"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Nick Perry. Nick Perry is the godfather of the national wholesaling model. Not only was he the first one to do that model, but he's done it on a level that nobody else has yet done it. He's bought more deals in more states than anybody else. We're going to talk about what motivates him as a person, we're going to talk about what his team looked like, we're going to talk about how his business model shifted in his story, and I think there's a ton in this episode that you're going to get value from. So without further discussion, let's get into it.

"How you doing today, Nick?"

"Amazing man, appreciate you having me on."

"Yeah, I'm super excited. I even caught you in the United States. What a rare opportunity. So you're in your office right now in Austin with the team?"

"I am, yeah. I'm here with the team right now. We're busting out of this office, getting ready to move into another office. So I'm back here helping with the transition."

"That's awesome, and I'm super excited to speak to you. You have been on the top of my mind for this podcast for a period of time. Honestly, whenever anybody asks me, because there's this... you know, there's people that believe that a real estate business today has to be built the same way it was built 10 or 20 years ago. And obviously, the world has changed, and it's not like those old things don't work anymore. In many ways, they do. But when people ask me like, 'Is anybody actually doing really well with some of these newer, more innovative models?' I always point my finger to you and say, 'Well, look at Nick Perry,' because I don't know anybody who's accomplished more of a modern national virtual wholesaling real estate model on the level that you have. So I'm sure you have millions of cool insights and things to share, but I'm super excited to dig into Nick's background."

"But if it's okay with you, let's start with your story. How did you get into real estate, and what was between there and where you are today?"

"Yeah, you know, I've always been an inside sales guy, so I'm going to start it off with that. We are in the inside sales business. We're not in real estate. Real estate is just the widget, right? So my background and my experience comes from banging the phones, you know, 60 calls a day, 120 minutes, high quotas, and I've been able to take that into what we do now, and it's the exact same thing.

Bringing you back to how I started, I started off, you know, very humble beginnings. I was a screw-up. I was in and out of juvie growing up for underage drinking and fighting. I had to grow up quick. My parents were divorced, so I lived with my dad. My dad was a landscaper, just trying to get by. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in not the best part of town. He was struggling to barely make rent, much less afford clothes or food or anything. So I had to start working at an early age.

I started working every day after school when I was 14. At 15, I was working at a cell phone store. I got a promotion to store manager, and they were like, 'Hey, we want to promote you to store manager. It comes with a raise, but it's full time.' So I had to choose between work and school, and I chose work. That was the end of my education in high school. I dropped out in 10th grade, and I've been working ever since.

After high school, I became a personal trainer, and I realized as a personal trainer that I was really trading time for money. I did well as a personal trainer, had a full book of clients. I trained in a wealthy part of town, and I made good money for a personal trainer. So yeah, 18-19 years old, I'm making 80-100K a year, but my clients are pulling up in Rolls Royces. They live in the mansions around the area, tell me about their trips to the Maldives, and I'm quickly realizing like, why are they making millions of dollars and I'm not?

So my first mentors were really my clients. I would interview them while I was training them, and lo and behold, none of them had 9-to-5 jobs, none of them had any W-2 income. It was all 'I got rich through real estate' or 'I own a business.' So success leaves clues, and I said, 'You know what? I really need to figure out this real estate thing.' But I didn't have any money, I didn't have any credit, I didn't have any experience."

"And you know, I came across real estate wholesaling. I was living in Northern Virginia, which was where I grew up, and I was kind of tired of living there. So I quit my job and I moved down to Austin, Texas. No job, no connections, I had five thousand dollars to my name. So I moved to a little one-bedroom apartment in the hood with a laptop, bag of clothes, and an air mattress, and that's how I started my real estate journey.

I needed to figure out what was going to be my next move, and I didn't want to get a job. So I got on YouTube and started researching real estate wholesaling, and that brought me down that route. This is very early days. I was handwriting yellow letters, sending out bandit signs, and striking out left and right. I was getting appointments but I didn't have a coach, I didn't have a mentor, and I was getting my ass handed to me, you know, getting told no, no, no, no, no, no.

I was running out of money to keep my dream of being my own boss alive. So I went and got a job at Indeed.com. They're headquartered here in Austin, and so I started doing inside sales at Indeed. When I started that job, I was negative 800 in my bank account, didn't know how I was going to make rent, and I told myself I'm only getting this job so I can come out and keep this dream alive and be an entrepreneur.

So I went in and I gave it everything I had, and I went from negative 800 in my bank account to making a quarter million dollars a year. Rookie of the Year, Top Gun, top of the leaderboards. I used all of that money to put into my business. I used that money to go to masterminds, I used it to put into marketing, and I worked non-stop for those first three years.

It took me 11 months and 104 face-to-face seller appointments - this is where I used to drive to the houses - before I got my first deal. So it wasn't like an overnight success. I really struggled in the beginning, and that was part of my journey. It took me that long to get my first deal, and I worked non-stop. Nine to five at Indeed, get home, eat dinner, and then back on the phones until midnight until I couldn't stay awake anymore, and then every day on the weekends. And that's basically how the journey began."

"So I did that, and, you know, it took me 104 appointments to get my first deal. All that money from my first assignment, which was $12,000, I put it right back into marketing. Quickly after that, I got deal two, three, and four. I continued doing this for, you know, I stayed at my nine-to-five for two years. So until 2016, I stayed in my nine-to-five, and then I made the transition full-time into real estate. You know, I built my company. Since then, we've got 22 employees. We're doing five to six million dollars a year and growing right now. That's pretty much where we're at."

"Yeah, that's awesome, Nick. I'm so curious. I've never talked to anybody that went on so many appointments to get their first deal. At that time, I don't think your sales skills were new. I mean, you've been doing that for some time and you were performing really well in another sales job. So, what do you attribute the reason to that being such a difficult start for you?"

"At the very beginning, I didn't know how to comp properties. I wasn't confident in what I was looking at. I didn't have the right exit strategies. I was locking stuff up at full retail, just making a lot of beginning entry-level mistakes. That's really what held me back. I was just kind of stubborn in the way that I wanted to figure it out myself. I was going to watch YouTube videos until nauseam until I got it down. I was trying to piece together advice from multiple different people, and that is not what worked. It wasn't until I got a real mentor and started attending real masterminds that I structured my business properly and started getting real traction."

"Yeah, that's awesome. It reminds me in some ways of the beginning of my journey. I look back at it, and I was like too dumb to stop, basically. At the very beginning, when I had started Bateman Collective, you hustle for—it's crazy—like I hustled for so long for like two or three clients, probably two or three clients in my first year, working all the time to make that happen. Now, we'll onboard two or three clients in two or three days. It's insane how much that changes when you start to learn and understand what you're doing as a business. That's wild. Also, the part of that whole journey where I imagine you grew the most is the part you glazed over super fast. It's like, you know, the origin story and then where you are today, but I imagine you went through quite a bit between just being the guy who figured out how to get those two, three, four deals to the guy that can run a business doing five to six million dollars a year in revenue. Tell me about that growth path. I'm super curious to hear what struggles you had then and what helped you break past that seven-figure mark and get from that three to six. You get what I'm saying?"

"Yeah, so for the first four years, we were stuck at three to five deals a month. I felt like that was a real tough point for me to break past. The reason was I wasn't marketing properly. My people sucked, my system sucked, and so I had to—you know, I was hiring people, firing people, I wasn't tracking my KPIs properly. These were all things that were the difference maker from three to five deals a month to 35 to 45 deals a month. Now our marketing is streamlined. We do all inbound marketing, PPC. Our team is top-notch; they're tracked on very strict metrics for performance. Our systems—we've invested heavily into making sure we have the best software, the best tech in order for them to do their jobs effectively."

"Yeah, that's crazy. Isn't it wild how the most successful companies and the ones that just can't make it work have a lot of the same elements? You had people, you were hiring, you were firing, you had KPIs, you had systems. So many people think of it as a checklist, like 'I got to get these things,' but the level of mastery of each one of those things sounds like that's what took you to the next level."

"Correct. Everybody always likes to ask me, 'What are the top three things that made you—what was the turning point from five deals to 45 deals?' I wish I could give you one tip or one software, but it's really the mastery, becoming one percent better every single day over a year, five years. The compounding effect of that is what really gets you there. There's no silver bullet, no magic software. Of course, all those things help make you one percent better. That's the true answer to what it takes. There are no real shortcuts to success. Sorry to break it to you guys. I can give you a lot of tips and things that'll speed up that process, but you're going to have to commit to mastering and growing every single day."

"Yeah, that's awesome, Nick. I'm really excited to dig into Nick's current business model. What does your business model look like right now? Just the basics, right? What does marketing look like? What does acquisitions look like? What does the team structure look like? Anything that you think is really helpful. I know a lot of people listening to this podcast feel like you did back before you had that breakthrough, stuck in that two to four deal per month range with the wrong systems, the wrong people, probably even a pivoted business model from where you are now. Tell me about some of those key factors that make your business as it functions today different from the average wholesale real estate business."

"Yeah, so we're nationwide. We do property all over the country. In terms of marketing, like I said, we're all Google inbound PPC. Rather than just tell you what my team looks like, I'd rather just show you. Here we go. I'll walk you into my acquisitions room. This is my acquisitions team right here. Everybody's on the phones, cranking out deals left and right. We've got eight or nine guys here on acquisitions. You guys are on a podcast right now; y'all are gonna be famous."

"And then, back over here up front, we've got our transactions team that are on the phone right now. You're on a podcast; you're gonna be famous. And then we've got my COO and executive assistant over here. They're cranking out everything we need to be able to run this business at a high level. And then back here, I have a dispositions team. I've got three dispo, so they're all on phones cranking right now. That's what it looks like to run a five to six million dollar a year operation in a nutshell."

"That is super neat. There are tons of little takeaways in that little office tour. By the way, for anybody listening to this, this is your sign that you got to start watching these on YouTube instead of listening to the podcast form. But yeah, that's interesting. The ratio of the number of acquisitions reps to the number of dispo reps is crazy interesting because it's a little bit stronger on dispo than the average real estate company, which I think is a piece of your model, correct?"

"Yeah, it's about having streamlined processes on dispo, making sure that our acquisitions are doing a great job of locking these deals up at the right price. If you don't lock them up at the right price, it's going to take a ton of bandwidth on dispo. If you don't have the right systems on dispo, like having certain softwares like InvestorLift, PropStream, etc., I could go down the list. If you don't have the right systems and process on dispo, you're going to have to hire a lot of dispo to manage the amount of volume that we do."

"Yeah, yeah, totally fair. I'm really curious to ask. Um, obviously, recording this, we're in September of 2023. A lot of people kind of got thrown for a loop close to a year ago. Tell me about, like, with your business model and how you operate, what effects, if any, did the market shift have on your operation, and did you make any changes?"

"I didn't even realize people were struggling and that there was a problem in the market until, like, a couple months ago. You know, people were like, 'Yeah, we got crushed in Q4 and Q1.' I was like, 'I missed the memo,' because, you know, I think the fact that we are nationwide, the fact that we pivoted to novations and selling to retail buyers, you know, wholesaling and doing novations, that was a big shift we did early on. We did that, you know, Q2, Q3 of last year, so we missed, like, you know, front. We never sold to hedge funds or anything either, so that was, you know, I know where a lot of people got the rug pulled from underneath them. And then cash buyers started drying up because the interest rates skyrocketed and construction prices skyrocketed. So, um, we had already made the shift before, you know, all of that transpired."

"That's wild. You, like, timed it just right because, yeah, so many people that I know that were doing well, then they struggled, and then now they're doing well again. They were doing a lot of wholesaling. It hit them hard. They lost a lot of cash buyer traction. I mean, either your deals are gonna contract in their size or you're not even going to sell them to cash buyers in a tough period like that. And then they started learning other exit strategies, pretty much anything that gets you to the MLS and maybe a hotel or wholesale or maybe flips in some circumstances for people that want that headache in their business. And then they're doing better."

"That's crazy. I don't think 'luck' is the right word because I'm sure there's a lot of vision behind that. But that's awesome that you had timed that just right when other people needed that."

"Yeah, you know, we had experimented with it before, and we just saw the traction that we were getting, so we leaned heavy into what was working. That was a blessing. You know, we were very fortunate that we made that shift early."

"Well, it's crazy because often the things that save your business in a tough time are just getting better at the same things that you should have been doing even before. That would have been what would have taken you from profitable to very profitable before. And then now with the shift, it could just take you from not profitable to profitable in some circumstances. Like, I'm totally with you that people using those exit strategies even before the market shift, it was still better. People were still getting larger spreads than they were through other exit strategies. People were just content because they didn't need to do much better than they were doing."

"It seemed like a lot of the people I was talking to, their focus was selling the deal, not maximizing the deal spread because they could still be profitable and move on to the next one."

"I agree. And that's a good point you made. You know, the people that are training every single day, working on getting better every single day, when shifts in the market happen, those are going to be the companies that excel versus the people that go out of business. If you run a clean operation, you're dedicated to becoming better, when things do happen, you're much stronger and much more equipped to deal with market changes. So, it's just about being the best you can be individually, and we preach that in our company. It's like, 'Hey, one of our core values is never-ending improvement.' That goes down from the individual level and rolls up to the company. We're always self-scrutinizing how we can become better individually and as a company."

"Yeah, it's insane. The best leaders, you don't have to ask them what their core values are, right? You spend a little bit of time with them, you'll know that. And I can tell you, I knew that about you. I knew you had some core value that was like growth or never-ending improvement or one percent better every day. I didn't know what words you used yet, but I knew it was something like that."

"That's awesome. Something else I noticed in your office tour that was abnormal, you had a CEO. Most people don't have a CEO. Speak to, if you don't mind, that decision. You know, why you chose to have a CEO, what they do, and what that means for the business and how it interacts with your life and all that stuff."

"He does everything. So you guys kind of caught me at an interesting time because I'm not really here in my office very often. I live in Cancun, Mexico. Previous to that, I lived in Panama City, Panama, and Miami, Florida. So I come to my office as needed, mainly because I want to. I don't have to be here, and I enjoy that freedom. I wanted to build my life to where I can do what I want when I want. I'm young, I like to travel, so I wanted to build my company in a way that I was not the bottleneck. So having a CEO is not like I hired him in and stepped out of my business. This was a very long process to get to this point. Brandon was actually my intern when I was at Indeed in the corporate world."

"Interesting."

"Yeah, so he would see me locking up a deal at Indeed, and then I'd click over to a few other tabs to Podio, and I'd lock up a deal with a seller, right? And he was like, 'Wow, this is interesting,' and I was like, 'Listen, kid, just prospect my leads, do what I tell you to do, don't ask me questions about real estate.' Whatever. He ended up really taking an interest in it, so I was like, 'Here, take this course,' and he took the Sean Terry course and ended up getting a deal on his first direct mail campaign. I coached him through it. Long story short, he got hired at Indeed, I left Indeed, and didn't think I'd ever talk to him again. He was making six figures, doing well at Indeed, also interested in real estate. Six months later, he called me out of the blue asking if he could come work for me. I said, 'I don't have a position for you, but you can cold call my old leads, basically a follow-up specialist for $500 a week.' And he left a six-figure job, 401K benefits, to come basically be my junior acquisition at the time. And then from there, he worked every job in the company. As we brought in new reps, he helped hire and train. He started, you know, he became a closer on acquisitions, then ran our acquisitions team. And then eventually he was at the point where he was ready to take over dispo as well, so he took over back-end dispo, and he was promoted to COO. This is still 2017 through 2020. He was the COO of our company, and he did everything. Towards the end of his tenure as COO, I was still in the office every day, but I wasn't doing anything. I was scrolling TikTok all day. And in 2021, I decided, 'You know what, I'm going to go ahead and move and see how you do.' And I'll come back. He did very well over the next couple quarters, so I promoted him to CEO. That was the evolution. He earned his stripes to become the CEO of the company. He's been with us for eight years now and has worked every single role in the company and knows the business better than I do probably at this point."

"Yeah, that's wild, and it has to be an inspiration to other people starting with the company that there is a path for growth within the company. I'm curious, did you hire another COO when you promoted him, or is it just him with new responsibilities?"

"Yeah, he has department heads now. So we have a director of acquisitions, director of dispositions, and they report to him. So he has two people underneath him that report directly to him, and that's how we're structured. We don't need to be that top-heavy. I don't like having a bunch of high-paid executives within my company, so that's how we're organized right now."

"Okay, super helpful to know. Well, that's awesome, man. So that..."

"Why expand nationally vs. dominate locally first?"

"Consider, let's just say I'm an investor, and I subscribe to this mindset where I say, 'Why would I go to more markets than just the one I'm in if I haven't dominated the one that I'm in?' It doesn't make sense to expand if you haven't won already. What would you say to that?"

"Well, there's multiple reasons. One, if you're doing digital marketing, you know that the larger the audience that you serve your ads in front of, it's typically going to result in a lower lead cost, right? So if I'm marketing, say, in Dallas-Fort Worth on PPC and I'm just using that market, my cost per lead is probably going to be three to four hundred percent higher than if I do national or statewide. So economies of scale and marketing is one big piece of it. Additionally, when you're spread out, you know, in the United States, you're going to be surprised about how we pick up these deals. We pick up deals in towns that you've never heard of, and we're ripping spreads that are crazy because there's no competition. So we'll go lock up an innovation for forty thousand dollars, put it on the MLS for two hundred

thousand dollars, and we don't have much competition because it's in these little pockets. So you can almost find these little gem deals in smaller markets versus if you're in a large, competitive market where everyone's got this mind-share idea that it's the hot market to be in. A lot of times, you won't have those larger spreads, and you're dealing with more competition. So for us, it makes a lot of sense to go nationwide."

"Yeah, I mean we always come in and anchor with a cash price, even if we are going in to get a novation, you know? So that's the way that we pitch: we make sure that you know we underwrite it as cash even if we know we're not gonna do a cash deal. Like I said, in these rural markets we're almost always doing novation because it makes the most sense. So they will still get a cash offer to the seller, and then it makes the novation offer much more appealing after they hear that cash offer."

"Got it. Okay, so a cash offer is a price anchor. Understood."

"Okay, that's super interesting because these same processes with other people end up being a cash deal much more often. And then with you, you just know you're going in for the novation from the very first second. So yes, you start that direction."

"Alright, that's super interesting. Let's talk about, um, I'm curious to see how our opinions differ or are similar on this. So a lot of people are basically trying to figure out PPC and they just can't make it work, right? They're working with different agencies, they're trying to do it themselves, they're hiring people on their team to try to do it, and then, like, no matter what people do, it seems like they tend to fail on some level with PPC, or at least it's really common. So when somebody's considering that, obviously you and I are like naturally on different sides of this table, right? I have a managed service for PPC, we encourage people to come with us, and we say, 'You know what, yeah, there are some bad agencies out there. We're a good agency, we're going to take good care of you, we have a lot of data, we can make this work.' And we have people do that with us. Your model, as part of your program, you're actually teaching people to do their own PPC, and I don't think you're exclusively telling them like this is the only way to do it, but that's kind of the model that you've had there. So as much as I believe in what I believe in, I love a good healthy conflict, and I think that's where we can get down to it a little bit more. I'm super curious to hear your opinions on, like, if I'm an investor and I want to make PPC work for my business, what are the different paths I should consider and why would I go down one of those paths versus the other?"

"Yeah, so my stance on it is, you know, as the investor, my PPC journey, I learned how to do it myself through trial and error and eventually I got it up and running and started doing very well at it. And then, you know, going to masterminds, I would hear like, you know, there's always somebody that's out there that can do it better, you need to outsource it. And I did, and I've had PPC agencies do well for me, don't get me wrong, but there has always been a shelf life on how long they continue to perform well. They do well for three months, and then the performance would, you know, go downhill. Or I would, you know, outsource it and they would screw up my campaigns, and I went through this probably, you know, seven, eight, maybe ten times before I just said, 'You know what, I'm pretty confident I have a better grasp on PPC than the agencies that I'm outsourcing and managing it.' So there are good agencies out there. You've built an incredible business. For the most part, like, I think that it's a skill that is not that hard to learn. If you can run cold calling and pull lists and list stack and do all that, you can do PPC. In my opinion, it's actually easier than managing data and things like that, and it just takes a little bit of time to learn it. And when I say a little bit, it's not that much. Like our mentorship is designed to get you up within the first couple of days to where you're generating leads within 72 hours of signing up if you hit the books and implement."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. And I'm curious because you said that, and I didn't know all the details of your previous experiences that you had with PPC companies. You said there's always the shelf life, right? Things are good, and then they're not, and things are good, and then they're not. Have you ever found a shelf life with your own campaigns?"

"For sure, absolutely. Like there's, I think there is a point of diminishing returns, and there is a shelf life on campaigns. Like if you look into my Google Ads account, you'll see campaigns that are paused that have thousands and thousands of conversions on them, and it's because they hit that shelf life and it was time for them to just be shut down, put out to pasture, and I've got new campaigns. So I don't know why that is with the algorithm, but I've never had a campaign that's lasted forever."

"Yeah, which is kind of interesting because I think, I guess I'll pose a question in some way that I think about this. Airplanes are like 95% flown by autopilot, right? Pilots make a lot of money. So if you think about it, why do pilots make a lot of money when they're just sitting in the airplane and they're not really doing that much? Well, they make a lot of money because the moment that something goes wrong, you really want to have somebody who knows what they're doing there to fix the problem, right? Because everything's good when it's good, and then when it's not, it's not. And I think what a lot of agencies do is they kind of put it on autopilot, but then they've got no pilot in the plane anymore. So with this shelf life, I wonder if even the shelf life you're talking about is the natural shelf life, so to speak, of a strategy without iteration. And on the agency side, they're just not able to make the iteration often, whereas on your side, in many ways, you're kind of going through the same experience but coming back from the tough times more effectively. Or perhaps with agencies, I've also seen people just run their campaigns until things get bad, and then they just quit and try a different agency, and then it magically gets better because anytime you change something, it gets better. If you change something when things are bad, usually you can only go up from there, right? So they just build this idea that they need to change it when maybe the agency would have recovered it. But I'm curious what you think of that analogy and to what extent it could apply here."

"Yeah, I agree. I think that that is probably common, especially with a lot of agencies. They do well, they start bringing on a lot of clients, and then they may have originally been super invested in your campaign, and now your campaign's running, so it's on the back burner and they have maybe somebody else watching it. That's what happens. Like you said, it's the airplane without a pilot analogy, and I don't like feeling like that as a business owner. Here's the thing, I take extreme ownership for everything in my business, and so I don't want a single point of failure or I don't want a vendor being responsible for why I'm not doing well. If I'm going to be pissed off at somebody, I'd rather be pissed off at myself than some outside company. So that's why having it in-house has been beneficial to me, because if I'm going to be angry about how my campaigns are going, I'll be angry at myself, and I can figure out how to fix it."

"Yeah, that's totally fair. It's a wild ride."

"I know what you're talking about. I don't have any issues with using outside agencies, and I think it's a good supplemental resource or even a big part of your digital marketing strategy. But I also believe that you should have it in-house. There should never be a single point of failure in your business. If you're 100% reliant on one agency, you set yourself up for potentially anything. You have an established business, but anything can happen. You could end up getting hit by a bus or, God forbid, anything were to happen to you. You're the single point of failure."

"If it gives you any comfort, once upon a time that was true. Now I could get hit by a bus and I think things would go okay around here."

"It was true once upon a time. If you have, like, what you're talking about is just the concept of outsourcing overall. If the company you're working with has a single point of failure, then you're at risk. If the company you're working with has their stuff figured out, then you're not. I don't think most people really evaluate companies on how well they have their stuff together or a single point of failure when they're deciding to work with them. They usually use other things like track record. Honestly, in this industry, when people ask why they should hire us, I don't point to our track record. The reason I don't is because I don't think it actually matters. I think the future is going to be different from the past. Always. Past performance doesn't predict future results. I point to the fact that we have a research and development team that's always trying to stay on top of what's working. I point to the fact that we have a team structure and the right accountability that should make sure that those things don't go on autopilot. But that's not the reason people hire us. They always hire us because whoever it is that's worked with us said that they had great results. I think it has nothing to do with their results in the future, to be completely honest. It matters a little bit, but how the company's run has so much to do with how at risk you are."

"I couldn't agree more. It's true for any business and same thing with what you do and what I do. Like we just talked about earlier, if you don't have a good

process to onboard a new lead and convert it, then you're going to struggle, regardless of what I do for you or what you do for somebody else. Like you said, it's how you structure the company and all that that really matters."

"Yeah, well, I'm super glad we can both agree on that because I think sometimes it can sound a little bit odd for me to just go and say, 'Look, track record's great, but the future is going to be different.' What matters more is the structure of how things run. So, awesome."

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