5 Step Process to Start Generating Your Own Off Market Leads

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Hey, guys. Mike DeHaan here. And before the show, I just wanted to take a moment to talk about our most recent partner, Ballpoint Marketing. Direct mail is a common way for people to start marketing for off market deals. But standing out from all the other investors out there is never easy. That's where Ballpoint Marketing comes in. Ballpoint marketing allows you to send actual pen written letters to your marketing list. They legit have warehouses full of robots using ballpoint pens to write your letters. This comes along with all the smudges and pressure points of a handwritten letter, which which gives the same effect as if you had written them yourself at your kitchen table. If you go to ballpointmarketing.com, you can use our code m d five, and you will get 5% off your next order. 5% might not sound like a lot, but when you're sending thousand dollars of letters like you need to be doing to get deals, that will add up very quickly. For example, if you're sending $5,000 of mailers next month, that's gonna be $250 in savings. Anyways, go to ballpointmarketing.com and use our code m d five. That's m like Mike, d like Dahan, and the number five for 5% off your next order. Thanks, and enjoy the show.

Speaker 2: [1:02] Welcome to the collecting keys real estate investing podcast with your host, Mike DeHaan and Dan Austin. From wins, losses, horror stories, and tactics for optimizing your business, Mike and Dan take a real uncensored deep dive into the ins and outs of running a full time real estate investment and wholesaling business.

Mike DeHaan: [1:27] What's going on, everybody? Welcome to episode 12 of the collecting keys real estate investing podcast. We'll have a prerecorded one here because we are going to be out from Christmas to New Year's. So we are recording this one pretty shortly after episode 11, actually. So if anything crazy happens in the real estate world between Christmas and New Year's that we don't talk about, because we haven't recorded since then. So anyway I hope not. Yeah. Right. Anything weird happens at all. I mean, never know. Never know exactly. But, yeah, we thought this would be this is gonna be our last episode of 2021. It will be coming out on the December 30. Is that right? December 29. It is today if you listen to this. And we thought this would be a great way to talk about if you want to start generating leads in 2022, the five steps you can start taking, which comes right out of our free ebook, which you can get online at collectingkeyspodcast.com.

Dan Austin: [2:27] Yeah. Write your New Year's resolutions with this sitting next to you on your desk if you're that sort of thing.

Mike DeHaan: [2:32] Yeah. And if you wanna run a real estate investment business, you wanna do this full time, or even if you just wanna casually find deals, I think everyone's sort of benefit from this process. And this is step for step how we got started. And honestly, if you wanna make real money in real estate and not just park money for some decent returns, you have to be looking off market to be buying things

Dan Austin: [2:53] with equity because I think

Mike DeHaan: [2:55] we can fairly say that the one thing that we've learned over these past couple years doing business this way is that, you know, the actual return while holding it is great, but you really make your money when you buy.

Dan Austin: [3:07] Absolutely. And you can't buy off the MLS. We've bought off the MLS. That's true. It's just there's not enough quantity. Yeah. And it's interesting. We've also been the receiving end of investors trying to buy off the MLS, and it's like, okay. You are dumb. Like, the way some of the some of the offers we've gotten on our listings, you're like, come on, man. Like, that's that's I know what you're trying to do here, and it's just not a good idea.

Mike DeHaan: [3:29] I know. Right? Well, it's always like, you know, people like like, you've done like a value add and then people trying to buy your value add property because they think they can do a value add somewhere else. Right. You know, think you see that a lot in the commercial space. I remember listening to something a little while back with Ken McElroy, you know, he's a pretty big investor who owns, probably tens of thousands of units at this point. But he was talking about how they just finished this syndication project. And they were listed at the sell. And the prop property as far as he concerned was fully stabilized and wasn't much much upside left. And they listed it on the market, put it under contract to sell and then almost immediately he was on some other syndicators like list and he gets an email saying the risk money to buy his property

Dan Austin: [4:14] Yeah. That's

Mike DeHaan: [4:14] for a value add deal.

Dan Austin: [4:15] And if there's if there's one guy in the apartment space that's kind of known, like, you know, Ken McElroy is obviously widely known that he squeezed the juice out of the deal. Like, I would believe that him. He's got teams of analysts that look at these constantly. And not that another guy can't make money, but probably not what the syndicator was saying they're gonna make with amazing returns and no risk at all. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [4:35] Mhmm. Yeah. Exactly. Right. I know. Which is which is just how all that stuff is right now with with raising money and and that whole space. But that's conversation for another time. Anyway, the top five steps to start generating off market leads straight out of our ebook from collectingkeyspodcast.com. Let's go right down the list here and we'll kinda chat about them. But step number one, and I think this is also one of the ones where people get hung up pretty well is choosing your farm area, or basically choosing where you're going to start marketing. And I feel like people particularly in expensive markets, decide they're not going to do this in their backdoor in their backyard. So I guess let me press that. There's kind of two areas you can pick, you can either choose to do it locally, or you can do choose to do your investing virtually. And, you know, there's kind of a lot of different things considered with that. But I think people, particularly if they're in an expensive market, and they're choosing to do this remotely, those are the ones who tend to get stuck with analysis, Oh, sorry. Paralysis by analysis before they even get started.

Dan Austin: [5:40] Yep. And when we say expensive market, it's generally speaking people in California. I mean, you you hear some virtual stuff, but even like, you know, guy like Billy Varro, he's another guy, out there in the East Coast. He's he's in Jersey area. I mean, he's investing in his home market and stuff like that. That's, you know, East Coast is known. Some of the areas Northeast is expensive markets. But it's generally speaking, a lot of folks in California make this decision for many reasons. But one of them being that they're in a expensive market.

Mike DeHaan: [6:08] Yeah, exactly. Finding like rental properties that are gonna cash flow, and are going to have, kind of that long term growth potential when you're looking living somewhere like San Francisco, where single family homes are, you know, million dollars plus. It's not only is it challenging to find that, I mean, the upside is there if you can find them, but it's also, you know, you're gonna need more capital to get started with that. So, you know, so if you're somebody looking, you know, in that area, and even if you make good money, your living expenses are so high, you're gonna need to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to get started investing. Whereas, you know, if you take that same money, and you got the same 100 thousands of dollars, and you're in that situation, you start investing, say somewhere in the Midwest, you're going be able to buy a, you know, a dozen properties, the same amount of money versus one.

Dan Austin: [6:57] Yep. It's and it's somewhat personal preference in that sense, because investing in an expensive market has its advantages. Like you said, there is more appreciation coastal markets, especially more appreciation over over time. It does take a little bit more money, but you could still I mean, we know people that are investing in California and flipping in California. Right? Depending on what market you're in, and those are generally speaking, higher appreciating markets.

Mike DeHaan: [7:20] Mhmm.

Dan Austin: [7:21] But what you lose out on and going buying 12 houses in the Midwest is that appreciation. Although lately, the last couple of years, it has been appreciated. The Midwest has appreciated, which as we've known talking to other investors that they still don't really like believe it. Right? They're they're like cashflow investors. And so as cash flow is more important to you, then you might look at a cheaper market like the Midwest, if you're an expensive market. But if, know, we're kind of a tertiary market where we are kind of an expensive market somewhat, not traditionally, but we are now compared to, let's say, the Midwest or even the Southeast. But we can still find cash flow, and we still do by going off market.

Mike DeHaan: [8:01] Yep. Yeah. Exactly. And I think that's that's a good point. You know? And people do still do things in expensive markets. I mean, one of our our top sort of performers in our mastermind, he's in, I think, Southern California. And he did I think he said he did 14 deals this year, and he made close to a million bucks. Right? Off of all of his like, and those are all his wholesale deals because his wholesale fees are like always like 6 figures.

Dan Austin: [8:25] Right. You

Mike DeHaan: [8:25] know, they're huge wholesale fees. Whereas, you know, we learned on our venture into Knoxville, Tennessee, you know, here in Spokane, we can regularly get $2,030,000 wholesale fees. But there are our properties are also $300.100000, right? You go somewhere like Knoxville, and trying to get a $30,000 wholesale fee on a property that's only worth $150. It's not gonna happen. Right? There's not enough room on the deal. And b, it's not gonna be taken kindly by the people over there. Right. Because, you know, like, for them, that's like a big deal. Whereas, I hear in in Spokane, you know, you can flip a property, make $7,080,000 bucks. Mhmm. So, you know, if you have a $30,000 fee and somebody goes and flips it and makes 50, you know, that's gonna be a lot more kind than eating the entire thing away in those cheaper markets. Right. So, anyways, yeah, just to reiterate, kinda depends on if you're looking for cash flow or appreciation. It's a big thing if you're looking for cash flow, obviously, going to those cheaper markets where the rent to purchase rate is gonna be a little bit closer. You're gonna be able to do better with that.

Dan Austin: [9:25] Yeah. Then would add to, like, when you're looking at your market, like like, you and I, we we pull down a ton of data. Right? We look at multiple different facets of that market. Like, when we're looking virtually or even locally, what does that data look like? And that's kinda how we get into and analyze markets that we want to be in, is making sure that they they perform in way in multiple ways. I think we're looking at, like, maybe eight to 10 different statistics for the markets we look at to neck it down.

Mike DeHaan: [9:50] Yep. Yep. Exactly. So cool. Tip number two is to pull your data. So now that you kind of have the general area that you're looking at is trying to figure out who the hell to actually reach out to in those markets, where your motivated seller is going to be. There are a number of different tactics you can use for that. Some specific details about where exactly we pull in our ebook, you wanna go check that out. But, you know, basically what it comes down to is you have to look at different data providers, you have to determine different nichelists you want to reach out to, you have to figure out which zip codes you're interested in. You'll be right there. What is that? Sorry. That was my phone. Oh, your phone. You bumped it. What? You have to figure out, you know, which ZIP code you're interested in, and that's all gonna come from either your personal experience in your market or looking at some of the different websites you can use to analyze zip codes in in foreign markets? Like, I know what's what is it? Neighborhood scouts, a big one that people look at. Well, some people look at for, like, school zones and sex offenders.

Dan Austin: [11:00] Well, Zillow has good, good school zones on there already for most markets, you can map that out. And, but yeah, what is the sex offender website? I can't remember what it's called. I can't remember. Definitely been on there before. Yeah. Right. Watchdog there.

Mike DeHaan: [11:16] Is it watchdog?

Dan Austin: [11:17] It might be watchdog. Let me look it up real quick. I'll look it up while we're doing this.

Mike DeHaan: [11:21] Yeah. So, you know, using those sort of areas to pinpoint a an area to start marketing, especially if it's a larger larger area, you can't just pull an entire city and start marketing that way. Like, a, you're gonna be overwhelmed and b, you're gonna probably waste a lot of money reaching out to people that don't necessarily have a potential motivation to sell. So using different data providers, we use, you know, PropStream, ListSource, you know, what's there's a oh, what RealFlow. There's so many out there. If you just look up data providers for real estate investors and you'll find stuff.

Dan Austin: [11:57] Family watchdog by the way.

Mike DeHaan: [11:59] Family watchdog, is that what it is? Yep. Okay. Yeah, that's a good one. So look at your zip codes. So anyway, you want to start with that and then you want to sort of narrow it down to about 5,000 potential leads to start. And if you want some more details on how to do all that, keep following along with us. We'll post a YouTube video or at some point. So that's step two, pull your data. Step three, this is somewhere that I think a lot of investors who start and they're kind of cheap, they waste a lot of money. Sorry, don't wanna spend any money, so they waste a lot of time and they miss a lot of opportunity. Step three is set up your CRM. So that is your what does CRM stand for? Customer Or relationship management. Manager. Is that what it is? Management. Super critical.

Dan Austin: [12:45] You gotta have one.

Mike DeHaan: [12:47] You gotta have one. And so many people, especially when they're starting out, CRMs are kind of expensive. You know, they can be 100, couple $100 a month pay for. And so when you're starting out and you're very cost sensitive, a lot of people have an aversion setting one of these up. For some reason they have in their mind, you know, people will just call me on my cell phone, and I will be able to keep track of these people and these conversations that I'm having. Or, you know, people will have an Excel spreadsheet that they're trying to keep track of these leads. And that's I I can't even imagine doing that. We had a CRM from day one. We use one called Ari Simply. If you we'll we'll put our link on here. And if you sign up with a ari simply section on our website too. What I'll do is I'll I'll if you go to collectingkeyspodcast.com/arisimply, I'll sort of set up a a page so you can see how we set ours up and how we structure it. And if you use our link on there, I think you'll get a free month trial. So you can sort of play around with it for your wire testing out your marketing here in the new year. But basically, what the system does is it automatically takes the calls. It automatically has a place where it stores all the phone numbers. You can keep all your notes in there. You can, you know, automatically link it with Zillow. You can actually send text messages through there so all your conversations are in one place. So you're not having basically your personal text messages mixed in with these other ones.

Mike DeHaan: [14:16] Not only that, but you can set up different phone numbers in here. So, you know, when people are when you're reaching out to people and they decide that they hate you, they don't have your personal phone number. Right.

Dan Austin: [14:24] Yep. Key. That's important.

Mike DeHaan: [14:26] Super important. Yeah. People kinda laugh at that. But I mean, we've had, you know, we haven't had anybody too crazy with ours, I don't think. But

Dan Austin: [14:34] We're lonely sellers. I just wanna talk.

Mike DeHaan: [14:37] Yeah. We get all that's actually more common. Don't get too scary, but, like, one of our competitors literally had a someone show up at their office and start physically threatening their their office staff. So, you know, being able to turn off the switch and keep it from contacting you if things get weird is is pretty beneficial.

Dan Austin: [14:56] Yeah. I mean, if if you if you're pulling good data, it's taking you to the depths of your town or city wherever you're at. You're there's a reason why they're on your list, and sometimes it's not always the best reason.

Mike DeHaan: [15:07] Yeah. I know. Right? I mean, mostly it's not. If you're marketing correctly, there are people that do have problems and they're gonna be sensitive to that sometimes. Yep. And, you know, if they're the kind of person that decides that you're the reason for their problems, you know, and you can't convince them otherwise. You wanna be able to, you know, pop smoke and and disappear. And having a disposable phone number is one of the easiest ways to do that.

Dan Austin: [15:27] Yep. Yeah. And I think too, if you're in a competitive market, which most everybody is now, when I say competitive, I mean other investors, the CRM is going to get to help you squeeze the juice out of your deals, your leads. Because if you're even with a CRM, if you're not properly maintaining it or utilizing it, you're going to be missing opportunities and being able to set up tasks and notifications to call back and to follow-up To be able to listen to your phone calls and improve, that's huge. Coaching either your app manager or yourself and saying, okay, what could I have done better here? That's really huge. And then like calling somebody and trying to remember that is like the worst, like, remember what you talked about last time and you're trying to like give them a sales pitch. Like, you can go back and look at your notes and listen to a call or something, you're gonna before you call back like that, that helps you, you know, immensely. So just just helping you take get the most out of your leads and also be more competitive in your environments, like a huge benefit that's not usually talked about.

Mike DeHaan: [16:23] Yeah. Exactly. And I think, you know, being able to remember is a majorly understated sort of perk there. I mean, especially our our average time from when somebody calls us to when have a signed contract, it's about thirty days. Right? It's about a month. Mhmm. And that's average. So we have quite a few that are a lot longer than that. Yep. And there's nothing worse than when someone calls you and they're like, hey. You know, we chatted a while back. I'm ready to move forward now. And you're sitting there going, who the hell is this person? I can't remember. I don't know what address this is. And now you're caught with your pants down. Right? Yeah. But if you have the ability to go back and look at all the data, you can remember the notes, you can remember anything you put about their personal situations, you can keep that rapport strong. That's gonna be a difference, you know, in several deals a year if you're doing this thing right.

Dan Austin: [17:06] And a huge time saving because, I mean, the nice thing about Ari simply is if you get a lead that comes in, right, and you have it, you can look at Street View right there. You can see the Zillow information. You can get all these, like, really high level pieces of data right, you know, before you even get into the lead. Right? It's all in one spot. So that's also time saving if you're trying to bounce back and forth between four different applications to to just do the same thing. It's it's helpful.

Mike DeHaan: [17:30] Yep. Exactly. Perfect. And then step four, after you have your leads prepared, I guess, the list that you're gonna be mailing, you know, your area you're going to, you have your CRM already start receiving information, then you need to pick your marketing channel and how you're going to actually reach out to these people. There are so many different options to this. There's no right option. There's no wrong option. The one thing that I see that's very common is everyone thinks that their their method of marketing is the best, like if people that are successful in this and that the other ones suck, I can guarantee you whatever marketing method you think is terrible, there's probably people that are making millions of dollars doing that. Right. And, you know, the kind of the key point with all this is to pick something and become awesome at it before you start jumping around to a bunch of different things. So, know, the different kind of marketing methods, you know, direct mail is very common. That's that's mainly what we do. Cold calling is huge. There's people that do a lot of online work, you know, PPC sort of stuff, Google Ads. There's people that do SEO and try to establish themselves as like an authority that shows up organically on Google.

Mike DeHaan: [18:43] There's people that do, you know, run social media ads, people that do TV, you know, advertise people that do radio ads. What else do people do? People that straight do just like driving for dollars only Door knocking. Only direct with up door knocking, you know, like like some of the best people. I I know a guy down in Boise who he did several million dollars last year, and he strictly does driving for dollars and door knocking. He has a team of, like, 15 dudes that just go out and drive for dollars and door knock, you know, and for him, you know, being in a nondisclosure state like Idaho, that makes perfect sense. Right? Because we can't just pull same data as everyone else. So he has to go extremely targeted with his marketing. So, you know, that's like the most archaic form of marketing you can do, and he's killing it down there with that.

Dan Austin: [19:31] He has an unfair advantage though. It's like the the point pest control guys, that sell like the pest because Boise's it's near a, you know, it's it's I don't know the what's the PC way to say? It's near a Mormon market or has a high Mormon population and they are killers, dude. Like they, cause they go on their mission and what do you think they do? They go door knock and try to sell people their religion. I have a great experience with those, those guys, just in my personal experience and they, they are killer. So he probably has 15 dudes that just got off a mission going and knocking on doors. So, I mean, it works, but he has an unfair advantage.

Mike DeHaan: [20:06] Yeah. Geographically unfair advantage. That's true. Right? I mean, sure having the university there, that's a good size helps as well. You know, you can find a bunch of colleges that wanna go. I mean, we kinda have that here, the problem is our university is here full of bunch of rich kids. So they're not gonna go. They're gonna on tours for $15 an hour.

Dan Austin: [20:24] Yeah. Catholics and stuff.

Mike DeHaan: [20:26] Yeah. Right. But yeah. So, you know, there's so many different methods. We kinda break down the specifics in the ebook if wanna go check it out. But, yeah, if you wanted to check out direct marketing in particular, we use Ballpoint Marketing. If you, go to ballpointmarketing.com, you can use our code MD5 and you get 5% off when you send your I guess we send any order, not just your first one. And you know, it's funny because 5% doesn't sound like a ton, when you're sending What's up? Yeah. When you're sending $57 8,000 with the mail mail, you start growing, that's several $100, which is gonna add up extremely quickly. Right. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [21:02] And I think you made a good point when you first started the conversation that I'd reiterate too, is like, you, you kind of got to, you got to pick a marketing channel and stick with it because you can't just like, I'm going to send one batch of mail and thirty days later, I'll be rich. And then I'll do it again. You can't just cold call for a little bit and then, and then stop and SMS. You have to be consistent with whatever you choose. You know? I'd say we we love mail. Right? I mean, we do really well with it. We've kind of built that as our niche, but we also layer on other marketing channels as part of our marketing plan. And as part of it is building your marketing plan.

Mike DeHaan: [21:37] Mhmm. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, one side as well that we were doing well with direct mail before we started doing everything else, you know, and and the other forms of marketing have their own systems, and they all complement each other at this point. And it's not like we are stopping one to start the other, but we're sure doing them in compound. But at the same time, we also have a system and we have staff in place to work those leads and market, sorry, work those leads and close those leads. So we're not just marketing and getting a bunch of leads and not closing any of them, which also would be an extremely easy thing to do, especially if you're someone that's sitting on some money and you're, like, you have more money than you have patience.

Dan Austin: [22:13] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [22:14] Yeah. Oh, yeah. You'd be spending an incredible amount of money. You'd be getting nothing back from it.

Dan Austin: [22:18] Yep. Yeah. Let people, I guess, who've spent, I don't know, a pretty significant amount of money on marketing, do all the testing and retesting. And we've done, you know, testing, retest it, try this type, try that type, not just marketing channels, but how do we build that marketing plan within a single channel, whether it's direct mail or cold calling or whatever, scripts and all that sort of stuff.

Mike DeHaan: [22:36] Correct. Yeah, exactly. Let let us in the well, I think it was a $132,000 spent on marketing this year. Learn from our expensive. Right. That's right.

Dan Austin: [22:45] We've definitely made a fair amount of mistakes. That's okay. Exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [22:49] Exactly. So you kind of and you guys kind of decide what works well for you and your personality and your situation as well. You know, like if you're somebody that's working a full time job and, you know, you don't necessarily have time to be answering the phone every single second, then, like, something like a direct mail sorry. If I said if you have full time job, something like cold calling wouldn't necessarily work for you because that's gonna be more immediately proactive. You know, even if you hire like a call service, it's pretty important that you get to those cold calling leads pretty quickly because as soon as they're off the phone with your rep, they're gonna be cold within minutes. Right? Or, you know, if you're doing it yourself, it's a very time intensive thing. That is a cheap way to go. But with direct mail, what you can do is you can be more reactive to it because they're gonna be calling you. So, you know, if you have you don't really have, like, a flexible scheduling answer your phones all the time, be important to, you know, maybe have a partner or something that can help you answer stuff. But, you know, it's gonna be a little bit less labor intensive even though it is more expensive upfront than say, like, cold calling. You know? And then when it comes to things like the Internet marketing, that's going to be probably the most expensive and the most hands off. But the challenge that that and what why I'm actually not really a big fan of it is that you can't really control when results are gonna come in. You know?

Mike DeHaan: [24:12] Like, we know that when we send mail, you know, however, whatever class shipping we do, when the letter starts hitting, we're gonna start getting calls. We know that when we are cold calling, when our people are calling, we're gonna be getting leads. You know, we run internet stuff all the time and it's completely random when the Internet would come in. It's like a black box. Yeah. And half the time it's at like 2AM, you know, and then you see it the next morning, you call them back and you found out the person was just having a shitty day and was drunk at home and decided to submit a web form on your website for some reason. So Yep. Different things there. Yep. So anyway, so then at that point, you have your market, you pulled your list, you have your CRM, you've started your marketing. What's the most important thing? What's the last thing, Dan? And the thing that we struggled with the most when we first started?

Dan Austin: [25:01] Talking to people.

Mike DeHaan: [25:03] Exactly. Talking to people and learning how to do sales, which is something that I think everyone who starts this business probably doesn't really realize, especially if you're come from kind of like a corporate mindset where maybe you have an office job. And talking to especially the kind of people in this business that you interact with that are a bit colorful is not an easy thing to do. So you know, when we say this, a, you know, talk to people to learn your learn your sales skills, and b, make sure you're following up, you know, because when we when we first started, that was kind of the biggest thing that we learned was we'd send out marketing, leads would come in, we talked to people when they came in, they would kind of brush us off, and we would never call them again, You know, or we'd call them like very sporadically because, know, you didn't wanna have to talk to the weird, you know, old lady that was gonna just chat your ear off about weird stuff or tell you how, you know, the five gs gave her cancer or tell you about, you know, whatever. It's just weird stuff that she do, right? So we wouldn't follow-up with them. We wouldn't talk to them enough. And then, you know what happened? We spent a shit ton of money and we got very few deals for an extended period of time.

Mike DeHaan: [26:18] And then, you know, after we sort of did some analysis, we went to a mastermind and, you know, my our business coach basically said that maybe we suck and we need to hire this out. We don't suck. As he said, he's like, he's like, you're good at generating leads. You just suck at talking to people. Yeah. And, you know, we decided to take the risk of hiring somebody, which can go either way. So a lot of other people got the same feedback as mastermind. They didn't have the luck that we did. We brought in our first employee who had a full time commitment to now following up and talking to all these people. And lo and behold, she pulled what, like seven contracts in the first couple weeks from leads that were already in our system, not even new stuff. So she basically just did the talking that we didn't wanna do.

Dan Austin: [27:03] Yep. And it is full time job. If you wanna be successful at it and you wanna get through leads and actually do contracts every month, it's full time gig because not only do you have new leads coming in all the time from your marketing, but you have to be following up with these leads thirty nine, twenty seven days, forty five days, whatever it is.

Mike DeHaan: [27:21] Yeah. Exactly. Hundred plus days. We have several leads that we've gotten the contract over three months after they came into our system. Wow. Yep. And and a lot of those came because we have staff. You This isn't saying you should go hire staff because before you know what you're doing, you should definitely not hire staff. You need to get your licks on your own before you start bringing other people in because otherwise they'll just be like, what the hell am I here for? But, you know, we now we have staff that are just going through their follow-up process and they randomly decide to give someone a call that we haven't talked to in a couple weeks, you know, but we like we and the this conversation sort of reignites. We literally have a lead right now that I'm hoping to get soon. Like, she's definitely warm towards us. They came into our CRM a year ago this July. It's been in our system for eighteen months. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [28:09] I know what you're talking about. You know? We're gonna close it. We're gonna do it.

Mike DeHaan: [28:12] I feel like we are. Right? She's she's stubborn. Like, she's not moving forward, but their situation, they need to. So Right. I'm I'm optimistic that it'll happen. But

Dan Austin: [28:24] Yeah. Think if anybody's proof that you don't have to be a salesperson is us. Right? We both come back, you know, come from engineering backgrounds, which is funny enough because there's a lot of real estate investors that for some reason come from engineering backgrounds, which I think is just because a lot of it's a numbers like numbers and, you know, naturally we're good at numbers. It's also doing this stuff.

Mike DeHaan: [28:42] An engineer is fucking miserable. We want to do

Dan Austin: [28:44] anything Yeah. There's a lot of truth to that. Right? But like, we worked through it and we survived long enough to realize that that's not our favorite part of the business is like salesy stuff. We understand it and we know how to coach on it and we get it. It's just not our natural skill, but when you run into a natural salesperson, like, you know, right away, they're a salesperson, that they're doing good. And, and obviously,

Mike DeHaan: [29:07] I I I think they

Dan Austin: [29:08] have a leg up in this business if they can keep everything else organized. And there's no reason to hire a salesperson if you're kick ass at sales, to be honest. Right? That's what you're gonna hire somebody to do your operations, not your sales.

Mike DeHaan: [29:21] Yeah. Exactly. So and, I mean, that's how you get into more in the weeds. But, yeah, I that'd be a good good topic for another time is, you know, how do you figure out who exactly to hire and what fits your sort of purpose? Because that was at the mastermind we went to in Florida at the beginning of November. It's funny that was a very common conversation. It was all kind of people that had been in our group for a while. You know, pretty much everybody there had a operating business. But one of the most talked about topics was how, you know, how do I, sign? How do I not sign? How do I hire an acquisitions manager that's going to do as well as I do in the business? And kind of what it came down to was, if that's your part of the business, don't freaking hire that person. If you like that, you you got to find the people that do the parts that you don't like. And then outsource that first hire that out first. Know, You if you're the guy that crushes sales, do that. If you're the sales guy, but you suck at data, find a, you know, find an engineer, and bring them into manager data and manage your marketing. Yep, you know, and everyone sort of seems to think that you have to outsource the more active parts of the business. That's unnecessarily true if those are the parts that you like. Mhmm. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [30:36] So I'll be going for another time. Anyways, so we have finding your farm area. We have, finding your data. We have setting up your CRM, starting your marketing, start learning to talk to people and following up. It's pretty simple. Is it

Dan Austin: [30:53] that simple? Jeez.

Mike DeHaan: [30:54] It is that simple. Well, mean, funny. It really is. I mean, I remember when we first sell this up, we dropped our first batch of marketing. I think we got 5,000 pieces. And we're like, wouldn't it be crazy if somebody actually called us? And we had so many freaking phone calls. Didn't even know what to do. Yep. I remember because I I was still at my gig. I was working out. It was like a contract engineer for this place out in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho. And my phone just kept going, like, all day. All day. And I was I was like, are you serious right now? I could not believe that I kept getting all these calls. You know? And then I was like, I remember they started going. I like, man, we're gonna be so rich.

Dan Austin: [31:34] Every call is a deal. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [31:35] Yeah. Yeah. As far as I was concerned,

Dan Austin: [31:37] it was.

Mike DeHaan: [31:38] Yeah. And then we proceeded to get no deals for four months.

Dan Austin: [31:43] And it wasn't because of the lead quality. That's for sure.

Mike DeHaan: [31:46] No. It definitely wasn't. It was just a learning experience. So cool. Yeah. So that's basically the five steps. You can start this literally the second that you hear this. You can go start setting this up. You want specific details of different platform and everything we use, go check out our ebook at collectingkeyspodcast.com. And then last podcast, I said if anybody has any questions about how to get started or or anything related to real estate, hit me up on DMs. And it was funny. So this that episode hasn't even come out yet when we're recording this. But I just happened to get this podcast. Sorry, this podcast, this message randomly today. And it's from this guy. His name is John l. He doesn't have I don't know where he's from or anything. But he said that, Mike, I've been listening to your collecting keys podcast. I'm just like you. I'm also an engineer. How did you take the leap from your engineering job to go into real estate? I think he's looking for some tips on sort of how to do that. What do you think, Dan?

Dan Austin: [32:47] Cool. That's a great question. Can I explain how you did it?

Mike DeHaan: [32:51] Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Mean I hate from my

Dan Austin: [32:55] from my perspective because I was on the outside. Right? So, like Yeah. I think you just woke up one day and you quit your job. Like Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, that's quite literally not how it happened.

Mike DeHaan: [33:06] It kinda is.

Dan Austin: [33:06] How you did it. I'm the opposite of you because I still do work in corporate America.

Mike DeHaan: [33:11] Yeah.

Dan Austin: [33:12] And so I think it's definitely a personality thing. And I think we've both proven that there's no wrong way to do it. For sure.

Mike DeHaan: [33:18] Yeah.

Dan Austin: [33:19] Yet. Right? Yeah. But, yeah, you definitely and you're not the only person I met that's like that. Right? But just finally say, yep. Enough's enough. I'm done.

Mike DeHaan: [33:27] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you're not wrong. It's fine. I remember when we had that conversation too because I was working for you. Right. And, you know, I was you were my boss at Vista and we went out to lunch. It was my one year anniversary from starting. Do you remember this? Yeah. And we were at the Mexican place here in town and you're like, how's your first year going? I was like, man, I'm gonna tell you this, but I'm quitting. You're like, what are gonna do? And I was like, fuck, I don't even know. You know, had like all sorts of different thoughts on what I wanted to do.

Dan Austin: [33:56] Real estate investing wasn't one of them.

Mike DeHaan: [33:58] Real estate investing was not even on my mind at that point, I you had this, At first, I was gonna go and be a physical therapist, get into sports therapy, then I was gonna do tech startups. Then, you know, real estate just sort of came around after I tried a handful of different things. And, you know, I sort of got into the financial freedom and wealth building sort of mindset, and then real estate just made sense. But yeah. Anyway, if you wanna if you wanna know my full story, you can go check out a medley of the other things that I've been on as well, because I've I've retold the same story on about a dozen different different podcasts now. Don't need to repeat it right now.

Dan Austin: [34:34] Yeah. For another time. It's it is it's a fascinating story. I think I think everybody's origin story is really interesting of how you get into stuff and that sort of thing. But, yeah, I think everybody has different reasons. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Wanna quit or why you don't wanna quit and where you start. And, you know, for me, when I started real estate investing, it wasn't like an exit strategy. It was a wealth strategy. For a lot of people, it's an exit strategy. For sure. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, and

Mike DeHaan: [35:01] I I would say that, you know, to actually answer that question, a, make sure that you have, you know, financial, like like like, some financial savings. I think that's one of the biggest things that a lot of people don't realize is how long it actually start it actually takes start making money doing this. Because I mean, even then, you know, if you start getting deals, it took a long time for us to start actually making a profit, you know. And if you're trying to take money out of the business to live off of, you're not putting it towards marketing, you're gonna be living paycheck to paycheck, and it'll be very, very stressful. I mean, we we know a lot of investors who fall into that trap. So, you know, make sure that you have some financial savings as much as you can. And then, I mean, I was fortunate in my situation that I had a wife at a decent job that was bringing in some money. So, you know, that that definitely helped. And then, I mean, when I quit, it wasn't like I just quit to go fuck around. Like, I had plans kind of, you know, was at least had ways of making money. I was working as a coach, you know, weightlifting coach. I was I was doing that and making a little money. You know, I would drive for Uber. I would just do random things. You know, I would do odd jobs just to help people out to make extra cash.

Mike DeHaan: [36:11] So I was more just in, the grind mode, you know, and I went from making just under 6 figures if you look at everything combined. And I went I think in 2018, the first year I left, I made like $27 off of just straight hustles.

Dan Austin: [36:24] Hustle. Hustle. Yep.

Mike DeHaan: [36:25] You know, no actual big upside or or like regular paychecks. Just all odd jobs and random stuff. But Yeah. So Anyway and also too, I would say that if you did wanna take the leap, going through this whole process and having some leads set up for you to jump right into and and occupy you full time would make a big difference as opposed to if you quit and then start trying to set this up with the lag factor involved in this. It's gonna be an extremely uncomfortable period of time.

Dan Austin: [36:55] So I mean, you can do it no matter however you do it. Right? Because there's the one in a million success stories. Guy quit his job. Homeless, you know, homeless to millionaire. There's a handful of those success stories out there,

Mike DeHaan: [37:05] but Yeah.

Dan Austin: [37:07] It's not quite as easy for everybody else.

Mike DeHaan: [37:10] Exactly. Yeah. Those are the exception, not the rule. There's a reason most people used to be on, like, Oprah and stuff. Right. Yeah. Cool. Alright. Well, I think that's our time. My name is Mike DeHaan. Follow me on Instagram at mike underscore invests. You can follow Dan at investor man Dan. You can check out our podcast collectingkeyspodcast.com. You can also follow us on socials at that same tag collecting keys podcast. And,

Dan Austin: [37:37] yeah, this is

Mike DeHaan: [37:38] the last of 2021. Keep an eye out for 2022. We actually have a lot of content stuff that we're starting to prepare different educational stuff. We're working with a a media manager right now. It's sort of helping us sort of plan and strategize all that. So we should hopefully have some good things coming up 2022. And, yeah, anything any last words from you for 2021, Dan?

Dan Austin: [37:59] Nope. We'll see you next year, dad joke. See you. Boom.

Mike DeHaan: [38:02] There you go. Alright. Thanks, everybody. Happy New Year, and enjoy any time off that you have. Alright. See you.

Speaker 2: [38:27] Thanks for listening. Please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and check us out at collectingkeyspodcast.com for tips and guides on starting your own real estate investment and wholesaling business.