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.
(00:41): Hey guys. Welcome back. You're listening to the second part of last week's episode. Let's jump back in. So like, what was the thought process? You're like, okay, I'm just gonna get in my car and find a deal. Like what drove you apartment intended to do that, you know? So I done like seven or eight deals, right? Yeah. And every single house I was driving down the street, you know, looking up the address and I'm driving down the street and I'd see it down the way. And I'm like, that's the house. Right? You see the grass growing crazy. Like it was like, that's the ugly duckling. Mm. So I was like, dude, why don't I just drive through? And just finally ugly ducklings. I was like, why am I buying these lists? Cuz I guarantee I'm marketing to a ton of houses that are loved and cherished someone because if someone has a property that they want speed and convenience over price it's cuz the property's a thorn in their side. If the thorn in their side, they're not gonna take care of general maintenance. Let's go look for houses that need TLC. That need work. So that's what I did. I went and wrote a list of 70 houses and I did a $9,000 deal and I'm like, Choch that is profitable. So
(01:43): How are you finding the ugly duckling? So you're literally just driving around looking Yes. Driving around, Looking, just driving around And looking. Yeah. So in the, in the beginning I was just riding down the addresses, looking up on county records who owned them. And then I was going to, um, can't remember if it was like Twilio, some like, you know, I had to create like this LLC, it was a pain in the butt to get phone numbers. Now they have all sorts of systems. It's so easy. Like now we use a tech, a piece of tech, it's an app called di machine. When you're driving down the street, you can touch the house on the Google maps image and boomer uploads, everything you need immediately. So it would take me days to build a list of 70. Now I can do 70 houses in literally an hour. Right. And so it's completely changed the game. I mean, days to an hour is lifechanging. So I have one driver now we add 2000 properties to our marketing list every single week, every single week.
(02:30): So you've got someone on the team whose job is purely to drive to the properties, check them out. And then do they have like a checklist or sort of like an SOP for where it's like, okay, look for XYZ, see what's there. Or is it up to their judgment? Like how do you Somewhat to judgment? We do have a list, right. A criteria and so forth. But that's what we do. Right. Driving for dollars. Essentially we drive fine ugly houses, reach out and see if they wanna sell for speed. Convenience. Yeah. Right. From there. Then you can get these properties in a massive discount. You can wholesale 'em you can flip 'em, you can buy and hold. Right. Whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish in your goals. So that's, that's kind of what happened, you know? And, and that first, so that was the very beginning of 2018, by the end of the year, we did just shy of a half a million. Wow.
(03:12): So, so that changed my, my life then. And then, and then at the end of that year is when I accidentally became a coach. And the next year I coached, I coached only like 20, 30 people. Um, and uh, but I did 1.2 million in my, my wholesaling business because of driving for dollars that next year. So I went from like struggling to do a deal, to like, boom, my business blew up. So like N and not just blew up. Right. Cause like to, to walk backwards is make sure I have the numbers. Right, right. It's like you went from basically nothing to 500 K and then you went from 500 K to nearly one and a half million. Right. So you basically like went from zero to one and then one to three, um, in a period of two years, that's like absolutely massive. Right. So do you think, or do you attribute some of that to the fact that driving for dollars is because there's labor involved? Do you think that people avoid that as a marketing channel? Yeah, because they're just like, I want the, you know, the easiest possible thing, like the click it and send it or whatever. Is that kind of like the moat that you think keeps people out of it
(04:24): A hundred percent, because what do, what do all the giant operations? So if you go to like these masterminds for success, successful investors like myself, right? What are they pushing paper, click they're pushing, uh, buying lists from like prop string, giant buying giant lists, a hundred thousand, 200,000 people on this list, blanketing with postcards and texting hundreds of thousands of postcards. You know, I know like one of our biggest guys here, he spends over a hundred thousand dollars a month in marketing. Yeah. It's insane. You know, I think he does probably like two and a half, 3 million a year in gross, but dude, I spend, and so I've tested, I've tested banded signs. I've tested radio. I still do radio it's okay. Um, I've tested a bunch of different other marketing channels. Of course I want as much as money as possible, but I spend no more than 15% of my, my gross revenue on marketing that leaves me an 85% profit margin to pay my team.
(05:20): Yeah. It's how I don't do any of the work and still pull a 50% profit margin it's cuz my cost per lead, my cost per deal is so cheap. And, and like you said, it's barrier entry. It's work up front, but on top of that, no one's gonna ever have your exact same list. You go pull the tax delinquent list at the beginning of the year, everyone in their dogs doing it. When there's the pre foreclosure list that gets sent out by the title companies everyone's door knocking it. Right. But you now have a list that, you know, is, is yours, yours alone. And, and I attribute so much of my success to driving for dollars. Did I work hard? Sure. But is there a ton of people that work harder on me and, and know how to work like I do? Yes. So it's not like I'm a unicorn, but what's unique is how I was approaching getting these deals. That's what was like, boom blew
(06:03): Up. Yeah. It, it seems to me, right? Like it comes back to this sort of core concept. We were talking about different people optimizing for different currencies. Right. And by all means like I'm an online marketing person is what I love. Right. By all means if I am optimizing for time overall else, right. I'm willing to pay extra money to whatever, buy, you know, hire service to do something for me that I don't want to. But if you are optimizing for like in your case, right. And I, I don't, maybe this was conscious in the beginning, but ended up being the case, you kind of optimize for margin. And when you optimize for margin, you can do fewer deals and actually make more money. Right. You can actually work less and succeed more quickly. So it's all about, well, what's that currency that you are optimizing for.
(06:48): I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me. So I'm curious. So, and I've never driven for dollars, right? I barely drive my car to the grocery store. Right. Like I ride my bike to work. Like it's I love my car, but whatever. So when you set out and you're like, okay, I'm gonna go drive it for dollars. I'm gonna find these, like you said, not on anybody El not necessarily, not on anybody else's list, but no one's gonna have the same list as are you just driving and scanning like randomly, do you set up like a grid like over the city? And like I'm imagining just so you know, what I imagine is like, if you ever see in a movie where someone's tracking a serial killer and they've got the map on the wall and they've got all the thumbtacks with like the string and stuff, like, that's what I'm picturing. Right. So like, what does that look like in practice? Like how do you go out and start that process? Do you start with a list or like where, where does it start?
(07:36): Yeah. So, uh, when I first started like my story, it is not even close to what I do now. Right. I didn't have any tech. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I had no experience or even someone to tell me what to do. It's like, oh, go drive around, look for ugly houses. Okay. You know, like that was all that was out there that I found out about. So I can tell you what my business looks like now, cuz it's much more sexy and it's, you know, the best way to do It. Sure. Give us the sexier version. Look, I'm trying to get downloads here, Zach. All right. Okay. All right. Let's give some value. Some action, steps, meat and potatoes like Tom Kros said, so this is what we do now. Right? So you can Google your median house price and then your city. Okay. And it'll probably pull up Zillow and it'll say the median house price. Then you're gonna go to Zillow, solds for sales. And you're gonna scan through for numbers that are at or below that medium house price. Okay. And then you're gonna click on those listings that are medium or lower and make sure they're not condos and town homes and that kind of stuff. Right. You're looking for single family homes and small multi families. You want areas where the houses are built after 19 90, 19 90 and older, the oldest deals we do were like 19 84, 19 85. Okay. So our
(08:45): CRI you want you, they're more recent builds. Not older builds is What you're saying. No, no. You want older builds. So no, no. Newer than 1990. Okay. That's a criteria of where to go drive. Okay. Now that you identify those areas, now you're gonna go drive. Right? What we use is the deal machine app. The reason we use the deal machine app is for a few reasons it's extremely efficient and it's very cost effective. Right? Um, so the cool thing with deal machine is you can hit start drive and end drive. So it'll route track and highlight the streets you've been on. So when you go to drive the next day, you know where you've been. Exactly. And you're gonna be able to grid your entire area. So you'll identify where then you use deal machine to go drive those areas. Right. And go up and down. Those streets had one students like only write turns, right? So you'd skip a street and then write turns, skip a street. Right? Turns so Like ups, I think, is it
(09:32): Like 150 houses an hour? You know, just extremely. And um, anyway, so any house is physical signs and neglect on the deal machine app. There's three ways to add properties. Originally. You only could take a picture in 2018. They're like, Zach, we want you to promote us. We want you to use us. And I said, not until you can add the properties by touching 'em on the phone. I don't wanna get outta my car and take a picture. So you gotta make sure you turn it onto the tap toad version. So it'll show the Google maps. You can do maps or satellite imagery. And then as you're driving down the street, you can just touch the houses. Right. And at this time I was designing my own app when deal machine came out and I had a $50,000 deposit down with a app developer and um, and then deal machine heard me speak in an event.
(10:15): And they're like, Zach, like promote us, help us be our face. Like let's do this. And I said, okay, great. Let me get my 50 grand back cuz I don't wanna own a app. This is not my thing. I just want the tech to make money. Right, right. So they they've made some awesome updates so that the route tracking the master map, the tap to add all those things where were, were things that I suggested they add in there. And they're amazing. It's super efficient, very accurate data. You can buy phone numbers in there or you can ex export that Excel spreadsheet that's created. Once you now have this beautiful marketing list, you can call them or text them or send postcards right within the deal machine app. What I do is I wanna do it more efficiently than what they offer. So I have a multiple line dialer.
(10:57): I've used mojo sales.com in the past. Uh, we're just currently switching over to call tools, calling through multiple phone numbers at one time. And I have VAs in the Philippines that are calling it. We do two rounds of, or sorry, three, three attempts, three rounds of cold calling honor driving for dollars list. At the same time, I have someone texting this list using batch leads to do the texting. Uh, we do two rounds of text messages. Um, and then whoever we don't get ahold of, we do two rounds of postcards and I get about the same ROI in every single one of those outreach strategies I spend roughly, uh, anywhere between 9 cents and 18 cents to make a dollar on each of those outreach strategies. Is that because like the response rate is roughly is relatively consistent or just like, you know,
(11:42): Like some people don't answer their phone or text messages. They just don't. Um, so the postcard is what they prefer. Right? Some people get the postcard, they hold onto it for two, three months. Right. And we track it all. I mean, we track exactly how many spent we send to the exact amount, how many pennies we spend? How many, how many, uh, responses, how many leads, how many appointments, how many contracts, total revenue, you know, in our net. So we, we know exactly what's working and we've tested this and automated it. And the reason it's gotten so much better from when it first started only three years ago, three and a half, actually more than that, about four years ago when I started doing it, no, wait, it's been more. Oh my gosh. No, it's been four, four years. Yeah.
Sorry. Time has been weird this last couple years. So Yeah. Last seven years of my life has been like, woo, crazy. Your Birth certificate. I just make sure, you know. Yeah, yeah. It's like, am I 40? Or my 33? I don't remember, you know, Want to find motivated seller leads online, but don't know where to start download our free and motivated seller keyword report today. Edwards nerds have spent over $5 million this year researching the most profitable keywords for finding motivated seller leads. And you can grab these exact keywords when you download our report at www dot AdWords, nerds.com/keywords.
(13:07): So, um, anyway, so I, uh, I started coaching kind of by accident, like I mentioned. Right? Yeah. And I think this is really important to understand like why this system is so amazing and why it's so profitable and it's not because I'm so smart and I've tested everything. I've had the opportunity to work with others all across the country and test this and really tweak this system. So what happened was in 2018 October, uh, Tom Kroll asked me to speak at a, at a live event in Asheville, North Carolina. So I flew out there, I spoke and I shared, this is exactly what we're doing, how we just did a half a million in revenue. We're driving for dollars. We just started in February. Like it's amazing. And you know, I think there was like 200 people there. And I said, if you guys want more details and information and a breakdown, email of all of the things I shared, like just shoot me an email dude. I had like 170 emails. I was like, oh no, what have I done? you know, I had to go through it like, like email, everybody, Email everybody individually. Yeah. Did I
(14:05): Have an, I was like, I should have some systems in place for new soup and stuff like this. Um, but I just wanted to help people. I just wanted to get back. Right. It was, was my personality. And you know, plus I, I love Tom Crowley changed my life. I wanted to help him. You know, I wanted to like give back to him as well. And um, anyways, I met a guy there at an event and he invited me to a self-help journal with him. It's called living your best year ever. And in there the first hundred pages, it's all about who you have to be, who you have to become to accomplish the big goals. And then it helps you create three big goals. The one big goal that I had is I wanted to do a million dollars in revenue the next year. And I was pinching myself. I did a half a million. So I had no idea how, but it said whatever you wanted to receive, you had to give it away. If you want, love, you, you give love. If you want money, you give money. So in my mind, I had to give away a million bucks and I was like, well, I don't have a million bucks not even close. Right. Like how do I do that? And plus I want the million bucks. I don't wanna give it away. if I got it and then I gave it away, I wouldn't have it. Yeah. That's yeah. Yeah.
(15:04): But I, but I was like, but like, that sounds really cool. Right? Like I wanted to take this thing serious. Like it, like, it just like, it kind of like stuck with me. And so I was thinking about it for days and I talked to my wife. I was like, babe, like I wanna do this. How do we do this? And she's like, just teach. You could teach people how to do it was her idea. She knew me more. And I knew myself, I think. And um, so I went to Tom K and I said, Tom, I have this crazy idea. I wanna find 10 people. I wanna put a hundred thousand dollars on average into each of their pockets. I have a goal of making a million dollars. So I have to give it away. So I need to find 10 people and teach this driving for dollar system. That's changed my life that I spoke about on stage. He said, oh, easy peasy, bam. Let's do it. You know, the old Tom crawl saying, and he wears like these yellow Response.
(15:48): Yeah. If you guys like, just, just picture right. This guy, and he's just this fluffy guy and he's got these orange and pink and yellow polos, you know, he drives a golf cart around in Florida. That's your guy. Okay. I love him. And uh, he's my, he's my people for sure. So, um, anyways, he's like, okay, this is what we're gonna do. You cannot coach them for free because they will not implement and do what you need them to do to make that money. So they have to pay you. So they're gonna each pay you $2,000 and then you're gonna give all of the money to me and I'm gonna teach you how to coach . I'm like, I'm like deal. Let's do it, man. That sounds amazing. So it's exactly what we did. Right. And we went to work teaching these students. So I'm coaching for free and being coached, how to coach them more efficiently.
(16:38): It was never about me making money as a coach. It was never about me. It was 100% to give back a hundred percent. Yeah. And it changed my life because they started asking me questions and I realized how dumb I was, how many huge mistakes I'll give you one, one example, that'll make you sick. So they're like Zach, I've sent my postcards. I put the tracking number, set it up, like you said, and I'm receiving phone calls, but not text messages. How do we get the text messages to come through? And I'm like, uh, I've never received a text message. so I like go into my back end. I see all these text messages. Like I wanna sell my house like, oh no, You were. So you were getting them the whole time. You
(17:17): Hundreds of thousands of dollars down the drain. I like sit to my stomach. Right. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm so stupid. . And, and so, but like, these are like one of the many, like many things. And then we're testing and we're looking at their numbers and they're tracking what they're doing. And we're, and we're, we're perfecting the system at the end of that year at a 1.2 million because I was teaching and perfecting what I was doing. But even more important than all of that is my love of coaching. Like it was like, it was like this seed inside of me that blew up. It would be now, now I do, you know, one person, you know, someone else's podcast every week I do two of my own podcasts. I do two YouTube, no four YouTube videos. I do, uh, 10 tick talks, three Instagram reels, two emails every single week to help people wow. Every single week. Right. So I, I love this stuff. I live for it. And um,
(18:13): And so by the way, as someone who does a podcast and tries to do YouTube and blah, blah, blah, like that's a lot of out like that is a lot of material. Like if someone's listening to this, they don't really like, they don't really do that stuff. That's a lot, man on top of running your business and actually coaching and all this stuff. Yeah. And I have over 300 students and they all have my cell phone. Right. Like I, I, yeah. Like I live for this stuff. Right. So what happened was, you know, like my first student, Michael MCLE, she knew that like all those 10, they knew my goal. They knew what their, their job was to make a hundred grand, at least. Right. Like you guys need to do this so I can hit my goal. And my very, very first student, Michael MC leash, like a year and a half later, he texted me. He's like, I've now made a million dollars off my driving for a dollar system. Thank you. Wow.
For student ever a million bucks, dude, did I like Did they're all did
(19:05): It for all of them. My very first one. He's in Greenville, North Carolina or South Carolina. I know there's a North Carolina. I have students in both Greenvilles now, but anyways, um, and then Scott Dolinger, uh, Portland, Oregon, his first deal. He was like my third student, 113 grand. His first deal selling a piece of paper, quit his corporate job, life changing. Right. They weren't my very first students, but like I have these amazing students, uh, Aaron gaunt and McKayla gaunt. Um, he was a broke fireman trying to fight for custody for his daughter, like major, you know, problems. There was cold calling from the firehouse, trying to get deals in the first six months made 50 grand quit. His job was able to, to get full custody of his daughter, got married to Michaela and they asked me to marry him. Right. And they have this incredible business. Now I'm super close to him. And so for me, I found my purpose. I found my calling, uh, real estate gave me financial freedom, gave me that success. And it also gave me something that I understand and that I understand can change lives and gave me something to change lives. Right. It gave me something to teach.
(20:07): Yeah. It's so cool, man. It's such a powerful lever to change people's lives. Okay. So we're coming up on time. I have to ask you about the YouTube challenge that you did. So I want for people that were listening to this, I mentioned at the beginning, it was DFD mastery.com/forty 40. Those are the numbers. So four zero in four, zero. I'm gonna put that link on the show notes. You can get those@adwords.com, but DFD mastery.com/so give people the pitch for this because they can actually go there, go to this link and sort of get all this stuff and really walk through this whole process that you went, went through with you, which is so cool. But give people a pitch for this. They don't know what it was. What was the 40 and 40 challenge that you did? Yeah. So, um, if you remember my story, if y'all are still with me or even paying attention, maybe I bored the heck outta you, but in, or everybody Is paying attention at this point in the podcast. Yeah. This has been very, very cool. So I think we'll Put it well. Awesome. So if you guys remember, I had mentioned a guy named Stan, right. That gave me two of his properties and it gave me this belief, His confidence, the, the guy in the laundry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were talking his face off. Yeah. Okay.
(21:20): Stan. Yeah. Talk his face off a hundred grand and one deal. And it gave me the belief. Right. So when I started coaching, I discovered the number one obstacle for people to become successful was their belief. I can't do it because I'm not capable because, and I'm like, man, I used to think the same things and they'd think, say, oh, every mentor's out there just to take my money. Are there guys out there doing that? Yeah, well, a hundred percent. Right. Be careful who you hire. But you know, I wanted people to see that it was real, that it was possible. And it's like, I got this gift I made met stand. Right. Did I, did God give it to me? Was it chance? Was it luck? Ultimately, I got something that I don't know that I necessarily deserved. And I wanted to give that to someone else.
(21:58): I wanted to give that belief because if you have belief that you can do it, you'll do what I did, which is work your tell off. You'll give it a hundred percent. And I promise if you give it a hundred percent, you'll have success. And if you have success, you'll be like, see, I knew I was the man. I was the gal. I could do this. Right, right. And then you're gonna give even more effort and you're gonna spiral upwards in life. But if you go at it with half belief and, and, and you don't believe it, then you're gonna spiral downwards in life. Cuz you're not gonna give effort. You're not gonna get results. And you say, I knew I was not capable. I knew I wasn't, you know, the person to do this. And so I wanted to give that gift. And so I was like, I have to show people.
(22:31): They have to see it live. Right. So I took 40,000 or, or my goal was to make the average American income. It's $40,000 in just 40 days. Right. And plus I couldn't do it where I lived, cuz I have all my connections and my team and I had to go somewhere. I'd never been. Plus I couldn't start with a ton of money. Right. Because y'all probably don't have a ton of money to dedicate to this. So I got a thousand bucks and my goal is to make the average American income in just 40 days. So I flew across the country and I took that thousand bucks and I did exactly what we've been talking about. Driving for dollars cold calling. I didn't leave my house for four days, straight, cold calling from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, it was absolutely horrible, but it made amazing content.
(23:12): Right. I ended up doing, um, I got seven properties under contract. Okay. I'll break these down. I got seven properties under contract in that timeframe. Two of them, I canceled three of them or no. Sorry. How many did I do? Let's do the ones I closed. I closed. I I'm, I'm confusing them. I did three wholesale deals. We'll just talk about the ones where I, I just got the contract and sold the contract. Right? First one I made $10,000. Second one I made 30,000. Last one, I made $55,000. So, or 53,000. So I made $93,000 in wholesale fees. The other two properties I kept as rentals. So I actually kept two as rentals with over a hundred thousand in equity, I could not pass 'em up. They were completely remodeled. $55,000. Each they rent, they were currently rented for um, over 850 bucks and doubled my net worth overnight.
(24:04): Plus they cash flowed like crazy. So I was like, yeah, I'm gonna, and it's funny and you'll see, I'm like, Tom, should I wholesale these? Or should I just keep these? He's like, we'll show him how much money you can make. You gotta sell. 'em. I was like, ah, dude, I like money too much. So I kept them. So I kept two properties and then two of 'em I had to cancel, I wasn't able to find a buyer for 'em. I was in the contract too high. It was kind of a learning curve of being there. Yeah. So you guys can see it day by day, step by step of, of me doing this, I show what I'm doing. I share the tools, the systems, you see the conversations you see me say, you know, Jerry, why don't you just sell it with a real estate agent? You'll make more money and you'll hear people literally say, I don't care. I want speed and convenience. Right? It's powerful stuff. When you see those conversations, you see they exist. You know that you guys can do it.
(24:49): I mean, I, I love this. And again, for people, if you wanna go and sort of get all this stuff and actually be able to watch the entire process that Zach goes through again, it's DFD mastery.com/forty, 40, the number 40 in 40. So the reason I love this right, is like one of, I feel like the most common questions that people have for successful people. Right? If, if you're talking to a mentor, you're talking to a coach, you're just meet like, uh, I remember, um, Dan Kennedy's one of my favorite marketers, right? Old school sort of direct mail copywriter guy, real fun to listen to real, you know, just tough old cuss kind of personality. One of the questions you would always get from audience members is if you had to start over tomorrow, what would you do? Right. And you basically just did that to yourself.
(25:43): You're like made yourself start over, like in a different part of the country, which is like amazing. So like I highly suggest if you were listen to this, you're a real estate investor. You like marketing, you are interested in growing your business. You need to go check this out. DFD mastery.com/forty in 40. Again, those are the numbers. All this stuff will be in the show notes at Edwards, nurse.com. Zach, this has been awesome, dude. Like I, I will be honest. Like I don't, uh, you know, I'm an online marketing person. I don't know a ton about driving for dollars. It's been super educational for me. Uh, you got me pumped up about driving, which I don't even like. So I can imagine that a lot of people are listening to this and getting really excited if they wanna follow up with you, learn more about you. And what you do is the DFD mastery.com/n 40. Is that the best place to go? Is there anywhere else you want people to check out?
(26:34): Yeah. I mean, whatever social media platforms you guys like I'm there. Right? So I will have unique content to every platform. If you're on the podcast, you obviously like podcasts. So definitely check out my podcast, driving for dollars mastery. Everything I have is titled driving for dollars mastery. So websites, podcasts, YouTube channels, Instagrams talks, all of that stuff. So wherever you guys consume content, go there. I'm active on my DMS. Obviously have people that'll help me, but I do look at every single one of my DM platforms. So if you DM, I will see it. Okay. All right. So feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to serve and bless your life. It's an honor and, and privilege to be able to do so. All right. Well, I fully expect people listening this to slide into your DMS. I'm telling you to do it. If you have not done it, slide into X DMS. That is Zach booth, which has an E at the end, B O O T H E N. Driving for dollars. Mastering Zach. Thank you so much for coming on, man. This was awesome.
(27:32): Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate It. Yeah, it was absolutely my pleasure. That is it. That's the end of this week's episode as always. Thank you so much for being here every week. It means a lot to us. I would love if you could give this podcast a review or a like, or subscribe, however you can support and helps other people find the show. And I read every single one as always. This is Daniel bear from nurse.com signing off. I will see you next. Choose.
(28:08): This is the podcast factory.com.
