On this episode of the Note Closers Show, Scott discusses some of the biggest mistakes that he sees investors making along with sharing some of his mistakes that he has made along the way.
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My Biggest Mistakes
Biggest Mistakes: I’m a huge baseball fan and I just absolutely love the atmosphere of playoff baseball no matter where it is.
I’m in Houston to watch game two of the Astros versus the Boston Red Sox. In game one, historic José Altuve, the five-foot-six second baseman for the Houston Astros hit three home runs in a playoff game, only the ninth person to do that. First was 2012 since my biggest fan team, San Francisco Giants, Pablo Sandoval hit one in the World Series. I’m here because I really love the atmosphere of playoff baseball. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge baseball fan and I just absolutely love the atmosphere of playoff baseball no matter where it is. I am a very big Minnesota Twins fan. I’m also a very huge San Francisco Giants fan and very blessed that the Giants won three World Series in five years. We were there for several NL Championship series. I love to come to baseball games because it really allows me about three hours just to sit there and relax, sit there and enjoy myself. I can unwind a little bit. A beer is always a good thing too but it’s nice just to sit there and relax and appreciate the sounds and the atmosphere of the game. The energy in the stadium is like the bottom of the ninth tied game. It’s always exciting. Everybody hangs on every pitch, every out, every strike.
It’s just great to see, especially when the home team wins if you’re rooting for the home team that is. One of the biggest things in all our travels over the last few years when it was a regular season game, we always root for the home team. Honestly, unless it’s those three teams, the Twins, the Giants or the Astros, we’re rooting for the home team. We’ve been very lucky we’ve been in the playoff games in St. Louis, in LA, in San Francisco, Atlanta over the past decade as well for a variety of things. It’s just great. I’m really looking forward today. It will be fun to catch up and just relax a little bit by myself.
Today’s topic is all about mistakes. What does that have to do with baseball? On baseball, you make plenty of errors. We can all think about some of the greatest errors in baseball. It ties in with Boston playing. You have Bill Buckner on the first base made an error in game six of the World Series versus the Mets years ago, which the Mets ended up winning that game and then they won the series on game seven. Everybody knows about Bill Buckner’s between the legs; the slow roll between the legs. Another error you could say, you could be back when the Phillies were playing the Toronto Blue Jays and Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams threw a pitch across the play that Joe Carter hit it out of the park to win the World Series. Those are probably the two most famous errors. I’d say Bill Buckner is a lot worse because Boston had the curse and everything like that and they’ve obviously overcome that. It’s faded into posterior lore, but they were all mistakes.
Those two mistakes will haunt those two individuals for the rest of their lives. You look at Chicago Cubs who won it last year. Steve Bartman, the error he made as a fan and again trying to catch that foul ball and interfering Moisés Alou in the playoffs a few years back. That’s a mistake the guy has never recovered from. The beautiful thing about note investing that I love is that you can make some mistakes and still recover and still be fine as long as you keep playing the game. I’ve been playing this game for over a decade now. It’s hard to believe that. I look back at the last ten years and crack up. I have a lot more gray hair. I look at all this gray hair as mistakes that I’ve overcome.
I think that’s one of the biggest things that you have to realize as a real estate entrepreneur, you’re going to make mistakes. If you’re going to sit there and try to dive in and protect yourself from every little mistake you could possibly make, you’re never going to end up pulling the trigger. I think that’s one of the biggest things that I could tell you. You can’t overanalyze everything, over analysis paralysis. You can’t do that.
You’ve heard the comment, “Fail forward.” You can’t fall on your face without moving forward towards your destination. Trust me, I have fallen on my face many times. What separated me from a lot of the other crowd and why I’ve been around for ten years through the ups and the downs and the things like that is I didn’t let my mistakes stop me from taking action. Many people will ready, aim but they’ll never fire. I do have a passion and a dream to own a Minor League Baseball club at some point. I don’t necessarily think I want a Major League Baseball team, but I would love to own a Minor League Baseball team somewhere; just fun and the marketing aspect of it. To get there I’m going to make a whole lot more mistakes than I do now. I have to grow. That’s the only way you’ll get outside of your comfort level, is to grow, is to do things that are uncomfortable with you and you’re going to make mistakes.
I always like to make fun of the fact that we have two due diligence checklists. Many of you have reached out for that since we went through that on our earlier episode. There’s a short checklist, go through it. It’s going to cover about 90%. There’s the engineer’s wet dream, which is a 21-page checklist that covers every little detail. If you had to go through that checklist, you would barely ever, really especially in today’s market, never get a bid accepted because they’d all be bought up and gone by the time you get around to it. Do we make mistakes? Yes. Do we miss some things? Yes, we miss some things. The biggest thing I can tell you this is if you’re covering 90% of your bases, you’re going to still do very well. “I have failed more times than most people have ever tried.” That’s one thing Michael Jordan is famous for saying. He’s missed more game-winner shots than most people will take. Most people have died before they ever stepped on the court.
I just want to share some of my biggest mistakes. One of my biggest mistakes early on, and I think a lot of people think about this, is I thought I really needed a partner. I thought I needed to have a business partner. That’s the mistake that I’ve made a couple of times, bringing on business partners that didn’t have the same work ethic and didn’t have the same beliefs in me or aren’t as invested as much as I was. When I first brought my first my partner out, I was in a mortgage industry and brought a buddy of mine on who had brought me in to this business and I thought it was a way to help me out with this. I’m willing to do the work with him every time and his work ethic wasn’t the same. I’m not saying he was a bad guy. We’re still friends this day. It was just that he didn’t have the same drive. He wasn’t as hungry as I was so there was a lot of tiff there. There was a lot of friction. I’d be in a house on a weekend. When I was married, me and my wife would be there at the house in the weekends working to get it fixed and cleaned up so we could get it sold. and He’s babysitting his kids so his wife can go to concert. I’m like, “You’ve got to be there.” I’m not the one who’s finding the deals. I eventually found the money for stuff so why did I need a partner?
I have seen that mistake made by many investors out there as well when they get two people together that don’t have the same response, or three people. Especially when you get beyond two, I’ve never seen a partnership last long-term where you get three chiefs. You don’t have enough Indians doing the work when you have too many chiefs. I’ve seen this happen multiple times; four people came in to partner up, it didn’t work out. It was one person doing the work or they rely on the other people to get the work done and they don’t take it as serious, things happen. We had that happen one time. We had three people to come in to Austin for our Mastermind and Fast Track training and by the end of the weekend they were divorced. Two ladies stayed together, one person went the other way. It wasn’t that they’re bad people, it was just that one person had more of a drive than the other two and the one person took it more seriously. Just didn’t have the same work ethics, just didn’t look at the same things. Didn’t mean they’re bad people. Both groups have been very successful. It’s just the partnerships don’t work. I had another partner who was not as positive, who was always, “The world’s against me. It’s a negative place,” and that ended ugly as well because I was always taking two steps forward and one step back trying to drag that person. If you’ve got business partners you’ve got to drag or people or friends that surround you that you’ve got to drag them to get something done, you’re not going to be successful.
The second biggest mistake that I have made is not firing people soon enough. I’ve had assistants, I’ve had people that worked for me. My staff now is phenomenal. My staff is amazing. I’m not talking about my staff: Nichole, Greg, and Jennifer. Steph has been around but Steph’s not really a staff. She’s part of the WCN crew but she’s more of a true partner than an employee. I had people that worked for me that just didn’t do a good job. First of all, when you find out an employee’s going to lie to you once, they’re going to lie to you again. You’ve got to get rid of them. That sometimes is the hardest thing to do, is to let people go, to fire people because you want to give them opportunity. If they’re not going to do the right thing, you catch them lying once, they’re going to lie to you again. That’s where you see a good employee is great but a bad employee you just got to cut that dead wood and move on; same thing with vendors. I think that’s the biggest thing too because we’ve had vendors we let hang around a little bit longer than we should have when we should have just gone ahead nip the bud and moved on with it. Those are a couple of biggest mistakes. Get rid of the people or the vendors around you that don’t come to the table like you. They don’t do what they say they’re going to do and they’re going to constantly disappoint you.
Biggest Mistakes: Another thing that you have to realize too as a big mistake is you have to understand your value.
Another thing that you have to realize too as a big mistake is you have to understand your value. I see people that come in to the investing game and then they have business partner or people that they respect that want to partner up and they ended up taking on an employee mindset again. I don’t care what your number is, what your struggles are. I get it, you want to make money, you’ve got to have your bills paid. But if you go into the employee mindset when somebody is paying you a salary, most of the time you’ll never get beyond that. I don’t care what your experience is if you’ve had partners that were ugly or people who are ugly to you. You can write your own book. You can write your own destiny with the note business or real estate business altogether. It doesn’t have to be notes. It can be wherever you focus on the real estate side. You’ve got to have faith in yourself. Early on, that was one of the things that I didn’t have. I had lost my butt in a couple of real estate deals. I was getting my assets out of a sling and that’s why I thought I need a partner to help out. When I’m doing 99% of the work, it’s very easy to either just find a vendor or pay somebody to do the other 5%, 10%. I see that happen to people who take a job with somebody else, they’re getting a flat salary or they’re going to end up getting screwed in the backend because the partners aren’t as invested in as your interest is.
I see this happening especially when people come to the table. They get so worried about, “I’ve got to show that I can do this before I can raise capital.” That’s not the case at all. “I’ve got to prove that this works.” It works. There are hundreds and hundreds of investors. We taught thousands of real estate investors how to buy notes. The proof is in the pudding. It’s not with the actual buying a note deal that’s the problem. The problem is with you, in your faith in your own self. Sometimes, we are capable of talking ourselves out of deals because we over-analyze things. If the numbers make sense, you got a realtor driving by, checked out the value and condition of the property, you double check the taxes, and you’re going to pull title O&E, double checking O&E, that’s going to cover most of your too scary investor’s money. The fact that you’re going to buy it at the right price, there’s very few things that could go wrong afterwards. If you just don’t do the work, if you don’t service it or do anything with the files, that’s where the biggest problem can be.
Another big mistake that I did early on was that I didn’t bid on more assets. I look back now and I look at all the tapes that I’ve looked at over the last ten plus years and I should have bought more early on. I should have made more offers. I let the fact that I didn’t have a lot of private capital keep me from making more offers on phenomenal deals. I should have bought a whole lot more deals earlier on when they were cheaper but I let the fact that I didn’t have my own money keep me from doing it. I’m a much better marketer now than I was ten years ago. I was pretty good ten years ago because I just put stuff into play. I get really excited when I see people that are putting things into play. I have to give a big shout-out to Don Lucio at Houston. He just went through our Fast Track training. He’s raised $50,000 to $100,000 private money from his continued marketing over the last two weeks. Donovan didn’t let the fact that he didn’t have a lot of private money. He had some relationships, don’t get me wrong. He’d been trying to wholesale or sign owner financed notes and sell those off and hit in the wall stuff. He came to the Fast Track. He made 60 offers. He had some accepted. He’s working through some of the counters and stuff like that. I have to give him credit because the kid is hungry and he’s coachable. Kudos to you, Donovan. You’re doing the things you need to do. You’re getting the word out. I already see online, people commenting, people liking. That’s how you’re raising capital.
The most rewarding thing I get is when people text me or call me, “I got an offer accepted. I got an investor who’s ready to fund some money. They’re ready for $50,000 or $100,000.” That’s what’s rewarding in this line of work. That’s what’s rewarding as an educator who’s doing the business because I can actually give people what’s working. I can tell what’s working. I like to believe that we are a voice of experience but we’re also a voice who leads by example, not just talk about it. That’s one thing I really can’t stand is when you have people out there talking the talk, but they don’t walk. They don’t do the things that they should be doing. Whether it’s talking about the deals that they’re supposed to be closing but they’re not making offers or the marketing that they’re such an expert doing but you don’t see them doing it themselves. That’s a very difficult thing. That’s a hypocrite. It’s when somebody tells you something but they don’t do it themselves or they talk, “Do as I say and not as I do.” F that. Don’t be that.
One of the mistakes I have made over the last years at some point, and this is easy to do, is I get so busy with my education, I didn’t buy deals that much. We always have bought deals each year, year in, year out. We get side-tracked with things to travel and things that are very easy to do. There’s a year there I didn’t buy much because we were busy working on stuff that we’d bought before. Sometimes you’re going to have that as a note investor. You buy stuff, you’ve got to take some time to work through the assets that you’ve purchased, and it just ebbs and flows. You build the team, you build experience. You also make mistakes along the way. Mistakes, I should not have trusted the realtor to drive by. There are so many of them that you make but they’re sometimes little mistakes. Most of them are little mistakes. Bigger mistake was I should never invested or brought on investor I didn’t have a good feeling about because if they’re an ass in person, they’re going to be a bigger ass if you’re going to borrow money from.
Another thing too is we let some people come to Mastermind early on that I just don’t have a good feeling about and we should have kicked them out earlier on. Fortunately for the most part, we have got really good people in our Mastermind. It’s a no-asshole area. We had to boot a few people out on occasional basis who are doing crappy things to other people, but it is what it is. We boot them out, they’re done. They’re blacklisted. The biggest thing I can tell you about biggest mistakes is not making enough offers and letting somebody else determine my self-worth. I have probably more faith in myself than most people have in themselves. I’m not afraid. Either get out of the way or you can get the horns. We’re going to get it done. It may not be the most gorgeous looking airplane that takes off and lands but it’s going to make sure it will get you there. We might have a few ups and downs and dips and some turbulence along the way but we’re going to get you there.
I heard an analogy from somebody, “You have to be good at diving off cliffs and building the airplane on the way down.” We have done that over the last ten years but we always constantly evolve. We’ve had to adjust things. I think that’s one big mistake I see a lot of note investors make, is they get so reliant on the low-hanging fruit, the exchanges that publish lists on a regular basis. Eventually, the word gets out and those sources get oversaturated with buyers, not enough good products and the pricing goes up. You have to go out and market. You have to go out and build the business. I see so many note investors do that. So many note investors complain that price has gotten too expensive. It’s gotten too expensive because you’re sitting there trying to buy in the same place you’ve been buying for the last two years or three years. You have to evolve. You have to go add new sources. You got to reach out to people. I always find it humorous when people complain about pricing expectations as how it was done two years ago. It’s changed but if you get off your ass and call a bank and call a servicing company you’re buying in bulk, now that you’ve got an experience of 20, 30, 50 deals, it’s not that hard to raise $1 million of capital for people and get better pricing. Quit bitching about crap and go out and build the business, build the market. Learn how to market and you’ll get more deals in instead of sitting there, “Woe is me. I’m going to sit here and nitpick on stuff.” Quit being a nitpicker. Nitpickers never close on anything. They just sit there and they turn into negative Nancies and that’s not a good thing.
One biggest mistake is I have let sometimes negative people hang around longer than they needed to be. I’ve had negative people that I partnered with who are just a toxic cancer. Not only to my business but eventually in personal life because at some point you’re going to feel like you’re walking around on egg shells trying to make the person happy. That’s not life. You should not have to do that. That’s an important thing. Surround yourself with good people. Go find and hang out with positive people. The truth of the statement that you’re the average of the five people that you hang around the most is true. Look at what you’re making. If you look at the five people and your average goes down because of where you’re at, you need to elevate where you’re at. You need to talk to more people. You need to hang around with people that are closing more deals or hang around with people that are doing more business, raising more capital. Take yourself to the next level. Find out where those people network and go network there. That’s why I think it’s been one of the biggest things that we have focused on too, is to try to raise our level. It doesn’t mean we just hang around with the same people in the same industry. We take it to a different level. We go and join the club of genius Mastermind for a year. We go to the digital marketing convention to surround ourselves with 5,000, 6,000 of people that are doing great at digital marketing and helped us raise our level and put us above where a lot of people are at.
We have a question here, “Have you ever not funded a deal and pissed off a seller asset manager?” Yes. There are deals I’ve not funded. I called the seller up and said, “I’m not going to fund this deal. Our due diligence, we found out the property out there on a property inspection, it’s crap. The value’s not $80,000, it’s $40,000.” I’ve pissed plenty of asset managers off but I always tell it like it is, “Here’s the reason for why we’re not going to close on this.” I’ve never just flaked and duck tail and ran off. I’ve always, always communicated. If they didn’t like that, then it wasn’t a relationship I needed to have anyway. If an asset manager is not going to respect you doing your due diligence, then they’re only out for themselves. It’s not win-win. It’s win-losses. You don’t want to be on the losing side of the relationship. You always want to be a win-win. The biggest thing I could tell you is the only time they have been pissed off is if we ever dallied on our due diligence. As long as you’re working effectively within the time frame you give them and communicated. Sometimes asset managers want you to close faster than you can. That happened and they wanted me to fund a big portfolio before the end of the month. I’m like, “I’m not going to be able to do it. I can fund next Friday but I can’t fund this Friday. I’m not going to jeopardize my investors just to make you guys happy by the end of the month.” Don’t be afraid to push back. Trust me, it’s a good thing to have, “No, I can’t do it in that time frame.” If they move the asset to somebody else, then they move the asset to somebody else. It just wasn’t meant to be.
Some of my best things have come from assets that I didn’t close on because it eventually those turn to shit. The biggest mistake I’ve always made was when I’ve gone outside of what my bread and butter was. When I started doing the rehabs in higher value homes, they took longer to close, there are less buyers for it when I rehabbed it. It wasn’t like a bread and butter $200,000 value house or less. I went above that and was not making as much money and it was much more stressful. It gave me a lot more gray hair. You’re going to make mistakes.
Biggest Mistakes: Sometimes you’ve got to breathe air into a situation.
Another biggest mistake I think I did was sometimes you have to step away from an issue. Sometimes you’ve got to breathe air into a situation. That’s where your mentors come in. It’s good to reach out to your mentors and ask them a question. I had this happen. I reached out to one of my mentors and I called them up. I left a message and they called me back immediately and he told me exactly what I already knew. I knew what was going on but it was good to hear from the outside in. Your mentors are there. Reaching out to your mentors is a good thing. Talk to people. Anytime I’ve hit on something and didn’t reach out to a mentor, it festered and it made it a whole lot worse. You’ve heard the saying, ” If you could fix it, don’t worry about it. If you can’t fix it, don’t worry about it.” It’s true. I don’t sit here and stress over things that I have no control over. It doesn’t mean I don’t worry about it a little bit, but I always try to put things in an appropriate setting. I’m not one of these people that constantly worry about the worst possible thing going wrong. Our due diligence and the things that we do into our business, we think about that stuff so we keep that in mind, but we don’t sit there and constantly worry about the worst happening because what you focus on eventually happens.
If you constantly focus on the worst thing happening, a lot of times it will end up happening. You have to realize you’re going to have good and bad. You have great deals, you’re going to have some bad deals. A good note deal is like base hit though. I’ve got to give a big kudos to Cody Cox, he’s got a short sale that just got approved on and that he’s really been working on. It’s like a base hit. He called me up to tell me that he got his approval in less than ten minutes. A good note deal is a base hit and you’re just trying to get base hits done. You’re not going to have a hundred offers accepted. 100% of your offers are never going to get accepted. You might get lucky to hit 30%, 40% offers, but if you do that, you’re going to have plenty of deals.
The idea to keep in mind though is you’ve got to make more offers. That’s one thing that was a mistake early on, is I didn’t set numbers of deals that I wanted to make an offer. I didn’t set a goal. It wasn’t a KPI, a key performance indicator, or a goal that we have. Now I have that goal. Here’s what we want to do this year. We want to do 1,000 deals this year. We want average roughly almost three deals a day. Am I going to hit a thousand note deals this year? No, but we’ll probably get pretty close to half of that. If we get close to half of it, it’s still a phenomenal year. That still puts us at a high level of doing things. I’m going to miss on my goal but I’m still going to end up in the stars. I’m going to miss the moon but I’m still going to end up in the stars. The biggest mistake I see so many note investors make is they’re not making enough offers, “We don’t have enough deals.” It comes down to a marketing issue more than anything else. “I don’t have enough private capital. I don’t have enough deals.” Then market more. That’s what the biggest mistake I see so many note investors make, is they don’t market.
I got a phone call from two students and they came to Fast Track a few months ago. They’re seasoned investors. When I was talking to one of them on the last day of the Fast Track going through their business plan, they didn’t have anything about their marketing. I knew that their marketing was their weakest link, their weakest resource. I said, “You can do all of these bank reach-outs and calling asset managers, but if you don’t market, you don’t set up your email list now, you’re going to be f’ed later on.” “Yeah, we’re going to consider that.” Sure enough, four months go by, I get a phone call, “We got a tape from a bank.” “Great.” “We need your help.” “What do you need my help for?” “With funding.” I already knew this. I said, “Have you sent an email to your database? Have you even put your database together? Have you even put your MailChimp together at the beginning of stuff?” They’re like, “No, we haven’t done any of that.” I’m like, “You want me to do all the marketing for you to raise capital and give you basically my private funders when you won’t even do the simple things you’re supposed to do?” Thankfully, they’ve raised money, they marketed, they reached out, they got some stuff done, and they had enough time to close that deal, which is kudos to them, but it was a mistake. They did not know, they didn’t think they need to do that, and sure enough they needed to do that.
I’m not sitting here telling you these things just to hear myself talk. I do this because this actually works. The things I do and teach you to do work on a daily basis. They work on a weekly basis. They work on a monthly basis. If you just take all the marketing things that we do, it will work no matter what type of real estate business you’re in, whether you’re in fix and flips or wholesaling. The marketing aspect of what we teach works wherever you’re at. I could be selling tiddlywinks. The note market could crash tomorrow. They could pass laws where we’re no longer allowed to buy notes. I’m not saying it’s going to happen but I’m saying if they did, I don’t worry because I can take my marketing skills and things that we do and apply it to other things.
That is one of the biggest mistakes I see investors make, is they don’t spend more time in marketing and do more stuff on the deal flow as well as time on the deals. They’re not going after more deals, they get deal-focused, or as I like to say, emotionally involved in a deal. I have done that and it was a mistake that I did sometimes early on too because I got so focused on one deal that I stopped marketing for other deals. I spent time three, eight, six, nine months on a deal and it didn’t close. I now had nine months of really not generating any income. That puts you in a stressful situation. We got some reserves but not a good thing. This is why we tell people all the time, focus on the residential side. If you’re going to go to the commercial side, it’s going to take more money, more time. Make your bacon on the residential. Get that stuff rock and rolling and then as long as your bills and everything is covered and you get the cashflow coming, then you have the time to focus on the commercial stuff.
You’re going to make mistakes. The best thing to do is just own up to it. Don’t lie about it, “I just f’ed up and screwed up but here’s the solution. Here’s how we’re going to fix this.” That’s all anybody wants to see whether it’s an asset manager you’re not closing on, “My investor, my money partner walked at the last minute, but I got a backup. Give me another 48 to 72 hours I’ll get this thing closed,” or, “My realtor drove by the property and it looked like it was in good shape. It turns out it’s not. We got inside, it’s trash.” Those things are going to happen, that’s why we have insurance. Or, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to get this thing sold. We may just break-even on this one but the beautiful thing is I’ve got other assets I can get you involved in.” Those are simple things that you can do to cover mistakes, to help you in your mistakes or narrow times.
I think you’ve got to love people. It’s hard sometimes when some of the closest people to you will stab you in the back. That’s going to happen at some point to you. That’s always the hardest thing because you look back and you try to second-guess, “Should I have helped that person out? Should I have help that person and promoted people? Should I have done what I did to help them or should I have just been an ass and not?” For those who know me, I’ve got a big heart. I always want to help people. I’m always glad to try to help and guide people down the road to make things better. I think at some point, you can only help people so much. God helps those who help themselves. If you’re dealing with people that aren’t helping themselves, they’re not doing the things on a regular basis, you could bang your head against the wall frustrated with that individual, but they’re never going to pull the trigger themselves. They’re never going to do the things you’re trying to get them to do. Then you have to at some point just stop wasting energy and go find somebody else that’s going to help you out with that. That’s a mistake that we have made, trying to help people who won’t help themselves.
At some point, people will eventually get it. At some point, people will see the light and hopefully get it some point and hopefully come back and realize, “You were right. You were there to promote me or there to push me to do things. I should have taken better advantage of that. I should have done that, not take advantage of you, but taking that more in stride to make things happen.” It’s easy to get frustrated and jaded when you’ve helped people and they either turn on you or they run off or do other things. That unfortunately is what happens in real estate sometimes. It’s what happens. We’re all in business here. It is what it is. Either you’re going to sit here and cry about it and be upset about and waste good energy chasing bad or you’re going to say, “Screw it. Cut it out. Cut the cancer, get rid of it, and move on and start the healing process.” I think it’s one of the biggest mistakes I see people have made is that you end up dwelling too much on the negativity versus focused on getting better and moving forward.
You’ve always heard that whatever you focus on, you hit. Many people are so focused on that rear-view mirror, that they keep looking in their past versus going forward. They end up in a ditch because they’re not paying attention. It’s one of the things I like to keep of. You are on a journey and you’re driving a car. You’re supposed to glance in your rear-view every 20, 30 seconds or something like that. You always look up to what’s going on behind you and move faster, but keep your eyes going forward right in front of you. That’s where we’re on. We’re on that journey driving that car down the highway or hopefully autobahn versus in the slow lane. We all start off in the slow lane. The goal is to get on the autobahn. Too many people are constantly looking back at their past and letting that dictate where they go, “I’ve been through a divorce. I’ve been through bankruptcy. I’ve been through eviction, foreclosure.” They use that excuse, “My wife left my. My husband left me. My dog died. I got to move.” People use their excuses from their past and that guides them into the ditch in their future, versus ripping that rear-view mirror off and just being focused. Years ago, I think it was one of the best things that I ever did which was one of the scariest things, was to literally sell everything off in Texas, except the dog and my truck and some clothes, and then go on basically a three-year discovery of getting on the road and going talking with people.
Biggest Mistakes: I’m a much stronger and I have a belief in me now that nobody can take away.
Not everybody can do that. I had no kids, I was divorced at that time, no business partner, just me, myself, and Princess. We took off driving and that was over seven, eight years ago. I had the faith to do it. There were some scary times along the way. There were some, “I don’t know if this is going to work,” but it works. I’m a much stronger and I have a belief in me now that nobody can take away. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you think you can do to me, you’re not going to deter my faith from success, for me to achieving the type of success that I want to achieve. Am I close to where I want to be? Hell no but I’m a lot further along than where I was. I’ve lived and done some amazing things that very easily I could have said no to earlier on, but I said yes to them and they helped me dramatically along the way, whether it was going to events or talking with people or just having the balls to go say hello to somebody and pick their brains. Now I can free to phone call those people. I look at my phone sometimes and I’m flipping through it for numbers and I’m like, “I forgot I had his number. I forgot I had this person in my phone. I’ve got this author I need to reach out to.”
Leverage your relationships. I think it’s one of the biggest things people don’t do. They get so prideful of where they’re at. They don’t pick up the phone and call and talk to people. They don’t just ask, “What can I do for you? How can I help you? How can I help serve you?” If you reach out to those that are successful versus just asking for help or coming across from a servant-leadership, “How can I help you? Can I help promote you? Can I help with testimonial? Can I do an email blast for you? I’ve got a speaking opportunity for you,” or something. These are different things. What I’m trying to get at is doing little things like that will help you go so much further because it will often give you an insight to somebody else who’s walked that path before you. If you talk to people that have walked the path before you, oftentimes they will help you avoid making mistakes along the way. They’ll help you by detouring you along a path that may end up going in the ditch or may end up wrecking you.
One of the biggest things I’ve always kept in my mind was when I went from Bob and Jamie is I can remember Bob talking about how he has stayed in a small office out of a house, the bottom floor is three bedrooms, they knocked the wall out between the two and those where we office. We got the smallest small shop. I can remember Bob, he loves the small shop because it was agile and got more stuff done. He did not want the big shop, the big office, because it became an adult babysitting thing and became such a huge overhead anchor. Later on, there’s neck or feet every month the smaller you get. That’s one of the things that we avoid and has kept in our minds. If we add something, we’re going to make sure it’s going to be good. Let’s keep it small so we don’t get into that in over our heads. That’s what I love about the note industry is you guys don’t have to have the big office. You can work from home or Starbucks or Whole Foods or wherever you’re at, the beach, the hotels, with this business and make things happen. You’ve just got to work it. You’ve got to show the work to make things happen. Those are the last five years. There’s been more things that have popped up in a good way that we can’t have as much fun because we have a lot of great stuff, but it opens the doors to other avenues, others ways to having fun that we never thought about before.
You’re going to make mistakes. The thing you have to keep in mind, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Don’t be afraid of the what-ifs, “What if this goes wrong?” Start thinking about what if it goes right. What if it does work? What if you do have the success that you’re looking for? It’s a whole different life at that point. It becomes a whole different success story. It becomes a whole different journey. The biggest thing you could do is take more action. I think that’s one of the most important things. At some point you have to quit bullshitting yourself if you’re not taking action, if you just talk the talk, you’ve got to go out and deliver. I could have the biggest database of 100,000 people, it doesn’t do me any good unless I’m reaching out to those people or communicate with those people. I could have the biggest database in the world but if I’m not doing any outreach or market in that list, it’s useless. I’ve just wasted my time in the front end. Don’t be afraid to make any mistakes. Don’t be afraid of doing things more yourself. Everybody that I’ve ever come across has been capable of doing this business on their own. They didn’t need a business partner. If they’ve got employees or they’ve got vendors, that’s a different thing, but they could all do it on their own. There’s enough knowledge out there. There’s enough mentors out there that you can have your own business. You can have your own say. You can be the chief that’s leading the Indians or you can be the head chef and let the rest of the cooks get your stuff done for you.
That’s what I think most people get so tied up. I’ll give you an example. I’m a Cowboys fan. For those who don’t like the Cowboys, it’s tough. Or you had the Patriots. You as a note investor, you are more like the general manager or the owner of the team. You’re like Bob Kraft of the Patriots or Jerry Jones for the Cowboys. They’re not the guys that are going out and selling tickets. They’re not the guys going out and selling concessions. They’re not the Tony Romos or the Dak Prescotts or the Ezekiel Elliots or the Tom Bradys. That doesn’t mean you don’t want a Tom Brady on your team, it’s just that those guys are the people that put people in places. They put people to do things. They make the high level decisions and then they help delegate it off. That’s really what a good note investor is. You’re like your own general manager of your own team. If you find yourself that you’re doing all the workout initially, you’re the ones that are going out trying to do everything, you probably are a control freak and you’re going to end up failing because you’re trying to do too much. It doesn’t mean you don’t get involved, it doesn’t mean you don’t oversight what’s going on, but you have to control this. At that point you try to figure out what you’re doing because you can live a great life and still delegate things off. You don’t have to. If you feel like, “I have to do everything myself,” that’s your biggest mistake, that philosophy.
Early on you’re going to be doing a lot of things yourself until you’re making money or get this thing going. I get that. You have to work your way up to that. Do I think of myself as Bob Kraft or Jerry Jones? No. We’re doing pretty well but we could always take it to the next level. The person that I compete with isn’t where I’m at today. It’s where I’m going to be at in five years or ten years. When I turn 50 here in nine years, I want to look back and realize that this last decade has been the most successful decade of my life. This is more of the last decade between I was 30 and 40 has been the most successful decade of my life. It didn’t come with some whoozies of problems and mistakes. For the last ten years, there’s been a lot more positives than negatives. I’ve learned more from the negatives than I have from the positives. Those negatives have helped me make more positive decisions going forward.
We are less than a week out to Note CAMP 4.0. I’m extremely excited. We’re running a short-term special too for you guys who are interested. We’re doing a two-for-one sale. What does that mean? I’m going to actually give you two things for the price of one. Note CAMP is a great starting point, great foundation base to learning from a lot of speakers. A lot of people have been through our workshops before. This thing is a great way to come back and basically a continued education every six months and hear from the different speakers and add more nuggets. For those who are looking to get started, we’re going to do a two-for-one special. If you sign up for our December workshop which is normally $699, we’re going to give you Note CAMP included with that. We’re also going to give you $100 off.
If you sign for the December workshop at $699, we’ll give you a ticket to Note CAMP for free. That’s over $300 in savings based on that stuff, plus you get you replays, you’ll have the live interaction, live support, special Facebook group, several hundred people in it already. People are really utilizing that Facebook group, which is great to share and go from there. Two-for-one, you need to literally just go to WeCloseNotes.com, click on the Virtual Boot Camp Virtual Training and the discount will pop up when you hit Check out. It shows $699 and then you hit Check out and you see $100 drops off plus you get the two-for-one. We just believe that there’s so much value in helping out with that. We try to make it affordable for you because that’s one of the biggest things why we started Note CAMP was to make it affordable so you don’t have to jump on a plane. You don’t have to buy an expensive conference ticket. You can save money from air fare and hotels and rental cars and crappy hotel food and literally dive into that knowledge all from the comfort of your own home office or hotel or wherever you’re at.
Have a great day. Go make something happen. As always, if you’d like to register for our Monday Note webinars, all you’ve got to do is text the word NIGHT to the phone number 72-000 and that will register you for all of our Monday note webinars that we have through December. We’ll see you all at the top.