Scaling 101: Do The Hard Things

Dan Austin: [0:00] Welcome back to another episode of the Collecting Keys Real Estate Investing Podcast. The podcast where we teach you how to make massive income, not just passive income. Today's a Friday focus episode with me, your host, Dan Austin. And I'm gonna make this a short and sweet episode, but I'm hoping you're gonna take away a lot from it. There's not a lot of elaboration on these topics, and what I'm gonna talk about, which is doing the hard things in your business. I listened to a podcast a few weeks ago from another podcast host. If you guys follow Mike or I, or know much about us or listen to this podcast often, you'll know who that is, but I'll leave that up to you to figure out, make it a little treasure hunt for you as a listener. But anyways, this person talks about doing the hard hard things in business, and I've been chewing on it for a while, and I really came to this conclusion that there's like three categories, and I'm gonna get to explaining these categories here in a moment. There's like these three categories, three areas of the business, where I see most of our folks in the scale community, when they're bumping up against the ceiling, it's in one of those categories that they're not executing properly, they're not doing enough of the hard things. And there's there's something we said about doing hard things, and there's something we said about doing a lot of hard things.

Dan Austin: [1:09] Don't do dumb things, but hard things. Right? There's a difference. Dumb things can be hard, but they're not they're not the right hard things. Anyhow, my point bringing this up is, like I was saying, we see this a lot in our scale community, and there's people that end up giving up and not making it out there in the world as off market operators, and it's a lot of times, it's because they're just not able to really understand how much and and where the hard things are in their business. They get kinda caught up in in the wrong hard things. So I'll just dive right in. So the first hard thing, it's actually not that hard, it's just a mental breakthrough, is the amount of marketing you need to do. So what we see, where people aren't being successful, is they're not willing to take the risk and do the hard thing in mail, direct mail consistently. I strongly believe you need to hit a certain amount in your market of direct mail, before you start dabbling in other things and start going in and trying this lead source, doing PPL, doing PPC, doing cold calling, doing all these sorts of things. There's different reasons to do each of those categories, but if you have the money to spend, you should be spending it consistently on direct mail marketing. And for most people, as a solo operator, somebody getting started, if you can spend 3,500 to $5,000 a month in direct mail marketing, you don't need to worry about anything The hard thing for people is that they do that, they don't get a deal, they get frustrated, they start changing things up, or they go to a different lead source, or they quit altogether, and they say direct mail doesn't work, or marketing doesn't work, When in reality, they need to keep marketing, keep marketing for month one, month two, month three, never stop marketing, there's no point in the business where you stop marketing, you just always market. The difference is, is you should be scaling up your marketing as you earn more revenue, and you're able to reinvest back in your business, because eventually you'll get to the point, where do you know how much marketing you need to spend to get a deal, that's your cost per deal. The other thing I see people do is, they turn their marketing off, because like, I have too many leads, or I've got enough deals, I can't flip any more houses, I can't wholesale any more houses right now, I can assure you, you can, and you're better off letting something slip through the cracks, than stop marketing, because you stopped that flywheel.

Dan Austin: [3:26] So you have to really get through that mental hurdle of spending that money because it does it. I've been there. I do it every month. It feels like you're throwing money out into the casino and you don't know it's gonna come back. But I promise you if you do this long enough, the data trends towards a consistent trend line that you can follow, and that will actually help inform you what your business will do every time you spend that marketing. Okay, the second hard thing is, once we've started marketing, the second hard thing people do, or don't do or don't do enough is actually taking care of their leads. Like I would call it lead nurturing and lead follow-up. When you intake leads, something I've learned recently that is one of the most important things is speed to lead. I've always said speed to lead, but it really has proven that it's so important. If you get people coming into your CRM, just get after them, treat it like gold, go and get them. You'll know after you do enough deals, or you talk to enough sellers, say some of it, there's some tire kickers out there, you're gonna know those, but the ones that have even a little bit of promise, get in your vehicle, get over to their house, run an appointment, get them on the phone, do whatever you gotta do, and really, really push to get that deal across the finish line as fast as you can. Speed to lead matters. But more importantly, once you figure that out, it's the follow-up that I see people not doing, they're not doing enough of, they're not doing enough hard things, they're just getting leads, and they're like, all my leads suck. Nobody wants to sell their house, it's like, no shit, nobody wants to sell their house, not with that kind of attitude. So sticking to a sequence, setting yourself up with a scorecard for every single day, hit your follow-up calls, and don't miss it.

Dan Austin: [5:09] That is so important. Just like the marketing is going to be the bloodline that feeds the arteries of your business, the sales and the follow-up is like that heartbeat that you gotta keep it going, because you can spend a pile of money on marketing, but not do any follow-up, and try to just cherry pick the best ones, and you're going to be losing one of your cost per deal, it's gonna get so high, it's gonna be ridiculous. So you need to do the hard thing, and that is, look at what you got in your CRM, guarantee it, if you've been marketing for any period of time, two, three months, you have a deal in there, sitting there, right there in front of you, you gotta get those people on the phone. So bust your ass every single day, make sure you're putting in the time and effort to nurture and do the follow-up. Simple. The last piece, this is the part where it seems to catch people. You'll find people that come into this business as awesome salespeople, and they will go in, and they will start locking deals up. They're great at talking to people, they're great at building rapport. If that's you, your natural sales salesperson, awesome. You're gonna kick ass in this business, but you gotta do the marketing first on the front and then you have to do what I would call the dispositions, the networking, the investor relations part of your business.

Dan Austin: [6:19] Another thing that I, it's been proven to me, time and time again, and then more so recently, because I've seen the success in our own business, as we've ramped this up, is the dispositions of the property, and what you do with them. You need to do work. We've got folks in the scale community to say that they're talking to investors, and they're trying to sell a deal, it's like, how many are you talking to? I just referenced a specific story in one of our scale coaching calls, where when we were going into new markets, when we were first starting out, I was running our dispositions, and I would sit there, we'd get a deal and a contract, I didn't know this is straight from Adam. I didn't know anything about the property really, the area. I would go into these Facebook groups, I would scrape out all the emails, I would scrape out all the people that are actually active in that local real estate group, and I would be direct DM ing them on Facebook, the deals that I had. Hey, what do you think about this? Hey, what do think of this? And it would honestly, sometimes be pretty overwhelming, because you just have so many Facebook messages going on all at the same time on the desktop, and you're just trying to communicate with people, drum up some information, am I way off if people are telling me to piss off, like, hey, what's a good price for you, you know, like, what is this, you know, who's that, or do you know this person, know, just constantly communicating and building that, and that's going into a market where I know nobody, and I've literally never stepped foot into, and I'm able to build out buyers list and start selling deals. So if you're doing this in your local market, you should be taking people to coffee all the time, buying people lunch, going on walkthroughs with other people, like getting out in the investor world, don't think you can sit behind your computer and do all your little marketing, and call all your little sellers and be successful.

Dan Austin: [7:51] This is a team sport. It's more so a team sport than anything, you need to be friends with all of the flippers in your town, you need to be friends with other wholesalers in your town, you need to find real estate agents that have like retail buyers, that have like retail flippers, that have all those people, because eventually, you're going to have a deal that you need to pull an arrow out of your quiver, and you need to know who to call. And if you have to start from zero every time, you're going to be struggling. It's going to distract you from closing more deals on the front end, because you're trying to sell the deals once you get them under contract, and when you can't sell them, that takes the sale out of your wins, it takes the confidence out of everything you're doing, and that's the last thing you need. You need to be confident going into these seller points, you need to be confident you can find someone to buy it. And you can monetize a bad deal, or a not so good deal, if you have a deep enough buyers list, if you know enough people, because every property has a buyer for it. I'll give you a great example. One of our partners, Cody, we're talking on the phone, he called me about this house that we've got, it's like right in the city, looks like a totally normal house, literally has no foundation. No foundation. It's built on like little piers, like little, you know, one by one blocks, like not a block foundation, like literally like something you would put a shed on, but it's a full on like three bed house with a bathroom, kitchen, everything dialed in.

Dan Austin: [9:07] The guy wants to offload it quick. He's trying to pull a fast one on us. We can Cody kinda figures it out, like, oh, I don't think this house is on foundation. We're talking through it. And we're like, man, what do we do? I mean, well, the house is basically, we gotta get the property at a value where we can elevate the house and dig a foundation, because that can get financed. That's a big thing. Or we need to find someone that sees the value in the land, and also potentially the value in the house is like a buy and hold property. Or lastly, somebody that wants to take a house and move it onto another lot and then have this as a vacant loss. But either way, got to come up with a price that you're going to offer the seller and the seller did not want the price that was going to be kind of like digging a $50,000 foundation on this thing. Anyways, Cody, in all of his networking abilities, him and I were talking, he found somebody that did not care, and wants to invest in a long game. So we ended up basically reverse wholesaling this thing, figuring out what that guy would pay, going back and negotiating with the seller. It was a deal that him and I were literally both dumbfounded on what to do, because we hadn't ever had a deal with this, and it's kind of a tough situation. But because of the deep network we have in our market, and the people that know us, and we can pick up the phone, and there's trust built with them, we're able to find a guy that's like, I'm just a buy and hold investor. If you give me that thing really at a deep discount, I know that eventually just the land alone is gonna be worth more than I'm paying for it.

Dan Austin: [10:25] So we're able to scrape out a pretty awesome fee on that property. And that is all of the legwork that was done before, all the coffees that were bought, all the real estate meetups, all the networking events, all the hey, calling an agent, talking to them, you know, calling other wholesalers and making friends, all that sort of stuff. That is such an important piece of your monetization, and it's hard work, it's extra work. So when you're sitting there as a newbie, like, off market operator, and you're like, what do I do with my free time? If you're not calling and following up with sellers, then you should be calling and following up with other investors, and building those relationships. I'm gonna stop there, I told you this will be short and sweet, doesn't need a lot of elaboration. Do the hard things in your business. They're hard for a reason, and that's what makes people successful. When you look at the competitors in your market, or the other people in your market that are doing what you wanna be doing, and at a level you wanna do it, they probably most likely did hard things to do it. And if you're an off market operator, I can guarantee you 100% hard things. One, market consistently. Two, follow-up with your leads consistently every single day, hit your metrics, build out KPIs, and then three, having people you can sell deals with or monetization pathways for the deals you get in a contract. And a lot of times that is just networking with your local investors. I'll stop there, I hope you enjoyed this. Hit me up on Instagram at investor man dan if you have any other questions, always love to DM with people and answer questions.

Dan Austin: [11:47] Happy to help you, have a fantastic weekend, catch you guys next week, see you.