How To Effectively Lead Your Remote Real Estate Team To Success

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Real quick, guys. If you want to take your real estate investing business from 6 to 7 figures in the next twelve months, and you wanna do without being a slave to your business, then you have to check out our scale community. You can get the full details at collectingkeys.com/scale. But very basically, it is a community of like minded investors who are working to become the absolute top tier investors in their market. Along with three coaching calls per week led by Dan and myself, we also have a whole bunch of videos and materials that go into all the different SOPs that we use to run our business on a daily basis. This includes how we manage our sales team, how we hire, how we do our marketing systems, how we get the best assignment fees possible, how we do renovations, how we do all the different kinds of creative financing. And if you are serious about taking your real estate business to the next level, it is absolutely something that you should check out. So go to collectingkeys.com/scale, see all the details and see if you're a good fit.

Dan Austin: [0:59] All the operations stuff, that has to happen because it's a business, but you gotta get out there and meet with the clients, you have to be in front of people, you have to be selling, selling, selling.

Mike DeHaan: [1:15] What is going on, guys? Welcome to today's episode of the collecting keys real estate investing podcast. This is the show we teach you to make massive income, not just passive income with your real estate investing business. If it is your first time here today, this is the Mike and Dan show where I, Mike DeHaan, with my cohost here at Dan Austin. Hey. We talk about real estate investing and whatever else we feel like for the week. And it kinda just varies from time to time. And we are coming fresh into this episode after a little week away. If you listened to last week's episode, we kinda talked about where we were and the things we're doing. I was on a trip and Dan was at a conference. And so we're gonna be diving back into some business sort of scaling talk. And we have some interesting things I used to dive into today because every time you go on a trip, if you're a business owner, it's a perfect excuse to kind of like test the, I would say like the balance of your business, right, or like find the leaks. Yep. And it's a hard thing to I guess let happen. Right? When you're an entrepreneur and you first start traveling, I feel like there's kind of the Instagram traveling entrepreneur where they're on their phone by the pool the whole time and all those different things, which does happen like a little bit. Right? But I also think that if you're intentional about like kind of just letting the business run, that's how you actually like learn what you need to improve on even though it can be hard.

Dan Austin: [2:43] Let systems fail. Let the people fail.

Mike DeHaan: [2:46] Yeah. Exactly. I

Dan Austin: [2:48] mean, to a certain extent. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [2:49] To a certain extent. I mean, like, when you're small, you need to be more, I would say like cognizant to it because Yeah. Realistically

Dan Austin: [2:55] You don't want somebody to drop a $35,000 contract that's gonna feed your family for the next month.

Mike DeHaan: [2:59] Yeah.

Dan Austin: [3:00] Like don't let them fail that bad.

Mike DeHaan: [3:02] Yeah. Which when you're first starting out can absolutely happen. But when you have a little bit of scale with your business, then you have a little more flexibility to kind of like let things run their course. And so past couple trips I've taken, I've been kind of intentional about being as involved as slow as possible. And on this one, it was a good test because this was also the first full trip where we were both gone where we also had someone internal on our team running the sales team. Yeah. And actually running the day to day meetings, making sure that the entire process are going through, running all the transactions. And it was a great testament to show that when mom and dad are away, the kids do indeed fuck around. The mice will play.

Dan Austin: [3:44] Yeah. They do fuck around.

Mike DeHaan: [3:45] Yeah. And so, you know, we gotta come back and I gotta have a really fun conversation with everybody yesterday about like, what were they doing? You know, because stuff still got done, but like the effort of everyone was definitely encroaching on like that bare minimum to unacceptable on some days range.

Dan Austin: [4:06] Here's what I don't understand in general about humans. If you're in a role where commission is how you mark your success, how you feed your family and is directly correlated to doing certain tasks, you would think that those tasks are the ones you would do.

Mike DeHaan: [4:21] Right.

Dan Austin: [4:21] But in, I guess in the world, for the average person, they still just fuck off whether they whether they have a salary or they're commission based, right? I mean Yeah. Because you you and I see this time and time again, not just in our team, but this is a challenge for any sales manager. Like, It's how can I get my sales guys to do the right thing? And it's like, it makes no sense because their incentives aren't aligned with them do it.

Mike DeHaan: [4:42] You'd think so, right? And it's funny too because you can say there's this line where everyone has a line in their life where when they start making that amount of money, they're gonna kind of coast. And for most people, realistically, that's like 8 to $12,000 a month. Right? You're making a $100,000 to a $150,000 a year. Most people are very happy with that and won't worry that much harder. But the thing that's so weird to me is when it comes to like sales people, is they can have that lined up for a month, but if they stop working, they're not gonna make that next month. You think that they would know that.

Dan Austin: [5:17] Yeah, exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [5:17] Right? It's not like a salaried role where you're gonna be getting that consistently, but as soon as they kind of have those commissions sort of lined up for them, like clockwork, half of them will go and just be like, cool, I'm just gonna wait until I'm starving to death again, and then they start putting in the work. But the problem is as a business, you obviously can't have that. And it was a really interesting thing to sort of be thinking about, especially on my flight back. And I was aware that this was happening by kind of the end of the week while I was gone because our team member Matt, who was running everything, he kinda let me know that there were some challenges. And it was great because it gave me like seventy two hours to kinda just like think about what I wanted to do. Because my initial inclination as you'd expect was to start hitting people up and be like, hey, what the fuck?

Dan Austin: [6:01] Like, go go home. We're done with

Mike DeHaan: [6:03] you. Well, I was saying I was like, I even thought about I like, should I actually call someone and like fire them tomorrow?

Dan Austin: [6:07] Right.

Mike DeHaan: [6:08] I was like, I don't wanna do that. I'll wait till he gets back. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, do we need to like restructure how they report their work? Do we need to redo the KPI expectations? All these different things. And after seventy two hours in a long flight across the country, I basically came up with the idea of having a productive conversation around why they all think that this was a problem. And then now for the rest of the week we get to have a conversation around what are we all going to do to prevent that from happening again. And they're gonna be able to build their own solution. And whether or not it's gonna be effective or not, I don't know. But I will tell you yesterday after they got their ashtraying in the morning, numbers were sky high bro. Everyone got to work. Everybody got on it, yeah. It's just you just can't be doing that every like three weeks, right? Or every time that there's, you know, the boss leaves the area for a little bit. And so, it's part of business, part of having humans. Will also say if you have a sales team in a real estate business, especially an off market real estate business, understand that they have a really hard job.

Dan Austin: [7:13] Yes, they do.

Mike DeHaan: [7:14] Right? Like, they are talking to the most pain in the ass people every single day and is very can get very jaded from it. They get abused on the phone. They have commissions that they're expecting that go sideways because of weird things. I mean, especially you Southeastern states, what are you guys doing down there?

Dan Austin: [7:33] Yeah. People just don't care, dude.

Mike DeHaan: [7:35] No. We have never had more title and estate issues than in some of these Southeastern states we're in right now. Do we have stuff like right now where there's like nine people on title? Yep. Because there was such little estate planning done over the past generations, and now somebody like the great great grandmother or great great granddaughter wants to sell the house. And they're like, well your seventh cousin who lives somewhere also has claim now. Yep. Right? But those things are things that your sales team has to deal with.

Dan Austin: [8:05] Yep.

Mike DeHaan: [8:05] Right? And they start paying their bills in their head, and then the most unsolvable calculus problem of like family tree nonsense pops up and they're not gonna get that anymore. And it makes it a very difficult role to get excited to keep doing.

Dan Austin: [8:19] There's a lot of ups and downs in a sales role, you know, emotions because you are tying your like livelihood to the sale of something. So it becomes challenging but as a leader, the things that I do know from any any leadership standpoint, especially when you're in a sales leadership position is setting the expectations upfront are absolutely key. So when we coach people on hiring their first acquisition manager, their first lead manager, their first employee, a lot of times where they end up kind of like falling short or having struggles is they didn't properly set the expectation. And sometimes it's honestly because they don't know the expectation. They don't know what it should be and that's that's just a learning curve, you gotta figure it out. Sometimes unfortunately your first employee is is your test run on that. But setting the expectations and then being accountable, holding people accountable. So if people don't meet those expectations and they're reasonable, holding them accountable. And like one of the things that you were talking about Mike is like, here's the expectation, why are you not meeting it? Like, help me help you, right? So that's the conversation because sometimes you do miss your target and sometimes there are actually things and there's reasons why your employees or your staff miss expectations because you had a wildly wrong expectation, or you told them to do two things and they had competing priorities. I see this a lot with VAs, people just dump random shit on their VA, I've been guilty of this, and eventually they don't even know it's a priority, so you're like, why did you do that on Monday? You're like, well they said that you told me this was a priority last week, and like, they're just doing too many things and it's not easy for employees to manage. The third point is a leader that makes it so you can hold people accountable as being present. That is very challenging in a virtual business or in a business where you're an owner operator and you have employees as well kind of side by side where you're so busy that mentally and emotionally not presence, but that presence is super key so that we see with a lot of sales managers is like that dial time is like being present and available for that dial time and watching and helping and coaching and that pump up sales shit, like that's why you see that.

Mike DeHaan: [10:11] Yeah. And it's funny too because when it's a virtual business it feels really hard and I mean it's not, you kinda need to be like just more intentional about it.

Dan Austin: [10:19] Different.

Mike DeHaan: [10:20] It's amazing how many people that we've we've had in the scale community or that I've just talked to in general that have virtual sales teams like, oh yeah, we meet on Monday mornings. Like, what the fuck do the rest of time? No wonder they're not performing, dude.

Dan Austin: [10:33] The other fifty hours in the week that you're working.

Mike DeHaan: [10:36] Yeah. Yeah. And so that's like, we're really intentional to meet every single morning for that reason.

Dan Austin: [10:40] That's huge to do that.

Mike DeHaan: [10:42] And then when you're small, it's easier to keep people accountable because you can sort of keep track of your own pipeline, your lead flow is manageable, have your ups and downs. Every deal is more important to you, so you're gonna pay more attention to it. When you start to reach a point of scale, like we're getting 600 to sometimes over a thousand leads a month, it is literally impossible for one person to monitor the entire pipeline. So we now enters a new challenge where you have the team that has to manage their own pipeline that they have to report on its effectiveness. And that's a whole different level of this accountability that you have to have, an oversight that you have to have. And the unfortunate thing is is it leaves room for them to abuse the system if they want to. But if that does start to happen, that's when you have a personnel problem and not a system problem. Yeah. Right? Because at that point they are crossing into malicious behavior and not just like ignorant. Totally. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's just It's one of those things you always know it's gonna be something. I just always hate when it's on like the sales end of it because it's like, the only solution is to go into hard conversations, which no one likes to have. Yeah. But unfortunately, as a business owner, as an employer, your job is literally to have hard conversations.

Mike DeHaan: [11:55] Be that with your team or with your customers who are unhappy with whatever reason, because which will ultimately also happen if you have a business that has customers, which is the definition of a business. But it's also how you get better. Right? And so I'm hoping that over these doing these calls with everyone individually over the next couple days, we can come out with a plan that is mutually beneficial across everyone. Put some new stuff in place starting next week and hopefully won't be an issue again. And if it does, we'll just make some changes and that is what it is.

Dan Austin: [12:24] Yeah. Mean I think I'd be clear too is like a lot of people quick reactions, I'm just gonna fire people. And there is something to be said, Like so given the opportunity to fail, people do fail. By and by fail I mean take advantage of the system. Or just kind of slide back into whatever's comfortable. So there's two perspectives. The one perspective is is like, well they've already done that once, so I'll just keep doing that again, so just shit can't get rid of them. And you see that kind of snap judgment made by a lot of people, they just fire people too fast and and we see people fire their acquisition manager the first week, two weeks, whatever. And sometimes it's needed, like I'm not saying don't do it, like don't drag something out, because like fire fast is one of our things. Mhmm. But like, that problem could be sometimes solved by sleeping on it. What I usually do is I like to sleep on things. When I have an emotional response to something, I usually sleep on it, and if I have that same emotional response the next day, I sit back and I think even more about it and then if I saw the emotional response, then I'm like, okay, there needs to be something done. But usually, a good night's sleep or a restless night's sleep will make you think differently the next day.

Mike DeHaan: [13:27] Yeah. Totally. And this is also the benefit of having like a business partner too because if you do need to make hard decisions like that, I mean, I feel like you and me have never had like a thought that was going to lead to like a firing or like a major business change something else where we weren't already both thinking about it and weren't already both mutually aligned on it. Right?

Dan Austin: [13:49] Totally. Totally.

Mike DeHaan: [13:50] If you're present in your business, you know what's going on. Like everyone knows what's going on. Yeah. Literally every time I was like, know, I think we need to get rid of this person. You're like, yeah. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [13:59] Let's do

Mike DeHaan: [14:00] it. The one I think about is when we were in Lake Oconee for the Go Bronze event, and we had to do this exercise where we all had to basically rate the key people in our business. And there was one person in particular. It was funny. We both did it. We both picked the same people because we found And the same I literally right afterwards, you were like, hey, what did you rate this person? And I was like, oh, like minus two.

Dan Austin: [14:21] And they were like, oh,

Mike DeHaan: [14:22] I was minus three. Was like, well, guess we better fire them back.

Dan Austin: [14:25] Guess we know exactly what we're doing Monday morning. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [14:28] Yeah. He didn't wait till Monday. He did it Thursday. Yeah, that's right because it was

Dan Austin: [14:31] like mid week, right? This is like the after we got back. Yeah. But I mean, and in those cases too, don't don't waste time. I've never like, if you've already, now that you've made up your mind about terminating something, don't waste time. No. Just do it. Just rip the band aid off. Don't even like go into the conversation and be like, hey, how are you doing? Don't do that. Just like, hey, I've got something we gotta chat about. This is gonna be pretty serious. You're not gonna love, you know, whatever you say to lead up to it, but just be like right into it. Don't try to do pleasantries. Don't, yeah. Just just rip the band aid off because that's what they want. It's like it's like when we talk about like seller negotiations where you're trying to like lead up to the shitty price drop. Just get to it. Don't give them the shit sandwich first.

Mike DeHaan: [15:07] Hey. We really appreciate being a listener of the collecting keys podcast. Did you know that we also are on social media and on YouTube? You should go and shoot us a follow on those as well. You can find both Dan and I on Instagram. I am at Mike underscore invests. Dan is at investor man Dan. You can also find short clips from the show at collecting keys podcast on Instagram. And if you wanna see our faces talking when you're listening to this show or you wanna check out some of our crazy animated adventures, we've been putting together into some funny little web cartoons that sort of show the crazy stories that guests tell on the show, then you should go over to YouTube and check out the collecting keys channel. Shoot us a subscribe over there. It really helps continue to grow our audience. We really, really appreciate it. Well, anyways, enjoy the rest of show you guys. We appreciate you all. On that same point, right, like a good way to think about this is the length of the conversation and the amount of like, I would say banter that you have should be 100% inversely related to how severe the conversation is. Like, when you're going to fire somebody, it can very realistically be a two to three minute call.

Dan Austin: [16:10] Is it?

Mike DeHaan: [16:11] Right? You don't need to have any small talk. It usually is. You hop on and you're like, hey, so this is unfortunate. This is what's happening. If you're gonna give someone like a lecture on something or you're gonna be like doing a disciplinary sort of conversation, right, that can be a five to ten minute call. It doesn't need to be a thirty minute thing where you ask about how their kid's soccer game was before you tell them that they're sucking ass and you need to pick it up. Right? That should be faster. You can save that for the monthly review where you talk about all the things that have been going well.

Dan Austin: [16:38] Yep. Right? And Exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [16:40] It's kind of like an uncomfortable thing almost, especially if somebody feels like they're being blindsided, which is also rare. I will I will say I don't think we have ever fired anybody and they did not know that it was coming. I didn't have some sort of suspicion.

Dan Austin: [16:54] Totally. Yeah. And and that should hopefully be because you had a few hard conversations with them leading up to that saying, hey, you need to fix it. You set the expectation, you've held them accountable and they're not meeting that expectation. That friction that exists there is they know it. They see it. They just feel it.

Mike DeHaan: [17:09] Yeah. And I I will say that if you ever fire somebody and they are 100% blindsided, that is poor leadership because they should have probably had, you know, some sort of warning signal whether it was a chance to improve, an analysis of their performance, things like that. Yep. It's part of the business. I mean, it's funny. I was we've talked about this before, but at this point now, we have had almost 70 people come through our business since we started that we have brought in and fired between VAs and American based people. That's like a freaking bus full of humans, dude. Have you ever had anybody quit? Trying to think. We've had two. We've had two people quit our company ever, which is crazy, which was Ricardo.

Dan Austin: [17:51] Oh, yeah. Because he was moving.

Mike DeHaan: [17:53] Mhmm. Well, and not only that, but like the business had evolved or didn't really make sense for him anymore. And to have a

Dan Austin: [17:59] dude fucking get drunk during the day flexing muscles on camera. We had evolved past that.

Mike DeHaan: [18:04] Yeah. We'd evolved past that. So it was Ricardo and then Koa, who was our sales guy that last day. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Young Gen Z guy, I'm guessing you got a talking to about how, I don't know, I should be in a commission job. But he was crushing it. He had all these deals lined up, all these closings lined up.

Dan Austin: [18:19] He had a ton of closings. He had like 10 g's in closings, I think.

Mike DeHaan: [18:22] Yeah. And he walked away to go and do something else. But those are the only people that we've ever had quit, I'm pretty sure.

Dan Austin: [18:27] And they were both high performers, dude.

Mike DeHaan: [18:29] I know. They were high performers. Totally.

Dan Austin: [18:30] Things have just changed and

Mike DeHaan: [18:32] Mhmm. We weren't able to provide them what they felt they needed to receive in order to be successful. Yeah. Yeah. But besides that everyone else is fire. Fire. Well I mean, I mean to be fair to you, our numbers asymmetrically skewed from when we had our third partner a couple of years ago and when we asked it with him We

Dan Austin: [18:50] had a bunch of sales guys.

Mike DeHaan: [18:51] Yeah. We had a ton of people that followed him we left. And so I don't know, between the sales guys and the VAs at that point, there was probably eight or nine people.

Dan Austin: [19:00] Yeah. I don't know that they initially all wanted to follow him but they ended up following him.

Mike DeHaan: [19:04] They all ended up following him. Yeah. Yeah. Well I mean they they all departed at the same time.

Dan Austin: [19:09] Yeah, exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [19:11] Or we released them at the same time.

Dan Austin: [19:12] We released them. They went to the waiver wire, whatever it's called. Whatever it was.

Mike DeHaan: [19:16] Yeah. But, yeah, so that was that was our fun start to the week. But besides that, I mean, things have been been moving like we have our new partnership. We've crushing

Dan Austin: [19:28] here locally dude. Feels so good to get back at it.

Mike DeHaan: [19:31] I know. We started up officially in Spokane with our new partner, he's one of our main competitors here, they both did. And we'll have one of them on the show here in the next couple weeks because he's just great personality. He's like really really good at the sales side at a whole another level. It's awesome to like I feel like it's the ultimate proof of concept when you can take you know, we have this partnership model we've been doing forever and all these virtual marches for over two years now. We decided to just take it, plop it into our local market in Spokane, and immediately start closing deals. Immediately. And we're gonna be what? This is like our third month doing it right now that we just went and we're gonna close four this month, I think. We already already closed we already had our first closing.

Dan Austin: [20:19] I wanna call it three months of working so far.

Mike DeHaan: [20:22] Yeah. Within three months, we're gonna end up with four closings at the end of three months, not even three full months. This is like it's like two been two full months, but like fat deals too. I'm super excited.

Dan Austin: [20:32] Yeah. Yeah. We I would imagine by the end of May, we'll have well over 200,000 in fees, just just wholesale fees. And really, and you say a few months, but really it's like six weeks of of effort from everybody. Think we started marketing a while ago, like you know, really spinning it up as we kind of approached the partnership and the partnership kinda closed up and tied up. Yeah. So we've got we've got so much runway to go ahead of us now that we're really full steam ahead.

Mike DeHaan: [20:59] Dude, I think we only started marketing again in March, this is currently middle of May, so it was only been two months in a bit. Damn, you're right. Yeah. It hasn't been that long.

Dan Austin: [21:07] That's actually a good point though, that speaks to the fact that like when we have people coming in and they're talking about like marketing and stuff, like we've had deals like locked up super fast in markets before, but like we started marketing in May, I think we started closing deals in April.

Mike DeHaan: [21:21] Mhmm.

Dan Austin: [21:21] Did we close our first deal in April?

Mike DeHaan: [21:23] Yeah, it was, it would've been last

Dan Austin: [21:25] Like forty five days probably?

Mike DeHaan: [21:27] Yeah, was April 26, oh yeah, I was in DC so.

Dan Austin: [21:29] That was our first one, yeah. No, we closed one before that.

Mike DeHaan: [21:32] No, was our first one.

Dan Austin: [21:33] We did, because I got a check-in the mail, dog.

Mike DeHaan: [21:36] Yeah, that was on twenty sixth, that was

Dan Austin: [21:37] a check. Maybe, okay. Okay. So that's probably, yeah, that's like probably forty five days do you think?

Mike DeHaan: [21:42] Well, so from when you sent the first mail it would've been March 1, so it was about eight weeks. Eight weeks. About two months, to the first closing.

Dan Austin: [21:47] Yeah, we see about forty five days would be like an average like quick nice like, oh wow, you're closing the deal. That doesn't happen for people, that didn't happen for us, it was months for But we've refined our system, plopped in all these different markets, and did exactly what we say happens, we did it here in our local market, and guess what? It did, it happened. The marketing systems, we didn't, you and I

Mike DeHaan: [22:07] didn't do anything special. In fact, didn't do anything. No. We've said Robbie who's on our team who does all of our marketing for all of our partners for our partnership program. Just did the exact same thing that we do with all those. And I think what honestly what the success comes down to is like knowing the market and being able to kinda make fast fast and competitive decisions. Right? Like honestly.

Dan Austin: [22:27] Very true. That's a huge piece. Yeah. Being aggressive on just getting after it, going with your price, getting your underwriting done and locking it up.

Mike DeHaan: [22:35] So I think that's where most people tend to get caught up is when the leads are coming in is they are slow to follow-up with them, they're not making aggressive offers because they're kind of unsure about what really makes sense, And they aren't like pursuing things while like a speed that needs to happen. I mean, we even see it with our partners right now all the time is a lead will come in and they won't get back to us with what they need the offer to be for like seventy two hours. So like that one that we closed, we've already closed. We had the offer in and the contract signed within forty eight hours of the deal coming in.

Dan Austin: [23:08] Good.

Mike DeHaan: [23:08] We were super fast on it. Right? And that makes such a huge difference. It really helps having Cody as our boots on the ground here because he responds to stuff immediately and is out at the house so fast.

Dan Austin: [23:20] Speed to lead. Speed to lead. He gets it. That's the thing. He gets speed to lead so well.

Mike DeHaan: [23:24] Yeah. Yeah. And people that come into this business and they're trying to balance other things like, oh, you know, I can't miss my kid's soccer game, all sorts of stuff. That's great. Super noble, good for you. You will lose deals to people like us, right, who are gonna be at the seller's house an hour after the lead comes in.

Dan Austin: [23:39] It's beyond even the kid's soccer game. It's like, oh well I need to finish this whatever. Your computer's like, no, drop everything. Anything that has to do with sitting at a computer can be done at like 9PM.

Mike DeHaan: [23:50] Totally.

Dan Austin: [23:50] All your other shit, your sales calls, that's where I try to talk to like folks on the sales side of things is like, like all the operations stuff, that has to happen because it's a business. Growth, but you gotta get out there and meet with the clients, you have to be in front of people, you have to be selling, selling, selling and get in, that's what happens during the time that people that wanna be sold, like in our case, homeowners, during the day, that's when they wanna be done and if it happens to be a 6PM, you go do it there then too, but the shoulder times are when you really dig in and do your strategy and your your business growth work, like that stuff's backwards because you want to be selling and and revenue solves all problems. Totally.

Mike DeHaan: [24:24] And and the thing is people use those busy sort of tasks as like a productive procrastination tool because

Dan Austin: [24:31] They do.

Mike DeHaan: [24:32] Honestly doing those hard sales tasks, going out and walking the properties, being flexible to go and respond immediately is hard. Right? It feels super challenging to stay on top of that. So instead they go, oh, I'm gonna mess around with my data. I'm gonna dink around with a spreadsheet. I'm gonna try out these new marketing templates. I'm gonna do all these things from ten to noon, which is like prime sales time. Totally. Like that is when you should be calling. Yeah. But instead of people go and they put on their calendar bookkeeping, you know, for two Do hours most that before you go to bed.

Dan Austin: [25:05] I think I could make it out to your house by 02:30 today. Like, no, dude. Here's what I would challenge you with, if you're running appointments is like, obviously speedily, do what we just said, get out in front of these sellers as fast as you can, while you're driving there, call somebody that is in your network, call another wholesaler, call another investor, call a contractor, another flipper, have a very productive conversation with them, because when you go and get this freaking thing locked up, you're gonna be able to go talk to the people that you just talked to and built a relationship with right away. That I can't encourage enough, is like getting out in the community, building those relationships, and just using every ounce of your available energy and time during the day to be communicating.

Mike DeHaan: [25:41] Absolutely. I mean, that used to be a huge thing. It's funny. I actually remember when driving time transitioned from being my podcasting time to my networking time. Yeah. So your calling time? Dude, I would all the time. I would actually structure my calls. Like if I go through and I had to plan a call with somebody or I was planning to talk to a wholesaler or even a lender or whoever, I would look at when I was gonna be driving to an appointment and I would say, yep, I'm going to call you at like 02:50. Knowing that I was gonna be leaving my house at like 02:48 to get to the house by 03:00 was my appointment. Then the second I got in the car, I'm calling you know, our hard money lender to talk about this deal that we have that we signed around the day before while I go to look at the next house. Yep. And I did that for years.

Dan Austin: [26:28] Yeah. You know? That's productivity right there.

Mike DeHaan: [26:29] It's super productive. And I would say it's an easier, like those networking calls are easier than trying to do like sales calls when you're in the car where you're not present, and you're not giving the seller the respect that they need. If you were talking to like another wholesaler or what they're looking to buy, or another investor, Tanya Flippier trying to raise money, trying to network, Leverage that time, right? I would honestly say to do that instead of doing things like going to lunch with people, which takes an hour and a half or longer to have a conversation that you realistically could have on a ten minute drive.

Dan Austin: [26:58] Yeah. Totally.

Mike DeHaan: [26:59] Right? Like honestly.

Dan Austin: [27:01] That's really good advice.

Mike DeHaan: [27:02] It's fun to sort of see it like ramping up though. I'm super excited about it. And I will also say the thing that I have to fully acknowledge is the fact that, you know, years ago we went through those same learning curves that we just talked about here for the last fifteen minutes, and we learned this market so well that makes it admittedly so much easier for us to make decisions on these deals. Was one of them that came in that we got under contract and we assigned for a $30,000 fee. And when Cody went and told me the basis of it, I was like, oh, would you offer 100? He's like, yeah, exactly that.

Dan Austin: [27:37] Yeah, exactly.

Mike DeHaan: [27:39] Because he's been on the same playing field. And I was like, okay, cool. I think I got a buyer for this. I'm gonna send it to somebody. And I sent it over to somebody with like the numbers and stuff that I thought worked, and Cody goes, oh did you tell him you want a $1.30 for it? And I was like, yep. Exactly. Literally on the same wavelength dude. Like there was, we didn't talk about the middle thought process.

Dan Austin: [27:57] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [27:57] We just all have enough collective experience here that we already knew what the numbers needed to be for it to make sense for somebody, and sure enough, found the buyer.

Dan Austin: [28:05] Totally.

Mike DeHaan: [28:06] Done. The entire time spent on it was fifteen minutes.

Dan Austin: [28:10] Totally. Yeah. Where back in the day, four or five years ago, you would have spent an hour Easily. Figuring those offers out. Yeah. We did the same thing on text. Cody texted you and I this morning, we each just comped a property in like fifteen minutes. Just because you know the neighborhood, you know what buyers and people are going to be looking for, and so it's just like, I think this is right where we could be at on the ARV. It's like, okay cool, go make the offer.

Mike DeHaan: [28:31] Yeah. Eyeball can it. That's the value of being in a singular market and being really good, especially if it's not a big market. It is. I can tell you by the house number and the street that it's on probably what the value range is of the property, and as soon as you tell them the bed bath count, I know almost exactly what it's gonna worth.

Dan Austin: [28:50] Right, yeah. Right? It helps to, and like being at that expert level is, takes to look at a lot of lot of properties and to spend all that time you have as a new person like sharpening your steel, getting better at every aspect of it because then you can get that speedily and you can make those calls super fast like hey this dude's ready to move, I'm ready

Mike DeHaan: [29:09] to move. Exactly. And that's why a big thing that we talk to scale folks about, what I encourage everybody to do, is every opportunity that comes through, analyze it, run comps, if it does sell, follow it through the transaction process, see what it actually sells for. Great advice. Goes to another investor competition, follow-up with that person and see what they bought it for. Right? Or like if somebody wholesales the property that you tried to get to somebody else, go and look them up on PropStream, look up the buyer, see what they bought the property for, because it's not gonna show up on title with the assignment fee. Now you know what buyers willing to pay in the area, you know what assignment fee your competition's getting

Dan Austin: [29:45] Yep.

Mike DeHaan: [29:45] And you know how to analyze properties better for next time. You do that over a couple of years with a couple 100 deals, you're gonna be a pro. All of a sudden things will just be so much simpler for you.

Dan Austin: [29:55] Yep. Yeah. Great advice. Study your competition. See what they're sending out. See what they're doing and you will learn a lot and you don't have to spend a lot of money doing that. You can just see what's around you happening.

Mike DeHaan: [30:05] You don't spend a lot of money, you don't have to do anything special. That's the other thing too, is people don't understand is what we do for our business, how we get a lot of our deals, is the most like vanilla process. Like at this point, I mean, we paid to join a mastermind to learn this six years ago, but now every single person has like free YouTube videos about how to go and pull these lists send mail, and there's like these mass mailing companies that you can use. All these different platforms and AI and other bullshit that everyone's trying to upsell you on, you don't need any of that.

Dan Austin: [30:36] Don't need any. And none of it's worth shit. Just do the basic stuff. We fact, in fact, I bet you, we do Well, I know we do. We do significantly less like trickery or specialty specialty shit shit with marketing than we did when we started. We just do the same thing over and over again every single month, and it seems to be working for us.

Mike DeHaan: [30:54] Flit, I just like jump shot and bounce past basketball. Yes. It's like, no. There's nothing sexy about the business at all, other than the fact that it is fast, it is efficient, and we have done it for long enough that we know what the KPIs are going to lead to success. And we just have to hit that same amount of marketing spend. Yep. We have the contacts to be able to move stuff a little bit faster, but that just comes from experience. You can't force that.

Dan Austin: [31:18] Yep. Yep. Totally. And it's just I guess if you wanna do more, don't go and like seek out the new sexy tool. Do more of what's worked. And the quantity of what you have to do it is going to probably be much higher than you think you need to do. Mhmm. That's how it is.

Mike DeHaan: [31:33] And just realize that every single person that goes online and talks about their new super sexy secret that is allowing their business to explode, it's because they have a really good affiliate relationship or they have some kind of owner partnership in that company. Absolutely. Right? Or they're like white labeling. It is not that it's actually that good looking at you Josh and Tiffany, hi. Right? Where every single new affiliate thing that they can grift money out of you Right? While they're gonna Like that that is the game.

Dan Austin: [31:57] Last month it was SEO and optimization of your online platform. This month it's mail. They're all in on direct mail. Next month, it'll probably be back to texting.

Mike DeHaan: [32:05] Yeah. It's just ridiculous. Right? And so Don't worry

Dan Austin: [32:08] about that shit. Just stay in your lane, do the simple stuff, keep doing more and more of it, and

Mike DeHaan: [32:12] get better than the next guy.

Dan Austin: [32:14] Yep. Absolutely. So

Mike DeHaan: [32:16] cool. Alright, guys. Well, we're gonna wrap it up here. Yeah. Know. Appreciate you guys listening. You should go and share this with your friends. Anyone who has interest in building a real estate business, this is a great show for them because I don't know. I always hopefully it sounds like we know what we're doing. I feel like we do. Probably just not

Dan Austin: [32:31] We talk a lot of shit about it anyways.

Mike DeHaan: [32:33] We do. We probably sound like pompous dicks, but that's fine because that is honestly kinda who I am. So if you don't like it, go listen to somebody else. Listen to somebody wholesome like Brandon Turner.

Dan Austin: [32:42] Yeah. Has nice things to say.

Mike DeHaan: [32:43] He has nice things to say.

Dan Austin: [32:44] Let me actually do something because if I was to ever meet Brandon, let me just say this, but one thing I wanna tell him to do is that the whole homeless to millionaire titling is over. Like don't do It is. I scroll because I have his podcast on my list and so I scroll through it and I'm like, dude, come on. We don't need another dude who like did this to that. Like that naming, I mean that's just not interesting anymore. No. Change It's it not. Change it up.

Mike DeHaan: [33:09] It's especially not interesting when we are, you know, still pretty close, like the most insane economic growth we've ever seen in the country. Right. Like it's There's a lot of things they could have figured out. Could have just found, like you know, saved up their $8 in 2016 and bought freaking Bitcoin, and now they're no shit they're rich. Good for them.

Dan Austin: [33:29] I know. It's overplayed. It's not interesting anymore. Let's do some I'm not saying that the episodes aren't interesting. I'm saying the titling sucks. Don't do it.

Mike DeHaan: [33:35] Yeah. Well, I'm not gonna tell you what the title is of our show on Monday because it might be exactly that. I have no idea. I don't think it's put together yet. We'll find this. But I'm gonna laugh if

Dan Austin: [33:44] it is though. Yeah. Well, it's a it's a bigger pocket syndrome. Right? It's just like so boring. So boring. Anyways,

Mike DeHaan: [33:50] guys, we appreciate you all listening, and we'll talk to you guys next week.

Dan Austin: [33:52] See y'all.