Live Group Coaching #12: The Ultimate Guide To Time Management, Productivity, and Building Out Your Business.
Episode #12 of Estate Professionals Mastermind Podcast
Please note that live participation in weekly group coaching is reserved for Certified Probate Experts (Probate Mastery course alumni). You can take session 1 (over 2 hours!) for free.
What’s In This Episode:
Chad and the Masterminds brainstorm tips, strategies, and tools for increasing productivity and properly executing time management. Rosie Hayer shares how she was able to separate what tasks were necessary for her to handle (the dollar-productive work) and begin to delegate work that did not require her expertise to ISAs and Virtual Assistants. The Masterminds discuss how to properly find, hire, and train virtual assistants and ISAs so they can execute the exact processes required for their job role. The masterminds get philosophical and reflect on realizations they’ve had when they really needed to gain traction in their business most – What broke them through the cash-flow roller coaster cycle and made them top-performers? Lastly, Chad, Meera, and Donna discuss how to buy investment properties as a licensed real estate agent without pissing off your broker. You don’t want to miss the nuggets shared by Probate Mastery’s top performers in this episode.
Podcast Streams and Download: Gaining Traction In Your Real Estate Business – How To Master Time Management and Build a High-Performing Team (buzzsprout.com)
Video: Watch On YouTube
Episode Time Stamps (YouTube Links):
00:00 Introductions
1:06 Productivity and Time Management The Tony Robbins Way
5:01 Using Google Calendar and Calendly To Balance Work-Life Time
12:11 Rosie’s “3-D” Strategy For Productivity
14:39 Is It OK For People To Think You’re Busy?
15:56 Streamlining, Documenting, and Delegating Tasks To Assistants
21:16 How Rosie Manages Hiring and Task Hand-Off With VAs and Gig Workers
27:58 Documenting Your Daily Processes for Future Training
37:53 Tips For Building Systems As A Solo Agent/Investor.
40:29 Getting Your Business On Track When You Need It Most
49:32 How Rosie Interviews Virtual Assistants To Find The Right Fit
57:12 Creating Facebook Ads For Probate Leads
1:07:06 The Probate Checklist as Ad Creative
1:14:15 Suggestion For Finding Videographers
1:15:28 Always Celebrate Your Small Wins
1:16:49 Starting a B2B Networking Group For Local Social Media Marketing
1:23:54 Custom Branded Books For Probate Marketing
1:24:34 How To Start Buying Investment Properties as A Licensed Agent
Resources:
- Ninety.io Trial
- Tony Robbins RPM pdf summary:
- Chad’s Business Strategy Book List
- Daniel Ramsey’s MyOutDesk VA Service
- Rosie’s VA Recommendations:Real Estate ISA Mastermind Facebook groups, and PAMS Consultancy
- Ask The Expert with Nate Joens (Structurely): Smart Scripts: What We Learned by Analyzing 4 Million Real Estate Conversations with AI – Probate Mastery
- Donna’s Recommendation for Custom Real Estate Books: Authorify Book Company
- Estate Professionals Mastermind Group (Facebook):
- Chad Corbett’s YouTube Channel:
- Ending The Real Estate Feast Or Famine Cycle and Finding Financial Freedom Through Real Estate – Probate Mastery
SEGMENT TRANSCRIPTS:
Introductions
Okay, welcome everybody to the probate mastery weekly group coaching call Kat. I didn’t see that you got our podcast from yesterday published. So I’ll start with that. One thing I want to point you guys to if you didn’t watch it already, did it call yesterday with one of them, leading professional and conversational AI and the real estate space, Structurely. We talk a lot about scripts and lead nurturing, and looking for ways to supplement what we do from a marketing standpoint. And we had the unique opportunity to pick the brain of a tech guy. Who’s been able to record and analyze over 4 million real estate conversations and writing.
A lot of folks claim to have true artificial intelligence. What they have are just simple chatbots, and these guys actually have, true empathy and linguistics built into their platform.
So it was an opportunity to just talk to somebody that’s a leader in that space and hear what they’ve learned in seeing 4 million conversations across all different lead types and all different markets. So if you haven’t had a chance to check that out, I think you might find it interesting.
And that’s about all I have for the week. If anybody has any questions, anything we can help you with how can we serve you?
Productivity and Time Management The Tony Robbins Way
[00:01:06]Chad, this is Eric. I was just getting off the call with you and Nate Joens from yesterday. And man, just so many, a part of me feels like this technology portion is literally taking over the psychology of how humanity responds and why they’re so guarded. And I really liked some of the key points that you guys pointed out in there.
And I’m definitely going to listen to that one over and over again. But with that being said I’m looking for some real human non-negotiables that I can start making a daily part of my probate business that can get me off this feast and famine rollercoaster.
You, you talk so freely. So what, tell me more about what you’re looking for. What are the non-negotiables what it explained, what I kinda find myself still tending the fires that, that are needed to be resolved, whether it’s like drop everything and go after a lead, which is obviously the highest and best use of my time versus saying no matter what’s going on, you guard this 90 minutes a day, you spend time working on better processes, better systems?
Like absolutely non-negotiable from this time, Eric, I don’t care. What’s going on in your life. You are to do this every single day
Tony Robbins has a course. It was originally called RPM wrap the rapid planning method. And I think it evolved into the time of your life, but that course talks about and it’s very valuable in all aspects of your life, but in business and personal life, but it talks about the target.
So you basically have a bullseye, which is what you’re focused on and what Tony has the personal application of that is 65. Excuse me, if you can imagine an X and a Y-axis, and the two variables are on those axes are urgency and importance. And we tend to focus on the things that are urgent and unimportant more than anything, like email, text messages, the stuff that social media, the stuff that seems easy, it’s like it’s unthreatening.
So let’s focus on that. Let’s burn 30 minutes on Facebook, anybody has ever done that? Anybody ever wasted guilty? Yeah. So it’s those two variables that you’re managing and in, and Tony’s personal goal was to spend 65% of his time doing the things that are non-urgent, but important.
For me, those are things like being able to leave my freaking cell phone and go for a mountain bike ride, go back to my family farm and help with a livestock obligation that I don’t really care to do, but it’s important to those people in my life, right?
Like I don’t want to be a cattle farmer, but they do. So it’s important for me to contribute to that because there are people I love and want to support. Things in business tend to be, we have important and urgent things, and that’s a closing that’s prospecting.
Like it’s urgent to prospect your probate list. It’s also important to prospect that list. So those are things that you must do and what you, what your goal is to delegate or just rid yourself of anything that is not urgent and not important and those things. So that’s one way to look at it. And there’s a cheat sheet.
I was trying to figure it out. If I was going to do a video on this, or if I was going to write a long-form blog here is basically a summary of the very comprehensive course. I think the course is designed to be taken over 10 days.
It’s broken into 10 segments. It’s worth every penny of the whatever 500 bucks or whatever that they charged for it. But that summary sheet will kinda give you each of those areas or the dimensions and the dimension of fulfillment as Tony calls it as the things that are important, but not urgent.
And those tend to be more personal things. So recharging your batteries, spending time with your kids, going to that baseball game, even though, your team’s going to lose like those things. So I would encourage you to look at that for look for inspiration, if you want, like a long-form education on time management and planning, that’s probably the best resource I know of.
There’s another really good book that I’m failing to come up with the author’s name. It’s called Getting Things Done. There are some nuggets in there, I just can’t think of the author right now. The name of the book is getting things done.
Using Google Calendar and Calendly To Balance Work-Life Time
[00:05:01]And then the last thing is what worked for me.
I made some vows with myself in 2012, 13, I was running multiple real estate strategies across an investment brand, a real estate team brand. And I just, there was literally more things to be done in the worst seconds in the day. And I hadn’t learned to delegate well, but what I ended up doing to reign it in was I made my calendar, my CEO
and I made a vow to myself that I would give it that authority. And I started to live and die by Google calendar. And that really changed things for me. So w with what my goal was 12 hours of prospecting. So each day from eight 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, those were sacred prospecting blocks.
So that gave me 12 hours a week to prospect. Now in between those blocks on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, that was transaction coordination or office work that was chasing paperwork, scheduling inspections, anything that needed to do to process a deal. So what that gave me was three solid days in the office.
I did not MAKE appointments on Monday. I only took appointments on Mondays and Fridays, whether they were buyer appointments or listing appointments or acquisitions Seldom make exceptions. It scared the hell out of me to try that because I’m like, oh, people are going to think I’m lazy or I’m going available.
And it’s, this is going to hurt me, but it got to a point where I was willing to try it. What I learned was what was really surprising to me. People respected my time. And by limiting access to me, people took me more seriously, especially buyers. You know how buyers, and I know you’re not really working the buy-side of brokerage, but a lot of people on here do, and they will run you ragged.
What I found is I would show after I started this, I showed an average of two homes to a buyer. And before, the market average was probably right. But it was because they had, I was more structured than what I did. They respected the boundary that I set. So something, it could be as simple as that, like literally make your calendar, your CEO B, be diligent about making sure everything goes in there.
And the way I use calendars, I have a personal calendar that I share, like a family calendar. Then I have a calendar for this business, a calendar for that business. They all flow up in one calendar, but on the left, you can toggle them on and off. So you have one for this business, one for that business, one for your kids, one for your wife.
Things like that. But if you, as long as when that thing pops up and says, Hey, Eric, you need to be doing this. If you consider that if I don’t do this I have to fire myself. I have to quit because if I’m not responsible enough to take direction from who I’ve appointed as my CEO, which right now is going to be the calendar, just to build a habit, then how good am I in any way?
And that was something that I just came up with on my own. I tried a lot of different things. That’s the one that really kept me on track. And those became sacred time blocks that could not be violated you, they weren’t repurposed ever. And it’s tough sometimes. Like when fires are burning all around you and everybody’s wanting more and more of your time.
Guess what, that’s only getting worse. It’s not getting better. How many text messages do you get a day? How many emails do you get a day? It’s always going to grow. And this type of, a culture that we’ve built. So the electronic distraction is only going to get worse and worse.
So it’s more important than ever that you get a system in place for yourself. So those are the best resources I have. You could just try to be more diligent and be really serious about your calendar. Use Calendly, quit publishing a phone number, use Calendly. And instead of having somebody inbound call you every time you’re interrupted, it’s about 15 minutes for your brain to get back on track.
Like limiting inbound calls is scary as hell for any salesperson, right? Whatever does that? That’s insane. However, it’s quickly normal, I started using Calendly in may of 2019. When I came back from spending a month in the POL completely off-grid, I was just fricking bombarded. I literally had thousands and thousands of messages that I couldn’t get to.
And I was like, there’s no way out of this. Like I’m never going to recover. So I started to pull my phone number off of it. And everybody, including friends and family, has to schedule into my calendar because it’s. So I fully committed to it at that point, were to have access to me, it’s through a calendar so I have a podcast link.
I have a personal, or after-hours call link, and, surprisingly even with friends and family, they’re like, oh, okay, this is cool. I don’t have to chase you. And I hate your damn voicemail. Cause my voicemail basically says don’t good luck. Cause I just can’t keep up with it all. So inbounding making things, making your outbound effort, come to you like inbound those out the outbound calls that you need to make, if you can inbound those.
So while you’re doing transaction management or you’re prospecting, people can be looking at your website being on the, on your landing page, responding to your direct mail piece, but their call to action. Isn’t calling distract me and get me off track for 15 minutes. Their call to action is to respect my time.
And find a place to have a conversation with me. And I think what you’ll find will be people actually do respect those boundaries. They don’t credit. I got, I was just, I’ve never had anyone go, I’m not easy to get ahold of, but people don’t really get mad at me about it because I give them alternative ways to have access to me.
Okay. So just to recap, there’s been a few people popping in and out like the master’s degree in this would be Tony Robbins’ RPM or time of your life. There’s someone actually back me up, David Allen is the name of the author. David Allen, getting things done. And yeah, so Rosie recommended E-Myth revisited.
That’s one of the books in the probate mastery reading list, that looks incredibly good on taking even the most complex business and boiling it down to a franchise prototype where everything is systematic and documented and you have, and it also makes it really easy to hire and delegate if you get your business to that point.
So those are the pointers that I have. Fantastic. I will start there and I definitely love the calendar idea. That’s stuff. Beautiful. Yep. Now there are lots of folks on this call and I’ll tell you guys went last. The week’s call was amazing. And my team, in our team meeting this morning, people comment on how nice it is to watch you guys coach each other and support each other.
And that man that warms my heart. So there’s a lot of folks on there who have built and scaled businesses. And Jonathan, for example, I’m sure you’ve struggled with time management as a single pastor in a church when your whole congregation wants access to you. If you guys have any advice to share with Eric, please jump in.
I think honestly, it’s training people. It’s, you are congruent with your values and what you really hold to be true. I’ve just found having an ideal week spent I think production is more biology and vision. Then anything else, meaning that if you’re not eating, if you’re not drinking, if you’re not sleeping, really not going to do much.
And so I’m like you, Chad, my, my Google calendar is my CEO. I don’t have a to-do list. Everything goes there, just like a budget. And the voicemails that I have at trains agents saved for calling after 7:00 PM. I’ll return your call the next business day. Those are the kinds of things that I’m, I’ve had to do.
And are doing right now. Otherwise, it just would get consumed.
Rosie, you got something that
Rosie’s “3-D” Strategy For Productivity
[00:12:11]Rosie, okay. This is my favorite topic actually. I don’t know how much this would be helpful for everyone. But my buyers’ agent is, and I, we do 105 transactions a year between two producing agents. And most of my team is admin.
Yeah. And we often compete with groups that are 70 DJ and I would love to share that my buyer’s agent sells maybe 40 to 50 buyers cause actions on my team. And she takes four vacations a year, had a baby and stays with her daughter at home, and has a very high-quality life. And a few years ago when I was running separately my, SUV driving around all the time.
One day I just gave up. I was like, I can’t do this. I’m much more useful than taking phone calls and driving around one day, all-around all day. And a couple of strategies I used is number one, I came up with three DS in my business. So everything I got to do in my day, I wake up in the morning. I just write it all down or I’d write it all down a day before.
That’s the ideal sleep that night. The next morning, I start highlighting them into three things, dump it, do it or delegate it if it’s not important and it doesn’t move my business forward or my growth forward, I literally moved to the bottom of the list. If I don’t get it to it in months or two, it just gets deleted.
IMIA was never important. It was just a creative idea. And the second one is delegated. This part took me the hardest time because I had a habit of sitting on things. After all, the delegation also requires a clean head because sometimes anytime I was copy-pasting more than a couple of times, I made sure I hired someone to do it for us.
The three D’s of do it delegated and dump, it has gained a lot, has allowed me to gain a lot of time now what I can gain helping or in case, in terms of phone calls, anybody who’s asking us a question. Hey, is this house still available? Does it require my expertise to answer? I think anybody who can look up metrics and say, it’s actually, it can answer that question.
So any redundant information, have you received any offers or anything that a normal person can answer without a real estate license? I made sure I’m not a part of that anymore. And it was a very conscious decision. Like I got tired of it by hitting balls. A couple of times, Chad, this was helpful. So dump it delete it and delegate it.
What I can use help today on Chad is that by doing so by time blocking and following as close to the calendar as possible.
Is It OK For People To Think You’re Busy?
[00:14:39]There’s one thing that bothers me when I get a call from someone they’re like, oh, I’m so glad you’re talking today. I know you’re very busy. I know I’m very busy, but you and I both know we’re busy with the work that they have given us.
So I’m making productive. So I’m not sure why it challenges my values and somebody calls me busy because I’m truly trying to be available to them. So I would love to know how you guys handle it when people, or is it okay for people to call you busy? I just need a little mindset change on this, on how to beyond receive it when you’re following your time blocks.
That’s what happened when I started booking things, pushing people to my calendar and when I changed my voicemail and to me, that’s a really good thing because it’s like, Hey Rosie, I know you’re really busy. Thanks for taking my call. That is, to me, it’s a signal of respect.
They’re acknowledging, I’m grateful for your time. Let’s get to it. And I can’t think of a better outcome for you. As I said, what was surprising to me is I didn’t lose respect or social capital. I gained it. I established a boundary and it was clear how to still have access to me within those boundaries.
But people appreciated my time more and were more competent. And so I think what it’s just your perception of it. I think it’s a good thing for you. Not a bad thing.
Streamlining, Documenting, and Delegating Tasks To Assistants
[00:15:56]So I want to go back to your 3d and I want to know when you dump, are you dumping into a catch-all so things don’t fall through good ideas, never fall through the cracks.
And I know that as a visionary, I have literally hundreds upon hundreds of folders and notes of things that there are whole businesses and in my notes that haven’t ever been started. And there’s just a ton. So do you have a catch-all or do you just, do you truly purge that and move on? So before we approach it, it sits in this DuPage checklist for few weeks.
Right? And oftentimes the things that get dumped are the ones that I need to find partnerships with. And I need to move that project forward or it’s just not relevant. So what I do is if it is in regards to the business growth, like adding new parties, like redesigning and picking up the colors for the new logo.
I, I have an opinion on the end product, but I don’t think I’m a candidate to walk through the journey. So sometimes that task gets delayed and delayed. And at some point, I have to decide that, okay, who do I need to partner up with? Who do I need to hire as an expert at, based on one to make decisions on this.
So they don’t get just deleted forever this little pocket. And we carefully pick the things that actually going to move the business forward. Otherwise, we just didn’t do it because I don’t know, you’re a visionary. Your brain is on the go all the time. There are so many ideas that are coming to you and you want to put them down so you can focus on what’s important.
And it was a challenge for me to do it. And another thing that was challenged for me was emails. Like I read an email. I don’t really know, smell. How about I glance over it. I look over the keywords and sometimes I tend I’d read you read it and tell me what’s going on because if it’s too long, I don’t want to lose focus.
So I engage people who are more Bijan-oriented with me. What I’ve done really well to overcome that is voice notes. So I literally, if there is an email that’s an important immediate response in the morning, I get four hours a day by delegating property. So I literally would voice notes on my phone. So my team can understand what I’m seeing because I typed wrong a lot too.
And these are honest mistakes I’m making. So if you see me typing wrong, my fingers will much faster than my brain. And it’s sometimes too. So I record what I want my team to do, and I tell them, do things happen first because I’m cutting it short. My team doesn’t feel that I’m being rude. Like sometimes I say, do it, what I’m saying is do it, but they might hear it, do it.
So I like to just create those voice notes and send messages on slack. That’s the tool that I use in my team. It’s free guys. You get literally, and I switched them rather than telling what happened. I screenshot the message and I get it to the person and they know what to do next. So I found little shortcuts like that, voice notes, screenshots slack.
And it really helps you gain time. So you can think. I have four different things that I want to say at the same time, swirling through my head. I’m going to start with, we’ll go back and we’ll finish on your 3d. So on the delegate part, and there’s some conversation happening in the chat right now, Rosie, and I think you just elaborated, you probably answered some of those questions, but as far as how the hell do you delegate when you’re a solo person?
What do I do? I can’t afford full-time help. And I want to come back to that, but before rosy answers that, like how you delegate as a, as an early-stage entrepreneur or a solopreneur, I want to point you to a book. And this is also in the probate mastery reading list. Dr. Ben Hardy has a lot of good advice and some really good YouTube videos on time management.
And one of the things he does is 10 minutes before. When like no electronics for 30 minutes. And then 10 minutes before bed, you sit and recap what you got done today, what you didn’t get done today and what your priorities are for tomorrow. That’s to me, I don’t usually offer that kind of advice mainly because my personality doesn’t stand up to it as a visionary.
I’m like, Nope, that feels too much like discipline to work and the hell with that. I’m not a great meditator. So I have my own versions of meditation that are not as it’s not like traditional TM, but it’s, it works for me. So if you’re one of those, if you have like more of an operational, like an ops mindset that, and discipline works for you, for me, it just doesn’t like it’s, it ends up me.
Criticizing myself because I ran on willpower for three months then. But Ben Hardy has a book called who not how, and as far as the D the delegating D and Rosie’s 3d, if you haven’t read who, not, how today’s the day, like you, you should go get the book and it will give you the idea that doesn’t specifically say, here’s exactly how you find the person to go make phone calls for you, or do this, or that it’s higher, it’s a macro level conversation about that, about how procrastination and to overwhelm oftentimes are signals of success.
It’s it means you’re doing things right. There’s an activity in your life. And rather than looking at procrastination as our parents or teachers or anyone else would tell us that it’s a bad thing, you just need that you need to find your grit and go get it done, actually. Yeah. His mentor actually said, suggest that, procrastination is a really great thing because it’s an indication of where either your time or your skill sets coming up short.
And it’s a clear indication of what you need to delegate. So if you haven’t read who not, how I would recommend doing that,
How Rosie Manages Hiring and Task Hand-Off With VAs and Gig Workers
[00:21:16] So Rosie’s really good at leveraging virtual assistance and, gig workers to really take her out of those unimportant urgent tasks that are present in every business.
What’s your best advice to Dan on that? That’s a great question, actually. So Jan is absolutely right. Currently. I have both my team with VAs but before, I had someone in the house that I worked with and The two things I realized are either I was moving away from pain or I was moving towards pleasure.
The few things that I ran towards me and I felt great. Like one thing I had learned in eight years of my business is that you got to become great in tune with yourself. Because if you’re not in tune with yourself, you might find yourself doing busy work and finding yourself productive, but you don’t feel fulfilled at the end of the day.
So I became very conscious of what things I do at the end of the day. If I still have plenty more things to do, I’m still walking around and being like, Hey, I did it. So anything that doesn’t make you feel like yay and not that’s your item then you need to do. I, what I do is I’ll give you a simple example.
Going back to the original days, you probably aren’t calling a lot right now. And when you’re calling work creates more work. So when you have called, you gotta have molds I’m not into Nordson stuff. But I need a reference job conversation again. So the simple thing you can do is if you are using any kind of dollar, any dollar is coming up with recordings now, right?
Most of your dialer has recordings. So what I did is in the beginning, I’ll make the phone calls. I’ll have my VA upload the list and I’m done with my dialing at the end of the hour. I want them to hear all my recordings and write down the bullet points of the conversation and set my next phone call based on them. I got out of that management system. So I only did what I enjoy. So to answer your question as a sort of nerd your paperwork and your busy work, optic prospecting is probably consuming most of your day. And when I say people work means writing an offer and it’d be all think about it.
The offer is literally nine pages on a contract. And we all know we write the same thing again and again. And I have actually come up with a checklist, not a checklist. I have my team come up with a checklist. I give them ideas that they come up with a check. I visit you, tell them, Hey, this was earnest money.
This much price. This is the title company appraisal waiver. So once you slow down and think, what did he do? And come up with those 12 items you’re constantly doing again. And again, next time you will spend less than five minutes on it and you would apart. So to answer your question and looking things that volume dump and hiring D and very global VSPs are everywhere.
Do you want to know how I hired my first year? I got so tired of work and the next morning I was getting ready. I was like, God, give me an answer. I don’t want to wake up and do this today. And some email cares for me about the days for help. And I just called and got connected. And since then I have built a right now we have five active VA’s and one part-time we’re used to teenagers in the front.
So go online. There are listings of VA Facebook groups you can go to PAMS consultancy once you go to these tools, resources on Google, you will have so many of them. And these are my primary, the areas I go to look for me.
Where are you in the country? Oh, I have an Austin, Texas, Austin, Texas. That’s great. 21 Selma Hughes drive. That was our old place. Let me know when you want to visit your old place!
Thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah. The VA stuff it’s difficult to find a good VA, right? So it’s like finding a good girlfriend or a good boyfriend, right? Sometimes you got to go through a little bit to find one that, that just clicks and works and it can be frustrating.
But once you go through the pain of finding that person and you can hand the stuff off and know it’s done great. I, if I could find someone to just give this stuff to, and I know it’s done great, I would add something to that. And this is probably going to you guys are very dear to me and I promise not to show up any less than authentic with you all.
So this ride going to some harsh. I’m about to say next. I have heard that a lot even before I hired VA’s, but I always chose to make things my experiential truth. If we, as our hard to meet it, I want to know it for myself. Why they’re really hard. Here’s why I’ll tell you the truth. You’re working with an employee who doesn’t understand your culture.
They’re really hard-working people. They don’t want to let you down. Okay. They want the job. So can we agree? Like they need the job and you have a job opportunity. So that part is satisfied. But what we built overlooked is we overnight once somebody to be a replacement, right? And that is a lot of expectation for someone willing to work for four or $5 an hour at the job, we can not expect people to replace us overnight. We, first of all, become, must become very clear about what is it that we need help with because anytime things don’t work out, there are only two wrong things. Either the system fails or the skill fee. So before I pointed the finger at myself or the other person, I first went to the system.
So you fail to do this task because you don’t understand me right. Or is our communication system wrong? So I do a lot of zoom calls and I would share with you, like in last year and a half, since I have really established my VA team, then there has not been a single day that I missed my team meeting.
And the reason I bought Ms. Matti’s meeting is not that I enjoy it. I honestly don’t enjoy it. I don’t want to show up, but I know the amount of time and the movement I may buy. So I had dedicated 30 minutes to the operations team, which is all of your team. I have one person just handling the phone. I have one person just doing listing transactions.
I want person-gesturing leases because I have investors who buy with us and they want us to rent them. So she runs all my leases, like without my, involvement. Now I only get to see the final result at the end. And there’s one person who was just uploading clean sheets, downloading team sheets, dining, and just sending emails and marketing and whatever needs to be done.
So I made one thing, the one thing for everyone. So I have clarity when I go to this person in slack, I’m only talking about it. I’m only talking about investments. So you’ve got, these buckets really helped me. So I would say when you work with VAs, see if you can emphasize on systems and skill before we are hard on ourselves, that we are not doing a good job at hiring, or we’re not finding the right people.
And between these two, you may be surprised how much they’re willing to do for you. I have people who are willing to work on Memorial day for me. And they’re like because I took some time off and I needed help that Monday and they actually volunteered to work. It didn’t have to do it. So they’re very giving people they’re very culturally kind and I think it takes time to understand them and use them.
Documenting Your Daily Processes for Future Training
[00:27:58]Yeah. So just to summarize then, and she just gave you the nicest SmackDown you’ve ever had. Like it’s not the VA
yeah, no I know I’ve used the VA’s before, and I know a girl who ran really ran her whole business, built the thing in the whole damn thing, ran with VAs. Yeah. But she was a drill Sergeant. She was very disciplined and she was very structured. She worked for Dell. Like she was a manager there.
She was a hard hitter. My personality is a little bit more laid back than that. So for me, it’s I need to get more structure. Yeah, maybe structure and they manage all your views for you. A couple of things that I wanted to circle back to the four things that were swirling around my head. This is an amazing conversation.
Thank you, Rosie. One of the things that I did that I forgot about or take for granted, like when I first hired, I chose not to hire a virtual assistant. I chose to hire locally because I wanted to be able to use her for, instead of me going to a home inspection or me going to we have what’s inflow and infiltration, as the water authority, we have a mandatory inspection there’s there.
They always pass. Like it’s just, someone has to show up. And so I wanted to be able to have, local services from that employee as well, as virtual. So before, like when I decided to hire, I was processing all alone as a solopreneur. I was running about eight, 14 transactions a month is what I was averaging.
When I finally made that decision, it was eating me alive because it was just like Rosie said, work begets more work. And it was just every day that I did a better job. I had more damn work to do the next day. So what I would do is I would go home in the evenings. I had developed checklists for everything.
So I came out of if you remember, I came out of resort real estate like we were spoiled as hell. We worked for a developer. We had a big office on a kind of poly beach. I drank a beer and made friends with millionaires. That was what I did for a living. And everyone else did the transaction management and all the busywork.
Like I was fortunate enough to be in that environment. However, I got my ass handed to me when I stepped into your old world. When I came into the residential real estate, I’m like, whoa, holy smokes. There are a million moving parts. So I very quickly, we moved to systematize everything in my business. So a buyer appointment, how-to checklist of a buyer contract had a checklist, a seller phone call had a checklist, a seller appointment, had a checklist, a listing upload how-to checklist a listing, marketing, how-to checklist.
And these are all things I literally just opened an Excel spreadsheet, put input made a little. Box and made it where it would print on one page and I would adjust the format and the font. So I had all these checklists to keep myself on track. What was fascinating, amazing to me is when I started working with the local title companies, I sent closing instructions and I sent the checklist.
So it was literally proved that everything on this transaction had been done linearly. They were blown away. They’re like there are 3000 real estate agents around here and we’ve never had anyone do anything like this. And I’m like, I don’t have fucking time for you to be chasing me on the phone.
If I drop, if something falls through the crack, you shouldn’t have to be chasing me. I should have caught it. So the checklist is the first thing. If you can document every process in your business or the lack thereof of it, we’ll show you where some of your time is being wasted or where you’re not being as efficient.
Yeah. I took that to the next level. When I decided to hire an assistant and I’m like, how the hell am I going to train in the system? I was literally working 16, 18 hours a day, seven days a week. I was processing over 150 transactions alone. As a solopreneur, it was eating me alive. So I’m like, how in the hell am I going to train this person?
I got to have the revenue. I have the money, but, and this was you guys. Might’ve heard me talk about the metaphor of, I was riding a lion, so it looks sexy as hell from the outside, but I knew the first time I had to pee, I was stepping off that line’s back and he would buckle around and eat me. So it was, I was in a conundrum.
What I did is I took every time I would do one of those checklists or buyers agreement or a listing agreement or a purchase agreement, everything that I did for about a three-week period was a screenshot. Corded on my laptop. And I didn’t know who I was talking to a job application hadn’t been posted, but in the course of my normal business, I just started to document my daily processes.
Here’s how I manage my email inbox. Here’s how I put leads into the CRM. Here’s how I review a contract and present the offer to the seller. Here’s how we fill out a pre-fill listing agreement before our appointment. Here’s how we do a preliminary title search to make sure that this short sale is not messier than we think.
And it was it. I literally just made video after video and at night, when things calmed down at two o’clock in the morning, I would upload those into a YouTube playlist. And then I would go, I created a system, CRA assistant@gmail.com. I would take the YouTube video. I would go into the calendar of this future mystery person for who I hadn’t even posted the job.
And then I would say buyer contract training, and it would be a three. However long that video was, is how long that block was. So over a three-week period, I booked 60 days of intensive virtual training using nothing but YouTube and Google calendar. And when Stacy, so Stacy was her name, she moved from Iowa.
She was running, an REO department. She was responsible for about 110 Oreos at a time. So she was the right person to thrive in that environment. I literally gave her a Gmail username and password and said, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be here to train you personally. And let me know if you ever need any input.
And 60 days she never wants to be said, I don’t know how to do this because there were checklists and Dropbox folders. There were YouTube videos, length in the calendar, and little, I know it’s a long story, but there are little things like that, that I’ve taken for granted how I was able to get myself out of that damn mess.
Cause it was, it was, it felt impossible at the time, but I just, w there’s little things like that, that you can start to document the processes, how you do it, why you do it that way. Audio recordings, video recordings, get it into a calendar. And that’s where back to the VA and the cultural differences, the biggest challenges, and Rosie, you hit the nail on the head.
It’s a method I’m using insight like. We have unrealistic expectations for people who really have not been conditioned and trained in our culture and our business culture. It’s very different. Imagine hiring a Spanish VA, like that would be a nightmare wouldn’t it was like, what do you mean you’re going to sleep for three hours?
It’s two o’clock. But these people are extremely hard workers. It’s we have to take accountability as leaders. And if they’re falling short, we need to look inward and say, what the hell did I, what could I have done to help that person to better set them up for success? So those are just some pointers from things that actually worked for me, where I was able to just in the course of normal business, build a library of corporate training videos, and that’s back to the E-Myth revisited.
That’s why I picked that up. I always strive to have a franchise prototype and document the processes in the business. And surprisingly that, that helped me train station. No all that said, if you don’t want to do this, there is a company called MyOutDesk. You might, you are probably aware of them.
A few of you’ve worked with VAs. Daniel Ramsey is a friend of mine. He’s the founder of that company. He literally built a family in the Philippines. So he goes in and builds big facilities. He treats these people like he treats them with respect and dignity and pours his soul into them. And there’s no surprise why he’s been as successful as he is because he actually cares about that cultural difference.
And it’s important to him that he. Creates good careers for these people, not shitty VA gigs. So if you’re, if it’s time and you’re ready to commit to at least 20 hours a week you will not find a better-managed group of employees that will stay with you forever, but you’ve got to be at a position in your business where you can bite off, a minimum block for it to make sense because Daniel is protecting their culture and his stances.
I’m going to make sure I create a career for this person. And to have somebody say, wow, I’ll try them out for five hours this week and maybe three hours next month. He’s protecting his family. He’s built, he’s protecting from that. So if you’re at a certain level where if you have 15 to 20 man-hours a week, at least then mild dusk is as is I can’t give them a better endorsement.
Like I know Daniel personally. He’s a great man. He treats his people well. And the rates vary based on the skill set, but. They’re pretty heavy in real estate. The vast majority of their virtual assistants are trained in real estate, but they go through linguistics training. They go through inflection training, like how like cultural, the idioms and the things that us American Jews and they work our hours.
If you don’t want to tackle that mastering, that skill set like Rosie has, Rosie’s chosen the DIY method, which is commendable. It’s hard. It’s a lot of work and the VA’s come and go. People poke them off of you. When they find out you’ve got one that’s doing well in the real estate space. And then they find out that they can make an extra $3 an hour.
You don’t even know there’s a problem until they quit answering your emails. And that’s the constant that’s a huge pain in the ass, but my dusk will alleviate some of those problems, like having the training, the cultural training and the, and the English like English with barely any accent managing the HR components of that, the payments, a lot of the ins and outs.
So if you have that much work, that’s my suggestion is okay. Yeah, give my desk a call there’s. Daniel and I there’s some stuff on YouTube where he and I went long-form and talked about this and what it looks like to use VA through my desk. If you search if you go to YouTube and do Chad Corvette, Daniel Ramsey, or mile desk, you can probably find that in an interview.
But man, so many good pointers in here from this is a good conversation. This is stuff that, I don’t know, we’ve thought about theming these calls, but if we do, it’s like w we really have uncovered it.
Tips For Building Systems As A Solo Agent/Investor.
[00:37:53]I don’t think most people have systems in place that are repeatable. I think, most of us are single unit people and it’s like thrash to get the next deal where I don’t have enough systems in place to give them the training or, I don’t have, I don’t have some repeatable process to give them, I have all these odds and ends things to give them.
And I agree, it’s, I know they want to work harder, I don’t doubt that by any means, but my message isn’t clear to them, so Dan, can you commit everybody here that you’ll start to document your business processes? You will come up with checklists and just start to let me ask you this in the form of a challenge, let’s find let’s I’m trying to make this not depressing.
I don’t want to make you terminally ill. Let’s say, you want a six-month trip where you get to travel. The world. Ritz Carlton just issued you a six-month trip, all expenses, but you have to accept in the next seven days, can you get your business processes documented where they’re duplicatable by a capable person in the next seven days?
Can you at least document what it is you do in the business? So what is your job description? What do you do? What do other people do? What are you like? And I think if you can get in that mindset and connect with that exercise if I was going to travel the world for six months without a cell phone, and I had seven days to prepare how in the hell would I do that?
And still, have this business be alive when I come back. Interesting story. When I cut Stacy lose when she finished the last block on her training calendar, I was getting, I literally put seven deals in an escrow in one day and I was doing, I was ratifying contracts as I got on an airplane to fly into Northern Canada and 18 days.
I came out of the woods and I was like I wonder if it burnt to the ground. Cause I literally just realized on the calendar and YouTube, the trainer and I were up till four o’clock in the morning. And I flew out at six. I laid down for two hours because I ratified seven contracts in a bay from start to finish.
And I was just, I was here. And the and so when I came back, I talked, I called the title company first and I’m like, Hey, can you tell me, like, how bad is it amazing. I love her. Can we, just work with her? And you get the hell out of our way. I’m like, yes, it worked. So I didn’t even think of that when I challenged you with the exercise, but I loved that.
I literally trained her and disappeared for almost three weeks and came back. She did not drop a single ball and we closed, I think we had 14 closings while I was gone. And she was at the closing table. Like she went there and greeted my clients then as the title companies loved her from that moment on.
But there’s a lot of good.
Getting Your Business On Track When You Need It Most
[00:40:29]We’ve thrown a lot at you, but I think if you can just, and maybe it’s not a seven-day commitment, maybe it’s over the next 30 days. If you can commit to just forcing your yeah. Not forcing yourself, but challenging yourself to document those processes, whether it’s in writing on video, however, you might do that.
You’ll start to see some of your own blind spots I think, and where you really need help. The next thing I would encourage you to do is once you’ve done that, go by and put a checkmark beside everything, you hate everything. You don’t enjoy doing the things that are urgent, but not important. That becomes your job description.
And that might be the job description of one person or four people. But regardless, they’re the things that you need to get rid of because you’re not you’re they’re keeping you from dollar productive activity. So the exercise is folding one. It helps become a training manual, your franchise prototype to, it becomes a job description for your key hire.
So I think it’s, for me, it’s probably a three-part process because, looking at it this way, I don’t have enough. I don’t have a repeatable day. I don’t have repeatable processes and that’s my fault. I don’t have enough of a structure to hand that off to somebody. Yup.
And I, that’s a bad thing for me to admit, but I’m sure there are other guys on this thing in the same boat, we’ve all been in your position. If anyone on here says they haven’t, that means they haven’t really, they haven’t been successful enough. You haven’t gotten your ass handed to you yet.
You’ll get there. We all will none of us are immune to this. It’s just, it’s a muscle. We just have to learn how to build it. And it’s a little different for all of us. I’ll go back to Rosie, I think was the one that recommended the E-Myth. It sounds to me having talked this conversation through a little bit more, that suggestion is even better than it was when she made it.
I think you’re going to get a ton from that book. Then, if you like, do you like audiobooks, Dan? That’s the only kind I can read. Cool. Gerber, actually, I think he self-narrated that one, he has a George Carlin voice. It’s a really pleasant audiobook to listen to, but Yeah. Yeah. That’s that one’s investor specific.
I don’t think I’ve read that one. I’ve read the original multiple times I guy, that’s one of those books that I revisit. All right. You’ve got the whole library, man.
Sorry, go ahead. I was going to ask those look like pretty crisp copies. Are you using the osmosis method or are you actually see that’s some of the issues? I, there are so many things that I need to do sometimes. You’re just like, okay, I am, I want to do this, but wait a minute, I’m not really prepared.
I have to do this. And then you’re just in this cycle of chasing my tail, that your income where you want it to be, oh no. Nowhere near my income. Is it my income is a dwindling Schwab account. That’s what my income is. Do you have high months and low months or is it you’re just living on savings right now?
Yeah, I do. Okay. I but I’m really new. I’m really new to this business. I was a tech guy for 30 years and this is a whole different game. It is for sure. But the good news about you being a tech guy is you have an operational mind, right? Like you don’t recoil from those things.
I do. Like I can make myself do it and sprint, so I can make myself be an ops guy, 30, 60, 90 days at a time. But eventually, I’m like, I’ve got to run away to the woods and camp by myself for months. But so what I would do. I want you to focus on the urgency and the importance of getting foundational systems in place in your business.
And I would say of having had this conversation, reading that book, like seriously, reading it with a highlighter in hand and notes. And when you get inspired, when you have an idea, put the book down, write that down and come back to it. I did this in 20, but before the story of documenting every little process and making YouTube videos, I did it.
I remember clearly it was new year’s day. I was home alone. I chose not to do anything on new year’s Eve or on, I kept that day open for just planning and clarity for the start of a new year. And this was, that was the same year, right before I went to Tony Robbins UPW the first year. But I sat down with E-Myth revisit.
By the fireplace and I committed to reading it cover to cover. In one day it took me almost 16 hours because I had so many ideas and so many lists as flashes of inspiration. This was the second or third time throughout the book. It’s still, it’s usually taken me six to seven hours to read a business book cover to cover.
It took me almost over twice that time, but it was, it locked in the lessons that I didn’t hear the first time. I didn’t notice the first time. And. It’s it, the reason I was so thorough that time is frankly because it fucking mattered more than ever. And I was living off of savings. I didn’t have the revenue that I needed.
Like I had revenue, but my net was terrible. I was spending more, too much of the revenue I was earning and it mattered. And right now it sounds like it matters. And in your situation. So I would if you can commit to whether it’s that or something else, but you’ve got those books and you’ve heard.
Our suggestions on how much of a difference they were able to make for us. I would think that’s the most important thing you can do in your business right now is lay down that foundation where you do have you are clear on what needs to be done daily. You know what the rhythm is, then you will begin to learn how to, you can delegate that in the parts you hate and the part that you love, and the parts you want to celebrate.
And like Rosie said, those are the ones you want to keep. The rest of them become job descriptions, delegation. But if there’s we’ve put you on the, in the hot seat and hammered at you. But I would say that’s the most important thing you can do. And the next month is really focused on whether it’s the E-Myth or some other system.
Gaining Traction
[00:46:04]There’s one more thing. Geno Wickman wrote a book called traction and there’s a parable version called to get a grip and that teaches the entrepreneurial operating system or EOS. These books are also in the probate mastery reading list that has been like the next evolution moving away from Google calendar in a way from the first iteration of things that helped me get my processes in place.
The next iteration of that when AllTheLeads began was moving that over to the EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. And there’s a piece of software that, that I still use and. I probably should own stock in this company as many people that I sell it to, but I just dropped in the chat.
There’s a 30-day trial. I, this is, I’m not an affiliate. I just grabbed that off the Google result, but that will help you reign in the daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual activities. And when you read the EMF, what’d, you’re going to, one of the biggest takeaways for me from that is you need to visualize who you are 10 years from now.
What’s your business look like 10 years from now and then start to document your way back and you create right. And that’s what, that’s the fun part about business. And it’s hard when you’re in the state that you’re in right now. It’s yeah, I don’t want to be creative. I want to make some damn money.
I gotta pay bills but give yourself the space like that to tap into that creative genius and look out there 10 years and then come back and a good place to capture that. Or the best place I’ve found is not in Dropbox, not in. A million different word documents had the ninety.io software has really helped me keep all that.
And Rosie, back to all the way back to the, when you first began talking one of the questions I asked you about dumping your last D the dump. Then, what I use is you have long-term and short-term. Issues as they’re called within the software and with an EOS and what I use long-term issues for the catch-all.
So when something, a short-term issue is the things that need to be talked about on a weekly meeting and each of those should be dispositioned off and there shouldn’t be anything left there. Anything that the disposition is what you’re talking about, delegate, do or dump. And you just you either delegate to another team.
You delegate to yourself and do it, or you dump it into the long-term issue. So that way it’s never lost. There’s always a record thereof your best ideas and inspirations. And oftentimes you’ll come back in six months and be like, that was a stupid fricking idea. I’m glad we didn’t spend time on that, but then you can always delete the four D right.
So you can dump and then so I guess I use to like the 40 like delegate does the dump or delete would be the way I use that system, but that’s something as you jump into this, Dan, it may be helpful to start that free trial of ninety.io. And as your vision develops for what your business looks like and what those processes are, all of that is documentable right inside of that software without the software EOS.
It’s impossible to keep up with the amount of discipline. And I’ve watched hundreds of guys go through this. And I ended up being like I said, that made the joke about 90 because I’ve helped so many guys get there, like small to medium-sized businesses up to 25, 39 bucks, help them get everything back on track, and reign in the chaos by using that software.
So it’s just a simple tool. It’s $12 per user, but it’s worth its weight in gold. So that’s my last piece of advice and I know Ronald and Eric and Justin have been waiting to jump in. Eric, I interrupted you earlier. We’ll start with you.
How Rosie Interviews Virtual Assistants To Find The Right Fit
[00:49:32] I actually just wanted to see if Rosie might be willing to have a conversation just about how she does some training with her ISA just about culture. Cause I think one thing that I’ve really identified is my guy is too polite at times.
He’s too apologetic. Not brash or abrasive or rude, but he’s definitely a little bit apologetic at times. I feel so. I just want to know if she might be willing to have a conversation, even if it’s not today offline, sometime I’ll go ahead and speak for her rate is $1,500 an hour. It runs through my Stripe account.
That’s fine. I’d pay for it. I love it. I love that Chad thank you. You’re absolutely right. They are very polite and they are very like sometimes they’re very timid in terms of, they don’t want to say that we didn’t get right. So one of the cultural things that when I hire people, you know in addition to understanding their skillset not to attach to what they know, but how they do things like that has been my consistent theme in hiring people.
My buyer’s agent who is such a top producer right now, in my opinion, is she’s doing really well for herself. She was leaving the real estate, if we can change our mindset, maybe try trying it in your personal life and your business, rather than hiring someone on what they do, what they have done, mommy, more attached to how they are going about things, and if that isn’t fit with your personality and business. So that’s the number one thing I did with VA, I asked them, how would you go about if something like this happens? So a lot of those questions were asked when I interviewed them and. Another question I asked them, is that in your career, what has been an ideal supervisor for you?
Like when did you feel most productive and most growing and most joyous at your work? And I figured out, I wrote down those traits for those people, and consistently across the board, all of these gave me one response. They said they had zero political interaction with the main person who hired them and they just didn’t know if they were doing or what was truly needed.
And I’m a visual person. I, my audiobook kind of flies over my head. I have to read something. So I actually, to be honest with you, I don’t even talk to me if there are none of us caught on a video. So I have all my views on the video. I want to see the crunch or the timidness. I want to see the body language when I see something, how you receive it.
And that really. It gave them get, give me a lot of leverage, always doing a video call with them at screen-share and showing them because how do we know? Are they kinesthetic? Are they more visual? Are they more auditory? Like at the best? My best liberation has been, people don’t have to know what I want to get done.
It was more important to me that I know how the people I hired get things done because then I can navigate my business properly. So this really helped me to do a zoom video call and asking an of hard questions on what has been their best experience when did felt fully trained and fully useful on the team.
So when you find those core qualities and you’re willing to foster the talent and say they may not have strong sales skills, but they’ve got a really, they’ve got these core qualities that really may work well with you. And you’re like, this person can be trained over time. So it’s not so much about just finding somebody who’s super strong in sales, but finding somebody who may have.
On good customer service background, or knows how to reroute the conversation and kind of get it back then. Yeah. Yes, that’s right. And Eric, you and I both know that in our business, the highest dollar producing activities, having a conversation or moving a transaction forward like if somebody is on a fence, their homework, or if somebody has been a prospect, the fact that I hear the word right in you, and I can tell that fires you too.
So I think the highest dollar producing activity on my clock, I want it to be dedicated the last in the row. First I want to dedicate all the minimum BJ activities. the reason I want to do that is so that I can become more dollar productive per hour. So the sales part was not even my expectations.
I said you don’t have to sell a single thing. I want you to do everything but sales, because more time I had to mess, the reason we don’t like lead generation is that all the people were creeping up in the back of her head is scary. Then the moment I’m going to put this phone down. I have to attend to all those monkeys that I have been jumping on my emails and my phones.
But it’s still keeping that down. I find myself having fun with prospecting. All I want to do is just talk to people and make deals, but having this ad, is where we forget what you’re hiring people for. My biggest there are two things. Somebody I was really inspired by in real estate.
I always watched people were very bigger producers than me and I always tried to reach out to them and see how they respond. They will always answer my important question, but if I’m just checking on them, they didn’t respond. It means they’re busy doing their thing. So I always like to
mimic them. And there were two things that someone told me. I forgot the second thing now, but I won’t remember the phone. He said I’ve entered that. My great friend had Andy. I said, Andy, you do so well for yourself. Like I know what are the right things to do, but I’m not able to do it. He said it’s not important enough to you yet.
The day becomes important enough to you. You will figure it out. So it became so important for me to figure it out with them. That I had to figure out, how these people work best so I can plug my system to it. And Walmart is a big, and guys, I know Walmart is hated and all those things are McDonald’s are heavy then.
But what we’re hearing is our opinion about it. But in essence, we look at it from far away. They’re running good businesses. It is much harder to find high-quality talent because the high-quality talent is going to want to learn, grow, and move. And that’s the best compliment. A high-performing talent can give you the right for high-performing talent to survive our world has to be big enough, so their world can exist within ours’s then we are working with VAs. They can be average talent, but if you give them a sharp system, they can look like high performers.
The word that I use to describe something becoming important. I use the word conviction until it becomes a strong conviction in my heart. It’s not going to be front and center. So that literally summarizes my question at the very beginning of the call. I need to be more convicted of what my non-negotiables are.
And it sounds like it’s just prospecting and building processes for everything that might fall to the wayside, but still has to be accomplished. So that’s my big takeaway. Yes. And the second thing I just remembered it. The second thing was, I learned it from Chris’ boss, actually, Chad yeah, but Brian has been quite a few times.
I love I had gotten a lot of opportunities to meet Chris Voss Brandon Voss and Derek Gaunt at a couple of events. And they told me one thing, they said never be so attached to an outcome that you won’t take anything better along the way. So I never get attached to what idea I started the business with because I’ve been a victim of that as a business and entrepreneur or entrepreneur.
We think that if I set the vision and if I change the vision, where are people going to think about me? I thought about that all the time. And one day I was like, you know what? Not no more, maybe I want something better. So I’m the first one to tell my team. I don’t know what I’m about to say, but you guys are better at building systems.
So hear me out and tell me what I should be doing then. And Chris wants me to base the flow for me. He said the smartest person in the room is the person who knows how to use everybody’s brain. So I shut up and I had my team talk because then my team knows what they think matters. And the more you empower them, the more powerful you’ll be.
Thank you, Eric. I’ve already emailed you the invoice, so be sure and pay that. Thank you, Chad. I appreciate that one. All right, Ronald. You’re up next.
Creating Facebook Ads For Probate Leads
[00:57:12]Thank you. I’ve got a question for you, Chad, and just to give the question a little context I’ll let you know that I. Are remind you that I became an agent in January and no income. I’ve been living off of savings for months. Finally, we’re getting our first listing. We’ve been working on this particular property for more than a month, trying to get everything together.
We’re signing the listing today. That’ll be our first deal going forward. I’m excited about that now, as I want to probate, that’s a probate deal. Yep. And it was through an attorney referral. I was excited about that. Then I met with another attorney who bought his lunch on Thursday of last week.
I told, coming up, I’ve got this thing I’m excited about. So he promised that he was going to refer somebody to me. I’ve referred somebody to him already. It’s starting to happen. My, my question though, my, my issue here. That I am, have not had any success in prospecting. I’m hardly ever able to get ahold of anybody on the phone.
When I do get somebody on the phone, it seems like it’s, I’m too late. Like I’ve had people tell me, Hey, I closed on that deal three weeks ago, very active kind of market wholesalers are hugely active out here. And I know that I need to get better at the prospecting side if only to get people that I can refer to my attorneys to begin those relationships because those are where my deals are coming from right now is from the attorneys I’m in Phoenix.
My partner’s in Tucson. And are you buying leads? So we’re buying leads in Tucson from all the leads and for this market, I’m buying from another vendor I’m buying both probate leads and pre-probate leads your advice to me on the last call was to get the email addresses and to try to Facebook retargeting ads, which I have started doing now.
But I’m not sure I figured out that you got the skip trace done. So you got an email address. Okay. And have you figured out how to make the saved audience or the custom audience and all of that? So of the, let’s see I had on the pre-probate needs, I got about 125 in Maricopa county and about 125 in Pinellas county of those 250, I had about 650 relatives who had emails.
I’ll put those into the end of the thing and start doing those ads with a custom audience. Okay. And what was, what’s your, what’s creative for your ad? Is it a photo of the video? It’s a video of me just talking about the services I provide helping people go through probate and deal with personal property and all of that.
And how long has that been? How long is it running and what’s your daily budget? So the video itself is 33 or 34 seconds. It’s only been running about four days and it’s 20 bucks a day. Okay. And what’s your cost per impression? What’s the CPR? I don’t know. It’s I don’t know. I’d have to, what’s the call to action in the video and that cop, it is to learn more and it sends them to the, to my website.
Okay. And what page is it land? On the first page. Okay. And what’s the call to action on that homepage? There is a place where they can push a button and dial my phone. But now you’re telling me I should get rid of my phone. Good. But at this point, it’s not a problem. I’ll take any call. I can get, no, you can absolutely do both.
I’m saying when you’ve got, when you need to guard your time, then it’s time to remove your phone number, but it’s not time now. I, one of the methods that I like is to leave your phone number on the top header of your website. And they can always find that find your phone number, but they call it action is your Calendly link, right?
So they go in, they choose a time that works for them, but always give them the option to call right now, if they want to, as long as you have the bandwidth or you have somebody that you’ve delegated that too for me, I was really interested in creating the expectation that I don’t jump in and I’m not always there, but I get that doesn’t work for everybody.
The one thing I would like you to do is build a are you on a WordPress or you’re using one of them, all the leads sites or. So you can build a page that’s not in the deck, it’s not in the menu. Just put in, domain.com forward slash Community resource, whatever that might be, and on your Facebook ad, have it land on that page.
And on that page, you’re going to have a subsequent video because they’re not going to learn. They’re not 35 seconds is not long. For them to trust you. It’s long enough. It’s long enough you get the interruption, they can identify with it. Then they click. The next step is let’s get them on a landing page where you go along for them.
And you talk about the social enterprise that you’re offering, why you’re doing that. What value that, that you can bring to the families, give some examples give them ways where they can learn more about you. Hey guys, there’s an about page right here. I encourage you to go look at that. You’ll find more information about me on Yelp or Trulia or Zillow or wherever you Google reviews.
Or you can point them to, but permit them to do their due diligence on you. And like that will build trust. But that if that traffic’s hitting your homepage and you’re not getting conversions, you’re not getting calls. It’s probably because they don’t, it’s not clear enough what you’re doing.
So let’s, we can use your WordPress site. Let’s just land them on a specific landing page off of your, when you on the URL from the ad, and let’s land them there and give them a more detailed video that tells them more. And excuse me, and that should increase your conversions, the call to action. Put it right below the video.
Hey guys, my name’s Ronald, thanks so much for clicking the ad. As of now, I specialize in helping families in probate and yes, I do have the courage to put myself on social media because it’s so important to me that I actually reach as many families that I can America Copa. I realized there’s a lot of folks out there with different intent.
So thank you for your patience. I’m sure you want to learn more about what we do if you’d like to call me right now, whether that’s to cuss me out or tell me that this is amazing. This is in the community. There’s a number above. Or you can schedule yourself into my calendar below. If you’ve got a few minutes to stick around, I’ll tell you a little bit about what we do, why we do it, and how we built this, and then go into your pitch and a really a casual video like that permits them to critically be critical of you.
They’re not going to but something like that casual really will help them go, oh, this guy’s human. And he’s actually in Maricopa. Ah, this is pretty interesting. I’ll stay here for another three minutes and then remember to go back to your call to action. So if you’ve made it this far in a video, obviously you’re thinking maybe you could use a little help.
The easiest way to reach me because we do help so many families. And I do, I have conversations every day with families all over this massive county of ours, but the easiest way to reach me is to go ahead and schedule into the calendar right now, or call the number at the top of the page.
If I can’t get you out, if you miss me, I’ll make sure you get a return call by the end of the day. But thanks so much for visiting our page and please. Let us help you and something like that. And then in three minutes, like you can take it if you’re not getting the conversations on the phone, but you are getting some engagement with that.
Let’s sell on a landing page. So that would be my advice there. The other advice is the same as last week, man, focus on those attorneys like you who are in one of the most tenaciously competitive markets in the country. So you gotta focus on that X factor, things like this. So building organically, building relationships with attorneys, doing, using social media and other methods that other people aren’t cracking into the, and I forgot that you’re mixing pre probate in there too.
You may even soften that message on the video. You might say, listen we understand that. Some people don’t know what the first step is, and that’s why it’s important that we reach out and we get that. This is contentious and this may be reaching you at a time where you’re still grieving.
However, just know the wolves are. And we can either work for you or, w we can help protect you from that. You may go with a message like that. Because you’re even upstream of the probate filing. Yeah. That’s the goal is to get upstream so that I can help direct them to the attorneys.
And I want to strengthen relationships with, I just got to figure out how to do that. So if I’m, you don’t want me to call the pre probate leads you to want me to, but I can’t call the probate leads. Yeah, probate is, they’ve appointed themselves or they’ve been appointed as a public representative.
So there, they sh they should be willing to talk. Otherwise, they’re signed. The pre probate is contentious. And you can try it. It’s your reputation, the risk. I’m not going to hammer that list because you don’t know who the decision-maker is. You don’t know if the estate is ready to be sold, if the siblings are all, positioning the higher attorneys and Sue each other, and you call one, you might be walking in the middle of a damn litigation mess.
There’s just so much uncertainty and a pre-probate scenario. They could, who you never know, and the risk you run there as you become that guy. Like you, you call the family members that one family member tells the other five and those five go and get out their poison pens and troll you on the internet and leave you bad Google reviews.
And some of that shit can’t be on doing. So you can do reputational harm by, by, a lot of people think, be there first and who cares what they think, but in today’s day and age, if you’re building a digital reputation, it can be taken from you in seconds. So that’s why I’m so cautious to support anyone calling these folks with probate.
They’re in a different mindset. They’re they’ve, they’ve processed to an extent they’ve processed the loss. They’ve moved forward, gone to the courthouse. Scheduling an appointment, going to the courthouse, sat down and talked to the clerk, and now they expect that there’s going to be some inbound from creditors.
There’s going to be some inbound, they have responsibilities, but in pre probate, that expectation is not there yet. They’re still like, I don’t know what to do. What are we gonna do about this? One of the things like if you want to specialize in pre probate, a very valuable offer that you could offer on that social media campaign.
The Probate Checklist as Ad Creative
[01:07:06]If you can get a pro a probate attorney or an estate planning attorney if you can get them to coauthor, even if it’s just a 10-page book, something that, that a legal professional in the county can coauthor with you you, so you’ve recently lost a loved one. Here’s the life transition checklist, and it’s here.
Here’s how do you like and talk about things? What do you do about their passwords, their email account, their online bills, their cell phone, their things like this talk? I don’t talk about real estate. Talk about early in the process, the things that are right in front of them that are glaringly like that are saying, holy shit.
Where did she, what, like, where does the phone bill even go? It didn’t show up. And now they’re like, or the electric bill and they’re going to shut up the electric off and it’s 125 degrees. And, the cat’s still in the house and we’re going by their feet. And every day, like those are the more immediate problems that are, that, that start to occur to them right after the death.
Those are the kinds of things that it’s most valuable to help them address because they’re in this kind of panic mode a lot of times. So if you can get an attorney, to help you co-author a piece like that. That could be the offer and on your landing page or maybe even in the Facebook ad, click here for a family tree Maricopa family transition, a PDF, or whatever that might be not a great creative job here, but I think you get the idea.
I’ve thought about that kind of thing before. My concern though is if I aligned myself with one particular attorney, does that mean some of the other attorneys that I want to. Have relationships with won’t refer to. So do it as like you be the author and go to each attorney and ask them for collaboration and just say, listen, I’ve, I’m adding attorneys to my team.
Would you like to comment on and have, a citation and this, and then the end of it, you could have 10 attorneys like this is, huge thanks to the estate planning attorneys of America, Copa county. Here are all the contributors to this piece and just it’s, there are lots of books.
So you can, it can be a collective knowledge piece from you and 10 different attorneys, and you guys, they have a choice at the end of that. If they got value from it, and maybe you give each attorney a chapter, maybe you write a damn book. And one attorney writes a chapter on preparing, on, on guardianship.
And another writes a chapter on this and another on that. But that way everybody gets to contribute and get credit. And they have their own little piece of pieces, the piece of the PDF, but that’s a long-term thing. It’s not something you’re going to get in place, this week.
But it’s something to think about, take that idea and run with it. What if I had, a valuable resource for folks who are pre probate who have just lost a family member? What if I have. A CPA, write a chapter, a funeral home director, write a chapter, a, somebody from the bill, the collection department at the phone company or the water utility.
Like here’s how here’s, if in a perfect world, here’s what families should know about paying the last utility bill or making sure utilities get transferred, not shut off. Just think of all those people in the community really early in the process that can offer good advice to this family.
Go out, document their best advice, bring it back and you take credit. You put your name on the cover. That’s pretty good, Chad. Yeah. The one thing I would say like I did that article at the, you can go out and get one written for you and then ask for their opinion to edit it. That’s a really good idea.
And you can put, that’s a really good idea, Chad. Wow. I figured I’d say something. Yeah, appreciate it. Ronald is that enough? Yeah, it was there another part of the question or I guess I’m I want to start prospecting. The probate leads immediately. And for one thing, I’m not sure if these probate situations have been filed and then they sat around for weeks before the attorney published them.
The fact that the petition has been filed, I don’t know what’s going on. No, it’s getting recorded on the public filing of the petition. You have access now. All the leads are gathering. No, no more frequently than every two weeks, but it could be every month. I don’t know. I don’t remember in Maricopa, it could be a 30 day period from the last time a researcher was in there until the next time.
So if someone comes if they, if the researcher gets leads on May 28th, while the is not going back until June 28th, and if somebody filed on May 29th, if they followed probate, they could, someone else who’s gathering their own data could have actually had a hold of that for a month. Now, the one thing nobody’s going in there and gathering the data though, because the courthouse won’t allow people in It’s funny how it’s being done.
If they have, electronic access, people who are gathering daily do have an advantage. So you can do that. It’s cost-prohibitive for all the leads because we use, we use human researchers and not scrapers and Maricopa may be on bi-weekly delivery like every two weeks, but you can, you can look at if you can do daily collection, but regardless, some people will have listed the home before the death even occurred, because they’re just proactive.
They have it together. You’re never going to help those people that they don’t need help. They. They’re strong and they’re diligent and they really just don’t need that much leadership. It’s the ones who procrastinate and don’t know what to do and they freeze up and they think I just want to dump this for whatever, to get, get rid, to get away from this responsibility.
Those are the ones we helped the most. But so if you’re coming up short on the phones, contact rates are the hardest thing. And the follow-up, follow-up is the name of the game. And if you all the way back to the very beginning of this phone call, the first thing we talked about is, the thing that matters the most and prospecting, whether you’re using artificial intelligence or using your cell phone, it’s repetition, right?
So it’s discouraging, especially when you sit down and hammer out eight hours of calls and you met, you contacted 10, 15% of the people, but you just have to be persistent and hit it again the next day, like just keep calling. But 10% of the people. Yeah. It’s tough, man. And especially in accounting, like you’re, so a lot of the reason I’m spending the time and energy to give you some of these different ideas as I, and I’ll be Frank here, I think you’re going to burn out.
I don’t think you can sustainably continue making those calls with such low contact rates. So for me, you mustn’t quit. Cause I know this works. I know it works everywhere. I know it works for Maricopa. It’s fine. It’s me, I feel compelled to find the next factor for you, an edge, something that makes your offer different, something that allows you to attract business while everybody else chases it and competes.
So where is, where are Ronald’s blue ocean and Maricopa county? And that’s why a lot of the advice that I give you so I can tell you to go hammer the phones, and like some, some old school, real estate coaches, some of the biggest organization, it’s all about repetition.
That’s a numbers game, keep track, keep dialing. But it only works for so long. And then you’re like the hell with this. I’m going to, that book on blue ocean strategies, by the way, it was very good. And I’m trying to do some of those things.
Suggestion For Finding Videographers
[01:14:15] I had some videos that I had laid out. We had interviews with partners, interviews with me, that kind of thing.
And I’ve had two different video companies screw up. One of them gave me a bad sound. It sounded like I was in a well, and the other one just never delivered a product. It’s been over two weeks now. And I’m just frustrated with that whole thing. I think the videos are really good or could be if they’re done right, are a really good resource for attracting the business instead of chasing it, you know, the community college.
Yeah, there are several actually it’s Gusto community paradise valley community. Find one with a video department or with a digital marketing track and go over there and talk to the summer instructor and say, listen, I need interns. I need people that can edit video. I’ll give them a steady flow of real projects to work on.
That’s a great idea. I was getting, they’re not going to half-ass and that they have deadlines. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that’s great, thank you, Chad appreciates that. Yup. Chad, it’s it sounds like Ronald needs some wins. Can you give him some wins, some stuff that he’s done now that’s really put them in the right direction for being successful?
Always Celebrate Your Small Wins
[01:15:28] You are Ronald. You seem rundown a little bit like discouraged, I guess is the word, but you gotta hang up. Yeah, I can be discouraged. I’m getting a listing today. I’m actually pretty excited about that. And I’ve got another one coming, but I just still feel like I haven’t cracked the code yet and I need to find a way to get those people so I can refer them to my attorneys and keep those guys.
Yep. Keep raising your hand, man. There are thanks for calling home, calling me out there, and honestly, not facetiously, like you’ve done things in the last two weeks that I haven’t been able to get people to do in five damn years. Like when I tell somebody to create a custom audience on Facebook and go skip, trace the leads and figure out your match points and create it and run an ad.
So I have literally begged people for over three, four months before cause I knew they were about to quit. They didn’t do it. They quit. So I’ll commend you on taking action. Like this, isn’t just a whole bunch of talk and like sharing ideas. You’re actually putting the ideas and the play and that’s rare and successfully close.
The people, the common thread among the people that I’ve coached that are most successful in this is they go try it, they go put it into action. They don’t make excuses and say I wouldn’t have, but there was this and then better than that. But there was that, and you’re not doing that. Fuck it.
I’ll try it. And you go do it. You put it into action.
Starting a B2B Networking Group For Local Social Media Marketing
[01:16:48]One of the ideas that we shared, I think it was last week, potentially the week before John Fraker had suggested an estate planning council. Did you look into that in your market?
Yes, I did look into that and talk to them on the phone. They’re still not meeting in person yet. They’re doing like zoom calls and stuff and that may be that’s. That may be valuable, but I haven’t pulled the trigger on that. What’s that I just had an, I put a pin in an idea when you were talking earlier and I forgot to come back to it.
Do you have a Facebook group for these families and pre probate or. I do not. I have a challenge for you. So my challenge for you this week is to find a way to create a Facebook group that provides unique value to those people. And you, this is a place where you can invite the attorneys who are looking to earn that business and take all the people, all the idea about writing the book, take that and put it into a Facebook group.
Invite somebody from a city utility to come and talk about how what to do. This becomes organic archived video and this property of your Facebook page, that’s shared in the group that goes on your YouTube channel. So everything that takes the entire book idea and translates that to a Facebook group and makes it a community resource for families in transition.
And that’s something you can implement and execute on starting right now. Go have those conversations with those attorneys, invite them to contribute to the group by polling up their zoom and doing a 15. Interview with you and feature them as the attorney in that group, then go to the utility person and feature them, then go to a social worker and feature them, then go to a nursing home and take that commission person who gets paid to put heads in beds and feature them in an interview and do a series of interviews that are legitimately valuable to families that are in that deer in the headlights phase of, I just lost somebody and create a group, bring the damn audience to you.
And that’s something that you should be able to execute on starting like right now, just start thinking about who are these people in the community that can really be a value to this family right now, if they just lost somebody in the last seven days. Talk to the funeral, home directors, like what happens with a death certificate?
How does it get to the courthouse? How does social security know when somebody passes away? Those are processes that happened with the funeral home, the funeral administrators, but not everybody knows that I can, and they’re getting a bunch of, they’re overwhelmed. So have that community conversation, an archive that in the Facebook group and put that out there for everyone in America county defined, including your damn competition.
Okay. So what did we call this? A Phoenix probate network or. W now it’s, they’re not like, so the pre probate, they’re not even, they may not even be familiar with that term. So you could call it, Phoenix, life transitions, or something like that. It says we’ll not get lost. I don’t want to give you shitty advice on branding that it’ll take some time to get creative and think that through.
But whatever that brand is like, it’s something about a transition because if this works, if this gets traction, don’t you want to work with people in trust administration, high net, worth individuals, and Canadian internationals who own in your market. So you don’t want to isolate, you don’t want to box yourself in and say, oh this is a probate group and somebody who’s entrusted administration or somebody who’s exempt from probate.
And I’ll tell ya, there are, imagine if. People oftentimes like if someone who has a family member going through that has passed away and they’re exempt from the probate, that doesn’t really mean, the parent or the decedent didn’t have much net worth. But if you can provide value to the people in their family who don’t, who are just on simple probate, Who knows what they own, right?
Like how many generations that the next generation just knocks it out of the park. Most self-made millionaires and billionaires had broke ass parents. So you never know who you might find in these groups, even if they’re not going through probate, even if they’re exempt from it, especially if they’re in trusted administration.
But talk, think about it in broader terms of not just a probate conversation, but a transition conversation. And even, if you really want to get upstream of probate, get upstream of the death, start featuring elder care professionals. Start talking about long-term care planning, start talking about what happens to a whole life policy and how a family, how long should they have to talk to an insurance agent and say, when somebody has a whole life policy and when someone passes away, how quickly how long should it take for the beneficiaries to receive the benefit so they can, and have those conversations publicly?
No one else is I challenge you to go find them. They’re not there. People are too timid to do this. So this is you putting a flag in the sand and Maricopa saying. This is I’m serious. And then the time that you might spend hammering the phones to come up with 10% contact rates, I’ll tell you, this is Tom, better spent like you, this is evergreen.
It will, it’ll build a reputation that’s that lasts. And rather than you getting frustrated to a point where you’re willing to give up on it, do things like this. And this becomes a sellable brand. And that’s the other thing to think about when you’re naming it and branding it is who am I selling this to in 10 years?
Which you know which real estate investors, real estate agent hedge fund will find so much value in this captive audience that I can sell this off as a business asset. So you don’t want it to be, the Ronald show makes it something like, like Phoenix, life transitions or Arizona life transitions or something like that.
And then in your group description, you can be a little more specific about what you do. We help families in the transition to guardianship, probate, trust administration, divorce, whatever that might be. This is a community resource where professionals who can provide value to families and transition, jump in and help.
And, there’s no. We’re here too, we’re here to earn your trust. And ultimately if we help you with your business and that’s the message and your group description, you should ask a few qualifying questions, something like, are you a competing real estate professional? Or I wouldn’t do that because you don’t want people to feel like you’re only corralling them to eventually force them into a real estate conversation.
This is something that you want to, you want people to go, holy crap, who knew there was a Facebook group for what I’m going through. This is amazing.
I guess a really good idea, Thank you very much. I do appreciate it. It was very helpful. Yeah. And keep your head up, man. You’re in one of those tough markets. You’ve done a lot of things, right? You’ve taught for no longer than you have been in it.
You’ve done well. Some people go six months to try to get a deal in markets like Maricopa or Colorado. So keep doing keep flipping over stones. If you execute on everything we talked about here today, how our problem will be, we won’t see you again because you’ll be too damn busy to come to these calls. David Pinel, you need to go do the same thing in Fort worth, buddy. Yeah, I’m just, I have a lot of things on the books. If Rosie was here, she’d give you a talking to yeah. Do, dump, and delegate it.
Custom Branded Books For Probate Marketing
[01:23:54] Donna, you’re up next? You’ve been patiently waiting.
I’m actually Maricopa too. I mean, Phoenix, I don’t know if you remember me, but anyway, I, I put a little note in there. This authority, I book this company creates these book templates and they’re just little mini books and then you brand it with your information. And it’s, that’s me, the one I chose is called tips and tricks for selling your inherited home.
And I’ve been giving this out and it looks like I wrote it. It looks like I’m, it’s But it has you check it out and you can add things to it if you want and tweak it a little bit, but it’s all basic information. It’s really good. And they love getting that little book. So I love in a little book idea,
How To Start Buying Investment Properties as A Licensed Agent
[01:24:34] but my question is I’m gonna I just took an investor class as well, and I want to start doing some of this stuff that you’ve been doing as well as, and I also finally having an estate sale guy on my team.
That’s actually just referred me to a property. I just got 16 offers on the property today. I’m presenting it to the client today on an estate. So he’s actually moved to assisted living because that’s one of my goals too, is that is even before probate. Do you know what I mean? The care homes, things like that when they’re moving.
I just had one that’s closing next week. That’s a. We call it reverse mortgage. And what did that look like on getting a closed and soul? And it has four beneficiaries involved. And so as we’ve been learning all along the way, but now I want to know, but my broker, I wanted to buy under an LLC as an investor.
And I want to start doing some wholesaling as well as some remodels flips and things like that, and then holds so a combination eventually. So my broker though, commented to me because I’m a realtor and they did say this in the investor class that, every state’s going to have different rules that we that I can’t have another business within a business.
And I think it’s protective to buy it, to have it under an LLC. So what does that look like? Is it just my broker, do you think? Or what’s the best way for me to start buying a property? What unique value does your broker bring you? I’m a mentor in the mentoring program. So I get a little piece of that, but I, not the I’ve been in the business 20 years.
I there’s, I re I changed from Keller Williams to HomeSmart because it was cheap. HomeStars diver, not very expensive but they are going to take a piece of everything I do. So I don’t know what that looks like now is that as I talked to another investor agent yesterday, and he said, maybe you need to move brokerages, but I don’t know.
I’m not going to start with that. What I would say is it’s hard without being witness to the whole conversation. It sounds like your broker’s perception was you will be putting an LLC within an LLC that already contains your brokerage activity, and that would be dumb, but you, Donna RA. Do you have your license and an LLC?
Or do you have your work? I have a PLLC. Yes, I do. The person, the brokerage, LLC. If you start an investment LLC, over here in the eyes of the law and any state in the nation, that’s a separate entity. Even if you’re the managing member of both, it still doesn’t mean that, that you are acting as your brokerage entity.
You may be act Donna and Donna as a member, but there’s no link back to your license from a legal standpoint. So if you’re, if you’ve drawn that structure out, it’s Nope, I’m here. This branch is all for my brokerage active. Just Joe, like full disclosure. Of course, this branch is for all my investment activity and even full even earlier and fuller disclosure over here.
So Donna is a licensed real estate agent and these states, and that is entering into this transaction as a principal, not as a fiduciary, no agency relationship exists, and she fully intends to make a fat ass profit, a big disclaimer, all of those things. I have a real estate license. I am a principal. I am not your agent.
I am not your fiduciary. I will make some damn money. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing this deal. And if your broker is not comfortable with that structure, then it’s time you go find a new bar. I just wondered if the Eno or something to that particular brokerage does not allow it or something. I don’t know, because that company, there’s a firewall, you have a legal, you have a legal veil.
So it’s the thing is he probably thinks like when I, it took me a dozen brokers before I found one that had the business savvy that could understand entity structuring. The decision for me, I’m like, oh, you’re the only person that hasn’t told me. What I’m doing is illegal. When I know, damn, I can’t wait to work together.
And we have a joke. She’s what’d you just get your damn broker’s license already. I’m like, no, I’m smarter than you.
I don’t want to be, but I just wanted to do it correctly. And I wanted to make sure, cause I wanted to start most selling actually right away. And that’s one of the keys that make money, I think a little faster to start planning on retirement, basically. So I I want to do it as another source and I I didn’t really, I just found, I’ve been taking this course as that means you guys are out of Texas and may have a different they don’t know the state different state requirements and they say that, but I can’t even near as, under state requirement, I looked it up and I actually called the Arizona real estate board and they told me I had to refer back to my broker.
I cannot go directly to the legal department or anything. I’d have to hire my own lawyer. I go, that just seems crazy. Welcome to the bureaucratic runaround. Exactly. So I have literally thousands of friends who do both brokerage and investment, and everyone’s structured very similarly.
Like you have a separate entity, you have a separate EIN bank account. Credit cards contain everything your own copy at your own company and QuickBooks, none of that gets co-mingled and it’s where it becomes sloppy is if you’re co-mingling, if you’re moving money from one entity to the next and this bank account, and you’re buying stuff like a brokerage sign with your investment company credit card you just pierced your corporate veil on your ass.
Your ass is grass you’re exposed to, but if you properly structure this, if it is its own person, you are your own person. And your brokerage is its own person and the eyes of the law in any state that I’m aware of. But the thing is like most brokers are, they have to be cautious right there. They’re representing a group of people who place themselves every three years.
So it’s not like we ended up with this group of highly professional savvy, real estate agents. They’re professional babysitters in most cases, they’ve got to be extra careful about covering their assets because they could lose everything they’ve ever worked for because of one subcontractor making a bad decision.
But you also have to earn broker has to realize they have a responsibility to realize when they do have a savvy real estate professional and you’re for on their behalf as a sub-agent, you’re condoning everyone else invest in real estate. How hypocritical is it that you’re not allowed to yourself?
And that will always my position with these brokers. I’m like, so let me get this straight. You want me to go charge people? You want me on your behalf to go charge people to buy real estate, but you’re not comfortable with me buying real estate. Help me understand. And I’d like, and they never had a good answer.
It’s I’m like, it’s clear, I’m in the wrong, I’m in the wrong office. But no, like what if as long as you structure it that way, and I would recommend you buy as a person as Don, I buy yourself an umbrella policy. If you don’t have it already, your LLC that holds your brokerage is that has Eno insurance inside of it has a corporate bail.
Your investment company will have the corporate veil. No, I usually don’t recommend buying a perp like a dedicated insurance product for an LLC and real estate because they like the when I shopped for premium, they were between five and $15,000 a year because I admitted that I was doing creative financing and they didn’t know what that meant.
So the underwriter it’s something different. I was like, you know what guys the hell was it? I just went back to myself as a person. And I bought a big umbrella policy in case anyone ever got through any of my veils. So that’s your, we’re talking about all the properties. Most, all of the properties would be off MLS.
They would be, off-market properties too. And I don’t know a way, obviously, you don’t care. I don’t really care if there’s a way around paying HomeSmart their portion. I could still do that. That’s not a big deal. But it’s just you don’t have a portion. That’s actually what I was told to at the investments program network, but they’re like insisting that I have to put their name on it.
And I said, but I’m not acting as an agent. That’s the case then you’re breaking state law, for sure. Certainly, if you’re offering, if you are entering into a deal as a principal and putting a brokerage service behind that like you’re wearing both hats like you’re, they’re putting a square into a gray area of the law and putting you at risk and that’s ignorant damn advice.
Like why would you do that? If you’re acting as Donna, the investor, they didn’t, they did not procure the lead. They did not like they have anything to do with that. It is a completely separate relationship and it has nothing to do with them. And you certainly don’t owe them a commission on it. And if they feel like you do, then this is easy.
You’re at the wrong brokerage. So one question I did have is when you market, I know I’ve used your letters and stuff before, but when you market off-market, like this are you required? Maybe you don’t know, this name is a state thing to put like the brokerage name on it, when we’re doing it, the off-market stuff.
No. Okay. Like you curate and the listing and you want to list it. Which is right. If you offer brokerage services, if you say I’m a realtor, I would like to list your home. If you’re offering brokerage services, then yes, you should always put the minimum disclosure if you’re not, if you’re saying, Hey, my name is Donna.
I’m looking at the buy three houses in this neighborhood this year. Please give me a call. What the hell does your broker have to do with that? Donna, the managing member of an LLC that is set up for the sole purpose of investing in real estate as your operating agreement will state like.
And, I’ve had some trouble with it, not trouble. I’ve had some people titled and report me for because I had my investment company had its own professional yard signs. And they said like in Virginia, you have to put a broker, so I had the disclosures on the side, but they were very professional.
They matched the colors and the fonts were, are very similar to my team brand. But then people would say, oh, that damn corporate guy he’s out there, brokering deals off-market. And the state investigator would call, I would say, James, listen, here’s what happened. Here’s my website. Here’s a disclosure, here’s a copy of the purchase agreement.
And he was like, oh, this is pretty cool. You’re doing a really good job and we would close it up. Then I’ve coached other people who go through this same stuff because of tattletales. But even like in Chicago, they’re really an Illinois they’re really cracking down on wholesaling. They want to make sure that anyone who has anything to do with real estate out of the light.
Oh yeah. I was told that the classes that Chicago has to have a license. So even there as tough as an environment as that has become for wholesalers, I have had one of my coaching students reported to the state and he had, it was his burden of proof that he wasn’t, that this structure that we’re referencing was in fact, legal and did, and he did not need a license to do what he was doing.
And he got, he had nothing, no reprimand. He did. I said, here, just stay calm. This isn’t a big deal. You didn’t do anything wrong. Just document the separation between the businesses and clearly show that you are a human. That is the principle of this and a managing member of this and a managing member of this.
And he submitted it. He was sweating bullets, his burden of proof. He’s I’m going to lose my license. I’m like, no, you’re not, you haven’t done anything wrong. And the Illinois board said, oh, okay. We understand. And they closed it. I’ve heard. More people than not more brokers and more like retail agents than not say that the Chad guy’s full of shit.
That’s illegal. I’m telling you. It’s not, it’s just you’re probably sitting in front of the wrong broker. So when I go to present that though, I do have to disclose still that I am a licensed realtor, but I’m not acting right now as an actually licensed chiller. I was overly thorough.
I’m like, Chad Corbett, the managing member of resolutions, LLC, is a licensed agent in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Hawaii, Washington, like every single license that I had and those other points. And I don’t know how important it is, but the regulatory body seemed to like it. But I am entering into this transaction as the managing member and the principal, not a fiduciary -caps, bold, no agency relationship exist.
And I’m entering into this with the sole intent to make a profit. So if I ever find myself in a courtroom defending my disclosure, I’d be like what the hell? Didn’t I say, I have five real estate licenses. I’ve come into this as a principal. I did not have a realtor hat on and I wasn’t going to make money.
And what the hell is the defense counsel going to say? I know in mastery when we took mastery, you said that you at first, I remember when you said you went there and you gave them the choice of did they want to put it on the market or did they want you to buy it? And you showed them the differences, very disclosed the differences of the costs and what you were going to make on it, you just disclose both of those.
So they had an idea, they had a choice, from the beginning. Yeah. I have that sheet, like every appointment package is saved in the Dropbox folder and it’s, it’s, you can see the creation date on the PDF. So if anyone, if an independent thing ever would have gotten further down the road, I would have said, okay, here’s a secure PDF.
And here’s the date that was created on you can audit the file, but this is what they were given. Okay. Okay. Awesome. Thank you.
Mira had some advice. She said also buy investment property under separate LLCs. However, I do have to pay my broker, his fees. If it’s a property listed on the MLS.
And I asked my broker to cut his fees since it’s a property for me, I’m in New Jersey. Yeah. Guys, I like you and Mira if you have a good brokerage relationship, I’m not here. I don’t benefit from driving people to different brokerages. I don’t play that game. There’s a reason I’m with an indie brokerage and I’ve turned down all the phone calls.
When people try to recruit me to be a recruiter What’s important to me is that you’re in an environment that actually promotes growth and innovation and mirror. What I would say is if you’re truly just acting as the principal on a transaction and your brokers insisting on a commission, I don’t think that’s fair at all.
Now, if his brokerage is incurring a cost or an administrative load on the acquisition of that asset, then that’s a different thing. If you’re running it through the transaction coordinators or the title company at the brokerage, and you’re getting some benefit from that. And I don’t think she’s not here.
Let’s off it. I’m here. Her key that she said was, is offered on the MLS. Once it’s offered on the MLS. Yes, we do have to pay brokerage fees and we have to pay the MLS or we can’t. We have to pay a Cobra payment or offered on the MLS in the state of Arizona.
So I’m here at Chad a couple of the deals that I worked on, yes. Some were on the MLS. So I did have to, pay up with my brokerage, but I just made a deal with my broker, but there was, can you not make yourself an unrepresented party as the buyer? So there’s no load on the brokerage.
Honestly, I never asked that was my first one. And so I just thought that anything that we do has to go through the broker. I did, later on, try to get out of it with another deal, but it was a situation where I was trying to help the woman who had just lost her parents and she wanted to sell the house.
So I was representing her as an agent first, but when then when I saw the property and I saw the condition of it, I said, she’s not going to get what she’s thinking. And I made an offer to her. When I talked to my broker, I told him the scenario that I first approached her as an agent and then later offered to purchase it myself.
So he did not give me any advice to say, okay I’m not going to charge you anything. What I would like you to present to your broker is well, if I’m the managing member of this LLC.
And I’m also like I’m presenting an offer. As a realtor with the client, having an unrepresented party addendum and me waving my commission and the additional terms, then you’re not picking up any liability or, how can I represent myself as a principal in the transaction, the fact that something’s on MLS, if it’s not that broker’s listing, then I just want to be clear.
So this is another brokers listing that you are as a principal and an investment LLC, making an offer on your broker brokerage expects. Yeah, that’s one scenario. And then the second scenario was I made an offer to someone where it was not listed at all. And we did write up, an agreement for the attorney saying that I am, I originally started as a broker for her, but we never listed it and I’m waiving my commissions, but my broker still charged me a small admin fee, not a small, but like a thousand bucks.
Yeah. I don’t think you have to do that. But if you’re happy where you are and that’s not, it’s not, I’m looking into switching out, but I didn’t know I had this option, so it’s good that I’m hearing this today because that is something I’m going to interview with the next broker. Yep.
All right guys. Jonathan had asked, would you advise against cold emailing lead that we have email addresses for inviting them to the Facebook group? My answer is absolutely not. Go ahead and do it. Cold emailing, like it’s not a big deal.
So the other thing you can do, Jonathan, instead of just cold emailing them at the risk of messing up your domain authority, you can also pull that list into a Facebook-saved audience, run a join this group ad to them. So then you don’t run the risk of messing up your domain authority. Guys these are some of the comments here.
People have messaged me privately like this is the best call we’ve ever had. So it’s been a really great call. Lots of good ideas were shared. I hope you guys got a ton from it. And as always thank you for being here and being part of the conversation, part of the community, and for everything you do for us, have a great day.