The big challenge is this: How are investors like us who are not backed by a billion hedge fund who are investing money from our own pockets? How do we buy, sell, and invest in the properties we believe in, yet still make a profit without risking all of our own money? That is the challenge. In this podcast, we'll give you the answers. My name is Nate Armstrong and welcome to the social media blueprint.
Welcome, welcome. You're here with Nate and my son. This is Bianco and Bianco and I have a really special topic for you guys today. If you've ever tried real estate investing but didn't get the traction that you wanted, then this episode is definitely for you. Okay, so first and foremost, I started in this business back in 2007 and I remember I was working a corporate job. I was at target, target corporation in. I wanted to do more.
(00:49): I wanted to accomplish more in life. I realized that like we all know when you're working in a corporate job, you work a lot and you don't necessarily get paid in equal proportion to the time that you put in. So I wanted to do something more with life. I eventually found real estate. I jumped in. I've got other reasons that we'll get into in a different episode, but I jumped in and then here's the very first thing that I heard from my parents or my parents, people that loved me and that I loved. They thought that I was nuts and I was crazy mostly because they were scared. This 2007 was the start of the big fall, the big last fall that we had, the great housing recession in the midst of them trying to protect me, and not only my parents do this, but probably your friends, family or other loved ones, the in the midst of trying to protect you, sometimes they'll try to hold you back because they don't want to see you get hurt and that's what happened with my parents.
(01:38): They were trying to hold me back saying, Hey, this is crazy. Don't do this right now. There's foreclosures and short sales coming on the market, like that's not something that you want to do. And then to top it off, the very first realtor that I hired, I'm out super excited to get this real estate business going. And the very first real estate agent that I'm out with, she takes me and shows me houses for a day. We, that night she says, well, which one do you want to write an offer on? And I said, well, let me run my numbers and I'll be ready for tomorrow. And I got back to her the next day and I ran numbers on all of them, not just one. And I'm like, okay, I want to submit this offer on this one and I want to submit this out. And I had numbers prepared for all of them.
(02:13): And she's like, no, no, no, no. We just have to do one. And I'm like, well, why can't we do all of them? And she said, no, no, we've got to just start with one at a time. And I said, okay, well great. This is my favorite one. Let's put this offer in. And she said, are you kidding me? No, that's too low. They're never going to take that offer. Just never going to happen. And I'm like, well, can we just try? And she said, no, Nope, that's insulting. We can't do that. And then she canceled the appointment that we had for the next day to go look at houses. So I got fired, I got fired by my realtor. And then meanwhile my coworkers at work, we're always talking, Oh, Nate real estate investor guy like laughing at me and joking around and whatever. And like that's the rejection. The traction that I had my first year was laughable because I had all of this negativity around me. And I'm sitting right now with my son Bianco. He's six years old and Bianco. Have you ever had something that you failed, that you eventually got good at?
(03:07): Yes, I fell off my bike and I wasn’t good at it.
(03:12): So you fell off your bike.
(03:14): ya one time.
(03:15): and then right now you, are you good at your bike or do you still fall?
(03:18): I'm good at it now.
(03:21): Okay, so we're talking to a six year old right now who's giving us a lesson that most of us adults forget at some point in life. At some point in life we forget that things take time to learn and we don't give ourselves enough credit. If we just think back to our five and six year old days when we learned how to ride a bike, we all know that we fell at least once, I felt probably a lot more than once and then eventually we got good at it and now we're to the point where we can ride a bike with our eyes closed if we really wanted to. And it doesn't happen overnight though. So I want to give you some practical steps that you can use to start getting the traction that you want for your real estate investing business. First and foremost, this is number one you need to surround yourself with like minded people.
(04:05): Well, what does that mean, Nate? Like-minded people. Here's what it is. It means people that you want to be like, not just the folks you're hanging out with right now, not just your family. Sometimes your family and the folks you're hanging out with right now are probably the worst possible folks for you accomplishing the dreams that you want to accomplish, and you've probably heard this before, if you haven't, then take note of this. I can bet that your income is probably pretty close within 10% of the five people that you spend the most time with. If we took those five people and we average their income and we compared it to yours, I bet you yours is within 10% of that. Now, why do I know this? Well, it's just kind of the law of averages. If we're going to hang out with folks at a certain level, then what tends to happen is we end up getting to that level and that's the level that our brain says, Hey, this is good.
(04:56): We can stop right here. Okay, so what do we do? Okay. What we want to do is we want to get with the people that actually are at the level that we want to be at. I'm not just talking about financially either. I'm talking about education-wise, I'm talking about the amount of family time they have, the amount of faith time they have. I'm talking about the people that you aspire to be, so you want to spend time with those people. The majority of your time should be spent with those people. How do you find these people? Well, you can go to meetup.com I know that an admits of a pandemic, there's stuff that's still closed and whatnot and there's restrictions in place, but meetup.com still has some virtual groups. You can connect with the virtual groups. You can join Facebook groups on the topic of real estate investing.
(05:40): I myself host a really big group. It's got over a thousand people. It grows every single week and there's a ton of really smart people in there and in that group grows because there's more people that come and they want to hang out and network with like minded people. So you want to get with as many like-minded individuals as you possibly that are either at the level you're at or they want to get to the level that you want to get to as well, and you want to talk with them. You want to run your ideas off them. Don't run your ideas off of a dream killer. Okay? Dream killers have no place in your Destiny's path. Okay? Next, this is number two. I need you to immediately start getting off market deals. Okay? I'm going to say it bold and playing like that. I need you to stop doing what I did in the beginning.
(06:24): That almost caused me to quit and almost caused me. It definitely led me to not getting any attraction and I was trying to buy stuff on market. I was shopping with a real estate agent and that stuff doesn't work. Yes. Can you get lucky sometimes to score a deal? Yes, I've done it. I've, I've done it hundreds of times and I'm not saying that to boast, but I have, I've been there. I've done that and I made it work for awhile, but I almost killed my dreams early on and the only thing right now, I've done
(06:50): all kinds of different marketing that's out there. The only thing that's working right now exceptionally well for the best possible price is social media marketing. Hey, cold calling, can't stand direct mail. Wish there was a way to have sellers coming to you instead of having to chase them down. Now there is, it's called the social media blueprint and you can get it absolutely free when you go to www.socialmediablueprint.com/podcast so I want you to get off market
(07:24): deals from social media advertising. Okay? I don't want you to do organic posts and all that kind of stuff. That stuff is almost like shopping with a realtor. You get lucky sometimes, but at the end of the day, running ads, paid traffic, if you know how to build the campaign the right way, then these ads bring in seller after seller, after seller, and when you have so many opportunities coming to you every single day, you get to pick and choose. The ones that you want to work on. If you're fighting for deals like the shark tank style, like where everyone's fighting over the same thing, then you end up overpaying. You get in multiple offer situations and all of this bad happens and you end up getting deals that aren't really deals. Some said, I want you to get to the off-market world as soon as possible so you can start enjoying the benefits of having a lot of sellers coming to you.
(08:10): Okay? I don't want you to do cold calling anymore if you're doing cold calling right now, I equate it to this cold calling in real estate investing is kind of like real estate investors, suicide for their business. Okay. I don't mean to use the term in a in the wrong way at all either, but literally I've seen so many people give up on their business. Their business ends up committing suicide because they get burned out and cold calling, calling thousands of people and hearing the word no and getting rejected. It has a psychological effect on people that make them want to steer away from doing it. And I know it, it sounds cheap or when you first start, but that's not cheaper, is not always better. Cheaper, can kill your dreams. It can kill your business completely. Okay, so instead of what you to do is you want to shift gears, you want to get over to social media and the folks that win at that whole cold calling game, they hire call centers and they call thousands of leads every single week, if not every single month, thousands of them, and that's how they win at that game.
(09:11): Kate, you and I, we're usually not in a spot where we're going to hire thousands of people. When we first started in this business, thousands of people are at least hundreds of people to call, thousands of leads, no way. We want to work with sellers that wants help. There's a very big difference. When I get a call from a seller that comes to me asking for my help, it's very, very different than cold calling and begging someone for their property. It just the positioning all wrong with cold calling. I had a call from one of my national sellers just a few days ago and the seller literally said to me on the phone, she said, Hey, my husband died. We've got the second property. I'm behind on my mortgage right now. I've got to sell the second property. Can you help me? Can you help me? How many times do you hear sellers say that if you don't hear sellers say that at least once a week, then the marketing or the lead sources are completely wrong.
(09:59): You gotta switch gears. You got to get onto the right campaign built and use social media for that. Okay, so with that seller from Nashville, I said, yeah, I'm happy to help you. And we talked about everything under the sun with her property and then she eventually told me that the price she wanted and I was able to give her 10% more than she asked for. She was ecstatic, like ecstatic. I thought she was going to cry on the phone. She was so excited. By the end of the first day that we connected, we had a contract sign on that deal. That's the kind of people that I want to work with. I got in this business to, yes, I want to make profit, but at the same time I want to make profit where I feel good. I don't want to have to fight dog and to for everything.
(10:35): If I can help people and make profit, I am all in for that. Okay, so that's why we want to get to off market deals immediately. Okay. This is the third point and this is probably the most important one. It's often the one that we neglect the most. We need to celebrate the small wins and I'm talking about small wins. Everything from your very first lead, like the first time that you generate your first off-market lead. That's a really big deal and a lot of people, the first time that you set up a seller appointment and you go meet the seller and you walk their property, that's a really big deal. I see too many people, they get so caught up on this notion that they've got to close a deal. I got to get a close deal and sometimes they put so much pressure on themselves that because they don't close a deal their first month or their second month, they totally disregard the fact that they generate a 12 leads or that they are on six seller appointments or they talk to six sellers in person and walk their house and then they burn themselves out and they quit.
(11:32): They don't get the traction that they want right away and then they just decided to hang up their hat. You don't want that. I don't want that. Nobody wants that. So you got to take time to give thanks. And then to celebrate, let yourself let your hair down a little bit. Okay. Get out there and actually celebrate it. When my son was learning how to ride a bike, we got this bike called the wound bike. W. O. M. they're great, great bikes, really high quality. Everything does that. That face on the [inaudible] and Betty that go down to 10 years.
(12:04): bianco has got his second wound bike right now. We like the first one so much that he upgraded. Well, we got the second one because I wasn't told it.
(12:11): Yeah, someone stole it. That's how much people liked it. Somebody took it from him while he was at the park. They took it and they ran. So beyond good did is his very first wound bike we did. It was a woman without the pedals, right?
(12:23): No, that one wasn't at war. There was just made out of,
(12:27): Oh, that was a balanced bike. Okay. So we started with a balanced bike and guess what? The first time that he was able to get his balance and not fall down, we celebrated. We clapped, we applauded, we celebrated that success. And then when he moved up to the next level bike, we celebrated the success when he was able to jump on and pedal for the first time. And we celebrate each of those. When we're kids and with our kids, it's so easy to do and like we're excited and all that stuff. But as adults, sometimes we forget, we gotta give our brain a round of applause. We've got to say, Hey, you did good here. You've got, you generated your first lead. You set your first seller appointment and when you start to celebrate those things, you're going to see that your brain will start to feed on if it's in the right way instead of in the wrong way.
(13:07): Right now I see too many people with so much pressure on themselves to get their first closed deal that they totally forget that all the action steps they're taking to get that deal is what actually leads to the deal itself. The deal closing is a bad measurement. That's a terrible measurement because that's a lag indicator. Well, we want to focus on in this business is the lead indicators. How many leads did I generate? How many calls did I do, how many offers did I make? Those are the numbers that really shaped this business. If I can look at someone's business and I'm just looking at closed transactions, it's a terrible measurement compared to the leading indicators. So I want to look at the leaders, not the laggers. Okay. All right, so we've covered a lot here, so I just want to give you a quick recap of this.
(13:49): So if you've tried real estate investing before but you didn't get the traction that you wanted, then I want you to go back and examine these three areas of your life. Number one, who are you surrounding yourself with? You've got to surround yourself with likeminded people or people that are at the level that you want to be at. Doesn't just have to be money, but finances, faith, family, et cetera. Okay, so you've got to make sure you're surrounded with the right people. And if that means you got to cut somebody out, if you got to cut out uncle Jimmy because uncle Jimmy doesn't have dreams, he something shattered in his life and he doesn't want to Excel to the next level. You got to cut on uncle Jimmy. Sometimes, like with family, I love my family. I do sometimes with family. Family is best for holidays and for vacations, but your everyday stuff, sometimes you could just got to keep them at Bay.
(14:36): You got to keep back to protect what's most sacred to you, your time, your space in the thoughts that go on between your ears. Okay? So surround yourself with the right people. Next, immediately start getting off market leads. Stop cold calling real estate investors suicide. Stop that immediately and get to social media marketing so that you can actually get off-market leads. Okay, the next one, this is number three, the most important one. Let yourself celebrate all the small wins. Celebrate the first lead you get. Celebrate the first time that you set a seller appointment. Those things are so crucial for you and for your team if you end up getting a team into this, but you've got to let yourself celebrate those. Okay, awesome. Mr Bianco and I will be back again on the next episode. So then the next one you cannot miss. This is called breaking the cold call trap. I see too many people get stuck in this cold calling world. They don't know how to get out. We're going to help you break that cycle. We're going to help you upgrade so you can start getting the right kind of leads and the right deals closed inside your business. So for the next episode, make sure you tune in for it called breaking the cold call trap. All right. We appreciate you. We look forward to connecting with you again soon. Bye.
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