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(00:44): That's pretty exciting stuff. For those of you that are in the wholesale business and follow us. I want to welcome my good buddy of mine and known George for years, premier wholesaler in the Philadelphia area. I don't even know we could be talking about other markets at this point. I haven't talked to you in a while, George, but it's been on bring George on to talk about the game of wholesale, right? Wholesaling, wholesaling, figuring out how to build their business and build up, you know, some leverage. If you guys have some small teams and you're trying to grow bigger, like I said, George has been highly successful at this for years, and I want to dig deep into what else you got going on. You were just kind of tell us a little bit about what's been going on in your life or let's see.
(01:18): So it's been a little while he's still wholesaling. Let's say still live in the Philadelphia area, moved to Montgomery County. Now I bought a house. So no more, no more ridiculous high rise overlooking center city for an astronomical amount of money. Yeah. But you know, same old GB, just trying to stay a wholesale company is still growing. Obviously we're in a pretty uncertain time, but 2018, what year is this? This is 20, 20, 2018. We did 2 million in revenue, 2019. We did three. I thought we were going to do like three and a half or four, which I can get into kind of what happened and what the breakdowns were if you want. Yeah. And then this year we were, depending on how you look at cash projections and you seasonality and blah, blah, blah, which is complicated for wholesaling. And it's also frankly, complicated for a company like mine.
(02:11): That's grown so much in a short period of time and hasn't been around for 20 years. It looked like we were going to do four ish, maybe more I thought we were going to do 3.8 to five. So hoping to do closer to five, and then, you know, COVID happens relatively suddenly. So, you know, that put a significant wrench in a lot of our recruiting efforts and things. It just, I mean, it's a wrench, a wrench is a wrench, right? So sure, no, not sure how this year is going to end up. I think it's still going to be a good year, but you know, the nature of how my operation is structured overall is advantageous for something like this happening. I E I don't have a tremendous amount of people and equipment based overhead, you know? So just trying to make a decisions and keep growing through whole thing and probably buy some shit as well.
(03:02): You know, they, they say that adversity is what is, what really gets you to focus on the things that you were probably should have been doing correctly all along, right? Like these times of adversity hit us and we're like, Oh shit, we got to make a change. What are the things that maybe you have changed or you've noticed, and you've taken notice of, because let's face it like in a hot market, everybody's genius. Everybody's printing checks. Everybody's a guru he's on top of the world. And then when hard times hit, you got to duck and jive, you gotta do things differently. But some of those things are, let's just be honest, shit. You should have been done doing all along. Right. Like, I know we're having that pop out at you right away.
(03:36): One of the things I realized pretty quickly was, I mean, I've shared that viewpoint for awhile and then trying to make sure, okay, like I'm in an up market. How much of me being successful is due to me being an up market versus me being good at it turns out a lot of it is because I'm good at it. And I have great team and, and things like that. But, you know, the upmarket is substantial. Like they can erase a lot of your mistakes and it can turn a real mistake into, Oh, I still made five, 10 grand. Like, it's not always easy to learn from things like that. But yeah. I know a lot of people have been washed out in the market so far, or at least like, maybe they haven't been washed out, but they've been decreased their budgets where they're holding their cards and they're scared.
(04:17): But I mean, dude, like, it all comes down to what your numbers are and like what your numbers are. If you adjust them, how much are my numbers due to me getting lucky? Is it just this one person that's a really good performer? Like, things like that. Like all of those things are like extremely important. So like, if you didn't know your numbers before this, and now you have to get to know them, like, you're probably gonna see some things you don't like, like I've been through a lot of ups and downs in my business by no means, has it been a smooth ride? Like I've almost run out of money. I think two, maybe three times maybe three. This is not one of them. We'll fucking do it. Great. Like I'm fucking, this is great. Well, not great, but
(04:55): Know, yeah. Relatively considered,
(04:58): You know, lessons learned from that. But you know, like I've been forced to have hard looks in the mirror and see where I'm spending money on things before actually, frankly, on that note, more recent, like some of the issues with last year and moving into this year were all technology tracking related and, and frankly continue to be a little bit. Yeah. But you know, since this happened, it was like, all right, like, let me really look at like, as much actionable intelligence as I have now to see, okay, what am I spending money on data wise? And like how much of it is generating? And then I actually getting something from, because some of it, like, I know that I'm not going to know whether I'm making money from it for another three to six months, which is fine usually. But now it's like, okay, it's more than likely I'm going to be burning some amount of money every month while I keep my machine on. And it's optional for me to burn money. I'm doing it, not on purpose, but I'm knowingly burning money right now. And will for a short period of time,
(05:51): Got a little bit more, I mean, you don't have to get into like specific detail, but I think that's an important thing to realize is that in a, a real functioning live business, you can't just stop spending money, right? Like you still have to, you have to spend money to make it, to make it work. So what are some of those things that like, they're just non-negotiables for you, you know, that whether the bills get paid, you have to spend marketing. Marketing is a, for me,
(06:14): One of the easiest things for me to downregulate if I need to, it's like a, my marketing budget is more than that.
(06:19): And my overhead, like my static overhead by a significant amount. Yeah.
(06:24): Not necessarily more than the commissions that I pay, like salespeople and bonuses and performance-based things. But in terms of how much is my rent, how much is my attorney retainers and things that I never thought that I would have marketing is by far.
(06:42): Yeah.
(06:43): Any of the things that I spend marketing money on marketing are optional or they're adjustable, like pretty significantly. So like for instance, late last year I started buying leads. I've never really bought leads before once or twice I bought leads and I spent 30, $30,000 a month buying leads, I think, massive, massive loss. I should've never done that. And I went all in on it and I saw a couple ones that looked promising. I'm like, all right, I'll buy all these ones that he's I can get. So, you know, I cut my buying leads, budget down from unlimited to a, I think two or $3,000 a month. And then like, I constantly have to go to these fucking websites and be like, okay, half the leads you guys sent me were trashed. Give me my money back. And it's a real,
(07:26): Yeah. I'm asking for the, for the refunds and nipples, like there's like a week long
(07:30): Thing. And like, I look at it once every six weeks, you know what I mean? It's like, alright, well, fuck you guys.
(07:35): Yeah. I literally sell yeah.
(07:37): $50,000 a month and your sites if I'm making money for it. But if I got to fucking sit down and go back and look at every single lead that you've pushed in every three days, like you can kiss my ass.
(07:44): No, it's so true. I think it's important. I'm back in like 18, 17, and 18, I'm going to say 18 mid year, we were spending 20, 30 grand a month with a site that I won't name, but it's just like that seven day recourse for leads that don't work out. It's like, dude, I'm dropping 20. You know what I mean? Asking you for a thousand dollars in refunds. I'm not going to fucking do it. Like I'm not going to keep following up on it. So
(08:07): People's business models are different people's business styles really, but going back to knowing your numbers. So I'll also my three tips before I forget to talk about all three of them are. Yeah.
(08:16): So George, what is the title of this thing? Hold, let me go back three simple tips to get ahead with the seven figure wholesaler.
(08:24): Also the revenue is not total amount of real estate that we sold. It's actual revenue from wholesale deals is discounted significantly from the actual gross spreads. We have a lot of costs of goods, sold things that come out on the HUD that don't count for a revenue, which, you know, some people don't count those. Some people don't, there's obviously no standard for wholesaling, but
(08:43): We can only get a good asterix, right? Cause you got people that say we do four or 5 million a year and you're counting the fricking house sale. When you sell a house for a hundred grand, you make 3000. That's not a hundred thousand.
(08:53): Be honest. There's a lot of people that lying to themselves and everybody around them in this business, absolutely careful who you take advice from. Maybe that's number four on wholesale would be the bonus tip bonus. Today. First tip is know the right numbers for your business. The second one is always be marketing and the third is treat buyers like a commodity. I was going to say, treat them like shit. But you know, you should treat them like a commodity. And number four is be careful who you take advice from. Let's start with the top one, know your numbers. You're talking about KPIs, key performance indicators. So no you're right numbers. Right? When I say the right numbers, like a lot of people are like, you know, they get caught up in a few numbers that I hear a lot, which are, how much do you make per deal?
(09:38): How much money did you make this year? Or what your revenue is? Things like that. Like those things matter, but they don't like matter as much as other things. So for instance, one of the biggest metrics for me is dollar per appointment issued, which is the net amount of revenue that is generated to the company per in house appointment. Like to make an offer that one of my salespeople get trite. That's high level that's high level. So tell people how, how did you get not really that high level. It's actually a very simple thing, but it's very important. You take the amount of revenue, your salesperson got and divided by the number of appointments they got. Right? So you can get into close rate, but then it's like, okay, how many of these things settle? What's this guy's average assignment fee does one guy do bigger deals than the other one?
(10:23): Things like that factors into the dollar per appointment. So a companywide, our DPA, whatever last year was like 5,000 over the whole company. So that means every time a salesperson of mine goes into a house, the company gets $5,000 of revenue. This year was up by like 10, 20%. And our number of appointments were up by like 50%. It was tremendous. Really, really good news. Well, that's a year to date. 50%. Yeah. So Jan fab and beginning of March, all of our numbers were up significantly. We were having a fucking blown away record year. And you know, you read that too. What do you attribute that difference in appointments management management of call center people was the number one. I mean, I made a lot of mistakes in the way that I was supervising and managing my my call center or like my inside sales, like folks with like appointment centers, whatever you want to call them.
(11:18): And there was staffing issues and like training issues and it just, I just didn't keep an eye on it as much as I should have. Cause like we were still, you know, a market was so profitable. Wholesaling is a great business. Like you talked to other people that own businesses and they're like, what are your net margins? Like, they're not exactly more than 3% net on your things. And you're like, yeah, I make more than three, like three I'd be out of business if I made one fucking mistake. Now that's the problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I hired a new manager, moved some people around into positions that they probably should have been in, in the first place. This person should be in sales, you know, like whatever and I'm fucking skyrocketed. And you know, at first it was like, okay, we're getting all these more appointments.
(12:02): Like, are they trash? Like, are we just setting bullshit? It turned out we weren't, all the metrics are the same, actually a little bit higher. I was expecting to have double the number of appointments, but have all the other metrics drop by like five or 10%. But actually all the other ones went up with the increase of employments, which is interesting, small sample size. I have two main outside sales reps. So like, you know, some of it could be this guy's having a better day or whatever, which, but you know, with enough of a time span, it's not just that, but anyway, the right numbers is how much do I get per appointment? But like, what does that ultimately matter if you don't know your other numbers, right? What if it costs you $10,000 get an appointment? So how much revenue do you get per appointment? How much advertising spend do you need to get an appointment? What are your other soft costs? And ultimately is this profitable or not to like, you know, we don't run leads in Darby as an example, we don't run leads in a bunch of neighborhoods in Philly that everybody else runs leads in and things like that. Cause you know, over the course of time they're not profitable, right. Or they're like, you know, we've eliminated them from our mail and things like that.
(13:03): That right there, that takeaway guys, like if you listen to the last 20 seconds like that, right, there is one of the biggest takeaways that most people don't do. They just span the market. They don't pay attention to what they're best at. And like, I think for you, that's a big differentiator between you and your competition when you say yeah. Yeah.
(13:19): I mean, so also some context. So like, you know, most people need to run 10 or 20 seller appointments to get one deal. We close that a little bit over 35%. We're right. Around 35% on average. So we run three leads to get one deal. And then, you know, we closed some of them and whatever for our average assignment fee is like 25 K pretty high it's dropped now because you know, we had some issues with buyers and things like that with the COVID thing, but it costs me a thousand dollars in advertising to get it for one appointment, just to have a sales guy face to face with somebody that's qualified and like meets a couple of indicators. Like it costs me actually over a thousand dollars, especially depending on lead source. That's a lot of money back in the day. I heard people say that it used to cost them like one grand for a deal. You know, we're getting 5,000 on average, but like, these are really valuable appointments. So like I'm not giving these qualified appointments to like scrubs, right? Like my salespeople are fucking excellent. Like the business, like they train themselves, like we do some training. They're really good. You know, we follow up.
(14:18): What do you think makes them stand out? What do you think makes them the best in the business where you're recruiting them from the training you give them?
(14:24): So one guy actually came to me a couple years ago and was like, Hey, you know, I'm having trouble doing well in real estate. Like, can you help me out? It's like, yeah. You know, whatever. I think I blew him off at first and then he didn't go away, which works for everybody, frankly,
(14:39): Sales guy, by the way,
(14:42): The other guy was the very first appointment setter that we hired and made it past a week or two was promoted. He's also excellent. That was, I think a couple of years ago. So there are indications for what we do, which is short cycle in home sales. Like there are some personality indicators for people that are likely to be successful at this, or at least increase the odds. Cause like the other thing is, dude, you still got to have it or you don't want to work hard and be money motivated. Keep you be likable interested in learning. Like there's so many other factors to it than just like, okay, I personality test somebody and everybody that fits this is going to be a rockstar. Like it's not that simple. I do disk everybody. Like the DIC does test there's three personality types from that that are good for what we do.
(15:28): It's a persuader dynamo and results oriented, which are all high D high I in varying numbers. Both of those will be over the midline for all three of those. I would not hire an outside sales rep or anyone for sales. That is not one of those three profiles. Both of my guys are results oriented. Take that for what you will, which is much higher day, a little bit of a lower eye, but still both over the midline. But these are dominant personable guys that want you to make a decision on something right now. And like aren't afraid to RFI to tell you, which is good, but yeah. You know, like going back to the, knowing your numbers thing, like how much do all those things cost you and is it profitable? Are you wasting money on this person?
(16:13): Do you think that something is profitable, but it's really not. Like you got to know that shit. Like what are you spending on marketing? How much does it cost you for a mail piece? Well, what about your data? How much does your data cost? Is it really profitable? Like, are you chasing some deal that you did two or three years ago that you're never going to duplicate in some super high end neighborhood? You know what I mean? Like I've done that like fucking send a mail to Gladwin, mailed to maybe Haddonfield or whatever, or like you did one deal there. Five years ago, you made 20 grand and you spent 30 grand in fucking marketing since then try to do another one. Like, you know, dude, you know me, I'm fucking down the rabbit hole of viciously on data. Like we have a SQL database and all kinds of other stuff, but yeah, no, your numbers is a, is the big one.
(17:00): I love it. Again guys, you're watching this two things post where you're at, what market you're in. Somebody asked the question, what market is Georgia and Philadelphia only, still right toward Philly and the surrounding four suburban counties actually in February, I started mailing Northern Delaware and a couple of zip codes in New Jersey, which I've since stopped doing because of the coronavirus things like entering a new market. Even though it's across the river from me, you need the great wall of China. There's like, I need all these new vendors and stuff. It's, it's not as straight forward as, as well where the idea was to do Delaware and New Jersey as test markets to see lessons learned for going to a new territory. And then whenever the call center is, is a little bit more scaled, which is sort of been like a big focus of mine recently, North Jersey, Maryland, or now Ohio, I'm kind of chewing on as well, like Columbus.
(17:52): [Inaudible] Cool. So you're looking for external markets and right now still doubling down on the existing market. You're in what was number two, what's the number two, our number two tip.
(18:02): Just be marketing. Like don't stop. Don't be afraid. Don't wait until your next check to do the marketing. Just always have it on. You have a plan. Be consistent, understand that the majority of people that are going to turn into transactions for you are not going to be one hit wonders where you send one mail piece one time and you get lucky. That happens. That does happen. But if you're fucking relying on that or trying to base a business off of that, you're making the wrong move. This is a marketing based business. It's a direct response based business. If you're not knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending mail or doing some type of internet advertising or fucking whatever. Even if it's TV, whatever you're fucking up, like you're not going to be like, whatever you spend on marketing today is what's feeding your play style or whatever, three or four months from now don't ever stop.
(18:49): Number two is still related to the number one, right? Because you're not getting the good data guys. If you're not consistent, that's the one biggest challenge people have with marketing. They test something out, they do it for a week or two. Oh shit. I don't have any deals. Let me stop. Let me try something different. You can't have consistent predictable results if you're not continuing to push the marketing each and every week. And so you have to try something out for, I mean, what do you try a minimum of what, before you finally kind of duck out and say this isn't working or I should try something different.
(19:14): That's a good question. It depends. So like male, male is a little bit of a different animal because you have to do all the data stuff you have to say, okay, this is who I'm marketing to. And then you have to send the piece and then it's got to get in the mail and then people have to call it, you know, there's a burn off for that. You know what I mean? And like tracking mail is a fucking nightmare. Honestly, I have like 50 phone numbers or 40 phone numbers and I'm still not very good at it.
(19:40): We gave up truthfully, we gave up tracking direct mail, like maybe a year or two ago. Cause we had maybe a hundred phone numbers. Every piece now was tracked to a number and then I could track it to that location. Well, I'm not quite as tuned into the analytics as you are. I'm more of a high level guy, but yeah, the mail thing was really, really difficult to get down to. The pretty
(20:01): Is high level. What are you spending on mail when we spend on mail, right? That therefore that's high level. Right? So Podio, which you're still on Podio. So I fucking hate Podio. Now I had a nightmare with a programmer a year ago. We're still reeling from it and switching to Salesforce, hopefully by God we'll finally go fucking live in the next month, but that'll do all the tracking of all the mail pieces and things like that. But it, interestingly enough like that you don't want to track too granular of an area on mail because it can get insane. Like I trust me, look at my Excel history. You can go down, it can be great. But like I differentiate between the city and the suburbs geographically. And recently I've been lumping in some suburbs that are very similar to the city in with my city analytics. I E you know, like Norristown and places like that, or maybe, I don't know what the New Jersey examples would be as much, but you know, there are different markets, right? What works here? What works there? Like my response rate in Philly is way higher than what it is in the suburbs. But suburbs ones are like typically higher value.
(21:03): Yeah. Right. So they're still really profitable. Right?
(21:07): A little bit more risk, but yet like tracking your mail is very hard. But to answer your question, how, how soon, you know, like with buying leads, like in the way our thing is structured, like I know whether I'm getting appointments and because all of our appointments meet certain criteria. I know how much they should cost me per lead source. And even if I'm not getting transactions from it, if I'm still getting appointments from it, I know eventually I will get transactions from it and things like that. So like buying leads, you can tell within a couple of weeks or a month mail, it takes a few months, but you need a sample size. Like if you're a one man band, like you cannot make that decision over three phone calls, you just can't do that. Right. Like when I'm looking at stuff like that, like I'm looking at like dozens or sometimes hundreds of opportunities, you know what I mean? And like, I can see the statistics and then going back to know your numbers, like how much does it end up costing you? Like, maybe you're not getting any appointments from something you're not getting any deals, but how much do appointments cost you? And how many appointments have you been to have you reasonably been to enough appointments where you can say, okay, something here is not working. You know what I mean? Like you got it. You have to know that shit.
(22:09): Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. We usually run, you know, mail, we'll test it out for at least four to six weeks, maybe more. And again, people make so many emotional decisions. They're like, you know, all of these, these couple of calls came in and they work out in my favor. Well, you don't know that the stuff that happens next week off the same exact campaign, isn't going to be a totally different result. The sales guy had a bad day. You know, he, you know, his screen door broke on the way to work. Like who knows, like, like having the ability for, to analyze those numbers longterm, you need to have a couple of weeks data to be able to make that and then double down or remove it. But you got it. You got to do it consistently too much emotion. It, Shannon says Salesforce. Salesforce is a high level CRM guys. Very, very not only expensive, super, super detail oriented. I don't know that many guys in this business using it, but it's definitely something. I think you get to that three, 4 million Mark. You guys start getting a little bit more calculated. I was literally just on a call before this, talking to someone to organize our call center, back office, all this stuff. Right. Because it's difficult when you have a lot, a lot of data points and you have to manage them.
(23:09): You know what you don't like? Do you know what I fucking spent on Podio programming? Okay.
(23:12): I spent over a hundred grand dude. I know when I stopped using it.
(23:17): And then like, it still has all these mistakes to it. And then when I look back, I'm like Salesforce, by the way, like though the CRM is extremely expensive and the implementation is expensive. And so is any other service that you want for it. It's so easy to use. You don't need like some programmer to do shit for you. So like, when I look at it like that, I'm like, Oh, this should actually be around the same amount of money. If not like a net savings, like longterm. And plus like, it's not going to fuck up all your shit. Like Podio was deleting. The second phone number from our leads
(23:47): Are like six months,
(23:50): Literally just throwing things in the trash. I was just like, yeah,
(23:54): Yeah.
(23:55): Right. So those Salesforce is expensive to your point. Like if you're running a larger business than a couple of people, like if you're not, you know, if you're keeping track of like you and your buddies activity,
(24:05): You don't really need that shit. But yeah, if you're running
(24:07): The mistakes that your CRM costs, you are worth and upgrade to a better place,
(24:14): Period. Look at the very early stages. Guys, you can do this business with a notepad and a pen, but that's not how we start to scale. It's not how we start to build teams and manage them and all that kind of stuff. So I don't think there's a good real estate CRM on the freaking market. I mean, the thing is like everyone's business is so different. Like, yeah, I'm here.
(24:34): Julie liked step selling in home sales oriented. You know, you've always had a, quite a large construction business, which is like a totally different thing than what I do. The most complicated stuff that I get into is like the operations department of like moving sellers and like clearing title and things like that. You know what I mean? A lot of the rest of it is sales metrics. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's the thing, like if you're running a significant or a sophisticated business in any form, and you're trying to use something out of the box, it it's hard. You're asking for trouble, man.
(25:05): It's nearly impossible. And the problem with the out of the box stuff is you don't have the ability to modify it. You have to start moving your business around the capabilities of the system instead of the other way around the system share, follow you. So I agree with the Salesforce thing, but guys, again, if you're flipping you're wholesaling three or four deals a year, don't even think about looking at Salesforce, it's going to just overwhelm the hell out of you. Scaling a business might be a different scenario. So what's number three, tip George.
(25:30): Buyer's like a commodity as opposed to like a friend or the only guy with money. But this is more so targeted towards newer people in the business. You know, I see a lot of people that are like, Hey, I've got like three buyers. And if those three buyers don't buy it, like I'm kind of fucked. And then I'm like, Oh, well like, are they good buyers? They say yes. And they're like, yeah, they bought XYZ for me for this amount of money. And I'm like, you could have sold that for 10, 20 grand. More than that guy gave you. Like
(25:53): Yeah.
(25:54): When I'm like, Hey, also all your deals for you. But like, I want this big fat percentage. You don't have to do it.
(26:01): Oh, whatever. That huge percent I'm like, you would've made double the amount of money. Yeah,
(26:06): Yeah. Know your numbers, right? Like what are you actually
(26:09): Tip number five, keep your ego in check. I love that, man. I mean, because if you're doing 25 on average, I mean, these guys, some guys are doing three, four or five grand on a deal, and then they don't want to JV when your average deal is 25 grand. It's like, do you realize that you, if we go 50, 50, you're going to double your income, but they want to control the whole thing, you know, just crash. Anyway, I get it. So how do you treat your buyers? Like c'mon, I mean, how do you offer the opportunity to create better deal flow with more buyers? How does that, how does that,
(26:36): The biggest thing is just understanding that the guy in front of you that has money is not the only person out there that has money. And the only thing that matters about him is what he's willing to pay you. Nothing else. I mean, well, is the transaction going to be easy? Is it cash and not alone? You know, there's, there's some things like that. Like is he going to try to renegotiate with me at the table? Like, you know, there's some things like that that go into it for sure. But you want to expose your deal to as many people as possible, have as many people see it as possible and have all of them make offers and then highest and best everybody so that you can get the most amount of money versus doing it. Like the reverse wholesale way, which like, I don't know who the fuck came up with that, but there are a retard that is one of the biggest pieces of bad advice that I see people using like ever.
(27:25): Yeah. You can reverse engineer a deal guys, but just do it by knowing the market where there's a lot of buyers. It doesn't mean reverse near for one person, right?
(27:33): Yes, exactly. Yeah. Unless that one person is you and you are going to buy it. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean like there's a lot, like, even in an environment like this, like there's still a lot of people out there that are looking to buy deals. Like just because one guy is like, no, you need to give me this deal for $0 and I need it for free. Like, doesn't mean that your deal is worthless. Just like ask somebody else. Right. Like, you know, put your property in the MLS, send it out with somebody. That's got like a giant buyers list, like near you or whatever. Like, just understand that. Like, just because one guy's not buying or because one guy tells you to fuck yourself, doesn't mean that you're deal is shit. You just need to show it to more people. Right. You just,
(28:12): Well, like glazed. Cause it's like second nature to us. Right. But for so many people I say to them, put your deal on the MLS. Oh my God, what do you mean? I don't understand what was like, how could I do
(28:22): Guys trying to a license? There's so much opportunity. Yeah. I mean, at least if you use bright MLS, which is between DC and I think New York or DC in here, it says it in the rules, you can fuck it. What's your deal on the analog equitable interest. They're like, not okay with it. Or like there's some like laws or whatever,
(28:42): Not here. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely out here, you get your contract to say that if you have equitable interest, then you have the right to market the property and put it on the MLS. That's it? That's your equitable interest guys. You can literally take that, put it on the MLS, you know, show your deal to a million people. And I think it's about it. I'm not going to say we don't work with the same buyers. Cause we do, like, I feel like over the last year,
(29:01): Decade plus buyers, they pay good money. They they've earned that spot. It wasn't just because I fucking knew them in high school. Exactly.
(29:09): It's a big, it's a wide net. And then you ended up filtering it down to the same people. But the net's why I think so many people, like, I think to your point earlier have the same three buyers and they're like, Oh, it's not a deal. All right, let me cancel it. Like you got, get yourself an opportunity. You still got to cast that net. Right? And most importantly, look at the spread guys. You can't be doing favors for friends and losing $10,000 on a deal for a lot of you, 10,000 could be your whole month spread George's making. Is he double closing? Nope. No, no.
(29:37): Especially if ever they saw box, you know, and just to speak to that
(29:42): For a second look, four or five years ago, people double closed
(29:45): Wholesale was taboo. You know, if you got caught making a $5,000 spread, like there was something wrong with that. Nowadays guys, majority, you can speak to this, but most investor buyers are, they're finding all their deals, do a $5,000 deal. I lose money. I don't want to do any $5,000 deal. Have my point is though, any type of deal like nowadays you can pull a $20,000, 30,000, our wholesale Simon.
(30:05): I'm used to paying that. That's almost like the doing business nowadays. Yeah.
(30:10): They're able to list on bright. So George, anything else you want to add? Anything? We didn't cover? Anybody got Q and a, I like unit. Hello, Brian, how are you? So Brian, you're running high level. Can you run a high level? What can we chat about? What can we want to talk about?
(30:23): So I guess I missed the beginning of this conversation, but did you guys talk about training new reps and then hiring and onboarding reps growing the team? What kind of reps acquisition, right?
(30:33): Like an old guys or a phone guy?
(30:35): Well, both really. So you're, you're still doing like in firstly contracts. All right, George. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I mean, you know, how does that process work? You know, do they start on the phones and then, and then end up in person or using like call centers or what's that how's that work?
(30:49): So I haven't hired anybody directly off the street into role ever. Frankly, everyone that's on the team now started out doing something else and now they're there or people that have been there in the past. I knew from a window company that I used to work for and sort of like gave them a shot. And really only one of them was really good at that. The other two, one of them was like mediocre and the other one was like a complete waste of time and money. And I blessed and learned, right? So training hard. And frankly I have not done a great job doing that. Ongoing a big reason that they are good now is because of the, like the character quality of the people that are in that role now, character quality, meaning they're hard workers. They study on their own. They want to succeed.
(31:42): They're open minded to like what works and not necessarily just like, well, I just do things this way and that's how I do them. You know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of like, I'm sorry that plays a factor. Like everyone's got an ego. I do. I think you need one to do the thing you just do, but you know, there's an element of like evidence-based stuff in it, right? So like, I want to do stuff that works is because I want to make money. Right. So like, everyone's sort of like on that boat, so to speak, there's also a strong element of a little ruthlessness, right? You gotta be a little ruthless to do this stuff because you know, otherwise, you know, you're, you're gonna make a deal with somebody and then you're like, all right, let me just give you another 15.
(32:22): K I know I'm making a really good deal. Like you can't, you can't go into this, not thinking that you're doing right by people like helping them out, moving out. Like we do a lot of extra services for people, like way beyond just fucking doing their house. Like we'll do fucking legal work. Like we help people move. Like we do all kinds of shit, you know? But like, and plus like most of the people that are out there that we're competing against are like idiots. They're offering people too much money. They can't close the deal or they're assholes. They're fucking assholes. They're like, you know, we know that going into it. But to answer your question, like the majority of my recruiting efforts now are for the call center folks as are the majority of the training stuff. I know a little bit about those things, but if you're training outside reps or hiring for outside reps, a they need to be a hundred thousand dollars or better a year people, which is hard to filter for.
(33:07): And you need to hire a bunch of them at once to see if any of them are gonna work out. You just do. Unfortunately you need to use a script or a method or a bullet pointed methodology. You have to, and you have to enforce route like ruthlessly enforce adherence to that while someone's getting their training wheels on for the first 60 days or six months, especially if they're coming directly into it, you cannot rely on them having previous experience. You know, you can't just be like, Oh, this guy's a hitter for this other company. I'll hire him for mines. Guy sells janitorial supplies, whatever. He'll be good. It's not the case. Personality. Assess them. See if you'll like them and interview them multiple times, make sure that they show up on time, make sure that they ask the questions, make sure that they shut the fuck up during the interview and ask you questions.
(33:54): That's a really good sign. Right? You know, we're, we're all in consultative, selling whatever they're calling it. Now dude asks you for the gig, you know, at the table, walking out of an interview. And that's obviously a good sign. Things like that. But training you lots of scripts, lots of role-playing going to houses, sending them with construction guys and all that shit. And then look at their numbers. Like you should know what should this person's numbers be? If they worked hard, got it. And like are doing their job after a month or six weeks, you're gonna lose 80 or 90% of the people that you hire for that type of role. It's fucking hard. It's a hard job. You're on the phone all day. You're driving around all day. You gotta fucking put on a new face every time you meet a whole different person and be sort of a chameleon like multiple times per day, plus you have to comp it, right?
(34:37): Plus you have to like know about construction. It's that's a lot of stuff that is not an unskilled. Like you can't just put a fucking beats up. Like I should stop saying retarded. You can't just grab it here from Longhorn steakhouse and expect them to make 200 K a year for you as an acquisition agent that Longhorn steakhouse waiter might. But they're probably not right. They have to hit all of those criteria. Yeah. And even after that, you know, you got a out of five chances of them not making it long term. It's just a reality. You know, you gotta like know that, like going into it, looking at we're going to know your numbers. How many people do it? I have to hire that. Meet what criteria do I need to have a pretty good salesperson? That's profitable or a rockstar is a rockstar. You can't game that out. You get them or you don't right. You want to make your money in the middle and make your money with the regular or maybe not regular, but like making you make your money on like a good performing sales person. If your whole business is based around a rockstar, you don't have a business. That's just a reality. You feel like there's more
(35:38): Money to be made in wholesaling or being a licensed. Yeah.
(35:40): I can't answer that question. That's different for everybody. I know agents to make a million dollars a year
(35:45): And there's like 10 of those in the country, but you're right. They're out there. I've been in the real estate industry for 15 years. I'm a licensed broker guys. I'm telling you right now, there's no money to be made like wholesale real estate business. There's a lot of just like there are in wholesale. There's a lot of people faking what they're making a million dollars and maybe they're closed 20 million in sales. And you know, you're seeing them brag about that. But the net net on that is nowhere near what a wholesale business can make. Matt Nash wants to know what's the best lead source.
(36:13): That depends how much money are you spending on marketing and how many leads do you need? Do you only need one lead? You know what I mean? Like I need to do everything at scale. So like it's a little bit of a trick question, right? I'm going to answer this from the perspective of somebody that's doing three or four deals a year or three or four deals a month or, or whatever. Normally we write up for in February wrote up 22 transactions or 25 transactions March. We did, I think 18 to, you know, depth with Kobe, you know, still doing deals. What's the best lead source, direct mail, you know?
(36:43): Yeah. I think when you're starting out, especially it's just this, this is the lowest barrier of entry you're you can spend money and make mistakes with direct mail, right. You're spending a hundred, 200, 300, 500, depending on your market for exclusive web leads and you fuck up. Well, that's a lot of money
(36:57): Really quickly. We'll get fucked up on the scale of direct mail. Like they'll send 500 postcards and they'll be like, how come I didn't make any money. Right. So like looking back at my marketing stuff. So I need to send 2000 ish letters or postcards or whatever, to get an in-home appointment with a sales rep. Right. And that's after scrubbing my list after only mailing people with equity after, you know, all that shit. And then, you know, I need three of those three appointments, right. To get a deal to now I'm at like six or 7,000 pieces. And then we lose some of our transactions because we wrote them up too high or because there was some title issue we couldn't clear. So I'm sending like eight to 10,000 mail pieces for one hit. Right. So just understand. And you know, I'm the big guy in this market place or this market area, at least one of them.
(37:47): Right. So, you know, if you're expecting to send one or 2000 Facebook leads or letters and make a million dollars, like you're mistaken, right. We just started advertising on TV like this week, like is when our ads started airing. And I have no idea if they're working at, I think that they're going to spend a lot of money on them, but how do I evaluate the effectiveness of the ads I'm going to see? So, you know, it's got a unique phone number and a unique URL. So in a month or two, I'll see, okay, how many appointments did I get and how many deals did I get? And the number one thing that I'll look at is how many appointments I got and I'll say, okay, how much did each one of these appointments cost me in advertising? And then I'll know, right. Going back to knowing my numbers.
(38:34): So if they're under a number, if they're over a certain number, you know, that'll matter a lot. And then depending on what that is after two months, I'll probably have a little bit of a better feeling. TV's I don't have a lot of experience advertising on TV. I have a lot of experience advertising on Facebook and direct mail. A lot of the others, these sources, I don't know a ton about, or like, I don't know as much about, but like if it meets the metrics that I need to be profitable, or if it appears as though it's going to meet those metrics, I'll know that probably in another two weeks, like pretty definitively, which direction that's headed in. I've heard TV ads are very, or can be very profitable. So we'll say, but they're fucking expensive. Good gun can say, guys, marketing is testing and it's all fucking risk, right? Like, you're doing this, you gotta have fun. You know what I mean? You got to test it out. It might totally bombed for the Georgia. It might be the best thing he's ever done. But the fact is, once you start to make money, you have to, you have to test it for things to increase the scale and to start to grow. So cool, man. Well, I appreciate you being on here. That was a lot of fun, George Beatty, man. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks for chatting. Have a good time. It's fun.
(39:40): Okay. Catch you later, man. If you are ready to put the immense power of wholesaling to work for you, then head over to Joe evangelists.com/downloads and get your free business in a box download. Or if you're a true action taker, ready to blow the lid off your results. You can apply now to work with our team, to build the business of your dreams faster than you ever thought possible. This call costs $500 to weed out the tire kickers, a mental masturbate, a feed. The real ballers will make back many times over on the first deal. Even if you don't get selected to work with us, you'll get a full year of access to our private coaching group, a $1,200 value and a 30 minute coaching call with Joe. So you win either way, go to www dot real estate money, mindset.com to apply and change your life.
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