3 Things You Need to Scale a Real Estate Business w/ Steve Uhlig

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Really quick before the show starts, in case you haven't heard, we have a growing community of investors called the scale community, which is full of people learning to make massive income with their real estate businesses, so they can reach financial freedom a little bit faster than building a rental portfolio solely over time, because honestly, that takes decades and who has time for that. So if you're an investor who is serious about growing and creating a scalable business without needing to be a slave to it twenty four seven, then go to collectingkeys.com/scale and apply. And if you're a good fit, we would love to have you join the community. So again, collectingkeys.com/scale, go ahead and apply, and see if you're a good fit.

Steve Uhlig: [0:38] We're basically hitting all the towns where we've had success in the past, just mercilessly over and over and over again. And when they're ready to sell, they're gonna hopefully call us.

Mike DeHaan: [0:49] Hey, guys. Really quick before this episode with Steve Uhlig. Wanna give you a heads up that he's not like a podcast guy. He's a real sick guy. And so when we recorded the show, he was in, like, a coffee shop or something. And so there's, like, a little bit of residual noise that comes and goes throughout the recording. Our editors did their best to kinda remove a lot

Mike DeHaan: [1:08] of that, but you might hear, like, little things

Mike DeHaan: [1:10] in the background. And so just letting you know, it will be a slightly different tone from our normal, you know, super sexy, professionally recorded voices with these these expensive mics that we have. So I just wanna give you a quick heads up on that. Besides that, it's a great episode, and Steve dropped some incredible knowledge, and he really outlines how simple this business can be if you want it to. So enjoy, everybody. What is going on, guys? Welcome to today's episode of the collecting keys real estate investing podcast. Today is Monday. It is the scale show, and this is the show where you, as real estate operators, get to learn from other real estate operators who have sort of figured it out and started to find some success with their business. And we get to learn about what is working for them in this market, what it has taken for them to be able to grow to something that has replaced their w two income, allowed them to build a large revenue stream into their business, and ultimately achieve some level of financial freedom. So today, we are welcomed by Steve Uhlig. And Steve is not a member of scale like many of our other members are, but he is a guy that I know from a previous group that I've been in. And I've known you, Steve, well, probably since 2019, I think, when I originally connected with you. And you've had a pretty incredible rise to growth over the past couple of years. And so get us started.

Mike DeHaan: [2:28] Give us a quick rundown who you are, where you're based, and what your team currently looks like. Sure.

Steve Uhlig: [2:34] Thanks for having me, Mike. So, yeah, I'm Steve Uhlig out of the affiliate area. We operate a company called Guardian Property Solutions. It's a I would call it a real estate selling company at this point. So sort of a flipping company. We don't bought whole rentals at this point. We're wholesaling, doing some light flips, hotels, innovations, things like that. And we market primarily to the Western Suburbs, Chester County, Monaco, Delaware County, Berks County. And it's currently me as the founder. Started it it'll be five years since I've been in business this coming November. And I've got Erin and Jeff who are my acquisitions managers. I've got a lead manager. Her name is Erlen. I have a cold caller named Abby, and then I have a marketing assistant named Chai. Had a dispositions manager who went went to do other things a couple of months ago, so I'm in that seat right now, but we'll be looking higher for that role probably by the end of the year. Awesome.

Mike DeHaan: [3:42] Perfect, man. That's a great little simple transactional real estate business. Right? Like, that is that is by the books what the average team looks like. I love it. So what are your overalls of business? How many deals are you currently doing a month? You said you're doing mostly flipping and wholesaling. Is there one that you, like, prefer over the other?

Steve Uhlig: [4:00] Honestly, I I we prefer wholesaling. We don't also everything, obviously. But I think on a risk adjusted basis as far as, you know, money loves speed. And as far as not taking the risk of the rehab that a lot of the properties we wholesale actually require to get them ready for prime time, wholesaling is probably 90% of what we do.

Mike DeHaan: [4:23] Okay. Cool. And about how many a month are you doing?

Steve Uhlig: [4:25] So we're doing 46 per month right now. Looking to scale that to about eight per month by the end of the year.

Mike DeHaan: [4:32] That's great. I mean, four to six is a great clip. I mean, that'll be 50 to per year, 72 per year. So that's awesome. And how are you sourcing all of these deals right now?

Steve Uhlig: [4:42] A majority of our marketing is is honestly direct mail. We use ballpoint marketing for all of our mail. We do a pretty even split between their hand lit written letter product and their postcard product. But, yeah, I'd say 95% of our lead gen is from direct mail.

Mike DeHaan: [4:59] Yeah. That's awesome. And we're the same. Right? Direct mail has been such a pillar for us. And it's funny because people always they get kinda funny around around direct mail because it kinda hurts when you have to pay that credit card statement, and it feels like it's a large chunk of money. But, you know, it's such a tried and true way of finding deals. So for you to be doing four to six deals a month right now, I guess, like, why do you think that you're successful with direct mail doing that? I mean, that because that's not like you're, like, skating one here or there. Like, that's that's a pretty decent little business you have going.

Steve Uhlig: [5:30] I think the number one thing is consistency. I think mailing every single month the same number or having like a minimum number you're going to mail whether it's 10,000 pieces, 20,000 pieces, 30,000 pieces, and sticking to that, whether you can, I hate to say it, but whether you can afford to or not, you need to find a way to be consistent with whatever marketing channel you're using? Think consistency is number one. And then I think understanding your market is number two understanding which areas produce deals, which areas don't understand the lists that work in your marketplace, understanding whatever market you're in, like the back of your hands.

Mike DeHaan: [6:08] Yeah. And I I know you've had to learn that over the years too, because I remember talking to you on the phone years ago. You called me and you were trying to, like, kinda figure out how to get out of that phase where you would, like, do a deal, and you would spend all the money and be starving again. Right? And that consistency is so huge. And so something I wanna emphasize is you're talking about figuring, you know, what works in your market, trying to find, like, the areas that actually produce deals. There's not, like, a one size fits all strategy for everybody in every market. Right? And so I guess from your standpoint, when you're saying, like, find the kind of areas that produce deals, like, what did that process look like for you? Did you were you, like, throwing out a bunch of pieces to a ton of different areas and seeing, like, where leads came back from? Were you, like, testing places for, like, three months at a time and then measuring it against other areas? Do you have kind of strategy, or was it kinda just throw the spaghetti at the wall and then ultimately see what sticks?

Steve Uhlig: [6:59] I didn't know the strategy. I when I first pulled my first RealNow list, it was just absentee owners. Yeah. And I wasn't sheltering for evaluation. I wasn't sheltering for number of units owned. I was hitting people that own 5,100 properties in India, you name it, you know, very savvy people, people that own million dollar properties, which is very high for, know, our market. And I was just likening everything. And I was burning money, at no strategy, and I wasn't getting deals either.

Mike DeHaan: [7:27] Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're paying for an education. Right? You're learning what didn't work, and that you need to do something different.

Steve Uhlig: [7:33] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [7:34] And so, I guess, ultimately, did you find that it was the location that mattered more or, like, the kind of mail that you sent that was kind of the key for you?

Steve Uhlig: [7:43] I'll be honest with you. I think it's a little bit of both for us. We're not in a super super, like, cheap market, but we're not in a super expensive market either. It's sort of pedal the road here. And we have a mix of wealthy areas and not so wealthy areas. I think it came down to because I was looking for stuff to wholesale, was looking for stuff that I can make quick cash on to pay back marketing as opposed to lengthy projects. So one of the things that really helped me in the beginning was learning how to dial down into like the data providers like PropStream, for example, and dialing into my farm area and figuring out, alright, here's all the cash buying activity happen. You know, there's there's gotta be a few ZIP codes or areas in my market where the majority of the cash buyers spend their time. And there were. I found that in the data. And I started to concentrate a lot of my marketing efforts on that handful of, let's say, 10 or 15 ZIP codes that were the majority of the the actions happening. And as a result, I started to get a little bit of traction there. And then, honestly, now that we're five years into it, I've got five, almost five years of my own data

Mike DeHaan: [8:48] Yeah.

Steve Uhlig: [8:48] To pull from. So I know exactly where the deals are coming from. I know what lists are on, and we double down on on that stuff.

Mike DeHaan: [8:55] Nice. And so for context, how long did that process take you? Because I think where most people shoot themselves in the foot is they get impatient. I imagine it took you quite a long time.

Steve Uhlig: [9:05] Yeah. I mean, when I started, it was just just me. It was me in my basement. You know, I had no sales background, no marketing background. I was just doing it blindly. And it probably took me a good, honestly, couple of years to really get some solid traction. It was a lot of just bumbling through the dark and just asking a lot of questions.

Mike DeHaan: [9:25] Sure. Yeah. I mean, which is how you learn. Right? That is the hardest part of any business, though, and I feel like the off market real estate realm in general because it's it's a fundamentally simple business. Right? And it's so easy to kinda get, like, shiny objects and you're gonna be trying all these different stuff and burn all this money, that's probably the worst thing that you can do as you come to learn. Right? And then on, like, the mail that you send, do you have, like, a specific sequence that you run, or are you kinda, like, trying stuff different every single month to just, like, sort of keep things fresh?

Steve Uhlig: [9:59] We switch up the postcards to different areas and different sequences. Right now, we're on a comic card sequence. We went through our marketing data recently to figure out the types of pieces that actually produce the deals. And this one, this particular sequence out of three or four sequences they offer by far produced the largest number of deals for us. So we're circling back to it. We have on there absentee owners with equity that own three or fewer properties in their own name or trust. So you're hitting people that are theoretically less savvy that way. You don't want you're not targeting people with portfolios. We're hitting a lot of the easier initialists on PropStream with that, and we're also hitting driving for dollars. We don't actually drive, but our local county drives for us, and that data gets into our MLS. So we just literally download it right from there. So we're basically hitting all the zips, all the towns where we've had success in the past, just mercilessly over and over and over again, different postcards every month because we wanna stay in front of people. And when they're ready to sell, they're gonna hopefully call us.

Mike DeHaan: [10:59] Yeah. I mean and that's that's key, right, is something that people need to realize about real estate is it's not like selling a widget. You know, you need to sort of be present when they decide to do what realistically for the sellers can be one of the biggest transactions of their life. And 90% of this business is just like being the one that is in front of them when they decide to make that decision. So, like, you can call and, like, bamboozle somebody into buying your, I don't know, whatever trinket that you're trying to sell them. Right? So it's very, very different.

Steve Uhlig: [11:27] Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [11:28] So awesome. I love that, though.

Steve Uhlig: [11:29] And then we'll use a fancier piece, the fancier ballpoint, you know, handwritten letter piece for stuff that we scrape directly to county that isn't getting, you know, a lot of they're not really getting marketed to as much as somebody as somebody other lists because these are lists that you really can't pay for. You just gotta get in there and either get a VA to do it manually or create a, you know, an automatic bot or scraper to do it for you. So we're, we're hitting those weekly with fancy letters. And then, you know, people we want to make an impression on maybe there's an asset class we want specifically, or an area was really like, white those with letters as opposed to the postcards to try and stand stand out.

Mike DeHaan: [12:02] There you go. Yeah. People respond to different stuff too. So it's always good to mix it up. Cool. Let's let's talk a bit more about your team and what your sort of, like, lead funnel looks like. So mail goes out. You said you have a couple acquisition managers. You have a couple overseas VAs. What's, like, your full transactional process? Are your acquisition managers receiving your calls, or are you using call center?

Steve Uhlig: [12:27] So we use CallPorter in St. Louis, US based answering service. I think you you use them as well, at least. And they take the initial call. So it starts with a letter. There's a URL and a number on the letter. Usually, people go to the website first, do a little research on us, then they'll call the number. They'll chat with a US based operator in St. Louis. That person's goal is to book the appointment, gather information. They're successful, I'd say, about 20% of the time. So the other 80% of new leads fall on our in house team then field. So the call center drops a lead into our CRM. We use ReSimply, and then the acquisitions manager takes it from there. And we'll call, build rapport, ask questions, and gather any missing information, and then try to book an appointment

Mike DeHaan: [13:13] Mhmm.

Steve Uhlig: [13:13] With that seller to go out and sit down with them face to face, you know, really hit on why they called us in the first place, talk about where they wanna go, and how we're gonna get them from a to b as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Mike DeHaan: [13:27] Yeah. Easy enough. And then when you're when you're making offers and everything, are your acquisition managers the ones making the offers, or are you underwriting everything?

Steve Uhlig: [13:33] Nope. So the we typically make the offer the next day. Sometimes we'll make it in person on the appointment if the situation calls for it. But I'd say 99% of the time we're doing it next day on the phone and the acquisitions team underwrites their own offers. I used to look at everything, but I probably look about at about half of their offers now just because at this point, they, you know, I trust them. Yeah. And they just they just bring me stuff that maybe they don't want a second set of eyes on. So they're underwriting, I'd say, about 50% of their deals without any oversight for me.

Mike DeHaan: [14:05] That's great. How did you train them to do that? This is always one of the big questions that we get from, you know, operators as they're building out is, like, your your acquisition managers are incentivized to close a deal. Right? They don't necessarily care for it to be the biggest deal or the best deal. They're gonna get paid, I'm assuming, on a commission when the deal closes. And so how do you have, like, checks and balances, or how are they trained to make sure that they're getting you the best deals they can?

Steve Uhlig: [14:31] That's a good question. I mean, we use the same formulas that everybody uses where 75% of after repair value minus repairs minus Mhmm. A wholesale spread if we're gonna wholesale it, which we usually build that in whether we're gonna wholesale it or not. So they're just trained really well at running comps, I have a set of criteria that they, they stick religiously to as far as how to run the comps. And they, you know, they don't go with the highest, they don't go with the lowest. They're sort of taking the middle ground and using that as their after repair value. One of the things that's helped us is we underwrite deals the way our buyers underwrite deals in our market. A lot of them are not using per piece prices because it's it's slower, it's clunkier. A lot of them are using per square foot pricing. So for example, $10 a square foot for flooring and paint, $30 a square foot for kitchen flooring, paint, and bathroom. I got them using, for the most part, per square foot repair pricing right now, which cuts down on the opportunity for error. And they can add or subtract items piecemeal. So for example, if it needs $30 a square foot plus a furnace, we'll add 7 or $8 for a furnace to that $30 a square foot. So that ensures that they're underwriting for the most part the way our buyers are underwriting. That's our customer base, obviously.

Mike DeHaan: [15:48] Yeah. Yeah. That's that's such an underrated piece of this business, though, you know, is because ultimately, right, your buyers in a wholesale business are your customers. You know, your your sellers are your product that you're sourcing, you know, and understanding how to best service your buyers, the people that are gonna be actually the ones that pay you money is so important. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges for people when they are starting out is they'll be making offers based off of their view of the renovation or, like, they try to, like, itemize things a different way than their buyers are going to. And so they end up not necessarily making competitive offers. You know, for example, in my local market here in Spokane, there's like a standard spread that buyers wanna be making. Right? And if you're off from that number, you're not gonna be able to find buyers versus if I go out to, like, Seattle where homes are more expensive, you know, a similar state, but it's a different kind of market. People there will be wanting to make their profits based off, an actual ROI. So let's say, like, I need to be making a 10% ROI on my money. And that's gonna allow you to offer much higher than you would in, say, like, Spokane where people are going off just like absolute values. So that's awesome that you figured that out. So how how did you determine that, though? Was that just come from experience?

Mike DeHaan: [17:02] Was that from, like, connecting with buyers? Did you have, like, a mentor buyer that kinda, like, coached you on what they were looking for? You just expanded that out.

Steve Uhlig: [17:08] Yeah. Good question. So it came from a couple of different sources. A mentor of mine is actually a wholesaler. He pulls his buyers every year to, you know, kind of gauge where they're at as far as how they underwrite, because he wants to make sure he stays in lockstep with the way they're doing things. And at first, I was just kind of taking what he gave me and, hey, just use this. And I'm like, Okay, that sounds good. And it worked. So but now we do our own, you know, polling and we have a set of, I'd say, 20 buyers that you know, it is the eight twenty rule. So there's a handful of buyers that buy more than the others. So we're in constant communication with them, as far as how they underwrite, what percentage of ARV they're using, and you know what their repair costs are. Because as a wholesaler, we don't have we're not doing a ton of projects. So it's not like we have a ton of our own flipping data to base what things should cost on. So we're basically looking for the word of our buyers to tell us, alright. Here's what we want. Here's what we need. Can you get us this?

Mike DeHaan: [18:05] Correct. Yeah. And everyone's needs are different. You know, can have different costs of material, can have different costs of labor. They're gonna have different costs of money. And so being able to just, like, understand that is such an underrated thing. And, you know, everyone tries to find, like, the way to perfectly project different expenses and things like that, systematize it. But it's you can't do it. Like, it's infinitely variable all the time.

Steve Uhlig: [18:27] Yeah. And because it is so variable and subjective, you know, we market deals. I know a lot of wholesalers like to put out comps, they put out, you know, their assessment of after repair value assessment of repair costs. We don't do any of that stuff because everybody's different.

Mike DeHaan: [18:42] Yep. Totally. It's it's completely subjective. Too many different ways, but awesome. Right on, man. You gotta dial it out.

Mike DeHaan: [18:48] I hope you guys are enjoying this episode. We are seriously trying to grow this podcast so that the voice of what it really takes to grow a real estate business becomes kind of the norm versus the guru get rich quick b s that everyone is fed on a daily basis. With so many podcasts out there, it is hard for us to get discovered on our own. So a quick ask, please share this episode on your social media accounts. Be that a real story, whatever. And if you tag me at mike underscore invest, then I'll give you a follow. And I will also send you a DM so that we can have a little chat about your business and any ways I could potentially help you grow. So again, please share it on your socials. Tag me at Mike underscore invests, that's with an s at the end, and I'll follow you. And we can have a little DM a convo about your business, and maybe I can help you

Mike DeHaan: [19:34] grow a little bit, or you could just

Mike DeHaan: [19:35] say what's up to. That'd be awesome. But appreciate everyone, and thanks so much for helping us grow.

Mike DeHaan: [19:41] So one last question for you before we kinda dive into our end of show questions. I know you're a family man. How does it currently look balancing your, you know, growing real estate business with the rest of your life?

Steve Uhlig: [19:53] That is a really good question. I would say now that I have my priorities straight, it's gotten easier. Honestly, I prioritize family before business. And if I've had a commitment with them, then if I'm working on a business project, the business project, it just gets put on the table as it's gonna wait. And I'm gonna spend the time that I promised with the family I've got. They are my priority.

Mike DeHaan: [20:20] Nice. And was it always like that as you're building your business, though? Did you have to take a step back a little bit while you're going through that that challenging middle phase?

Steve Uhlig: [20:28] You know, I never wanted it to I'll be honest. I I try not to ever allow it to impact the time with my family, like the evenings, the weekend times. Don't get me wrong. There were times when I was getting off the ground in the first couple of years where I didn't spend as much time with them as I wanted to. But so as not to eat into family time, I would just work later. I mean, after the kids went to bed, I would just burn the oil till midnight and try to figure out, you know, systems, and then wake up early the next day at, like, five and, you know, work a few hours before my appointment started. So I was just working longer hours to try and avoid impacting the family. You know?

Mike DeHaan: [21:09] Yeah. I mean, it's what you gotta do. And that's also one of the major hiccups I always hear from people is they have their, like, nonnegotiables with their family, but they also wanna build a business that they currently know nothing about. And the problem is is you need to have some kind of, you know, compromise there. Right? Like, it's it's inevitable. And it doesn't need to be forever. It can be for a year or two. And maybe unpopular opinion in some circles, I don't know, what I tend to tell people is like, you willing to give up a year with your kids to be able to spend the next five or ten years with them? And that is the reality of being an entrepreneur. Right? Or you have to give up on your own health and yourself there a little bit, you know, have less sleep, put yourself to the brink a little bit more, which is gonna have, you know, on its its own impacts, but that is the necessary evil.

Steve Uhlig: [21:55] Yeah. Entrepreneurship is a royal ass whooping. It's the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

Mike DeHaan: [22:00] Yeah. And there's there's no way around that. So where's your business headed? What are your plans over, like, the next twelve, eighteen, twenty four months?

Steve Uhlig: [22:08] Whoo. Man, well, let's see. We got about let me see. It's about three and a half months left in this year. Honestly, we wanna take this this wholesaling, this I'll just call it the transactional business, which is phase one, get it to couple million dollars in revenue by the end of twenty twenty five. That's my goal.

Mike DeHaan: [22:28] Nice. What are you gonna do in 2024, if you don't mind sharing?

Steve Uhlig: [22:31] We're on pace to do about a million in 2024 if we wanna double that for next year.

Mike DeHaan: [22:35] That's great.

Steve Uhlig: [22:36] And then, honestly, phase two, now that we've basically figured out the financial freedom aspect of in other words, how we pay today's bill, I've basically neglected the wealth building piece out of all this, which is why I think most people get into this in the first place. So phase two is right. Now what kind of assets are we gonna start to acquire, hold, and generate cash flow from? And honestly, several family houses and small multis are are nice, but I think we're probably gonna get into something a little bit larger. I'm looking at self storage right now as the asset class of choice for phase two of this business.

Mike DeHaan: [23:09] Cool. I like it. Are you gonna try and source those yourself? Are you gonna do it more traditionally go through brokers?

Steve Uhlig: [23:14] We're gonna try and do it ourselves. We're gonna use what we know, which is direct mail, and just change up the piece and the copy and how we do it, and just experiment when it's the way we did when we were just getting into residential market.

Mike DeHaan: [23:25] There we go. It can be done. Piece of, I would say, advice for you, the hardest part with self storage we've come to find, we've dabbled in it a little bit, is getting, like, accurate contact and even, like, property information when you're running marketing. Because, like, a lot of self storage places that are, like, the mom and pops that everyone sort of seeks, right, they won't necessarily have accurate contact data or they won't even necessarily be registered in the public records as being, like, a self storage unit. The ones that you'll tend to find on public data will be, like, the more corporate owned ones that have already been acquired by, like, larger funds over the past couple of years. And so I know people that take that very, very seriously. They have, like, boots on the ground teams to get out and, like, actually hunting for these places, or they're, like, pulling data manually off of the Internet, you know, by looking up self storage units in whatever place and trying to find the owners that way. So little piece of advice from what we've dabbled with in those over the years.

Steve Uhlig: [24:21] Gotcha. Hit it up.

Mike DeHaan: [24:22] It's Yeah. Not quite as simple, unfortunately, as going on PropStream. We're just pulling off self storage label places. But cool. Well, awesome, Steve. Congrats on your success, though, man. It's really awesome to hear how stuff has grown over the years. So we are going to go into our last couple questions for the show here. So we ask the same questions of everyone that comes on the show. And the first one, which is always the crowd favorite, and sorry, I probably should have prepped you for this one so you could think about it. But I

Mike DeHaan: [24:45] didn't, so we'll see how

Mike DeHaan: [24:46] it goes. But what is your craziest real estate investing story? And this can be a big win. It can be a loss. It can be a crazy tenant. We've had people talk about everything from, like, personal slash tenant issues to, like, the time that they showed up to a property that they had just bought and burned down to, like, people flooding properties to everything else you can possibly think of. So let's hear your craziest one.

Steve Uhlig: [25:10] Got some really crazy ones.

Mike DeHaan: [25:13] Yeah. Whichever one comes to mind first. What I always tell people is, like, you're in an Uber. Right? You're driving ten minutes to the airport. The Uber driver says, oh, you must see some weird stuff in real estate. What's the story that you're gonna tell them?

Steve Uhlig: [25:26] Well, we got a weird one that just happened recently. It was a fire damaged property in one of our satellite markets. And the lady, the woman was very, very nice needed help. And we made a good fee off of it too. You know, want to say it was like a 45 k wholesale spread, which isn't just too shabby. The buyer was through a realtor. So we'll reach out to realtors a lot when we have properties to wholesale and they'll bring the client. And this is what happened in this case. This was a realtor and a buyer who we had never worked with before, but, you know, nice people on the up and up. And I called the seller the day after closing because I was on vacation when it closed. So I wasn't at the closing table, and was very hands off throughout the entire process actually. And said, hey. How did it go yesterday? Is everything is everything okay? Were you happy with your experience? And she told me that she was happy with the experience that from our company, but that she'd been arrested the day after closing at the property. Apparently, she had gone back to the property. After closing, it happened to try and remove some things. And I still don't know the the the full story because I haven't actually chatted with the realtor yet. It was my contact.

Steve Uhlig: [26:44] But, apparently, the the buyer, I guess, saw some red flags and decided to call the police and have her taken away from her own house. Yeah. She wasn't the owner anymore as of the day prior. So it wasn't her house anymore, and I guess she was causing a fuss and wouldn't leave. And apparently, she spent the night in jail and then was released the next day. So long story short, yeah, I've had one of my sellers go to jail the day after closing and was very happy with our service as the as the wholesaler, but I guess kinda got into it with our buyer Gotcha. On the back end.

Mike DeHaan: [27:21] So that was the conflict. You said yeah. When you said she's got some red flags, I wasn't sure if you're implying that there were, like, drugs or something that were in there, and then the buyer decided to call the cops on the seller for, like, just previously having these items?

Steve Uhlig: [27:35] Well, I'm not a I'm not a psychiatrist or a doctor of any sort, but I I got the sense that there might have been some tinge of mental illness maybe on her part. Not that she wasn't competent, but, you know, in our line of work, we deal with a whole variety of folks. I had the feeling that she might not be able to let go.

Mike DeHaan: [27:55] Sure.

Steve Uhlig: [27:55] And I think that's what happened here.

Mike DeHaan: [27:57] Gotcha. Yeah. Well, at least it was only for a short time. Yeah. Hopefully, she's in a in a better spot now.

Steve Uhlig: [28:03] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [28:03] But that's a good one. Haven't heard that one before. That's very unique for sure.

Steve Uhlig: [28:06] Yeah. That was a weird one.

Mike DeHaan: [28:07] Yeah. Alright. Second question. If you could go back to the very beginning, what's one thing that you would do differently?

Steve Uhlig: [28:14] You know, I would I would probably ask for more help. I'm the kind of person that rather than take some time to stop and sharpen the saw, I'll just keep going like a bull in a China closet to try and figure out myself when I could do it a lot faster by just picking a few people's brains. So would probably ask for more help from some of the folks in in my circles, probably would have also bought into some sort of a sales training sooner, because this business is about sales. We're not really buying real estate. We're basically selling folks on why they should sell to us at 50¢ on the dollar.

Mike DeHaan: [28:48] Yep.

Steve Uhlig: [28:49] And I probably would have brought on at least like a part time team member sooner, probably like lead manager and help me divide and conquer things a little bit better. I would have done those three things.

Mike DeHaan: [28:59] Yeah. Yeah. The sales piece is massive. You know? It's not only with the sellers too, but also with the buyers. Like, learning how to, like, sell buyers, especially when it's like right now where the market isn't what it was in 2021, buyers have options. And if you can't sell them on why yours is the best deal, they're going to go somewhere else. Yep. The best people that I find that come into this business and do very well very quickly are typically the ones that have very strong sales skills.

Steve Uhlig: [29:20] Yes. Which was not me.

Mike DeHaan: [29:22] Yeah. Me neither. That's why we hired out early. We moved we moved quick.

Steve Uhlig: [29:26] Yep.

Mike DeHaan: [29:26] So awesome. I see last question. Where do people find you, follow you, reach out to you?

Steve Uhlig: [29:31] Oh, yeah. So probably the best way to reach out would be on Facebook. Mhmm. Not really on Instagram too much. And happy to throw my email out to if you want to email me as you like so suhlig@selltoguardian.com. S e l l t o guardian dot com.

Mike DeHaan: [29:51] Cool. And that's your business name. So a guardian?

Steve Uhlig: [29:53] Yeah, Guardian Guardian Property Solutions

Mike DeHaan: [29:55] in Philadelphia. Perfect. Right on, guys. So if you guys are in Northeast and you're interested in doing some deals up in Philadelphia with Steve, you should go and hit them up. Well, Steve, thanks much for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate the time. And seriously, congrats on your success, dude. It's so awesome to see. I'm super happy for you.

Steve Uhlig: [30:11] Thanks, Mike. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Mike DeHaan: [30:13] Yeah. Absolutely. Alright, guys. Don't be afraid to reach out to Steve here if his story resonated with you at all. I hope he made you understand that what he talked about there was so simple. Like, it's not easy, but it's fundamentally very simple. And Steve, in a couple of years, has completely changed his financial picture for probably the rest of his life. You know? If he wants to be that way and he's spending more time with his kids, his business is thriving, and he has really worked for that. So hopefully, you got a lot of takeaways from this one. So thanks for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you guys next week.