I’m thrilled to share this exclusive interview with three highly successful real estate investors, each completing 100–300 deals annually. In this video, they reveal the strategies behind their thriving businesses, including how they minimize their workload while achieving massive success. From scaling operations to marketing hacks like TV ads and beyond, this is a rare opportunity to learn directly from seasoned pros. Don’t miss these actionable insights that can help take your real estate game to the next level in 2025. Subscribe for more value-packed content!

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Welcome to the Real Estate Masters podcast, where we interview the top names in the Real Estate game. If you want to grow your Real Estate business, see more podcasts, or get free resources – Go to www.REMmastermind.com. The only podcast that allows you to directly connect with the guests and many of the highest-level names in the real estate game.

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Itunes – www.TonyJavier.com/itunes 

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Show Transcription:

Tony Javier (00:00:00):

I’m giving you access to a secret interview with three real estate investors that are each doing 100 to 300 real estate investment deals. Every year you’ll get a deep look into the businesses of multimillionaires. They will answer questions that you usually don’t hear, and you will be surprised at how little they work because of how they run their business. You’ll get the insights of businesses that are collectively doing over 500 deals a year. So buckle up and enjoy. These guys I’ve known for a while, they’re all givers, which is awesome because they’re going to play full out and I know give a lot of value to you guys. By the way, if you want to put it on speaker view, I think you can see the four of us here. It’d be easier to see who’s talking and whatnot. So I’ll let them introduce themselves.

(00:00:42):

I’m going to ask them some questions. I’d love for you guys to participate as well. So if you guys could put either questions in the chat or a topic that you want to discuss. So whether it’s raising private money, hiring innovations, whatever it is, just put it in the chat. I’d love to hear what you guys came for and we’ll roll with my questions until we start getting some of your guys’ questions. So let’s start with Michael McDonald. So Michael’s become a good friend in the last few years. So Michael, tell them a little bit about your business, what you do, your exit strategies, and then I’ll start drilling you guys with some questions.

Michael McDonald (00:01:22):

Awesome. Well, good to be here, man, and honored to be on the panel. Nice to meet everybody. Just a little bit of background. My business is based in Nebraska. A little bit about me. I am married, had a third kid, so that’s a huge win. Actually, I forgot to share just a month ago, so I had a newborn, so I have a dad of three now. Talk about getting used to a new routine. I moved to Las Vegas four years ago, and when I did that I had to figure out how to run my business pretty much entirely virtually. And with doing that, we ended up figuring out how to lock up deals over the phone very efficiently. And one thing led to the next, and now we do a heavy amount of flipping, although we can do wholesale, we can do innovations, we take down quite a few properties in our core market, but at this moment in time, I have flips going on in Nevada, Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas.

(00:02:15):

I have a couple flips going on in Arkansas as well. So all over the place in terms of where we do business, really, we’re just looking for great deeply discounted deals, a hundred percent inbound. So being a part of Tony’s mastermind, we run tv. We just fired up TV in Las Vegas. Just picked up our first deal from that effort, which is pretty awesome. And we’re buying a property in California for $5,000 down, which is pretty insane if you think about it. So siding my team right now, we’ve cut back the fat a little bit. We’re we’re seven full-time employees ramping up marketing efforts. And what my team looks like now is I have three lead managers, I have two full-time acquisition managers. I have a full-time transaction coordinator, a full-time executive assistant, and I have a marketing manager as well as a tech support who really helps with operations.

(00:03:09):

And I have a COO, which is the newest addition within the last six months and after I would say running my business very much not like a business. And the reason I say that is because if I stepped away, my business would not perform and not continue to pump revenue with my operator. He’s crushing it. Everything seems to be running really efficiently and I’m not a part of all of the decisions, which is awesome. So it definitely didn’t start that way. It took me four and a half years to figure that out, but now that I’ve got that person in place, it’s been a huge, huge game changer. So that’s a little bit about me and what I have got going on right now.

Tony Javier (00:03:46):

Congrats, man. So talk about lifestyle. When I met Michael, I think he just moved to Vegas from Nebraska, so investing in Nebraska, figured out he wanted to live somewhere else, moved to Vegas kind of like I did from Wichita to San Diego and decide what lifestyle he wanted to live and congrats on. I mean that’s a short amount of time, four and a half years to get from pretty much starting out. I think it was about four and a half years ago when you started out to being able to grow your business where it is now and automate and get it where it doesn’t really need you anymore is unbelievable. So congrats on that, man.

Michael McDonald (00:04:16):

Yeah, thanks man. It’s been a lot of fun and hasn’t been easy. We learned a lot of lessons last year. I would say if you’re actively full-time in real estate, hopefully we can share some lessons that we learned last year. But as far as lifestyle goes, man, I mean I had the most fun I ever had traveling and going on vacations, taking my kids to Disney, doing different things like that and I couldn’t have done that without the real estate business, honestly, just from a financial perspective and then also just from a time freedom perspective. So it’s been a lot of fun, man.

Tony Javier (00:04:47):

Good stuff, man. Good stuff. So I want to take a moment to share with you 10 x tv. It is the buzz in the real estate investing world right now, and guess what? I was one of the first to do TV commercials over a decade ago. If you want high quality motivated seller leads that are asking you to do business with you instead of you reaching out to them, go to claim my market.com and we will show you our TV launch formula. We have the shows and stations that we know work. We have the scripts that we know work. We’ve basically taken the formula that I’ve created over the last decade plus that I’ve been doing TV commercials and we are now plugging it in for over a hundred real estate investors around the country. And if you want to be one of those as well, reach out to us. Claim my market.com. If you want a 10 x extra marketing, go and apply and see if we have a spot in your market. Now back to the video. All right, Michael Smith, you want to give an intro and tell people who you are and your different kinds of strategies and how you’ve gone from where you are now a little bit or where you were to where are now?

Michael Smith (00:05:46):

Yeah, so I started with TV, what, August 17th of 21 and I was working a full-time job and got fired the same day they saw my TV ads run. So I had to figure it out real quick and very grateful that I had inbound from the start. That’s all I’ve ever done is inbound. Last year we’ve been in wholesale heavy, I’m trying to get to an eight figure wholesale business this year. Got a lot of upward headwinds to kind of figure out, but I think we’ll do it. Last year we did 2.3 in assignments on 140 something deals, so just over 15 K assignment and we’re looking to see what we can do to crush that and do about four x this year out of Columbus, Ohio.

Tony Javier (00:06:23):

Nice, sweet. And you’re doing multiple markets, so that’s cool. Not many people have successfully been able to do multiple markets. So I think you’re in three markets now, right?

Michael Smith (00:06:33):

Yeah, we started a third one March 1st.

Tony Javier (00:06:34):

Awesome. Good stuff. Looking forward to diving into that. James Kie, what’s up man? Tell us a little bit about your business and where you are right now.

James (00:06:41):

Hey Tony, thanks for having me. I’m out of Minneapolis. We do about 50 50 wholesale deals to flips. Last year I think we did 188, so I think 88 of ’em were flips, a hundred of ’em were wholesales. I guess you could probably say we’re probably one of the original OGs on the TV for everybody. I’ve been doing TVs from day one. We’ve been in business, we call this our eighth buy-in year. So yeah, we’re pretty excited. TV’s just been absolutely great from day one from us. I like to tell the story of the phone rang the very first day and it was a deal right out of the gate. It doesn’t always happen that way just so everybody knows. But yeah, it’s pretty cool.

Tony Javier (00:07:16):

Cool, awesome. And James recently kind of like I did, kind of was burnt out with the business and decided he needed to figure some things out and automate the business and step out. So recently, I think just was it last August or so you finally kind of stepped out of the operations of your business? Pretty much,

James (00:07:33):

Yeah. It’s funny you actually say that. I actually just stepped back in as a Monday. We had some things go on and so I’m actually stepping back in. We got a new venture, we’re going to start licensing in our home guy’s name at different cities. I think the Knoxville guys are actually on, I think they start TV next Monday. So that’s one of our next adventures is basically just selling licensing agreements. We think we figured it out actually. We know we figured it out the home guy’s way. These guys saw a podcast and basically kind of making a dream come true. This is our vision from day 1, 7, 8 years ago when we came up with all this. So that’s kind of one of the other reasons why I jump back into see how I can push that and see where we can take it to the next level.

Tony Javier (00:08:10):

Yeah, it’s funny when you kind of step out something, you get a little bored or something happens where you figure out how to jump back in and get yourself busy again or start a new business or do something to occupy your time. So I totally get that.

James (00:08:21):

It was pretty neat how the team, I literally came through the door and the team’s like back. I bring a lot of energy to the team. You’re right, you do get bored and you almost have to go do another adventure and then you either come back to it, but it is great to have my team that’s still in place. That’s what’s really nice that I was able to step away and then come back in and my team’s still there and supporting me too. So it’s pretty exciting

Tony Javier (00:08:40):

Mean you have the option to step back out if you want to and take a little time off if you need to. So that’s what it’s all about. It’s not necessarily getting to that point where it’s having the option, it’s being able to do what you want to do when you want to do how you want to do it, in my opinion. So anytime I start something new I figure is how much time is it going to take of mine and what effort do I put in which I want to put in this much effort and get this much output. Whereas it’s usually the other way around, especially when you start something, you’re putting all of this in and you’re just getting this little bit out and then as time goes on, you learn how to flip that around. So

James (00:09:14):

Right, somebody told me is you don’t ever want to sell your whole business because you always want that core that your core is still there. I’ve heard too many stories where people got sick and tired of their business, sell it, travel around the world for three years, then they come back and go, now what? Now they got to start exactly what you just said, start back from all of that. Now if you have a core team, you can step back in and build something a lot quicker too.

Tony Javier (00:09:36):

Yep, absolutely. So cool. So I’ve got my list of questions, but I’ve got some questions here in the chat, so keep those coming. So Elliot says, with tb, how much do you qualify the lead before setting an appointment with your acquisitions person? Michael, you want to jump in on that one?

Michael McDonald (00:09:50):

Yeah, mine’s going to be probably a little bit different. I think a couple of these guys maybe run an in-person model. So for us, we’re a hybrid, so remember I said Nebraska is my core market. However, we just started running TV in Las Vegas as well. A lot of our TV leads are going to be kind of sporadic. Just like any inbound channels, you’re going to have people in different parts of the state even. So it’s not even always feasible to go on an appointment. So for us, we always qualify based on the same factors. It’s always urgency, motivation, price and condition. And based on those factors, if the lead would be reasonable and qualified, that will then get passed over to our closer, which will take them through a process and then we’ll go ahead and make them an offer. Or if timing’s not right, then we’ll set up a follow up for that.

Tony Javier (00:10:35):

Awesome. Michael Smith.

Michael Smith (00:10:36):

For us, everything goes directly to our acquisitions manager. We’re all inbound and they just qualify and I think it’s 98% of our deals that close are all over the phone. So we do not go out to very many properties and I haven’t found the need to. Cool

James (00:10:49):

James. We’re pretty much belly to belly. If you’re in the Twin Cities metro area, we find it that you have to go belly to belly. We can maybe on the outskirts we can do virtual. We find that I would say 98% or completely the other way, belly to belly versus virtual.

Tony Javier (00:11:05):

We close on. It all depends on your area, how receptive they are to it, your team, how they present it, and then also your model. If you’re wholesaling and you’re no veining, it’s probably a lot easier to not have to look the property. But for us, we close on everything, so we’re belly to belly too. We go out, we want to see what kind of condition the property’s in. When we would put a property under contract, 99% of the time, I can only remember probably two or three deals in the last 23 years that we have had to back out of. It didn’t have to do with title issues or something outside of our control where our team just didn’t run the numbers. So we want to make sure that when we block something up that we close on it. So as far as qualifying, obviously for us we want to put out a general price.

(00:11:49):

So sometimes we give a price range, sometimes we give ’em a roundabout price, just depends on property itself. But for us we always want to make sure that they know too much on the property or else it’s just a dead deal and then give them either a price range or a pretty roundabout price of where we’re going to be to feel them out. We don’t want to waste our time going out there if we need to be at a hundred thousand and they are dead set at 150,000. But on the other hand, we noticed that if they have the property paid off and especially if they inherited the property, they’re willing to probably take a lot less than what they said. So our rule of thumb is if it’s paid off, we go to the property. Actually had people take a 50% cut from where they were down to our price and the properties paid off and they were able to do that. Whereas if obviously they owe too much, then there’s no reason to go out and take a look at it. So Elliot, hopefully we answered your question there. And how about growing and managing a sales team? This one’s the tough one, so Michael McDonald.

Michael McDonald (00:12:46):

Yeah, so I would say as James said, he’s been trying to fire himself as a COO. I’ve been trying to fire myself as the sales manager for a long time. I’m not a COO for my company anymore, but I’m still overseeing the sales team. It’s kind of funny how that works for us. It’s been very challenging, but one of the biggest piece of advice that I could give is you have to have a really crystal clear expectation and you have to have a good onboarding process and daily training with your sales team. And so every morning like clockwork, 10 o’clock, the sales team gets together, they report the previous days and numbers and we hold them accountable to the expectations that we have If they’re not hitting them, which it happens. We had to fire somebody at the end of the year because they weren’t hitting their expectations. So finding somebody who’s as hungry as as the business owner, I would just say good luck, but there’s good people out there who want to and have what it takes to do it. You just have to make sure to communicate that vision so they want to work for you.

Tony Javier (00:13:43):

Awesome. Michael Smith, this is something you’ve done in a lot. Very short amount of time is growing your sales team, so I’d love to hear what you have to say about this.

Michael Smith (00:13:53):

A lot of it’s what Michael said. I’ve been sales manager the entire time. Sales is what I came from and why I got into this. I was buying properties before off of wholesalers and realizing they were making more money than I was. So for me it is daily training. It’s finding people who are coachable to find athletes that made it through all four years of college or people who have been with the same company for three to four years. We’re finding people, we, in our interview process, we have ’em make a mock call and then we just, no matter if it’s good or bad, we just tell ’em it was one of the worst ones we ever heard and just see how they respond to it because that’s the person who’s going to do really well is when they hear they’re doing bad, instead of trying to fight you or say you’re wrong, they’re going to come back and say, okay, can you educate me and tell me what I could have done better?

(00:14:34):

And if they respond that way, I’m like, okay, if they’re coachable last, just like someone who doesn’t get offended when someone says no or upset when someone says no or when we have a 50 5K assignment that was folks closed today and the seller got a realtor yesterday and I had a feeling it was going to go sideways. It didn’t close. That sales rep could have been all upset about it. I mean he was on track to close 200 k, which is almost 9% commission. That’s a pretty good math. Or he could get back on the phones. He chose to get back on the phones. That’s someone who’s going to do well instead of worrying about what didn’t happen, focusing on what you can control, which is the next phone call.

Tony Javier (00:15:06):

Good stuff. How about you James?

James (00:15:07):

 Building a sales team. I found the perfect version of myself and we hired her. She’s a female version of me and normally I say that about my daughter, but she’s pretty awesome. She can really run the team. She comes with five kids and she’s still juggling five kids and now she’s got to juggle five other people at work. So I’ve heard somebody say something where they hire a stay at home mom or a mom and they actually kick butt at those positions because they’re so used to juggling everything around. So she’s been with us for almost three years. One of the other things we do is we don’t like to hire realtors. We like to hire investors and then we actually like to hire somebody who’s just in sales and then we’re going to teach ’em the investing side, then we’re going to make ’em a realtor.

(00:15:46):

Everybody of our team is a realtor and we look at that as if we’re going to go out to a house, we might as well build a rapport and if we can’t buy their house for cash, hey, maybe we can still list it and keep moving forward. So plus it puts a little bit, a lot more integrity, not just a little bit, a lot more integrity towards when we’re buying, we’re going up against another wholesaler. So I really look at that. That’s pretty huge. But like I said, training, we’ve tried to take realtors that have been around for 10, 15, 20 years and teach ’em. They don’t get the discount part. They think a discount is like $10,000 off. I’m like, no, it’s like 30,000, 30%. So that’s probably one of the biggest things that I think, I mean, we don’t go anywhere without our sales. We don’t really go anywhere without our marketing and then our marketing is our sales. So I think our sales is the most important, one of the most important things we have to make sure we take care of your team. The other thing is making sure your team is always recognized, empower your team. That’s really, really huge. If you don’t empower ’em and you micromanage, they’re not going to stick around.

Tony Javier (00:16:46):

I heard something the other day, Dan Martel I think is his name. He said, manage the outcome, not the tasks. And that hit me. I am someone that I want the outcome, but sometimes I’ll get a little too granular with a task. So it’s like, here’s what I want and you guys figure out how to get there and I’ll train you worse than answer questions. But yeah, empowering for sure. And one thing I’ll say about salespeople, that’s probably one of the hardest to hire and there’s multiple reasons I would say the main thing is, is that even if they’re a decent salesperson, they’re going to figure out how to sell you that they can do a good job. It’s not very hard to sell you that they can do a good job, but once they get in there, that’s when you really go, oh shit, I was oversold or something of that nature.

(00:17:32):

So really digging deep. I think that’s probably one of the deepest you have to dig, I think into personalities and references and things of that nature as salespeople is because they will tell you what you want to hear to get the job, but you don’t know if they’re going to perform. The other thing is is that the good ones really, they typically want more want too much, and so if you don’t give them what they want, they’re going to trade money over what you give them, right? So not to talk bad about salespeople, but they are the toughest to hire, I think, and to retain. And so I think you guys kind of get the point there. So

James (00:18:11):

You got to dingle shiny things in front of ’em every once in a while, Tony got to keep ’em occupied.

Tony Javier (00:18:16):

Yeah, well that’s the thing is, so my sister does my acquisitions and so she is not a salesperson whatsoever. She runs numbers, she manages the office. She actually does multiple roles, but a lot of people think that you have to have super sales ability to be able to sell. I think to me it’s almost more of a personality, more of the personality metrics of they show up, do they try hard? Do they do what they say they’re going to do? I would pick a bad salesperson that does all of that and is a culture fit over someone that says, I can do all of these things and sells the crap out of you, but they don’t show up or they don’t do what they’re supposed to on the other side. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that too many times. All right, cool. So Jason Lewis, do you guys split up your acquisitions and dispositions companies? Meaning do you market and brand using the same or the acquisitions of Dispo side and some people do, others have separate branding names, reviews, websites and things of that nature. So Michael McDonald, do you split the names up of your dispositions and acquisitions? And actually on top of that I’d like you guys to answer, is your acquisitions department the same as your disposition department?

Michael McDonald (00:19:37):

Yep. So branding wise, split ’em both up. I didn’t do that until I had a seller call me from the disposition line on one of the deals that sent out and that was awkward. So we split that out since then and our disposition department is separate from our acquisitions department. We don’t use our salespeople on acquisitions to seller deals.

Tony Javier (00:20:00):

Do you feel like there’s a disconnect between the acquisitions and dispositions department?

Michael McDonald (00:20:05):

Yeah, that’s been a difficult gap to bridge from a communication perspective, getting them all the information they need upfront. So we’ve created forms of things that the dispositions are going to have questions on that the acquisitions that need to have filled out. That way it makes their job easier, but that’s always a gap that’s been difficult to tie together

Tony Javier (00:20:28):

For us. Yeah. Cool. What about you, Michael? Do you split yours up?

Michael Smith (00:20:33):

So we are looking to do that right now, split the companies and we’re just trying to figure out what to name our dispo side, so we are going to be doing it, haven’t done it yet, and then we’re going to run TV ads on the dispo side, trying to figure that out. As far as sales reps, they’re all in the same room, but they’re two different roles. We don’t let them, we have one guy who kind of fills in when needed whatever side needs help, but for the most part they’re all or all dispo and so they can communicate to each other live when they’re on calls and it makes it a little bit easier on the communication there.

Tony Javier (00:21:09):

Cool. Awesome. What about you James? Do you split your departments up?

James (00:21:13):

Yeah, we definitely split acquisitions and dispositions up. At first we didn’t, and like Michael said, it gets very awkward when somebody calls and they see that you’re putting their house up for, you’re making 30 grand in between. So we definitely got rid of that. We started, it was a couple of years ago. Our goal here is to use our acquisitions as more of a, I’m sorry, disposition as more as a newsletter that goes out. We do email blast certain times of the week and it’s constantly the same thing. So it’s like Mondays at three, Wednesdays at 10 and was it like noon on Friday?

(00:21:57):

Again, our goal was to have other wholesalers that are in the Twin Cities areas, Hey, let us be your disposition person to get rid of the property for you. We’ve just been so busy, we really haven’t been able to do that. We just thought we figured why not try to figure out how to make even more money out of a disposition side and they don’t interact. The only time they interact is maybe, Hey Paul, you thinking you can get rid of this property for roughly the same amount we can make on a flip? And if he can, he gets rid of it. So that’s the only kind of talking they do. Otherwise, yeah, they’re pretty much on the separate corners.

Tony Javier (00:22:41):

Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Alright Brooks, thanks for the question. If you have realtors on your team, are you presenting a cash offer when belly to belly along with the option to list or is it the option or is it just one option presented to the seller, Michael McDonald?

Michael McDonald (00:23:02):

Yeah, so our acquisitions are not realtors. However, I am owner in a brokerage as well. So we do have a way to funnel in realtor referrals. So we do definitely capitalize on that, but our acquisitions team is always going to go for the deep discount for the wholesale as low as possible. If that doesn’t work, we’re actually pitching ations as well, so if they want a higher price and their home, we’re going to go ahead and shoot for the novation. If that doesn’t work, then we’ll refer it out to the agents. So we have a couple of different exit strategies and we’ve done creative as well, but realistically it’s like we’re just trying to flip it and if we can’t do that, we’re going to refer it out.

Tony Javier (00:23:50):

Cool. Michael Smith, do you have realtors on your team?

Michael Smith (00:23:54):

Yeah, I don’t have any realtors. We’re just focused on the cash. Every now and then we’ll do a novation. We’re just trying to get the best at being the best cash buyers first.

Tony Javier (00:24:05):

Cool. What about you, James?

James (00:24:07):

Yeah, we’re definitely all realtors. What we try to do is we’re paying a lot for those leads and we want to monetize every single dollar that comes out. So if we can help ’em out, we like to say we’re a full solution real estate company, you come to us with an issue, let’s figure it out for you. So we do give multiple offers in different routes.

Tony Javier (00:24:28):

Cool. Yeah, my acquisitions person, my sister, she is a licensed realtor, but she does not really list properties, so we just refer those out. I think we did try at one point in time and people when they want cash offers typically want a cash offer, and if they’re going to deal with a realtor, they kind of feel like it’s bait and switch sometimes if you’re coming out as a realtor is what we’ve kind of found. So we actually just refer those out to another realtor. We actually have several clients that are paying for their ad spend just from realtor referrals. So that is, we don’t do a great job of that, I’ll be honest with you. We just don’t focus on it a lot. But we do have clients that pay for their ad spend just from realtor referrals. So if you guys have realtors on your team, if you have realtors you can refer to, you can make, I dunno, a few thousand bucks a month at least from those referrals. We actually have a client of ours I think was doing eight to 10 grand a month just in realtor referrals, which is crazy. I don’t know how he was doing it, but he was doing a really good job. I think the realtor was on his team actually now that I think about it. So made a deal.

James (00:25:33):

That’s how we have it set up, Tony, is we don’t want them to actually turn it around and run with the listing. They get a percentage of that listing and they tee up their job is to tee up the in-house person because again, we had it before where they would get 50% of the listing and now they’re trying to jack how they’re going to make the most money. And so their goal is to a hundred percent buy for cash or if they realize it’s not going to go that way, tee up that in-house person because you don’t want your acquisition’s always buying. You’re going to get burned on that

Tony Javier (00:26:08):

And don’t ask if they want a realtor referral, just tell them We found that that’s helped a little bit where we’re like, okay, we’re going to connect you with a realtor and have them give you a call instead of like, Hey, do you want a realtor to call you? They’re going to know almost every time. So instead tell them

James (00:26:24):

That’s a great idea

Tony Javier (00:26:25):

And you’re more likely to get them to talk to the realtor for sure. Cool. All right, well, I’m going to jump into my questions. You guys ran out of questions here, so if you guys have any more questions, please do put ’em in the chat. So for those that are growing their team, which I think everybody is at some point looking to hire in the near future, what is the one hire or maybe even two hires, whatever you want to get into that has helped you the most in your business? So I know people ask me, what should my first hire be that are solo entrepreneurs? So I’ll kind of answer that here in a little bit, but Michael McDonald, what’s one of the, if not maybe the top two hires that you made in your business?

Michael McDonald (00:27:11):

So I think you really need to figure out what your unique ability is. Most of the real estate investors who I talk to sales and are good at it, which is what makes them successful. So you want to get the paperwork, the data work, all of that kind of stuff off your plate. So for us it was a transaction coordinator, got them doing the paperwork set of things and then in order to scale needed somebody to start taking the calls. So whether that be a lead manager until you can hire a closer, but those couple were our first hires.

Tony Javier (00:27:52):

Cool. Michael Smith?

Michael Smith (00:27:55):

Yeah, I think what really transitioned was last January when I hired a sales guy. I really just spent the time training him and educating him, reviewing every call and I think last year he closed his first 12 months, 1.1 or something like that and he’ll I think double that this year. I think the best hire for me is going to be sales management. I hate that part of the business and we got that guy starting here in about two weeks, so I’m really excited for him to come on board and really do a better job than what I do at it.

Tony Javier (00:28:28):

Very nice. James

James (00:28:32):

Tc Michael is on spot on. You need somebody to run all your paperwork. I’ve closed so many deals, I’ve never done the paperwork in my life and that person’s actually my wife, so she was one of our very first persons that we hired and I remember my business partners, like what happens if we have to fire her? I go, well then we have to fire her for crying out loud. I mean, she’s a big girl, but this is the person that we want that we can trust. And that’s worked out really well. Obviously the other one was a sales manager. That’s really, really huge. You really have to trust that person and that’s when I think I mentioned before, my sales manager is me and she can think outside the box. She keeps everybody in control. I think that’s probably been one of the other best hires we’ve hired too. So maybe I’m onto something that they’re both female too, so

Michael McDonald (00:29:31):

We can out

Tony Javier (00:29:32):

Loud. What’s that?

Michael McDonald (00:29:35):

Where did you find your, who’s a great candidate for a sales manager because Michael, you just said you hired one and James, you’re talking about the lady who’s like you, who’s great. Is there a certain background that we should,

James (00:29:47):

I don’t know because again, I can’t compare her. She is female. I’m a male, so somebody who can pivot. I mean my background was I was a firefighter. I had to be able to think outside the box at any given time. You need somebody that definitely is, that can pivot and she can pivot.

Tony Javier (00:30:14):

She’s

James (00:30:14):

Texting me right now and making fun of me now. So it’s kind of funny. She must be listening.

Tony Javier (00:30:21):

Yeah, wives through everything even if they’re not there. So yeah. So for me, I think the very beginning admin, when I have a in-person mastermind, one of the favorite things I like to do is called the, oh gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve done it. The activities analysis, and so you’ll list everything that you do in your business and put a dollar value on it and importance to it. So obviously the dollar value is pretty self-explanatory. The importance would be one, two or three. One is it brings a lot of value to your business, brings income in and you like it and you like to do it and you’re good at it. And then at the other end of it is three, which is you don’t like to do it, you’re not good at it and doesn’t bring in a lot of money and take those number three activities and try and hire someone to take care of those personal assistant.

(00:31:12):

Back in the day I was managing a bunch of my own properties, so I had then take on property management, then I had to do transaction coordination. So getting all of those low level activities off of you so that you can focus on the sales, you can focus on the marketing and then eventually you’ll hire sales managers or marketing managers and things of that nature to replace yourself. Some people say, oh, I want to hire a COO and then build the team down. You could do that, but if they’re not very good, you’re going to spend a lot of money and they’re going to make a lot of wrong hires. So I always like to start from the bottom, get all the mundane stuff taken off my plate or the businesses plate, whichever business it is and then build it up from there. All right, cool. So great question Deron. So how much do you spend per month on marketing? Michael McDonald? Do you want to answer that one?

Michael McDonald (00:32:07):

We are this year committed to spending $55,000 a month and that’ll fluctuate between 55 and 60 and really just reverse engineered what our revenue goal was and we’re going to reevaluate at the end of the quarter. But I told my sales team, I’m committed and no excuses from there.

Tony Javier (00:32:31):

Nice, very nice. Michael Smith?

Michael Smith (00:32:34):

Yeah, we’re right around 65. I think January was a little bit higher. We upped our Columbus and Cleveland Edge and then we started another market. So our goal get to about 108 months. Very nice. What about you James?

James (00:32:53):

I laugh. We’re scheduled 1.2, 1.3 this year in advertising is what we’re projected.

Tony Javier (00:33:02):

It’s about a hundred KA month hefty spends there. But you know what happens, you find what works, you continue to add to that and then you find another marketing method. I know James doesn’t have a lot of marketing methods. He does mainly one, but I get this question all the time. Can you just have one? Can you just do tv? Can you just do, and it can happen, you can, but what happens if that marketing method doesn’t do well for a few months for whatever reason, whether it’s TV and when the political campaigns come out and they flood you with all kinds of different marketing on TV or other TV commercials and either you have to pay more or people don’t watch as much or whatever the situation is. I’m the proponent to do as many things as you possibly can. So we spend, I don’t know what the exact number is, it’s at least 20,000, somewhere between 20 and 30,000 a month.

(00:33:54):

And we do everything you could possibly think of. We do tv, radio, postcards, Google, PPC, Facebook, we have a digital billboard that we own on one of our commercial properties that we have. So almost every single thing, we don’t do cold calling and texting. We don’t really do any outbound and some of those marketing methods don’t even return that much. We just know that we want to be everywhere. So like our PPC and our Facebook, we get a one to two times return on our money and sometimes we’ll get a three times if we’re lucky, but we just want to be everywhere. And we don’t know if those marketing methods are actually helping other marketing methods where it may be one to two on this side, but it’s really closer to three because it helped us get deals on the other side where they told us it was from another marketing campaign when it was really this one. So people ask that question, what should the minimum return be? And to me if we can break even and do it or especially do it two to three times a, we’re definitely going to keep it. So

James (00:34:55):

Just add, Hey Tony, we actually do a lot more than maybe you think. Yeah, I just saw somebody was asking the big channels that we do. Obviously we do tv, a lot of PPC, we do mailings, we always have to dabble. My suggestion is make sure you’re always dabbling like what Tony said, always dabble in something else besides your main line. You never know when that’s going to go a little sideways for a little while. So that’s the best advice I could say. So somebody was asking a lot of it’s PPC tv. We also do billboards. I think we need to talk to Tony about some radio and they all work together. Like you just said, one feeds the other. It’s a lot of branding. You want to make sure if you’re going to have a brand that you’re branding that really works well, if that makes sense

Tony Javier (00:35:50):

And consider it a long-term play. I mean obviously if you’re spending money on PPC and you’re literally getting no deals and you want to cut it, but if you’re making a little money or breaking even, like I said, I mean it’s a long-term play because at some point there might be a year where just all of a sudden you get a five to 10 x return because you close a few big deals. So usually averages out in your favor if you stick to a long-term. So cool. Brooks looking for some general advice here around the sales manager role. I have hired a handful of acquisitions managers and lead managers in the last 12 months and I’m failing as a manager. I can close deals but feel like I become the fallback person to attend the seller appointment with them to help them close. Therefore I don’t end up hiring myself out of a job. So I bet you every single one of us have been there. What are some things that you guys have done to overcome that? To hire someone that doesn’t have to be micromanaged and can do their job by themselves? Michael McDonald.

Michael McDonald (00:36:50):

Well, I don’t have a sales manager yet. I am that person, so I’m with you at Brooks. Honestly, it’s been a tricky one for me to also get out of as well. I’ll still close deals from time to time because I love to do it and that’s a weakness, right? My team, I shouldn’t be getting on the phones and closing deals probably, but it’s tempting when you like it and you’re good at it. So one thing that I would say definitely would help from a management perspective is I’ve had an acquisition manager who had sales experience and they’re used to managing their own pipeline and they’re used to eating what they kill. So if you give them the right tools and the resources and you have a good rapport with them makes managing very easy. So that’s definitely nice when you can just find a salesperson who gets the job done, makes management a lot easier.

Tony Javier (00:37:47):

Cool. Michael Smith?

Michael Smith (00:37:51):

Yeah, so how I’m looking at it is I had 10 years of sales experience with 3 billion plus companies and I was top 10 rep at all three of those companies. And I look at all the sales managers I had for the most part they were only hired because they were good sales reps or promoted to sales manager. They weren’t actually really good sales managers. So the best sales managers I’ve ran into are really good listeners, really good at understanding and keeping their salespeople on task. I haven’t found many salespeople who are good at staying on task and keeping up and following up with sellers and all those things. They’re really good at listening to people or it can be a learned skill. And to me the best sales managers can go in, listen to their calls, give ’em feedback, coach them up and then handle emotions.

(00:38:34):

I think a of salespeople are super emotional. So if you can handle those emotions and know when that person’s being emotional and really break down like, Hey, what’s going on in your life that’s causing this? Because a lot of times it’s not work related and then help them out with whatever that problem is. They get back on track to close the deals, which I have found to be really huge help with my sales team. Whenever they’re dipping, it’s typically something that’s happening outside of life and I got to go figure that out and help them manage that problem, whatever it might be. And so that’s what we’re looking for in a sales manager, someone who understands sales process, stuff like that. I don’t expect ’em to be the best at sales, but I do expect ’em to be the best at handling employee emotions, understanding what’s going on in their lives and how to help improve their lives because when their lives are improving, they’re doing better at work.

James (00:39:16):

I don’t have much, thanks for describing my sales manager. I defer a lot. I think that was

Michael Smith (00:39:22):

The case because female, no, no, females are really good at that. They are

James (00:39:27):

Right. You hit it spot on. That’s exactly where she’s at. That was probably the one thing my emotions are I want to tell ’em just to go pound sand, right? I mean she’s probably a little than that job. Do the worst. Whatcha here to do? You get paid. I’m hrs worst nightmare. But yeah, you said it right. I don’t even know if I can even add anything else to that spot on.

Tony Javier (00:39:53):

Cool. Awesome. Good stuff guys. Sterling, do you offer, oh, skip down. Do you offer radio management too? Yeah, we do radio as well. So I do TV and radio. As I mentioned, my media team has been doing radio for 20 plus years. They can manage radio like the back of their hand, like tv. So we absolutely do do that. Oh, let’s see. Sorry, my screen here is a little small on the chat. It’s all a good question here. Where is it? Eric Kielburger, what key metrics are you tracking on ad spend and what are the actual numbers? Cost per lead. Cost per deal. Leads per deal. Michael, do you know your numbers? Michael McDonald.

Michael McDonald (00:40:40):

Alright, let me find that question again. What was the first part of that, Tony?

Tony Javier (00:40:45):

What key metrics are you tracking? Are you doing cost per lead? Cost per deal, leads per deal and then I think he wants to know the numbers if you have ’em to.

Michael McDonald (00:40:56):

So all of it, especially when you’re spending really any amount of money, you should be tracking your numbers. But when you start to spend 50, 60, a hundred thousand a month, it’s life or death for a small business to track your numbers. So what I’ll say is we have two different components. When a lead comes in, we are tracking if it’s a legit qualified lead or if it’s not, meaning solicitations. Somebody take me off the list. We do direct mail as well. As far as telling you exactly right now, I had have to look, but historically speaking I can just kind of give you a last year type from 2023 and we will talk about costs per deal. Cost per deal was high for us. We were probably 7,000, maybe $8,000 last year was really high for us. So a lot of that had to do with some poor sales performance. Like I said, we fired somebody and various other things trying to maneuver the market, which is why I said there’s some lessons that we learned last year, but ROI on our marketing, if we’re not at least two, like Tony said, two x return on investment. So we track how much did we spend, what deal came in that gives that marketing channel credit and what was our ROI, if we’re not at least two x, we’re reevaluating it.

Tony Javier (00:42:30):

Cool. 

Michael Smith (00:42:34):

For us, our cost per deal is about 3,500 bucks. I don’t remember all the KPIs that were being done. Do I track ’em? Yes. What really helped me track them all, Tiffany and Josh High, they’re good buddies of mine and I think Michael’s in there coaching program too. I think he would say they have a lot of good systems in place and processes and really know their numbers inside and out and I’m trying to get to their level. But yeah, definitely track them. The biggest thing I look for, we close one in eight or we lock up one in 16 and close about one in 19. So we’re trying to get that down. We get a ton of deals that aren’t even closeable, but I think there’s still opportunities there. So I’ve always found whenever that creeps above one in 16, I start counting the team and it’s amazing that they bring it right back down. So

Tony Javier (00:43:25):

Very nice. What about you James?

James (00:43:28):

I wish I could say I was the numbers guy on this team, but I’m not. So guys, I have no idea. When I go to these mastermind groups and when I present, I’m presenting numbers that I have no idea. We got pretty big pretty quick and I know everyone’s going to probably get down on me for not knowing the numbers, but I really do trust my team, my business partner, he knows the numbers, I guarantee it. I know stuff that he doesn’t know and vice versa. And then it comes with the trust. So again, maybe be a little tap dancing here a little bit, but it is what it is

Tony Javier (00:43:59):

Now. I’ve always been the person over the years, which has done okay for me, but Pike could have done it better. Is there money in the bank? Are we making money? So finally last year I just started diving into the numbers, so I’ll just share my numbers with you guys. We spent two 50 last year, did 1.4 in assignments, profit per deal. I don’t have it averaged out, but based on, we do it per channel so we can see how much we make per channel. 23,000 to 36,000 per deal. Cost per lead probably averages out around 800. Our highest is 1600, our lowest is six. No 6 88 SEO. We don’t really count 120 just because we don’t spend a lot, but we allocate a lot to SEO even though we’re not sure if it’s our SEO efforts or them finding us on Google Maps and things of that nature. And then cost per purchase is between 6,000 and 9,000 and what did you say yours was, Michael? 7,000?

Michael McDonald (00:45:09):

Yeah, between seven and eight last year, which to me is unacceptable. It needs to be four to five where I’m going to feel a lot better about it. So we’ll get there.

Tony Javier (00:45:19):

Yeah, I mean it also depends on how much you’re making per deal. I think I’m kind of okay with that just because our profit for deal is over 30,000 at as high as 36 for some marketing channels and it’s actually probably higher for some deals because we keep some of ours long-term, so we actually make more money on those deals. We don’t really count that additional revenue and appreciation in the future, but there is some there for sure. All right, cool. Bunch of questions coming in. Love it.

Michael Smith (00:45:50):

Hey Tony, one question I have is how much we closed 50, we’re averaging like 40 to 50,000 a month just off of our website. How much are you guys closing off your website?

Tony Javier (00:46:02):

Lemme go back to the numbers here. Like I said, we

Michael Smith (00:46:06):

Last month was 61,000 for us.

Tony Javier (00:46:08):

When people say they Googled us and we can’t allocate anywhere else. I mean we only bought six deals last year, but we made close to 180,000 on those six deals from SEO

Michael Smith (00:46:24):

We’re in the same boat.

Tony Javier (00:46:25):

Yeah. Michael James, what do you guys have for SEO? Do you guys have numbers for your SEO? James? Nevermind. You don’t have any numbers.

James (00:46:34):

Thanks. I can get ’em. I just don’t have them right now.

Michael McDonald (00:46:41):

I’m going to look at my CRM. I know our website performs really well though. I mean we probably do a few hundred thousand from just our website alone. I’m trying to check right now though.

Tony Javier (00:47:01):

And the problem with those, you don’t know if it’s your other marketing methods. If you send a postcard, if you do TV or something and they go to your website and they don’t tell you that they came from that their

James (00:47:10):

Market, our biggest thing that we ask Tony is when somebody calls us, our inside sales will pick up and they’ll ask what channel just to see if, hey, did you or ask this specific question? Did you see us on tv? And if they said they saw us on tv, it automatically goes to tv. If they don’t, then we can figure out that actually it’s a true internet lead or

Michael McDonald (00:47:38):

2 75.

James (00:47:39):

It seems like we can get a good number off of that because I don’t know of any other way to try to guess. I mean, how many times people see a billboard or,

Michael McDonald (00:47:49):

Well, we get a lot of people who see us on TV who go to our website as well. So that’s another thing is having to be able to track that. So yeah, we’re in the same boat as you James. Did they see us on tv? And if they did, I want to make sure to give TV credit because we got to be able to track the ROI on that as well.

Tony Javier (00:48:11):

Cool. So Adam, any change in tactics or strategy for upper end markets? I’m getting leads where the properties are typically north of 700 KARV. My opinion is those upper end, I don’t really like doing those. I actually have one right now that I did last year with a partner and I’m regretting it because we’re going to lose some money on it in Indianapolis I think is where it’s located. And we had a couple other ones that were not quite that high but kind of pushing up there that we lost some money on. Those are the only ones that I lose money on seems like are the ones that are over like 400,000 and those were in other markets. Typically in our market, we don’t lose money on deals, but I think innovations is probably something you can look into on those upper end properties because it is going to be less risk. What about you guys, Michael Smith or Michael McDonald? Just start out with, do you deal with any upper end properties or you just refer those out to realtors?

Michael McDonald (00:49:07):

Pretty much just refer ’em all out to a realtor because even on innovations, they’re going to take a lot longer to sell. So we try to tend to stay away from those.

Tony Javier (00:49:18):

Michael Smith.

Michael Smith (00:49:19):

Yeah, for us. I take ’em. There was that one I was telling you I won on. No one wanted it. I was like, man, worst case scenario, this thing sold at four 50, I make 15 k. We listed it at 4 59. We got offers at 4 75, fell out and we’re closing Monday at four 80. Now we had another one, same thing, 700. I was like worst case scenario, make 30. It’s in a neighborhood where things aren’t dropping and we went like $70,000 over and that was all post June 22 by the way. So if my worst case scenario isn’t that bad, I’ll take it. My worst case scenario may be 10 grand, but I’m like, okay, I’ll do it. The neighborhood’s right, I know if I hold it I worst case scenario, I’ll hold it and I’ll make my money in the long term. So if we can make money on flip, we’re taking it.

Tony Javier (00:50:09):

What about you James?

James (00:50:11):

We’re going to wholesale it, but it’s going to figure out what part of the year it’s at. If I know that if I get the house maybe in October, that’s perfect, I’m going to spend a few months rehabbing it. We have a couple of them that will jump over a hundred, $150 in rehab, but we try to only do one or two at a time. We don’t want to load everything up because just like you, we’ve typically have lost money when we go over four 50. So it has to be a certain time of the year, otherwise we just wholesale it.

Tony Javier (00:50:47):

Cool. All right. What CRM do you use that keeps your lead flow the most organized and automated so they don’t fall through the cracks? So someone said this perfectly, how did they put it? All CRM suck. You just have to find the one that sucks the least because usually they have some kind of disconnect in some way that doesn’t work for your business. So for us we use simply that seems to be the most simple one that we found. And they’re good at correcting things that are kind of glitches and adding different features over time. So Michael McDonald?

Michael McDonald (00:51:27):

Yeah, we’re with you on recently, however, we kind of ran into a bottleneck last year with the amount of leads that we had coming in and losing the leads. And so for that reason we developed out Salesforce. And I’m kind of regretting it now because I talked to the owner of Reim and he’s talking to people who are doing 20 plus deals a month and trying to figure out how to please them too. So like you said, Tony Reim is great and they’re beginning to innovate even more, so may have made that decision too soon.

Tony Javier (00:52:01):

I actually have a discount code re simply.com/rem. I just put it in the chat. So if you guys use that to book a, I dunno if you book a call or sign up, but Ard, the owner gave me that code for our clients, so I’m going to share that with you guys if you want to discount. I can’t remember what the exact discount is, but then also I have a resources page that has other resources too, so I just put that in the chat. Typically give that to clients, but there’s different PPC providers and whatnot, and actually Michael can talk about his PPC here in a little bit too, so you guys can go there and get some good resources. Sorry, Michael Smith, CRM.

Michael Smith (00:52:44):

Yeah, I use em as well. It’s not perfect. Leads get lost, but I’m making money so I’m okay with it. Their phone system’s actually pretty good. They just came out with an update where I can whisper in to my leads. It has its glitches, but I have confidence Rashad will figure it out and that’s why I stick with them is whenever there’s a problem, they do a good job fixing it and any problem that’s come up, if I was with a Salesforce, I couldn’t fix it faster than what they’re doing. So if that’s the case, why the hell would I go build out a Salesforce? So until that happens, I won’t change it. I just believe in RAD and his vision and I think in the next 18 months or two years, he’ll have a perfectly built out system and that’s faster than what I could do it in. So I’m going to stick with him, but it’s not perfect. It is good enough and it is getting better and that’s all I can ask for personally.

Tony Javier (00:53:36):

Cool. Good stuff. What about you, James? What do you guys use? Do you know?

James (00:53:40):

Yeah, yeah. I believe it or not, I can actually get in there. It’s Podio and it sucks. I’m just going to come out and say it. We’re actually in the process of looking at a different CRM. The Nolans have one called Pete and I dunno if you’ve ran across that one yet. We’re testing that one out. REI. Simple. We got to get rid of Podio. It feels like we just keep getting a bandaid. We want it to do something and we spend 10 grand on the developers fixing it and then that part works, but then something else doesn’t work

Michael Smith (00:54:14):

And

James (00:54:14):

We’re just done. It shouldn’t be that hard. It really shouldn’t.

Tony Javier (00:54:19):

Yeah, we went down that road a long time ago with Podio and scrapped it. I don’t know a lot of people using Podio anymore of that issue. So let’s see.

James (00:54:34):

Before you

Tony Javier (00:54:34):

Go to the next, oh, Adam, sorry, I forgot you’re in San Diego, Adam. Actually seven 700 K is low end in San Diego. But yeah, I mean it’s still kind of the same thing. I mean it’s still a good amount of money, but yeah, if you have a follow-up question to that, you can put it in here, but it’s going to be kind of the same thing where that still is kind of a lot of money and you can still kind lose more than you could on a hundred hundred $50,000 house. Rob, does anyone track what their connection rate is with inbound leads? Example, if 100 S-E-O-P-P-C leads come in a month, how many of them are you all connecting with? My team is trying to get better. So do you guys know what percentage of leads you connect with? I don’t know if that’s something anybody tracks. I think

James (00:55:29):

We actually do track that It’s part of our KPIs, but my dashboard is down right now. That’s why I can’t tell you any numbers.

Tony Javier (00:55:37):

You mean your dashboard is somewhere you’ve never looked at it?

James (00:55:41):

Well, no, no, no, no. Yeah, we have a dashboard and for whatever reason because of Podio there’s a glitch and so that’s another reason why we’re just, again, we’re done with Podio.

Tony Javier (00:55:52):

Yeah, I

James (00:55:53):

Hear you. But we do track that number.

Tony Javier (00:55:56):

Yeah, I think very rarely can we not get ahold of somebody. Usually they call in and we can answer, have the answering service answer and get their information. So I think we do have some slip through the cracks, but it’s not very often. I’m sorry, Michael McDonald, did you answer that? Do you have any deals that usually slip through?

Michael McDonald (00:56:15):

It was extremely low, was an extremely high percentage of the people that we couldn’t get ahold of and that was when we were running a high volume of leads that were just flying all over the place. And so that’s part of the reason why we’ve changed, but I’ll be honest with you guys, a lot of our web leads are difficult to get ahold of for some reason. I don’t know what it is and I think it’s more for the Facebook ads than it is for a majority of the other ones. Organic website, they know who we are, they’re easy to get ahold of. Other ones though have been challenging, so it’s a high percentage, like 60% of a hundred percent of the leads we’re able to get ahold of the other 40%. Sometimes we can’t.

Tony Javier (00:57:02):

Yeah, I have a feeling Facebook is because some people just wanted an offer when they really don’t need an offer or they just want to see what their houses is worth. That’s what we’ve found with Facebook leads. And then if it’s PPC, they’re usually filling out three or four different forms and it’s just basically whoever they get ahold of first, that usually gets there first and sometimes the only one that they talk to,

James (00:57:24):

The ones we can’t ever get ahold of are the ones that come in at two o’clock in the morning because my guess is they’re drunk. They got in a fight with their spouse and they’re selling the damn house and they go out and they fill out something on the internet and then you can never get ahold of ’em. So I always laughing when I see what time it actually came in, I go, likelihood of us not getting ahold of that person is pretty high.

Tony Javier (00:57:48):

Yeah. Yeah. Nate asked, have you had any issues with the phone system on ra? Simply, I think someone mentioned the phone system.

Michael Smith (00:57:55):

Yeah, we’ve had good luck with it personally. They had one issue when they were switching over from the provider, but that was just on texting, not necessarily calls. So yeah, really good. Every now and then a call goes missing and they’ve always been able to find it and give us that recording. So no complaints on recent police phone system. They only have a one line dialer I think though, if you dial out a lot,

Tony Javier (00:58:16):

Yeah. Okay. I don’t think we’ve had an issue with it or else I probably would’ve heard about it. Jasper, follow up question. When starting a new channel, do you give 90 days from launch to see a return or would you give a brand new channel just a bit longer? Just launch PPC and I’m in the red two months in LOL. So PPC might be different, but for me, when we look at tv, radio, Facebook and Google for sure, we’d want to give it or I’m sorry, not PPC Facebook. Well maybe PPC too. I always think that six months is a pretty good metric. I mean really 12 months because a year can change. You can get a killer deal. We had talked to a client last week and he almost stopped his ads at one point after about six months, and then he ended up continuing and then it started kicking in and then he told me the other day he just got a deal under contract or on it.

(00:59:21):

He’s splitting up the lots and he’s going to make like 250 grand from it and that’s going to totally up his numbers for last year. He got it under contract last year, so I’m under 90 days, very minimum. If you don’t commit to 90 days, don’t even do it. Six months is a better metric, but really 12 months now if you launch PPC and you’re two months in, you literally have no deals and not very many leads. That’s something to evaluate and say either I have the wrong provider, it’s too competitive. I mean there’s a lot of different things to think about there. Michael, Madonna, what are your thoughts on that?

Michael McDonald (00:59:57):

Yeah, I mean I agree a hundred percent and I would ask you how much are you spending a month and in what market? Because like Tony said, it’s going to really vary on the market and I’m in the same school of thought as you. If I can spend a couple thousand a month on a channel like PPC and get one deal every other month, it’s not ideal, but what size of deals are you doing? If you can do say even four or five deals a year and make 20,000 on average and your ad spend was $20,000, you’re good. That’s a really good return. So yeah, you’re definitely going to want to evaluate how much you’re spending. So if you don’t mind sharing that, that would be helpful.

Tony Javier (01:00:44):

Michael Smith, what do you think about that?

Michael Smith (01:00:46):

Yeah, for us, yeah, I think six months, if you’re going to start something, do it for six months, we just aren’t going to give up on something that quick. Especially a lot of people will say, oh, I had a bad month, and then three months prior they had a one to six x return. It’s like, whoa, whoa. There’s ebbs and flows in business and ebbs and flow than everything. Why wouldn’t you calculate that? So the longer timeframe, if you look for a longer timeframe, it almost always works out. So our goal is not for to shut anything down, just increase ad spend.

Tony Javier (01:01:19):

Yep. Cool. What about you James?

James (01:01:21):

The only channel that I know that gave something right away is tv. Otherwise you have to, I mean you have to sit there and play it out a little bit. I always like what you guys were saying pretty much you got to do a six month test, you could even go a little bit lighter and go 12 months, but you want to keep your toes in the water on everything, in my opinion.

Tony Javier (01:01:48):

Rob asked questions, does anyone track what percentage of their deals come as a result of long-term follow up? Michael Smith says 40% of his deals come 90 days or older, which is interesting. That’s a pretty high number. What do you see Michael McDonald? Do you see more of your deals coming from follow up or from right out of the gate?

Michael McDonald (01:02:11):

It’s a combination. I would say for us, PPC expect to get the most motivated sellers to convert fast if you can get them while they’re emotionally over it. Like James mentioned, you have an ex-husband who literally just got in a fight with his wife and he’s like, I’m done with this house, but then you got to get the other person on the same page. So those ones convert fast, but overall you still have to have a good follow up sequence. We always get deals from follow up too.

Tony Javier (01:02:42):

Yeah. James, do you know your numbers on follow up? I

James (01:02:47):

Don’t know the numbers, but I do know we started a campaign. My background’s in the fire service and we have no lead left behind is what we started two years ago. And when we first started the business, I will tell you, we were so laxative on our follow-ups, it was all new leads and then we started realizing when you had started the campaign of no lead left behind, we were started to pulling more deals out of that. I can’t tell you the percentage, but I do know that we actually follow up, follow up, follow up, and we’ve had deals where gone two and a half, three years before we finally got the deal, got to set up a drip campaign. If you set up everything, you shouldn’t have to do anything, it should just automatically do it for you.

Tony Javier (01:03:32):

Yeah, I’ve heard both ends of the spectrum where some people are like, I would not do without follow up. We get 40% of our deals or whatever the number is from follow up, and then some people are like, we don’t really do follow up. We automate it just like James said, because less than 10% of their deals come from deals over and follow ups. Kind of a loose term follow up could be two weeks later, follow up, could be two years later, I think. When was it a mastermind? I think there was a poll and I think most people said that 90 some percent of their deals usually within 30 days of getting that lead. And we’ve seen the same thing. Most of our deals were either first appointment we’re out there, we might have to do a second appointment or we may have to do a follow-up call and send a contract, but most of our deals come within 30 days, so Cool. How do you fund your marketing? We use Capital One for everything we possibly can because we get the highest rewards then we just pay it off every month. Michael McDonald’s says he uses Chase Inc. Credit card. How do you guys fund your marketing? James and Michael Smith.

James (01:04:46):

I think our Go ahead. Case card. I think

Tony Javier (01:04:50):

Case card also.

James (01:04:53):

Yeah, we have a bank card that we use all the time. I mean everywhere we fly, we never fly, never pay for rental cars. I mean, I think we can even get gift cards for our team. We try to give out, we try to use your perks, let’s put it that way. Use your perks if you’re not, you’re not doing it right.

Tony Javier (01:05:11):

Yeah, I mean obviously you have to be disciplined. You don’t want to rack up too many credit cards, but man, we have, I think I’ve got at least 2 million, probably two and a half million points between my credit cards. So it’s like 20 to $25,000 worth of travel that we need to use, which my wife keeps begging us to use on Europe, but we will get there this summer I think. All right. Anyway,

James (01:05:34):

Mine wants to go there too.

Tony Javier (01:05:35):

Yeah, let’s go together or you can take my wife. We’ll see

James (01:05:39):

Why don’t even just send the wives.

Tony Javier (01:05:41):

There you go. Perfect. We’ll go somewhere else. All right, so Ryan says, have you hired a business development manager that you cannot live without? That’s a great question. Michael McDonald, have you hired anybody outside a business development manager to help you out?

Michael McDonald (01:06:02):

Business development? So I did hire a recruiter who we had help us with some business development type stuff. She was great for us because she came from a hard money lending background, so she actually was able to bring some money, relationships, some knowledge to the table from that perspective, which obviously helps with business growth. But she’s been a great hire. I use her as my executive assistant right now since we’re not proactively hiring. So she’s an A player. If you can find an A player, you just got to find something for them to do and that’s what we’ve done with her.

Tony Javier (01:06:40):

So that’s an insight, that’s an employee that’s doing the business development.

Michael McDonald (01:06:43):

Yep. It’s an employee and she also helps for brand building reviews, customer experience, if anything goes south on anything. She’s the one who puts out the fire. She’s the barrier between me and the seller who’s like, I want to talk to Michael, I want to talk to Michael. That stuff’s going to come up. So she’s the barrier, which is great.

Tony Javier (01:07:07):

Yeah. Cool. Michael Smith?

Michael Smith (01:07:11):

Yeah, for us, we haven’t are maybe looking into hiring Gary Harper. I’m good friends with Ryan Pineda, but we haven’t done anything with it yet.

Tony Javier (01:07:21):

Cool. James?

James (01:07:24):

We’ve had Gary Harper out two years ago. That was pretty nice. We had a pretty good structure already and it was just more or less we kind of confirmed that we were on the right path from what we were doing. And then we had Jerry Green come out last year and did some inside sales training for a couple days and that was great. The team absolutely loved Jerry. Basically the John Martinez stuff that he took over.

Tony Javier (01:07:50):

Yeah, we hired Gary Harper last year, also not cheap, probably worth it overall helped us structure our meetings and scorecards and things of that nature. So if you want a connection, Ryan, you can email Noah or I and we can connect you with his team. My personal assistant that I mentioned to you guys, I’m still training her. She’s only been with me about a month now. I don’t even know if it’s been a month, right around a month, but once I get her trained up on all the basic stuff, I’m going to have her get more into the, I don’t know if I call it business development, but it’s more just the integrator. If I have an idea, I’m like, Hey, here’s the idea, take it, run with it, figure out who to hire, how to do it. So that’ll come from within. If you have any follow up questions on that, you can put ’em in there. I’m not sure if we answered your question a hundred percent.

Michael Smith (01:08:44):

Sounds good. Thank you.

Tony Javier (01:08:46):

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for the question. Jesse, what’s up? If you were starting your business all over again from scratch today, what would your steps be? And that’s a great question. Michael’s McDonald starting all over.

Michael McDonald (01:09:05):

That’s a really good question. I feel like somebody needs to put together a YouTube series on this one,

James (01:09:11):

Right?

Tony Javier (01:09:12):

Let’s do it right now. We’ll do a little 10 minute spiel and I’ll put it on YouTube.

Michael McDonald (01:09:20):

I mean, I think number one is you need a blueprint, right? So like Michael said, we also use results. I would find somebody who has exactly what I would and I would find a way to either pay them or follow what they’re telling you because they’re going to have the next four steps. But I started with $50,000 in credit card debt, zero money, and I sought out a mentor and I can’t tell you how important that person was for me. So that was my first step. Even though I didn’t have the money, I found a way to make it work.

(01:09:56):

Laser focus. So a lot of you guys have heard us talk about wholesale innovations, creative finance, all these different types of things. I love how Michael said just I’m the best cash buyer. I’m going to laser focus on this one thing. I was laser focused on wholesale. I wanted to figure out how to be the best deal finder. So laser focus on one exit strategy and start getting those relationships that could lead to a partnership that could lead to money. That way you’re in a position to, if you can’t wholesale, be able to partner with somebody to maximize that deal or whatever the case may be. So those are just a few things and study sales become the absolute best at that. And marketing, I mean, marketing and sales is the lifeblood of this business. So those are a few things that I would do. Sorry, it wasn’t necessarily your step by step by step, but Tony, I’ll put that into a YouTube series.

Tony Javier (01:10:52):

Michael Smith,

Michael Smith (01:10:54):

Step one, make sure you understand sales. Step two, just funnel yourself leads. That’s exactly what I did. I knew sales really well and I was like, I just needed leads. So I called Tony because he said he could get me leads in. It all came true,

Tony Javier (01:11:08):

James.

James (01:11:13):

So what’s really cool about that question is I actually get to do that with this licensing, and that’s what’s super nice. So the Knoxville guys are a new home part of the home guys version, or they bought a licensing and it was really nice about that is I can go, Hey, you don’t have to spend all this money to figure anything out. I figured it out already for you, it was kind of a really great lead in question for what we do now. We get to do it the right way now instead of throwing everything at the wall. So we know, which I will tell you that’s probably the CRM is probably the only one that we don’t like, but we know TV works, we know internet works, we know mailing works, we know our systems work. And so that’s really great about being able to that question. I mean, we get to literally do it the right way now without going through all the little hoops and mistakes. So it’s pretty awesome.

Tony Javier (01:12:12):

Yep. Hey James, if anybody wants to connect with you on licensing, if you want to put your info in the chat, they can contact you somehow if you’re ready for that. And then Michael McDonald does PPC for real estate investors as well. So Michael, if you have a I web domain or email or whatever you want to put in there for people to get ahold of you, they offer some great services. And then what’s that?

Michael McDonald (01:12:41):

Appreciate that plug. It’s in the chat.

Tony Javier (01:12:43):

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I get this question asked on podcasts quite a bit, starting all over, what would I do? I’ve been doing this 23 years now, made probably almost every mistake that you could make. I obviously still have some more probably coming up, but two things that I say. One is get in a room with people that are doing things that you want to do or where you want to be. That’s one of the reasons that I put on these mastermind groups. I’m not charging you guys for this. This is just me kind of saying what would I want? And so it was 2001 I started, I didn’t get into a mastermind group. Now granted, mastermind groups weren’t a thing back in 2001, neither was Zoom or any kind of online meetings, but it wasn’t until about 2013, it might’ve been 2012 that I started getting rooms like this actually physically in person rooms. And then I realized, holy crap, there’s a guy doing a hundred deals a year. There’s a guy doing a thousand deals a year. I mean, it was just mind blowing, getting in rooms with those guys and just figuring out how they thought, figuring out how they did it and just learning from them. So I would say just reach out to anybody you can and get in rooms like this where you can get as much information as possible. The next thing would be is I think Michael, or maybe both Michael’s mentioned sales and marketing.

(01:14:14):

I would do TV again. I would do TV earlier. Actually, I haven’t told the story, but in 2005 I actually reached out to a new station myself and I went to them and I said, Hey, I just had this idea. I’m an idea guy. No one told me about. I was just like, I called a TV station NBC, and I said, what would it cost to be on tv again? I didn’t have much money back in that time. It was $3,000 a month. To me, that was a lot of money. So I’m like, okay. And they put together the shittiest commercial you could ever imagine. Knowing what I know now, they didn’t get me very many commercials at all. I think it was like 50 commercials for 3000 most markets. Now we can get 300 commercials for 3000. And I let it run for two months and right at the end of the two months I’m like, I’ve spent six grand, I need to shut it off.

(01:15:08):

And then I got a deal and made six grand and got my money back and I stopped it. And I didn’t start TV up until seven years later. And just like James said, once I figured out how to do it and found the people that could do it right, it started clicking right off the bat. So I wish I would’ve kept doing it and figured it out sooner. So that’s my 2 cents on what I would do differently. Starting out. Again, part of that has to do with branding too. It’s branding yourself sooner. Alright, good Questions here. We’ll do, let’s see, maybe one more. I just realized we’re running time here. A lot of these are just chats going on. Okay, so let’s finish it out with, I think I just have maybe one question to finish. So explain something that either is working very well for you right now, something that you couldn’t live without, whether it’s a system, a tool, a hire, something like that, or just some kind of piece of advice that you would give our listeners right now that would be good for them to take and run with.

James (01:16:33):

All right. I can go first if you want.

Tony Javier (01:16:35):

Yep, good answer.

James (01:16:37):

My advice is too many people focus on deals, focus on revenue, quit focusing on, Hey, I need to do 10 deals, I need to do 20 deals. I need to do 25 deals. Whatever it is. I challenge yourself and put yourself as I need to bring in 200 K of revenue for this quarter. And now that changes your mindset. You’re going after the bigger deals. Too many people, in my opinion, go after these small 3000, $4,000 deals. They mess it up for the guys. So I always say go for the deep discount deals. But yeah, that would be my advice.

Tony Javier (01:17:20):

Yeah, it’s been interesting when I hear people post numbers on Facebook, you wonder what their net income is, what are they really making on that? And then also when people say seven figure business, I’ve said that before in a video before, but it’s so loose term. What is a seven figure business? Is it you’re netting seven figures? Is you’re doing seven figures in revenue? Is it you’ve sold seven figures worth of something over 10 years? You know what I mean? So I agree with that. It’s what numbers do you really want to focus on? And I think to me, the net number is the most important.

James (01:17:54):

Too many of the newbies come out and they’re like, yeah, yeah, I want to do five deals. I want to do this deal. I’m like, let’s just do a solid deal. You started off where some people are in markets where they do two deals a year, but they walk away with 500 K in their pocket. So revenue not deals.

Tony Javier (01:18:13):

Yep. Awesome. Michael Smith, we’ll go backwards this time.

Michael Smith (01:18:17):

Yeah, I would say focus on the big deals. Columbus isn’t known as a really big wholesaling, but we do pretty well on it. We get a big 50 plus K assignment every month and it’s just what that sales rep focuses on. And he’ll get three or four deals every month and he closes 120 to 150 every month. The other thing is just get off what your plate, what you’re bad at. So for me, I don’t do any paperwork or any organizational stuff at all. So just find that person to do whatever you’re weak at as soon as possible. I hope you grow faster.

Tony Javier (01:18:50):

Yeah, good stuff. Michael McDonald.

Michael McDonald (01:18:54):

Yeah, so ask yourself what you want. Why are you here? Why did you start this business? I’m big on that because it was my driving force when things were really tough and there’s rollercoasters in business, so this business is not for everybody, but if you know what you want and you for yourself, nobody can stop. Nobody can stop you. And so don’t have the business that somebody on Instagram has have the business that you want. So how do you define success? So define what success means to you and you’ll be a lot happier.

Tony Javier (01:19:31):

Good stuff. I love it. And then I’ll answer one last question and give you my piece of advice based on this last question, Rick, how said any advice on someone is starting commercials? He’s starting March 4th, I would say with any marketing channel or just sales in general, is to have your sales dialed in. So what I mean by that, it really starts in the beginning. You spend X amount of dollars on a marketing campaign and we used to, for a period of time, we were actually listening to our client’s calls and it was just atrocious. Some of the calls that we heard, they either weren’t answering the phone, if they did answer the phone, there was a kid in the background and they’re like, hello. And just, you got to have it dialed in, especially if you’re on tv, people look at you as the authority.

(01:20:23):

And so when someone calls it’s, hi, this is Tony, professional home buyers, how can I help you today? If you can’t answer the phone, if it goes to voicemail, call them back very quickly. For us, we have our calls. If our lead manager can’t answer, it goes to a answering service and they get their information. So at least a human answers the phone. There’s actually a study that shows that if you or someone answers the phone, a human within a certain amount of time, I can’t remember what the number is, but it’s like even five minutes to 15 minutes is a dramatic drop off of how likely they are to do business with you. So if you answer in five minutes or get back to them in five minutes, compare to get back to ’em in 15 minutes, the drop off just starts going. I mean, we’re in the world of now, we want something now.

(01:21:16):

If we want food, we can have it drop in our doorstep and 20 minutes, people just want now. So answer the phone if you can’t answer it, maybe an answering service or have it go to a voicemail where you can call them back very quickly. Get out to the lead as quickly as possible. Quick last story is back in 2000, gosh, it was something a long time ago, probably 2003, 2005, somewhere in that range. I invested in a phone system that tracked phone calls and I was in the mall, it was like six o’clock at night and someone called and they hung up. I got reception, I didn’t see it go into my phone. Once I got reception, it texted me and it said, Hey, you have a missed call. So I called that number back and it was a seller, and I remember it was Mays, Kansas on Cadi Street.

(01:22:04):

And I called them back and I said, I will be there at eight o’clock the next morning. I was there the next morning, eight o’clock, put the deal under contract, and she told me that she had a bunch of other investors come in later that day to look at the property and I got that deal. So when people say a marketing campaign doesn’t work, I always think, is it the marketing campaign or is it their sales process? Because it just takes one of those deals to make a marketing campaign. You spend three grand a month, you get a deal on a contract, you make 30 grand, you’re at a 10 x return. If you miss that deal, all of a sudden you’re throwing your hands up and going, this marketing campaign doesn’t work. And so we’ve just seen that over and over with many different clients that we feel like didn’t have their sales process dialed in.

(01:22:48):

And once we talked them through it and really dug in that they were able to turn that around. So alright, this is good stuff guys. We could probably go for another hour or two, but I’m going to respect the time of our panelists here. They are givers. Appreciate you guys coming on. They’ve all become friends and they’re just really good people. So thank you guys for coming on. Hopefully everybody else got good value and I dunno, maybe we’ll do one of these again in the future, but for now, we’ll sign off. And thanks again guys, and thanks everybody for joining.

James (01:23:18):

Thanks Tony.

Tony Javier (01:23:20):

Thanks for listening. If you like this video, you will love this. Please make sure you like this video and subscribe.