—
Listen to the podcast here
To Infinity And Beyond 2019
Our topic is all about 2019 goals, To Infinity and Beyond. A lot of people when they start getting into the holidays, they slack off. They slack off because you’ve got Halloween coming up and need a halt by Thanksgiving. Then you’ve got Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and then you’ve got Christmas. They get all the Christmas sales and Christmas parties and then you have New Year’s. Sometimes it can be difficult for people to stay focused on where they want to accomplish. It’s the best thing I can tell you. This is why we start planning 2019 or the next year in October.
What To Focus On
We all have plans that we want to accomplish for next year. We all want to close so many deals. We want to raise so much in capital. We want to travel places. One of the big things that we have been doing here is working on some things that we want to focus. What do we want to accomplish? If you don’t have a plan, you are planning to fail out there for next year. I don’t care what your year’s been in 2018, if it’s been up or it’s been down. Everybody has peaks and valleys. That’s one of the basic things that I want to tell you. Everybody, every author who speaks about it, if somebody only shows positive, “Life is great. Things are awesome. Everything is awesome,” that’s not always the case.
I get accused of, “Where do you get your energy from?” I’m like, “I have peaks and valleys.” What happens is I don’t choose to focus on the negative a lot in the office. I try to figure what’s the silver lining about the negative. Let’s figure it and find a solution to it. I don’t focus on problems, I focus on solutions. If all you do is focus on problems, you’re never going to accomplish the things that you want to accomplish. You’re never going to have the success that you want to have because you’re constantly looking for the negative or you’re finding that negative thing. One of the big things that have been a big goal here is I have removed a lot of people from my outer circles. What do I mean by that? If I want to accomplish bigger things and I want to do amazing things in the new year and take our life to a different level, I have to remove dead weight.
Beyond 2019: If you want to go to infinity and beyond, you have to change your mindset.
We all struggle with that. That’s one of the big things. It’s removing negativity. I don’t want any news anymore for the most part. I occasionally jump on, take a local news but I don’t look at a lot of things. I also remove people. I unfollow people, unfriend people off of Facebook and other things that are just negative and don’t have anything nice to say, just derogatory. I don’t have room for that in my life. I encourage you to do this too. If you are constantly looking back online and see what other people are doing that you don’t like, you’re wasting your energy in your day looking in the rearview mirror. Keep focused on going forward. Focus on what you want to be and surround yourself with great people. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has ups and downs.
The biggest thing you don’t want to do is let it down, to keep going down and keep going down to the rat hole or the black hole. You have to rebound and turn around. Don’t waste yourself on negative energy. If you find yourself doing it, step away. Log off of Facebook or whatever and move on. That’s one of the best things I can tell you. Find things that you want to accomplish. Those people who are negative Nancy, they’re not the ones paying your bills. They’re not the ones helping you so why should you let them be dead weight and drag you down? Don’t let that do that. Keep moving on and moving forward. If you want to go to infinity and beyond, you have to change your mindset. You’ve got to change the people you hang out with.
Where Are You At
As Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, his mentor is famous for saying, “Who are the five people you hang around the most with? If you’re surrounding yourself or filling your mind with negativity, you’re not going to have positives.” Try to hang out with people that you enjoy doing it or are going to give you great energy who are going to support you going forward into the new year. Not maybe friends, acquaintances, people you get along with, maybe still hang out with them occasionally but remove them from that daily negativity coming in. That’s the first thing. I’ve been doing that. I’ve removed myself from groups online that I’m not big in, the part of it that’s junk. I just have, “Let’s focus on where I want to go.” Where everybody else is at, “Let me focus on where Scott Carson is at.” That’s one of the big things I would highly recommend everybody out there for your goals for next year. Where are you at? Don’t compare yourself to me or anybody else out there. Where are you at in your business? Where do you want to go? If you’re doing this part-time and you’re still enjoying your job, doing some great stuff at your job and doing that, that’s fine. Do this as a part-time gig. Do this as a side gig. There’s nothing wrong with that. I had a great conversation with someone about talking about going full-time, but they’ve got an opportunity for a promotion. I think it will be great for them. I was like, “If that works and you’re able to do this, by all means, do what you’ve got to do.”
When I was at the Magnify Your Wealth Summit, Aaron’s wife, Michelle Young, a great friend of ours, she’s a life coach. I love talking with her. She’s just absolutely an amazing individual. We’ve had her here on the show but I probably need to bring her back on. She had all the inner circle people do basically some visualization. I know she does this with clients too and it’s a phenomenal thing. This is something we all should do as well. Let’s unplug everything. Turn off the TV or mute it or the radio, whatever else you have going on. I want you to do some visualization to see what you want to accomplish. We’re going to get to 2019. If you sit there and think about where your life would be in three years, if you bust your butt and are focused on what you want to accomplish, where would you be in three years? What does that look like to you?
I’ll share what my three years look like. When I sat and did this exercise, I don’t know. I love Austin but I don’t think I will be here long-term. I visualize myself somewhere at least half a year, maybe somewhere tropical, somewhere on the beach. I’ve seen myself in webinars or recording this podcast somewhere from the ocean. The ocean in the background, wearing a white shirt, khaki shorts, flip-flops most of the time and having a nice tan. I’m paddle boarding all the time. Our note business is still rocking doing great things and the podcast is doing amazing things. Stephanie is doing amazing things. She’s speaking and doing her podcast a lot more in the Furbabies Podcast. She’s blossoming with that with her pets and cats and sponsors and having the faith to go along with that. I can see us absolutely in the best shape of my life. I’m still working it out, not traveling as much. We still travel for what we want to do, taking a major trip every quarter. Also doing some amazing things on the beach. I don’t know exactly how we’re going to get there but we’re working towards that.
This year has been an interesting year of ups and downs. We’ve had new staff. I’ve let some staff go. We brought some new staff in. They’re doing a great job even better than before. It’s been a little bit of transition phase, but we’re rock and rolling and I’m excited about what the markets are. The things that I see in the market, the market’s changing. We’ve had a lot of people come in the note space, which is okay. There are still a lot of opportunities out there. I see a lot of people who are working this as a business versus a hobby that’s having a lot of success. I do think that the next year, more of the small one-off guys are going to be a little bit squeezed out. You’re going to be more of a bulk phase. You’re going to go a little bit bigger, not much bigger, but a little bit bigger and be more direct to the banks versus a hedge fund aspect of things, so that’s all right.
One of the great things is in Note Night in America, we’ll be doing a small asset aspect. I’ve got an investor who sent me some assets they want us to work through and offer them up for sale to our audience. On Note Night America, we’ll be doing one of our note sales. We’re going through a note break down. On iTunes, you’ll be able to catch the replay on Note Night in America Podcast or you can go to WeCloseNotes.TV and watch the video, watch us break down the assets, go through them. I think it’s about 27 assets. It’s not a huge state, but still some great stuff.
Beyond 2019: If you’re able to remove stress and anxiety from your environment, you’ll be more successful at putting energy towards your future.
The other opportunity to pick up are first liens. Then there are also a couple of reperformers in there and a couple of IRAs too. I see us doing a lot of great stuff here but a lot of stuff on automation. One thing that we’ve struggled with a little bit in the past is getting some stuff updated. We’ve had some great people in there who took the reins. They dropped the ball. We had to go back and replace them. I had been working hard to replace people with vendors who can help us out with that. That’s one of the big things that I have focused on. We’re boosting our retirement accounts and our taxes are being paid. We continue to wow and amaze people out there. It’s part of what we focus on in 2019 to get to where I want to be six months out of the year in the Caribbean. I would love that. Having the fresh fish every night. Sitting outside with a cold drink, a good Cuban cigar or a good Rocky Patel Decade cigar. Sitting outside, listening to the breeze and listening to the wind chimes. Watching Steph’s cats running around.
The reason I say this is I’m trying to help you come up with ideas. There are no wrong things when you think about where you want to visualize to infinity and beyond. Think about that aspect of things. If you’re able to remove stress and anxiety from your environment, you’ll be that much more successful in putting energy towards where you want to go, to where you want to be towards your future. One of the things that we have decided to do here is we’re bringing in some of our vendors. We’re bringing some of the people that we love to market and that we love relationship-wise. We’re having our own little mini-summit here with some great people out here and help us cross-market work together. We’re overjoyed at who we’re bringing. We’re overjoyed at bringing those people here in Austin for two days to sit down with them, break bread, talk about their business, talk about where they’re going. Talk about their numbers and see how we can best help them market themselves and also help market us. It’s a great conglomerate of about eight or nine companies doing some great things. I’m excited about that.
When I reached out to all of them, they were all like, “This is a great idea. It’s a great way to help us book each other and to help us spread the knowledge of what we’re doing.” They are all great quality people. We’re excited about that. We’re going to call it the WCN Summit. We announced the new thing called our WCN Brand Ambassador Program. I’m overjoyed with the amount of people that showed interest in it. I’m seeing forms getting sent in and people signed up for it. What does the brand ambassador mean? I’ve been messing around. This talks about time, taking time to get things in place. We had national Social Media Day, June 30th. One of the ambassadors on there talked about micro influencers, people, clients, vendors and things that are in all of our circles and having them help market your business or market your product or service, things like that. I was like, “That’s a great idea. I need to figure out how I’m going to do that to make it easier on us, but also beneficial for our clients.”
When you start to think about something, things are going to show up. I had been bombarded online, Instagram, Facebook, people wanted me to be a brand ambassador for them. I’m like, “I’m not big into your shirts, jackets or your T-shirts,” but it gave me ideas on how to roll it out to our tribe. We came up with the idea for a brand ambassador where people are promoting our workshops, our classes. We offer them a discount code to provide to their audience, but also give them an affiliate code for them to make some money and get paid to promote. We’re doing that. We launched that and it will be basically our first round of micro-influencers brand ambassadors. I’m overjoyed about that. Just great people that love us, we love them and want to create a win-win.
I like being the dumbest person in the room. I don’t like being the smartest person in the room. I want to be the dumbest person in the room because I learn more. We grow more in that way. If you find yourself being the smartest person in the room, then you’ve got to find different things. That’s one thing that I’ve looked back at this year too. What are events that I’m going to that aren’t helping me grow and how can I best grow in the next year? I’ve removed a few events that we used to go to. I’m like, “I don’t want to do that. Let’s go somewhere else.”
What we’re planning is I’ve got Shannon to go out and get two big calendars where you can see stuff marked on. I highly recommend if you don’t have a wall calendar for your business, you need to go get one. We’ve already got stuff marked on there for what are the big events that we go to, like the Traffic & Conversion Summit in San Diego. Then my friend, Diana Rogers, alongside the guys at the DigitalMarketer that Roland Frasier and other guys put on. It’s an absolutely amazing event. They had 6,800 entrepreneurs. They’ll have maybe 8,000 held in San Diego. We have our tickets booked. We’re excited to go into that again for the fifth or sixth year straight. Always pick up something worthwhile. That’s one of the first things we put on. We added Podfest, the first time we went to this year because we see the Note Closers Show podcast blowing up. It’s been amazing.
We’ve added Spotify as a way for you to listen to our podcast on, which is nice. We’re excited about that. A big kudos to Feed Your Brand and Brandcasting You, the team over there with Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazzard. Just absolute great job. Thank you so much. We have also been added to iHeartRadio and I’m geeking out flipping through Netflix like, “iHeartRADIO, let’s see if we’re on there.” Click down there, sure enough, it’s there. I’m excited this year too to be working with Tom and Tracy Hazzard, we announced this on their international podcast, they live streamed it for Feed Your Brand. Tom and I, Tracy and Steph were working together to help other people. We’ve been getting with a lot of podcasts or podcasters looking for help, marketing-wise and sponsorship-wise.
We’re launching the podcast mastermind here. We’ll do some webinars and things like that help other podcasters grow. That’s a fun side project we’re doing a little bit here but for the most part, we’re focused on business as normal. How can we drive more business into what we’re doing and to our sponsors and help feed more deals to our tribe? I’m going to call it a day with one of our technology partners. We’re building an app. We’re building some cool stuff that we’re getting ready to launch here, hopefully by the first year, if not sooner to help you identify and see some opportunities. Then also in bringing on assets that you may be interested in buying and being able to work directly from your phone. We’ve got some great stuff.
We’ve got some great things going on. You’ve got to put it on a calendar because that’s the only way you’re going to visualize where you’re going. It’s the only way to help you identify opportunities to not miss out on other things. It’s important for you to be putting dates, putting calendars, “I’m going to go to this event. I’m going to jump on Note CAMP twice a year. I’m going to jump onto the virtual workshops. Here’s when the masterminds are scheduled for.” That’s one of the great things that we are doing is planning our year. At least the first six months for the most part. It’s so important for you to do that. Where are you going to go? What events are going to go to? Who are you going to surround yourself with? We are also starting with the help of Quest IRA.
Beyond 2019: Putting dates is the only way to help you identify and not miss out on opportunities.
I talked to Ingrid Chavez and we’re starting a local note investors meet up locally in Austin or working with the existing ones to meet over at Quest IRA and do that stuff on a regular basis. I’ll probably be speaking a little bit more about traveling, not crazy nights, but traveling and speaking a few more REIA clubs across the country in 2019. I did this year as long as we have Note Night in America. We’ll be tweaking a little bit of stuff. We are just absolutely excited at what the Note Closers Show’s done. We’re seeing a lot of you who are reading and reaching out. I’m so honored that you reach out to us on a regular basis.
If you want to plan things, if you want to have a big year, you’ve got to plan your year ahead of time. You can’t wait until it’s January 2nd because we know you’re not going do anything on January 1st. If you want to lose weight, if you want to do something like that, why not? Don’t wait. Start now. Start doing those little activities each day to help you. Cut your meals in half. Spread them out through the day. Start going to the gym or start putting twenty minutes in, 30 minutes, little things like that to help you grow and get better. To have momentum so that when January 1st hits, you’ve already built some habits, not trying to build a habit on a hangover. That’s how I see January 2nd, all the gyms are going to be packed. January 3rd is a little bit lighter. Then by the time February rolls around, we’re pretty much back in normal. We don’t want that for your business. We don’t want that for your real estate business. We don’t want that for your note business. We want you to build good habits so you can rock and roll. This is why we push so hard at the end of the year. We keep going, making those emails out to asset managers, picking up the phone, jumping on LinkedIn at night and connecting with the asset managers.
Those are some things that you can do to help you grow your business. I look back to what we have done marketing-wise and the students that we’ve helped this year, the numbers of people who have been on Note Night in America, the number of people who have been through our workshops, the number of people who are going to Note CAMP hearing it. We’ve accomplished some great things. We’re excited about it, but we know we can do better. We know that we’re here and we can be in the year. If you’re down here beginning, you’re trying to get up to here and you’re struggling, you’re having mind blocks, you just got to talk to somebody. If you’re struggling, feel free to drop me an email. I’ll jump on the phone with you and visit with you. I’ll try to help you get through that mind block as best as I can. I’m talking to a couple of people, some of our students who are like, “I’m experiencing a mind block. Do you mind taking 30 minutes?” I’m glad to take 30 minutes out of my day to help you overcome any mind blocks you have to help you grow.
I started on saying this, everybody struggles. Everybody goes through mind blocks. Even I do. I have days where I walked in the office and I’ve got a lot of things to do. I’m like, “What do I need to do? What can I do? How can I declutter my mind to get focused on things?” Sometimes I’ve got to pick up some stuff in the office. It looks pretty nice behind me. Sometimes it’s a controlled mess chaos on the other side of the camera here as I’m in and out. One of the best things you can do is realize you are not alone in your business. You may think you are. You may not have the most supportive family, spouse or friends but you’re not alone in this note business. If you want some help and figuring out goals for 2019, drop a message. Reach out if you’re part of the WCN crew Facebook group. Go on there, “What goals do I have for this year? Are 50 goals this year feasible? How do I get to that?”
Work your numbers backwards and that’s the easiest thing. If I want to do 50 a year means I needed about four a month, that means I need to do one a week. I need to be making ten offers a week to get that one closed. You’re going to have flows and peaks and valleys. It’s going to fluctuate depending on your activities and I get it. We all get sidetracked with health and family issues and things like that. I see some amazing people out there. We all get sidetracked with that. If you get sick, you’re down for a couple of days. If you had a death in the family or you have an elderly you need to take care of in the nursing home or bringing them in the house, you have to do it. If you’ve got kids, I get that. What you have to do is don’t be so hard on yourself that you are the negative energy stopping you from going forward. Shake it off and move forward.
We are so excited. We’ve got some big things before the end of the year. We’ve got our Note CAMP 6.0 on November 15th to the 18th, a little bit later this year because of everything but it’s a good spot. Our last workshop of the year, November 30th through December 2nd. We’re excited about that. We’ve got a great group of people coming in for our last Fast Track of the year. We also have our Mastermind in Cape Coral, Florida, December 7th, 8thand 9th down at the Westin. We’re so excited about that. We’re going to do some cool stuff with meetup groups going forward in 2019. We’ll kick it off with that big event on the 6th that night with the local people at Cape Coral.
What I’m trying to get at as I rattle through these things is you have to look back at your calendar. One of the things that I look at every day when I’m sitting here working on stuff and look at the wall is I have my calendar. My calendar is what guides me. What do I have? What do we have going on? There’s a number written all over it for what do we do this month in goals, we do this month in sales. How are we driving forward? There are some things that I am tweaking and some of the things that I look at about what we do to drive forward. We’re honored we’ve brought some great vendors on, people who are helping us grow our business. I highly recommend it. If you’re at a point where you’re struggling to bring things on, maybe you need to bring somebody aboard to make that next level. I’ve met some educators out there, people who are starting to make a name reach out to me, “How do I get beyond this?” The biggest thing I tell them is if you want to grow your business from 50 or 80 assets a year or that’s all you can handle, you have to bring people on. You’ve got to bring vendors on. You can’t do it all yourself. You’ve got to rely on people. You’ve got to train them or hire vendors to help you out with that.
We’ve got some great things that we’re doing to make things happen. We’re upgrading the website. We get that in the works. We’ve got some great guests who are coming in next year. There are some exciting things we’re pretty stoked about and looking forward to big things for 2019 for us and those around us in our tribe. I’m a big believer that the more people we make successful, the more that we’ll be successful. That’s servant leadership. That’s what I believe in. If I can make you successful, I can help lead investors around me, close more deals, raise more capital, make more things, we will naturally rise to the top as we surround ourselves with people.
Beyond 2019: You can’t do it all by yourself. You’ve still got to rely on people.
If you’re struggling, you’re not getting as much stuff done as you’d like to, maybe you need to change your environment. Change people you surround yourselves with. Change your mindset. Once in a while, and I’ve seen this happen in many people around specific friends and they have a specific mindset, you’re going to think like them. You’re going to talk like them. You’re going to having an accent like them. You need to change your location. Change the people you hang around because then you’ll start thinking differently. You’ll start taking different actions. We’re looking at the world a little bit differently. Oftentimes that changed perspective, that changed mindset, will help you accomplish the major things not only in the short-term but the long-term. If you’re shooting for the moon and you adjust by one degree, you’ll miss it. You can hit different things by adjusting your goals a little bit. It can go up tremendously.
What Are You Struggling Over
There are times when I look at things like, where are our goals? What are we getting? I have to bring them back down to help everything else gets caught back up for me when we go. I’m constantly thinking, “What’s the next thing? What can we use? What can we use to leverage?” I am proud of that this year. 2018 has been more of an implementation of some things to help us grow more in 2019 and we look forward to that. Do you have a big goal for 2019 that you’re struggling to find a way to get around it? Was 2018 successful or 2018 disappointing to you? Where do you struggle with that you need help to accomplish big things? What are things that you are struggling with that you can’t seem to get your mind around? What are the things that we can help you get to where you need to be? Is anybody else out there dealing with a mind block or with a big decision? They’re trying to identify. If it’s something that I can help you with, I’m glad to try to refer you to somebody that can help you walk you through that or refer you to counsel and advice.
The biggest thing is you go out, get a glance at the calendar, throw a yearly planner calendar up there. It’s only $20-$30 but it’s one of the best investments that we do every year, especially around the time of the year because it helps us chart out where we’re going. If you’re going to go to Note Expo in Dallas, you want to have that on the calendar. If you’re going to go to Paper Source in Vegas at the end of April, you want to put that on the calendar. Start planning these things out. One of the big things, if you’ve got a family or spouse or something like that, plan your vacation. Don’t make it a last-minute thing because the last minute never happens. Plan your vacation. It’s important. One of the things that we do every year planning a big trip, put them on the calendar. Steph tries to cancel about four or five times. I’m like, “Leave it be. We’ll be fine. Everything’s rocking and rolling all. We’re going to take that.” It always works out fine. Plan your vacation.
If you’ve got great people that you care for, the big thing I can tell you this too is it can be frustrating. We have all the people around us that we want to see do big things. No matter how much we push them to do things, they have to make that decision on their own to grow. A great thing is you can help people. If people want to do it, help them but if people aren’t ready for it and people don’t want to put the work into it, it’s hard to help people grow. It becomes frustrating and you also put attention because you’ve got somebody that’s like, “I’m not ready to grow.” “You are going and I’m going to push you to grow.” They’re not going to experience growth.
Beyond 2019: Don’t make your plans a last-minute thing because last-minute things don’t happen.
Planning Ahead
The best thing I can tell you is work on your plans. Work on your plan to be open. Let the people know around you that you are open to helping them grow. Help them with their plans, what their big goals are. A lot of people don’t come from a place where it makes sense to have goals or work goals. People are living for that 4% raise or that 3% or 2% increase in pay. They’re looking for their two weeks off a year, not their two months in trips or whatever. The biggest thing is if people are close to you, you want them to grow, talk about, “What are your plans for the year?” They may not know, especially your spouse, you’re going to have good days and bad days and things like that. That’s okay. What you have to do more importantly than anything else is to communicate, talk, share where you’re going. Share what’s going on. Share what you’re thinking because the other person may not be able to read your mind a lot of times. They may not know what’s going on. Share what you want to focus on, share where you’re going.
That’s one of the most important things. A lot of relationships fail at that. They stop communicating and you can’t do that. That’s a kiss of death. If you have inline goals with your spouse or your family, it’s easy to get there working together versus going in different directions because you’ll never get there. You’ll be frustrated. The other person will be frustrated because you’re not working together. What’s the priority? In some cases, you’ve got to take a back seat. Everybody has to take a back seat to their spouse or significant other at some point and that’s okay. Know what that is, communicate it and see where you want to go, where you want to be and work to get there. Go make something happen. Go do something. Don’t sit around, take the time. Literally just writing out some of the things that you want to accomplish on a napkin or a piece of paper and post it somewhere.
Write out some of the things that you want to do and then spend some time. Go to Office Depot, jump on Amazon and have it delivered to you. Pull that counter out. Take some time, draw it out, work on where you’re going. At least plan the first six months of the year. At least plan what do you want to accomplish? Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? What kind of income do you want to be making? Start putting that out there and tracking it. I think a Notepad is a great place on your phone, but I don’t think it’s good because once it’s on the phone, it can get gone. Put it somewhere on a piece of paper where you can see it. On your refrigerator, on your TV, in your office, in the mirror in the bathroom, above your bed. Post that somewhere where it can be seen. One of the couple of things that we did in the Mastermind is we found and blew up thousand-dollar bills for everybody.
Somebody took it with them and they put that in their office. I think so many people still have that and other things. Maybe we need to move it up a little bit. Move their goals to get some big things done. Maybe we’ll do that again. Go out, make something happen. Go do something. Plan some stuff out. Put it on a calendar, talk to your spouse about where you want to go. Where 2018 is going to end up and where you want to see 2019. Start planning and start surrounding yourself with great people. Put it on a paper and then start reaching out to people to help you out with that. That’s the only way you’re going to get where you want to be is have good people that are pulling for you. You’re both growing in the same direction as your spouse, your friends, your family. They’re a whole lot faster being a team than trying to do it alone.
If you have issues or anything like that, drop me an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. Also you can go to the Facebook page of the show and leave me a message. Leave a note. We’ll be glad to reach out with you. We’re pretty good about reaching and responding whether it’s online or smartphone and things like that. We look forward to helping you all and seeing what all your goals and plans are in 2019. We’ll see you all at the top.
Important Links
- Michelle Young – previous episode
- Furbabies Podcast
- Note Night in America on iTunes
- WeCloseNotes.TV
- Traffic & Conversion Summit
- DigitalMarketer
- Podfest
- Feed Your Brand
- Brandcasting You
- Note Closers Show on iHeartRadio
- Note CAMP 6.0
- Fast Track
- Mastermind
- Scott@WeCloseNotes.com
- Note Closers Show on Facebook