that where we were having trouble is the more rural areas. You're not going to have a lot of buyers on that. Those properties really need to get on market versus off market, and so I think that's one mistake we did is not getting some of those early in the year on market fast enough."

"Got it, so maybe you had novation on the tool belt somewhere, but like it wasn't..."

"Yeah, we were still kind of like, have a great process for it, you didn't really know exactly how to do it."

"Okay, exactly."

"Yeah, that makes sense. And as doing dispositions, do you also kind of dip into TC or do you have a separate TC team that handles it?"

"Actually, yeah, especially like my own properties that are already in escrow. I'm still working with the seller and also still talking to the buyer as well, getting anything that escrow needs, making that communication if they need me to. Actually, not even if they need me to, I take that initiative myself."

"So, a lot of the coordinating."

"Yeah."

"Okay, fair enough. So, this actually seems really simple. You tell me if I'm just like way oversimplifying. Deal gets under contract, next step, we're going to call some buyers, we're going to blast it out, have some conversations with people. You use InvestorLift for that?"

"Mhmm, recommend it."

"Oh, work."

"Mhm."

"Okay, so InvestorLift works, you can find the right buyers, you can call them, you can blast it out. I'm sure you get some offers through the system here and there, and then you look for agents, you've had a few. The agent puts it on the market, next 60 days, hopefully you close. About 70% of the time, the properties that you've gotten under contract, that's going to work for you. And then, of course, sometimes the seller backs out for whatever reason, you know, those things happen. But in terms of finding a buyer, is it really that simple? I mean, simple doesn't mean easy, but it is that simple on paper?"

"Yeah, of course. Not that easy sometimes when you're, you know, going back and forth, then a lot of negotiating. I mean, they also get the post properties everywhere on Facebook, Facebook groups, Marketplace, Craigslist, you know, putting, getting, we call it setting the bait, just getting it everywhere, getting the property on as many platforms as possible to get eyes on the property. But I mean, in all honesty, it really is as simple as that. I think with the innovations, it's made it a little bit simpler. You know, we're leveraging somebody else's time. We're leveraging an agent's time. They're the ones out there, they're doing their marketing, they're doing the showings, which frees up their time to be able to move more to work on other properties because essentially somebody else is now also working on the property for them."

"Yeah, that makes sense. Have you tried, I know some people with novations are doing like a flat fee listing service or something like that, and essentially not using an agent. Sounds like you're leveraging the agent to make it a lot more efficient on your side. Have you tried it the other way?"

"We did, and that's why I think for a while we were steering away from it. I think we also didn't know that you could use agents to put it on. I don't know why, it was just kind of like, well, hopefully that's a nugget for somebody listening to this. Hindsight it was like, oh yeah, duh. But I think we thought that there might be something special with the flat fee services, that they had some special agreement with the MLSs in the areas. I don't know what we were thinking, to be honest. And yeah, it is cheaper, but the issues you fall into with a flat fee service is there's no one monitoring it. You know, and when you're, I think that a flat fee service works if you're in your market, meaning where you are living. You could be there, you could go to the property, but when it's in a different state, there's a lot of stuff that you may not know. There are certain things we found out, disclosures that need to get done or a certain way it needs to be uploaded, and we didn't know. We're not in that area. So yeah, with the agent, you're paying more, right? But it's also, it's just paying a fee for anything, right? Like Aaron always uses this analogy, he's like, 'I could go buy my sandwich, but I'm using DoorDash and I'm happily going to pay double what I'm getting my sandwich for because of the speed and convenience and the easability of somebody else bringing it to me.' So we are paying a little bit more for the agent, but we're utilizing them for their expertise in the area and expertise in the paperwork."

"Boots on the ground."

"Boots on the ground. With a flat fee service, you have access to all the documents you need, but I don't know what documents I need. And so with the agent, they know what they need, they know the areas. So it's utilizing someone else's expertise in that instead of trying to figure it out yourself. You can, I'm not saying you can't, but when we are in as many states as we're in, if we were only in one or two markets, I'd say yeah, maybe we could utilize the flat fee and maybe go that route. But with being in as many markets as we're in, agent all day long."

"Yeah, it's interesting because if you think about it, a lot of the barriers that people have to being in multiple markets are exactly those things. Like, I don't know the streets, and I don't have boots on the ground, I'm not able to visually see the property. If you're really good at finding, well, if you have good agent relationships, it fixes that problem. Secondarily, if you're really good at finding new agents even in areas where you haven't had an agent historically, then you sort of have all that. I imagine you've worked with some agents and it just hasn't worked out, you hire the wrong agent from time to time. What do you do in that circumstance?"

"You try to keep the line of communication as open as possible, and it gets to where like, let's just get it through the finish line, let's get it to close, and then we just don't use them again. There's a lot of stuff that we take initiative of doing ourselves when it comes down to it. So, I mean, if it, I'm not afraid sometimes to step on somebody's toes in the right manner. We try to be respectful of our agent because we, you know, as I do have my license in California, so I do know a little bit of it, of like agents are only supposed to be the ones talking, the seller's never supposed to call the other agent, so I understand that. But like, if it gets down to and our agent hasn't responded to me for five days, I'm calling the other agent. But it comes down to like, 'Hey, with all due respect, I got to get this to the close line for your buyer, for our seller. Sorry, ask for forgiveness later.' Somebody has to take initiative. So there's, you know, you

just got to take the initiative and get the deal done. And if that means that I have to step on some toes, I apologize later. And like I said, I understand the agent's role, but sometimes you just have to take control of the situation to get it done."

"Yeah, totally. It sounds like a lot of your success boils down to having a system that works, being adaptable, and just putting in the effort to get things done no matter what obstacles come your way."

"Exactly. Having a good system in place is crucial, and being willing to adapt when things don’t go as planned is just as important. It's not always easy, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run."

"Absolutely. This has been incredibly insightful. Before we wrap up, is there any final advice you'd give to someone looking to scale their real estate business across multiple markets?"

"Sure. I’d say don’t be afraid to take the leap into new markets. Do your homework, build strong relationships, and leverage the expertise of others, like agents who know the local market. Also, keep learning and adapting. Every market has its nuances, but if you stay committed and flexible, you can overcome those challenges."

"Great advice. Thanks again for joining us today and sharing your experiences."

"Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure."

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Discover the secrets to scaling a real estate business to seven figures using PPC marketing strategies! Join Aaron and his guest as they dive into optimizing campaigns, targeting high-profit markets, and balancing rural vs. urban strategies. Whether you're new to PPC or a seasoned pro, this episode offers invaluable insights to boost your ROI and drive success in real estate.

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"Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is another episode in the series with Aon and Michaela Gant from Southern California, who took their business from local to national. With PPC as the primary channel, they were able to generate seven figures in revenue just from PPC in their first year. This time, we're going to talk about the marketing decisions they made over this time period to help them get the best quality leads and the most volume of leads possible to grow to that seven figures in revenue."

"Aon, Michaela, I'm super excited to talk with you guys about marketing, um, choosing a marketing channel, which is something we've kind of touched on in a few of the other videos. But I think it's an awesome experience to go deep and talk about how you've done what you've done. Obviously, we work together on this aspect. It's the aspect I'm personally most passionate about, most knowledgeable about, and it's really interesting for me to learn how you view it and why you've chosen to execute on certain elements of your strategy. So, um, anyway, with that considered, what are the things that you think about when choosing what marketing channel you're going to go after? Obviously, you have experience with outbound channels like cold calling and texting. It seems like mail's been good to you. Um, PPC, Facebook ads—what is it that you're looking for?"

"Inbound leads, hands down. We want inbound leads for our primary source of revenue now. Obviously, there are different types. I mean, a bunch of stuff, but what we want to do and what I've seen—because our primary business is marketing and sales—is, as they always say, that's literally every business: marketing and sales. If I went and we talked about how your business is doing and how you've really done a great job of dominating the space and being a top provider for real estate investors, it's like... and obviously, yes, you are very skilled. You have the data to help us get to the next level. That's why we love having you guys as part of our team. But it's also that you really got yourself out there. You really marketed your company out there to get yourself known, right? So marketing is huge."

"I think if you're going to start any business, you need to be really particular about how you're going to market and who you're going to work with. The market, right? Obviously, in this case, do you want an in-house or, you know, using a marketing agency? But we've been really, really seeing a lot of good results with your company, and that's PPC and direct mail."

"Yeah, okay, now that's helpful. That's helpful to think of. So inbound is primarily what you're looking at, and then you've got a few channels that can fit in there, like PPC and SEO."

"Mhm, which we need to do. It's the next one."

"Yeah, good news is I came here to upsell you today."

"There you go, you came to sell something."

"I'll leave with the contract."

"Was that a part of the script?"

"Yes, this is the part where you say, 'Yes, I will give you more money.' So, okay, inbound marketing channels are what you're looking at, and then obviously PPC has been the one that you've chosen to focus on the most, which isn't an unusual choice considering the inbound nature of the lead. It's just a completely different conversation with sellers, which I'm sure is what you've noticed as you've grown to seven figures in PPC revenue over the past year. This is a huge accomplishment. Not a lot of people go that channel alone."

"Yeah, not a lot of people go with PPC alone as a marketing channel from zero to seven figures in a single year. There's a lot that plays into that. So, yeah, I just want to pick out those different things. We've changed a lot over this time period about how we're doing things. I know something that we were talking about before is like you've got to have the vision and be willing to give it the time and follow the process, but that doesn't mean that you're unwilling to make changes during that time. You’ve got to be working on the right things. What are some of the big changes that we've made to the PPC marketing over the past year?"

"Like us personally, or what we've seen you guys change?"

"Well, I could probably speak a little better to what we've changed, unless you notice anything in particular that you really want to mention. But I guess what I'm thinking here is budgets are a big factor, like locations. I know we've made some major changes in terms of that, and that's something I really want to dig into because there's a lot of strategy behind why you target this market versus that market and how those different things worked for you."

"Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, but when I think of PPC strategy, I think of two things. Number one, you have the parameters. Parameters are just rules that we have to live within, like we have this budget, these markets, this kind of ad schedule, whatever. And then you have optimizations, which are like adjusting keywords, changing bids, improving landing pages, changing ads. When I think of what a business owner needs to know about their marketing, they need to understand parameters, not optimizations. That's why a lot of the changes you'll notice, and a lot of the stuff we talk about together in your marketing, it's all parameter stuff. The reason is optimization is what we do; it's not what you have to worry about. But if we're talking mainly about budgets, locations, that kind of thing, what kind of changes have we made?"

"Yeah, obviously that's what we look at on our business side. You're going to give us the most high-quality PPC leads there are, right? On the back end, because you know, we've talked about that, you know the difference between a really cheap PPC lead and one that's not necessarily as qualified as you would want it. You know, regarding negative words, positive words, whatever. And the leads that you guys give us have been fantastic. What I see on my end is you're right, I have control of the budget and location. This past year has been a lot of testing and understanding where I want to focus. And a lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, are going to want to change things, get their hands dirty, and mess things up."

"My wife would say you're messing everything up."

"We've told you that a few times too. We should have Jeff in this conversation. Where's Jeff? I love that guy."

"No, it's been fantastic because we want to try things out. When we first started with you guys, we were doing $10,000 in ad spend a month. I could be wrong, but I think that's what it was. I think so too. And we were just here in Southern California. We got our first deal in two weeks, which gave us $40,000."

"I know you hate me saying that."

"That's not the message. I mean, if you have a good sales process, that was a one-call close, but it happens. Expectations are a whole different thing. Let's dig into that next, but yeah, continue."

"We did have that, and just a couple of months later, we decided to open up a couple more markets. We were in Southern California, then we decided to open up Texas, and then we decided to open up everything south of the United States. We're talking about metro areas."

"Yeah, we did pretty tight radiuses at first, trying to stay away from anything rural and keeping to the main metro areas. The idea behind that was if we could get a deal in this metro area, we could move it. We could dispo it. Then I decided to open up a lot more metro areas all around the United States, and then I decided to open up states. We really went broad with a lot of changes, and currently, as we're filming this, we're still broad. I think we're hitting in like 14 different states."

"And we're doing deals every single day. The idea every time we strategize is, 'Aaron, if we go this broad, can you dispo them?' You're asking the right questions to your client to not steer them wrong. You're not just saying, 'Okay, Aaron, just do that.' You're setting the right expectations. Just like your core value says, you're a truth warrior. 110%, you're a truth warrior. You're going to tell me the truth about what to expect and what can go wrong. Sometimes you might even say, 'Hey, I don't know if it's a good idea,' but in the end, you're going to let your client decide."

"Letting your client have that final say, right? You give them the best advice you can, but sometimes they have to do whatever they want to do."

"Exactly. It’s kind of like an attorney. An attorney's going to give you the best advice, you're paying them for their time, and they’re going to give you the advice, but you’re going to do whatever you’re going to do."

"Yeah, so we decided to open up because what we were looking for was... well, obviously, we made another video where we were spending up to $330,000 a month. Right now, this month, we're spending $20,000. The sweet spot has definitely been about $25,000-$30,000. The idea behind that is we’re spending about $10,000 per acquisition rep nationwide. So, we're at $94 per lead right now on a nationwide campaign. We have debated on setting up another campaign to go directly into our own backyard, which we might, you know, go up to $15,000 to $20,000 per rep."

"But when it comes to marketing, don’t be afraid to spend because every dollar you put in, you should be getting five to seven back, especially if on the back end everything is set up to get it to the finish line. So, when we go into 2024, that's going to be our main focus: putting our marketing dollars into the right marketing machines, ATM, to get that return we expect to get. And that’s going to be, again, PPC and direct mail."

"Yeah, one thing you're thinking about that's really positive is you're not thinking about it as, 'Do I want to do a California campaign or a national campaign?' You're thinking, 'Well, could we test?' A lot of our clients have the 'burn the boats' mentality where it's like, 'I was doing this, and now I'm doing this, and now I'm doing this,' and then at some point everything crashes and burns. You just don’t really know if it's because you changed the market, or if it's because your team stopped working as well. You don't know what it is. Marketing is full of good ideas that don't end up working."

"Right, we should be open to trying things. If you're going to be in business and be an entrepreneur, you can’t be afraid of failure. If you are, you’re not going to last very long. We’ve taken big steps that haven't panned out, but we learn from it, adjust, and keep going."

"I like to think about it in terms of asymmetric bets. I'm conservative, I don't want to, you know... there's this psychological concept of loss aversion, where if you take a dollar away from someone, they'll be a lot unhappier than if you gave them a dollar. People are more afraid of losing than they are happy to gain."

"Absolutely."

"For me, I just have to look back at my business and think that every single good thing that has come has been through some type of bet. None of them had a 100% guarantee of the results I was looking for, but they were what you'd call asymmetric bets, where the upside is larger than the downside. For example, marketing: you could say, 'I need to spend $10,000 a month on this marketing campaign for six months and I'm risking $60,000.' A lot of people would stop there and say, '$60,000, I'm out.' But then you have to think, 'What's the downside? The downside is limited to $60,000. What's the upside? Maybe I could figure this out in such a way that I generate a million dollars in revenue this year, which could set the stage for $3-$5 million in revenue the next year, and for a decade I could get awesome returns and scale this really far.' That’s the upside."

"Right, and with an upside like that, the risk is very acceptable."

"Exactly. I think people go wrong by not taking enough bets. They put all their eggs in one basket or aren’t willing to take those asymmetric bets. People are quicker to buy a lottery ticket than to spend $10,000 a month on PPC. Which one has a higher expected value?"

"Isn't that crazy?"

"Yeah, but it's the world we live in. The cool thing about business is you can start a business and create a cash machine. In wholesale, you can create a cash machine. Houses are always depreciating every single day, and there are deals everywhere to be found. No matter how many deals there are, you’re going to be a deal finder."

"Oh, absolutely. What would you say your mindset was going into PPC in the beginning?"

"Excited, you know? I think that's the issue with a lot of new people that try PPC. They have this high expectation, like, 'I'm going to start PPC tomorrow and make a million dollars.' That's where expectations get steered wrong because they hear all over social media that PPC is the best marketing channel, which it is. But if it doesn't work or if they're not able to close the leads and get it to the finish line, they think it's not a good place to put their marketing. You’re going to get leads. Some people think, 'I could cold call, get three cold callers, get a bunch of leads in the first week. I could spend the same amount on PPC and get five leads.'"

"It takes a lot less leads to get a contract, and that contract could net you a lot. Plus, you're going to have better quality conversations because they’re reaching out to you. Even if they're not a fit, you had a great conversation because they reached out to you. If it's not a fit, you part ways peacefully."

"I think there's a misconception that people think PPC leads are all lay-downs, but they’re not. There are one-call closes, but there's work the acquisition team puts into that. They spend half an hour or an hour on the phone, getting it to contract. You still have to put in the work to sell it. There's a disconnect where people think, 'Oh, they're hot leads, it'll be easy,' and forget there's still a lot of work to make it come to fruition."

"I totally agree. My personal opinion is that the idea PPC leads are lay-downs is misguided. Just because you can be at 10 leads per contract doesn’t mean you will be. You have to work them differently, and it takes skill. Maybe they spent an hour on the phone, and you call that the work, but what about all the training they did for six months every morning? That’s the work. Maybe cutting down the trees is easy, but sharpening the saw can be hard."

"Right, exactly. I like that. How do you know if a marketing campaign is working or not?"

"The easy answer is to say KPIs, you know? Because you get a bunch of contracts but nothing has fruition into revenue. It comes down to KPIs. Three months later, can I look back at what I spent and see if those deals closed? In our CRM, we see a lead when it came into the system, so when it turns into a transaction, we see how long it took to close from when it was created in the CRM."

"No, that absolutely makes sense. So obviously, KPIs about performance and stuff like that. What do you do when it's early? Let's just say it's been—let me give you a scenario, right? Let's just say somebody out there sees this video, they start working with Bitman Collective, right? They start generating leads and they're wondering after a month, after two months, are they on the right track? Is it working? How do you think they can know if they're on the right track?"

"You know what's funny? Because I was talking to Jeff about this, and we were talking about a client. He didn't give me names, but he sometimes uses clients as examples. And he spends like $2,000 a month, and I think out of that month he got like two opportunities, right? That's $2,000 spent. To me, that's not a lot to get a good return. It's kind of like the lowest we would ever take. We say like be really, really careful that you give it a lot of time because the less money you put into it, the more time you need to see the results. I would say, you know, it goes back into your KPIs. You know, how many of these leads—okay, so you look at collectively over the past three months. You should always look at 90-day increments. How many of these leads came into my system? Because again, you should have a filter in your CRM. All right, how many leads have we contacted? How many leads have turned into opportunities, and how many leads have turned into transactions? I mean, I hope that answers the question."

"Yeah, you're looking at a funnel, basically."

"Yeah, and to me, it's just like when I first started. So now I don't talk, I don't call the leads, but when I first started with you, I was the one on the phone, so I get to kind of feel the leads, hear the leads, touch the leads. You know what I mean? And I got to know the quality of these leads compared to other types of leads, so I knew it was working because these leads were amazing. You know what I mean? But also, I was obsessed with making sure I got the contract. So if it was right down the road, I'll go to the—I’ll go to the dang house. You know what I mean? Unfortunately, nationwide we don't get to do that. But when a lead comes in—going off track here a little bit—you need to be crazy obsessed when a lead comes in. So my team will call them four to five times. I say you need to call them, you need to send obviously an email, voicemail, texts. Everybody needs to be calling them. And then they stay in our bucket, our new bucket, we call it 15 days of pain. And in that 15 days of pain, you're blowing them up every single day."

"Love the branding."

"Yeah, I think there's a lot you have to look inward on within your business to see if it's working. You have to see, am I getting to these leads quickly? Am I actually having quality conversations? One metric we have our acquisitions and dispo teams put in is how many quality conversations you have. And a quality conversation for us is 10 minutes or more. You know, that goes to show, are you guys actually having in-depth conversations? And then seeing how many it takes for you to get it to a contract and then get it to close. So I think it's hard to just look at it from the outside. You have to look at what you're doing internally to nurture those leads. Are you taking three days to get to the lead, or are you calling it within 30 to 40 seconds?"

"Yes. Let me ask you this: How would you tell somebody or ask a new client how they think the campaign's working? Like if I say, 'Hey, if you want to come join and obviously pay for our services,' it's almost a question to them. How will you know that our marketing or this service has been of value to you?"

"Yeah, I mean, we often ask those questions because it kind of reveals—like for us, retention is the biggest metric. Like do we start the month with however many clients, and how many clients do we end the month with minus the new ones we added on? That's our number, right? Because it shows, are we adding value? Do people see a reason to continue working with us? And with that being the case, we're always digging into—like I remember as part of your sales process, you talking about going through the things that blow deals up front because you're saving yourself the pain of those things being a problem later. I don't want to be on a different page. But yeah, I'm asking you a lot of questions. I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, but I've thought through my answers to these things a lot because obviously, this is what we do. And because that is a very good question: How do I know this campaign is actually working? Even when it comes to going from our backyard to slowly opening up our campaigns because we wanted more leads at a cheaper cost no matter where they were going. It's like, how do I know that this actually worked? Obviously, you're going to look at how much money am I bringing in per campaign each month, obviously. But that's a good question."

"Yeah, for me it's really about two different types of metrics. Number one is the leading metrics. Number two, lagging metrics, which I'm sure you're crazy familiar with. The biggest problems that we see our clients making is that they look at the lagging metrics too early. And what happens is the lagging metrics always look bad really early. Like you could bring in a new sales guy and after two days be like, 'Oh, his close rate's 0%. Worst sales guy ever,' right?"

"Ever, yeah."

"But we all hear that and we laugh because it's like, that doesn't make sense. But a lot of people don't really realize what it takes in terms of sample size to do good marketing. So in the spirit of understanding how long does it take or like how long do you have to give it before you look at lagging metrics, I hired a data scientist recently."

"Oh, wow."

"And basically gave them the question, because it's really a statistical question. Like every time we buy a click, there's a certain percentage likelihood that someone becomes a deal. And then there's an amount of time that it would take for us to get enough data to understand how the campaign's actually performing. It turns out there's all these—like I don't want to take you back to your college diploma. And I don't know, Michaela, if you did his statistics homework too or if it was just the spreadsheets."

"So anyways, there's lots of statistics stuff, but think of it like—okay, I don't want to get crazy deep into it, but I'm getting deep into things, so we're just going to talk about it. Think about there's this thing called simulation-based inference. It's a statistical concept. Picture it like I'm here and I'm just flipping a coin, right? I'm just flipping my coin over and over again. Well then you can start to ask yourself the questions like, well, how many times do you have to flip a coin to know that a coin is actually fair? It's an interesting question when you really think about it. And the answer is there is no answer because there's always going to be a bell curve around that 50%. Slightly higher, so it's always going to be 50% of data above, 50% below. So then you have to think, well, how many times do I have to flip the coin to know with whatever percentage confidence that the coin at least gets me heads 40% of the time, for example? And then you've got this wide bell curve around the 50%. It just gets more and more narrow over time and eventually, 90% of the bell curve is above the 40%. Hope that makes some sense."

"So the question that we tried to answer was to know that I'm getting a 5x return on—or to know that I'm assuming like a coin, we know it's going to get 50% long-term, right? So with the marketing channel, assuming it's targeted towards a 5x return, how many dollars do we have to spend on it to know with 95% confidence that it gets at least a 4x return? Does it make sense, like for the problem? The answer was—I'm trying to remember exactly what it was—I think it was $145,000 is the number of how much it takes statistically, which doesn't take into account that you get better at it over time or that you make pivots or changes where the algorithm learns. It's just like even assuming it was working just like a coin does from the very first flip, you still have that probability of a 50% chance of success. Patient vs impatient mindset, assuming it works exactly like a coin, it was like $140,000 or $135,000, $145,000, it was somewhere in that range, just less than $150,000. And I was a little bit shocked when I saw that. But the crazy thing is a lot—so we do, we measure. People, of course, quit working with us, for sure it happens. You work with enough people, it'll happen. That never happens to us. When a seller signs a contract, they're with us forever."

"You don't have sellers ghosting us?"

"Yeah, lifetime contracts is what we should start doing with our clients. As long as you're in business, you will pay us. I like to try to enforce that. So we did that and the number one reason that people stop doing this marketing is poor ROI. That's the number one reason. Occasionally there's like, 'I didn't like this person on your team' or whatever, those things "It's just like who can invest money better. There could be a version of me that goes and buys a lottery ticket and then wins the lottery and makes like, you know, 1,000x what I bought all my lottery tickets with and stuff. Then there's a version of me that was in the stock market and then loses like 20% over 2 years on the S&P 500 in a recession. I'm more comfortable with the second one, the second version of me, not the first version of me because what I'm focused on is making good decisions, making smart bets, right? And in my opinion, a bad bet that turns out good isn't good behavior. So that's where for me, it's like, it's never been about the outcome, no, it's been about playing the game the way the game deserves to be played. It's more of like a process than a results orientation."

"Yeah, and I think it's honestly a really good mindset for marketing because you have to accept that you'll lose some of those bets."

"Yeah, but the game is can you make those asymmetric bets where the upside equals this and the downside equals this."

"Yeah, and the opportunity wouldn't be there if you didn't take the bet. Yes, there wouldn't be the chance to get, you know, a $40,000, $60,000 assignment fee if you didn't make the bet."

"100%, yeah. I mean, it's scary for a lot of people to say, you know, like our average monthly spend in marketing this year was probably, like, altogether just in marketing spend. We're not talking about overhead, we're not talking about subscriptions, all that stuff, we're talking about probably about $30 grand, right? $30 grand a month."

"Yeah, tell that to you four years ago."

"Oh, it would, it was, yeah, you would have been no for sure, but you're playing a bigger game."

"Well, next year our plan to spend per month is $70 grand, right? So you need the marketing budget of the business you want, none of the business you have."

"Exactly, people set marketing based on topline revenue. You need it to be based on the topline revenue that you're going to have at that time."

"Exactly, did you hear that? That's exactly the truth, and that's exactly what we're going to do this next year. But it goes back into your risk now, right? It's not that we know now that as I spend this, my team, our processes, it goes back to the levers, it's going to handle it. It's going to be able to handle that inbound stuff."

"It would be scarier to spend that bigger marketing budget if we didn't have the foundation of the team that we have because we know that they can lock it up, we know that dispo can sell it. The risk tolerance, I guess, is a lot lower because there's faith and trust in our team."

"Yeah, no, you're not doing anything new, you're just doing more of what you've already proven works, right, just at a higher level."

"Do you know what the metric impression share is? Have you heard that metric?"

"I've heard you say it before."

"Yeah, you've probably heard me say it before, you might have all over the podcast."

"Yeah, sure, I'm sure."

"Impression share is basically, think of it like market share for Google. It's like what percentage of what you could be getting are you getting with your budget, and where it's really telling is it tells you kind of contextually how many leads are you getting in a campaign compared to the number of leads that you could be getting."

"Here's the thing that's really exciting about your situation to me. If we look at the impression share on your campaigns, it is very low. A lot of people would view that actually really negatively, they would say I'm only getting a small fraction of my potential. I view that as you just did seven figures in PPC in a year with getting a small fraction of your potential. What does that mean your potential is?"

"Yeah, it's really, really high."

"And that's what naturally happens when you expand into more markets is that ceiling goes up and up and up because now you can spend whatever you can spend in this market plus whatever you could spend in that market and that market and that market. You can add those together, and it's this really high number."

"But not a lot of people, like for anybody listening to this, I encourage you to think like right now, do statewide vs metro area targeting. You have a lever in your business that you know you can pull and get more leads, right? A lot of people don't."

"Yeah, that's the really cool thing about PPC, in my opinion, is the availability of those metrics and the total scalability of the channel. Like if you told me you need 10 times the number of leads next year, I could absolutely make a plan to make that happen and I know it's possible."

"Especially if you're flexible on like what markets they come from or something like that, like it's, right? I mean, until like we've done that 10 times the number of leads thing like several times. You're not going to bump into the issue of like there not being enough leads out there."

"And that's just, it's insane potential, right? If you really think about it, like you figured out how to make something work on a small scale and then the only thing between there and this higher level is just multiplying more of what you're doing. And that could be done on the ads, that could be done in the team, and you'll run into new challenges, right? Like you'll go from being a leader to leading other leaders."

"Yeah."

"And you'll go from a small team to a larger team and you'll grow from $20,000 a month in ad spend to $200,000 a month in ad spend."

"There you go."

"And those are all like, like it's different, like it does change, but it's like that's the power of marketing, right? It's the ability to like scale a business. I'd bet to say 90% of businesses in America don't have that lever. If they needed to 10x their lead flow next month, they wouldn't have a way to do it."

"That's the first thing. I think a lot of companies, not just obviously wholesaling or real estate, but a lot of companies do. My mom has been in marketing forever. She's her Masters and everything in it, and she always says it's the first thing that every company wants to cut out."

"Yeah, that is exactly what happens."

"Yeah, I could tell you, like market shift last year, which is actually ironically when we started working together, which I didn't really piece together, that that was like, that was an interesting time in your business. You were cutting cold calling and scaling way back on like, you know, cold calling, texting, and jumping into a new marketing channel at $110,000 a month in Q4, the worst season in real estate right after like interest rates went from rock."

"A good idea, I need a hotter lead, I'm just kidding."

"Yeah, talk about risk, like you, you're just like layering on every possible unknown at the same time. And that was, I mean for a lot of people Q4 of last year was a tough time. I remember looking into our system and seeing how many credit cards failed from the clients that we were building, like spiked like November of last year, and like calling up these people and just like I don't, I just don't have money."

"Yeah."

"Like my business is just broke."

"We felt it too, everybody felt it."

"Yeah, everybody felt it in some level, even if you were doing okay from return on investment standpoint. Let's just say you're flipping, you're used to selling things in 30 days, now it takes 90 days to sell."

"It took a little bit longer, yeah."

"You just took your 30-day revenue and just spread it over 90 days, right? The people banking on it being returning in 30 days didn't plan for it in May."

"Yeah."

"So cash conversion cycles became like a really real thing. It was, and there were real issues in PPC too because people started like going online to search for, like they have their property that's been sitting on the market for 90 days. That was something you were getting blown up, including us. You were getting blown up by us about all the leads that were coming in that were listings and we like, we don't want your crap. And you guys obviously fixed it really quick."

"Well, there's multiple elements there. There's like some things that we did to optimize for and understand where they're coming from. But then there's also like, you know, now the market, that's just less common now than it was then because then, you know, the realtor told me I'd get an offer in a week and then now it's been a month and I haven't gotten an offer because when the realtor told me that, that's how."

"And then now that's not how it works anymore, you know, it's just a, you know, you know what they say, like, like down markets, okay, up markets, that's fine. Just the transition from up to down is hard for a lot of businesses. But I guess my point with that is we have clients come marketing and we had clients not. We even had clients double down during that period, and it was really interesting to see the businesses that did really well versus those that didn't."

"I even have one client, love them to death. They still haven't marketed all year, they're still just working old leads. They cut with us and I guess they just financially could not afford it, and they're playing this game, and they're just still like playing with these like $10,000, $20,000 months and just barely making payroll because they didn't want to lay off too much of their team and all this stuff like 12

months ago."

"Yeah, they're playing a different game now."

"They're just stuck in the cycle now, right? Because like now, they're on this treadmill, like, we got to make enough money so we can afford to market so we can afford to make more money and now it's."

"But do you think, okay, when I hear that, I think they, because that 20%, 80% rule, like they just didn't find what works for them."

"I think they just didn't have the faith to go in on it."

"Yeah."

"And to be clear, there were people marketing in Q4 of last year, like I just said, that really struggled because the market was really tough."

"It was a new channel for us."

"Yeah, that was one of the bigger challenges is like it takes some time to get up to speed and figure out what works and everything. So you were still kind of figuring it out, even when you were, you know, doing that, but you had the faith that you knew that you had to invest in it to get it to the point where it would be working really well."

"Yeah, yeah, it was scary. I would probably not do that today, you know? Not at all."

"Well, you don't have to because you already made the investment. You already have the learning curve and everything."

"Yeah, it was scary, dude, it was crazy."

"Yeah, it was, and we knew we were playing a long game, but if it doesn't work, if the markets aren't there, we're not going to get any return, like you just get burned."

"But I'm going to tell you, one thing that we did, I think we did well, is we surrounded ourselves with the right people. You know, like yourself, you know, we talked to Justin. Justin always had a lot of faith in PPC, and we had to, the first time we made the switch, it was based off of trust, right? We trusted you, we trusted Justin, and we're like, okay, let's give it a go, and like, you know, we'll make adjustments as we go."

"Yeah."

"And that's it, you know, that's what we did."

"But think about it, I mean we're getting a crap ton of leads. So, but think about that. What do you think most of the leads are coming from? They're coming from towns, they're coming from cities, like you know, where people are living. So, that's something you also have to think about, right? People are not just all coming from these random little areas, you know what I mean? Because there's nobody there. So absolutely, we get leads all the time in metro areas, towns, and statewide. You're getting leads from cities, so it's like cities within the state."

"Exactly, where people are living."

"Yeah, fair enough. So yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. I think there's an element of budget here too. Sometimes if people go at it with a small budget, like let's just say I have three grand and I'm spreading it across the whole United States, what am I going to get there? I'm going to get a ton of leads, like there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm probably going to get some of those most rural leads versus a lot of people I know that are doing really well with statewide campaigns. They do have a little bit of a larger budget, which means that they're getting the bad ones and they're getting the good ones. Then you need an acquisitions checklist for like it has to fit these criteria for me to pursue this as a lead because if you pursue everything, then you know, they can waste all their time with all these leads that'll never actually dispo. So you kind of have to understand what's going to be able to be disposed of. It has to be within like however many miles of a town that has at least whatever population, for sure, or you have to look at InvestorLift and find this many cash buyers nearby."

"Do you guys do something like that or does your team?"

"No, I actually don't. I think that's a fantastic idea. I'm actually probably going to look into it more. It sounds like you're basically doing it because you're saying like you have to be able to disqualify leads, but maybe systematize it more. And that's probably due to it just being the past few months that you guys are doing more rural marketing and you probably feel that pain eventually and build the process around it. Let's talk strategy then. I think it's an interesting case study to look at your situation because you've got a backyard where you get awesome spreads. You have specific rural targeting that's working well for you. You're getting a five to six times return, so you don't want to get rid of that necessarily, but could we do it with less work? What if we move to a situation where we're doing $30,000 spreads on average, and with that, we can achieve the same revenue with fewer deals and maybe with the same team, right? Achieve more revenue. Very real things to think about."

"100%. I'm just blurting out a strategy and I want you to tell me what you think about it or how this solves or doesn't solve the problems. I like the idea of running two campaigns side by side. I think the biggest thing that you do within Google is target different costs per lead across those campaigns. I think the mistake that people make is they target rural Texas and Southern California in the same campaign, and what happens then is you don't get many leads from Southern California and you get a lot of leads from rural Texas because what that campaign is going to do is it's going to bid the lowest that it can and still get leads because you're telling Google you want as many leads as possible. It doesn't mean you can't get leads in Southern California, but you're not going to win those auctions very often. So ideally, you have your Southern California campaign, you have your rural campaign, you might want to consider getting a third campaign if the goal is to get spreads up. If you could target a bunch of areas that have really high assignment fees similar to Southern California but just other markets. The thing about California is it has the largest assignment fees. I don't know anybody anywhere that has larger spreads than you can find in Southern California, but you can increase it significantly if you're staying in places like the top cities in Florida, Texas, and the DMV area. There's a lot of markets that have high ARV and high spread markets. You could have a campaign targeted to those areas where you're not necessarily touching the rural stuff, but you'd have a significantly lower cost per lead than you would in Southern California. Assuming you have a dispositions process that works everywhere, you would likely have a lower cost per lead and then a lower deal spread, but maybe a little bit lower on the deal spread and then a lot lower on the cost per lead. So a disproportionately positive return on a campaign like that. Any thoughts on something like that?"

"100%. Like I said, I think we were kind of doing that just a little bit, but are you talking about setting basically a radius around the big metro areas? I think it was Robert Wiley who said someone was targeting places that had airports or NFL teams."

"Yeah, they don't have an NFL team then, yeah. Which is interesting. I mean, Utah doesn't have an NFL team, but it's a great market. But I get the point where it's like, and then you have Green Bay, it's not a huge market at all, but it has a huge NFL team. So it doesn't perfectly correlate, but yeah."

"Yeah, maybe targeting like five huge markets would be great, you know what I mean? We have good healthy spreads, like split-testing the campaigns. If you move into a couple more markets, you get a significantly lower cost per lead, but there are good spread markets out there. But I think the pain that you're feeling right now, based on how your marketing is set up, that makes you think to go from a bunch of states to Southern California, you're playing way over here and way over there. I'm suggesting maybe playing in the middle a little bit too. There might be some good middle ground, and because you have a bunch of states where there's a high variance in the profit per lead, like the profit per deal, you have some Midwest states where you're going to do slim spreads and you've also got areas like Dallas Fort Worth that are awesome markets with large spreads. If you put them together, you're just naturally going to find more leads and more deals in the areas where there's smaller spreads because they're the less competitive areas. If you just have a campaign that still targets a lot of areas but you set the bar for like, I will not include any area in here that doesn't have a spread at least this high, then you start to play in that higher spread game, but you still get the benefits of a cost per lead to a more national campaign. Of course, you have a higher cost per lead than if you're going really rural, but it plays in between the two things you're talking about."

"Yeah, 100%. I've been thinking about it all year, figuring out the right way to dial it in. But the really smart thing you're doing is not burning the ships, saying, yeah, I have a 5-6x return on this rural campaign, but I'm going to completely ditch that and jump into this new thing I'm excited about. That's the impulse that a lot of entrepreneurs have that you kind of have to be careful about. There's a time and place for that."

"Well, like I said, we're really ramping up our direct mail campaigns. At this moment, we're sending out 30,000 pieces of postcard a month. We want to get that up and going, get a couple of deals under our belt, and then we're going to start playing around again with our areas."

"Totally makes sense. Would you do direct mail in many markets?"

"No, just Southern California. It's a lot harder to scale by the time you figure out how to do the data in a lot of different markets versus PPC, it's really easy."

"Yeah, and I know, like I said, we're excited to do some bigger deals this upcoming year."

"Totally makes sense. Anything else on marketing? What's the secret to marketing?"

"The really interesting thing about marketing for a business like this is here you guys are doing seven figures in revenue, and you don't even have a marketing person for me to talk to. It's really common in this industry, even if you're growing a lot. If you leverage the right partnerships with good vendors, you don't need a marketing person. They call it a marketing and sales business. I was talking to a friend of mine, Vance Courtney, the other day. He was in the Collective Genius in the same group you were in for a time. What he told me is people call it a marketing and sales business. I don't agree; it's just a sales business because you can outsource marketing, but you can't outsource sales. If you really think about it, you're just running a sales organization. If you get good vendors for marketing, you can outsource transaction coordination. You're just selling deals to buyers, buying them from sellers."

"True story."

"Yeah, which is super cool. Any last comments on marketing? Anything you could do better or others could do better?"

"No, just like I said, that is a position in itself. We do plan on probably bringing on a marketing director after probably 2025. It's just still needed in this industry, but you can go a lot longer without."

"Well, that's awesome. Super grateful for the time you guys have invested into this and for having me out here. Thanks for talking all things marketing."

"Thank you, it's been a ton of fun."

"Awesome."

"Brother."

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Eric Lyman is a visionary real estate investor who leverages the Novation model and cutting-edge technology for a sustainable competitive edge. As co-founder of Impact House Buyers, his focus on constant improvement and transparent sales processes powers their growth. Eric's passion extends to empowering others through his Investor PowerUp training program, designed to help new real estate wholesalers reach their full potential. Through leadership, innovation, and a commitment to giving back, Eric is helping shape the future of the industry while building a legacy of empowered entrepreneurs. In this episode, Eric Lyman shares his laser-focused approach to real estate investing via novations. Specializing in this single exit strategy, he reveals his systems for structuring virtual novation deals nationwide. Eric discusses managing risk, working with remote realtors/contractors, and leveraging the MLS. He unpacks his lean two-person business model, key metrics, and lifestyle goals behind this simplified operation. A must-listen for novation mastery.

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Want to learn how a small-town real estate investor closed over 400 deals last year? Eric Brewer spills the beans on scaling a business with his "innovator's edge" strategy, revealing hidden profit channels and essential leadership insights.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Eric Brewer. Eric Brewer's company flips or wholesales over 400 houses every year. Today he shares with me some of the lessons that he's learned over that process through implementing different exit strategies and developing as a leader to help his company grow. Welcome to the podcast Eric, how you doing?"

"Doing great man, how are you?"

"Hey, fantastic. Excited to talk with you again. I can tell you, you're one person every time we talk I learn something and I appreciate that a ton. So I'm excited for you to be on this podcast, mostly selfishly, mostly just because I want to learn a few things from you."

"Cool, well I'll do my best not to let you down. We'll see how we do."

"So for people listening to this podcast that might not know you, might not know who you are, your background or anything like that, could you share just a little bit about like, you know, who are you? What have you done? Like the history of how you've gotten to where you are today and then you know, what are you doing now?"

"Yeah sure. So I am in York, Pennsylvania. It's a relatively small rural area about 45 minutes north of Baltimore, Maryland, and about 30 minutes south of the capital of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. And then about 3 and a half hours east of Pittsburgh and an hour and a half east of Philadelphia. So if you sort of triangulate that stuff, I am in the southern east portion of PA closer to Baltimore than really any other notable area. I am a real estate investor, been doing it since 2006. Currently have roughly 40 plus employees. We operate in three markets within two hours of our home office here. We did just north of 400 real estate deals last year. I got my start really in business in the automobile industry. Went out of high school, went into the army, got out of the army, got into the car business, spent eight years in the car business. Really learned how to sell there, learned how to manage, learned a little bit of marketing. Got burned out. The car business back in this would have been the late '90s early 2000s was very demanding from a schedule perspective and it's never been known as like the most enjoyable atmosphere to either sell or buy in, right?"

"I think uh most people that sell cars don't love the experience and I don't know, Consumer Reports said a couple years ago that like 98% of people that bought a car didn't love the experience as well. So I was, you know, that was catching up to me. The hours were weighing on me and I was about to have my first child. So in 2005 I left the car business, did some soul searching, decided to get into real estate, started my real estate career in finance. Was basically cold calling refinance leads at a mortgage company and after doing that for about six months, my previous mentor from the car business got into real estate, knew that I had made the transition out of the car business and called me. And uh a couple days later we partnered up and in February of 2006 we started flipping houses."

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Looking to break free from traditional real estate constraints? Join Chris Prefontaine as he unveils his "three paydays" system for acquiring properties without mortgages, sharing insider strategies from over three decades in the industry.

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"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Vitman, and today I'm joined by Chris Prefontaine. Chris specializes in creative finance, and we talk about some of the strategies that they use and how, in his opinion, creative finance is a lot more attractive than wholesaling or flipping.

Chris, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?"

"I'm awesome. Thanks for having me, Brandon."

"Yeah, super excited for you to be here and to get to know you a little bit and understand your unique perspective on real estate investing. For those listening that aren't familiar with you and your background, would you mind just sharing a little bit of your story and what you've done and how that's kind of led you to where you are today?"

"Yeah, so I've been at this 33 years. For the sake of protecting their time and not putting them to sleep, we'll do this quickly. I'm from New England. I can go quickly, Brandon. So yeah, I've been at this 33 years. I will tell you that I've touched a lot, not all niches in real estate. I did some building back in the early 90s, owned a brokerage, sold out to Coldbanker. That was around 2000. That led up to sort of what I call the debacle, the crash of '08. And what that did - why I wanted to get you there - is what that did, the crash of '08, it really caused a lot of re-engineering in the business. And it's why and how we exist today, meaning I got out of that and said, 'All right, what are the things that I need to change or would like to change?'

And they were as follows: One, no signing personally on bank loans, like taking conventional loans out anymore, because I learned the hard way what happens when the market crashes. Two, as we talked about off-air, let's work on - when I reengineered it, I said to myself and my family, 'Let's re-engineer this so that we work on a deal not being so transactional.' If you will, like I built a home, I got a check, good check, but had to do it again to get that same check. Or a rehab, or as a broker, they were all transactional.

So we trademarked what we call the three paydays. We go out and buy real estate. We buy it without banks, we buy it creatively, but we also now teach that out in the field and have for, gosh, I don't know, 12 years or so. And when I say teach it, as I said to you offline, we don't just sell things. What we do is we say, 'Hey, let's lock arms, let's do these deals together,' because the biggest gap in real estate education is people not implementing, and mainly because they're afraid or don't have the support.

And so that's what we do. The company, Smart Real Estate Coach, has now been on Inc. 5000's fastest-growing companies for the last three years because the model works, plain and simple. So I can go back to any piece of that, Brandon, but I just want to kind of give an overview for now."

"Yeah, that's super helpful. So I guess if we can get down to the details of it, what is it that you're usually helping people with that they don't understand before they work with you, or they don't know how to do?"

"Let me answer that by saying, because I always try to give real stories, it reminds me of my story. Like, I was in the business 18 years before pivoting to laser focus on creative real estate, real on your terms. Why? I don't know why I didn't at first, but the fact is that creative real estate right now, unbeknownst to most, is by far in 33 years under the most demand right now. And there's a bunch of reasons why.

One, interest rates. Crazy interest rates right now, so many people got pushed to the side. For buyers, that means sellers are having a tougher time. Two, we're at like the third time in 50 years where it was an affordability issue. All these things scream loudly and pull on the people that know how to pivot in the market for creative real estate.

Because I know for your listeners and your experience, everybody would agree that there's one constant in real estate, and that's that it keeps changing. And so many people go, 'Well, I got to time this, and I got to go in this geographic area,' and the fact is, you don't. You need to know how to pivot in up, down, or sideways markets. And you do that by becoming that sort of transaction engineer that knows how to creatively pivot, and that's the best thing that you could do for yourself in your business right now."

"Okay, yeah, that's super helpful. And I know that a lot of, just from speaking with our clients, I know that creative finance is - I mean, obviously, there's a lot of different things that can mean, right? Lots of different ways that you can do this. And I know that we have some clients that do focus on it quite a bit, and then for many, it seems to kind of be like the thing that you maybe pull out once in a while when you're not able to come to an agreement with a seller on price for a cash deal or something like that. It's kind of like that last trick up your sleeve when other stuff doesn't work.

So anyway, with that context, can you help me understand, like, when you say creative, what exactly are you referring to? What are your favorite strategies, and how might it be different from somebody who's listening to this and saying, 'Oh, creative finance, I got that. I do that already'?"

"No, I totally get it. So a couple things you said that are super important, I'll tie it all together. One is a lot of people in our community came to us because, say, they were wholesaling or flipping, and there's a lot of things that don't fit in that box that they throw away, literally like hundreds of leads that they throw away. So to your point, they can use the creative as a, 'Hey, I'm capturing all these leads I was previously throwing away,' like literally hundreds for a lot of wholesalers. Number one.

Number two, what's neat is we, in our community, we do the opposite of what you said, Brandon. I lead all the time, every time, with creative real estate. And what does it mean to us? To answer your question, one of three things. Okay, very niched down because you are right, creative can mean so many things within one deal.

One is owner financing. We niche this down very specifically to owner financing with free and clear properties. So they have no mortgage, and we do so by making monthly principal-only payments. This is a huge sort of recession hedge, if you will. If you get a long enough term and you're paying principal-only payments, I don't care what the market does, literally do not care what the market does. So you have a chance to do 0% interest.

And I was on a show recently, and the host said, 'Well, yeah, but the free and clear properties probably went down because of the interest rates and everybody took on HELOCs and whatnot.' And I said, 'Uh oh, I better check.' Check my stat - fact is, in the last decade, free and clear properties went from about 33% of the population, like literally 33%, to about 39.3%. So almost 40% of the properties in the United States are free and clear. Why not just go target or kind of fish in that pond? So that's how we do owner financing.

And just to clarify this, you don't have to stay in the residential world. I bought my office building the same way with no underwriting and no garbage that you have to go through to go through the commercial grueling process if you had to go conventional.

Second way we buy is subject to. So next best thing to 0% interest is what? Two or three or 4% interest. We're buying homes as recent as this week in Florida. I grabbed one at 2.6% interest, buying them subject to the existing loans. Plenty, plenty of people that are going, 'Wow, I'm in trouble. I got this extra house,' or doesn't matter how good the rate is, they got to get out. That's a very cool strategy right now, both of those.

And then the third is very standard, good for a new person: lease purchase. I say good for a new person because our agreements have built into like a $10 deposit, and you can tie up these properties, not own but tie them up and control them.

And I think the kicker here, Brandon, is sort of what a lot of creative people don't do is we've trademarked it: the three payday system. Meaning, when I do a deal, it's great to get paid once, like I said, transactionally. But the way I set it up, and I write about in the book that your whole tribe can get, is they get now money. Everybody gets now money when they do a deal, but then that sets in motion sort of some continuous cash flow and then long-term cash out and wealth building. That's an ideal model so you can get off the treadmill every few months or every few years and not feel like you got to be on this proverbial treadmill to keep earning the dollars. If that makes sense."

"Yeah, that does make sense. So help me understand, like, really specifically, what these paydays are. Like, what - I mean, sounds like you very specifically say like there are three. Could you walk me through, like, a - let's just say an example deal. It doesn't have to be a real deal, but like, put some fake numbers in this and let's just understand how this usually works."

"Sure. So there's a big - this is, in my opinion - again, I'm pretty opinionated with the industry of education and real estate - there are a lot of public podcasts and YouTube videos right now, with no names I don't need to mention them, that'll come on and say, 'Hey, we exit all our properties rent-to-own, and I don't care if the buyer ever gets qualified during the rent-to-own process because I get to go out and do it again and collect another check.' And that, although that may be correct legally for them, morally and ethically, it stinks. Because what do we want to do when we exit all our properties rent-to-own? We want to make sure we set the buyer up to win and cash out the property and eventually own the property.

So here's how the three paydays work then. I want to work with - Brandon, let's say that you're in a W2, and because of COVID or personal reasons, you left and you started your own business. I want to work with you because you're not bankable today, but yet you probably have good credit, you probably have some cash, and you probably were ready to buy a house. But now you're not bankable. You can't start your own business and get a loan tomorrow. Banks are going to need two years of tax returns to get you qualified.

So I work inside that realm with buyers that are true buyers that just need time. And payday one comes in when they step up to the table like they were ready to do when they didn't know they couldn't get financing, and they put down a down payment somewhere between 5 and 10% - let's say - of the property I have. That's payday one. That's now money. That's like that transactional piece.

Payday two is the spread between the payment I'm making to the bank on that underlying loan that I'll never be on personally, remember, or the payment I'm making to the seller and what I'm collecting during the rent-to-own process. There's a delta there. That's payday two.

And payday three - and I'll give you the numbers on this in a second - and then payday three is really cool because it's the cash-out, increase in the price, you know, the increase in the sales price. But it's also all of the principal pay down throughout the term of the deal. You cash that out at the end.

All three paydays in our community range from a low of 45 grand to a high of 350,000 per deal. That's pretty lucrative. For our family business, myself and my son, it's about 75 grand per three payday per deal. We're in the lower end just 'cause the price range in New England.

So that gives you an idea of how lucrative one deal can be. I wanted to throw that in there because I'll get a rehabber that calls me, and says - I get like six of these a year from one rehabber, and he'll say, 'Hey, Chris, I can't make heads or tails out of this deal. There's no money in it.' But a three payday system can eke out, you know, six figures all day long. That's a big difference for people that are not used to how to create those kind of dollars out of thin air, literally."

"Yeah, that totally makes sense. One thing I've seen, and I'm curious how you combat this, and maybe this is just a weird question, but bear with me 'cause one thing that we deal with often is we're trying to look at like marketing return on investment. And it seems like everybody, when they're wholesaling, has an idea of how you calculate marketing return on investment. It's just well, when we make 20 grand on the deal, then, you know, and we spent five grand to get it, that's a 4X return, right? It's pretty simple.

Once you get into like three separate paydays and the time value of money and stuff like that, it gets kind of messy. And what I've seen is that, in my opinion, a lot of our clients just kind of undervalue their creative deals because they're like, 'Oh yeah, that's a deal, and I'll make a lot of money on that eventually, but I'm not really making that much money now.' And because of that, let's just not include that one in our return on investment, or let's just put it in at 10 grand, whatever the case is.

Like, do you deal with that problem commonly? Or like, how do you recommend dealing with like comparing creative deals to other deals that you're doing in your business? And because this gets important even when we're going beyond just like the business owner making the decisions to like the team making the decisions and the metrics that they're held accountable to and the fact that they're trying to hit revenue numbers for company. And like, I feel like there's just like some some natural like apples to oranges kind of comparisons happening here. And how do you deal with that?"

"Yeah, see if this answers your question because this is interesting that you bring it up. So if I do a deal - I'll use the deal I just did in Florida. So we're about to close on this. Buying it for - I'm going to use round numbers - we're buying it for 350,000 by taking on the property subject to the existing loan and then giving the seller a little bit of equity in four years, no interest, no payments.

How much am I going to spend to calculate my return on investment? How much am I going to spend to buy this house? Zero money down. But because we're giving them zero money down, this young couple, we can't expect them to pay their transfer tax. Right? So we will have an expense of, let's just say $2,500 for a round number. Okay, on $2,500, what will we create for return on investment?

Well, we'll get a down payment of about 10%. That's going to be about $40,000. That's day one. So let's just look at the first year. We'll create a monthly spread of about $500. So that's six grand a year. So in year one, on a $2,500 investment, if you will, to buy that house, we're going to pull in about 46 grand. So in year one, if I compare that to anything else, it's not infinite, but it's very strong, right? You do the math.

So, and then it just depends on when you cash it out. But the neat thing about the way we structure our three payday is I can take a four-year deal and turn it into a 10-year deal and turn it into a 20-year deal. I can do anything I want depending on what cash flow needs I'm encountering right then. I don't know if that helps your question with the ROI. I think I - I think I was tracking with you, but you tell me if I wasn't."

"No, it does, it does make sense. So one way that you're talking about is like basically how much money are we going to make in year one from the property and comparing that to - comparing that to the other - to the other types of exits. I guess what I'm getting at now is I feel - it feels to me that a lot of the companies we work with are kind of undervaluing their creative deals based on the fact that it takes a while to to get the money. And and like, how do you - you know, how you deal with that, which is which is interesting 'cause you do great creative mostly. How many of your deals are not creative, or are you just 100% creative with the deals?"

"We do mostly creative now. We'll make decisions internally, Brandon. We'll go, 'Hey, we're - it's about time we bring on a whole - a buy and hold.' So recently, I got with our assistant who's been with us for nine years, and I said, 'Hey, here's a zip code. I want you to mail postcards,' which we don't do. We do all phone work, so we don't spend money unpredictably. But I'll pointedly say, 'Hey, let's go grab a 4 to 10 unit.' How do we do it?

We buy a free and clear list of owners who are free and clear that have a 4 to 10 unit, and we'll go ahead and send those out. We'll look to do a buy and hold. But that's bought creatively still, it's just not exited right away. Most of our deals, if not all, are in the creative space for sure.

I just have this subversion, Brandon, and it doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just what I came out of the crash knowing and believing and staying with. And that is, I will not take out a bank loan and sign personally any longer. Maybe it's my age, maybe it's because I went through the crash, maybe it's all the above, but I will not do it. So I tell my students not to do it. And now, there are exceptions, of course, there are, but that's how I tell everyone: just buy creatively, don't be signing on the personal guarantee line ever."

"Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That's super fascinating. So do you have any advice - like obviously this can get pretty complicated from the standpoint of everything involved in the transaction, and you're working with these sellers. I think a lot of people don't lead with creative just because a lot of the other stuff is a lot more simple and oftentimes is what more like what the seller is asking for in creative. Like, nobody goes - I - I would highly doubt that people are coming to you saying, 'I want to do some type of like creative finance solution to sell my house.' Like more often than not, they probably want something like a cash deal, and then you're kind of showing them, you know, the value of what you do with creative. So can you help me understand like what that conversation looks like with the seller and how you take this like complicated thing and make it easy for them to understand?"

"Yeah, yeah, very good question. So my conversation goes like this - I mean, I had one right before this call, right before this interview. My conversation goes, 'Hey, Brandon, I see you want X. If I can get you full price, are you open to doing that over time via owner financing or lease purchase?' And they'll say, 'Well, no, I want, you know, I want to sell.'

I get it. 99% of the homes I buy, the sellers want conventional full price cash. I say it kind of facetiously, but then I add the 'but,' and the 'but' is: Right now, if you talk to top-producing mortgage brokers - and I share this with a seller - about 17 to 20% of the applicants can get a loan today. That's low. That's a very low pool of buyers. So if you don't get full price in the time you want and you don't need your cash today to go buy another home, I'm a great plan B. And so that's where we get all our leads, and that's been the case for the last, again, 12 or 13 years.

You'd be surprised, though, to your earlier point, like some sellers do seek out owner financing from a buyer. My building I bought November of '18 - I just sold it recently, but I bought it in November '18, and he said to me in frustration, 'Hey, Chris, I have brokers coming in my door saying, "Hey, I have buyers, I have buyers."' He said, 'They don't understand it. I want owner financing for estate and planning reasons and tax reasons.' Like, some intelligent, sophisticated owners of single families, multis, and commercial want and require owner financing for personal reasons. So there's that component.

And the other component is we're doing a deal right now - again, I'm doing all current stuff - this week a student called me at 8 a.m. this morning and got me on the phone with a couple. That's what we do, we help with that. It's a young couple, it's a sad story, but they have to get out of the house. They're three months behind, they don't have a choice. The credit's already beat up. If they let it go, as you know, they're going to be beat up for 3 to 7 years. We're going to come in, cure the arrears, and buy that subject to. That is a gift to them for sure.

So there's all those moving parts. There's the free and clear person that wants creative and wants all their money, and then there's the person on the other end of the spectrum that is in dire needs and needs you to come in and understand how to structure that. So we do both."

"Yeah, that totally makes sense. Well, thank you for sharing some of this, Chris. It's super fascinating. So I understand that you have a book, right, that people, if they want to learn a little bit more about this, they can somehow get?"

"Yeah, so we don't do - I again, I'm going to talk about the industry again and poo-poo on that a little bit because a lot of times I'll personally look at a book, look for a book offer, right? And I get all the way through to the screen where I put my address in, it says, 'Okay, pay $8 for shipping.' I'm like, 'I thought it was free.'

So we will send you for free, no shipping, one of our - we have four, but one of our bestselling books, which describes sort of what you and I have been talking about. It's called 'Real Estate on Your Terms.' Just go to WickedSmartBooks.com - that's Wicked Smart Books with an S - dot com, slash Vitman and the number one, numeric number one. And we'll ship that out to you.

And then you and I were chitchatting before the show, we do have our annual live event. We've done this since 2016 when we were in a basement of a Chamber of Commerce, and now it's done at a larger scale. That's in Boston, Massachusetts. It's September 23rd and 24th. You can just go to QLS.live.com for information on that."

"Very cool. Thank you, Chris, for your time and generosity and sharing all your insights today. And for everybody else listening, I'll see you next week."

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Discover how to turn probate nightmares into profitable deals with attorney Al Nicoletti, who shares insider tips from 700+ transactions. Learn to spot deal-breakers early and navigate probate with confidence, all without upfront legal costs.

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"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Al Nicoletti. We talk all about probate: how long do probates take, what are some common reasons that deals blow up, and how can you avoid those things? How can you sniff out a good potential probate deal from a bad potential probate deal? Just all these things based on his experience. He's done over 700 probate deals in the State of Florida, so I hope you'll find the episode useful and I'll see you there."

"Welcome to the show, Al. Super excited to have you here. How you doing?"

"Good Brandon, I'm happy to be on the podcast with you."

"Man, yeah, I'm super excited for you to be here too. When I think in my mind of like people that bring energy to real estate investing, Al is right there at the top of my list. So really, really excited to have you here. You brighten up my day a little bit."

"For people that don't know you though, like it's every day, there's something going on. It's... I mean, my days, every day is crazy."

"Yeah, I fully believe you. Trust me, you don't have to tell me twice. Yeah, that's and you're kind of in that phase of a business, I think, where everybody feels that way a little bit. So yeah, that's crazy and there's probably a lot to talk about there. But for people that don't know you, haven't heard of you, or seen any of your content or something like that, just if you wouldn't mind, just like a brief summary. Like, who are you? What's your background? What do you do? Anything?"

"So I'm Al Nicoletti. I'm a probate attorney in Florida. I've been doing this for seven years now. I've done over 700 probates in Florida, working with a lot of investors, realtors, title companies. Where my specialty is, is I come in and help solve the problem when you're under contract with a seller or the title company tells you, 'Hey, we got to do probate.' And so there's some kind of probate involved. That's where I come in on the legal side to help overcome the issue, figure out and dissect what's going on, and see what the solution is and bring it to the closing table so that everybody can close. That's where I come in."

"When I first started doing this, Brandon, it wasn't just probate. It was a lot of the foreclosure world. So I got to see a lot of what was going on with the foreclosure defense, and then all of a sudden, probate kind of got dabbled in there. Because with pre-foreclosures, you're going to find distressed properties because somebody owned it, they either can't pay, they won't pay, or they're dead. So I found a lot of that."

"My background really started down in Miami, and I found my way to Jacksonville. Really found this niche, wild story that was with probate. And you know, I realized, Brandon, that there were just tons of opportunities out there where there's just lots of properties. A lot of them are titled where there needs to be a probate involved. And when I saw that model, I saw this niche where there can be somebody that can come in and provide a solution to the seller's problem. And ever since then, just blown it up, spoke everywhere, met with a lot of investors, and it's been a great journey. You know, it's crazy. I've had my own law firm for three plus years now, and we're scaling."

"Very, very cool," Brandon replied. "Yeah, thanks for sharing all that, Al. I mean, I think obviously probate is one of the biggest areas that investors love to focus on. You know, one of the places where you'll find the most distress. And I'm super curious just to like, you know, hopefully pull some wisdom out of your mind."

"I can tell you the number one thing I hear about probate. It happens all the time. Like, we have working with the client that get a deal under contract and they're like, 'Oh, but that's a probate one,' and they're like, they don't count it. They're like, 'Oh, it's just going to... it's going to take forever to get that closed.'"

"Like, I'm curious from your perspective. I mean, you've done 700 of these. Like, walk me through the process with the probate lead. Like, how long in your opinion - well, not necessarily in your opinion, but in your experience - does it take to bring something through the whole cycle?"

Al responded, "Yeah, so this has definitely been one of the things from the very beginning that I really explain to a lot of investors. Because for a long time before me, the investors were like, 'Wait a second, this is going to take six, nine months, 12 months, a year.' You know, and sometimes Brandon, I'm at presentations and they're like, 'Hey, this is going to take two years,' or you know, they think it takes two, three years."

"When I started doing this - so get a little of this - when I did my first probate, this was pre-COVID. I wanted to see like, what was really the potential here. So when I first filed the probate, I got the case number, I went downtown, judge looked at everything, signed, we were done. Literally, it took 4 days to do a probate."

"And when I saw what was going on, then I was like, 'Wait a second, is this like this in every county?' So COVID happens, we're all virtual, everybody's submitting things. I'm doing things all over the state and I'm really learning about what different processes are happening with different counties."

"The real answer is, I would say about 80 to 90% of these probates can be done within a matter of weeks, like four to eight weeks. That's my range that I like because some counties have different rules with checklists, procedures, and different hurdles that we have to overcome, some nuances. Some counties could be a little bit longer because they have different reviews. But the whole thing of 6, 9, 12 months - it doesn't take that long. And I think the procedures can be a lot faster."

"And to all the investors that are listening, I'd say this to you: whenever you get that lead that comes in, if it's inbound or outbound marketing, don't pass that probate off. I mean, there could be options with that. I'm only in Florida, I know you know that Brandon, but you know, a lot of people don't realize that there's options, there's people you can go to, there's experts that you can leverage that can help with that."

Brandon replied, "Now, that's helpful to know. So help me understand this: is it that probate doesn't take six or 9 or 12 months, or is it that it could take that long if you do XYZ, but if you do ABC instead, then it can be four to eight weeks?"

"So the idea of four to eight weeks is everybody's on the same page, everybody's holding hands, signing the contract, agreeing and moving to closing. Right? That's the beautiful part about it. That's where I explain that this thing can get done fast. It's where then you start having uncooperative people or maybe nobody signing documents, and you know, you have to track people down in the process to make them sign things. That's where the process, of course, is going to be longer."

"But when you have everybody together, which I'd say a high percentage is where everybody is just on the same page, that's when it's going to be done fast. We've had a few cases where when you have a missing heir, maybe, or uncooperative people, sure, those are going to take like three, four, five months, maybe longer. But the way to look at it is, in that deal, is it worth your time to wait that long if there is a solution because there's enough money in the deal to make it happen? That's where I tell a lot of people too, is like with these probates, the money's got to be there if this thing starts getting more complicated."

Brandon asked, "Does the legal representation that you have affect pretty strongly how long it takes? Like, could it just be that you work with - because you said like when people work with you, you can get it done pretty fast. Is it basically like, obviously if it takes you - if there's 64 heirs and you only have contact with 20 of them and you got to get the rest, like obviously that's going to take a minute or you just shouldn't do that. But you know, assuming everybody's holding hands and stuff, does the - let's take you out of the equation, you know, for those for people that are listening that aren't in Florida because if you're in Florida, you just hire Al, like it's simple. But let's just say I'm in Utah here. Like, what are some things I want to think through in terms of like who I hire, who I work with to make this happen fast?"

Al replied, "Yeah, so that's a great question. Sometimes we know people in other states. Like lawyers know people in other states, I know a few in other states. I don't know all the states, but one of my best recommendations is: one, get with somebody that is also doing high volume deals in that state. Why high volume? Because the chances of them finding a messy deal are higher than somebody doing just a one-off or one deal a month. The high volume investors are the ones that are really dialed in on making sure that they're having a specialty, a special attorney for that work."

"Another thing is local REAs, local meetups. There's always somebody that is having a problem with the deal, and when you go there, maybe they have an open mic night, maybe they have like a Q&A or like a networking event that you can really ask and find out."

"Also, you know, not every lawyer is the same. So what you really want to hone in on for finding that right person if you're getting into a messy deal, that right lawyer is, find out like what percentage of their practice really is probate or messy deals. Because there's a lot of lawyers that say, 'I do this, I do this, I do divorce, I do criminal law, I do mergers and acquisitions.' It's like, how do you do all that? I can't even do all that in one day."

"And it's because they're just throwing everything on the menu to see what sticks. You want to find somebody that's a specialist at what they do and find out what kind of volume are they taking on. You know, Brandon, ask me like what percentage of probate is my practice - it's got to be 95% to 100% basically. I mean, with the files that we have rotating all the time, and we're always in real estate deals. That's what you want to look for."

"Another one is just making sure that they get on the creative side. You know, another thing with probate lawyers, and now that we're on the topic of like, basically what do you want to look for in a probate lawyer, you know, what you want to look for too is that they're not just thinking about probate but also how does the deal get closed. You know, I've seen a number of deals, Brandon, where it's a complicated one where they think that they can just get one person to sign on behalf of others, and not every state's the same, not every rule's the same."

"And so you know, you hear it from one person, you hear 'Yeah, you can do it,' 'You can't do it.' You got to really make sure you're with somebody that sees the end, how do you close the deal. So the lawyer that can see the probate, get the probate done, but how do you close the transaction? That's the key. That's what I look at every time I look at a file. If you call me and you said, 'Al, I got this wild deal, you know, what do you think?' I'm not looking at it just probate. I'm like, how does Brandon actually get this closed?"

Brandon responded, "Okay, that's super fascinating. Thank you for sharing some of that. I mean, honestly, I've heard from a few people that they're a little bit scared of probate. Like there's just a lot there, and I have every end of the spectrum. One, I got a friend of mine that is proud of closing his probate deal where there were like 39 heirs or something, and he somehow got it done. I'm like, that - and he said it was absolutely not worth it, but it's a cool trophy deal, whatever you want to call it, right?"

"So I mean, there's that, and there's people that like will actually pass these kinds of leads and these kinds of deals up, or maybe they just don't see something. They don't see the opportunity because they don't understand the process. Like, help me understand, let's just say you're talking to an investor and they've got hundreds or thousands of leads in their system and some of those could be probate. Like, what are the common reasons that they might just be passing them up where maybe they shouldn't be?"

Al replied, "So maybe there's not enough money in the deal, maybe there's a lot of other issues with the property. Maybe, you know, I'm thinking first thinking land, right? So what could be the problems? It's landlocked, there's no rights of access, there's environmental issues. You know, forget the probate aside, there's all these other problems that they hear about. So they could be passing it off just because of that."

"Sometimes, sometimes the money's just not in the deal. You know, they may be able to lock it up for five and they're going to sign it out for 20, but then we do the probate analysis and there's going to be four probates. Well, the four probates are going to eat straight into the assignment fee, and then the deal doesn't make sense. Right? So sometimes it's about - sometimes it's not about the probate, but it's the margins, the money, and all these other auxiliary things going on."

"Another reason some people kind of get a little turned off by it is, we find out well, you think that there's three heirs, and then we have the consultation, and then we find out well, there was a fourth one that died before and they have seven kids. And it's like, wait a second, like so do we have to track down the seven kids? And it's like, yeah, you got to go find them. And some people don't want to get into it, right? Like this is the messy stuff."

"And there's a lot of investors that like, get excited, they get energy from like, 'Wait, we got to go find people?' I do this for a living. Like, I work with those kind of people, right? Like they find people for a living. So there's a lot of these little things."

"I always think it comes down to money. I think it comes down to, you know, getting around it. Sometimes the title companies have weird requirements, right? Or maybe the people are just crazy. Sometimes there's like, you know, crazy sellers and so they don't want to deal with them. Like, I don't mind crazy deals, I don't want crazy sellers. Right? So that's something that a lot of people want to avoid."

"But going to your point, Brandon, this niche can be one of the most profitable in real estate, I think. Because I've just seen so many investors recently where it's not 64 heirs, it's not 32 heirs, it's one heir, it's four heirs, and their assignment fees are like $800,000. Like, there's a big range of spread, and so finding two people or one, three people, like it makes a lot of sense because it's going to be their biggest deal and it changes their entire platform. It changes, you know, who they hire, who they get for acquisitions, can they get another TC, can they take on more. So it's a game-changer."

Brandon asked, "So you would say like in a typical situation, basically they'd be responsible for tracking people down, and then the attorney they're working with is just doing all the paperwork and all that kind of stuff to get it done, right? So that's kind of like part of like, who usually does that in a company? Is that like acquisitions that's responsible for tracking people down? Or like, just help me understand, like when someone's thinking, 'How do I do more probates?' and they're thinking like, 'How does this fit into the org chart and who does what?' What's normal?"

Al responded, "From my understanding, it's usually acquisitions, right? Or they'll have somebody underneath them, or you know, maybe go look for them or they'll hire someone. TCs are not usually doing that, they're just trying to like, you know, herd everybody together to sign things and do things. But acquisitions is just trying to find and locate people or, you know, maybe try to get more information from the seller."

"So you know, that's the one thing I've learned too that I think a lot of people can get valuable information is the acquisitions if they can ask the right questions to that seller, that you find out wait, there's more people. They know the family, they know where people are. I would say most of the time they know, and sometimes you have to ask like three times for them to be like, 'Oh yeah, there's a kid in New York.' It's like, well, where was that like, you know, six months ago?"

"Like, we just had a case where at first it was one guy, and then the story kind of changed, and all of a sudden like there's more people, and then all of a sudden there's more. So they all know, and sometimes, you know, another golden nugget for people is, you know, death certificates. If they're able to get - if they're able to get this to help like find more people, you know, or find the next lead, sometimes death certificates, if you're able to acquire them, will list an informant on it. And the informant usually has an address, a name, which is basically like another - it's a lead to a lead, right? It's another little clue so you can find out what's going on."

Brandon replied, "Totally makes sense. So let's just say, let's just say the financials of a deal sound right. Beyond that, if we know it's a probate situation, like for people a little bit new to probate, like what are the key questions they should be asking the seller to better understand is this an opportunity or is it not? Or maybe like along those lines, like red flags where you're like, you hear this, like just give up now, it's not going to work."

Al answered, "Well, definitely the crazy factor, right? Like that, that's got to - I mean, that I didn't even used to say that before. Now for me, it's like, it's definitely the crazy factor. They're out, right? So that's one. Two is, who are - who is that person that acquisitions is talking to in relation to maybe the title owner, right? So you want to find out like, who is this person in relation to them? Like, are they the cousin or are they like the child? And you have to know that because that person - very different people are going to have an authority to sign documents, move forward with a probate."

"And so you first have to ask it - if you're really talking to somebody far down the line like nephew and cousin or uncle, that's where you kind of have to put your red flag up about wait, there's got to be a little bit more to the story. It sounds too good to be true."

"I'd say that that's a big one. Of course, just listening out for what they're saying. You know, one thing I've learned is they'll tell you guys they're the only one, and then I find out that there's seven, right? So it's being able to ask the questions in a way that's going to pull out as much as you can. Right? You're only going to get so much."

"So finding out how many, how many children ever, right? It's crazy that we have to say it like that, but for some reason, like when you say it the second time, it like registers and they're like, 'Oh, ever,' and it's like, 'Yeah, like, like how many kids ever?' And then they tell you, right? So being able to ask these right questions."

"I have a checklist too, which could be a freebie for everybody out there, Brandon, which is, you know, some of the right questions to ask is, you know, where's the death certificate? Do you have the documentation that if we were able to move forward and I - you can put somebody in touch with an attorney, that we can do this, right? Do you have the death certificate? Do you have the will? Do you have the important heir info? That's really key as well."

"A lot of people don't realize like those are vital documents to being able to do a probate that lays the record for being able to say, 'Hey, somebody owned that property, they died, now we have to do this estate administration.' And I mean, there's so much to this. Like I see every day, a lot of times the sellers will also be really pushy to get the transaction going, and it's like, well why? Like, what, what, what's going on that we don't know? And I hear about this once in a while, and of course then we find out there's more kids, which is why they wanted to push it to the closing line because there's, you know, there's more people."

"So you know, just being able to ask these right questions up front and at least having a little guide for yourself that can help prepare you when you go to an appointment so you can find out what's happening."

Brandon responded, "Yeah, no, that's super, super good advice. And kind of along those lines, I mean, you sort of touched on this a little bit, but I just want to make sure I'm sucking everything out of your brain that can be found. Is there a - like, are there any other things you're noticing that are like reasons that deals are blowing up, just never getting closed, but are in your opinion avoidable if you did things the right way?"

Al replied, "Man, that's a really good question because - so I can think in my mind right now of a few deals that we've been scrambling on lately that have blown up not because of the probate, but one, you know what happens with foreclosures, there's a payoff, right? And then you think that the payoff is 220, and so your contract price is 260, right? And then all of a sudden you're ready to close, and then the bank shows the payoff and the payoff is 320. And it's like, well, you know, now what? You know, even if we increase the purchase price, dead deal. Like, doesn't matter. Like that's, that's it, right?"

"So we've seen some actually get messed up because the bank just refused and didn't provide the payoff, and now everybody's in a scramble. We've seen some that when you get probates, sometimes these properties are heading for a foreclosure auction, and that's like another niche I kind of get into as well. As like, if they're heading to an auction in two weeks or one week, you know, can we try to cancel and reschedule the sale? And I'd say about 85% of those have been successful. Sometimes the judge just says no, and we had one recently where the judge was like, 'Nope, we're not, we're not doing it.' Like, and we're - it's going to go to sale, and there's only so much you can do, right? You only have so much control, and you just do the best you can. So we've seen, we've seen some deals like that."

"Crazy sellers, sometimes everybody's under contract and they're just getting mailed, mailed, mailed, and somebody's just saying, 'Hey, I'm going to offer you a million dollars for your property.' And it's like, then they ghost, they ghost everybody, you know? So we've seen - I say more recently I've seen some of the probates go crazy not on the probate side, but like the after part, like when they're about to go to the closing table, when everybody's getting all their numbers crunched. That's when there's something happening."

"And we saw one recently too where the acquisitions was on great rapport with the seller, and there's multiple sellers. I mean, they took hours, Brandon, hours just building the trust, building the relationship, probate done, out - just ghost, ghost. And we never know, we never know why sometimes."

Brandon asked, "Fair point. And there's no - like, help me understand, 'cause again, prob- just not something I know a ton about, but like, let's just say you're under contract with a seller and just normal wholesale deal. And the seller ghosts you, like, I know there's ways to deal with that. Like you file a memorandum or whatever the case is, so you can, you know, eventually get paid or, you know, prevent them from selling to another investor, whatever the case is. Can you do that with probate still? Like in the circumstance where like the seller just ghosts you? Or can you not do that in a probate situation?"

Al responded, "It - I was just having this talk with my assistant today. It's, it's a tough spot to be in, right? It's kind of the risk that you get into when you play the game. The hope is that everybody's gonna close, right? But then sometimes you get into ones where they do that. Sometimes there's a way, there really is a way. It's - there's probably a lot more work on my end that I have to get into to kind of enforce that, you know, go through maybe some kind of lawsuit or something like that to get a judgment. But it, it's really part of the risk, and the hope is that everybody, you know, will get to the closing table."

"At some point, there's an invoice and the title companies will add your invoice to the line item on the HUD, right? So it's, it's definitely - it's a lot harder than people realize. And yeah, I mean, of course we hear all the investors have the different strategies to making sure they're, they're in place in case that doesn't happen. Just in our world, it's a little different."

Brandon replied, "Okay, yeah, it's good to know that it is a little different. So I'm assuming then that your clients really appreciate that you just get paid at closing basically on this pro- I- that takes from their - from their plate that takes a lot of the risk off because then they're not thinking I'm, I'm like getting - I'm getting deep in debt here with Al just to get this deal closed. And then the seller ghosts me and then now I've got all these legal fees and I don't even have a deal."

Al confirmed, "Oh, that's one of the biggest selling points. It's probably the biggest selling point for my services, right? Because if investors know that wait a second, if I get a Florida probate and the title company says, 'Hey, we got to do probate,' or there's some kind of probate word that they hear, they're knowing, wait a second, I can get with Al, he'll wait until closing to get paid. Nobody's having to pay anything up front. And by the way, the seller is going to be all in because they don't want to come out of pocket because how many attorneys they've been to where they're being told, 'Hey, you need to pay us, you know, five grand up front.' And so they don't want to do that, right? But they want to - they're like, 'Hey, we'll wait until closing, no problem.' I can name so many people that are like, loving that strategy because it helps them do deals. I mean, some of the highest volume investors that you know, Brandon, love the strategy because they can just go deal after deal after deal and close and just get, get it done."

Brandon concluded, "Yeah, yeah, totally understood. Well, thank you for all the wisdom that you shared today, Al. It's super interesting. For people that want to get a hold of you for whatever reason - I mean, I imagine if you're in Florida, definitely hit up Al for any appropriate deals you might have. If they're in other states, I don't know if you want me to just tell them not to ever talk to you, Al, or if you still welcome the reach out, but yeah, they got to get a hold of you. How do they do that?"

Al replied, "Yeah, I, I'll say this, Brandon. If anybody is looking for somebody in Georgia, I know Georgia. There's - there's a couple states I know of. Illinois, knew somebody there. California, I think there's someone over there. There's a few states I know. So if somebody needs something like in a certain state, I don't mind at all. I'd say this: the best way to get a hold of me, if you're finding deals - because by the way, a lot of people are doing probates now in Florida, a lot of people are coming to the Florida market just because it's been so hot - find me on all the social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, under Al Nicoletti. My website, www.alnicoletti.com, and you can - if you need a call, 904-999-4953. And of course, I have my own podcast, the Al Nicoletti Show, which we had Brandon on. If you missed that episode going all into inbound marketing, you got to watch that episode. And we go live on the show 9:00 Eastern on Wednesdays, and a lot of people love watching that just because of the value on that too, just getting more info and they see me and they see you and it's just great. So that's where you can find me. I'm, I'm all over."

Brandon concluded, "Okay, very cool. Thank you, Al. Appreciate it. And to everybody else listening, I'll see you next week."

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Tired of wasting money on online targeting? Join Brandon and Garret as they share practical tips to maximize your digital marketing efforts, from refining audience targeting to converting leads effectively.

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Grab your notebook—this video is a game-changer! Join us as expert Brandon Bateman teams up with Jerry Norton and Robert Wensley to reveal strategic secrets for pinpointing high-potential neighborhoods that maximize your PPC ROI.

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Ever feel like you're tossing money into a black hole with your online ads, watching your budget vanish with no clue if it’s working? In this episode, we're cracking open one of the biggest mysteries in digital marketing: how long until your campaign actually starts working?

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm here with Landon Heeden, a member of my team. We're going to talk all about how long it takes for a Google Ads campaign to work. There are a lot of different directions we can go with this discussion. We'll talk about leading metrics, lagging metrics, platform learning versus optimization, and how those things often get mixed up. Ultimately, we'll address how long it takes for a campaign to work. Landon, how you doing today?"

"Doing well, how are you doing?"

"Fantastic! Excited to have you here. This is your... second? What's a better word for that? Um, this is your debut, the Landon Heeden premiere on the Collective Clicks podcast. Very excited to have you here, to have you be a part of the team."

"It's good to be here."

"Yeah, so we're going to get into the topic today, which is basically how long it takes for a PPC campaign to work. But before that, just because you're newer, would you mind giving a brief introduction so people know who they're talking to and where this random guy came from out of nowhere?"

"Yeah, you bet. So I'm Landon Heeden, I'm the director of account management here at Baitman. I've been in the digital marketing world for over 20 years, which makes me feel old, but it's true. I've been through... I mean, I've worked in a ton of different industries and areas in e-commerce, lead gen, bunch of stuff. It took a while to find a company that I wanted to land with, and I found Baitman in December, and I'm glad I'm here. So yeah, it's really, really good to be here."

"Yeah, I'm excited for you to be here too. Actually, I sometimes actively caution people against working with people who've been in digital marketing for a long time because sometimes they just... like to get some context here, I mean, you were basically doing Google Ads like when they first started existing, similar with..."

"Years after."

"Two years after, which I mean, in the world of ad tech, is so... like primitive in terms of the targeting and stuff. There's... in my experience, there's very few people who've like kept up well with the changes. If we're being honest, like this landscape is completely different than it was like three or five years ago in terms of how do you win with online marketing campaigns. Completely different game than it was five years ago, and a lot of people just have a hard time keeping up with that. You seem to do a good job with that, so I'm excited to have you like bring that wealth of knowledge and experience to the team with, you know, the ability to learn some new tricks and have..."

"There's always something new to learn. I think that's what's kept me in this for so long, is that it's always changing. It doesn't get boring, for sure."

"Yeah, so the topic today is really difficult. Really difficult question. Basically, let you know where this came from. I asked my team that manages our social media like, 'What's the most common question that you're getting right now?' And the most common question that we're getting is, 'How long does it take for a campaign to work?' Which is like the epitome of a loaded question. But where... you know, the answer to a question is a little bit complicated. I think it's good that we have time to just dig into a couple different facets of that and how those work. But yeah, where would you start? Like when you're thinking, let's just say you're talking to somebody and they're asking, 'How long does it take for a PPC campaign to work?' I mean, a lot of times they're asking because like maybe 'I have X amount of runway and it's got to work by whatever date' or maybe like 'I've been with another agency and it's been however many days and it's not working' or whatever the case is. Like everybody has their own reasons, but yeah, what are some of the things that come to your mind when you think about how long it takes for it to work?"

"Yeah, and I always translate that when a client's asking, it's 'How long till we can start making money?' basically. When they say 'How long does it work?' Which also, that's a whole another loaded question. But I think there's really no standard answer as far as how long it'll take to work. I think it depends on a lot of different things. It depends on targeting, it depends on budget, conversion cycles. And I've always broken it into two different areas: we've got learning and then we've got optimization. And so, I think a lot of people could confuse those two. They say, you know, 'It takes about three to six months for the campaign to learn.' That's not true. The campaign learns within about two conversion cycles, whatever that is. So if you're selling cars, it's different. In this particular industry, it's very, very quick. We've got motivated sellers and it happens, you know, generally within a week, I would say, sometimes a little longer. So if you talk about two to three of those conversion cycles, that's how long it takes a campaign to learn. So very, very quickly."

"Now when you talk about optimization, now we're into a whole different world. That's more what the client's asking is, 'How long is it going to take for this to work?' That's more the optimization stage. And I think there, you know, we talk about patience, profit, growth, and we can break them into like three, six, nine months. That's more of where we get into..."

"Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. I just add like a ton of clarity to what you're saying. You know, when we say conversion, what'd you say? Conversion cycle?"

"Conversion cycle, yeah."

"A lot of people were just... just thinking like real estate investors, they probably heard that like, 'Oh, cash conversion cycle, a week? You serious? What kind of business do you think we're in?' So I mean, that's where... and that's kind of why we're doing this, like break down these different pieces and how they work. You know, so what Google's looking at is how long does it take for Google to get a conversion, which is basically a sign of success of something from the leads, which is usually going to be like... everybody measures it differently. The way we usually do it by default is we're going to measure what we call a 'qualified lead' as a conversion. It's not exactly a lead, it's not exactly a deal, it's like somewhere between where we like verify it's a lead that meets certain quality criteria. That's what we're going to call a conversion."

"So it's how long does it take between a click happening and us getting that conversion to Google Ads, because it's got to get feedback happening a few times for it to get smarter. This is like the... this is like the stereotypical like digital marketing learning of a campaign. Like you turn it on and then the first two weeks of the campaign are just garbage. Like that's what we're talking... like you can't... get it to like spend your money correctly, does it, and you have a high cost per lead, whatever the case may be, right?"

"So that's like the... a lot of people call it like a learning phase of the campaign. And you're totally right, a lot of people think it takes three to six months for that to happen. Not really, it takes probably two weeks. I mean, some... depends on your budget. You got a tiny budget, then... 'cause there's the conversion cycle that needs to happen, and then there's also like a certain amount of data for Facebook or for Google to even know that the conversion cycle happened and have like statistical significance around that learning. So there's an element of both that's definitely important there. But a lot of people don't realize, yeah, that happens pretty fast. Maybe it's like two weeks, but it also can happen again and again, you know."

"Something some people know, some things about... like you kind of with PPC campaigns, sometimes you want to be a little bit slow to touch them because the more you touch them, the more you go back into the learning phase, right? In your experience, what are some things that kind of reset that learning? Like what kind of changes are you worried about making?"

"Still, the biggest change would be bid strategy. I think that's the biggest change. You know, and I've had plenty of clients do that where they get a week or two into it and it's like, 'Hey, let's... we should... we should try this strategy instead' or 'Can't we just... can't we just manage the clicks manually?' Bid strategy is the biggest one. That's... I mean, that's 100% starting right over from square one."

"And then another one, this is probably the most common one, is budget. So a client will start out with, you know, let's just say $5,000 per month, and then you get a week into it and they're like, 'Hey, we just talked and had a marketing meeting. We actually want to spend $10,000 and we want to add another state or another metro area.' So budget and targeting, I think, are also... if done correctly, budget won't change things as much as targeting will. But if you change the budget, and that's not just adding, that's also taking away, because you got to realize that within those two weeks of learning, Google now has X amount of money, right? And if you change that, you're pretty much starting that over again. So it's a whole different discussion when we get into optimization with budget. But yeah, the learning phase: budget and targeting and bid strategy."

"Yeah, 100%. You know what I also noticed? When we started using Target CPA as a bid strategy, it's not nearly as sensitive to budget changes as something like Max Conversions. Because Max Conversions, if you change your budgets without actually trying, you just change your bids also."

"Yep."

"And so now you have budgets that changed and bids that changed. So it's more learning versus Target CPA. You can keep your bid steady and change your budget, which is... yeah, which is interesting. But it's kind of like the magnitude of the change, right? This is why a lot of marketers recommend like incrementally increasing budget. You don't want to just 10x your budget all at once. Like go up 20% and then go up another 20%, etc., so you avoid like deeply putting the campaign into learning."

"I think targeted locations would be the same. You know, if you're going to add one little city, increase the population your campaign's targeting by 5%, that's... it's not really that big of a change. But if you're going to go from just targeting Columbus, Georgia to targeting Florida and Georgia, North Carolina, that's... that's a big, big change. Like that's a different campaign. A lot of the things that Google learned before aren't... aren't as applicable. So would you agree with the statement that like the magnitude of the change is... you know, roughly correlates with the magnitude of the learning that's going to need to happen in the algorithm after the change is made?"

"Yeah, I would agree with that."

"That makes total sense. So... so about the first level, right? Like... and I think that's how most marketers would look at it, is like if you're being asked, 'Well, how long does it take for the campaign to work?' Like, well, the algorithm's got to get like past its learning phase. But here's the thing: let's just say we start that today and then in two weeks we're out of the learning phase. Do we have more money in our bank account than we did when we started? The answer is probably no, right? So I think the answer to this question from like a business owner standpoint is really different than how like a lot of marketers would approach it. What... so let's just say we're taking out like the algorithmic... what else are we thinking about? Taking it out of... taking out the..."

"So you're talking about after the learning phase?"

"Yeah, after the learning phase. Like, what else needs to happen for us to work?"

"Yeah, so that's... and that's where this kind of opens up into a like Pandora's box of like a million different things. It's funny because, you know, clients often ask questions exactly like this, and I always tell them like, 'I could write a book on this answer.' And oftentimes, like if any clients are watching that's worked with me, they've probably seen a book come over in like an email form. But it's true because there's so many different things that... when we talked about working or optimization or how long till we can get to a 3X return, that's where all these things come into play."

"So you got to remember that Google, when it's trying to... take the budget you have, your targeted locations, the product or service that you're offering, it's got to learn when to serve ads. When I say 'when,' like time of day... you... the serving overnight... it's like Google can know, 'Hey, I can serve an ad at 2 AM and I know I can get a third of the cost per click that I could if it was 4 to 6 PM, you know, on a Thursday.' But the leads that come in at 2 AM might not be the same quality. Like, we might not... might not be the same quality lead. Or I can... even though I'm getting a cheap cost per click, maybe I'm not getting conversions during that time."

"So that's just two quick examples of like all of the things that Google's trying to learn to actually optimize the account and/or to quote-unquote 'work.' And that's where we talk about the optimization and actually working. We talk about it in like three-month periods, right? So three months of patience. That's not patience to say... sometimes I... I'm careful with the word 'patience' with some clients because I know to some clients that could mean like, 'We're not going to make any money in the first three months, like I got to be patient.' It's not true, doesn't mean that we're not going to make any money. But that patience phase is basically letting Google, now that it's learned, optimize and say, 'Okay, how can I be more efficient?' And that's exactly what Google's doing. I've got to get the client conversions at a good cost and learn how to be efficient within all these parameters. And that would be the first stage, patience is what we call it, I guess the first three months."

"Yeah, yeah. And this is... so... so kind of what you're alluding to, and where you... everybody listening to this, if you notice, as a company, if you talk to our sales team or if you're a client or seen enough of our marketing materials, you know that we talk a lot about this framework that we call patience, profit, growth. And it's... it's really specific. A lot of people think it's just like, you know, like things are slow and then they get better, and like that's all what it means. Yeah, really... and it talks... it addresses this question because the first thing I hear when I hear the question 'How long does it take to work?' is 'How do you define the word work?' right? And how you define that word greatly affects the outcome."

"The question is... how long does it take for us to get the right leading metrics, meaning we're getting the right number of leads and we're getting the right lead quality? Roughly, that takes probably within 3 months... is realistic for most companies. That's what we call the patience period, where we're just trying to get those leading metrics in order. But once you have your leading metrics in order, there's other things that need to happen too. Like if we just got our leading metrics in order today, that means that we still haven't seen them consistently come in, right? So we got to have a period of consistency there."

"And then when we have that consistency, we have to take enough sample size to do deals because just the fact that I figured out our cost per lead and I got us two leads doesn't mean that we're doing deals, because we might need 15 to get to a deal. And we might need to do that 10 times over to get enough data to actually know what our conversion rate is. And then we also have cash conversion cycle on top of that. The moment we get a contract, we have the potential of revenue in our pipeline in the future, but we don't yet have that revenue. And all those things are things that like... take... take more time."

"So that's why we call like months three to six usually the profit period, because that's usually the time where like your cash conversion cycle catches up with you enough that you're starting to make some profit. It's where you start to get enough data from a sample size standpoint to understand with lagging indicators. And then once you get through that, then we have a growth period, and that's where you're like doubling down, you're trying to make things more efficient, you're increasing volume, you know, all those different things, all those different levers that you can pull."

"But that's why I kind of break it out to like leading metrics versus lagging metrics. The way that I kind of think about it is in the first three months, what you... what you're talking about was learning, this optimizing. It's totally feasible for those things to happen in the first three months towards leading metrics. But fall optimization is way, way different. I was just reviewing some data for a client today that's running a national campaign, and they're running a campaign in some major markets in Texas. And for them, what we're seeing is their... Texas is like their home market. National campaign's a little bit newer to them. They thought they could do... they could do deals in any area."

"What we're seeing in the data is that in that national campaign, their lead qualification rates are really low, and the leads are converting to contracts at a really low rate. And if they convert to contracts, they're converting to deals at a really poor rate versus in that local Texas campaign. The lead quality looks stellar, they're converting to contracts really well, they're converting to deals really well. So what we're noticing is that their company from an operational standpoint, even with like the same keywords and the same landing page and, you know, targeting all that kind of stuff, the company from an operational standpoint is managing leads significantly better in one market than they are in the other markets."

"That kind of thing you don't learn really quick. It takes us a lot of data. Like, for you to know that your number of opportunities per contract is high, you need heck a lot of opportunities and heck a lot of contracts to actually know that that's true. And that's where I think people get like tripped up about like how long exactly it takes. Because you look at like, okay, maybe we're like two weeks for the algorithm to get past its learning phase, but then after that, you know, getting the leading metrics in order could take up to about 90 days. And then we have to have cash conversion cycle, we have to have enough sample size for those things."

"And then sometimes in six months, you're like, 'Oh shoot, I just wasted half my budget for six months because now I finally have enough data to know this half of my campaign wasn't working well.' But you can't end up like throwing the baby out with the bathwater at that point. You got to understand like what's working and what's not within your campaign, and that... that's like an even deeper level of optimization that like never ends, right? You're always gathering that data."

"Yeah, it's so true. I always talk about the... I call them the four S's: so strategy, success, sustainability, and scalability. And it kind of... it follows the patience, profit, growth. So you have strategy, and that's what... what you come up with with our team and marketing team, and then you start to see, you know, get learning and optimization. You start to see some success."

"I think one thing clients miss is when they start seeing success, they skip sustainability and they go right to scalability. And a lot of those things that you're just talking about, how, you know, they find that... that the efficiency or, you know, different areas, that's kind of what... what happens. So you've got to have that strategy, you gotta have success, you got to sustain that success. And that's part of this three-month period, is clients love when we start having good quality leads in, they start getting some opportunities, contracts, they start closing deals, and they immediately want to scale."

"And you have to remember that we've got to be able to sustain that success, not only for Google's algorithm but also for like... internally in... in a client's business. You got to make sure that you can sustain that, right? Not just close a couple deals, but like it continues. And then we start to talk about scalability, which would be like six plus months, right? After those first six months. So it kind of... it follows hand in hand. You can't skip sustainability. It's like... that's the one part that most people miss."

"Yeah, well, I think... I think as an industry we have a problem, and it... it's exactly along the lines of what you're talking about. Everybody wants to skip the sustained success. They... and... and like we're just naturally attracted to what's most viral, what's most interesting, and that's just like the coolest thing that's happening, and it's just like big success and it's new. And that's also true like... I've had in my business big successes and they're a lot more exciting at the beginning than it... it's... it's a lot more exciting to find the success than it is to sustain the success."

"True, because once you are successful, you're just like, 'I'm just getting more of what I've already gotten, like onto the next thing. Like, I'm not excited about that anymore.' But like, that's the real win. Like that's... that's where the money's made. It's not in like finding a way to get three deals from a marketing channel, it's in like finding a way to do more than a million dollars a year from a marketing channel for the next decade. That's like real business success that builds wealth."

"Um, we had one of our members of our sales team was at a mastermind the... the other day, and we had this client there that just started with us like 3 weeks prior. And they were super happy, they were telling like all a bunch of people there like about all the success that they'd had with us. And really what happened is like in the first three weeks of their campaign, they just got like three deals, like $1,000 cost per deal, and they were big deals, and they were like tracking toward like a 60x return or something like that. And they were like really excited about this."

"So... so this sales guy reaches out to me, was wanting to like, you know, thinking he's like spreading some of the love, and he's just like, 'Hey, look, this is what's happening. This is awesome.' And I'm just like, 'Will you just tell him to shut up? Stop telling people about this.' Like... this is not normal. Like, I don't want more people out there thinking that this is normal results for a digital marketing campaign, that you're going to get $1,000 cost per deal in the first three weeks."

"Like... and I think it took him aback a little bit because he was like just... like all positive about it, and I just came in and just like destroyed his... just like happy moment. I'm just like, 'No, your happy moment is stupid.' Because I... like that's what happened to this industry. Like... like the... the biggest successes and the biggest failures are like what we focus our time on, and... and the sustained success just doesn't get enough attention."

"And yeah, so... so then we run into like these clients that like after 3 weeks, they're like, 'This isn't working.' And you think like, well, where did they get the idea that it needs to work? It's 'cause they heard from someone else that they got these three deals in the first three weeks in the PPC campaign and they were killing it. And like... so... so I guess what I'm... like what... what a lot of people think is that a campaign just by nature just gets better and better and better over time, and that's just like the natural ramp up and how it works. And like, there is some truth to that, but like what you see in actuality, it's like we have clients that get like a bunch of deals in their first few weeks and then they drop off for two months, just don't close a lead, and then they come back."

"Just... just like how you'd be flipping a coin and you can start out with three heads in a row, and then you could end up with... yeah, a bunch of tails for a period of time, and then the heads come back. Like there's... there's an element to... and... and really, I... I guess what I'm saying is like sample size is like a crazy important piece of this. I think of it like... like we talked about performance versus results before, you know, but the... the core differences between those where like performance is when I flip a coin, I've got a 50% chance of getting heads, I've got a 50% chance of getting tails, versus results is like I flipped my coin twice and I got two tails."

"Yeah, performance being a lot more predictive of future success. 'Cause I flipped twice, I got two tails, didn't mean I'm always going to get tails with this coin. Probably not, no. But that's where, you know, sometimes we focus a lot on the result, not on the performance, but they kind of approach each other over time."

"I'll get off my... my soapbox, but I think I... like it requires diligence. Like I'm... I'm seriously thinking like... you... there's a lot of our... like case studies as a company, they're like six month plus case studies. And the way we talk about their clients, like six month plus... like we don't highlight our clients that are like, 'Hey, I got all these deals in the first couple weeks' or anything like that, because like that's what I think we're missing in this industry, is that sustained success. And sustained success is what makes you money, not like discovering some awesome marketing channel that hits it big in two weeks."

"It's so true, and you got to think... I go like even one step further now, talking about Google and kind of what the Google algorithm is doing. Because you do see that... I wouldn't say often, but you hear stories like that where somebody, you know, the first week they get two... two deals right off the bat. What Google's thinking when that happens... so they're just starting to serve ads, right? So Google serves some ads to this particular area and three deals come from it. Okay, Google is also trying to be the most efficient and the most sustainable that it can. It wants long-term success. It wants people to continue to pay for advertising for a long time."

"So Google now says, 'Okay, I got three deals in the first two weeks from this area. I'm going to table that and I'm going to go work on the rest of this area for a minute.' Like, 'I know I can get deals here, now let's see if I can get deals over here, and let's see if I can get deals over here.' So Google starts learning, it gets smarter as it goes. It starts learning the areas and the time of day and... and the people that it can serve ads to, and has to get to all of that area, right? Because it's not sustainable if Google knows that there's this particular little pocket where it can serve ads to and get deals. If it just keeps serving ads there, eventually those deals are going to run out in that area, and then you've got no learning for the rest of the targeting area, if that makes sense."

"So that's kind of... sometimes that happens, and it... and it's not as common in this industry as it... like e-commerce, but that's the main point, is that Google is trying to be efficient and sustainable at the same time. Well, you can see those pockets of spurts, right? But they'll go away and then they'll happen again, and then they'll go away."

"So... random variation is a real thing, you know. There's like... there's an entire industry built on the idea that people think they see things in numbers that they don't actually see. It's called the gambling industry."

"Just know what we're dealing with here, you know. Like... like you're sometimes when you have like those times where your campaign's going super well and then those times where it's not... like it's not... like it was any hotter than just a roulette table at a casino where you got the same odds every time, but everybody's seeing something and there... and they're... they're all taking their own meaning from what they're seeing, and... and it can be totally different."

"So it's funny, it's uh... rocky road, like you know, ups and downs. Funny when you're walking into a casino and you see the roulette, you know, they got the window there above the wheel and it's got like nine reds in a row, and you'll see the table fill up so fast. I mean, like next time you're there, watch it. If there's a period of like five or six red or black in a row, that table will be jam-packed with so much money on the other one. Like, 'It's got to hit black this time.' It's like, no, it doesn't. It's the same... it's the same odds that it would hit red before that streak even started."

"It's that whole performance versus results, right? Like... but we know that in a roulette wheel, you might get eight reds in a row, but if you... if you do it a 100 times, you're going to be right about 50/50, right? So you're going to have slow times in a campaign, you're going to have uh... super fast times where stuff is... is cooking. So we're trying to sustain and be efficient over a long period of time. Like you said, how do we make $10 million over the next three years? Like that's what we're looking at, and Google's looking at it the same way."

"Yeah, 100%. So I hope for anybody listening to this, you have some clarity around like how long... I guess like here's the most simple way I could say this: like you have a funnel. At the top of your funnel, you have top of funnel metrics. We also call them leading metrics, right? Your ad spend turns into impressions, your impressions turn into clicks, your clicks turn into conversions, your conversions turn into qualified leads, etc., right? That's... that's just how we work all... all the way down to like deals, revenue. If the way that you defined that it works is something high in that funnel, then the answer is it's a short, short amount of time. If the way that you define the word 'works' is something low in that funnel, then it's going to be a longer period of time. And everything in between... is everything in between."

"And that's where like, honestly, my favorite way to deal with this is a really solid goal-setting framework. Because that's the thing, like... like when... when people hear like, 'Oh, just give the marketing campaign six months and then see if it works,' I can tell you as a business owner, the first thing that I hear is, 'I'm going to have to wait six months just to find out that I wasted all my money over six months,' right? Nobody likes that, right? But that's not exactly how it works. You want to talk about like the... you know, goal setting, how you can do that with like leading metrics and lagging metrics, and... and adjust campaigns accordingly?"

"Say that again, you kind of cut out."

"I just said, do you want to talk about goal setting and how you can do that with like leading metrics and lagging metrics? And that's a good way to know like, maybe we're not there, maybe we're not at the point that you could say this quote-unquote 'works,' but are we on track for it working or are we off track for it working?"

"I love that. So trending, right? Just what... what leading metrics trend into. Yep. And when you were... when you were talking about that, I thought a good way to answer this question when someone says, 'How long does it take for the campaign to work?' You could easily answer and say, 'How long does it take for it to work once or a hundred times?' And that's right, because once is super quick. A hundred times, and that's when we start talking about like leading metrics and trends."

"As a... as a marketer, that's what I'm always looking for. So I'm looking at, just like you said, I'm looking at... at impressions, impression share, I'm looking at the cost per click, I'm looking at the conversion rate. Now, if all of those... and then, you know, a client could say, 'Well, how do you know if those are good?' Right? I don't worry too much about them being quote-unquote 'good' as I do that it's consistent. So if I see a consistent cost per click over a three-week period or a month period... if someone says, 'Is that cost per click that you're seeing over that month period good or bad?' That... if it's consistent, it's where it needs to be."

"Now, that might be high to a client because a client's say all the time like, 'Wow, the cost per click in this industry is super high.' Yeah, comparatively, it might be, right? But if it's consistent and it's trending in a good direction and I'm getting conversions, right? That's what I'm looking for. So as far as like goal setting in those trends, I... I tend to focus on... I don't like to do leading metrics as far as goals as much as I do... let's set goals for the next month to have... to have five contracts or whatever it is, right? And then as... at a marketer, what I'm looking at during that time frame is I'm making sure those leading metrics are solid."

"And I don't... would you say I don't think it's super common to have... it's very few and far between that we get clients that actually care what their cost per click is. Once in a while it happens, but their clients are focused on, like you said, the big picture. They want to know like what their cost per deal is and stuff like that. It's our job as a marketer to look at the details and how that affects the bigger picture, basically."

"Yeah, yeah, I 100% agree. I also think there's merit to the fact that like, if... if what we care about is a return on investment, we know that a certain return on investment correlates with different... from a leading metric standpoint. I can tell you one of the biggest like issues or like... word that we deal with on a day-to-day basis is that people are like, 'Well, I want to achieve a 5x return and I need 100 leads per month' or whatever the case is. I'm just making up like... making up like two things. And then you calculate in your head like, well, if you got 100 leads per month and everything worked out completely average, you'd actually have a 25x return, not a 5x return. And we realize we don't need as many leads as we think we need and stuff like that."

"That's why I think it's really important... I... I like to call it reverse engineering ROI. You figure out if I am to accomplish this end goal... you know, simple examples: you have... you know, roughly a two-hour drive south of me, you live in Cedar City, Utah, and... and I live in Lehi, Utah, right? If... if I want to get there within two hours, then I can reverse engineer how fast do I have to drive in order to get there. And then I could also make milestones so I'm not just like finding out that I wasted all my time when I realize, 'Oh, I spent two days and I only made it 10 miles.' Like you can kind of see like, 'Okay, we've... we've gone 10 miles. How long did that take and are we on track for that or not?'"

"You can kind of do that with your leading metrics. So if you have... if you have your right data set, what you do is you reverse engineer and you say, 'If we're going to get this kind of return on investment, how many deals do we need to get that return on investment? And if we're going to get that number of deals, how many contracts do we need?' So basically contract fallout and how does that work into things. And if we're going to get that number of contracts, how many opportunities do we need? If we're going to get that number of opportunities, how many leads do we need to get on the phone who have a house to sell? And if we're going to get that many people on the phone, how many qualified leads do we need altogether? And if we're going to get that many qualified leads, how many leads altogether do we need?' And then you have your whole funnel."

"And then what you can do when you're one month in is say like, 'Okay, maybe we don't have the ROI that we're looking for, but we do see that compared to what we need to get to achieve that end return on investment, we're either trending towards it or we're trending against it.' And that helps us know like, are we on track or are we not? That's... for me, that's the big sign of like when do you need patience and when do you not? Because I'm... I'm not a fan of like burning money on a bad marketing channel, but if you see that the leading metrics are in order and there's not yet enough sample size to tell you that the lagging metrics aren't... to me, that's a sign of a successful marketing campaign that just needs more time versus if your leading metrics are across... like if I'm trying to get down to Cedar City, Utah, and I realize I'm driving north instead on accident, yeah, it doesn't take me driving 200 miles to realize I'm driving the wrong direction. Like that... it's just bad, right? It doesn't take a lot of time to know that's a problem."

"So for me, that's like... that's what I'm most passionate about for that. And I think if you play those cards right, then you understand just when you have to like ease back a little bit and let the marketing channel do its thing and when you got to be making active changes, making a U-turn, turning that car around so you can get... go in the right direction."

"I think that's one of the hardest things when we talk about like... like a... a client-marketer relationship, right? Or as an account manager, it's... there's a lot of like... we... we ask as... as... as account managers, we ask a lot of clients, right? And at the company, you know, Baitman, we... we ask a lot of clients. We're asking them to trust us, you know, with their hard-earned money to do what we're going to do to be successful, right? And so... so that, I think, that's one of the biggest challenges is how do I... and different account managers do it differently, you know. Like how do I gain this client's trust? Do I just talk about the numbers, the details, the leading metrics? Do I just sound smart and then they'll trust me, right? Or can I really talk about the things that matter the most, right?"

"So it's basically how... how can we convey to a client that those leading metrics are trending in a good direction, right? Like, do they just take our word for it, or is there actually a way that we can show you? And it's exactly what you... you just said, by backing into goals. I think that's a really, really good way to determine if this is going to quote-unquote 'work' over the next month or two is by those leading metrics. So it's... it's like trust me based on what I show you, not on what I tell you kind of thing."

"Yeah, totally fair. That... that makes sense. Well, thank... thank you for your time, Landon. Down at least a few of the rabbit holes... there's... there's so many more. Um... anything else you... you'd say is like part of what's... like most important? Um, or should we wrap this up?"

"No, I think we... I think we covered the... the main topics for sure."

"Okay, awesome. Well, for everybody listening, thank you for listening to this. We're always open to your feedback on what you're getting the most value from and what you're not. Feel free to reach out if you have any ideas around that, and I will see you next week."

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Discover how Rich Wonders went from homeless vacuum salesman to real estate mogul, sharing his proven strategies for maximizing profits through novation deals and delivering exceptional service.

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"Rich, how you doing today?"

"I'm doing great. Brandon, how you doing, man?"

"Hey, fantastic. I'm super excited for this. You and I just met actually a few minutes ago for the first time. A lot of mutual connections and talked through a little bit about your background and everything. I've got so many questions I'm excited to ask you today, so really excited to have you here. But for anybody listening that doesn't know you, your business, your background, anything like that - what's the story? How'd you get into this?"

"Yeah man, so Rich Wonders, I'm out of Phoenix, Arizona now. I wholesale and do NOVs nationwide. I teach a course on NOVs where I've got 400 people all around the country. Teach the acquisition side, so I've got a passion for sales, a passion for doing things in a low friction and ethical way, full transparency, and really serving the seller. Yeah, I love it. Wholesale and real estate has completely changed my life. I was a door-to-door vacuum salesman for 9 years, so I've like, came from the bottom, you know. I was even homeless at one point before that. And now I get to travel with my wife and my four kids. We get to do all the things that I dreamed of when I was broke, and I just feel very blessed, very fortunate. Got a team of 15 people, we do deals, JV deals nationwide, all through my Instagram account @NovationKing. But yeah, I was in the right place at the right time where I learned this strategy. I had the sales background and I just took the ball and ran with it. And you know, we're trying to make a huge impact and disrupt the industry and help people and do things the right way, keep things going. So it's very cool."

"I have to ask, what possesses somebody to sell vacuums door-to-door for 9 years? Like, I understand if you did that for like six months or something, but like, that's crazy."

"That's a fair question, and I ask myself that a lot now too, right? Looking back, so at the time, here's what it was: The guy that - when I needed the job, I was completely desperate. I got suckered into it. I answered a vague Craigslist ad and I was sleeping on my friend's floor. And before that, I was like sleeping on the floor at the recording studio I was working at. So I was doing bad in life, right? And the guy that ran it, he was the top distributor in the country for like 20 years, and he was making 3 to 5 million a year. And the way that he ran it, I learned so much about sales, about life. He was like a bit of a second father to me. I lost my dad when I was 12, and I learned so much. You know, for at the time, I thought I was making really good money. Like, there were years I would break six figures and everything like that. I never really touched any money like that. And basically, they put you on a track to have your own office, and I went through that whole process, got my own office, did that for two and a half years, had some success, but I was just burnt. I was burnt. I hated the industry. It was very long hours. I learned so much, but I just had this carrot that I was chasing, thinking, 'Hey, look, this job sucks. I'm grinding it out, but one day I'm going to be rich like my boss.' 'Cause he had like this beautiful custom house he built, and it was the first person that had real money like that that I had had proximity to like that. So he was really good at motivating everything, and it was a great thing for me. But yeah, when I got the job, I didn't plan on being there long, but you know, I very quickly, because of my hunger and you know, my background, rose to the top of the ranks there. And I just had like the bronze handcuffs. I thought they were gold, but they ended up being bronze. And yeah, when things went - you know, I had a buddy, Jared Piper, that was taking all these crazy vacations, and I had my first baby on the way and everything, and I was just really getting burnt towards the end. And I asked him what he was doing, and he said he wholesaled. And that's how I found out about wholesale, YouTube University, rabbit hole, eventually, you know, DM Sean Terry randomly and kept selling myself and being persistent, got an interview, got hired, and then I was running the sales department a couple months later from there."

"Oh, that's pretty cool. I mean, I think there's a lesson there in leadership, right? Because I mean, you didn't make a ton of money at this vacuum company, but like, they created an environment where you felt like you were learning and growing, and you know, that was kind of like your paycheck for a little while. You know, that's neat. So that's a really cool story. So how long ago was that that you started in..."

"So I started real estate January 28th, 2019. I remember to the day. Yep, so that was my first day. I even got a picture. I look like such a dork. I put on my glasses, I had long sleeve shirt on 'cause just my arms were tattooed then. I didn't have my neck and my hands hit up, but I wanted to just look like as innocent as possible 'cause I didn't want to go into the office and have them be like, 'Who the heck is this? Oh, get him out of here. He doesn't belong here.' You know what I mean? I was like embarrassed about them thinking I was rough around the edges. But now I use it as like kind of my superpower, and once I got independent, that's when I just started tatting everything. I'm like, 'Look, I'm going to only be around people that want to be around me. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm unemployable. Let's go.' So yeah, it was a great learning lesson working with Sean. You know, he's a good guy."

"That's a really interesting story. Okay, thank you for the background and everything. So something that I'm aware that you teach a lot, or that you're a little bit known for, is kind of, you know, different types of marketing like inbound versus outbound. And I'm really curious to hear your perspective on this. And for anybody listening, like Rich and I haven't like necessarily talked about this. I'm actually curious like if we might agree or even disagree on some. But what I'm specifically asking about, because I know your course dives a lot into an acquisitions process, and you had mentioned to me it's pretty different for like an outbound lead versus an inbound lead. I can tell you one of the most common issues that we deal with with our clients is switching from outbound to inbound marketing and like steering the sales team through that transition of like, we're getting a lot less leads but they're better quality, or even keeping the outbound going and then adding inbound and like, how do you adapt to it? Basically, everybody kind of assumes inbound leads are better, so we'll just close better. And you usually close better, but they're a lot more expensive. But unless you're really closing inbound leads like how they need to be closed, then they're just too expensive to really be able to afford them. And that's a very common issue where like, we start working with a client and the first 6 months they just, they just can't figure out that sales process piece. And then you know, they eventually have like new team members join or something like that, and they figure it out, and then they're off to the races. What's your advice for somebody who's like used to a different type of lead and then they're moving to a more inbound style of lead like PPC leads in terms of acquisitions process and key things that you're going to want to change?"

"So this is a great question. I'll try to nail these points down. So inbound leads - on an outbound lead, there's a lot more of a qualification filter that you need on your sales process. So you'll notice people that do really well with outbound, they normally have scaled out the cold callers because you need scale to get consistency. And then you have to scale out lead managers and acquisitions because you have a high volume of work that you have to do to filter through these, right? Because basically, normally the way it works, you know, is anybody that raises their hand and says 'I will consider an offer on my house,' boom, that's normally considered a lead, right? If you're using a VA, that's what they're calling all day to maybe get two or three of those per day, right? And then so you've got this massive filtering process where you're - you can't spend an hour on the phone with each one of those because some of those people will talk to you and they have no intention of selling their house, you know what I mean? Now with inbound, the beauty of that is you can take more of a consultative approach because right off the bat, they've raised their hand and they are actively seeking out more information at the very least, right? And there, it's showing that intent. So you can play the role differently, and you can nurture these leads and gather more information because they're reaching out to you. You're not disrupting them and, you know, basically asking for their time to see if they may be interested. They've already had that initial interest. So I think what ends up happening is people that are used to just running through leads with a machine gun and like, 'Hey, you know, throwing out low, see what sticks, going back and forth,' you try that with a PPC lead and it's going to be very difficult 'cause the person, you know what I mean, there - it's a different - you're not going for the same low-hanging fruit that you are with a cold call. With the cold call, a lot of times you can just be right place, right time, you run them through the meat grinder, and a deal can come out the other side, you know what I mean? But with a PPC, a lot of times you're dealing also with higher price point houses, more sophisticated sellers. You have to have a softer approach and a softer touch, and you have to look more into deeper of what the motivation - and it gives - it buys you more time because there's already that initial them reaching out to you. You can position yourself as an authority rather than as like a hunter or like a beggar, you know what I mean, like when you're talking to the cold call leads. So I think it buys you more time and you can nurture them. You can have a lower friction sales process because there's an inherent greater value of a PPC lead compared to cold call lead. And you look at the numbers, you know, what's cold call normal numbers? 30 to 50, maybe 50 to 80, depending on your team, like leads per deal. And then PPC, I mean, if you're a killer, you could be one out of eight, one out of 10, one out of 15, maybe one out of 20, depending on your market and your skill level and everything like that. But you - you know, people get so caught up on price per lead, but the more important thing is how much money do you make every month, right? You can have a really low cost per lead and you're spending all your time and you have your best people talking to people that aren't even qualified. You know, with a PPC, you may - you may pay a higher cost per lead or per deal, but you're - you know, if you're making more money every month and you're spending more time talking to motivated sellers, it's a higher ROI on your time and your opportunity cost."

"Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that aligns pretty well. One of the principles that we teach is we call it 'assume motivation,' and it's basically - for sure, like the idea is like, with an outbound lead, you kind of assume that they're not motivated until you can prove that they are, versus with a PPC lead, you assume that they're motivated until you can prove that they're not. So it's just a different, you know, just different mindset. But the idea is like, you don't - you talk to someone, you know, the house is worth 300, they tell you they want 400, like that shouldn't phase you on a PPC lead, like, for sure. Because yeah, you're used to - yeah, in cold call, you're used to just like, 'I can't waste my time with people,' versus PPC, it's like, how long can I waste my time with this person so I can get to the root of what's actually going on?"

"Yeah, 'cause you know, there's that underlying factor that they cared enough that they went on the computer and somehow were seeking out a solution. So yeah, it's almost like you keep qualifying them until you can get to the root of it and see if it's a problem you can actually solve or not."

"So, no, I totally get it. Like, there's, you know, there's something there. So yeah, 100%. Yeah, okay. That's neat. That's neat to hear your perspective on that. And like, the thing for you, the other thing I want to ask you about is NOV. I mean, obviously based on your Instagram handle, that's kind of your thing. And I know you've taught a lot of people to do novations that, you know, previously hadn't done them in their business. And we've had a few guests on the podcast kind of talk about novations. I'm super curious to hear kind of your unique spin on this. And I guess like, what is the opportunity? Like, how do you adapt your sales process for that? Like, all, you know, all these things. Just what's your idea of yeah, the right way to go about it, doing a novation deal where you feel like sometimes people are just missing the mark?"

"Great question, great question. So the types of opportunities that work best for novation are a motivated seller that's looking for certainty, peace of mind, and hands-off experience. Okay, normally a wholesale deal is going to be a distressed property with a distressed seller where there's enough distress between those two things that they're willing to accept an offer where you can make - you as the wholesaler can make a margin, the fix and flipper or landlord can make a margin, and it also invest money in the house. So a lot of times it ends up being 50 cents on the dollar, maybe 60 cents on the dollar is where you have to be. Now there's this whole range of sellers that they are motivated and willing to take a discount, but the ideal buyer is not a fix and flipper. You know, we do houses that are only a couple years old. You know, we do houses that were only bought a few years ago. And with this strategy, basically you can give the seller a net amount. We disclose what we're doing, that we're going to be selling to third party. We may be using the MLS if we choose. We'll handle all repairs. They get a hands-off experience. We do all the leg work. They know their net amount. Whether we make a dollar or a million dollars, they're getting X. And basically, we just delivered the result on the silver platter. So we call it the Concierge Service. Now that's like the basic gist of like - because NOVs can mean a lot of things. You hear people talking about renovating the house, houses, partnering up with the sellers. We don't do any of that. Okay, not that you can't make money, but it's just a different business model, right? I'm - I'll spend some money, but it's to help them move, to do egregious repairs like if there's trash in the front or painting something where I have a high ROI. It's less than normally $5,000, and you know what I mean, it's just kind of a no-brainer help them move their stuff out because that's got to happen anyways. So that's what we do. Now the thing that makes our program, you know, different is we have a very compelling sales process. Most people pitch NOVs as a secondary option after wholesaling doesn't work. So they'll pitch their lowball wholesale offer, they say no, and they say, 'Okay, hey, I understand. Well, we do also have this thing over here. It's called, you know, the whatever program, you know, where we partner up with you and then we get a realtor and then we get it sold,' and they explain the process. Now with us, we have a very low friction sales process, and then when we pitch the Concierge Service, it's pitched as the perfect solution. So we do give them a cash offer, but the cash offer is in a range where if they say yes to my cash offer, I'll buy their house cash because it's 50 cents on the dollar. Like, it's a low offer. But the way we pitch it is in a tentative way where it's like, 'Hey, look, we did get a cash offer approved, but honestly, based on our conversation, it's probably not going to be a match. You know, it came in a lot lower than you wanted to be. You know, we'd have to be at 342,000. However, I have some good news. You know, we have another program that I didn't really mention earlier because we have very strict criteria. This is the one I was really hoping I could get you qualified for. It's called the Concierge Service, and I'm extremely excited because I actually have a full approval. And let me just explain how it works. Okay, you get all the benefits of a cash offer, meaning you don't have to spend any money, you don't have to lift a finger, you don't have to do any repairs, you don't have to deal with realtors. We handle all the work on on the back end, and we actually secure a third-party buyer and we get paid by the buyer.' So we give them a short little sell the sizzle, and then we run them through the entirety of the paperwork paragraph by paragraph, and then we close right there on the spot. So our sales process is extremely effective. You can wholesale houses with the same thing. It's just they understand we don't represent ourselves to be the buyer. Like, if I tell them I'm buying your house cash, I'm going to buy their house cash. But anything else is Concierge Service. And about two out of 10 deals that we do, we put them through the Concierge Service pitch and then we sell it off market. 'Cause dude, I love selling properties off market. It's way quicker, it's less moving parts, it's way easier. But if you - if I only sold properties off market, I'd be missing out on 80% of the deals that I'm doing. So you know what I mean, it's - they both work and it's not - you're not going to sit there and go, 'Should I novate this one? Should I do a wholesale?' It's going to be a no-brainer. Like, it's either obviously going to be a wholesale or it's gonna be something that'll never work as a wholesale but is a great novation."

"So that's interesting. You view them as like separate different types of situations and properties that you'd use each strategy for. Because I've heard from a lot of people, they view it as like, 'Oh, I could make a thinner margin on a wholesale, but I could also novate it for more.'"

"Oh yeah, yeah. If it's a big gap, then I'll go through the hassle of putting it on the market. But if it's like 10 grand, I'm like, you know, 50 right now or 60 in two months maybe if everything goes right, you know, I'm taking the 50 right now. You know what I mean? But I have 50 deals going too, so anytime I can get a quick one, I'm like, 'Oh good, no crisis.' Like, easy, we just run it through because the velocity, you know, having a quick turnover too on the cash is good, you know, for any business."

"Is it the same contract for all this stuff, or like how does your paperwork differ?"

"Yeah, so the paperwork that I use, I've been using for 3 years, and then we have 400 plus members in the Rainmaker Community that also use it. None of us have been sued, nobody's gone to jail. So it's like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, knock on wood, right? But our paperwork's been super solid and we do it nationwide too, you know what I mean. And so I use a purchase and sale agreement that has our specific language. I use an attorney in fact, not a power of attorney. So that's one thing that's different than other people. I use attorney in fact, but I only use that to hire the realtor. I have the seller sign the buyer's offer, and the seller signs everything from the buyer's offer up until closing docs. Now people say, 'Well, don't they see how much you make?' Yes, they do. That's why you have to set expectations. You have to give them a really good experience. You can get away most of the time trying to do a POA or AIF and signing for the seller, but there will be times where the lender looks at that and says, 'Well, who the heck are you? Are you the grandson? Oh no, you're, you know, an investor,' and it can cause problems. The buyer's agents sometimes don't like it. So I try to do everything as either always or never, right? So I had a couple deals all at once when we were signing on behalf of the seller that became a problem, and I almost lost like 100 grand because the deals were like on life support. Like, one of them we had to find a new lender, the other one we were able to just get the seller to resign the docs and that saved it, and then the third one, the same thing. But I always try to operate where like, okay, if we're doing this at scale and I'm teaching hundreds of other people to do this at scale, is this the best way to mitigate disaster, right? So that's why I recommend signing for the - having the seller sign for the buyer."

"Yeah, that's fascinating. You ever run into friction because like, people are afraid of the friction of like, they're not going to want to sign because they found out how much money we make? Like, how often do you actually run into that?"

"I've never lost a deal from that. Yeah, and it's very rare that anybody even bats an eye. Here's the key to avoid that though. One, you have to really firmly set expectations from the very beginning, and that's part of our closing process where several times we mentioned the dollar amount that they're going to be receiving minus mortgage liens and tax. So that's part of it where we hit them several times with that. We also mentioned, 'Whether we make a dollar or a million dollars on this, it's not going to change on your end.' And we give - we make sure that we negotiate them well and we're certain on our numbers. And if we find out during our due diligence, like when we're hiring the realtor, that the condition's worse or we were off on our numbers or there's some other X factor, we will nego - we will address that before it goes on the market. So we don't throw spaghetti at the wall and see what hits because most of these are owner-occupied. It's like, you know what I mean, someone in a vulnerable position is either elderly person, a working-class family. Like, you - it's different than an abandoned house, right? Like, if this doesn't close, people get like legitimately harmed, you know what I mean, and they're in a bad position. So we find all that stuff out early, and we have like a 90% closing rate of once - once they hit the market, you know what I mean. So I forgot even what the question was, man. I got going and-"

"Oh, I was asking, do deals blow up when the seller sees the buyer's offer?"

"Oh, okay. So you just - you want to make sure this - you want to make sure this is what's going to make them mad: when you take too long. Okay? You need to price it so you get an offer in two to 3 weeks. You can't try - you can't try to make your money on the back end. You want to buy it at a discount and sell it at a discount so it moves quick. So that will make them mad if you go past 60 days. They will get mad. The other thing is if you're not in good communication and you don't provide the three things that they were originally looking for: certainty, peace of mind, and hands-off experience. So if they don't feel certainty throughout the process, they're going to be stressed out the whole time, even if you're doing everything correctly, right? So you have to communicate with them. You have to be their peace of mind. I always look for ways to help them out, especially when I know that we're making a big profit on it, right? Help them move, you know what I mean, help them find a place, do some work to the house to give some improvements, pay their mortgage if we need to. So I try to add value as much as I can, and it is - I try to approach it from the sense of like a five-star service, right, where we really treat them well. You know, like in the hospitality industry almost, right, where they - they just feel like they don't have to do anything and we just deliver results and solutions. They feed us problems, we deliver solutions back. So you have to - that's the key, is them emotionally being satisfied with the process. Then they won't be mad at the end, and you have to do what you say and set the expectations the whole way through. When people get mad is when their expectations are set one way and the reality is a different way. That's what really grinds people's gears. And that's why being trained transparent - it's more difficult. It takes a more sophisticated approach to be able to still word it in a favorable way for them, right? The shortcut is just to lie. 'Oh, I'm going to sell your house.' Bury a pre-marketing clause in there. If they see it on the MLS, 'Hey, didn't you read the contract?' and put it back on them. But you're still going to have - it's still - you can't do that. You got to win over their heart and mind. You know, if you can win over their heart and mind, that's the key. But you just have to have the courage and really truly believe in your heart that you're the right solution. Like, the people that I sign, I have the biggest conviction 'cause I know we actually care. We will actually only take on deals that we can get done, and I'll be upfront and honest with them in the beginning if we find out it doesn't work. I'll lay it all out on the table. 'Hey, look, this deal doesn't work for you now. I completely understand you're under no obligation to take this offer.' So I'm sold myself that it's the best thing for them, and then I make sure that I overpromise and we overdeliver."

"Yeah, this is the first conversation I've had with somebody where they've really focused on like the service aspect of NOVs as being a key part of it. Because we - I know we have clients all the time like getting a big deal and then, you know, seller backs out and stuff like that. And I know that will always happen, but I wonder, you know, I wonder how effective a lot of people are with like the service that they give and and how possible it is that so many deals blow up if you're not actually like continually delivering on those promises of that like five-star service that people are expecting. I just - I don't think that's - like, nobody ever talks about that, I guess is what I'm saying, which makes me a little bit doubtful that many people focus on it, you know? Like, you just treat the seller like crap and then they back - they might want to back out of the contract and and you're surprised, you know?"

"Yeah, it's not - you got to look at it like this: for the seller, it's not a transaction, it's an experience. It's different 'cause wholesaling is different, right? You're dealing with a lot of tired landlords, investors, people that have neglected these properties, you know what I mean? It's a different type of client. With this, our avatar is a normal person that's in a bind. They're in a tough life situation. So their life situation is the root of their problem. It's not necessarily the house. It's financial, it's personal life, or some situation - someone's sick, someone's got to move. So you know, right, it makes logical sense. The reason they're not going the traditional route is because they don't want that experience. So they're looking for this cash offer experience, but their property just doesn't fit in that box. So if you can cater to that, that's also too how we get such a high conversion rate. Because we - we talk to people where they're talking to inexperienced or hopefully not, but maybe even unethical wholesalers that are offering way too much money, where it's like, we can't even novate it at the price that they're talking about and sell it on market. So I know they can't wholesale it off market. And the way we can win them over, get them to agree to a lower price, is we do really take the time to understand them, and we don't do any negotiation in the beginning. It's all - the discovery phase is all about just seeking to understand them and asking follow-up questions. Because then when we come in to solve their problems, we know all the moving parts and the variables, and we can dramatically give a perfect solution that hits every major checkpoint. And we make logical sense on our offer too, where they can understand how the other offers - there's no way that that's a legitimate offer. So I do what's called scorching the earth, right? And I do it on my live, and I'll have wholesalers get mad sometimes too, like, 'Oh, you're throwing us under the bus.' It's like, well, dude, if - if you're going to wholesale, tell them you're going to wholesale. And if you play to be a cash buyer and you're offering him too much money, yeah, I am going to expose you because this is someone's grandma and I know you can't deliver on that price, you know what I mean? So have it be what it's going to be. But I think it's important, you know what I mean? 'Cause a lot of people get in wholesale and there's like a hustle mentality, and I get it. Like, I've been there. You know, I mentioned earlier, you know, I was homeless at one point when I was first, you know, when I was in my 20s for a short time. So I get it. But we have to elevate past that and realize that this is a - a people business, and us being experts and them being lay people, we have an obligation to them to do right by them, you know what I mean? And and follow the Golden Rule. And it's okay if you make money, but you just have to do what you say and set the proper expectations with them, and then no one's harmed."

"So yeah, I want to dig a little bit deeper into one thing that that you said, because I've heard - I've heard pretty varying opinions about when the right time to talk about price is. There's some people that just like go for their throat like right out the gate. Like, that's - that's how they do the the pricing negotiations. And then I - I do have some clients that that I really respect that kind of do sort of what you're talking about, where they like, you know, you figure out everything so you can just build up this like nice silver platter of like everything that they need. And then price is just a piece of that, like focusing on price makes it about price versus focusing on everything else. And then price is just like the final little detail to to get correct deal sign. So anyways, I - I'm curious to hear just like, if you were to - if you were talking to somebody right now who says you have to go for price right out of the gate, and you're convincing them that your way is the better way, like what would you say?"

"So here's - I - I'll build a steel man real quick of the opposing idea. So getting - getting the price out right in the beginning, that's more of a technique for cold call leads and for lower price point. That's a way to cut through the qualification phase, right? Because if their price - price is way out of the blue and you've got a hundred other leads to call, that's a good thing to find out early. Now on the inbound side of things and the higher price point - like, for example, we've got a house right now in Scottsdale, Arizona that we're under contract for 1.5, and we just sold it to a buyer for 1.7 million, right? That's not a deal that you're going to do in 15 minutes by throwing prices around, right? The guy's going through foreclosure. He had a bunch of businesses that had funding cut off that were in the healthcare space. There's a lot of nuanced problems, right? And that's - it's different than when you're talking to someone that has a house they inherited from their grandpa that's worth $60,000 and they're living, you know, check to check. It's just different conversations. So my thing is, is they both work, but the consultative approach - if you think about it, right, how important a house is, especially if you're talking to an owner-occupant - like with NOVs, most of them are owner-occupants, you know what I mean? And most of the house is there - if you get to price too early, you're going to cut off the flow of information on their situation, and you're making it too transactional. And you got to understand, this is not a business transaction for them. This is a life-pivoting moment for the right people, right? Someone that's just looking for price and just looking for convenience is probably not going to be a fit because, look, you know, they're going to have to take a relatively significant discount compared to what it would be on market, right? So you have to really understand their situation to see if it'll even be a fit. Because the thing that they can quantify is the price. So they're hurting, and then the price is the thing that they think is going to make it better. But you can address those same concerns in a different way, and then now all of a sudden, the price becomes less important because the things that they thought they would need money to solve, they no longer need money for. We fixed those problems. So they're willing to trade some equity for the peace of mind and not having to do the leg work. Same like when a seller says, 'Hey man, you know, it's a great deal, but they - they can't sell for six months,' right? Rather than just waiting 6 months, we try to figure out, well, what are the things that need to happen in these six months? And we figure out a way to compress the timeline. So we're solving the same problem that they thought needed to be solved with time, but we're able to solve a different way with our expertise and our resourcefulness. So being resourceful is extremely important because you can't blame them. Like, look, everybody's taught when you sell something, you try to get as much money as you can for it. But you got to dig down deep to see what are the actual problems that they need solved, and a lot of those can be solved without money. And then money becomes less important."

"Yeah, that's super fascinating. I mean, it's - it's kind of similar to the same reason that you sold vacuum cleaners vacuum cleaners for nine years, right? Could you have found a job that paid you more? Absolutely. Was the money great? Not really. But like an employee that's not learning and growing and respecting the people that they work with, they always just say they need more money when the root of the cause is like, they don't like the culture of the company or they're not learning or whatever the case is. So - so like in it's in the same vein, like a business owner could just look at all those problems like the whole way to solve this is you just like pay everybody more money all the time versus like, some of the most successful businesses, yes, they pay well, but they also learn how to build everything else that people want, that the things that they would never say they want just - that actually makes it happen. Like so that's the reason like you stayed - stay - stayed selling vacuum cleaners for 9 years, because your needs were met in other ways. Um, so that's where it - it - the principle also applies to like marketing even PPC. Like one thing that I see a lot of people doing wrong is they put in their PPC ads, 'We pay more than other investors' or something like that, and then they complain when they get a bunch of these leads that are really motivated by price. And all I can think of in my head is like, you're - you know, you're attracting price. Why are you surprised? It seems great when you get more clicks, but then when you find out what the clicks are, you're filtering the wrong people."

"Yeah, exactly. It's just - it's about where you put the focus versus like, the ad can speak to like, 'We help people out of these types of situations' um, 'with speed and convenience' or whatever the case is."

"So anyways, I - I just think it's super fascinating what you said. Well, that's - that's super cool. Rich, if somebody wants to get a hold of you, look into your course, whatever the case is, what's the best way to get a hold of you?"

"Yeah, uh, Instagram @NovationKing, all one word. Um, I do free live calls almost every day. I post tons of content that's all real estate related. You check me out on YouTube at Novation King. To JV with me and my team, we are the number one novation JV team on planet Earth. NovationJV.com, you can check out all the details on how to submit our criteria, our split, that whole nine yards. And then NovationKing.com, you can check out more info on NOVs. If you sign up for my email list, you also have some free goodies that we'll send you, and I've got videos and stuff explaining our sales process and more info on that. And you can also access the Rainmaker Community from there too."

"Very cool. Awesome. Any - any final words, any advice?"

"Man, appreciate you for having me on here. For everybody watching this, look, you took time out of your day to watch a wholesaling podcast. Shout out to you. The real estate industry has completely changed my life. If you're not looking into novations yet, I would highly suggest checking it out because it's a massive revenue stream, especially if you have good PPC leads from people like the Baitman Collective. You can monetize so many more leads, give them a great experience, and this really is the new wave in wholesaling. So yeah, check it out and appreciate you, bro."

"Yeah, yeah. I think just - just like one final note based on what you're saying. Do you think it's possible that NOVs are a better fit for PPC leads even than they are for other channels? 'Cause with PPC, you're - you're not like - let's just say it's direct mail. Like, you're building your list and you're looking specifically for distressed properties, or you're looking specifically for, you know, more - more specific locations potentially, or you know, more specific distress type of seller. Versus PPC, you kind of get everything under the sun. Of course, we try to focus on distress, but is it possible that that there's more leads through PPC that can be monetized by novation than a lot of these other channels like higher?"

"Absolutely. All that stuff - PPC is the most sorted for motivation out of any of the other - any other channel, right? Because it's - the person had intent to initiate. They're not responding, they're initiating contact with you. So right there too, and anybody that's ran PPC, you get lots of motivated sellers that just have houses you can't wholesale. And these are all the ones where you're like, 'Man, dude, if I just had unlimited capital, I would whale every single one of these.' You can do that now without taking on the risk and without having the capital needed, you know what I mean, to do that. So yeah, dude, with PPC, if you're not doing novation, you really should reconsider because you - once you see it, you're not going to be able to unsee it. When you find these motivated sellers with the nicer houses, you know what I mean, these are all leads that normally you just have to do a realtor referral or you just have to do an infinite follow-up sequence where you can be solving these problems. And there's very few people that know how to do these deals, so you have very, very limited competition, especially if you're going in markets where there aren't a lot of other wholesalers. But the smaller markets too, you can sell those on market that you'll never sell to an investor, but you'll sell to a nice family, you know what I mean? It's a win-win. They get a good deal, seller gets hands-off experience, the realtor gets paid, title company gets paid, you get paid, everybody gets paid. So it's a win-win."

"Yeah, understood. Cool. Sorry - sorry for the random last-minute question, but thank you, Rich. Appreciate all the value that you've added today, and for everybody else listening, I will see you next week."

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Curious if "data-driven marketing" is just another empty buzzword? Join Tommy Anderson from Bateman Collective as he reveals the real insights into top-tier agency operations, debunking myths and emphasizing sustainable results over superficial metrics.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I have Garett Craen from our paid media team joining me. We're going to talk all about targeting your lists from other channels for digital marketing. How you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing great, how are you doing?"

"Hey, doing fantastic. Thank you, it's good to be back on this track with you. We took a little break and plugged a bunch of content we had from other places for a little bit there because you had a baby and then I had a baby."

"Yeah, and there were like, I think, two other people in the company. One is going to have a baby very soon, and then one..."

"Yeah, so it's been crazy. We're just making it by with everybody on paternity or maternity leave, but we're back at it. So that's good. Babies are happy and healthy, and the podcast will go on. So I'm super excited for our topic today. We're going to talk about different targeting that you can do online."

"That sounds really good. These are the kind of questions that we get asked from our clients all the time, and I think the root of this is Real Estate Investors. The way they do marketing, for the most part, is through lists. You're going to do your cold calling to a list, you're going to do your texting to a list, you're going to do your direct mail to a list. Oftentimes, you're doing all these different channels to the same list of people, and that's how you succeed with a lot of other marketing channels. It's not always quite that way with online marketing, so that's where we have a lot of clients whose first approach to digital marketing is, 'What's the list and how do I target the list?'"

"So let's talk about some of the things you can do, because when a lot of people ask us about this, it's kind of a hard thing to respond to. There are a lot of things that you can do with online ads, but some of them work and some of them just don't. We can get to the bottom of some of those aspects today."

"Yeah, I like it. So let's start with the most obvious. Let's just say I'm an investor and I have this list, whether it's like my stacked list from a bunch of data sources, or I've got 8020 or Attom or PropStream or whatever the case is. Any type of list-building, predictive, or other list that I can use, and I really want to target a certain type of seller because they're on that list and they're likely to sell. Or maybe sometimes I specialize in foreclosure or I specialize in probate, and I want to target those specific types of motivation points. What can be done to target that kind of stuff online?"

"Yeah, so there's two main ways of targeting, and if I miss one, just add it in there. But the two that come to mind with that kind of a list is targeting by either the contact information, so the email or the phone number of the lead, or targeting by the address of the property. Would you add any more options beyond that?"

"No, that's pretty much all I know, and both those options aren't available everywhere. Like with Facebook, there's no way to target a list of addresses, but you can target a list of phone numbers or of email addresses. You need some type of... I think in Facebook, you either need a phone number or an email address. I don't know if there's anything else that could work, and then you can add information like the name and the zip code they're in and stuff like that can help the match rate. But you need at least either a phone number or an email address, which for most investors means you have to have a skip-traced list, which means you're paying 15 cents a record or whatever you're paying to get that done. Which would mean it would absolutely never ever make sense unless you already had that list skip-traced because you're doing some direct... not direct mail, but like specifically cold call or text."

"Yep, yep. So you can do that with Facebook, and Google has a customer match list as well, right?"

"Yep."

"So do you recommend it? Do you not recommend it?"

"Yeah, that kind of is the core of the debate. The way I look at it is digital functions in a very different way than what I call one-to-one marketing tactics like cold calling, cold texting, direct mail. Those are less a volume play than direct, where in general, the larger your audience on digital, the cheaper your cost per thousand views is going to be. So if you're targeting a super small audience, one, you'll be paying a pretty high premium to reach the audience. And on social, let's say a good CTR is 1% if we're generous. That means if we have a thousand views, we are going to have a tiny number of people that actually get to the page. And then if our page is efficient and converts at maybe 10%, you know, you can see how that math gets really small really quickly."

"So yes, there are these super cool ways of targeting that sound exciting and sound hyper-efficient, but when it comes down to it, they go against what makes these channels effective, which is marrying volume with data. And when we cut down that volume and overlay our own data, not data that comes from like own learning, we cut off the arms and legs of the platform."

"Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, different channels have different strengths, right? What I feel a lot of people are doing when they do this kind of marketing is you're taking the strength of a different channel and you're trying to apply it to a new channel. People like to view Facebook as a very targetable platform, and it is on some level, but it's more targetable because you can filter through a lot of stuff in-platform. Like, just have just the right creative that gets you just the right person, than it is that it's extremely like hyper-targeted with the ads themselves to a really specific audience."

"So it is a lot more like a mass advertising channel than a targeted channel when you're talking about how it's done. I think a channel you could compare it to is like TV advertising, for example, where you know you're just reaching a lot of people. Doesn't mean that the leads you get from TV are bad because they're not targeted. No, they're good leads, but it's only because you have the right kind of ad that the right kind of people are going to reach out based on. You don't just spray something out there that gets you everybody."

"So you're basically taking a channel that's good at mass advertising and you're giving it a really niche list to market with. And I think that the nature of what's going to happen there is you'll end up with a campaign that's ineffective or extremely low volume. And I take it to the level that like, I've been doing this in this industry for about six years. I've probably had more than 50 like deep dives in this, like clients we've done it for, so like other people doing it, and I have never ever seen it work. Just truthfully, out of all of those times, I've never ever... We've tried it, I've even talked to people that say that it works for them."

"So I ask them like, 'Well, can I take a look? I'd love to see how you have it set up.' I go in, I realize that they're actually getting all their results from cold audiences in Facebook, and then they also happen to be running these lists and they just didn't realize that the lists are getting them nothing and the cold audiences are what's generating all of their results from Facebook. So I've found probably four or five people that think that they're getting success with this, but they're not. They just don't even understand what they're doing and they're actually not having success with these kinds of campaigns."

"So it's, you know, just to give you an example: Like you start with 10,000 records, you're probably going to have what, like 50% of a match. So you're going to have a Facebook audience of 5,000, and not all 5,000 of those people are going to use Facebook all the time. So within your monthly that you're trying to target, it maybe only 3,000 come on to Facebook. And then you have a 1% click-through rate when they see your ad, so there you've got 10 or... I'm sorry, 30 people that could click. And then you have 1% conversion, which means you don't get a lead. Like that's just how... You think, 'I got 10,000 people, it should be good,' and for direct mail, for texting, for cold calling, yeah, you're awesome. But for online, it just... it just doesn't work."

"There's also something called lookalike audiences that are another category of what you can do here. How does that work in this industry?"

"Yeah, so on Facebook and on Google, you can't use those audience types because it's housing and it's restricted. It can be used on like either OTT or programmatic, those kinds of channels. And those, I've seen... I think that's a better play if you have a good list, is doing a lookalike list as opposed to just a one-to-one like just find these emails, but find people like these contacts. That works pretty well. You definitely have to have enough budget to have enough data to train the platform well, to sort through all of the people that it thinks look similar. Because obviously, there's so many different attributes that can link different people that aren't just that they're in distress or foreclosure or have a property that's inherited. They might like the same TV show or the same politician. There are all kinds of things that I could have in common that aren't the traits that you want. So you have to have enough data in there from an audience size and a budget side to really help the platform hone in on what traits to look for when building that audience."

"So the hardest thing that I found is it has to have a pretty good guide to help it find that target that you're looking for as it builds that audience. In case anybody is confused here because maybe they think they were doing this or something, it hasn't always been this way. Back in the day in Facebook, you could do lookalike audiences, and then a few years ago they took that option away if you're in the housing industry specifically. And then they replaced it with a special ads audience, which was the same thing that just didn't use any predictive features that were potentially discriminatory - gender or age or whatever the case is. And then I think it was this year... Well, not this year because it's the new year just started, but I think it was '23 when they got rid of even the special ads audience, which was sort of the handicapped lookalike audience option. And now you just can't even do it in Facebook."

"Facebook... Google still does have customer match though, if I understand. You can upload a customer list and it informs the bid strategy. It's a piece of the bid strategy, and that I think we've had good experience with because you can take... you can have an account that's new and then you can add this data that isn't from the history of that account specifically to help the algorithm kind of catch on a little bit faster with the data that it'll be gathering in that account. So we've done things like uploading a list of deals that all of our clients have done across the country into the customer match audience for a specific account to basically kickstart that bid strategy so it learns a little faster."

"Yep, and in Google, until recently they had an audience type that they called a similar audience, which was basically their attempt at a lookalike. But that keyword 'attempt' - it was not great. It's like, it literally performed... I've seen so many studies showing that those audiences performed literally equally well as a completely random audience. Like, it had absolutely no value, just a smaller average audience."

"Correct, yeah."

"Those are gone, and they are now only available in a demand gen campaign in Google Ads, but again, they aren't great. So if you're going to do it, it's probably best done in other platforms than Facebook, given the rules against it in Facebook."

"Yeah, and even Google... People want to layer like when they're doing Google search PPC with us, they want to like layer in their data in there. And I think the keyword here is just imagine you like layer a list of 100,000 people and then they also need to be searching... Like, okay, maybe it's a brilliant strategy, but you might get one click a month. You'll end up with one lead every five months. Like, it's just... And you probably overpay for that lead because you have to bid so aggressively that you like must buy whatever click comes across like that."

"So I think the... I think like what how I'm understanding is... is we probably just don't want to look at options to target lists online. However, there are some viable options to use those lists to create stronger online audiences or help fuel an algorithm, whatever the case is. But that's different from like directly targeting the list, and they operate really differently. And the core difference there is in one case, you use the list to help inform your strategy. In the other case, you use the list to be your whole target. So you end up with a much larger audience if you're just using it algorithmically."

"But even then, still, I'd say your list of like people who are in foreclosure in your markets not super useful for that. It's much more useful to have a list of like hot leads that you've had historically or deals you've done, or even hot leads for deals that have happened in the industry as a whole. That's where we can use a lot of aggregate data there because if you've got a list of 10,000 people going into foreclosure this month and I've got a list of 10,000 real estate deals across the country, and we're just talking about what's going to... what's going to fuel an algorithm better so that it can better understand who a motivated seller is, it's going to be the list of people who actually did the behavior, not the list of people that might be more likely to have a behavior."

"Like, you can't use as fuel for your algorithm something that is a feature. You need to have the end behavior measured and then use that as a predictive feature. I hope that makes a little bit of sense. It's just so much more powerful."

"Yeah, I... because like someone that's in like foreclosure might be a deal given just the odds, but a person that was a deal... like, we know that they are definitely the kind of person we want. And trying to time a lead's journey is like trying to time stocks. You might like have an ad hit them right as they're still in foreclosure, but odds are you'll miss them and they'll already have made a change, you know, a different way. And then you're just working off of a really poor list."

"Yeah, that's cool. Let's talk about geofencing. So at the beginning... I can tell you're smiling already. It's fun. At the beginning of this conversation, we talked about there's two different ways you can target your list. We're going to target it based on customer information like their names and addresses and emails and stuff like that, or you could do just address-based stuff. And obviously the advantage of this is going to be that you don't need to have the data skip-traced. However, you're cutting out most online ad inventory as you're doing this. You're cutting out Facebook and Google because they won't let you target a list of addresses and because they're a little bit more careful with how they do location targeting."

"But for anybody that's not aware, I guess I'll just explain briefly what programmatic advertising is. Programmatic advertising is like this weird like decentralized side of advertising. Like, in most cases, what happens is you have like Google has ad inventory and Google sells the ad inventory to advertisers on their platform, right? It's usually pretty simple like that. Then you have this weird like programmatic world where it's like the dark side of online advertising where you just have all kinds of different publishers that don't sell their own inventory and just sell it to exchanges. And then you have all kinds of different marketers that are buying inventory from these exchanges and it's just a wild world."

"Like, it's estimated... nobody knows for sure, but it's estimated that more than 50% of impressions through programmatic ad inventory are fraudulent to begin with. It's not even real inventory. This is the world where you get into like dirt cheap CPMs, whereas on Facebook you're dealing with 10, 15, 20, $40 cost per 1,000 impressions, which is what the CPM stands for. In programmatic, you might be dealing with $2 or $4 per 10,000 impressions. So we're talking about like dirt cheap ad inventory with sometimes a lot of sketchy stuff going on. Stuff like, you know, like fraudulent inventory, or it's a display ad and the company stacks like 80 ads on top of each other so the consumer only sees one but they get paid for 80. Like, it's just a weird online world."

"So that's programmatic. The thing that's neat about programmatic though is there's not many rules. Like, you could do a lot of stuff and... and honestly, if the average American knew a lot about programmatic advertising, it's... it's... it's wild to me that like Facebook's the one getting sued and Google's the one getting sued when in programmatic, stuff way sketchier is happening like every day. But people just don't know it even exists because it's... it, you know, a lot of people would say it's like roughly like 20% of the ad inventory online, whereas most of it's going to belong to like major publishers."

"While on Google you might be able to target like a one-mile radius or in Facebook maybe 15-mile radiuses in this industry, programmatic you could target kind of anything you want. There's even programmatic demand-side platforms where you can target literally the outside... like you target within the perimeter of somebody's property. You can even target like floors of buildings within... there's wild stuff. Like I can target, I want to target people in this exact precise location in this building on the fourth floor with ads. You could do that kind of stuff, which it sounds really cool."

"But it introduces something called addressable geofencing, which is basically the ability to say I've got these 100,000 people that are in pre-foreclosure, you know, whatever it is... my list, and I want to target those people and I'm going to find those people based on their GPS location being within the bounds of a property. So anybody who like lives in that house, for example. And it's... yes, it sounds really cool. I'll give it that. What are your thoughts?"

"It's definitely an easy channel to sell and overestimate how well it actually performs in practice. And as we were talking, I thought of a way to explain this a bit. There's two main forms of targeting: there's firmographic and there's psychographic. And an address or a job title or an income is all going to be firmographic, and that's what is preached pretty heavily by programmatic. Is we can get you their exact address, you know, reach just these incomes and like just these zip codes that aren't possible on Facebook or on Google. And it sounds great, but what's been found for years and years in marketing is that the better way of targeting is by far behavioral, where it's based on like... for instance, if I owned, let's say, like a business that sold shoes, I could target women and do pretty well, you know, women this income. Or I could have an audience of high spenders that have an interest in these things that historically during this season... and that's going to be so much more effective than just going for like certain like genders or income ranges."

"And that's the like misunderstanding of programmatic. Is that it's just a very static kind of targeting that's just much less efficient in an increasingly machine learning-driven world. And that's where these platforms fail. Is they don't have super advanced options for targeting with machine learning. There are some that are better, but they're still so far behind Facebook and Google that in this industry, I think that's where it falls short. Sorry, that was a huge ramble, but I was thinking about it as we were talking and I thought it was helpful."

"No, it is... it is super interesting. One of my favorite models for targeting that I've ever seen shows that like... picture it like a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, you have demographic targeting, and that's what a lot of people consider and important. And as you move up the pyramid, you're moving to data that's less available but more predictive of behavior. So you go from demographics to like psychographics, and then you go from psychographics to behavior. And behavior is more predictive of behavior than psychographics are of behavior or than demographics are of behavior."

"Because, you know, what tells... it's just like the concept of what tells you I'm likely to go to Hawaii next month? That I've been searching on Google for plane tickets to go to Hawaii. And that's like my behavior predicting my behavior. Or like, what tells you that somebody's likely to gamble? Probably that they gambled before is like the number one thing. Could it also be like relatively likely that they could end up going to a casino if they, you know, they fall in some income range or whatever? Yeah, that stuff helps, but like the fact that they were at the casino yesterday... like that's more meaningful to me than that they have this income or whatever the case is."

"So I totally agree with you, and I think it's... I think it's an interesting way to think through things. Now I think at the core of it, like the same reason that we're not seeing... so this just happens clockwork. Like I just... it feels every month we have another client reach out to us and they say I want to do this kind of marketing. And then sometimes they leave us to go do that kind of marketing with some other company. And I've truthfully... I've never seen it work. I think the same reason it doesn't work is because the same reason that Facebook doesn't work. It's just more or... Facebook doesn't work for niche lists, but just even more pronounced because you're with programmatic. You're doing even more... what's it called... like an even more low-quality ad inventory. Like it's the worst inventory pretty much that exists online for the most part."

"And then you're going with a niche list. So you're playing the game where usually the game with this is I'm going to pay like a $2 CPM. So I'm going to pay for extremely cheap ad inventory and I'm going to reach a ton of people. And just because I reach so many people and it's so cheap, that's how I'm going to get my results. But then you're taking that model and you're applying it to a niche list. And then also the company that you're working with realizes that's what you're doing, so then they actually charge you a 12 or $14 CPM because otherwise they'd have to quote you $30 for your ad campaign."

"So then you think you're actually doing like marketing with a larger budget than you actually are because, you know, programmatic has all these margins built in it for agencies. And it's just... at the end of the day, it's ugly. But the my favorite part of the scam is when you add in view-through attribution. And to explain to you how this works... like pretty much this is how, in my opinion, marketing channels generally work. People look for direct response ways to say like, 'You generated these leads and that produced, you know, this outcome in your business.' And when that doesn't work, they basically chalk it up to, 'Oh, it's probably brand.' That's probably what happened."

"And I'm not saying... I'm not like a believer in brand. 100% believe in brand. Like, brand drives more decisions that people make than a direct response does. I'm just saying the right way to build your brand isn't $2 CPM crappy programmatic ads. That's not... that doesn't build brand awareness. There are ways to build a brand and there are ways to not build a brand. The ad at the end of an app that somebody really wants to skip but has to watch unfortunately does not build brand."

"So I guess... I guess what I'm saying with that is... so they end up doing this view-through attribution. And the way that works is, okay, you're going to be targeting for direct mail, cold call, texting, all that stuff. You're going to be targeting these 100,000 records. Okay, let's just run some online ads to those 100,000 records too. At the end of that, tell me which... which of those people from which of those homes ended up, you know, ended up selling their house to you. And we'll tell you which of those actually saw the ads."

"And what you'll find is, wow, that was relatively inexpensive and it impacted a ton of those people that we ended up doing deals with. But it's just because that's what programmatic advertising loves to do, is just basically shove itself in front of somebody who's going to convert anyways and then take credit for it."

"So there's a way to do this, and I've never seen it done in this industry. I've never seen a company actually be able to like show results, but it's called the conversion lift study. You have to basically take half of your list and not show them ads through programmatic, and you have to take your other half of your list and show them ads. And then you have to see how do those two halves of the list perform in terms of their likelihood to become a deal through a different marketing channel for you."

"And if you do that, what you likely find is that your programmatic advertising expense is just not actually producing much for you. And it's just like... the whole advantage is that it sounds really sexy, doesn't cost a ton of money so it's not like a huge line item to cut out, and then the value is mostly hidden amongst results that were already going to come through other marketing channels."

"Sorry, that was a monologue, but there's a lot to unpack there."

"Yeah, and I think it gets to be a dangerous concept when it's chosen over channels. I think it's fine if it's used as a complement for, you know, retargeting air coverage. You know, I think that's fine. But when you take money away from like true drivers like paid search, for instance, that is going to feed your pipeline and drive revenue, and push it into programmatic that is low volume, low quality, and just not going to be a one-for-one replacement, that's when it gets dangerous."

"Yeah, yeah, 100%. There's a lot of things like this kind of... 'cause like we're... I mean, we're not like... in general, people doing marketing are not idiots. Like, we... we all know that usually people, when they become a deal for a real estate investment business, oftentimes they're going to have interactions with multiple marketing channels making that happen. So to say that one marketing channel is solely responsible for it is a little bit ignorant. It's not how it actually works. Like, the buying journey is a little different than that."

"But then there's a lot of these things like retargeting, branded search, view-through programmatic conversions, you know, all these things that are like these little sections of marketing that are usually given way more credit than they deserve towards the end outcome. And it's just because they're like relatively cheap things that happen to shove an ad somewhere in someone's path to conversion that they were already on anyways. And it's known... it's... it's just known super well amongst marketers, but it's sometimes a little bit harder for business owners to understand."

"Absolutely, yeah."

"All right, let's talk about one last twist on this. This is a question that we get from our clients sometimes too. Let's just say we're talking about this opposite. So maybe our list that we have from whatever company we get our lists from isn't going to do a ton for our online marketing. Well, can our online marketing do something for those other channels? Is there a way that we can use the, you know, the data that we're generating from online marketing to help find better targets for our direct mail, our texting, our cold calling, etc.?"

"Yeah, this is a pretty new concept for me. At least I didn't start hearing about this as... as a tack, so probably, I don't know, two years ago or so. But basically what... like how this works is you can throw a script on your website landing page, certain landing pages, and what it'll do is it will match the IP address of that traffic to an... to an individual. And then you'll get from this vendor different ranges of info. I've seen anything from just name, email, and phone number all the way to more of a like real estate-focused offering where they give you address, you know, bedroom count, bathroom count, data was constructed, like what the area is, near or zone for... like all kinds of things."

"And the idea of it being... it's basically retargeting, but instead of just getting a pixel hit and a user added to your audience, you're... you're getting actual information to contact this person that came on your site but just didn't convert. And... I think it's still to be determined how effective this is as a channel. What I've seen is that the intent of this audience is low for a reason. They didn't convert for a reason. Just because they came on your site doesn't mean that they are your ideal buyer. And you're paying a... a premium for that contact that's quite a bit higher than you would be paying in just retargeting them on display or Facebook or YouTube. And so in theory it sounds good, but the intent is just as high as it would be doing retargeting, but you're paying 20, 30 times more for the same contact."

"Yeah, but it is a more impactful thing if you can call the person. Like, that's a contact. That's... you know, there's a reason direct mail works at 40 cents a card. At 40 cents an impression on Facebook, you'd be bankrupt by the time you ever got a deal. Yeah, so... yeah, it's interesting. And I think some of it could depend on, you know, what kind of traffic you're targeting. If you're targeting top of funnel Facebook traffic, you're probably getting a pretty low-quality list there. But if we're talking like paid search, for example, you know, someone searched this keyword and then they came to this website and then they just didn't fill out my form. If you have a chance that you can match that to a person's phone number that you can call, chances are they have a house to sell and they're looking for something because it's an intent-driven campaign."

"So I see potential for... for these kinds of campaigns. I think the... the moral of the story... we tried it some for Baitman Collective for like our own marketing just to play around with this and didn't really see any success from it. We just haven't really tried this for real estate investors yet. That said, if you're a client of ours and you're listening to this and you want to try something like this out, I... I could see this being awesome or really not that good. I think a lot of it's going to depend on the actual quality of that data. Like, we can't assume that the quality of the data is going to be huge. Like, you're always going to get the right person, especially with like how IP addresses work on mobile devices, which is just a little bit trick... like, I know a lot of people that we talked to that try to do this reverse IP lookup have a hard time matching mobile devices to... to a person."

"So I guess... I guess what I'm saying is, for me, I haven't experimented with this enough to really know how it could work, and I haven't found anybody else... I found other people doing it. I haven't found anybody that can show me a measurable result that convinces me that this does work, just that it... just like that they think it's a good idea and they think it will work. So... but haven't actually gotten there... their full circles. So I guess the answer is like, that's what we know about how that can be done, but there still is a lot to be discovered from that. But I think there's certainly a case for how you could do... you could do really well building like colder lists that could at least be better quality than... than your other lists from your online traffic. I think there's a case for how it could be true, but it would take some testing."

"Yeah, I think the key to making it work is to build the audience around certain UTMs or certain pages that they've visited that maybe are deeper in... in the funnel than just your homepage. So like, you could build the audience of like people that... that came, like you mentioned, from my paid search or... whereas I probably wouldn't build that audience of like people from like Facebook or from programmatic, just because those are just like naturally less defined users. But if you can find like an already qualified list and then use this tool to get more one-to-one contact with them, I... I think that's where it... where the math starts to shift in its favor."

"Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I'd be shocked if it doesn't work. I guess the question would be to what extent can it work. For example, if you were just to target like the very best keywords on only desktop devices, which would be more likely to have more accurate data, then would it work? Yeah, probably. But you'd have such a low volume and you might get one deal for the next four years doing this. Or you could just target it for people that have been to your website more than three times. So it shows that they're like, you know, they're engaged on some level."

"So there's... I bet you... like at some point, you get deep enough into your targeting and slicing and dicing the data just right that you can make it so it's worth paying whatever it costs for the reverse IP lookup. It's just the... so the question isn't as much could it work or not. It's just like how, you know, how much volume could you make it work with and would the juice really be worth the squeeze? Because if you could make it work for Facebook cold traffic, then you're building a massive list and there's a lot that could be done from that versus if you're like just looking for hot Google ads traffic that clicked twice and hasn't converted from desktop devices. Then maybe you've got like the core... the target there and you'll get your one deal over the next decade at some point, but it'd be worth the money. So... yeah, that... that'll be fascinating."

"So yeah, of course, if anybody's interested in that, reach out to us. Like, we're interested in experimenting with it, and I'm honestly on the fence. I don't know how well it will work. I... I could see it working well, I could see it working poorly, but that's all we have for you guys today. I hope this... hope this gives you a little bit more context into what you can do and gets you thinking about some different ideas of how you could improve your online marketing, and I'll see you next week."

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Curious about what separates good acquisitions teams from the great ones? Aaron and Chris dive deep into their 7-figure wholesaling business, revealing lightning-fast lead strategies, stress-testing sellers, and the real deal on building a killer team.

"Aaron Chris super excited to dig into Acquisitions with you guys. Figure out what you're doing. Obviously, you're locking up a ton of contracts. Anybody who follows Aon on Instagram has seen Chris more than a few times ringing bells and all that kind of stuff. Chris, you're the... what do we call you? A senior Acquisitions manager here? Been here for about as long as anybody, which means a year?"

"Yeah, in the context of this business, which is a fun stage. It's the growth stage where you're just kind of figuring out how those things work. I've been there too, and I'm kind of there now. A lot of the people in my company who've been there for the longest are like two years."

"Okay, how long have you been around?"

"Six years."

"So just like you, I was kind of running around in circles for a while, didn't know anything, and then started to level up over time. It's like technically we've been around for six years, but those early years... those early years I was an idiot. They don't count."

"Yeah, that's why we're making this, you know, because I want to help somebody who's just one or two steps behind what you are in your business right now. There's a lot of people out there trying to build a seven-figure wholesaling company, so we can talk about what that looks like. And positions, obviously that's the spotlight of all real estate investment. I just talked with Michaela and Stephanie. We talked about dispositions, which is kind of underrated a lot. Obviously, dispositions are crazy important. I love the focus that you guys put on that."

"Well, they wouldn't have anything to do if it weren't for this guy right here."

"Right, so anyways, let's talk about Acquisitions. I'd love to get into some of the details and everything. First, let's talk high-level metrics. How do you measure the performance of Acquisitions of the company and what does that look like?"

"There are a bunch of things now. You know, a lot of us have read the book 'Traction,' right? A lot of us didn't like it, and I actually made a video on my Instagram not too long ago where I basically said, 'If you read the book 'Traction' and you didn't like it, it's because you don't have a team.' You got to have a team to really understand it and relate to the book. You have to have the problems that the book solves, which are all the problems that you get not when you don't have a team, but when you have a team and it's not working."

"So one thing we use from that book is the People Analyzer. We actually just implemented this recently, and I have it on a spreadsheet. We have core values as our title, and then we have the plus and minus. We evaluate each individual by month to our core values. If it's a negative, and all the people that have left us, I've looked at the People Analyzer and we saw that they were in the red and they were never a good fit."

"We also do a scorecard that's in the book. That's just four to five things that we want to see because you monitor it per week. You know, how many leads did you get assigned? How many contracts? How many closes? How much revenue?"

"What we do monitor is some of our KPIs. We want two contracts a week. It's not too crazy, but with our type of leads that we're getting, PPC, that's not a hard task to really come up with. So we want two contracts a week. That's eight contracts a month. With that being said, contracts are going to fall out, but with a strong disposition team, obviously our close rate's gone up. So then we kind of want to cut that in half, and we want about five deals closing the following month."

"We want to average nationwide right now about 12 to 15 thousand. If it's in our backyard, it's a little bit more, but we want at least about 12 to 15,000. So you could do the math. We want $80,000 per rep per month. And then obviously if they go off track, we figure out okay, what's going on? And you figure that out by the scorecard."

"For example, I had one of my reps... you might hear this, but I think it's a great example. We saw on the scorecard how many offers have gone out. If we're not hitting our contract goal, I'll see how many offers have gone out. So you just do backwards, right?"

"It's funny. So we were looking at... I had my one-on-ones, and we do two one-on-ones every single month. I call them coaching calls. They're like mentor-coach, and I actually have right here on my whiteboard: 'Stop doing, start mentoring, coaching, and recruiting.' That's been my kind of job now since I'm not the one calling the leads."

"So what I want to do is I want to coach them. So we look at a scorecard, and I was looking at one of our guys. He's crushing it, but I looked back and I said, 'Hey, we didn't hit our contract goal for the week.' I think he got like one contract, and I said, 'All right, so let's see where it was going wrong.' I saw that he made little offers. We compared them to other acquisition reps. He made little offers, and I thought it was a typo."

"In fact, I go to my admin, and I was like, 'Hey, what's happening here? I think...' And then I think Michaela was in on the meeting, and she said, 'No, those are the right numbers.' So I looked at my acquisition guy and said, 'All right, we need to start making more offers.' Literally the next week, he made more offers and got six contracts in that week."

"Hopefully, I answer your question. Those are a couple ways that we evaluate our acquisition reps."

"I think the only thing to add is we like to look at the talk time as well, and quality conversations. People can be making these dials but not really having these quality conversations, which is what we're all looking for. So tracking that is super important, and that usually reflects into the talk time. If you're having good quality conversations, they're 10 minutes or more, and we want the longer talk time. The more likely you are to get that offer."

"That's super neat. Something that I always have to remind myself of is you pay based on the result, you hold people accountable to the process. Sounds like you're talking a lot about holding accountable to the process, right? Because a lot of people, like I have clients that will say, 'I don't need to do that stuff because I pay them commission, so they should do all that anyways.'"

"Which sounds good until you actually go through it and realize it doesn't happen. People won't do what's in their best interest if they're not held accountable to it. Like somebody who wants to quit smoking can want to quit smoking so they don't get cancer. That doesn't mean they're going to do it because people need help accomplishing their goals."

"One thing that just popped up, and something that I'm always trying to get better at, is a deeper why. I think that really goes into because I'm here to be a servant to my team, right? And I'm going to always try to do my best to be a servant. And by doing that, if they don't hit their numbers, you know what? Again, what we're always trying to focus on is okay, if we didn't hit our numbers, do you remember that you wanted to do X? Do you remember you wanted to hit this goal, this target?"

"And if you put it in that aspect of obviously, this is not about... because we give you commission for XYZ, but it's like why? That commission is for something. We all want to make money, but why do we want to make the money? The money is for a deeper why. Why we're all here... I know you said you had a ping pong table at your office, but we always make a joke here that we don't have a ping pong table here because you're here for a purpose."

"You're here to kick some butt, to go back out to the world to fulfill your deeper why. So when you're here, it's all about business, kicking mass and butt, being ruthless, having resilience, having ownership, and then that accountability that we just talked about. So we're always really trying to dig into that deeper why, and obviously, I could always do better, and I'm always trying to get better at that."

"And we found like the best people, I mean, we all know the top performers, they want to be held accountable. So like, yes, they should be doing that for their best interest, but any top performer wants to keep that, track those numbers. I mean, I want to be... you know, I want to beat my numbers last week. So I want to be able to see that, keep myself accountable. We all slip sometimes, but it's important to visualize that."

"And I think it's for me, it's been one of my favorite things of looking at that in our morning huddles. We're seeing our numbers. This week has been tough for me. I haven't been able to hit those numbers, but today's going to be different. It's a conversation that we're constantly having, and if you don't track those things, they fall through the cracks."

"Totally understood. One of those numbers in my industry that's usually really important is how many leads does it take for us to get a contract? Obviously, all those other things contribute to that, right? We got to be making dials, be having talk time, stuff like that. What do you guys find is realistic and how do you set that benchmark for what realistic is?"

"I'm going to let him... Well, I know just based off of the conversation I've had with Aaron, I think the amount of your question was how many leads it takes to get to a contract, right? For us, our minimum is like we have 75 dials. If you don't have 75 dials, if you have a contract, you need to be including getting more dials. But I think right now what we're at is 12 leads to a contract, 10 to 12 leads to a contract, something like that."

"Yeah, one thing we always look for, and this is something Chris really embodies, and there's two things, and that's a good attitude and hard work. And that's why he stuck around with us for so long. He has a good attitude and hard work. It's funny, Chris, being... you know, we went from a small office to a larger office, starting to build that team, starting to build that culture that we talk about."

"And so, let's just... long story short, that small office and small team that we had is no longer with us. The one person that is with us is Chris, and you got to kind of see some of that growth. I remember when we were with that small team, we had to ask for grace because a lot of things were changing. We were growing, we were bringing on... Brandon, just kidding. We were bringing in... it's really when we started working together, that's when everybody quit."

"Yep, they missed the boat, man. They missed it."

"There was definitely a lot of accountability that the old team couldn't handle. I'm sure you as a business owner have felt that as well. But the cool thing is now, and I've heard one of my mentors say this, and he's like, 'I've never had to fire anybody.' And I was like, 'What do you mean you have not had to fire anybody?'"

"If your standards are high and your values are there, and they're not meeting up to your standard, you just have to ask them a simple question, and usually they unfortunately and fortunately leave on their own. So I had to fire somebody... actually, a good couple months now, they just quit. They just quit because obviously, we're looking for excellence."

"It's kind of like when I look for candidates and I got 20 candidates coming a day, which we are doing, as I was explaining to you earlier. Obviously, we're looking for the best of the best, and so obviously our hiring process has gotten a lot better. Chris has been a great right-hand guy to really help and filter those people, hold those people's standards high, really embody our core values."

"We, he and I, get to collaborate and talk about a lot of times when people come in. We realize that our sales process... every company should have a sales process, and we have a sales process. And we've seen people who don't embody the sales process, and they want to go cowboy stuff. Crash and burn hard. But if they could come in and they could have a growth mindset and they embody our sales process and bring in the value, obviously their skill set, the reason why we hired them, they're able to skyrocket and start hitting their numbers quick for sure."

"Oh, that's super cool. Chris, I'd love to ask you what that process looks like. Let's start at the very beginning. So, PPC lead comes in. How do you even know that that happened and what happens next?"

"Yeah, no, so first off, we all get a notification. Everybody on the sales team gets a notification. We kind of... it's a thing that we do here at the office because of Aaron. When something comes in, new lead, we all just kind of like to say it. Just one of those culture things."

"Urgency, baby. Like you come here for the first day, you're like, 'What is everybody doing?' Then after a year, you're like, 'This is just life. This is how it goes.'"

"Exactly. And I mean, even on some of the things that I've seen, videos that you made, it's speed to lead, right? It's a big thing that we have. We want to get to it as fast as possible. So I mean, me and Jonathan out there, we're fighting to get them on the line. But once we get them onto the line, then we just start going through our sales process, asking them the four pillars of motivation, trying to really dig deep and see if this is going to be a good fit and how we can really help."

"So that's pretty much it, but I think the main thing is speed to lead, just like getting them on the phone as fast as possible. I mean, we get the notification and we're dialing them three times back to back, me and Jonathan, right now."

"So different numbers?"

"Oh yeah, multiple tries. We're blowing them up constantly."

"You'd say the most important part of your sales process is what happens within the first few minutes of coming in?"

"Seconds. Seconds. And that's honestly something... like every time we go... because you guys, according to our whole client metrics, you stack up pretty well in terms of Acquisitions performance. It's part of the reason I'm here. If you guys really sucked, you wouldn't have this conversation, right? So you do well. So I have faith that what you're talking about is really real, really true."

"And every other conversation I've had like this, that is such a huge piece of the process. I think people struggle to actually tangibly make it happen. What would you say, and this question is for either of you, if we're talking about speed to getting to new leads, have you ever had a time where you struggled with that before? Like, was there a time where you weren't performing, or have you just always had this down?"

"I could say for me, no. Like, I think it goes down to what he was saying earlier, like the deeper why. Like when a lead comes in, it's not necessarily like, 'Oh, a lead just came in.' That's something that's going to put food on the table, right? That to get me to my next goal. So it's like, if you have to have that in you, and once you see that, it's... that's money ringing, you know?"

"And knowing what happens on the back end, we're fortunate enough to have somebody to kind of fill us in on those things. We spend a lot of money for these types of leads, so we need to take care of them. It's not something that we just throw off and like, 'Oh, I'll get to it later.' Like, you shouldn't really be here if that's your mindset, you know?"

"Yeah, so it sounds like for you, you're saying a big piece of this in your opinion is the right person with the right motivation. They're fast to get to the leads, not necessarily... and maybe like we say, like hold accountable to the process, that's important, right?"

"Right, but the right person theoretically would be motivated themselves to do that."

"100%. That's the culture that we're bringing in here as well. Like, we want them to be able to come in here and have that type of motivation. We're going to hold them to those standards, but yeah, I mean, you're getting a high dollar, high-value lead that just came in. You better be on that."

"Yeah, what did you do before this, Chris?"

"Here, I've been a realtor for going on four years now. So I was doing real estate, doing a lot of investments as well."

"Were you really connected to this deeper why before you started working here?"

"Yeah, yeah. I know definitely before real estate. I mean, I was in the restaurant industry. I was a server. Always had real estate on my mind. But yeah, I've always had large goals, and I feel like, you know, we all know real estate is one of the driving forces to build that generational wealth and get that cycle of poverty out of your family tree. So yeah, that's always been my deeper why. You have to... I feel like in sales, if you don't have a why, you're going to... you're in for a treat 'cause you go through it, you know? You go through those roller coasters, and if you don't have anything to anchor you, you're not going to last."

"Yeah, no, it's super... that's super fair. It's very interesting. So speed to lead and then the four pillars?"

"Yeah, so there's two things. One thing what I like actually... so last month our contact rate was a little off. One thing I really liked is you got to surround yourself and you got to build a team that actually gives a crap, cares, has passion for these leads. Chris, he saw that and he was like almost hurt, and he said, 'I don't like that.' And he got the other acquisition guy together and said, 'All right, let's pound these leads. Let's get in contact with these leads.' So that's something too that obviously fires me up."

"One thing too is obviously you want to use technology to get us fast, fast to these leads as possible. So we have a CRM that when a lead comes in, it sends an automatic text to them within like zero seconds. They submit, they get a text. Always going to be faster than a human could possibly be, even in the best of scenarios. And the text literally says, 'Hey, I saw you fill out a form. I'm calling you right now if you find an unknown number.'"

"Right, and I know you know that message, but it's a really great idea as long as you actually do it. Otherwise, you set the stage for how bad you are at doing what you say you're going to do from minute number one. So obviously that goes out to them, and then we obviously want to contact the lead in 60 seconds or less."

"One thing we did talk about, I know a lot of people talk about this a lot, is obviously nights and weekends, right? You know, that's probably where the contact rate goes down a little bit, and that's fine. But when we're in office, you know, that's like I said, we're here from 8 to 5, and we still keep those leads going after hours because we know the cost per lead's still great. So that's another thing too, is keep it on after hours even when people are still living their deeper whys, living their life, and that's fine. Obviously, we just really require them to answer the phones here, and we're really good at that."

"So speed to lead, boom, they answer it, and then it's also a sales process of already assuming that that lead's ready to go, that seller is ready to go, right? It's not a cold call, text lead, some type of cold marketing. That's why we love these leads because you could lock them up on the first call if possible. So that's another thing too, is you got to know how to talk to these leads or you're going to waste a lot of money."

"Absolutely. Do you know how many days it takes to get a lead under contract? I mean, do you have the stat like average or median?"

"Yeah, it's three to five days. Unless they, like I said, unless they get the lead on the first call."

"Yeah, fair enough. Which happens pretty often, right? They come in, we get on the phone with them within seconds, we're on the call with them for 45 minutes, an hour and a half, and we get the contract right there."

"When you say pretty often, are we talking like is this 10% of your contracts, 30%?"

"I wouldn't be able to say it's... I wouldn't know the actual numbers, but it's definitely up there. It's probably like 40%."

"Okay, so that's like almost as much as you get?"

"Yeah, it happens weekly. There's... I believe, and I think Jonathan's at that stage as well, if I get a PPC lead that is ready to go, they're ready to go, and I get on the phone with them, we're locking it up right there. Like, it's no question about it. I have the confidence in what we do that that's what's happening. There's other factors, right? If they... there's a bunch of things that they can't sign right then and there, which is kind of out of our control. But if we get on the phone with them, we're locking it up."

"It's funny, we have training every single day. Like two... let me see if I remember. I actually have a spreadsheet. Good job, they keep me accountable. For everybody's information, the reason the spreadsheet thing coming up is 'cause I learned that that's a phony. He's a phony, apparently. Michaela... yeah, this certificate of graduation. It's half my wife, half my wife. Apparently, Michaela did the spreadsheets class, not fully Aaron. But you learned the skills after college?"

"That's right, that's right. It's still worth it. And so I do hold myself accountable. Actually, I do do spreadsheets because it's my life data. Did I go to the gym today? And I literally track what I do. Anyways, on my trainings, so like yesterday was call out. Today's role play. Thursday, I forgot what Thursday is. And then Friday's like comp training. And I make sure I do that. I try to do that every day if I can."

"And I'll put 'Yes, I did it.' Anyways, today was supposed to be roleplay. Matter of fact, I held off roleplay because I thought maybe we'd get that on recording because I wanted to show you. Because what we do, and I didn't because I know that was part of what the email you sent me, but one thing we do with these leads is, again, when you talk, when you negotiate, you got to create urgency, maybe a little bit of scarcity. That's how you get those one-call closes, right?"

"By not moving forward with an actual close until you know they're actually fresh and hot and ready, and then you could go in and take them out of the oven and eat them. But I think that's to their point of another... the earlier question that you asked, like why these leads are so important is because a lot of them, there's a possibility that you're going to get them under contract right then and there. So like that, I feel like in itself should be the number one reason why you get on there as quickly as possible, or else they're going to call me and I'm going to do it. So that's a big, big factor for sure."

"Yeah, I totally agree. You said, Aaron, that you're basically not trying to do business with these people until like you verify that it's right. Can't remember exactly what words you said. And I've heard... just know I'm coming at this from like the 'never been in a seller's house' situation. So I'm just really curious to dig deeper into it because I've heard a lot of different things from different people."

"Like one person we both know is Cody Hofhine. Love Cody. Their team is also one of our top performers over time. They have this rule where like, they don't make offers basically. And basically what Mark says is... Mark is Cody's business partner... he says like, 'I'm not in the business of making offers, I'm in the business of doing deals.' So it's a lot of like hypothetical, like, 'Okay, well, so it sounds like if I could get you that amount of money, you might be interested in putting a deal together today.' And like, but I'm not like saying, 'This is my number' or something like that."

"But I also know that making offers is something that you guys track. Like, what's your mindset on this? Because some people are in the camp of like, the more offers you make, the more deals I do, for sure. And other people are in the camp of, 'I'm not going to make an offer unless I know it's going to be accepted for sure, and I want to hold my number close because if I put my number out there, then they have what they want from me and they won't care about me anymore.' Where are you guys at and how do you do your process?"

"So I guess when it comes to offer, it's not necessarily... let me rephrase it and give it the definition of an offer. An offer is not saying, 'Hey Brandon, I'm going to give you $30,000 for this house, take it or leave it.' That's not an... I wouldn't call that an offer in our sales process. It's more of a, you know, did we get to the numbers part? Did we have the full process? Got... maybe there was no like official offer given. It was just, did we talk about... exactly, did we get to the full... did we talk about that?"

"And you know, do we give a... or like, did we talk about ranges? Did we talk about what another investor might pay for something like this? We always use third parties."

"Yeah, that makes sense. No, that absolutely makes sense. I'm curious to talk about lead managers. Obviously, Chris, these leads come in, you're going right to them. And different people have different ways of building their business. I know, Aaron, you and I both know a lot of people that are fans of using lead managers in their business. Tell me about what went into your choice to not have a lead manager in between the marketing and Acquisitions."

"Oh yeah, that's... not a fan of lead managers. Now obviously, there are different types of, you know, philosophies out there. Some people use VAs, some people call them Junior Acquisitions, some people call them lead managers, but they're in the US, American side. There's a huge range of quality, those few things that you mention."

"100%. And for me, like when I'm hiring, especially at the size of my company right now, when I'm hiring, I'm looking for closers. Like, I want a closer. If I'm dealing with inbound marketing, I want closers. Now obviously, the lead comes in, it goes to maybe a lead manager to do follow-up. I think the amount of passing around a lead loses its... loses its warmth of that lead."

"Somebody... 'cause how I see it, if I mean, you're here from 8 to 5, you're in the office 8 to 5, you're going through your CRM, you're calling... you know, we're... you could be calling over 100 a day, just trying to get somebody on the phone some days. And then also they got their follow-up, they got their pipe. We do a lot of pipeline pickups. We're always figuring out what leads are in the end zone. They're doing the exact same thing a lead manager would do, and that's following up, trying to find leads in the CRM, closing deals."

"So they're doing the same exact thing as a lead manager would do. So basically when you ask me why don't you get a lead manager, it's because that's my acquisition guy already. They're the ones going through the pipe, they're looking through the CRM for leads, they're doing their follow-up. And also with their follow-up, they're able to follow up with each... their pipe to build the overtime relationship because our fallout game is strong."

"So I just don't see a point. I mean, they're making over 100 calls a day some days unless they're having great long quality conversations to get contracts or appointments or whatever. But I just... I mean, if I had them on the field maybe every day and they were going house to house, maybe that would make sense. If we're just kind of shooting the crap here, maybe that would make sense because now they're not on the phones going through it. But we're very good at closing deals over the phone. That's like our... that's our... that's the way we do things here. We close the deal over the phone."

"So they're just... they're going through... they're on the phone all day anyways. But yeah, if they're at the house, that might make a little more sense. What are your thoughts?"

"Yeah, no, and I think it makes it easier for what... like doing how we do it is because we have a system and process in place so that we know how to properly manage the leads. Like, it goes back again, taking extreme ownership. The top performers are going to have a clean pipe. They're going to have a clean CRM to look at every day, know how to manage those specific leads, what's hot, what's warm, what's cold."

"So yeah, I mean, we do it... we take ownership of our leads once we get ownership of those leads. So yeah, I think it makes it a lot easier of knowing how to properly do it and manage them day to day."

"Yeah, that makes sense. And I don't disagree with you guys. I'm just going to play Devil's Advocate."

"Well, I mean, we're... it's a very... in our industry, it's a very controversial topic, right? A lot of people say, 'Oh, you... why... you need a lead manager. What are you talking about?' You know, and just something I don't agree with."

"Well, you're the... yeah, you're the weird guy, I think, in this overall. Ironically, a lot of the clients that I've spoken to that are our highest performers, for the most part, don't use lead managers on the front end. Sometimes on the back end when leads go cold or something, for sure. We could talk about that as, you know, a separate thing."

"So I think you're unusual amongst the industry as a whole, but pretty common amongst some of our most successful clients. But that considered, I'm curious... back when you were doing tons of cold calling, texting, did you have lead managers at that point?"

"I did. You did? I had a VA lead manager, one and two actually."

"Okay, yeah. So the journey of what you've done is actually pretty similar to a lot of people, because what people notice is a lead manager is there to shield Acquisitions from all the crap you get from marketing. That's essentially their job, because Acquisitions people get really demotivated when they deal with bad lead after bad lead after bad lead. It's not actually motivated."

"But when they use bait... man, collect... we know all these leads are quality, man. They're quality."

"You... uh, I'm glad you remember the script, Chris. That's awesome. I was worried you wouldn't come in at the right time. That's super good. No, like, it's true though. If you need 40 or 60 or 80 leads to a contract, then that's a lot of work to filter through those. If you have 10 or 12... I'm curious because like, you still get... like sometimes we work with teams that are used to having a lead manager, and then they take it out and they're like, 'Oh no, this lead has the wrong phone number.' Like, as an Acquisitions manager, I feel super offended, and like, this... I should never have to deal with this or something."

"I'm sure you get... like, everybody gets that kind of stuff. Like, usually about 15% of leads are complete bogus in some way or another. And then, you know, you work down the funnel, some are better than others. Not all leads are created equal, we know that for sure, right? But how do you feel about like the spread of quality that you get? Do you feel like it's too much and you end up wasting a lot of time with leads that aren't as good, or does it feel like a productive use of your time?"

"No, yeah, no, definitely not. Most of our leads are quality, and you know, we don't have a lead manager, but like, for instance, if we have a lead that has a wrong phone number, we just pushed it to a VA. 'Hey, skip trace this lead,' and she puts the right phone numbers in. I put it in my follow-up for the next day and call with the right number. I mean, and I just keep moving on to the ones that have the right number. It's just super simple. It's not that hard."

"So yeah, now I think that we have some... the quality leads, and we're... yeah, we're doing pretty well. We had... so I was doing... I did an interview... were you on the interview?"

"Yeah, I think it was you."

"So he... so I'll have a shadow day, and I'll have a guy come in. And this guy came from the solar industry, and what he did is he went door knocking. And what he would do is he would like set up... like he'd be like a lead manager. He would set up for the closer, and then he'd get somebody... you know, guy opens, 'Yes, I would like solar.' He'd call his closer, and he would come over and close the deal."

"So anyway, so I guess I don't know, the guy maybe didn't like solar or something, so he applied for here. And I kind of liked him. He seemed like a sharp dude, sharp individual. Young, young, young individual. Anyways, comes in here, you know, we... he goes through the whole normal shadow day, goes in for our roleplay exercise that we do, part of that... part of our exercise. And I do... I do bring Chris, and I... and sometimes I'll bring either or just to kind of give me a second opinion when we bring somebody on the team."

"And we go through a roleplay, and every single time after the roleplay, he would always say, 'Hey, do you want... okay, so Mr. Seller, would you like me to have somebody call you?' He couldn't get over the fact of setting it up. So what we do is we pause the roleplay. We'll coach him and we'll tell him like, 'Hey, I know that's what you do, but I need you to be able to close the deal.'"

"And so we... so right, let's go again.

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Curious how a former house flipper turned $50k into an $8 million land empire in 2 years? Pete Reese spills it all – from unique marketing strategies to automating with AI, and raising millions from private investors.

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Pete Reese. Pete is a friend and a client of mine who specializes specifically in land investing. So, Pete, we'll be talking a lot about what land investing is, how it compares to single-family houses, how you've grown your company significantly in the past few years, and also some impressive numbers in terms of marketing for land. Specifically, what are some of the advantages of direct mail versus pay-per-click marketing in that particular industry? I'll see you there, Pete. How are you doing today?

I am doing great, Brandon. Good to be here.

I'm excited for you to be here as well. Nothing like a Friday afternoon podcast.

That's right. Everybody's winding down.

Exactly. I sometimes wonder if anything does get done on Friday afternoons.

You know, honestly, not much. If it's anything like my own work habits on a Friday afternoon, they really fall off a cliff after lunch.

No kidding. Maybe we should all just move to a four-day workweek someday.

Yeah, someday maybe.

I am super excited to have you here. I think you bring a unique perspective to the podcast. But for those who might be listening and don't know you and your background, tell me more about you. What do you do now? What has your real estate journey been like?

Well, my real estate journey has taken a long and winding road. I've been in real estate in some form or another since the early 2000s when we bought our first home here in California. We bought it with an FHA loan, 3.5% down for about $200,000. We sold it about two years later and netted about $50,000. At that point, I thought I was a real estate mogul because I had done some very shoddy improvements myself. In hindsight, not so much, but that got me exposed to real estate and maybe the power of it a little bit.

We started buying some homes and flipping them. In the early 2000s, it wasn't as mainstream as it is today, but there were still shows on HGTV and such. We did pretty well with that until the market crashed in about 2008. Prior to that, I got my broker's license out here in California just to get more access to deals. I was buying everything on the market through the MLS, thinking I could show myself the homes and write my own offers. I thought that would be great, but not long after that, the market crashed and it wasn't the best thing to be in real estate at that time.

I needed to earn income, so I actually started representing banks on their bank-owned properties. I became an REO broker and worked on that side of things, working with a lot of investment companies that were buying and flipping homes or buying them for rentals. It was easy for me because I understood what they were looking for and had access to deals that they didn't. That worked out pretty well.

I got a little sidetracked into a business with my wife related to blogging and travel blogging. We did a bunch of traveling as a family for quite some time, and that was a really fun business. But I got the itch to get back into real estate investing and stumbled upon land investing. I didn't really want to get back into home flipping because for me, it was too cumbersome with so many moving pieces. I stumbled into land investing and went down the rabbit hole. This was in late 2020 when I identified that this kind of matched what I felt I was good at.

In 2021, we did our first land deal in March and generated about $1.2 million in revenue that year with about a 50% gross profit margin. In 2022, we did about $3.4 million and some change at a little over a 40% gross profit margin. Then in 2023, we did $8.2 million at about 40% as well. Now, we're aiming to hit $20 million this year just buying and selling land. So, that's what I do now.

Wow, those are impressive numbers for the land investing space. You seem pretty nonchalant about everything.

You know, just buying and selling stuff. It's inspiring, though.

No, that's fair. It's super cool. I didn't know a lot about that from your journey. Obviously, most of the people listening to this podcast know the real estate space but maybe less about the land space. I'm super curious to hear more.

Let's say I came to you right now, and I fully expect a biased answer. If I asked you, "Should I get into a real estate acquisitions company, like wholesaling or flipping houses right now, or should I get into land?" What would you say?

Well, like you said, I'm pretty biased. I know all the different investment models, and I choose to do land because, honestly, it's the easiest. There are a lot of challenges and nuances, but there are things you don't have to deal with that you do with houses. For example, there aren't a lot of occupants, tenants, evictions, or anything like that when dealing with land. Occasionally, you might have a squatter on the property, but that's about it. It's very straightforward. Even something as simple as arranging a time to see the property is easier. You just go and go. You don't have to coordinate much.

The thing that always challenged me, and I know others are better at this, was the construction side of things, coordinating with contractors, running into unexpected issues. When you're doing a land purchase, you try to determine all these things upfront. It's not like opening a wall and finding something out after you've bought the property. Those surprises always seemed to come up when flipping homes, and I didn't enjoy that aspect.

While there's competition in land investing, there's also a lot of opportunity. I don't think it's nearly as competitive as the single-family home market, and the profit margins are great. Our goal is always to double our money on deals, though we average about a 40% gross profit margin. If we can move these properties on average in as many days, it starts to accelerate really quickly with that kind of return.

Yeah, that's wild. Those are impressive numbers for land.

Yeah, you know, the profit margins are great. A lot of times, our goal is to double our money on our deals. If we're doubling our money, that's a 50% gross profit margin, but we pretty much average around 40% at scale. We're still making a really good return on our investment and moving these properties pretty quickly.

Let's talk marketing. Obviously, my passion is marketing, and I know you're into it too. What's it like compared to houses?

Are you talking about on the acquisition side?

Yeah, so we use two methods at this point. Obviously, we're working with you on the pay-per-click side of things, and we also use direct mail. We send out offer letters to landowners based on average pricing in specific areas we like. These offer letters are kind of the first shot over the bow to see if we can get them to call back and gauge interest. Sometimes we're right on the offer values, sometimes not. When they contact us, we fine-tune and see if we can make a deal. So, that's primarily our marketing side of things. We're doing a lot of direct mail and paper click advertising.

As I understand it, direct mail is a staple for land. Most land investors seem to be doing direct mail. It's classic, just like it was for houses before it got really competitive.

Yeah, nowadays, direct mail isn't as easy as it once was for houses. It's interesting because we can define the type of properties we want and target specific areas where we know land sells fast and where we've built a good infrastructure, like a good team, maybe a good broker or title company. We buy a lot of larger rural properties, like 10 acres or more, so we can target those specific types of properties. We can filter by absentee owners or tax delinquencies, but we're more of a shotgun approach with our mail strategy. We send out a lot of mail, and overall, the numbers work out. On average, we're spending about $3,500 in mail costs per deal, and last year, our average gross profit per deal was about $30,000. So, it's a really good return on investment.

Paper click is different. The motivation is there, and these are motivated sellers, but the property type is random. We get properties from all over the country and random spots. Like today, we're advertising for land and got someone wanting to sell a school they bought and are renovating. So, we get all kinds of random stuff, even though we're putting out ads for land.

That's wild. I bet nobody's searching to sell my school for cash.

Yeah, they probably searched for "people who buy schools" and found us.

Interesting. They probably searched "sell my school for cash."

Yeah, if nobody has already, you should go snag that domain.

Yeah, I'm doing that. It's crazy because I'm looking at the satellite images, and I've always thought it would be cool to buy one of those old schools and redo it. I know there's a lot involved with it, but I'm looking at the satellite images, and it's in a great spot near a big shopping mall with a huge football field. I'm wondering, what would you do with that? I have no idea.

Brandon: That's fun. You've given me a couple of ways to think about land investing and marketing strategies. I hope you all got some value from what Pete just shared.

Pete: Absolutely, I hope it helped, and we'll see you next week.

Brandon: All right, guys, thanks for tuning in. If you haven't already, go over to LandConquest.com, check it out. We've got some really cool tools and resources that can help you in your land investing journey. We'll see you next time.

Pete: Take care.

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Ever wondered what it takes to go from crashing on your mom's garage floor to becoming a real estate mogul and HGTV celebrity?

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Tar Elusa. Tar has done a ton of stuff in the real estate investment space, everything from nearing a million dollars of revenue a month in his wholesale business to flipping real estate and having one of the most popular TV shows in the real estate investment space on HGTV. We're talking with Tar about all kinds of things like his mindset, how his real estate career has changed, his story, and how he got started. It's a super interesting episode, so I'll see you there."

"Tar, how are you doing today?"

"Good, what's up Brandon? How's it going?"

"Hey, doing fantastic. Good to see you again. It's been a minute. I'm super excited for today's episode."

"First, for anybody that doesn't know you or know you super well, tell me a little bit about your story. Like, where did you come from? When did you first start getting into real estate investing?"

"Yeah, sure. I'll give you the quick rundown. I grew up in Burbank, California, just a normal American family neighborhood. My parents immigrated—my mom was from Europe, my dad was from the Middle East. Fast forward to 19 years old, I got out of high school, I was going to college, kind of lost. I was selling kitchen knives for Cutco, and it turns out I could sell because I was actually making money. One day, I lost my sales book, so I essentially put myself out of business. I had what I like to call a defining moment. As a real estate investor, I've actually had many defining moments, but my very first defining moment, which is a moment in your life that changes the trajectory of your life, was at a Washington Mutual ATM in Sylmar, California, after losing that book. I'm looking at my ATM, and I swear, true story, I threw my head back and I'm like, 'Damn, what now?' Right? I looked over to the right, and there was this crooked sign that said, 'Say Y’s Old Owl Real Estate School.' I was like, 'Wait a minute, if I can sell knives, I gotta be able to sell houses.' So, that's how I actually got into real estate."

"At the time, the girl I was dating, her parents were in real estate like 20, 30 years before, so they used to talk about it, but I went in with nothing. Then I got my license and my book, 'Flipping Life,' just came out. It tells the very detailed story of exactly what happened, but long story short, I got a big deal early on, didn't know how to replicate it. I was totally broke six months into the business, ready to quit. I was trying to sell real estate at this time, as an agent, yeah, as a real estate agent, totally broke. At the time, I broke up with that girlfriend, my parents got divorced, my mom needed money, so she rented out my bedroom. So, I had to go move into her garage. It was a tough period of my life. I ended up going to this free event thrown by this guy named Mike Ferry, who's a real estate speaker and trainer. I had never heard a professional speaker. This guy, Mike, is a genius. He convinced me I could do anything. He convinced me that I would be a multimillionaire. So, at the end, I signed up for one-on-one coaching. It was a thousand bucks a month. Obviously, I did not have it, but I had a credit card. Here's what happened. I burned the booth. What I said was this: I'm giving myself 90 days. I'm going to do exactly what my coach says for 90 days, and at the end of 90 days, if I succeed, well, I made it in real estate. If I don't, I'm going back to school. I did not like school, and be very clear on that. So, I tell people, you want to change your life, you gotta block it into a 90-day block. For 90 days, you don't think about anything but that one thing that you want. So, the one thing I wanted was to make contacts. I know that sounds crazy. So, I'll tell you what we did. He said, 'How do you want to make your money?' There's for sale by owners, expired listings. An expired listing is a house that was for sale but never sold, so I would relist it. What happened was this: I would call from 7:45 a.m. to like 8:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, three hours on a Sunday night. Ninety days later, I was at the bank, cashing about $120,000 in real estate commissions, right around my 21st birthday, which today, with inflation, is like $550,000. So, you know, I'm that old. But think about that. And here's the cool thing, and this is what I try to teach people, man. People just sell themselves out of their own success. Like, you don't. You just gotta go. And here's the truth: I made $120,000. I should have made $240,000. You wanna know why I only made $120,000? Well, I didn't know what a listing contract was. I didn't know how to run comps. Did I know how to sell? I knew how to sell. Could I get the appointment? I could get the appointment. So, that's how I kicked off my real estate career."

"Okay, interesting. So, that was still at that point as an agent, correct?"

"Yeah, that was as a real estate agent. Want me to tell you the kind of transition?"

"Yeah, I'm curious."

"Alright, so calling expired listings, I did really, I did really well fast. Everything I all the money I made, all the deals I got, I had zero marketing. I never marketed in my life. I was a cold caller. I was a cold calling machine. I was doing $500, $600 a day. People would call me crazy. Oh, but I never finished my story. Here's what, here's how I did it. How I made the $120,000. I had one goal every day. It wasn't to make money. It wasn't to get listings. It was to have 50 conversations with someone that owned a house. And the rule was, I couldn't go home until I had 50 conversations. So, because I focused on conversations, you know, on call number 50 of the night, I say, 'Hey, this is Tar with Credential Real Estate. Do you, Tar?' And they hang up on me. Do you think I'm mad or do you think I'm happy? I'm happy. That's my 50th contact. I get to go home. So, my job was just to have contacts, but it turns out if you have contacts, you get clients, and if you get clients, you get money."

"Yeah. Okay. So, you made it's a way for even the failures in the day to be contributing to your goal. That's how you, like, stay motivated for that. How long did you do that?"

"How long can a human do 500, 600 dials a day? Almost 10 years."

"You did that for 10 years?"

"Cold called. I cold called. I door knocked. I'll tell you my schedule. It was gnarly. This is when I got the show. I'll tell you in a second. You know, my gift is I'm willing to outwork everybody. Because, you know, when I want something, I just want it so bad. Nothing else matters. And that's really helped me get to where I am. But built a successful real estate business. I was young. Great Recession hit when I was 25 years old. I was living in a million-dollar house, had all these fancy cars, all this crap I didn't need, moved to this tiny little apartment, had to borrow my dad's truck with roll-up windows and broken AC, and I was back to rock bottom, right then started getting short sales for about a year and a half. I was hopping around apartments, man. My life was different. Like, I went from driving like a S500 Mercedes Brabus to, like, a truck that was breaking down. It was pretty rough. So, I started seeing opportunities in the market. And I did the short sale transaction. I had a first lien, a second lien, a third lien, an HOA lien, an IRS lien, and I negotiated it for 11 months. And in the end, I got a check for $7,000. And I remember the guy that I sold it to hired a gardener, cut the lawn, hired a painter, painted the house, and sold it two weeks later, made like $130,000. And that was the second defining moment in my life. And that was the exact moment I realized I was on the wrong side of the equation as a real estate investor, which, by the way, I now realize I've kind of been in some aspects on the wrong side of the equation as a house flipper, which I'll explain later. But in that moment, I said, 'I'm going to be an investor.' So, what did I do? I did what everybody does. I picked up my phone and I started calling everybody in my phone.

I said, 'I need your money.' They said, 'Why should I give it to you?' I said, 'Because I'm going to give you a 25% annualized return.' They said, 'Where is it?' I said, 'I don't know. But it's going to be worth a million bucks.' So, I did. I borrowed money from people I didn't really know. I don't know how to do this, but my best investment is for real estate. So, that's the way it started."

"Alright, so you started getting money from private investors, and that's kind of how you transitioned into more of the flipping and the wholesaling side of things?"

"Yeah, I mean, I'm talking to my whole sales floor, and the first thing that I want you to know, who get house flipping out there the old when I to get anything, it's just to learn in the house in the with bad.

"Have that same mindset going into our business, and if you are hyperfocused on finding that deal, you are going to find those deals. Okay, so for you, it's a mindset thing, and it's like being willing to do the volume. You know, same thing that brought you success—calling five to 600 calls a day. It's that you just gotta spend a lot of time connecting with these people. And if you keep on doing that, then you're gonna get the right deals. It just takes time."

"And my favorite is digital marketing lead—you know, when I was actually like a salesman for my company, I was converting one out of 14. I had a pretty darn high conversion rate. Um, yeah, that's... Yeah, so you know, my favorite digital market—no, actually, my number one favorite is the organic leads I get from being on TV. I love those. Number two is digital marketing lead, for sure. And then three, honestly, like, we're crushing it with outbound right now. We're doing a lot of deals with agents."

"Yeah, that's very cool. I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the story of how you got deeper into the wholesale business. Let's talk about, like, so obviously there's that beginning there where you had to get the 13 houses for your show, which is a wild story. I didn't realize that you were actually, like, doing the show as you were learning to do the business. I'm super curious to go back on, like, some of those initial flips that you were doing. I'm sure you look back at it, like, thinking that you were an idiot back then."

"Yeah, that's fair. Um, yeah, that's how I am—the me from six months ago is always an idiot. Like, I've always believed that. Um, it's a digressing but also really positive truth at the same time. Um, so moving past that, I mean, tell me about, like, this process from being, like, Tar the guy who cold calls, the guy who puts the deals together, the guy who manages the flips, to, like, a real estate investment business."

"Yeah, absolutely. So what happened was this: I've always been just a machine and hustled, right? Because honestly, started when I was a kid with sports. My dad made me play baseball seven days a week, like, five hours, you know? So I learned hard work as a kid. Um, but guess what TV did? Took me away from finding houses, it took me away from walking properties, it took me away from prospecting. So now I've got to find all these houses, and I'm short on time. So that's when I was forced to learn how to delegate, and I was forced to learn how to hire and staff and scale. Of course, at the beginning, I did everything wrong. I hired people I knew, a lot of headaches. And here's a reminder for everyone out there: You are going to get burned when you hire people. It doesn't mean you stop looking; it means you keep looking. So I always say, to find the right person, expect to be burned three times, and the fourth one, that's going to be the one. Um, so again, the mindset—expect to be burned. And sometimes we get lucky, but don't get upset when you get burned, because it should be expected. That's one, it's a volume game. So to scale, I started off with, you know, one acquisition guy, who is Adam Lindholm, who's the president of my company, Tar Vice Houses now. Um, but back then, his first day on the job, he showed up in his Mini Cooper. I took him out to the middle of the Inland Empire, we jumped out in a neighborhood that was in foreclosure, and we went door-to-door for five hours. And I said, 'This is your job.' Okay? And that's how we started. And then I got him on the phones, and then from there, we—I built this little team of four, and we were just humming. And then I think the first year, I did three, second year 18, third 46, fourth 88, and then it just kind of grew."

"Yeah, yeah. And then I think the most I had going at one time was in the 90s. But let's talk about some of the challenges because, no [bleep], it's been a rough couple of years for a lot of real estate investors, and guess what? I'm one of them. But, you know, I'm going to share with you what I did, so maybe someone can learn from this. It's just impossible to time the market. The biggest mistake I've made as an entrepreneur was trying to time the market—making the wrong decisions at the wrong times instead of just letting time be in the market, right? Letting it go. But when the interest rates doubled the year before, I had a big push to scale up everything. So I brought on staff, I expanded marketing, I expanded markets. So I had bought 91 houses first quarter. The rates were low, they were like, you know, 3%. Right after that, they jumped up to 7%, as you know. So then I was stuck with $700,000 a month in mortgages, all these houses, the doubling of interest rates. I mean, I'm remembering the Great Recession, I'm thinking to myself, 'Yeah, what am I going to do now?' So within minutes, I made a decision: I'm not going to buy any more houses because I already knew these 91 houses right here, I already knew. You don't have to tell me, I'm going to lose millions of dollars. I already know. Okay, by the time I fix them and, like, you know, I've got left, so because I knew that, I stopped buying and I said, 'Well, how do I offset losses? I gotta bring in revenue. What's the fastest way to bring revenue? Wholesale real estate.' So overnight, I changed my business model to wholesale real estate. A few bumps in the road at first because it was a new model for us, but they hard times, too, because other buyers started to get skittish at that time. It's kind of like the worst time for wholesale, yeah. No, I know, but, you know, today, things are going good. You know, I think we put like $800,000 up on the board this month or last month, sorry, we're in May. So it's pretty good. I expect us to be at seven figures a month consistently on the wholesale fees. We're still scaling up flipping, not as much, mostly just for the show, you know. But outside of that, you know, I run my company, Homes by Tar. I have my flagship company, Tem Capital. We're buying commercial real estate, we're syndicating. Just bought an awesome deal in Texas, 45 units, previous owner was into it at $100,000 a door, we're picking up for $66,000 a door. So, 34% discount. Yeah, yeah. So the deals are coming. The deals are coming. So if you ask me what I'm looking for today, I'm not looking for houses, I'm looking for monster deals where instead of making a hundred grand, I can make $10 million. And I want to flip them, I'm gonna flip them hard. Okay? Yeah, that's a... It's, uh, there's a lot of distress in that outside of the industry right now. Yeah, coming soon. Yeah, fair point. Okay, very cool. So if I'm understanding it right, you kind of scaled up the business, and then you started to really scale kind of at the worst time, and then, right then, just started re-upping, and then you changed your whole business model to wholesaling, and today, mostly wholesaling. Yeah, yeah. I mean, some of these houses were in California, like I was selling this one, lost $638,000, this one lost $690,000. But it's okay, you want to know why? I washed it all out. I didn't lose anything. My wholesale fees offset the losses from those flips, washed it clean. Now, down to my last two old ones, we're officially profitable again, getting ready to scale back up. Wow, that's, uh, talk about your back against the wall. Said it's the time you work the bestest. That's so... What is the fee like, then? Like, what do you... What do you want to do over the next few years? Man, so many different things, you know. I'm gonna continue, um, you know, continue being on TV, I enjoy that. I like, uh, I like entertaining people, I like creating good shows. I'm working on a few new ones right now that are a lot of fun. Um, when it comes to Tar Gets Buys Houses, I'm still looking to scale that. I want to continue scaling that across the country. I'm thinking about maybe offering, you know, licenses of the brand because, you know, here's the cool thing about, you know, my brand. If you put my brand against any other marketing, I'm gonna get more calls, I'm gonna have higher conversion because people have been watching me for 15 years, right? So I want to be able to scale that, and I want to get back to the communities. I want to teach people how to do this, I want to create free programs, I want to do things for underprivileged kids, like, just anything you could possibly think of. I, I really like to get involved with and just give, give back as much as I can and really go as far as I can. Yeah, that's super cool. Um, one thing I appreciate about you is this, like, it seems like you can take a beating, but it doesn't matter what happens, like, you have this, like, this, I don't know if positivity is the word, um, as much as like resilient. Bro, here's what it is. Here's the truth, man. I have ADHD, which means I'm actually an overly sensitive person. I'm like, you know, I get my feelings hurt sometimes, but I'm so used to it. Like, I've just gotten stronger and stronger and stronger, and the more [bleep] you can deal with, the stronger you get, like cars, right? And then they get bigger, bigger, and then I think, man, when something bad happens today, I think about my face plastered all over TMZ. I think about paparazzi chasing me on the freeway. I think about crying in the bathroom for a year. Like, my life's good today. So one of the big things that makes me so happy today is reflecting. I'm a two-time cancer survivor. That was a rough period in my life. Yeah, I, F season two of 'Flip or Flop,' I found out I had thyroid cancer at the beginning, and I also found out I had testicular cancer. The network called me, said, 'We understand the show's over.' I said, 'This show's not over. You're gonna film my ass wheeling into those surgeries.' And they did. And if you watch SE, yeah, they did. If you watch season two, you can actually watch me gain 60 pounds on TV, and then they did a surgery. They sliced my neck open, I had this tube hanging out, one week later I was back on camera working. I was talking like that, but, you know, nobody could say I didn't give it 100%. Yeah, yeah, that's wild. Well, it's been, um, it's been super cool to learn about your story and what brought you here.

Um, is there anything I should ask you that I haven't?

Why am I not working with you yet?
I don't know. Why aren't you working with us? Well, we could work, actually. I don't know. I was gonna say, it sounds like we have something to talk about. Yeah, fair enough.

Okay, after the show. Thank you, Tar. I appreciate your time, and um, for everybody else listening, I'll see you next week."

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Justin Colby isn't here to sugarcoat it. With 17+ years in the trenches, he shares the harsh realities, mistakes to avoid, and mindset needed for real estate success. No fluff, no BS—just raw, unfiltered truth you can't afford to miss.

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"Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. Today, I have a special guest for us. His name is Justin Colby. Justin shares his pretty unusual views on business, leadership, and scaling. We talk about a lot of stuff, from who you should hire, when you should hire them, the most common mistakes that investors make in his opinion, and what drives him in the day-to-day. Justin's background and experience in real estate business - Justin, how are you doing today, man?

"Good, bro. Thanks for having me."

"Yeah, super excited to have you here. For anybody listening that doesn't know you already, doesn't know your story, give me the crash course - who are you, where do you come from, what do you do?"

"Yeah, I've done it for quite a long time. I've been doing this business since 2007, so 17 years. Done over 2,700 deals and counting. I'm actively buying two to five properties for myself each week. I'm wholesaling another 5 to 15 or so. I used to want to be the biggest, baddest wholesaler business person. Now it's actually about being efficient. I've already bought two apartments this year. I'm buying a third at the end of this month in a couple of days. I'm buying more to keep in my portfolio than I ever have."

"Very active in the business, I believe in being a dynamic real estate investor. What I mean by that is you should be wholesaling, fixing, flipping, and buying rentals. You should be doing the trifecta, and it's just a function of leads. Shocker, here we are with Bateman Collective, right? It's a function of bringing enough opportunities that you can do all of it, right? Because sometimes it's a great rental, sometimes it's a great flip, sometimes you just want to wholesale to get some quick cash so you can ramp up marketing so you can get some more. There's always a specificity - big word for the morning - on deals. But I help a lot of individuals not only just get the first deal but get consistent deal flow with the science of flipping."

"Very cool. So let's break this down a little bit. So, number one, you've been in real estate since, did you say 2007?"

"Yeah, 2007."

"What an interesting time to start."

"By interesting, you mean just ridiculous. Like, no one knew what was happening. The banks didn't know how to deal with short sales and foreclosures. And like, I'm broke, right? So even if you were around, dude, even if you could have offered me your service, I couldn't afford it. Like, literally sleeping on a couch. Repo Man took my car, home went to foreclosure, the whole thing."

"The only thing I needed to do was cold call agents. Funny enough, agent outreach again is like a big vertical to find deals. So I was cold calling agents, acting as if I was some big investor. I wasn't, and it got me my first 20 deals or so. From there, I moved on to buying at the auction steps and using a lot of direct mail and buying from wholesalers. Then getting into PPC, which is more of where you're at when that started rolling around. Direct mail started tanking, that's right when PPC started ramping up."

"Yeah, having a look back... Yeah, that's wild. Good for you, man. So obviously more than a few years in the business, more than just a couple."

"I had hair like yours when I started."

"Love this business. Did that to you, huh?"

"That's it. Sure did."

"Let it be a warning. If anybody listening is just getting into real estate, maybe it's time to stop."

"No, I would say if you just think it's all fun and games and you want to go drive fancy cars and flex all the time, then it's probably not the right avenue."

"Yeah, fair enough. And it does seem like as an industry, we attract more of those people than the average industry for whatever reason."

"Yeah, I think real estate lends itself a little bit to that. It doesn't help, obviously, there's a lot of TV shows. So now it's about the fame and the fortune and all that kind of stuff. But just like financial services and whatever, you kind of attract that type of person. But yeah, it is what it is."

"It makes sense. So I know you're a smart dude, Justin. I want to give you a platform to basically talk about the things that you're most passionate about here. So let's just say you're talking to the typical person listening to this podcast. Remember, these are people that are experienced real estate investors, generally doing deals, but of course, we all want more. We're all trying to accomplish something that we... Right. So that considered, in as mean of a way as you could possibly say it, what are they doing wrong typically?"

"You're just putting the cart before the horse. Too many people want to scale and grow and hire, right? Because they don't want to do the work. And so let's just use a service like yours. You bring in, I get 10 leads a month, 20 leads a month, just name the number. And people start to say, 'Okay, well I want to hire acquisition people.' Well, that doesn't make any sense because all of the money is being made on the buy."

"If we all agree that you make your money on negotiating the buy, the last position you should be hiring is an acquisition person. The challenge is they're trying to build a business before they're ready to build a business. And so they get caught up in the flex of it all and the social media of it all and saying how big their office is and how many employees they have."

"But if they aren't a true leader to start with - and there's a handful of people out there that I can say are true leaders, they know what they're doing. You know, Donovan Ruffin, Eric Klein, I mean there's people that are out there that are showing it on social media, but because they can back it up and do that. Tiffany and Josh High, these are individuals - in their case, a couple - but you know, they really do have a leadership ability to grow a business."

"Many of the people out there, many of your clients and people listening to this are going to probably hate me, and that's okay because I'm just giving it to them real. They're not ready to grow and scale. They shouldn't be. They don't have the leadership muscle yet."

"Yeah, well that's fair. Let me challenge this for a second. So let's just say I'm getting started in the real estate investing space. Maybe, you know, I start to do a few deals. I consider should I start to hire somebody, maybe not an executive assistant, maybe lead manager, acquisitions, you know, whatever it is that I'm hiring versus me. If I were to give it some more time, wait until I can get my take-home income above that $250,000 a year mark that you talked about, get a couple years under my belt. The way I see it, the me that has done that doesn't necessarily have the leadership skill compared to the me that hasn't done that yet. In either case, I'm probably jumping into leadership without having any idea what I'm doing. But is there like... what's... there's incremental leadership, right?"

"I agree with you to some extent. You got to start somewhere, right? That's really what you're saying. Like, some point you got to start, you got to do it. Right? Same thing I tell newbie investors. It's like, okay, just get in. Like, you got to start. Right? So I hear you, but there's incremental growth in that skill set."

"First of all, you should be reading books. You should be watching or listening to podcasts. You should be going, getting leadership type training. There's so many leadership type coaching trainings out there. But the other thing is, hire the person that's going to be better at that than you are. This is why you need the money to be right."

"Okay, so let's just say I'm... use Brandon as an example. Let's say you're incredible at the tech side of what you do. You dominate. But in terms of the people side, like going and finding the right people, hiring the right people, training the right people, managing the right people... like, there's all these different layers to when you're growing, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, let's just say you're like, 'Well, that's just not me.' But then you got to go hire the person that that is. But then you don't want to hire your buddy. 'Hey, bro, I want to go, you know, hire and train people and manage them. You want to do it?' Because he's your buddy. You want to hire someone who's coming from Google, who has a tech background, who has an operation background, who has a lead background, who is in the, you know, Google PPC world that you were able to recruit that might cost you $125,000 a year. But now you don't have to go do that, and you know that they have a resume and they have a skill set that's been there and done that. Does that make sense?"

"That's why you need the income up. That's my point. You hire different people if you wait a little bit longer versus the people that you would hire if you're just kind of barely getting getting off the ground."

"Which which does make sense because... because what I was going to say before is like, I waited till I had $300,000 in revenue in my business per year until I hired my first person. In my opinion, I hired them too late because I was like so busy with everything I didn't have time to like train properly and like that was kind of a common theme for a while for me. It was like I want to delay hiring and so I don't start hiring until I'm just way too busy and then at the point that I start hiring, it's then going to take me a certain amount of time to find a person and then that's not going to be the right person. So I find somebody and then it takes me some time to find them and then like I end up getting this person in the seat a year after I needed them."

"Yeah, and it's and it's really delayed. But to your point, I was looking to hire like at the beginning... all junior level people. Sure, I didn't start with somebody who's an expert of the things that I'm not. So I... and I probably could have. I probably could have afforded that, but that's not what I did."

"Well, so the thing that I would pose to you then, specifically to you, right, when you're talking about your real life example... have you read the book 'Buy Your Time Back' by Dan Martell?"

"You know, at that time I haven't. Since then..."

"Well, sure. No, no, but now that you have, right? So at this point then, I would tell almost anyone I think it's probably one of the best business books I've read in the last 5 years, let's say. But then you got to just go back to his, you know, hiring principal about like just even the economics of it all. Right? So let's just say you make your $500,000 a year divided by 12 or 2,000 divided by four, that's the number that you would pay someone essentially to... because you're making $250 an hour. So you're going to pay someone whatever it is, $75 an hour to do your exact role, your role, right? Because they're going to be that high level. But you don't pay them your salary, you pay them that number."

"Just in that concept, I believe that there's a value of like... then you can hire based around that. But I don't believe in hiring just to hire. Because what Dan Martell talks about, or even where I'm at... like in my tech business that's, you know, literally ready to launch now finally. So I feel your pain, is right? Like we hired our CEO, came from three different exits already. He took three different private companies and exited them into the nine figures. All three of them are in the nine figures. So he has the resume to do it, but I'm going to pay a lot of money for him, right?"

"Because I don't have the skill set or frankly, I don't have the desire to go be the CEO of this new company we've founded, right? Rocket Le. So, so I'd encourage people... I mean, you don't have to go find that person either, not in the real estate business per se."

"Yeah, but this goes back to the point I really want to highlight this: stop trying to be Justin Colby 17 years in the business, or name the name. I don't care. Grant Cardone, name whoever you want to name who has been doing this a lot longer than you. If you've been in this business and you're a client of Brandon or you've been watching this or listening to this and you've been in the business for two, three, four, five years, you have a lot of runway to catch up on. There's no way to like condense it into a year or two, right? You need to still have some level of learning growth because things change, like the economy right now. Right? Everyone's all caught up on the interest rates. So understand, don't be the version of Justin 17 years in business. Be the version of you right now and be the very best version of you."

"Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. Something you talked about before was that there's so many like leadership trainings, books, content to consume available that can make you better. I'm curious to hear from your perspective, let's just say I have little leadership experience. I can tell you where like our typical client is probably some leadership experience but a lot of frustration with it. Where have I... like I thought I knew leadership and then I started building and growing the team and now I've got you know, five or 10 people on my team and now I feel like I know less about leadership than I ever have because I'm seeing how much I don't know. Right? So this... let's just take that example. Like, what if you were them? What content would you be consuming to level up?"

"Well, I think that the one everyone probably has already heard of, I'm making that assumption, but like EOS or Traction, right? They have a whole full-blown like growing, scaling leadership business. Right? So read the book Traction, but then the EOS system essentially is... I don't want to call it coaching, it is like a... I guess it's coaching, but it's really meant around this: how do you run a company? How do you have your weekly meetings? How do you have your quarterly meetings? How do you have your yearly meetings? It's the operating system."

"And so it is probably more... Well, so I'm not saying anything someone doesn't know, but at a minimum start doing that. Right? Level 10 meetings just alone. Implement everything in that book. They would be way further along. So far, yeah, like that. Right? Because even how do you run a real meeting? What you know how most people run a meeting, right? The CEO, the owner, Brandon, Justin, get there. 'All right guys, so how many sales have we had? All right, is anyone complaining? Do we need any customer... anyone meet out? Okay, what are our goals for next week?' Like, that's the meeting. That's not a meeting, right?"

"So even understanding how to run a meeting is important. And so I think that's probably the best in the industry is, you know, that EOS operating system. Again, I don't know if I want to call it coaching, but it's something like that. Right? Accountability and the operating system. So that's probably where I'd point most people. But you have people like Tony Robbins that teach leadership, right, which are bigger names. There's a ton of... I mean, I don't even know how many books are out there about leadership. And Maxwell has so many books, you know, '21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership', right?"

"And so... but it is a muscle that needs to be worked out constantly. You cannot just like... it's the... it's the business owner. Here's how I view business owners today. They are the guys that go to the gym and lift heavy weight, but they come home and eat burgers and fries and drink beer and, you know, have a dessert at night. Well, you're not going to get ripped. You're going to get big, and I don't know if you're going to look very good because you're going to be doing it the wrong way. But it's not the right way to do it."

"Simultaneously, if you can have a better diet, you're actually going to change what your body looks like. Like, right? So you can't outwork out a bad diet. It's all about the diet. So you can't grow and scale a business without the ability to be a great leader. It's all about the leadership. Right? So that's kind of how I... I use an analogy to help people understand. Like, if you're going to eat pizza, burgers, fries, donuts, and lift heavy and think you're actually going to be shredded and ripped, that's not going to happen. You can't go and run a company and build and grow and scale without mastering being a leader. It's not going to happen."

"Something you said that I want to make sure we don't look over... it's something someone told me that had a huge impact on me years ago. Just that your business cannot outgrow you as a leader. And like, if you believe that, you'll find examples of that every day."

"100%. You're the constraint of your business. But the tough thing about being a bad leader is that you believe everything except for that. You believe it's all because of that person exactly."

"You know, a book that I read recently that was pretty great... have you read 'Leadership and Self-Deception'?"

"I have not."

"Okay, but I will... not like the... the premise of the book is it's... it's basically it's all your fault. It's not everybody else's fault. And... and like the way you treat people encourages them to continue to do the things that you are upset about them doing. And you're... you're creating all your own problems. It's a... it's a really good book. But anyways, it's... it basically supports exactly what you're... what you're saying."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm... but that's true of any business owners. Is it's always you got to look in the mirror, right? Just using the analogy of the person working out, look in the mirror, dude. Why don't you just boil some chicken, eat broccoli, and you won't have to just be getting big, right? Like, you'd actually start to get shredded."

"Yeah, because when you... when you look at what it really takes, you're not sure you want that anymore. I'm... I'm convinced that most people have... if they... if they knew what this entrepreneurial journey takes before they would have start on it, nine times out of 10, they wouldn't even start."

"Agreed. I think the only reason people actually get to the end is because they're deceived at the beginning. And you're deceived at like every stage. You just feel like if I could just make it around this corner, then I'm going to get..."

"And I coach people for a living on being an entrepreneur in real estate, right? The whole Science of Flipping Community is me coaching them on how to be successful at real estate investing as an entrepreneur. I'll tell you the number one reason people don't win is because they don't realize it's not all puppy dogs and rainbows. And again, what it really takes to become truly successful."

"Now, some people do, and they actually fight the fight and they dig in deep and they're ready to go for it. But the other people just like... like, 'Man, I thought this would have been easier. I would have thought, you know, whatever the case is.' Right? And... and so they quit. And then they want to blame whoever the coach is or what, because, you know, whatever. But the reality is, they didn't realize how much work that needs to go in."

"To your point, there's days where I say like, 'God, wouldn't it be nice to be Tom Cruise in the movie Cocktails and just be a bartender at the beach? No brains, no headaches.' Right? I'd have all my hair. It'd be great."

"Yeah, yeah. It totally would. I'm... I'm actually curious to hear because you... you see like which of your students make it and which of them don't. I have a hypothesis. It's kind of like that... I... I don't know, it's a saying or what that, you know, the person who loves to run runs farther than the person who likes to get places by nature of, you know, human nature. Right? Like, is it true your students that are really successful with this first is not that they just... they like their drive isn't to get the thing that the business will give them as much as they're... their drive is to do that hard thing?"

"Yeah, I think there's a combination from what I see. Part of it is there's enough pain of like, 'I don't want to be working for someone else. I hate my job. I'm really sick of it. I never have much money. Like, I'm just drowning.' So part of it is the pain of like, 'I'm ready for a change. Like, something... I can't do this forever.' Right?"

"The other part is genuine love and interest. To your point, the love of running, the love of real estate. Like, 'I want to be in real estate,' and they just say, 'I'm gonna make it happen.' And you know, the people that I can help mentally understand the time expectation of results..."

"So I have Five Laws of Success, right? One is - and if you're watching or listening to this, I would write these down - but one is decide what you want and who you need to be to get it. So decide what you want and who you need to be to get it, because that's the part of love. Then you have to commit to it. So you better love it because no matter what, it's hard, right?"

"Running isn't actually easy at distance. A short little sprint, anyone could do it, right? Running up your driveway, anyone can do it. You go and run 10 miles, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 miles... like, these... these people... ain't easy. One mile for most people isn't easy, right? So just you got to commit to it."

"Then you got to go do it. You got to take a lot of action. Then number four is you got to be extremely uncomfortable because the thing that you want, the number one what you want and who you need to be to get it, is something you don't have and you aren't getting. So it's going to bring you way outside your comfort zone."

"And number five is just remove your time expectation on the result. Right? And what I mean by that is if you say, 'I love real estate and I'm going to be successful in real estate,' and you full stop that... that's it. Full stop. Then you will, because you didn't tell yourself by the end of the year, in 30 days, by the time I'm 50, whatever. You don't tell yourself those things. So you never really have a way to unwind it. You just say, 'I love real estate. I'm going to be successful in real estate. I'm committed to it. I'm going to do whatever it takes. It's going to be weird as hell, and it's going to be, you know, make me super uncomfortable, but I'm going to go do this.' You'll go do it. It's because the love of running, same idea. Right?"

"Yeah, yeah. You're totally right. Something you mentioned, Alex Hormozi before. One of my favorite things that I've heard him say is macro impatience, micro... I'm sorry, micro impatience, macro patience. Like concept that like... kind of it's kind of like what you're talking about. Like remove that... remove that time expectation. Like those who are most successful in a certain thing... like on a day-to-day basis, hour-to-hour basis, it's like, 'I just got a lead. I'm going to call that right now because I'm impatient about getting to the result. I'm impatient about trying to get this deal to close.' But on a macro level, when it's been 3 months and I just started this and I haven't gotten a deal closed yet, that's where I'm patient. Right?"

"That's both. But that's where everyone loses patience, and you're like, 'Ah, you got this wrong.' Like, it... like that's why I keep saying like, everyone wants to be me 17 years into the game or... or name the name. I'm just using me as reference, but you know, that's not the game. I'm nowhere near where I want to be. Nowhere near. I just said I bought two apartments already this year. I'm buying a third. I'm buying two to five properties a week. Like, I'm not even close to where I want to be able to get in the real estate business. Not even close. And so I'm just going to keep my head down until I get there."

"What I'd argue so much of that is what's in your brain. It's not like... like, do you have... have financial resources that you didn't have when you started? Right now, absolutely. I'm sure like relationships right now that you didn't have when you started. But I'd be willing to bet that if you had none of like... if you... if you wiped out all the money, all the relationships, everything you started from scratch right now, it would not take you near 17 years to get where you are because the biggest thing contributing to your success is who you've become as a person. And that would be like much, much faster."

"You are dead on, my friend. I could not agree anymore. 100%. You could drop me off in Arkansas and say no Instagram, no Facebook, no recognition, no money, go build the business again."

"It's never been easy, even when it seemed that way."

"The same thing Grant Cardone essentially did on billionaire undercover or whatever it was, right?"

"I forgot that he did that."

"Yeah, yeah. I could go do it because I know how to work this business. I've been here. I've done it, right? And so I could go get my first deal and the second and the third and build it back up again because I have the runway of experience. All of you out there listening or watching this, you don't give yourself the runway of experience. You want it today. You want the microwave result, right? Like, 'I want to achieve this in a year or two years or three years.' If you're in real estate in general for a short quick win, get the hell out of real estate. That's not the game, right? It's not a short sprint."

"Real estate should be a lifelong journey of like... awesome. Because you can create active income, which is the flipping and the wholesaling, and you can create passive or wealth accumulation is how I say it. Is go buy a whole bunch of rentals over time. Use other people's money to do it. Don't use your own. Use leverage. Do it right. Buy right and do it forever. Like, I'll never not be in real estate. Ever."

"That totally makes sense. So I'm curious. You... you talked a lot, Justin, about this being hard, people not being willing to do what it takes. What in... in your experience, let's just say we look at the past 17 years, what was the hardest part of that?"

"Every inch of the way. There's never... there's never not hard. Started was hard. Yesterday was hard. Yeah, it's all hard. Yeah, it's all hard. And that's what people don't understand. It's always hard. Now, it's only hard for people who really want more. Does that make sense?"

"So I heard... I can't tell you when... a little while ago, someone told me parenting is only hard for good parents. If you're a parent, be easy. Yeah, kid, sit the hell down on the couch and drink a beer. I don't care, right? Like, you... you don't care. It's not hard. And I feel the same about business. It's always hard because you want more. You want better, right? You want to improve. You need to iterate. Things are changing, right? So it's never not hard. And this is where people literally go, 'I give up. I want to go back to my W2.' And I say, 'Not me, never.'"

"Because we only get one ride around Earth, right? No one leaves alive. And if I'm going to do this, I want all the experiences, all the feelings, all the challenges, all the things to see where I end up. I'm not here to just exist."

"And so when... when you talk about this... is a great question because I could just go off... like, there's never been just an easy time. I will give you an example that I thought it was an easy time, and I think this was about back in '14, '15, '16, something... we were just rolling. Money was coming in. Things were doing good. I basically said, 'I'm no longer needed here. My team's got this.' So I said... I took the owner's box is what I called it, right? Like, I basically hung it up. Like, I wasn't shown up to meetings, nothing."

"Well, all of a sudden my business doing this started doing more like this, and then started to go like this. And it's because I took myself out of the business completely. And we just talked about leadership and the power of leadership. And this is what people don't understand. Like, look at Elon Musk, look at Warren Buffet, look at Steve Jobs, on RIP, look at Bill Gates. Like, they're all still in the business. They may not be, you know, making the computers or writing the code or building the actual car, but they're in the business, right?"

"I, because I thought it was going so good and was easy, took myself out of the business. Major, major, major mistake. Um, so I think that was a big lesson. Never, ever, ever, right? Like, even today, even though I have a team and there's nine people in the office running my real estate team, I'm on our weekly calls. We have two every single week. I talk to my general manager every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Like, I'm not plugged in. Now, am I negotiating a deal with a seller anymore? No, I'm not, right? Am I, you know, trying to find the buyer? No, I'm not. But you... you know, doesn't mean business is easy just because I've been able to scale and hire and build a team."

"Yeah, that totally makes sense. Sorry, you just... you brought up a ton of questions. I'm actually... I'm really curious. So... so one thing I want to say, this is more of a... a challenge than anything. I want to hear how you like react to this. I would argue that what you're saying, um, as it applies to business only applies if you have the belief that continual growth is good. If you at any point wanted to say, 'I want to just be the Justin Colby that was able to run the business that he had one year ago, and I'm okay with that business accomplishing exactly that and never more,' then I bet you that's when it would get easy."

"Uh, no, you're not... you're not wrong. For like, that is 100% correct. That is not an argument. That is fact. 100%. If... if I was willing to say I am willing to make this... this was a good year, this is what I want, I don't want more, then it's just kind of cruise control, right? And then it becomes rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Yeah. But again, you can do a lot of things and make good money. Like, why real estate? Why be an entrepreneur, right? Why not just go find a job that can just pay you that level of income?"

"Yeah, so it's a super fair point. But I think it's... it's worth mentioning though, because not everybody shares that same belief as you do. Some people, they're in business to generate a certain amount of income, and if they can get that, then they don't necessarily want more. They're not necessarily wanting more impact. They're not... like, that's what... why the business exists is to like generate some livelihood for them. So if... if... like, and then those people will talk about how... how easy business is and how their business is running on autopilot and all those... and all those kinds of things."

"I... I love those people. I'm closer to those... not to cut you off, but I'm sorry I did. I'm probably closer to them now than I've ever been. And I don't mean I'm just going to say I want just this, but I can tell you I'm not the biggest 'bigger is better' fan. I just don't believe in that. I just told you you have nine people. Like, I don't necessarily need 12 or 15 or 20 people to get to where I want to go, right? Bigger isn't always better."

"Right, and so if... if I'm rephrasing it for my own purposes, then I also tend to agree with that. However, because of I have this system kind of running with these nine people, what that allows me to do is create more opportunity and have other things that take my time to go build and grow. So it's not like I'm just like, 'Okay, we're on a steady path here with the nine people. I'm just going to... I'm chilling now.' Finally, that's just... again, it's not really how I've been created."

"Like, I have my real estate business, I have my coaching business, I have my tech business with Rocket Le. That's just to name three of the biggest businesses, not to mention all the other things that I also have going on, right?"

"I agree. And by the way, from me, if you are one of those people listening to this that are like, 'If I can go make 250 grand a year in my pocket every year, I am totally satisfied. I love it. It is exactly where I want to be.' I love you for it, right? I'm just not built that way. Like, there's no judgment on my behalf. There's no like, 'Oh, you're small-minded.' No, no, no, not at all. That's awesome. That is why you built the business, so you can have your version of happy. There's different versions of it for everybody. There's no one size fits all. So good for them."

"Yeah, that... that totally makes sense. I... yeah, I would argue that what you're saying is for you, bigger is not better, but better is really important. You just... you can't... yes, stagnation in it, right? So maybe it used to be that you thought the way to get better was to go bigger, and now you go for better in different ways, which... which is... which is pretty fascinating."

"I'm also really interested to dig into what happened. So... so there is something you said that is... I don't know, you call it a little bit unusual. Usually what people are arguing for is that their impact on the business is more minimal and that if you have the right people... like, it can run without you. You shared your experience of when I thought that was true, I stepped out, and then the business started to stagnate, and then the business started to drop. And that's because I wasn't there. So I'm... I'm really curious to hear from your perspective, back then or even right now, what is the value you add to the business that no one else could add? Does that make sense?"

"You... you almost can consider me like the head of Business Development, really. And the reason why is like, for example, great example, real time, this moment, this morning, I get on a call with my general manager and one of our private lenders in one of our apartments has a very big personal scenario happening and is basically asking for his investment back. It's not a small amount of money, right? It's well into the six figures. And so I say, 'Okay, let me go kind of resolve that and go, you know, to my network and to figure out where we could replace that.' You know, and... and they have equity, they're an owner with us, right? So we have to basically go replace an owner of the company and a lender all at the same time."

"Right, so I kind of look at that more as biz dev, right? Like, all right, well now we got to go do something that really shouldn't be put on general manager's plate. It's not going to go to my acquisition, TC, disposition, construction, M&A, right? That's kind of me. So I kind of look at it more as a biz dev as the business continues to move and iterate and change. I'm the leading charge of the biz dev, if you will, right? Specifically to the real estate business. I would not say that for the tech business. I'm not... not... not big on tech. But yeah, so for me, like my role right now, literally have a week or so to go replace $500,000 in one of our apartments. And that's... that's kind of my job."

"Couldn't you just hire someone to do that? Like, they just say you..."

"We actually have... we have an investment relationship manager. Yep, we have him. So the answer is yes, but I... I think this is a little bit more like... so anyways, I'm going to call him. My thought is someone in my own ecosystem probably would want this opportunity, honestly, because they're going to get ownership of the apartment with me. So my initial thought was like, I probably have a handful of people that if I just even made a post on social media, which I will, by the way - you'll see it - someone, it might be one or two people or three people are like, 'Oh, I got 100 grand, I got 150, I got 200.' And then we, you know... because I... I... the connectivity of that, I really like."

"Like, let's just say you, if you saw me post that and you said, 'Justin, I got 100 grand or 200 grand or 500 grand, whatever. I want to start owning more real estate or add to my portfolio.' I would rather be a partner of yours than my investor relationship manager. He tends to find individuals I don't know. They tend to be better debt partners than they do actual business partners on the entity. Make sense?"

"It does, it does make sense. So I would rather have you come in on the LLC because I know you, I like you, I want you to be a part of my ride as well, be a part of my dreams and my future. So that's why I'll probably see what happens when I post, but also call him and say, 'Hey, do you know anybody that makes sense?'"

"So you have the relationships, the people that you know you want to do business with, that kind of thing. And that's... that's a hard piece to hire out."

"Oh, it's... I mean, it's impossible. I mean, that's really my role across all of my businesses, is being kind of the face, biz dev, sales if you will, to some extent, right? Like marketing, right? And so it's all... I don't know if there's a name for it, but it's all kind of captured into one. That's why I need to have my social media constantly running. That's why these podcasts are so important. I'm about to have a book launch that I got to be out there. I got to have recognition because for these things, whether it's raising 500 grand in a week, right, whether it's getting great podcast interviews like we're doing, whatever it may be, that's more my role."

"Yep, that makes sense. Cool. Thank you for all the wisdom you shared today, Justin, and... and dealing with all my... I think this is one of my more fun episodes."

"Dude, you have very good out-of-the-box questions that aren't like, 'So how did you get your first deal?' I'm curious that... that... that's what's going on here is I just... I... I just want to learn from you."

"Yeah, you know, that's... that's on them, but yeah, no doubt. Um, so uh, if anybody wants to... wants to follow you or get to know you better, what's the best way?"

"Best way is hit me up on Instagram, the Justin Colby. Uh, in fact, what I challenge everyone when I'm on a podcast, actually hit me up, message me, say, 'Hey, I heard you on Brandon's podcast. What's up, dude? I want to say what's up.' I want to reply. I want to build a relationship with you. So if you hear or see me on this episode, go to the Justin Colby and hit me up. Let me know you heard me or saw me on this episode."

"All right, that sounds great. Well, thank you for taking the time and sharing some of your wisdom. For everybody else listening, I will see you next week."

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Want to build a rockstar team and smash your revenue goals? Tune in as Aaron and Michaela Gaunt share the exact recruitment tactics they used to scale to 7-figures in their first year, revealing how to identify A-players and avoid hiring duds.

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"Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is another episode in the series with Aaron and Miquella Gaunt from Southern California, who took their business from local to national. With PPC as the primary channel, they were able to do seven figures in revenue just from PPC in their first year. This time, we're going to talk about the marketing decisions they made over this time period to help them get the best quality leads and the most volume of leads possible to grow to that seven figures in revenue.

Aaron, Miquella, I'm super excited to talk with you guys about marketing. Choosing a marketing channel is something we've kind of touched on in a few of the other videos, but I think it's an awesome experience to go deep and talk about how you've done what you've done. Obviously, we work together on this aspect. This is the aspect I'm personally most passionate about and most knowledgeable about, and it's really interesting for me to learn how you view it and why you've chosen to execute on certain elements of your strategy. So anyway, that considered, what are the things that you think about when choosing what marketing channel you're going to go after? Obviously, you have experience with outbound channels like cold calling, texting. It seems like mail's been good to you. PPC, Facebook ads - like what is it that you're looking for?"

Aaron: "Inbound leads, hands down. We want inbound leads for our primary source of revenue now. Obviously, there are different types. I mean, again, a bunch of stuff, but what we want to do, and what I've seen because what our primary business is, is marketing and sales. I know they always say that literally every business is marketing and sales. If I went and we talked about how your business is doing and how you've really did a great job on, let me call it, dominating the space and being a top provider for real estate investors, but it's like, obviously, yes, you are very skilled. Obviously, you have the data to help us get to the next level. That's why we love having you guys as part of our team. But it's also you really got yourself out there. You really marketed your company out there to get yourself known, right? So marketing is huge."

Aaron: "I think if you're going to start any business, you need to be really particular about how you're going to market, who you're going to work with, the market. Obviously, in this case, do you want in-house or, you know, obviously using a marketing agency? But I really, we've been really seeing a lot of good results with your company, and that's PPC and direct mail."

Interviewer: "Okay, now that's helpful. That's helpful to think of. So inbound is primarily what you're looking at, and then you've got a few channels that can fit in there like PPC, SEO..."

Aaron: "Which we need to do. It's the next one."

Interviewer: "Good news is I came here to upsell you today."

Aaron: "There you go. You came to sell something."

Interviewer: "I'll leave with the contract."

Aaron: "Was that a part of the script?"

Interviewer: "Yes, this is the part where you say yes, I will give you more money. So okay, so inbound marketing channels are what you're looking at, and then obviously PPC has been the one that you've chosen to focus on the most, which isn't an unusual choice just considering the inbound nature of the lead. Just a completely different conversation with sellers, which I'm sure is what you've noticed as you've grown to seven figures in PPC revenue over the past year, which is a huge accomplishment. Not a lot of people go that channel alone."

Aaron: "Yeah, yeah."

Interviewer: "Not a lot of people go in like PPC alone as a marketing channel, zero to seven figures in a single year. And there's a lot that plays into that. So yeah, I just want to pick out those different things, and we've changed a lot over this time period about how we're doing things. I know something that we were talking about before is like you've got to have the vision and be willing to give it the time and follow the process, but that doesn't mean that you're unwilling to make changes during that time. You've got to be working on the right things. What are some of the big changes that we've made to the PPC marketing over the past year? Like, us personally, or like what we've seen you guys change?"

Interviewer: "Well, I could probably speak a little better to what we've changed, but unless you notice anything in particular that you really want. But I guess what I'm thinking here is like, budgets are a big factor. Like locations, I know we've made some major changes in terms of that, and that's something I really want to dig into because there's a lot of strategy into like, why do you target this market versus that market and how those different things worked for you. So yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, but like when I think of PPC strategy, I think of two things. So number one, you have the parameters. Parameters are just rules that we have to live within, like we have this budget, we have these markets, this kind of ad schedule, whatever. Those are the parameters. And then you have optimizations, which are like we're adjusting these keywords, or we're changing these bids, or we're going to improve our landing page, we're going to change our ads. When I think of what a business owner needs to know about their marketing, they need to understand parameters, not optimizations. That's why a lot of the changes you'll notice, a lot of the stuff that we talk about together in your marketing, it's all parameter stuff. And the reason is, optimization is that's kind of just what we do. It's not what you have to worry about. But if we're talking about mainly budgets, locations, that kind of thing, what kind of changes have we made?"

Aaron: "Yeah, obviously that's kind of what we look at on our business side because you're going to give us the most high-quality PPC lead there is, right? On the back end, because you know, we've talked about that. You know the difference between, you know, you could have a really cheap PPC lead, but it's not necessarily as qualified as you would want it, you know, regarding negative words, positive words, whatever. And then obviously, the leads that you guys give us obviously have been very fantastic. Now what I see on my end is, you're right, I have control of budget, I have control of kind of like location, and this past year has been definitely a lot of testing, understanding, you know, where do I want... because, and a lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, are going to want to change things and get their hands dirty and mess things up. And that's what my wife would say is, 'You're messing everything up.' Anyway, then I say no, that's what we tell you a few times too."

Interviewer: "We should have had Jeff in this conversation. We could have a little... Where's Jeff? I love that guy."

Aaron: "And so, but no, it's been fantastic because we have... What we want to do is we want to try things out. So when we first, first, first started with you guys, you know, we were doing $10,000, I think, in ad spend a month. I could be wrong, but I think that's what it was."

Interviewer: "I think two, yeah."

Aaron: "And we were just here in Southern California. We got our first deal in like two weeks, gave us a $40,000... I know, I know it's not the... I know you hate me saying that. That's not the message."

Interviewer: "I mean, if you have a good sales process... That was a one-call close, but it happens. But yeah, expectations is a whole... Let's dig into that whole can of worms next. But yeah, continue."

Aaron: "We did, we did, we did. We did have... not guaranteed. Past performance does not guarantee future results. We did have that, and obviously, we... But very just a couple months later, we decided to open up a couple more markets. So we were in Southern California, then we decided to open up Texas, and then we decided to open up everything southern of United States. And we're talking about metro areas."

Interviewer: "Yeah, we did like pretty tight radiuses at first. I remember like we're trying to stay away from anything rural, just keep in the main metro."

Aaron: "And we figured that okay, the idea behind that is okay, if we could get a deal on this metro area, we could move it, you know. We'll be able to dispose of it. Then I decided to open up a lot more metro areas all around the United States, and then I decided to open up states. So I mean, we really went broad, and a lot of changes. And currently, as we're filming this, we're still broad. We, I think we're hitting in like 14 different states, right?"

Interviewer: "Yeah."

Aaron: "And we're doing deals every single day. We're the... because the idea, and every time we strategize is, 'Aaron, if we go this broad, can you dispose of them?' Like, you're asking the right questions to your client to not steer them wrong. You're not just saying, 'Okay, Aaron,' you know what I mean? Like, just do that. You're giving... you're setting the right expectation. Just like your core value said, you're a truth warrior, right? And 110% you're a truth warrior. You're going to tell me the truth on what to expect and what can go wrong. As long as you dispose of them, but sometimes you might even say, 'Hey, I don't know if it's a good idea.' But in the end, you're going to let your client do... kind of like we talked about being a diminisher and letting your client almost have that final say."

Interviewer: "Yeah, right. In some... the best advice you can, but sometimes they have to... they do whatever they want to do, you know."

Aaron: "Exactly. It's kind of like an attorney, right? Attorney's going to give you the best advice. You're paying them for their time, and they're going to give you the advice. You're going to do whatever you're going to do, right?"

Interviewer: "Yeah."

Aaron: "And so anyway, so we decided to open up because what we were looking for is... So, obviously, we made another video where, you know, we were spending up to $330,000 a month. Right now, just this month, we're spending $20,000. The sweet spot has definitely been about $25-30,000. We're... the idea behind that is we're spending about $10,000 per acquisition rep nationwide. So we're at a $94 per lead right now, a nationwide campaign. We have debated on setting up another campaign to go directly into our own backyard, which we might, you know, go up to $15-20,000 per rep. But when it comes to marketing, don't be afraid to spend because, you know, obviously every dollar you put in, you should be getting five to seven back, especially if on the back end everything's set up to get it to the finish line. So when we go into 2024, that's going to be our main focus, and it's going to be to put our dollars into the right marketing machines, ATM, to get those... get that return that we were expecting to get. So and that's going to be, again, PPC and direct mail."

Interviewer: "Yeah. You know, one thing, one way that you're thinking about this that's really positive is you're not thinking about it as, 'Do I want to do a California campaign or do I want to do a national campaign?' You're thinking, 'Well, could we test...' A lot of our clients kind of have like the burn-the-boats sort of mentality where it's like, 'Okay, I was doing this, and now I'm doing this, and then now I'm doing this, and now I'm doing this.' And then like, at some point, everything crashes and burns, and you just don't really know. Was it because I changed the market, or is it because my team stopped working as well? Or like, you don't know what it is. And sometimes, like, there's... marketing's full of good ideas that don't end up working."

Aaron: "Yeah, you have to try them out. Like, if you're going to be in business of any kind of business and be an entrepreneur, you can't be afraid of failure. If you are, you're not... you're not going to last very long. There's big steps we've taken that haven't panned out, but we learn from it, we adjust, and we keep going."

Interviewer: "Yeah, I like to think about it in the terms of asymmetric bets. I'm like the guy that's scared, like I'm conservative. I don't want to... like, you know, there's this... there's this psychological concept of loss aversion that like if you take a dollar away from someone, they're going to be a lot... they could be very unhappy. But if you were to give them a dollar, they'd be happy, but not nearly as happy as they would have been unhappy if they were to lose it. So like, it's the same reason like fear in sales works, for example. Like people are more afraid of like, 'I might not be able to sell my house to someone else' than they are that like, 'I for sure have it here.' Yeah, but anyway, yeah, for me, I just kind of have to like look back at my business and think every single good thing that has come in my business has been through some type of bet that I made. None of them had a 100% guarantee of the results I was looking for, but they were what you'd call asymmetric bets, which means that the upside is larger than the downside, or the expected value of the upside is positive. An example could be marketing. You could say, 'I need to spend $10,000 a month on this marketing campaign for 6 months, and I'm risking $60,000.' A lot of people would stop there, say '$60,000, I'm out.' But then you have to think, what's the downside? The downside is limited. The downside is $60,000. What's the upside? Well, it's that maybe I could figure this out in such a way that I could generate a million dollars in revenue this year in my business. And maybe that would set the stage for me to generate $3-5 million in revenue the next year in my business. And then for a decade, I could get awesome returns and scale this really far. And that's the upside, right?"

Aaron: "Yeah."

Interviewer: "And with an upside like that, risk is very acceptable. I think where I think people go wrong is they don't take enough bets. So they put all their eggs in one basket, or they're just not willing to take those asymmetric bets. They make bets that are like, you know... People are quicker to go buy a lottery ticket than they are to spend $10,000 a month on PPC. Which one has a higher expected value?"

Aaron: "Isn't that crazy?"

Interviewer: "Yeah, but it's just the... it's the world we live in."

Aaron: "I know, it... that's the cool thing about business in general. I'm not going to just say this. I mean, just the fact that you could start a business and I mean, you're just... it's a cash machine that you could create. A cash machine, and wholesale in general, you could create a cash machine. There's always... there's houses. You could always buy them at discounts. Houses are always depreciating every single day, and you're... there's deals everywhere to be found, no matter how many deals... There's still deals. You're going to be a deal finder, you know."

Interviewer: "Oh, absolutely. What would you say your mindset was going into things at the very beginning? PPC?"

Aaron: "Yeah, excited, you know. Because I think that's... I think that's the issue with a lot of new people that try PPC, right? Is they have this high... like, we could shoot these videos, somebody could watch every single video that we're doing, and they're saying, 'I'm going to start PPC tomorrow, and I'm going to make a million dollars,' right? And I think that's where... I think that's where the reality, the expectations kind of get steered wrong because they hear all over social media that PPC is the best marketing channel, which it is. But then if it doesn't work, or if they're not able to close the leads or and get it to the finish line, that it's not a good place to put your marketing. You're going to get... I'm telling you, and this is what a lot of people think, is that I could cold call, I get three cold callers, I get a bunch of leads in the first week. I could spend the same amount on PPC, I get five leads."

Interviewer: "Well, it takes also... or less in one week, right? Sorry."

Aaron: "Yeah, I mean, it takes... expectations, bring it down, you know. One... It takes a lot less leads. I'm not going to say how much, but it takes a lot less leads to get a contract. And that contract could obviously net you a lot. And also, you're going to have better quality conversations. They're reaching out to you. So now you're not... now you're not, you know, banging head against wall against all these leads that are saying, 'Hey, what's your offer? What's your offer? What's your offer?' Right? I'm sure we all been there, been down that road. But now you get to talk to people. Even if they're not a fit, you had a great conversation with that person because they reached out to you. And hey, if it's not a fit, it's not a fit. You get to go part ways and know peacefully."

Miquella: "I think there's a misconception too that people think that like with PPC, they're just going to all be lay-downs, and they're not. I mean, yeah, there's one-call closes, but there's work that the acquisition has put into that, you know. They've spent half an hour, an hour on a phone, or all day on the phone with them and gotten it to... gotten the contract. And then you still got to put in the work to sell it, you know. I think they may... there may be a just disconnect where they think, 'Oh, they're hot leads, it'll be easy, and we're done.' And they don't... I think they forget that there is still a lot of work you have to do on the back end to make it come to fruition."

Interviewer: "Yeah, I... I totally agree with you wholeheartedly. I also think, my personal opinion, the idea that PPC leads are lay-downs, I think is misguided. I think the fact that they... you can be at 10 leads per contract doesn't mean that you will be at 10 leads per contract. They... you're spot on about that because you have to work them differently, and it takes skill. And like, yeah, maybe they spent an hour on the phone with the seller, and you could call that the work, but what about all the training they've done for six months every morning?"

Aaron: "Exactly, like that's the work, you know."

Interviewer: "Maybe cutting down the trees is easy, but sharpening the saw can be hard, right?"

Aaron: "Right, it's true."

Interviewer: "I like that. What would you say is the best... I guess here's what I'm trying to figure out. I want to... I want to hear this from your perspective. How do you know if a marketing campaign is working or if it's not working?"

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Want to learn how Eric Brewer, a small-town real estate investor, closed over 400 deals last year? Tune in for his no-nonsense insights on scaling a business and unlocking hidden profit channels.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Eric Brewer. Eric Brewer's company flips or wholesales over 400 houses every year. Today, he shares with me some of the lessons that he's learned over that process through implementing different exit strategies and developing as a leader to help his company grow.

Welcome to the podcast, Eric. How are you doing?"

"Doing great, man. How are you?"

Hey, fantastic. Excited to talk with you again. I can tell you, you're one person every time we talk, I learn something, and I appreciate that a ton. So I'm excited for you to be on this podcast, mostly selfishly, mostly just because I want to learn a few things from you.

"Cool, well I'll do my best not to let you down. We'll see how we do."

So for people listening to this podcast that might not know you, might not know who you are, your background, or anything like that, could you share just a little bit about like, you know, who are you? What have you done? Like the history of how you've gotten to where you are today, and then you know, what are you doing now?

"Yeah, sure. So I am in York, Pennsylvania. It's a relatively small rural area about 45 minutes north of Baltimore, Maryland, and about 30 minutes south of the capital of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. And then about 3 and a half hours east of Pittsburgh and an hour and a half east of Philadelphia. So if you sort of triangulate that stuff, I am in the southern east portion of PA, closer to Baltimore than really any other notable area.

I am a real estate investor, been doing it since 2006. Currently have roughly 40 plus employees. We operate in three markets within two hours of our home office here. We did just north of 400 real estate deals last year.

I got my start really in business in the automobile industry. Went out of high school, went into the army, got out of the army, got into the car business, spent eight years in the car business. Really learned how to sell there, learned how to manage, learned a little bit of marketing. Got burned out. The car business back in this would have been the late '90s, early 2000s, was very demanding from a schedule perspective, and it's never been known as like the most enjoyable atmosphere to either sell or buy in, right?

I think, uh, most people that sell cars don't love the experience, and I don't know, Consumer Reports said a couple years ago that like 98% of people that bought a car didn't love the experience as well. So I was, you know, that was catching up to me. The hours were weighing on me, and I was about to have my first child.

So in 2005, I left the car business, did some soul searching, decided to get into real estate. Started my real estate career in finance, was basically cold calling refinance leads at a mortgage company. And after doing that for about six months, my previous mentor from the car business got into real estate, knew that I had made the transition out of the car business, and called me. And uh, a couple days later, we partnered up, and in February of 2006, we started flipping houses.

So a little bit of my background, how I got into real estate, and then I think what you asked is what does that look like now. Our business today is mostly wholesale novation, and we'll do about 75 fix and flips. About a year ago, I started a commercial real estate investment group. We have about $200 million in commercial multifamily office and industrial projects currently in our pipeline, actively raising 50 million in private equity to fund those projects. That'll include acquisitions, fundraising, construction, property management, and then obviously the disposition of those properties, whether it be through refinance and retaining those assets or selling them.

And we also do some group coaching and real estate training, taking basically just the systems and processes, best practices that we've used to build our company in the last 17 years, turning them into outward-facing curriculums to share with other real estate investors that are looking to increase profits, reduce drama and stress, and then grow simultaneously. So hopefully that gives you a decent sort of snapshot of what we got going on."

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's more than I knew even. I didn't know about your commercial real estate investment. Um, I don't know if you call it company or initiative. Um, so that's pretty fascinating. One thing I've always been super impressed by is the volume you've been able to do in a relatively small and non-populous area. Like, you're always like the example in my mind of like somebody who can show like how many deals can really be done in a market, which is pretty fascinating. And then on the education side, what you mentioned, because I know it's how we know each other a lot, is we're sending people to your novations training all the time because I think, I mean, nobody really invents anything, but of all investors who do novations, I'm not aware of anybody who did it before you did. Is that, I guess, what I'm saying?

"Yes, so I think I innovated, not invented, the wholesale application of novs. The legal concept and application had been around for 100 years. However, until 2008 is really when I sort of stumbled on it, simply because I was looking to circumvent the FHA anti-flip laws that exist. Where now, you can imagine 2008, to give you just how pressing of an issue it was for me to figure this out, in 2008, like 99% of every borrower was using FHA financing.

You might say why? Well, it's because what fueled the economic collapse in the United States was financial, the mismanagement of mortgage loan products and a lot of fraudulent activity and liberal lending policies. So in 2008, like the hardest thing to do in the world was to get a mortgage. Like, nobody was lending money. It's why most investors went out of business, because their lines of credit dried up, not because they couldn't find good deals and renovate them and sell them for more money. They just, like, all of the capital marketplace went away.

So I'm flipping homes, like buying them, renovating them in three to four weeks, putting them on the MLS, and getting offers, but every borrower was using FHA financing. The problem with that is there's a seasoning requirement. So I bought and renovated in three weeks, I got to wait 12 weeks before the buyer can even write a contract. Then once you got an FHA loan on a flip house into underwriting, you were a marked man. Like, they were literally trying to find reasons to decline a loan on a flip house because as these foreclosures and short sales and all of this was unfolding, the biggest loss that mortgage companies were experiencing on their foreclosures were flipped properties.

So that information makes its way back upstream, and underwriters are given basically a directive like, 'Hey, like if this is a flip, you know, there's a lot of risk involved here.' And if you really think about a loan underwriter, their job is to hedge against risk. So FHA was a nightmare for me back then, and I was looking for a way to circumvent it. And novs, as you start to learn more about it, really gives you the ability to sell your wholesale deal to a retail buyer without ever taking deed or being on title or funding or renovating it, which means you're not exposed to FHA seasoning, underwriting, anything that pertains to a flip.

So that's where it started, and as I learned more about it, I realized there were all these other residual benefits, and I just started applying it to every aspect of my acquisitions arm of my business. And come to realize that like, I was passing up 50%, roughly 40-50% of my leads generated from PPC, billboards, mail, TV were properties that were in like turnkey condition. The seller was willing to take a little bit less than retail, and my old wholesale fix and flip, buy and hold strategy of acquiring it just didn't fit for them.

So I was throwing away all these really good leads, and once I started to understand novations, we started converting 10 to 15% of those leads, which, that's why we do such a high volume in a small market. Because we're literally doing another four or five deals per batch of 100 leads than any other investor would do that's only trying to fit those leads into a wholesale, buy and hold, wholetail, or fix and flip model.

That, I think we do a fairly good job of just hiring good people, having good data, managing people, leading people, training things like that. I think we do a really good job of just running a good business. And then you stack that on top of having this, you know, sort of Swiss army knife, you know, exit strategy and acquisition strategy, it compounds, and we end up doing a really good volume in a small market."

Yeah, no, that's pretty fascinating. So yeah, there's the brief idea on novations, which I think is super cool, and it's something if you listen to this podcast, you'll see we talked with quite a few people about those kinds of strategies. And you've been highlighted before as somebody that many people have learned this strategy from. So yeah, definitely if anybody's looking, you know, if you're just like, it drives me crazy when we talk to people that are like only wholesaling. Like, you're missing so much potential opportunity in this market. So definitely hit Eric up if you have any interest in that type of thing.

One thing I want to take a little bit different direction though, because I'm curious to hear myself, like as you look back, I mean, what's crazy to me is you just described like your career in business, and it starts like pretty much when I was born, you know. So you got a couple years on me. You got your beard's a little bit more gray than mine. A little wisdom chocked into that beard.

"That's right, that's right."

So anyways, that considered, you know, seeing that you've been in the real estate game for a while, I'm curious, like looking back, what are the big things in your opinion you've learned at a few of these different stages that have really helped you to grow your business to the next level?

"Oh man, I might need a notepad. So I would say originally, one of the early lessons was we call ourselves a real estate investor, and this is assuming someone that's running, you know, some level of direct seller marketing, acquiring, wholesaling, noting, maybe renovating or fix and flip, or financing these properties. The reality is that a real estate investor has to market, acquire, lead manage, disposition, possibly construction, finance, and what am I missing here? Operations support.

So even though I thought I had one job, that was to be a real estate investor, early on when I started the business, I was literally wearing eight different hats. And one of the things I think I learned early on was that rather than trying to be great and accepting average in eight different departments, the quicker you can get your business in a position where you can start to hire a more qualified person to do that segment of the business, and you only live in the segment of the business that you're really great at and you love, I think I would have made more money, I would have made more friends, I would have had less turnover, I would have probably simplified my life, I would have reduced stress.

Um, so you know, I think a lot of times we say, 'Well, I'll hire that person if,' or 'If I can only get to this stage of my business, I would add that person.' A lot of times we do that because we want to conserve the profit that we have, which I understand, and I was in the same boat. However, the majority of the time, that hire is what prevents us from actually ever getting to the next phase because it's impossible to be an A player in eight different, um, sort of misaligned departments.

If you're a great marketer, you probably suck at finance. If you're great at finance, you're likely not good at sales. So whenever we take on too much responsibility inside of our business, we generally accept below-average performance in one or more of those departments, and that makes business hard. So I wish I would have maybe made that adjustment a little earlier.

And then the second part of that is, okay, I need people. Well, what makes you a great marketer, acquisitions person, lead manager, dispositions person, construction project manager does not make you a good recruiter of talent, retainer of talent, trainer of talent. It's actually sometimes almost a completely different skill set.

So you probably hear, and I hear it all the time, where real estate investors say, 'I want to scale my business,' and you ask them why, and it's, you know, you might get 10 different answers: more money, more time off, more impact. And the number one thing I can tell you that's required to scale a business is people. And then I'll ask them, 'Well, what's causing the majority of all of your stress and frustration and bottlenecks in your business?' And it's people.

So the number one thing that's needed to scale and grow a business is people, and the number one thing most people struggle with at their existing phase of their business is people. And I didn't even see that. I thought I just needed to get better at marketing and acquisitions and sales and all that stuff. I didn't recognize if I stopped doing all of that and I just got really good at developing people and coaching people and teaching people and connecting with people and leading and influencing and nudging and correcting and mentoring people, all of that other stuff would figure itself out.

Because if you get good at that, the best marketers will come to work for you, the best salespeople want to come work for you, the best finance people want to come work for you, the best construction people want to come work for you. So as a business owner, I think a lot of times we overlook what it really means to own a business, and we spend too much time running a business. They're two different things."

Yeah, that's pretty fascinating. Okay, I'm gonna ask you a few questions out of curiosity. So I totally understand what you're saying, where like, you know, having experts in each of the individual things. Like, I've seen the same thing in my business, that like, oftentimes all that you really need for growth in a business is just to do like the most basic things in every department, and that's what a business needs to flourish. You know, you think you got to do something like crazy innovative, but it's like, you know, it's the simple stuff. Like, a lot of businesses, they just don't like, they don't answer their phone, you know. Does it take a genius to know you got to answer your phone? You know, no, but like actually doing it, people struggle. Like, we struggle to execute even these basic things. Um, so I agree with you on that.

But let's just say we put the lens on of like, I'm just going to give you some constraints. Let's just talk like, how do we deal with the difficulty that this is? So somebody looking at that, okay, what's the long-term plan? We have a leader of each of these eight departments, or whatever this looks like, and we probably have an operator over all those leaders, and we probably have some element of redundancy. So when people leave, blah blah blah, then we have ways that we can fix those problems, etc., right?

So that's kind of what this business looks like scaled, but when you're trying to figure out like, I have limited budget, limited resources, and I know that I can't necessarily accomplish that right now. Like, help me understand what you're saying. Are you just saying like an early-stage business should just be investing as much into people as they possibly can for the purpose of growth? Or like, how would you go through, like assuming you can't have the cake and eat it too, like how do you prioritize what's most important there?

"Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, so this is where the difference between small business and real business is different, right? If you were to start a conventional startup, they raise money and they hire all of those people first. So the way corporate starts, which there's a lot that we don't like about that, right? We don't feel like we have a voice, we get lost, there's too big, they can't pivot quick enough. But the one thing they have right is they know how to run businesses, right?

So what they would do is they would raise capital and say, 'Hey, it's going to take us three years to be profitable. Here's what we need as far as operating expense and salaries and marketing and all of this stuff, and we need that for three years before we become profitable.' So there's a lot of merit to that, right? It's probably the correct way to do it.

However, the reality is, when we're talking about small business entrepreneurs, that's just, that's literally the difference between corporate and entrepreneurs. They do that completely differently, and even though it's the right way to do it, it generally just doesn't work for guys like us. We, that's not where we are. We're grinders, workers, right? We don't fit inside of that corporate box. We like to blaze our own trail.

So now that we know that the correct way to do it, right, that's done through corporate, that doesn't necessarily, those same opportunities aren't made available to us. We really have to figure out, I think, what our unique ability is, right? So like for me, it's the ability to influence people. For you, it may be the ability to map out a very complex idea and make it simple for your customers to understand and make it simple for your employees to understand, right?

Um, those two skill sets, why they may sound similar, may put us, like they have in this instance—you in a different business and me in a different business—I don't think we give that enough thought. Sometimes people just gravitate towards something they think they can make money in without really understanding whether or not their skill set aligns. So, let's use an example of real estate wholesale. If you boil that down to its most basic concept, it's marketing first, sales second. So, if you're a good marketer, which means you understand how to connect words and messages to a potential customer's needs, that's all marketing. Here's what we can do: if you put that in front of the right group of people, they're going to call you. And once they call you, you have to sell them your product or service. Everything else is secondary, tertiary, and of lesser importance than generating and monetizing leads.

So, if you're good at marketing and sales, real estate wholesale would be a good business for you. Do that for a period of time until you've created enough income. Now, you start to look at what you're incompetent at and don't enjoy. That becomes your first hire. A lot of times in real estate wholesale, hiring an executive assistant would be my first hire—things like scheduling, replying to emails, booking travel—activities that don't produce income but are necessary. Hiring an executive assistant for $25 an hour, $40K a year, if we're running a business that nets us $150,000 a year. The first limiting belief is if I'm making $150K and I hire someone for $50K, I now only keep $100K. Follow me? I think the reality is if I make $150K, I pay this person $50K, now I make $250K. Does that make sense? Because now I'm working on more income-producing activities.

So, there needs to be a strategic hire with an entrepreneur, always moving the lowest income, lowest impact, lowest energy task off your plate and onto someone else's. That allows you to function in this concept: only in things that either generate a lead or convert a lead. So as a wholesaler, you hire an EA. Everything else that doesn't involve talking to a customer and writing a contract, you've delegated. You're now talking to twice as many people, writing twice as many contracts. Got it? So it's almost like what you described before as the end state, but you're saying the process to getting there is looking at what sucks your energy away and what takes your time, and then delegating those one piece at a time.

So, probably at the beginning, you do start out like day one, you lead eight departments. And then slowly getting rid of a few of those things as you go along. Yeah, when we start, that's exciting, exhilarating, right? Because it's new, it's fresh, and it's us breaking the mold of what everybody told us we had to do. But at some point, the excitement wears off, the honeymoon phase is off. It's like, 'Hey, doing that stuff is no longer cool because I've started my own business.' We've got to start being smarter about how we spend our time. And we have to, you know, the value of small business in our country is to create opportunity for more people. So if we just operate in this little shell and we're a one or two-person operation and we never create a big enough organization to bring other people into that with us, to me, that would be a shame. But that's just me. When I look at business, it's at least twofold, right? It's the ability to help more customers and maybe of equal or greater value to me is the ability to help more employees. Like, give people a place to work where, you know, generally in corporate, most people would tell you corporate sucks to work at, right? I think we have a unique opportunity inside of small business to create a more meaningful experience for people inside of our businesses. And to not grow and expand, to open up that opportunity to more people, to me, would be a shame. But that's just me. That might not be for everybody.

Then the money comes with it, right? If I help more customers and I make working for me a more enjoyable, rewarding place to be, in my experience, you end up making more money. Yeah? No, that totally makes sense. Let's talk about attracting and retaining great people. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your strategies there. I've always kind of thought of it as the number one trump card in business because you can learn to market, you can learn to sell, you can learn operations, you can learn finance. But if you just learn to attract good people, then you have the ability to acquire the greatest of any skill that could exist in the marketplace, right? So that's obviously the most scalable long-term solution there. And it seems to be something that a lot of people don't agree on—what good people are. I know my definition of a good employee has changed a lot over the years that I've been in business. What I thought was the right person at one point is really different from what I could think is the right person now. And also, finding those people can be really hard. Sometimes it's easy. I'm just curious to hear, in your opinion, the right way to go about that. What's been successful for you? And what have you found is the key to attracting and keeping those people?

The short version is the best way to find great people is to become a great person. Let me say that again: the best way to find great people is to become a great person. So what does that mean? Each person may see it differently, but for me, I think there's defining and upholding standards, you know, five to seven characteristics. Or if you've ever read the book 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,' right? So how do they take care of their body, how do they take care of their friends, how do they take care of their family, how do they take care of their spirit, right? How do they take care of their finances, right? And you know, what I think, to your point, like what I would have thought a good employee was 15 years ago is someone who would take instruction, if they just did what I told them to do. Now, today, that's almost opposite. I want someone to challenge whatever anybody tells them to do, to potentially find a new or better or more efficient or more cost-efficient way. So that's almost a 100% opposite, right? I don't want people to do; I want them to think.

Now, what you start thinking about is, well, let me go back. The number one way that I hire talent is through social media. And the way that I attract talent through social media is just myself. I talk about what I'm going through as a father, what I'm going through as a business person. I read an awful lot every day and every week. And then I sort of take that information that I read, I apply it to my own experiences, my own circumstances, and then I share my perspective. And that attracts people who—it attracts people that are in sales, it attracts people that are into being an entrepreneur, it attracts people that are into becoming a better father and a better husband and a better leader. So my experience has been a well-documented personal and professional journey on social media that's authentic and organic has attracted A-players to my organization. That's been my own personal experience.

Then I think what you have to document is what your version of an A-player is. And in our organization, we look for what we call an ideal team player. That's from a book written by Patrick Lencioni. And the three aspects of an ideal team player are they're humble, hungry, and they're smart. And by smart, he means EQ, not IQ, right? So they have the ability to handle conflict, maintain meaningful and respectful communication even when there's a lot of pressure or there's tension or disagreement that arises, right? And then we look at core value fit. So we have a set of core values that are non-negotiable for us. That is perspective, having a can-do attitude, integrity, doing the right thing, excellence, which means improving and getting better every day, respect, which is our EQ core value that means to treat people the way they want to be treated, not the way I want to be treated, the way you want to be treated. So I have to have an awareness about me of what other people want, what their desires are. And then humility and discipline. So we run them through a series of questions and interviews that verify those core values are something that they align with.

And then, of course, we look at their ability to be able to do the work. Do they have the skill set and the cognitive thinking ability to do the job that we're interviewing for? And then there's some, what I would call soft skills. And I'm in the process of actually—we're going through what we call like a force-ranking, top-grading process in our organization right now. And we just did it last quarter where we ranked everybody. Before I got there, it was A, B, C, D, E, F. And when I got to the quarterly, there were all these people batched into this B category. The problem with that is it doesn't make you make a decision. It doesn't—like nothing happens with that. Like most people, if we said they were a B player, we'd probably leave them alone. So I said, "Hey, we're going to redo

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