EP 232 – Goals Don’t Happen Overnight, Follow The Path To Success

NCS 232 | Path To Success

 

NCS 232 | Path To Success

The note business is a constant process of getting things rolling. This means a ton of patience is required from a note investor. There are days when the office will be filled with questions about deeds getting off from the county or mortgages being signed. This is just the way things are in this business, but there is a path to success. One way to find that path is expanding your circle. Surround yourself with likeminded people, mentors and people who are in the spot that you want to be at. Find out how you can quit failing and commit to winning.

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Goals Don’t Happen Overnight, Follow The Path To Success

We have a lot of great stuff going on. One of the great things that we are rock and rolling is the Banking Blitzkrieg that we have. We’ve announce this already. We kept it open for basically twenty spots to take advantage of. It wasn’t open to everybody. We’ve done this in the past. It’s been probably two years since we’ve done a big Banking Blitzkrieg of making phone calls to asset managers and taking those lists and record it. It’s always funny when you see people that talk that they’re going to be big but then they end up flaking off after the first round. That’s expected, honestly. I don’t expect people to follow through for four weeks of anything for the most part. That doesn’t surprise me and we see that happen on a regular basis. It is what it is, it happens. Fortunately, mostly everybody got their call logs in to me. We are already at over 1,400 asset managers who called in the first week, which is pretty exciting. We’ll see if we lose a few more people. Our biggest goal with this is just to refresh our asset manager list. The beautiful thing is those people that are a part of this will get the list of asset managers at the end as part of their data play aspect and things like that. Those that have flaked off, they don’t get anything. They miss out and they go on from there. It’s sad that people talk a big game and then some of those just don’t deliver. That’s how people are. Unfortunately, it is what it is. We can only do what we can do so far.

We’ll give you a lot of numbers as we get things closer to it, but I’m already getting some tapes in. I’m waiting for some pricing quotation coming back but I’ve already got some assets in from these asset managers. If anything, what’s rewarding is seeing that a vast majority of the asset managers that we’ve talked to have encouraged us to follow back up or they’ll have something later on. Those that don’t want us to call back, that’s fine. They told us that allows us to remove them from the list. A big shout-out to my buddy, Ryan and his business partner, Danny, up in Dallas. Thank you, Propelio Real Estate Tools for having us. We had a good time in the Propelio Studios with Ryan and Danny. I look forward to doing more stuff with them in the near future as well.

NCS 232 | Path To Success

Path To Success: As long as you stay in the path, you’ll hit success.

The topic of the podcast is a little bit different than most. It’s titled, Follow the Yellow Brick Road. If you’ve ever watched The Wizard of Oz or read the book, you know what the Yellow Brick Road is. The Yellow Brick Road starts in Munchkin Land, it starts one way and it goes directly all the way to Emerald City. You could literally do a lot of analogies between the Wizard of Oz and entrepreneurship. As long as you stay in the path, you’ll hit success. Ultimately, what happens along the way is people lose their way. You have flying monkeys that fly out of people. You have the Evil Witch of the West. We have a lot of distractions that happen to us as entrepreneurs. I see a lot of failures. I see a lot of people struggling on a regular basis. It’s because they aren’t following a path to success or they’re chasing too many flying squirrels. It literally comes down to that. It usually starts with chasing too many squirrels, “I’ll go to a workshop or I’m going to take this educational class.” Success in real estate does not come from running to the back of the room. That’s not where success is made. I know a lot of people sign up for this, sign up for that, do all that and say, “I’m going to be a note rock star. I’m going be fix and flip rock star. I’m going to be a wholesaling rock star.” I get messages like, “I’m wholesaling, I’m going to be brokering deals because I can’t raise my own capital.” There is a path to success, and the only way you’re going to find that path is by sticking the course.

There are going to be times that you’re going up and you’re doing great, and there are other times you’re going down the valleys. I can speak from definite experience from the peaks and the lows. Every day, we have highs and lows in our offices. Most of the time, it’s pretty high. We have some lows sometimes, but we overcome those things relatively quickly. You have to have mounds and mounds of patience because things don’t always happen as fast as you would like them to happen. I get frustrated sometimes like, “Come on, where we are? Where are we? Where are we?” Especially in the note game, “Does the borrower have any payments? Have we got the deed back from the county? Did they sign the mortgages?” It’s a constant process of spinning plates to get things rock and rolling, but you have to stay the course. You don’t see me right off starting on the like bar. You don’t see me right off and dropping 20,000 postcards to try to find distressed buyers. You don’t see me pulling a list of vacant. We stay the course. Sometimes we take three steps forward, sometimes we take a step back, and then we have to go forward. It is what it is. It just happens along the way. A lot of entrepreneurs fail to realize that that’s just the nature of the business. You’re going to have setbacks. You’re going to have things that really get you rock and rolling. Sometimes you’re going to go into a field of poppies and just have to take a nap, take a little breather sometimes.

I will tell you this though. Hopefully everybody on here has mentors, people that they look up to, people that are coaches for them, that give them a clear path to success, and follow that path to success. If your coach is telling you one thing, hopefully they have been on that path before. They’re not telling you that just to waste your time. They’re doing that to help you not make the same mistakes that they did. Trust me, I want my goals to happen overnight. I want to drop 50 pounds in 24 hours. If that was the case, I’d have to chop off probably both my arms, and that’s not going to happen. You have to realize that where you’re at today is because of the decisions that you’ve made on a daily, hourly basis. Nobody is responsible for your success or your failure besides you. Ultimately, you are responsible for where you’re at today; nobody else. You don’t have a gun to your head. You are not a slave. I don’t care if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or you’re born with nothing in your mouth. You have the right to do what you need to do. There are so many things today online and with the way business are today that you can do things that you couldn’t do five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago

NCS 232 | Path To Success

Path To Success: Nobody is responsible for your success or your failure besides you.

Here are my three big steps to success. One, you’ve got to expand your circle. You’ve got to literally surround yourself with good people, like-minded people. Sometimes that requires you to remove yourself from bad situations. Surround yourself with good people. Secondly, get a mentor. Get somebody that you can talk with. Get somebody who is where you want to be, and who has maybe struggled along the way. The advice you get when you struggle is more valuable than the advice that you get when you’re doing well. Everybody wants to be around you when you’re doing well. You find out who the really good people are in your life when you’re going through trials and tribulations. That’s who you can really count on. Your mentors should be there through the good and the bad. They should be able to help you out with some things. I’m not talking financially. I’m talking about just giving you great advice, save you. I know that I’ve gotten advice from Greg Reid and others that are my mentors that have helped me overcome things. They helped me make difficult decisions, but made me feel a whole lot better that I was feeling the right thing, that my gut was telling me the right thing. I’m more appreciative of that than advice I get when I’m on top.

I’ll give an example. A lot of people are just jacked up about what we do marketing-wise. A lot of people are like, “You guys are on top. You’re everywhere. I can’t log in to Facebook without seeing you.” We’ve get it down to a pretty good science here. We have a few hiccups marketing-wise, but with our online events I think we’ve really got it down. I have been bombarded with people, speakers and educators telling me, “Teach me what you do with your online events and your online workshops.” I’m hesitant to do that because most of those same people didn’t believe that when we talked about what we were doing. “It’s not going to work. You can’t make any money doing that. You can’t charge what you’re doing to where you’re at and where you want to be in.” We have stayed the course this year. I have readjusted some things to be more focused on that ultimate path. I don’t care what your Emerald City is, I don’t care what your Oz is, hopefully it’s something worthwhile. I will tell you this though, at times, you’re going to readjust your focus. You’re going to readjust what that endgame is. Maybe you get to Oz and realize Oz isn’t as shiny and green city as it should be. I want to see what’s beyond Oz. That’s completely fine. You’re going to change your goals, you’re going to tweak a few things. If you’re at where you’re at today and you find yourself going in twelve different directions and you’re frustrated, the problem is probably you and not the system. It’s you in a variety of ways in the fact that if you quit out three or four things and focus just on one thing solely, you’ll be a lot better off.

NCS 232 | Path To Success

Path To Success: You have to be what you are to you. You cannot be everything to all people.

I was listening to Jason Bible talk about how they’re very specific on what they do with their education, “I’m chasing commercial. I’m changing that business.” They’re not that. You have to be what you are to you. You cannot be everything to all people. Especially in real estate, there are so many niches. You could try to run around and fix everything and make everything happen, but I think that’s the biggest farce, that’s the biggest lie I see people believing in when it comes to investing in real estate. You’ve got twelve different exit strategies you can do with every deal. This way you can do every deal and you don’t want to do every deal. I love what Ryan Harper is doing up with Propelio. They’re focused on providing value-add comps and things like that. Then they focus on their stuff in the Dallas market. I don’t care what your one thing is, as long as it’s one thing. If you’re going to focus at one thing, then you want to get the best mentor, you want to surround yourself with the best people that are doing the same thing to help you mastermind your way to success.

I can’t tell you how important it is to surround yourself with good people, remove the toxic relationships. Get rid or step away from those bad relationships that are going to be negative and pull you down. You’re going to have enough trials and tribulations, you don’t need anybody jumping on a dead horse when you’re going down. I’ve had that happen in the past. I speak from experience. We had deals that went south, people jumped and said, “Give that up. You’re a failure.” “This deal is a failure. I’m not a failure. I am only a failure if I choose to quit where I’m at today or if I stop focusing on what I’m focused on.” I know that a lot of people out there are struggling with different things. You’re like, “I wanted to close my first deal at the end of the month. I wanted to be able to go to the gym.” The biggest thing I can tell you is if you’ve failed so far, quit failing. Start today. Start knocking things out. Don’t let little things knock you off your back. If the little things are knocking you off your back, you’re not dedicated and you’re not focused enough to begin with. I know we all are going to have setbacks and it’s going to happen, but you just keep working one day at a time, and you keep striving to get where you want to be. Ultimately, you’ll be further down the road and you’ll look back like, “Holy crap, look at the journey I’ve made. Look at where I’ve come in the last six months, last 90 days, last year or two years.” I look back at where we’ve come in the last ten years and I’m like, “Craziness.”

Steph and I were out to dinner with our good friends, Kristie and Elijah Whites. We went by this tavern after dinner. Going by where my first ever office was and seeing how far we have come from the days of being in a 10×10 Margarita-pink room and teaching our first workshop of eighteen people, it made me reflect over the last couple of days of where we have come and how much further we have to go. When you look at those things and you see what your goals are, where you teach your class and you didn’t have a goal of how many people you get in the room, you just were glad to be teaching something to the point now where we want to help 10,000 note investors over the next five years make money and help educate and create note investors. It’s important for us to do that. It’s important for us to help those out there. That’s why we do what we do because we can hit more people without killing myself and killing my staff to make things happen.

NCS 232 | Path To Success

Path To Success: We are the first programmers of what we do and how we accomplish things.

Choose your tribe wisely. Choose your mentors even more wisely. Choose what goes into your head and goes in your ears more so than anything else. If you find yourself being self-deprecating to yourself, you have to quit that. That’s the first thing you’ve got to quit. We are the first programmers of what we do and how we accomplish things. No matter what kind of books you read or podcasts or audio books you listen to, if you aren’t saying good things to yourself, if you don’t have self-belief or faith in oneself, it doesn’t matter how much you pay for other stuff, it’s never going to happen if you don’t believe in yourself. That’s why I’m a big advocate in picking one thing, sticking to it and going from there. That’s the easiest thing. You’re going to learn more from your mistakes along the way but what you want to keep in mind is if you stay focused, you’ll see more success that’s going to build that self-confidence faster versus trying something and failing, versus learning from your mistakes and moving forward.

I’ll give you a great example. It’s probably like golf more than anything else. Golf can be a fun game. I’m not the greatest golfer, I just played pretty often on a regular basis in college. I haven’t picked up a pair of sticks in a couple of years. What’s great about golf is you get better at it. If you’re playing the same course, you eventually get better hopefully, if you take lessons or you work on your swing. The first time you go and hit balls, it’s going to be very frustrating because you’re going to be chili dipped in, you’re going to miss it, you’re going to dogleg it, left hook it. It’s going to be frustrating. When you get that one hit were you match up the ball, face the club with the ball, and that tuning fork and your loins goes off, that’s the, “I got that right. It went straight. It went far. It went better than the rest.” That’s what keeps you coming back. What you have to look at as an investor and as an entrepreneur is doing that on a regular basis; trying to hit something right so that the tuning fork in your real estate business goes off and makes you feel good.

That’s what I wanted to share with you guys, follow the Yellow Brick Road. When Dorothy landed in Oz, she didn’t have to go and hack out a path. There was a path set out for her to get where she needed to go from Munchkin Land to the Wizard of Oz. I guarantee wherever you’re wanting to go, there’s already a path set out. Sometimes you’ve got to dust it off. Sometimes you don’t know it exists. Sometimes it’s a different path than what you expect. The biggest thing I can tell you is that if somebody’s been where you want to be, reach out to them, give them a phone call, drop them an email. I guarantee they’re willing give you some great advice. Don’t call them up, don’t ask them, “Give me you training for free.” Don’t do that. Be a value-add. Listen to what they say and go out and implement it, because that will be the biggest and best way for mentors to want to continue mentoring you. If they give you advice, stick to that advice and keep moving forward. Don’t listen to one person and then go ask somebody else, because then you just have too many messages in your ear and you’re not going to get anywhere where you needed to get. Whatever your path is whether it’s wholesaling, fix and flipping, rentals, apartments, lease options, self-storage, notes, performing, non-performing, whatever that ultimate tool is that you’re using to get to where you want to be, stick to one thing. Just stick to it, make it yours, get rid of all the distractions, learn to say no to other things and go out and make things happen.

NCS 232 | Path To Success

Path To Success: If they give you advice, stick to that advice and keep moving forward.

Thank you for listening as always. Feel free to share this, feel free to leave a review. If you love what you’re listening to, I’m always glad to get feedback. You can always drop me an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com to make some things happen or leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher. I’m very excited. We’ve got Carole Ellis from SDRI Investor coming up on the podcast. She’ll be talking about real estate and some of the different markets that are going on. Then we have our good friend, Michelle Young, who’s an amazing life coach. She does some great stuff and continues to just absolutely blossom over the last few years and really helping a lot of people out as well. If you’re struggling, the best thing you can do is pick up the phone and drop an email to somebody that you admire and just share, “I’m struggling. I’m having a tough time. Can you give me any insight? Have you been where I’m at? Anything you can help me with to help overcome these obstacles?” I guarantee that the mass majority of people out there that are successful that you reach out to are glad to take a few minutes to share with you any tips or anything they do on a regular basis to knock things out. I want to thank all of you for being on the show.

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