You're listening to the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high-tech digital agency, focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition, and live a freer, more awesome life. And, now, your host, Dan Barrett.
Dan: All right, hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com. Look, if you need help with your online marketing strategy to find more motivated-seller leads and deals online, you know where to go. It's AdWordsNerds.com. That's where you go. [01:04.3]
Okay, hey, this week, I want to talk about maximizing our performance, maximizing the results you get from everything that you do, whether that's building your real estate investing business, whether that's online marketing, whether that's just your physical performance. There are so many places I know in my life and I’m betting in your life that I try to get the most from myself that I can. I want to have a really successful business and a really happy family, and I want to be physically fit and I want to be healthy, and I want to invest and there are so many things that I want to do. [01:47.3]
In the process of that, I do what I think a lot of you probably do. If you're listening to this, what you probably do. I set goals. I track KPIs. I keep spreadsheets. I’ve got a journal. I’ve got all sorts of things to track my experimentation, to track the results, to track my performance, and to try to figure out what really makes me tick, what really makes things come together when they come together.
If you are a real estate investor and you should be if you're listening to this, it's very much likely to be the case that you have some kind of similar part of your personality, whether you want to call it A-type or goal-oriented or whatever it is, where you're trying to get the most out of yourself.
Now, if you are like that, I want to give you a truism, a heuristic, a rule of thumb that you can keep with you as you try to maximize your performance, and it's one that has had a really massive impact on how I think about what I do and what I work on and how I spend my time. Here it is—your maximum attainable performance is not your maximum sustainable performance. [03:13.3]
I want to put this again. I want to say this again. Your maximum attainable performance is not your maximum sustainable performance. Let me back up and give you a very real-world example. I'm going to pull back the curtain here at AdWords Nerds a little bit and be a little bit vulnerable because I know I like when people do that on podcasts and so on.
A couple of years ago, AdWords Nerds had what really was a record month. I think it was the first month we ever broke $100,000 revenue in a month and I was over the moon. Over the moon. I’d never done that before. I’d never thought in a million years I would get to that point. [04:07.5]
I was still pretty new in managing a team and I was just ecstatic. I felt like I had everything figured out. I felt like things were clicking, things were working for me. Our online funnels were working andthe team was crushing it. We were getting great results for real estate investors all across the country. Our clients were staying for long periods of time and I just thought, This is it. I've made it. I’ve figured it out. I’ve figured the business out. That's it.
You know maybe if you've been in business for a while, you maybe have an idea about what happened next, but if not, let me break it down. So, we had this record month and I was super happy, and then in Month 2, we did a little less well. I don't remember what it was, but let's say it was 88,000 or something, right? [05:04.6]
It was still great. It was still awesome. But I felt disappointed. I felt let down and it's because I was coming off the high of this record month, this maximum attainable performance. It was everything firing on all cylinders. The team is crushing it. Advertising is crushing it. Retention is crushing it—and here's the kicker, some luck. Some luck.
Maybe more people came to us and wanted us to run their ads for them that month. Maybe more people than average clicked our Facebook ad that month. Maybe a bunch of payments all lined up to happen that we were getting a bunch of people who were paying in installments and they all happened to pay around the same time. You just had some randomness in the mix. Now, not all randomness, of course. The team is still crushing it. We're still getting good results. All that stuff is still true, but everything is lining up to produce the maximum attainable performance. [06:13.1]
Now, you’ll remember what I said in the beginning of this podcast. What is the maximum attainable performance is not your maximum sustainable performance, because the nature of incredible performances, these record performances, these peak experiences, part of what makes them what they are is the fact that luck plays a factor. Yes, you practice. Yes, you trained. Yes, you're great. But then when you went out to actually perform, all that was still the case, and then on top of that, everything worked in your favor. [06:53.5]
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Now, the thing about everything working in your favor is that it's not a particularly statistically-likely outcome. Most times you're going to get a mix. Some things work well, some things don't. Maybe the next month, yeah, the team is still crushing it, yeah, they're still getting results, yeah, clients are still staying.
For me, the Facebook funnel just happened to get less clicks than month or maybe less people clicked the button to get on the call. Maybe less people were in the queue for paying in installments. Whatever it was, everything didn't line up for me that month the way it did for the month before. [08:08.8]
Now, here's the thing. If you are an A-type or goal-oriented person like I am, what this creates is a sense of loss, a sense that I've let everyone down, a sense that now I'm doing badly. The bar for success has been set incredibly high, and now if everything doesn't work out in my favor, I feel bad, and what this leads to over time is irrational decisions.
Let's say my Facebook funnel, and now I'm just being hypothetical here, but let's say the Facebook funnel I keep referencing that produced this $100,000-month, which, at the time, was the record for AdWords Nerds, and then the next month produced 89,000, which is still good, but isn't as good. Maybe I start freaking out and I start thinking, Now it's broken and I've got to fix it. I've got to change it. I've got to do something. I’ve got to do something because I shouldn't be at 100k now and now I'm below that. [09:11.8]
The problem is maybe those fixes, maybe those changes, maybe all that stuff I feel I've got to do makes things worse. I see this a lot in the real estate investing space where someone has an incredible amount of success very early. Let's say you run Google Ads in your market. You're targeting really great keywords and you get two deals your first month.
Now, that is great. That is great. Spend 2k, make 30, make 60, sign me up. The problem is that means that the next month probably isn't going to do the same revenue. Maybe you'll still do two deals, maybe you'll do more, but it's statistically likely, if you are operating close to capacity there, that you're probably not. It's probably going to be a little bit less. [10:04.5]
For some investors, they look at that as decline rather than looking at it for what it is, which is statistical noise. Randomness. As Nassim Taleb says, we are often fooled by randomness. We look at the things that happen around us and we create narratives from them, and then behave and react according to those narratives.
But if you backed up and said, Hey, look, Dan, yeah, it's true, last month you got 100k from your Facebook funnel. This month, you got 89k. Yeah, it looks like it's going down, but, listen, let's just wait a couple months and get the average performance and then decide, based on that, whether we want to scrap it or change it, or do something to it. [10:57.1]
See, the thing is if you track data over time and you look at trends rather than a snapshot in time, you are much more likely to reduce the level of statistical noise in that picture. By backing up and not saying, Did my Google Ads do better this month than they did last month? or vice versa, but backing up and saying, Over a course of time, what has been my average performance, and does that average performance make sense for me? Is it getting better or worse on average? What is the trend telling me? That is a much more rational way of making decisions and it's going to produce a better marketing outcome over time.
I see this all the time. This is something that is nearly universal to human behavior. I do it. You do it. We all do it. But it is by becoming aware of these tendencies and understanding that our maximum attainable performance is not the same as our maximum sustainable performance. It is by understanding that and optimizing for what is sustainable that we make the most money, that we get the most deals, get the most leads, and have the best life over time. [12:16.5]
I hope that makes sense. I hope this was useful. Hey, by the way, I am on YouTube right now. I would love for you to come and check it out. I'm putting videos on there every week. I'm spending a lot of time on it. I really enjoy it. I would love for you to check it out, subscribe if you dig it. Just go to YouTube.com and search for AdWords Nerds. I would love for you to check it out, and if you like those videos, give me a subscribe. I post up every single week and I would love to see you there.
This is Daniel Barrett signing off. I will see you next week, and as always, thanks for listening. [12:53.6]
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