Helping ten thousand real estate investors buy their first notes in five years is one of the biggest goals for The Note Closers Show. In the coming New Year, Scott Carson is excited in going back to a bank-direct focus which will be leading to an event called Banking Blitzkrieg involving 20 note investors and a list of banks and asset managers. Scott asks his fans and followers to share their exciting 2018 goals, whether it be closing that first note, losing weight or welcoming the new baby home.
—
Listen to the podcast here
The Note Closers Show: Exciting 2018 Goals
Our topic for the show is a little bit different. What are you thankful for? What are you excited for 2018 is a better way of putting that. I talked to a lot of people. We got the largest workshops we’ve ever had. It was the largest workshop that we’ve had so far of our virtual. I guess we’ve had some great turnout for our Note Camps. I’m thinking over 1,000 people on our Note Camps. On our Virtual Workshop on December, we had over 200 people that joined us from roughly about twenty different states and we had a couple of international guys. I want to find out what excites you for 2018? What is the thing that excites you the most? I thought I would start off by sharing some of the things that I’m most excited about this coming year, this New Year. Don’t get me wrong, 2017 has been a phenomenal year. Looking back at our numbers, 2016, we had a total of 1,571 students go through our workshop or education thing we offer up at We Close Notes. This year, we’re just under 2,000, 1,997 and hopefully we get three more students before the end of year or so to get the 2,000. The beautiful thing is over the last two years, it’s been a combined total of 3,177.
One of the nice things is we have about a 60% bleed over ratio or retainment ratio for what we do with our students. 59% of our students for this year actually were students last year. That really excites me that we have a lot of retained students which obviously, if you’re in business, it would be easier to keep a client than to go out and retain a new one. A total of 3,177 students last year blows me away because we shot for a 1,000 last year, we had 1,500. We’re right at a close for 2,000 for this year. We’re pretty stoked about that. We have about a 40% growth rate year-over-year, which is really exciting.
We want to help 10,000 note investors.
Our goal for those who don’t know over the next five years, we want to help 10,000 real estate investors buy their first note. We want to help 10,000 note investors. That’s a lofty target having about 2,000 people per year, but I really believe that we can do that. We have a phenomenal year deal-wise for us. A lot of our students have closed on good deals. A couple of our students, one from Houston and the other guy lives in San Francisco, closed on 50 deals for the year. We look at a lot of things in what we do and how to make things successful for everybody. We get excited about so many things. Our podcast has been a big hit at the last third of the year. We’re really excited to where this is going. We’re excited for what Note Camp 5.0 and 6.0 have in store and some of the cool things we have as well as new speakers. Everybody is involved with that. I think we just keep growing. The pace that we do is not always the easiest thing. One of the biggest things that I have to give a big shout-out is that our staff does amazing job of supporting me and helping me be able to focus on the things going forward.
We’re going to see more changes in 2018 on some stuff. Product is always going to be an interesting thing to come across. Where do you find it? I’m really excited about the fact that we’re taking more of going back to a bank-direct focus in 2018. We have an exciting thing coming at the end of January. From the 22nd of January through the 19th of February, we’re going to be launching Banking Blitzkrieg. We’ve got about twenty people who signed up to be a part of this where I’ll be pooling a list of asset managers, pooling a list of banks, and feeding it to these twenty people. These people will be calling banks on a regular basis and reporting back with the names and contacts. At the end of the time, the twenty people will be sharing that list amongst themselves. That’s a really great thing we’re excited about. Always great to revamp our asset managers list. We’ve had some focus here in the last 30 days with some stuff and stuff have turned out really well.
What I want to know is what are you most excited about? What is the thing that really gets you rock and rolling for 2018? Some people say, “Grateful for my freedom.” That’s great we have our freedom. I don’t know if you were locked up or what. What’s one of the big things that excite you? A lot of people are excited because they closed some deals this year. They see them attaining their goal for cashflow. Gail Greenburg is excited about that up in Philadelphia with her deals. Her big goal is to get to $10,000 a month in cashflow. The last time I checked, she was almost there. We’re proud of her. What do you want to accomplish? What are you excited about? What are the things that you want to accomplish? We’re also excited about probably doing a road show this year, taking the Note Closers podcast on the road. I get some interesting ideas that come from different places. I go to movies, we went to the Nutcracker. I had an idea or two there. We have Martin, a buddy of mine say, “The Note Cracker,” which is a pretty good one. We are on a Metallica concert in Houston this year. We’re walking on the concert and you seeing this, if you’ve never been to a concert they always list the dates in the places that they’re going.
For 2018, we’ve toyed with the idea of doing that basically. A t-shirt with the road show where we’re going places. We’ve got a pretty busy first quarter of the year. We’re going to be obviously on the Quest Cruise in some pretty cool places with Quest IRA. Also in January, we’re going to New York for the Distressed Mortgage Expo. We’re going to be at Traffic & Conversion at the end of February in San Diego for those digital entrepreneurs. We’re excited to be out there for that. I’m excited to be going to North Carolina to speak in there. It looks like I’m going to be going Akron in March and April as well. Just some really great, fun stuff. We’re actually headed out on another vacation in May for some stuff that we planned a year ago. What are some of the big things that you are excited about in 2018 or you haven’t even planned 2018 yet? This cracks me up because I know a lot of people aren’t planning yet. We are excited to see where our staff goes. We’ve got some cool things that I’ve been working on it but they don’t know even about it yet for them.
Cedric said, “I’m excited to close my first deal. After the first one will be a full sprint after that. Also lose weight and healthy lifestyle. That will give me more energy to put into my business.”
I think a lot of people do that. They want to make more money, they want to lose weight or they want to pay their debt off. I’ve always had the idea that instead of thinking about what you have to get rid of, think about what you can do more of. A lot of people talk, “I want to pay off my credit cards.” If you only focus on your credit cards, you’re probably going to raise your balance whereas if you focus on making money, you have the money to help you payoff your credit cards. You try to take this, “What do I need to do? I need to make $20,000 more this year to pay off this $20,000 in credit cards.” Fitness is a big thing for me as well this year. We’ve done a really good job with Thomas Nee. If you’re looking for somebody to help you, give you a guide and just talk with you on the phone and go through some ideas, you can reach out to TeammateFitness@Gmail.com and Thomas will be glad or connect with him on here. He’s a friend of mine. He’d be glad to talk with you.
What’s one big thing you are excited about in 2018 for your business, not my business? I know Banking Blitzkrieg is great for those twenty but what is one big thing you’re excited about for your business, your 2018? I’ve told somebody before, “I can’t be the motivating factor. I can’t be the kick in the butt in your business.”
John said, “I want to pay off my debt and give the worthwhile causes.”
What are those worthwhile causes? What I’m trying to get you to do if you haven’t figured this out is be a little bit more specific. Cedric has been pretty good about being specific. He wants to lose 75 pounds and close on his first deal. Cedric, I challenge you, closing your first deal by the end of January. That should be a feasible date for you to get things rock and rolling. You want to lose 75 pounds, great. That’s about eight and a half pounds a month. That’s two pounds week. What does that look like? That’s 1,000-calorie deficit or basically working out where you’re burning at least a 1,000 more calories per day. Those are the things to look at for you.
If you want to close 50 deals in 2018, then one of the great things you’re going to like is one of the webinars we’re going to do come the first year is a really, really great tool that we’ve just implemented here at WCN. It’s a really great little asset management tool, easy to use, gives updates to our JV partners. We are literally transitioning all of our stuff over into this one software. Jennifer has been a trooper getting a little bit by little bit in between her sneezes and flu systems. You’ve got to be excited about something. Maybe it’s a trip you plan on taking. Maybe it’s money or closing deals. If you close 50 deals, that’s really phenomenal for bringing in at least $250 a month off of those deals. That’s even more exciting. You’re more excited when you are making money. We are excited that we want to take this podcast to hopefully 150,000 downloads in 2018 is my goal. We’re getting close to 50,000 before the end of the year. We may not exactly hit it because the holiday has been a little bit slower, but that’s not going to keep us from cranking up great content and sharing with you on an almost business daily basis. The new software is extremely cheap, $1 a month per asset. We’re pretty stoked about that.
Donovan is out there doing a great job with Chad Raggio running the Houston Note Closer’s Group as well. Hopefully, if you are running some Meetup group, you have a target that you want to grow your group by, by the end of next year. Figure out what you’re doing for that twelve or thirteen people. Let’s see if you can get that to 50 people by the midway or you’re in 100 by the end of next year. Very feasible to do if you’re just doing some very simple things out there. I know you want to close some notes but if you’re not specific, you’re just going to run around like a Wild West gunslinger and not getting anything accomplished. The more specific you can be with notes, you can go from there. That’s where it’s exciting about it. If you’re closing on your first deals, you’re getting your feet wet like a lot of people are, having a focused plan. The idea here too is you have to have patience. You’ve got to have a little patience that you’re going to get things done. It may not come as quite as fast you want to. It may take you a couple of weeks. You’ve got to realize right now, this week and next week and in the first week of January, really a good time. If you already hadn’t gotten deals in the pipeline to close, it’s going to take a little bit time to get some stuff done between now and then. Or you’re not going to get much stuff closed, but you can at least put systems in place, start working through things, start working on your direct marketing.
I’m excited because we’re going to bank direct for this year in a lot of things. I think we’re going to leave the industry and reaching out direct to banks and buying from the banks. That’s one of the big things that we’re going to focus on. I want to say share the banks. I’m not going to share our hard work that we do but I’m going to share the fact that, “We close for another bank, we close for another bank, we close on another bank this year.” I think that’s really a big, big thing for people in 2018, is going back to the bank sources. A lot of these hedge fund guys, they’ve become a product of their own success. They have priced themselves out of the market where they are trying to buy assets. They’re paying too much for assets and they’re trying to carve down just good assets so they’re paying it premium and trying to sell it off to their investors isn’t working. They’re getting stuck with these assets that really the only play on them is to work the assets off themselves. They’re not really a trading platform. You have to be mindful of where you’re buying from and actually go further and further upstream to close your bigger deals to make things happen. Next year is going to be the year of the bigger pool trades. By bigger pool trades, I mean not the one off something like 10, 25, 50 of people working together to get things done.
What are you guys most excited about in 2018? There are a lot of things. I’m excited to have the new guest on our podcast and I don’t know who is all going to be on there. I’m about to slap a calendar up on the wall here for just the podcast so we can plan that out and see what all comes from there. We’re making a challenge to help 10,000 note investors over the next five years. It’s one of our biggest things not based off numbers that we’ve done so far but starting fresh, January 1st. How many new note investors can we have? Can we get 10,000 in the next five years? It’s 2,000 a year. I think we can feasibly do that and making things happen.
One of the biggest things that we have I think also is we already planned our marketing calendar. If you’re on with the previous Monday Note webinars about what to be getting done in the last month of the year, we talked about through that. I love the fact that Nichole is already on her calendar, 60 days to Note Camp, 90 days to Note Camp, 30 days to Note Camp. That’s one of beautiful things is implementing those strategies into our Buffer or other systems so that it makes a lot things run easier going and rocking forward.
It was last year in Austin, Texas on June 30th, my good friends, Kristie and Elijah Whites was able to get to the City of Austin to officially announce Social Media Day for Austin. I was excited to be a part them, offered their first Social Media Day at the digital marketing offices. For this year, we want to take it a little bit further with their help. This is something you want to put in your calendars now, June 30th is a Saturday. I’ve come up with the idea of doing a 24-hour non-stop social media live stream and bringing on guest every hour. It will start early. I’m even toying with the idea of doing it from midnight East Coast time to midnight Pacific Coast time. Technically, 27 hours straight and bringing on twenty guests throughout the show to interview, to talk, to share, and go from there and see if we could not get 1,000,000 hits off of it. That has been one more thing in the back of my head, focus on starting to put things in place for that. It’s seven months from now. That is exciting to me. That’s one thing where, “We will do something bigger and better and really not knock it out of the park,” would be awesome.
Exciting 2018 Goals: What are you so focused on in 2018 and how can we help you accomplish those goals?
This is what I’m asking for you guys. This is a show designed more so for you. What are you so focused on in 2018 and how can we help you accomplish those goals? Maybe I should ask that out here on the podcast. What are you looking for? What you would like the most amount of help with? Is it raising capital? Is it finding asset managers? Is it marketing? Is it business systems? What are some of the biggest issues that you’re excited about, hurdles that you’re excited to overcome in the New Year? You need your own balls out for the social media day. That would be interesting. I’m definitely thinking we’re going to do clocks across somewhere where we can keep track of the time or everything. It’s going to be great. 2017 was one of our best years. We’ve really perceived 2018 being better. We’ve got some cool technology hacks that we’re doing. We’re really excited. We’ve been implementing pulling some list, really dialing in on some more marketing if we weren’t dialed in already on that stuff.
What’s the biggest thing that you are excited about in 2018? Travelling abroad could be one big thing you’re excited about. I know we’re excited in going over to Italy, in Spain and a little bit in France this year. It’s going to become a little bit of an international year on some stuff. I’m excited that we have an international following as well. We have people listening in about twenty different countries across the world as well. We definitely want to recognize our international listeners. As always, if you’re listening from somewhere overseas or even in Canada or Mexico, I would love it if you drop me a message at Scott@WeCloseNotes or shoot me a message that you’re listening from abroad. I would love that and then we would love to even possibly get you on the podcast interview to why you love potentially investing in the United States when you’re living abroad. That will be really a fun episode I think.
I love hearing what people want to accomplish and their goals and the things that they’re excited about because exciting thing is what drives us. I will tell you a personal goal, not a business goal, is I’m excited to see where I am in another twelve months of training with my trainer. Right now, I see a difference. My pant size are going down, shirts are going down, the double chin going away. I feel healthier. My back doesn’t bother me like it did before. That’s a huge thing. I’m moving and agile and having fun because I think it’s one thing that a lot of us take for granted is our health. With notes, it’s in a sedentary position we’re in a lot of times with being on the computer and doing things. You have to be up and moving and things like that. I’m excited about my training with Thomas.
2018 is going to be an amazing year for those who want to make it amazing. If you’re going to be down in the dumps and Debbie Downer and things like that and not accomplish things and complaining and bitching about things, you’re not going to see any difference in your life. You’re not going to have any more success than you’ve had before. You’re just going to have more shit that literally gets you pissed off and that’s not going to make you successful. You have to realize that life is a whole lot easier going through the positive mental attitude than a negative attitude. If you let little things throw you off, you’re going to run in the same road blocks and have the same distractions. I know it’s easy to do that and it’s frustrating when things happen in life but you have to have a 30-second mentality. What I mean by a 30-second mentality is literally, 30 seconds for something negative and then move on. You’ve got to try to find the positive in something to make things happen.
If you do that, you’ll start attracting positive things versus attracting negative things. If you’re in a gray cloudy sky, you’re negative about something, all you will end up doing is attracting negative things. I’ve seen it happen too many times. I’ve been down that road before and the one thing that I had to do is I just had to reprogram my mind, start focusing on the positive. Even the worst days, the worst times, I had to try to find something positive about my life. Find myself moving towards that positive direction. Sometimes, it’s ceasing to hang out with the people that are around and starting to hang out with new people or reading books or watching motivational things and taking away the negative things and stuff in my life.
I challenge you all if you are having a hard time finding something positive, find something positive. Find something little and build upon it and then build on the next thing and then the next thing and then the next thing. Go hangout with some people, pick up the people that inspire you, give them a phone call and talk because I guarantee, some of the most successful people are the ones that are most giving especially this time of the year. Giving with their time and energy and they also don’t want you to make the same mistakes that they have made. They also want to save you from making those mistakes because they realize how much more valuable their time is and your time is.
If you can go, condense a six-month thing into six weeks, it’s phenomenal or a six-week thing into six hours, it’s phenomenal. That’s one of the biggest things that we are focused on, I know I am here, is we’ve got some things that we just started on. My goal is literally in the next two weeks, really get a lot of the stuff implemented. We’re going to be filming a new marketing video series, we’re going to be filming some new training stuff, updating some things going forward in 2018, and switching up our business model and a couple of things. I look forward to that. It’s not about getting knocked down, it’s about getting back up. If you can’t find something positive to focus yourself, to draw right on the board or something like that that you see everyday, you need to because it will drive you. I don’t have a problem getting out of bed in the morning and being in the office and driving forward and being here late and knock out things down because it’s fun, it’s excitable, and we have a lot of great things to accomplish in 2018. By we, I mean not just us here at WCN. I mean we if you’re listening, if you’re part of the WCN Crew Facebook page, you’re part of our students, we want to help you achieve big things this next year. Go out and make something happen. Have a great day. Thank you for all that shared. I appreciate it. If you’re listening on iTunes or Stitcher, once again please feel free to leave a review. Share it with anybody that enjoy. We’ve got a great line up of guests actually that we’re bringing on to the podcast. Have a great day. We’ll see you all at the top.
Important Links
- Quest IRA
- Distressed Mortgage Expo
- Traffic & Conversion
- TeammateFitness@Gmail.com
- Houston Note Closer’s Group
- Buffer
- Social Media Day for Austin