Scott Carson breaks down the five most important factors that you must have in place when you grow your note business from one-deals to a larger portfolio of distressed mortgage notes. He discusses the need for a good servicer and other vendors, along with having your systems in place, communication and other necessary items when growing. He also shares the need to have an assistant or staff already trained and ready to handle the activities after you buy notes. He also talks about the need to focus your portfolio and streamline deal flow on your notes, REOs, rentals, or performing notes depending on what your focus and long- term goals are. And finally, he reveals the need to have your marketing rocking and rolling.
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Growing Into 100 Notes
Knowing What Numbers To Hit
I’m excited to be with you here. I wanted to talk about the subject matter of growing into 100 notes. What do I mean by that? A lot of note investors come in, they get excited about buying debt, notes, mortgages or contract for deeds. We all set some lofty goals. One of the big things that we always talk about is knowing your numbers. You don’t know how many deals roughly need to close that are bringing in say $400, $500 a month to hit your monthly goal to help you get away from your job. If you needed $5,000 a month to leave your job or to replace your income and you had assets that were bringing in $500 a month, you would need ten performing notes bringing that into your goals to technically replace your income.
That can happen sooner than later if you focus on it. One of our students had done this process of closing his fifth deal in the first 60 days since going through our coaching. He’s excited about that. He’s picking up from three different sources too. That’s not one source, one deal on one source and then two deals from another source. We’re excited about what he’s doing. Rafael is doing a tremendous job. The big thing is we’ve had other students who’ve done well as well and they grow into closing on some bigger pools. They’re not just closing on one asset, but on 5, 10 and 20. They’re looking to close on 100 notes in twelve months. Where you’re at closing your first deal to where you’re at closing on 100 deals, there’s a lot of things you’ve got to do to grow into that entrepreneur, to grow into that person.
Let’s talk about the specifics of the team, the people you’ve got and the systems in place. One of the things that we’re proud of is the fact that we have got quite a few students but closed on quite a few deals. We’re not talking 10 or 5 deals. They closed on 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 plus deals. One of the students is closing on a pool of 96 assets, 80 assets or something like that. The thing I’m excited about what they value and wonder, he used private funding. He didn’t take it all down with itself. He’s used as marketing. He reached out to previous investors that funded some of his other traditional real estate deals and they converted into notes. It was an easy conversation with them and also an easy conversion because he explained what was going on and they liked what he was doing. That’s been a bonus.
Know Your Vendors And Have Systems That Empower Them
What you have to realize what you’re doing with one deal, what you’re able to have your hands on with one deal will strangle you if you hit 100 deals and you’re working on 60. More than twenty deals, you need to start looking at some things to put in place. That’s what I wanted to talk about. What are the five biggest things that you need to focus on to grow your business to that point? The first thing is you’ve got to know your system. You’ve got to know who your vendors are. That’s the biggest thing. Your vendors are going to be a well-servicing company. You’re going to have to have your attorney’s rock and roll. You may need to make sure you’re allowing or empowering your servicing company or asset manager at your servicing company to make decisions on your behalf or not truly make decisions but know what you want to accomplish.
If you’re buying some performing notes or non-performing notes, here are the 1, 2 or 3 things that we want to do. Anything outside of that, I need to approve for. Vegas isn’t bringing in $500 a month or $100 or $200 above their existing payment. Bring 4 or 5 months down. “I approved that all day long. Let’s get that repayment plan rocking and rolling.” You’ve got to have your vendors down. If you’re still trying to do everything yourself, to call the bars yourself, trying to limit your costs legally wise, I’m going to try to do the workouts myself, you can’t do that with 100 notes when you could do that with less than twenty. We’ve got students that have come and did a great job. They like to say “I’m the laziest known West around. I systemize everything.” Everything runs on automation. That’s great on the front end side, but the work-end the side, this is where you’ve got to have your foot on the pedal. Your thumb on the pulse because things need to wait for me if you don’t pay attention and you don’t push to do things. I’ll give you an example.
I got a deed in lieu. Our cancellation of the contract shook me. I could have taken an extra two weeks, but instead, here it did. I take an extra two weeks. We sent the paperwork out. He signed it. The mobile notary was supposed to mail it into us and it never showed up. I have never received that. We paid her $50 to mail it in and do that when I should have gone ahead and paid the extra $25 for a two-day FedEx. Sent an email thereof the documents, they put it in a FedEx envelope and they ship it back out to us immediately. Two weeks, it’s a little thing. Some people will, “I’d rather spend $1 on postage versus spending $15 on a FedEx envelope.” Those two weeks could turn into a month. We were fortunate that the borrower was willing to sign it and send it back to us.
Some will disappear. They head out of town as fast as they can and you can’t find them. They hit out of town as fast as they can. That’s the big thing. That’s one of the biggest things that are having your vendors delegating your duties. We had Aaron Young on from Laughlin Associate talking about what you can defer, delegate or delete from your schedule. Here’s the big thing. You as a note investor, your two biggest activities, and most profitable activities are finding deals and raising capital. You should not be doing the workout. The workout is for a $15 an hour employee. Somebody that is either at a servicing company or you may want to hire somebody yourself who’s got some servicing background, which is what we have done.
We brought somebody in, worked for a major servicing company. She works full-time on our portfolio work, talks with the vendors, talks with the realtors, talks with the borrowers, talks with attorneys. Is that my go-between and I’ve empowered her to make decisions. It’s worked out splendidly well. Love her. She works remotely. It’s a beautiful thing. I did not want to be handling phone calls from borrowers. I’ve delegated this off or I’ve deferred it off to somebody else. One of the things, here’s another thing that you’ve got to do is as you grow into the 100 asset thing, there are things you can’t be doing. It’s not in your best interest to be doing your books or your accounting.
Growing Into 100 Notes: Getting to 100 assets means streamlining your due diligence faster.
You need to hire a bookkeeper, come in and do that because if you’re spending time each week, you’re going to eventually get behind. That’s what you start buying more assets. You’ve got to have somebody that can delegate or that you can defer to so that they can do the taxes. They can track that. They track the expenses. They can track what’s going on. Getting a download from your servicing company is great each month of what came in and goes out. It’s often not the easiest thing to read, to track, to see what the expenses are because they often will go by loan number and then you got to track that. Not the easiest thing, but it’s much easier when you have somebody to do it. Let the expert do that. Let somebody do your books. Let somebody else do your accounting.
You should not be doing that. That’s the big thing. Once again, making sure your vendors are operating. Who’s handling who? You want to try to make things as simple as possible when you’re buying new assets with your vendors. I’ve avoided vendors that make me fill out the same damn paperwork about the entity every damn time. I’ve gotten rid of insurance companies that made me jump through hoops every damn time I add an asset or take away. I may be paying a little more for insurance on properties, but I pay more because I’m able to log in and add or remove properties easier. Make it simple. I can have my assistant do this where they can add insurance coverage to it. They can go online and automate it.
Here’s the thing with our vendors too, when we have different vendors that are pulling, skip traces or door knocking or things like that. I want those vendors to be able to be paid via credit card or debit card. If I have to mail a check, that isn’t the most effective thing and any effective things that we have to do and we’ll often go with a vendor for us to pay the credit card or wire. Electronic Square, PayPal, I consider those as via credit card. Pay that way or send a check. Sending a check, things can get lost and wait for an invoice. Let’s get this stuff paid and sent back out. That’s one of the most important things that we can do to help speed up things.
Another big thing you’ve got to have with your vendors is there are some things you may want to put in place to speed up the velocity of capital, velocity responses. This is a system thing. One of the things that we do when we buy new assets, we will immediately send a hello letter out. One week after funding, we send it out. We know that 99% of the time, servicing is not going to sip learning servicer, but we want to get that letter out, especially it’s nonperforming assets, so we can get the borrowers to start responding to us, to start talking with us. Start calling the servicing company is we say, “Here’s who you’re going to be talking to. Expect a letter from this. Here’s what’s happened. We bought your note. Yes, you’ve gotten your pay.”
Narrow Your Focus
It’ll probably be in a goodbye letter most of the time by sending out in a week, but “We’ve been purchased your loan. We’ve done that. We’re going to do some things here. Contact us, let’s get you in a house. Let’s get you on a payment plan.” Especially non-performing, you need to get that out. Those are systems they have in place or the staff that you have in place. I don’t wait for a servicing company to send out their hello letter. They could take two weeks to one month. That’s a whole another month of payments. That’s another 8% of profits or ROI that can be added if you can get them to repay in a timely fashion. Another thing that you need to do, you got your vendors to get some systems in place. Third thing, you’re going to narrow your focus.
Why don’t we mean by narrowing your focus? The biggest mistake I see, and I only say this because I’ve made this mistake and I’m calling myself on this, is the more assets you buy, the narrow your focus needs to be. What do I mean by that? Narrowing your focus, it means you don’t want to be doing outliers. You don’t want to be doing weird one-offs that don’t match your investment portfolio. The lean, mean note binding machine that you all want has to be focused on a specific value, specific location, specific asset, unpaid balances behind. We know it’s not possible to systemize what type of notes you’re buying because every note is going to be different. Everyone has a different borrower, payment plans and stuff like that.
You can start bringing in simple things. If you’re buying more notes, you don’t want your money and time tied up and rehabs. It’s going to happen. This is where you probably want to cut out the vacant properties that you maybe would jump into at first if you’re coming over from the landlord or renter side of things. Stick to the owner-occupied more exit strategies. You want to get away from doing fix and flips. You want to start streamlining your exit strategies when you take back. I’m going to start list things there’s 85%, 90% of the values so I can sell it for the foreclosure auction. I’m going to offer up $2,000, $3,000 and deal low cost immediately to the borrowers.
I can speed this up in six months or less than six months. Is it taking 1.5 years to foreclose? You’re going to start systemizing these things a little bit better. We talked about having your vendors, having some things your vendors are doing differently, but this is you narrowing your focus. That’s the thing too is you’re going to start streamlining your deal flow. What do I mean by that? I know I’m talking about what you’re buying and things like that, but you need to start streamlining your things with the ability to look at more assets. If you want to get to 100 assets, you got to be able to perform and do due diligence faster.
Hire An Employee/Assistant
One of the best things that we have, we love having using NotePros.com. It is software to pull the online value. That saves us hours, extra VA hours, but we still have to go in and double-check things. Anytime you want to start putting those systems in place with your staff, you’re going to need to hire up an employee. That could be 1099. Most of the time, if you’re going to hire an employee, they’re going to probably need to be in a W-2 if they work long or they working from home or are working from your office. If they’re showing up in your office, you got to look at what the employment requirements are for an employee versus a contract employer. That somebody is going to help do your due diligence. They’re going to help you, “Let’s pull true values. Let’s pull the rent rates. Let’s look up and see exactly what it is. Instead of going on Zillow’s views, let’s have somebody drive by the property.”
Many put their eyes and ears on that asset, in that neighborhood. Let’s not rely on what Zillow or Google Maps shows for us. That’s an important thing. You need to have somebody who’s reaching out to realtors, whether you’re hiring a vendor to perform BPOs for you or CMAs to do it in an area or you’re hiring your staff or narrowing your focus down on the states and the cities that you’re buying in and going back to the same realtors time and time again. People do want a two-way. People will hire a BPO company, pull values, external values or they’ll hire realtors over and over again and make those relationships. Either way, you still got to go back and look at things. You’re going to be doing other things too. This is why the most important part of what you do is hiring an assistant.
This is somebody you need to bring on 20 to 30 hours immediately when you’re getting your first 5 or 10 deals. You get them trained on what they’re looking at. They can do other things besides due diligence. They can communicate with your servicer. They can make sure and communicate with the bill payer. They make sure bills get paid. I had an investor reach out when they were getting ready to sell and they forgot to pay the electric bill, so the electric got turned it off. The buyer pulled it because they couldn’t do their due diligence on the asset because they didn’t pay a $50 electric bill. That’s a big thing.
As you start taking assets back, you’ve got to have somebody who can reach out to realtors to sell the assets and see what’s going on. Do we need to fix it? Do we enlist this up as a handyman special? Do we need to sell this asset ASAP? Is it painting carpet-worthy? That’s a whole different animal when it comes to getting rid of assets. You need to have a professional that you delegate in those cities to best help you. You don’t have the time to jump on a plane and go out and take a look at it. If they’re in your neck of the woods, 30 minutes to an hour, that’s great. Maybe you do have time to take a look at it, but then you still would need to hire probably a GC or somebody to help manage the project and go from there.
That’s why it’s one of the big things that we love so much about Southwest Florida is our buddy Brett Garrett who’s a great realtor down there and also a note investors. When we bought assets in his neck of the woods in Cali or Lee County, we didn’t mind paying them an extra 10% of the profits to manage the project because he knew the area. The vendors were able to delegate or defer to him in a local market. He always had our asset sold quickly and we made money and moved on. That’s the biggest thing too. This goes back to your vendors, but it’s also having somebody. If you don’t have somebody, you got to find some good people to work with, whether it’s your network across the country of investors you work with or Meetup groups and things like that.
That’s the number four thing is your network is going to be the most important thing. You want to try to stick it to clean networks. What do I mean by that? Those are clean groups that aren’t a pitch fast, a bash fast, people that are doing the same thing. Those are important metrics. Maybe you don’t have a Facebook, maybe you’ve got a list of people that you can reach out to via your email blast. That’s the biggest thing I want people to know is that you’re going to be on the phone a little bit more. You’re going to be responsible for a little bit more. You’ve got to have somebody that can go back in and make sure to do another thing. If you’re raising a lot of capital to get to 100 deals, make sure what they’re saying is uniform. Try to get it as simple as possible to reach out to other people and communicate on your behalf.
The biggest thing that you want to look at too is you’re going to have to try to start systemizing your capital raise. You’re going to be not only looking for deals, but you also have to look at where you’re buying those deals from, the sources. Do you need to be buying bigger bulk versus one-off? You’re going to probably eliminate somewhere you’re looking for. You have to look at who you’re raising from. Maybe you need to up your ante of what you require your investors to bring to the table. Maybe they’re not bringing in $25,000 or $50,000. You’re requiring them to buy $100,000. You’re not having to piece mail together.
Get Rid Of Distractions
Maybe you need to look at dropping down more money to start a fund to make it simpler for you. As you grow into things, one of the biggest mistakes I did was not starting a fund earlier because we were busy doing a variety of things. Here’s number five, probably the most important thing. We’ve talked to about having your systems, empowering your vendors, knowing your vendors, having an assistant and narrowing your focus. Five is getting rid of the distractions. The distraction’s maybe your job. Maybe you have to leave your job. If you’ve got 100 assets and you don’t have a full-time assistant, you can’t count your wife or your spouse as your full-time assistant. It doesn’t work that way. They’ve got family to deal with. They’ve got kids to raise. They’ve got their job to focus on unless they’re working with you full-time and they can help.
Honestly, you need to have a third party, somebody that can go do those things that you don’t need to do. It’d be nice to have that income from a job plus the income coming in for a while. That’s great. That’s what we look for. If you let your systems in place as you’re growing into that, great. At some point, the 30, 40, 50 hours a week that you have scheduled for your job is going to eventually take away from your ability to go out, raise capital and find more deals. At one point, you’re going to have to make the decision and you need to do it sooner than probably later. If you’re waiting and you’ve already bought assets and you don’t have an assistant, there’s going to be paperwork file, email to handle, home and family life. If you’re married and got kids, it’s going to start to wane because you’re busy having to put together and then go through it, then it’s hard to train an assistant because they’re trying to look over your shoulder. You don’t have time to sit down. It’s a snowball effect that can lead to bad things with things not happening.
I’ve had to hire and fire people. I’ve had to retrain people. It’s never an easy thing, especially when you’re in 200 deals that you bought six months ago and you’ve got to dive back into the paperwork. You’ve got to get back and be involved in looking at the collateral files or looking in the workout system. The building, this is why your vendors are important and having a good network of people. There are times when stuff like that will happen. We all hire and fire people that you can delegate, “Can you help me out with this? I need to change my servicing agreement to go from collections to full third-party aggressive reach-outs.” Those are things that you’ve got to look at, but you also have to look at your mindset on things. A lot of times an entrepreneur will say they can’t afford this system, “I can’t afford $60,000 a year.” If you hire an assistant and are paying them $30,000 $40,000 a year and they have a couple of marbles in their head, they should be able to find ways to give them what most people want, more work.
They don’t want to sit around looking at YouTube or Facebook or twiddling their thumbs. Most people want to go to work. Most people want to do more. Making a list of things to delegate off is an important thing. Also too, look at what your staff, your assistant is capable of doing. You’ve got to start learning and coaching your people. That’s the thing. You got to move your mindset. You got to probably stop watching football and other things on the weekends and moving into a different gear. If you have things rocking and moving, have some fun. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. The thing I want you guys to realize the most is you need to start sooner than later.
Maybe you have your assistant start off doing your marketing for you. Maybe they’re doing your social media. Maybe they’re doing their email blast when you don’t have the deals. They can help you build a pipeline of either deal flow, capital raising or expand your network. When you do hit the ground running with some big deals, you have the network to be able to move those assets. You have to realize you’re a company at that point. You have to operate as a company. You can’t operate like Joe Schmo, who still works at the dealership, but then comes home and changes the oil on the weekend and comes on and buys notes on the weekends and nights. It doesn’t work that way. You have to evolve. You have to realize, “I’ve got to do something.” What’s going to happen?
You’re going to stub your toe. You’re going to trip and fall and mess some stuff up. I’ve only said it because I’ve been there. I’ve bought a big portfolio before I had people in place. I relied too much on my vendors initially, without spending time coaching them on what I want to have happened. Coaching them on the important things of what I was looking to make happen. “Here’s what I want to do.” Delegate it to them, I was like, “We need to get a lot more aggressive on this reach out.” That’s the thing is important. Those five things are critical of your growth. What you need to do is you need to surround yourself and level up a whole new flash of friends too.
Growing Into 100 Notes: You need people that can help take you to the next level and help you with your mindset.
The Only People You Need
It was one of the biggest things that we’ve prided ourselves on is as we have grown, we have increased the value and expertise of those that are closest around you are. We’ve got a whole new set of friends that you ever had beforehand. It’s not saying you can’t love and be friends with people, but they don’t understand what’s going on. It’s hard to explain what’s going on as an entrepreneur or business owner to somebody who works 40 hours a week and can’t wait for the weekends. It’s a whole different mindset. It’s a whole different type of coaching that you need. You need to look at an offer, no coaches, people that can take you to that next level. People who can help you with that mindset, give you systems to help delegate.
Getting started is great. Everybody can get started. It’s the matter of if they’re going to continue that momentum. One of my coaching students closing deals. I reached out and talk to him and he’s like, “I need to do this.” I go, “What do you mean you need to do?” I haven’t sent an email since that first one I sent out and I’m like, “You’re killing me.” Do you send an email to your asset managers? No. You send an email out to the investors here? No. Have you got in any of the local Meetup groups? No. That’s a 0 to 3 on things that you all should be doing and we all should be doing on a weekly basis. Send emails out to our database of investors, send out a database to asset managers and networking. Networking is one fashion.
Maybe if you’re remote, you’re jumping online in a Facebook group or LinkedIn group and doing that or you’re going to a local Meetup group. You’re going to a conference once a quarter. You have to take a look at what’s going on your calendar and start circling those things so you can plan for it. You can get to that point where things are rocking and rolling for you, but you have to build up to it. You’ve got to build the systems. You’ve got to grow. You can’t go out and buy 100 notes and know what the hell to do. I’ve seen too many people. There’s a tape that floated around for about five years from a group of investors up in Northern California. I believe it comes from alfalfa farmers.
They spent $5 million and bought a portfolio of nonperforming notes, but then didn’t touch it for two years because they were only focused on REOs. They didn’t make sure that everything got taken care of in two years. The collateral was a mess. Assignments are missing. A lot of the assets wanted to tax foreclosure or increase taxes. It was cluster F. It was horrible. Empty properties got trashed. It was a horrible portfolio that bounced around. I saw this three times in a two-year period, “I know this asset.” I was like, “What a horrible portfolio.” What happened? They bought a portfolio that they weren’t familiar with it. They didn’t understand the systems and they blew $5 million and maybe got $500,000 back.
Growing Marketing To Investors
That’s over a 90% negative return on your investment. The thing I want people to realize out there is you can have these great goals, but if you’re not doing the basic things in the beginning, you’re going to struggle. The basic thing is, in the beginning, are you’ve got to have your marketing in place. You don’t have to post to Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. You pick out a couple of things. I think we’ve all need to have a LinkedIn profile. You all need to have, unfortunately, a Facebook profile and you need to have a YouTube channel because you need to start creating videos about what you’re doing. It’s the 21st century, you’ve got to start sharing the video. Video is where everything is at these days. You have to start sharing videos on the deals you’re working on, the case studies.
You don’t have to have long. We’re not talking about an hour-long video. We’re talking shortly about 5, 10 15 minutes talking about your case studies, the deals that you’re working on. It’s simple to share. It’s one of the most effective things that you can do in getting your message out to other people, other posts and other investors. That adds to your value. It adds to your value as a note investor, as a note buyer for note sellers. Growing into the investors. Start looking. Don’t be spending all your money on things. Start putting money aside. That’s one of the most important things that you need to have is I believe it’s from the get-go. You’ve got to start putting away money into your IRA accounts, self-directed accounts into savings accounts on the sidelines.
I would recommend at least 10% to 20% of your profits. If you can afford that of whatever your cut of the profit is, put that away. Max out your IRAs. Put something in a savings account or another account that you can use as a slush fund, basically for things when your uh-ohs pop-up. You’ve got to replace a roof on a property, you got to replace an AC or you’ve got to pay $5,000 for the deed in lieu on expensive property. You’ve got to do that. You have to grow into that investor. It will not happen overnight. You know what you need to do as well, as we’ve talked about this before of upping your friends. You need to tune out all the distractions that you can.
If you’re trying to do 2, 3, 4 things at once, “I’m going to buy a note portfolio, a rental portfolio,” no. You don’t want the rental portfolio. That will not be the best use of your time. “I’m going to do Airbnbs,” that’s great. Give it to somebody locally to do it for you. Get someone else to manage it while you’re going out and finding other deals. Look at your activities, because I guarantee 80% of your income is coming from 20% of your activities. If that’s the case, you need to learn to delete that 80% of wasted time. Not delete it all. Maybe cut it in half if you can. You can cut 80% of the wasted time into 40%. That’ll take your profitability from 20% activity time to 60% it’ll triple your income.
Somebody asked me, “What are the things I can delegate, Scott?” Here’s a little thing, delegate your social media. Delegate your stuff you find that you’re doing. We delegate our video editing. We delegate our podcast production. I don’t do that myself. It’s not worth my time. It’s much cheaper for me to delegate that. What I defer to, I defer to staff to be making travel arrangements. I defer staffing for wires. I defer staff for other things, to booking events and to booking hotels. I don’t need to be doing that. That’s deferred delegate 1 or 2. Deleting, there are some things I cut out in time. I’m looking at my schedule. I’m not traveling as much, because that was not only a big waste of time where I was losing days, but I could turn that around and turn that into an online event and online something that would become much more valuable.
I was able to cut out the waste of space of travel, a day on the front side and a day in the backside. I have three productive days versus one productive day. That doesn’t mean I’m still not traveling to events. I’m also trying to combine things. If I am traveling, trying to combine one thing into three things. What are those three things? First thing, I’m going to the event for some reason. I’m going out to speak. I’m going to a conference. One of those three things. That’s the first thing. That’s the main focal point of making me go there. Let me give you an example. We’ve got the Podfest Summit coming up in Orlando in early March. I’ll go out there first and foremost.
I’m going to try to look at and see if there’s any Meetup group that’s meeting either the day or two before and it’ll be either 1 or 2 things. It’d be a real estate investment club or it’ll be a podcasting summit. Some are marketing thing or entrepreneurial focus around that event. If I’m flying early in the morning, I’ll make sure to get to the hotel, get checked in and see what’s going on that night or I’ll be doing a live event. I’ll be doing my own Meetup at an event where I’ll reach out to my database in the local areas and say, “I’m going to be here. Come on out, let’s network. Let’s come out and meet.” Either the day before or the day after or the night before an event or the morning after an event.
The reason I would do that is I’m not going to be able to do it the morning, but for the day. Let’s say I’m flying in at nighttime, we’ll do it in the early morning before I go to the event during the summit. If I’m flying out the next day, I would try to do the recording early in the morning, so I can catch my noon flight. Combine a couple of things at once. Kill three birds with one trip if I can. Those are the things that you need to look at your calendar. How much more can you combine? How much more can your workaround? For many of you guys that have assets in different states, maybe you need to jump on Southwest Airlines and fly out and to do something similar. Fly and take a look at assets. Find your local real estate investment club that’s big enough. Have a day of meeting with vendors or a day where you’re doing your own thing to talk with local investors.
You’re marketing out to local investors via IRA lists or pulling off the County records and sending out, “I’m going to be in town for this day. I’d love to meet you in the morning and talk about the projects you’re looking at.” That’s one of the most effective things you can do. You maximize three things at once. You’d be a lot more effective on those trips and be a lot more successful. That’s not saying you can’t have some fun. Have some fun. Go to an event, a concert. Go do whatever you need to do. Go hang out with some buddies but try to maximize your event so that you realize, “I’m getting stuff done.” If you’re traveling, this is why it’s important to have an assistant back home who can still handle your emails, make sure things are getting posted, that the house of cards you’re building gets cemented in place versus falling.
This is why you can’t have your spouse or girlfriend being your main assistant because if they’re traveling with you, they’re probably not checking their emails as well. They’re probably not doing as effective on the road. You combat ineffective versus somebody home who’s holding down the fort. That has a system that will often turn into your main office admin or one of your most trusted people to trust to help you grow your business and help make sure your business is profitable and does a struggle in downtimes. They also can be your biggest advocate if you are having a rough time because they know what’s going on. They see you working. They can also be your buffer if you need to avoid phone calls or if you’re busy the gatekeeper.
We all see this at banks and high-end successful people have an assistant and gatekeeper so they can filter through the important phone calls, emails, contacts so they can keep you or their boss doing the most important things, the high dollar events. They’re helping delegate things out and helping defer. They’re deleting things off the schedule if you need to be to make some things happen. This is what I’m trying to get, everybody. As you grow, you’ve got to put those basic things that we preach about on a regular basis, marketing, systems and finding deals. Those are the important things that you got to grow on. Eventually what happens is you get good at what you’re doing. Your assistant can see how you speak and see what you doing. They get home and you can almost delegate off that marketing. Some of you guys need to delegate it off, but they can see what you’re doing.
You can bring on a college assistant or somebody else part-time to handle social media, marketing stuff, video editing, “Contact John and make sure that’s cranking and going.” You are focused on doing the two things you need to do. You can take a vacation for three weeks and have to stop what you’re doing to send a wire or to get something notarized. I know that you all can be successful in what you’re doing and I don’t care where you’re at. If you’re struggling, I have to work to make money and start, that’s great. Let’s start putting simple things in place. Let’s start putting your email system in place with email blasts. You can do that. Start getting on LinkedIn and networking on there. Start doing a little short video. Everybody’s got time to do a video when they start with. That’s going to be one of the most valuable things that you can do. Start building that library of content that maybe if you need to slack offers, slow down because you’ve got to focus on something you can. We’ve had to do that from time-to-time, focus on getting some deals closed and sold off. Money returned to investors. It’s a variety of things.
We’ve taken a step back from some of the marketing because we’re focused on things and we have such a big ramp up for some things. The thing I want you guys all to realize is those five things aren’t going to happen all at once, but you need to start putting it in place. You need to start keeping that in mind. Who can you hire? One of the things that we’ve seen, some investors hire a similar assistant or similar VA to do some of their marketing until one person grows into needing them. It’s from 10 to 20 or 40 hours a week. We’ve talked to Aaron. Aaron’s gotten a separate assistant, not Laughlin Associates, clients or employees. Aaron’s employee, that’s $300 a month to handle this stuff. We all can afford it. That’s $75 a week. That’s less than $20 a day. That’s less than $2 an hour.
Where To Find Your Assistant
If you figured out if you had a full-time assistant to help you out with some things, those people are possible. You can find those people on Upwork, Fiverr.com for a variety of things. That’s what I want to get at with you guys and gals out there is don’t be afraid of those big numbers. Everyone has big goals, but to get where you need to be if you want to close on 50 deals by the time December rolls around, put your systems in place. Start putting those people and systems and things in place. Look at immediately what you can do to delegate, what operating procedures you need to have in place. Start putting some manuals on what you do on a day in, day out basis.
Growing Into 100 Notes: If you’re not doing the basic things in the beginning, you’re going to struggle.
One of the best people I’ve ever seen do this is Robert Woods, known MBA, previous Mastermind student of ours, good friend, a former deadbeat borrower from one of our first strikes back in the day, an absolutely amazing friend and he talks about all the time, “What did we do? What can we write down? When this comes in, what does it happen?” He shared that he had a friend who was an assistant who would put some together but wouldn’t take the bill and go put it in the mailbox or wouldn’t do little things. That’s why you have to avoid hiring your friends and family. They’re going to slack off on you. Hire an employee, have an employee-employer relationship. Don’t be harassing. Some people were good at micro or macro.
Give your employees enough of the leash to make some mistakes. Give them the opportunity. “You can make up to $100 mistake will be good,” and grow that number to $500 to $1,000 if you think something works best. If it’s a tool that you’d like to use or think we would be good at, let’s add it. Let’s use it. We can always cancel if it doesn’t work out. Realize that stuff. Start putting in place and start doing the things that you need to do. Somebody reached out to me and said, “Scott, what I need to do to find notes besides calling asset managers?” I chuckled. I’m like, “That’s what you have to do.” Calling could be emailing and connected on LinkedIn. They’re not going to start sending you stuff because you’re a badass guy or gal.
You’ve got to do the things and set those systems in place. Start that wheel. It takes a little while. Eighty percent of sales are made of the fifth contact but realize that fifth contact could be in five weeks or five months. If note investing is a hobby for you, it’s a side thing where you’re like, “I’m going to buy assets here or there,” that’s fine. Maybe you can do it all yourself. For those that are going to be buying bigger things or doing some things, start adding that staff either virtually or part-time on the front end. If you get to where you close in a big pool of 50 to 100 deals and you don’t have that in place, your deals are going to struggle because you are the blockage.
You are the weakest link. You’re that bottleneck that needs to expand. How do you expand that? By learning how to defer, delegate and delete other things or other activities that you can’t be effective. Please take that to mind. Please go out and take some action and put some of these things in place. If you’re starting, start those little things. Start buying some more assets or portfolios. Start to delegate. Start to look at people. Look to hire somebody, whether it’s a VA or somebody in person online, and go from there. I wish you all the best of luck, guys and gals. Go out, make something happen and we’ll see you all at the top.
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