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.
Okay, welcome. Welcome. You're here with myself, Nate Armstrong and my son, my co host, my partner, mr Bianco Armstrong, and if you've ever tried to hire a mentor before but it didn't quite work out, then this message is totally for you. Okay, so first and foremost, the reasons that mentors usually don't work out or a mentoring relationship usually doesn't work out. Maybe I should even call it a coaching relationship is three big topics, and I'm going to hit each of these in a little more depth, but number one, it's lack of access.
(00:56): If you don't have access when you need it, then things don't go right. The next one is lack of accountability. If you don't have someone that knows the numbers and knows where you should be within those numbers, then usually things don't work out right. And then the third thing is lack of belief. Okay? If you have a lack of belief, it's really hard for you to trust the other person or believe that you can do it if you don't believe in the coach or the mentor, so to speak. Okay? So let's go ahead and dissect these. Let's jump into them and let's break them down to show you what you can do to actually get through these. Okay, so let's talk about the first one. Lack of access. Now this reminds me back in 2007 my very first real estate mentor or mentorship was a $5,000 webinar.
(01:42): And at that time it was a ton of money for me. I had to put it on a credit card. It was a load. And I remember thinking to myself like after I jumped in, I was super excited and I was happy that I had the opportunity, so to speak, to go out there and make this happen. But the information was delivered via webinar. It was like a course basically, and that was what I was supposed to go out and start my real real estate business with. It's probably part of why it took me almost 11 months to close my first deal, but nonetheless, I jumped in and I made that mistake. Okay. I didn't have access when I needed to reach out for help. I couldn't get it. I couldn't get it at all because it was a $5,000 webinar. Kay, so how many of you out there have done the whole really expensive seminar program for some type of business coaching, business coaching or real estate coaching or whatever it might've been?
(02:33): I know I bump into people. I talked to someone almost every other day that's been through one of those really expensive programs, like a $30,000 program. The couple of the husband and wife I was talking to last night, they had paid for a $30,000 mentorship, $30,000 and the reason that it didn't work out and they put to me in their words, they said, frankly speaking, we just didn't have access. We wanted access, we wanted to spend time with the group, but we didn't have access when we needed it. And let's face it, and this is kind of my next bullet point here, is that real estate or business is not always a nine to five thing. Like it's just not. Sometimes deals happen when they happen like sellers and buyers and everybody gets together and they do the deal when the deal makes sense. So it's not always, if you can have this perfect nine to five world and the coaches that only operate in that world, they put their students at a disadvantage.
(03:28): I think I personally feel because I recognize and know that real estate takes more than that. We do structured things inside of our program and whatnot that are during business hours, but we've also got off business hours to support people because we know that folks need that extra edge. When you're working on a deal and it's a Saturday morning and you don't know what to say, how to say it or when to say it, or maybe you need a special tool or someone to walk you through the conversation, that's when a mentor can shine the most. When you can reach out to them and get that help from them. That's in my opinion, okay, now I kind of laugh now today at these programs that charge 30 to $70,000 to put people either through business coaching or through real estate investing coaching. It's insane to me. I get it.
(04:13): I understand why they do it. They've got a lot of expenses and they've got their overhead and whatever else, but it's just not necessary, especially when it's structured in such a small box that you can't get access. I talked to another gentleman just a week ago that he's in a program that he paid 15 grand for it, not our program, but 15 grand for, and he gets 30 minutes per week and literally on the 29 minute Mark and alarm goes off and then at that Mark they say, Hey, we have one minute left and they have to jump onto the next call. And that program lasts for a handful of months, I think six months and that's it. Like boom, 30 minutes, boom, boom, boom. And it's so hard to make that kind of style work for someone. For some people I prefer that you stick with it until the questions are answered because some people need that support and you want to make sure that they've got that support and make sure that they've got the answer that they need to succeed.
(05:05): That's the whole goal when you get into a mentoring relationship, a true mentoring relationship. Okay. Now on the flip side, I know I'm kind of beating up on some of the coaching programs that are out there right now and mentorship programs are out there right now, but I truly do believe in the whole mentoring arena. Big time. I have several mentors myself and I pay a lot of money per year. I've been in Frank Curran's private client group the last two years I paid for that and that's a 30 to $40,000 program depending on what you buy in. I gladly paid for it. Prior to that I had gone through strategic coach, very expensive program, like I have gladly paid for those things because I know that they make me a better entrepreneur, a better business person in a better person to help our members with their marketing, which is why most people come to us in the real estate world and so I pay for those mentors.
(05:52): I do, I believe in it. I have made mistakes too. The, one of the biggest mistakes that I ever made is that when my wife and I, my wife got diagnosed a handful of years ago, shortly after my son was born, she got diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease. And if you know anything about that disease, it's bad. It affects the thyroid. And for some people it'll take you down, it'll make you super sick and not feel well. And then beyond that, things like can't have kids. And the doctor pretty much told us that until we got better, we can't have kids. And we tried to go about it our way. Like we didn't want to go the doctor way and take a bunch of prescription pills and stuff like that. Cause once the ladies on prescription pills for that, it's for life. And so we didn't want to go that way.
(06:34): So we tried our own way, kind of like our own way without a mentor. And we tried to have a second child, couldn't, couldn't, couldn't. And then we said, you know what, we gotta go to the experts and we found a health Institute that was full of the best, the best mentors in the country. And we sent my wife there for three weeks through Hippocrates life is your mom. Yes, yes. My wife. Your mom. So yeah, we got pregnant, thank God, because we had the right mentorship. The right mentorship showed us the path in. I had messed around for three years, four years almost trying to do it my way and I wasted so much time. And then we finally got the right mentorship. We got my wife's health back. That's the most important thing. And then we got blessed with another child on the way.
(07:22): All because we got the right masters. And that mentorship was expensive. Super expensive. But you know what? It was way cheaper than losing three years of our lives. Almost four years of our lives, way cheaper. So I'd made the mistake in the past. So I do fully support mentorship. I do, as long as they're following these principles that I'm talking about. Okay, so lack of access. We've covered that one. But you've got to have access. You cannot get into a mentorship program that doesn't have the right level of access. If it's Saturday and you need support, you've got to be able to get some support somehow on a Saturday. Okay. That's my belief. The next thing, lack of accountability. Okay. A lot of people to get into mentorships, myself included because they want someone that already knows the numbers and what's important to be able to walk them through the numbers that are important than their business when they're on track, when they're off track.
(08:11): In a lot of the mentorship programs or coaching programs that I've seen out there, if they don't have that accountability piece, the program ended up itself can sometimes fall apart. Okay. For me, like I've got one mentor, he's a virtual mentor that does my physical training with me every morning he checks in on me. Okay. He doesn't always have to like sit there and babysit me as I do my workout and all that kind of stuff, but he checks in with me. He's checking in to see, Hey, what are your numbers look like? Have you been able to accomplish this, this and this and because he knows it so well, he can tell when I'm off just at a glance by looking at my numbers and I'm so thankful for that. Like I just feel, I feel so much better. Like someone that really knows this inside and out. They're looking at my numbers. It helps me perform better and I get everything done. You like hanging out and training with Juan? Yeah. Yeah.
(09:02): Sometimes he's sleeping when one does his check in, but I love it. It's absolutely one of the best parts of my day is having that kind of mentorship. Okay. The next thing is that a good mentor on this accountability side, they're going to help you track your key performance indicators. Kpis is what they stand for. Okay. Our KPIs stands for key performance indicators. It's the crucial numbers inside your business. So for us, we track three things like if don't get carried away, especially if you're in the real estate investing business, don't get carried away with all of these things. Like there's so much noise out there. Oh, you need this software in this, ring this with, no, no. What you need are three things, and these are the three things you want to track inside your business. You've got to track the number of leads you get in, and I'm talking about genuine off market leads that are coming to you, asking you for help, okay?
(09:51): I'm not talking about any cold calling craziness or anything like that. I'm talking about genuine people coming to you. You gotta track that. How many leads did I get in? Okay? Then I'm talking about how many calls did you make, so you got the leads. Then you got the calls, okay? Those calls, you got to practice on that. You need someone that's tracking those numbers so that they can see if you're missing something or if your stats are going down, they can actually call it out and they can fix it with you. Okay? The third statistic, the KPI that you have to track and then had mentors, should be looking over your shoulder with how many offers have been made. Okay? We call those three the leading indicators in your business. The lagging indicator, the one that comes behind that is how many deals did you close?
(10:36): Yes, closing deals is important, but the leading indicators tell us everything that we need to know about your business to make sure that you're on track. Okay, so that's the three things that should be tracked. Now, one of our members, Scott, he came into our program, started doing really well the first month, got a couple of deals and then the second month all of a sudden just tanked. Got plenty of leads, got 60 plus leads in coming through the system. But then all of a sudden not getting any more deals under contract. And I was looking at his KPIs and I messaged them and on my cake, Scott, can you help me understand what's going on? And we ended messaged back and forth and then we jumped on a quick call. And, and what we found out is that he had gotten so busy in month one, he said, Nate, I got so busy month one that a month two I had to hire a VA to take over my calls in.
(11:22): Ever since then, like I don't know what's going wrong, and I said, well, has your VA been through training? Does your VA know what to say? How to say it when to say it? How are those calls going? Are you recording them? And when we figured out is that the VA really didn't, they weren't prepared enough to jump on the calls and they weren't trained enough to take those calls. So we put Scott back on the phone. So month three he ended up get another deal. And then VA, we also put into training with us too so that the VA could sharpen up for those calls. It's an important thing if you're not looking at those numbers, let's keep performance indicators. A lot of stuff can go wrong. Okay, hate cold
(11:54): 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
(12:17): The next thing that a good mentor should be able to help with is measuring your ad statistics. Okay? This is an hold you accountable to certain ads statistics. Now, when you're spending money to bring in sellers to you, there's certain best practices or ratios that you want to follow and a good mentor, a good real estate mentor, they should know what those numbers are like. I talked to some folks that they're part of those big national franchise companies and that buys a lot of houses and whatnot and some of those people, they're paying like between 5,000 and $12,000 to get one deal from a seller. I laugh at that number because that's super expensive. Our members are typically way, way under that, but nevertheless, if somebody gets a deal for 5,000 to 12,000 bucks and they turn around and make 15 off of it, then it's okay.
(13:08): I mean I get it, but a good mentor should be able to look at those numbers. You're advertising statistics. What we look at is social media. Primarily. Social media is the driver that we run with because we know it works. It's the cheapest possible platform to use to get the highest amount of results. Also very, very scalable. Okay. The other thing that a good mentor should be able to help you measure and help you hold accountability to is your cost per closed deal. So we talked about some of the big national franchises. That's their cost, not ours. And then for ours we should be able, if you're working with the right mentor, they should be able to pin it down and say, Hey, if we're spending more than X to get this result, then we're doing it wrong and they should be able to help you course-correct.
(13:51): Okay. That's my belief and at this point, if you do find yourself wanting to get help to get these sellers coming to you and you want help on this mentor level like this, then I'm going to extend it out to you. You can reach out to my team by going to social media blueprint.com/podcast and you can find out everything that we're doing. I'm going to show you everything that our team is doing to help our folks get really good results. Okay, so that's social media, blueprint.com/podcast the next thing, lack of belief. If you don't believe that it can happen because of either the mentor, you don't believe in the mentor or you don't believe in yourself, then guess what? It's not going to happen. You probably remember Henry Ford's famous quote on the subject. Henry Ford said something that I'll never ever forget. He said, whether you believe or you don't believe you're right, how simple as that, but think about that.
(14:48): Whether you believe or you don't believe you're right. Okay? What does that mean in layman's terms? This simply means this, and if you put in your mind some doubt and you say, ah, I don't know that I can do that, or guess what? It's never going to actually happen for you. Then on the flip side, if you believe that it can happen, if you believe you can close three deals in a month, if you make that belief real for you, then your odds of it happening go up exponentially. A mentor should be the first one that helps you with your belief. It's not all just the tactics because the tactics are the tactics, but belief is so important. Henry Ford said it best whether you believe or you don't believe, you're probably right. Okay, so what should a good mentor do? Well, this is where I want to break down the difference between a mentor and a coach.
(15:35): K , a coach is someone that's hired to do something to work with you on some aspect or some result. A mentor is someone that does the business that guides you. Okay. Someone that's doing the business at a level that you want to do the business at that's guiding you. Big, big difference between the two. I've been around folks that are coaches. I've met some really good coaches. I met one gentleman, I've known him for like eight or nine years. Great, great guy. He did one real estate deal like 12 or 13 years ago and then he jumped into a coaching company and became a full time coach and he's a great, great dude and you can talk like he knows a lot of stuff, but then when push comes to shove in a mentee, a student really needs to get something that's real time and relevant.
(16:24): It's hard to get that information from a paid coach because the paid coach hasn't always been the one that's doing it live out in the field. A mentor is someone that's doing the business every single day themselves, someone that's done the business at a very high level that you respect, that kind of person. That mentor will help instill belief. It's also very, very similar. If you think about, I went to college, you don't have to go to college to make this business work. I happened to go to college. I'm not going to send my son to college unless he really wants to, but I don't plan to at all. I'm not going to pay for it at all. I don't believe in that institution anymore. I really believe in real business results, but one thing that I did notice at college when I went is that I took a couple of entrepreneurship classes and the teachers, I have one that was good because he actually used to own a business.
(17:13): He owned a business for like five or six years and so he could talk about real life experiences and then the other one totally had never ever been in business for themselves, couldn't speak about the ups and downs, couldn't speak about anything other than what was in the textbooks. Which one do you think was a better mentor? Obviously the one that actually did it in the majority of the folks in college institutions, they've never actually done it. Not unless you go to like an advanced business school, but most standard bachelor type degrees. They don't have folks that are real mentors, mentors that can help in that whole entrepreneurship or real estate world. So I think it's very vital that whoever you're going to work with must be a real mentor. They've got to be living the business day in and day out. And additionally, if they've got other team members that are helping you, those team members can't be coaches either.
(18:03): Those team members have to be real mentors, people doing the business, living it day in and day out so that they can actually help you with real time relevant information. The next one is, I believe, especially in the real estate business, that a mentor relationship, in order to help you with your belief, they must be able to listen to your call recordings or show you some examples of live calls that they're doing and you sit right over their shoulder and you listen to it. I truly believe that it's a must because the live calls, they're different than the kind of scripted roleplay calls. Role-Plays are great. I'm a fan of getting a ton of reps doing that, but I think that every once in a while there's gotta be some live calls happening too, because there's different things that can happen and objections that can come up and it just makes it fun.
(18:48): And that's where real deals are done, is on those live calls and that's where people can learn the most. So I think that's gotta be an important part that's mixed into the mentoring relationship came. The last thing is this. Some folks, they lack belief in themselves and I believe that a good mentor instills belief in them. Okay. I know that for me, I've had a lot of good mentors help me with my beliefs. They've helped instill things into me. I had Frank Kern once tell me the first time that I started showing them different things I was working on. He kind of laughed and he very, very nice about it, but he's like, Hey, let me help you with that. And he helped me. And then over the course of two years, by the end of that two year period, he said to me once, he's like, Nate dog looking pretty good, looking pretty good.
(19:34): That was the first time that my belief in myself went up through the roof. Like I finally believe like I, I'm actually getting this marketing stuff. I got the acknowledgement from a mentor that I respect at a whole nother level. When that happened to me, like my belief went up. And so a good mentor will help instill those beliefs. They'll tell you when you're right, when you're wrong and they'll help instill you with those beliefs to get to the next spot. Okay. I, one time I made a mistake, I actually hired a marketing coach. This is way before I met Frank, but I hired a marketing coach that literally they were more of a coach, not a mentor. They literally, when I started getting into the relationship with them, I said, well, Hey, how do you do your ads? Like I want to know how you do your actual ads online.
(20:19): And they said, well, I don't run any ads. I just get referrals. I've got a lot of referrals. So I just get referrals. And I'm like, hold on a second here. Like you're the marketing coach and you literally don't run any ads for yourself. And he's like, no, I run him for other people but I don't run any ads myself. I'm like, no way, no way. And then I continued the relationship for a few more months, saw no results, and I had to end the relationship. You could probably guess how the relationship ended. It's just that someone that's more of a coach that's just doing the thing as a paid thing and not actually doing the business that they're teaching on. It's a recipe for disaster, like I don't believe in it and don't support it. Yes, there are some exceptions. I know there's some exceptions to everything, every rule that's out there, but if you want the highest quality results, then you want the folks that are doing it at the highest level.
(21:05): You want a true mentor that's doing it day in and day out. Kay, so we've covered a lot here. We've covered, if you've ever hired a mentor before and it didn't work out, this is what we covered under the three main bullet points we've covered. Number one, you've got to have a lot of access. You cannot have this lack of access issue. Okay? Number two, you've got to have some accountability. Someone that knows the numbers, someone that can help you track your key performance indicators intertwined inside that mentor mentee relationship. And then the third thing is that you've got to have belief. You've got to believe in the mentor. And that mentor should also help instill belief in you to make that mentorship actually work. Okay, I appreciate you. And the next time that we get together, I've got a really special topic that's near and dear to my heart.
(21:50): I've been doing this little mini case study, so to speak, and I've noticed that the folks that are military members in our program, they are excelling like kicking butt and taking names as real estate investors in our program. And I'm so I'm doing this case study right now to figure out why that is. Why are these folks that are in the military just taken off like rockets? And so we're going to be unveiling that and all the findings that I'm seeing in my case study. So until next time, I appreciate you. God bless. We'll talk again soon. Thanks.
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