Join in as Scott Carson shares the ways to start your side hustle and transform that into your full-time success. Learn how to create a plan of action and runway to help you find success as a note or real estate investor. Listen to this episode as Scott shares his best practices and why it’s important to start with the end in mind. Learn how to identify KPIs to help you map your way and keep you on track on your journey to success.

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A Real Estate Investor’s Guide To Turning A Side Hustle Into Full-Time Success

We’re going to talk about short-term versus long-term goals as a note investor, how to identify them, put them out, and backend engineer them to find success. Let’s talk about two big goals. I often roll this back to what you’re ultimately trying to do and accomplish as a real estate investor. One of the things that we always do with our three-day workshops is talk about how to make six figures in 12 to 18 months, $250,000 in 12 months. That comes down to identifying what your income goals are.

Income Goals And Finding Your Why

Income goals can vary. If you love what you do and you’re working full-time, you’ve got a career and note investing is a hobby, that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that. Kudos to you. We have plenty of investors like that note investing is just a hobby. It’s a side hustle. They’re doing some funding, dabble in it with rentals or whatever they might be doing in their portfolio. That’s okay. A lot of people want to make note investing full time eventually, all day they do, transition out the workforce into business owners and entrepreneurs in the note industry.

You have to look at where you’re at and what you need to accomplish before you can go from part-time side hustle to the full-time day in, day out note investor where that’s what you focus on. What I always tell people is, look at your bottom line. What are you making per month? Hopefully, it’s enough to pay your bills. The first starting point is looking at what you have coming in and what you’re working. If you’re making $3,000 or $5,000 per month, that would initially be the first number you need to put down as a KPI.

 

What is a KPI? That’s a Key Performance Indicator. These are numbers you guide yourself by and how you’re doing or how bad you’re doing or how not you’re doing in your goal to accomplish whatever your why is. Your why could be not to leave your job, maybe it’s to retire your spouse, pay for your kid’s education, or retired grandparents. There is a whole lot of other whys out there. That’s not going to be, “I’m leaving my job because I hate my boss. You can take this job and shove it.” You have to outline your why and what that is.

What that why might be, you got to figure out what’s it going to cost to get to that why. If you’re making $5,000 a month and want to leave your job, that would be the first time you look at $60,000 a year. If you need to retire your wife or your husband, bring them home from their job, figure out what those costs. If you’re trying to pay for your kid’s education, what’s it going to cost per year? How many years do you have to do that? Figure out what you need to put in place. Whatever that number is that you reach towards, but don’t quit.

A lot of people are done, “I’m quitting what I’m doing. I want to be a full-time note investor.” That’s the wrong thing to do. Note investing is not a get rich quick. It takes time. The average deal is going to take longer, but the returns are higher because we are getting better discounts and have higher returns because we are getting things at a better discount and multiple exit strategies. No matter what the government does with exit strategies, there are ways to make money at note investing, whether it’s foreclosing, modification, selling the notes off or a variety of different exit strategies that we’ll cover on a later episode.

How To Make Deals And Close

Let’s take a look at what your numbers are. Let’s say $5,000 is a number you want to be making in the next 12 to 24 months so that you can do A. What’s your number one goal? You need to make $5,000 per month to do so that. That’s great. That’s $60,000 a year. That is a feasible number. You can accomplish that in a couple of different ways. My first belief is that you should look for nonperforming notes that are owner-occupied because you have a higher chance of those getting re-performing. People that aren’t paying their bills, get them re-performing.

There’s some loan modification, forbearance agreement, “You didn’t pay the bank previously. Start making payments. You didn’t pay in 2, 3 years. Start making payments. For every payment you make now, we’ll forgive an extra payment.” Do something like that until you get back on track. There is a whole variety of different ways. Owner-occupied assets where the borrower has not paid in a while. They can get a discount. The payment has to be at least $250 or more a month. I prefer $500. This is a big cavity, if you don’t have your own money, it works in your favor.

If you have your own funds, it works. You can use your funds to buy deals and get started, but you don’t market most of the time. I hate to say it, but it’s one of the big Achilles’ heels of real estate investors. We see they have a lot of money saved or they’re moving out. They’re using either 401(k) or something like that. They don’t market, no matter what it is. That drives me bonkers because, at some point, you’re going to use up your $80,000, $800,000 or whatever you might have in your bank for your retirement count because you have it tied up in deals.

It’s good to have the money, but use other people’s money. We see investors that don’t have their own money do a better job because they embrace the need to market. They embrace the need to contact self-directed IRA investors. They embrace the need to use the tripod that we discussed in the earlier episode about using LinkedIn, email and video to get the word out where they’re going to market. One of the most important things you can do is get $5,000 per month. Let’s break that down. How many deals do I need to do and make offers on? Here’s what it comes down to.

If you take that $5,000 per month and divide it by $500 per month, that comes down to ten deals. You need to close ten deals between now and twelve months if that’s your goal. It’s good to have a launchpad or one way to get rocking and rolling because it’s going to take you 60 to 90 days probably to identify and close in your first deal and then get it rocking and rolling back and forth. Don’t get me wrong, there are going to be deals you get accepted that you’re going to cancel through due diligence that, “This deal did not turn out what it should be.” It happens all the time. I canceled a couple of deals.

I got them approved and then dived into the due diligence side. I’m like, “This doesn’t make any sense because the value is a lot less. The numbers don’t make sense on what my winning bid was.” I have to fade my bid and the seller didn’t want to allow me to fade my bid. Fading my bid means is reducing my bid because through due diligence, the numbers came back differently than what we were shown. It only happens all the time. Anyway, you need to close on ten note deals in the next twelve months. That’s less than once a month, but how many offers do you need to make?

Delegation And Hiring A Virtual Assistant

I’m a big proponent that you probably going to have a 10% closing ratio on stuff that you get accepted. That means if you need to close on ten deals, you need to have 100 offers accepted. How many offers do you need to submit to get that 100 accepted? It’s accepted initially on the front end. It all depends on how aggressive you are and what you’re bidding on. “I make 500 offers.”

I say, “You bid them on Fannie Mae loans and you guys have ridiculously low prices. They weren’t going to accept it. I told you not to bid on those and you still bid anyway.” The thing to keep in mind here, what’s the likelihood when you make a bid? If you’re bidding to win that deal, you want to make sure that you’ve got your funds. You’re bidding in an amount that makes sense for your returns, what type of return on investment you’re looking for. If you’re using other people’s money, what are you going to have to pay them to take deals down?

We always say, if you’re bidding on assets, especially that you can get re-performing occupied, you’re going to figure in probably around making a bid initially by taking the principal and interest payment times twelve and dividing that by your purchase price, roughly to get around a 20% to 25% cash and cash return. The easy thing is taking your P and I times 12 and multiplying that by 4 to equal your 25% return for the most part. If you’ve got a low-interest rate, 3%, you’re not going to make money unless you offer 25% unpaid to have it work out well. That’s another day for a spreadsheet or a calculator for it.

Going back to your runway, you need to get ten accepted offers. I need to close on ten deals. I need to make 100 offers. That comes down to what? You need to make about eight offers a month. That’s two a week that you hope to get accepted, that you ended up in a closing. We see that happen. I’ve seen students like Adam Adams and others got fourteen accepted in their first time. Not then only ended up closing on one because they realized they overbid or the due diligence killed a lot of them. I’ve also seen people make offers on 20 and get 10 accepted and close on 4 or 5.

Tracking And Managing

It all depends on the seller and asset. I’m trying to give you some rough numbers to put out. You’re going to have to adjust your numbers on what you’re bidding on. That’s ten approved offers that are making at least $500 a month payment. That’s getting you to your $5,000 in 12 months. You have to figure out too how much time do you have to commit to this because getting 100 offers probably means you need to look at 400 to 500 note deals that you’re breaking down and doing due diligence on. Let’s say 400, you may be looking at 35 to 40 notes per month. That’s ten notes per week on an average basis for you.

 

That’s doable. If you market for asset managers on LinkedIn, some of the different hedge funds, other investors or Facebook groups, you can do it, but you’ve got to market and you’ve got to be willing to ask, “This is what I’m looking for. This is what I need.” Go from there. One of the great things that you guys can also do is start tracking this stuff. Let’s run some numbers. On every deal that you make an offer on, is it going to re-perform? No, it’s not. You’re not going to get money from the $500 a month coming in. If you’re originating stuff, you can set that up.

Honestly, if you close on ten note deals, you’re probably going to get 5 or 6 re-performing. The other half is going to be probably split up between deed loans, where the borrower signs the property over to you and walks away, and/or foreclosing, where you go the legal route to foreclose to get them to walk away. Cash or keys maybe, who knows? Let’s say half gets re-performing, the other half turns into an REO of some sort. They walked away, you’ve paid them to walk away, or you’ve done the legal route to foreclose.

Those REO deals that become from the nonperforming note side are your bigger checks. You’re going to have bigger checks. I always say, don’t get involved in something you weren’t going to make at least $10,000 to $20,000 on if you’ve got to take the property through foreclosure rehab, stuff like that. I say this because you’re going to have some people that aren’t paying their mortgage like we see with the foreclosure and eviction work point. You can foreclose, it may take a little while longer to foreclose or evict to take the property back.

This is why you may want to look at it as cash for keys as an option to make sure you’re having extra funded when you’re purchasing the notes. Put a little money aside before we go the foreclosure route and drop $3,000 or $5,000, depending on what state you’re in. You may want to offer up as a deed in lieu of cash or keys situation and see if the bars will walk and move on from there. It’s a different time out there. Going back to your full-time versus part-time activity. If you needed $5,000 per month at a $500 per note deal, that means you need to close on ten in the first twelve months.

The Note Business Benefits

It means getting offers accepted on 100 and looking at 400 assets and working through them to get to that final ten. The yield on these things is higher. People are like, “That’s a lot.” It’s a lot cheaper to do the note business because you could do this on a part-time basis. You can do it after hours at lunch breaks in the morning and the evenings or the 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM side of things. You can also don’t have to worry about dropping thousands of dollars in direct note campaigns. That’s one of the biggest things that a lot of people look at, especially as they get into investing.

This doesn’t matter if it’s note investing, fix and flipping, whatever. It’s the upfront cost to market to get your thing rocking and rolling, especially if you don’t have a big amount of investment dollars to put towards your mail campaigns. It’s expensive to drop postcards, foreclosure letters, yellow letters, no matter what type of list, that often costs to buy the list. You’re going to have to have mail and stamps and time to do it. You’ve got to do a repeat basis to get a 1% to 4% response rate. In the note business side, you’re not doing direct mail. It’s all LinkedIn, email or phone calls, which is a whole lot cheaper.

One source can lead to multiple offers, versus your direct mail campaigns are often targeting one borrower or one homeowner who’s got one property. They may have a couple, I get it. Probate leads mainly do other things. I’m not talking about those. Those are great. The mass majority of people that are marketing to foreclosures and short sales and estate owners, those property owners have one property, hence, why you’ve got to drop so many postcards and direct mail pieces to get multiple people responding to you.

When we’re dealing with banks or note sellers, these sources don’t have just one deal most of the time. They often have hundreds of deals every month, every quarter that they are cycling through. Some banks and lenders only sell once a year, others will sell on a constant basis. As I’ve said before, everybody’s a buyer, a seller or a funding source when it comes down to note investing. It also comes down to marketing, too everybody’s a funding source where he’s looking for a good return in their retirement. Whether they’ve got $20,000 or $200,000 or more, they’re looking for a good return on investment.

Going back to your schedule to go from part-time to full-time or getting started, you have to understand those numbers. How many times do I need to look at assets? Look at 35 to 40 a month. That’s ten a week. How do I get that ten a week? What you have to do with that ten a week is start that marketing process. That’s either doing a drip mail campaign. What we mean by that is an email campaign out to asset managers and banks. This would be something that you do via either email.

We go through this intense in our three-day workshop about, “How do you pull lists of asset managers? How do you contact them?” There is a variety of ways to find asset managers. Texas Savings and Mortgage Lending. You could look at Lane Guide, Distressed Pro and Scotsman Guide. You could jump on LinkedIn and type in a few job titles to pull lists to stuff. You can look at events. You jump on and look at the county records for assignment of mortgages who are buying and selling and whatnot and contact them directly. There are plenty of deals out there because there are plenty of notes still moving hands.

I hate to say this, but the websites that have lists from traders or people put lists of websites for you to go and cherry-pick. They’re picked over. They’re not a great source. I used to be a fan of a couple of them. I looked at them like, “There is nothing on here that makes sense.” They’ve allowed investors to post stuff on there that isn’t a deal. It’s crap. The stuff that gets drug out. The telling sign is when you see the company that owns the listing website, marketing their deals through other sources that tell you that they can’t even sell their own stuff. That doesn’t bode well for investors trying to find stuff.

If you always go above and beyond, especially a lot of investors don’t want to do the emailing. That’s a sad thing. That’s easy to do. It’s one of the biggest lifeblood of your business. They don’t want to pick up the phone and call. They want the low-hanging fruit. I know we’re all inherently lazy, what’s the least amount that I have to do? Nothing. You could sit there and not do anything, but you’re not getting any further along in your goals. Setting that income goal is one of the most important things that you can do. “I need to make $5,000 a month and cashflow from this to cover my bills.”

After Hitting Your Income Goal

You hit that $5,000 mark. You’re covered. That doesn’t mean quit right then. You need to hold onto that for a little while. I always tell people, “If you hit your income mark, if you can handle it, stay for six more months to sock that money aside.” That comes from the old financial advisor. You should have six months of reserves of some sort if you can on the sidelines in case you do quit because you’re going to have peaks and valleys. While making $60,000, an investor is taking home more money than if you worked for a job and paid income taxes and all that stuff, you still have other expenses.

If you need health insurance, you got to think about that because that’s probably going to go away if you leave your job or unless it’s covered by your spouse. You’re going to have some more marketing costs. Don’t get you an office right off the bat. Find a spot that you can work remotely or if you have to work from home.

You are going to spend some money on marketing costs, people ask, “Scott, what’s that cost going to be? Is that going to be huge?” I’m like, “You look at email campaigns, you probably haven’t even had a website and then attending a few events or working some things on your logos and your LLC or two that you need to have. You’re probably going to spend about $5,000 in your first year in marketing costs if not more. It all depends on what you do.”

 

I was talking to somebody and he said, “There is an event going on. They’re only going to have 30 people at this event.” I’m like, “I don’t think that’s a good event to go to.” This is what I mean, $1,500 because honestly you can find other investors in the network. If you’re going to network with them, don’t go to events when they have 30. If you want to go to an event, you want to go where there are people at. Not something where just 5 or 10 people, unless you’re going for some one-on-one coaching or it’s like a small mini mastermind, it’s a different story. There are events out there that have maybe 50 people or 100 people or not many people at all.

Trust me, I’ve been to one. There are events that were supposed to have a lot of people and didn’t have anything. Maximize your networking opportunities. You also have to realize that if you’re building a runway to leaving your job, to accomplish whatever your why it might be, you have to get the word out. You have to start developing that image, that notoriety as being the person that your warm market turns to for advice or counsel on real estate. That means that getting the word out to your local meetup groups. Get the word out to your RIA clubs that are in the neck of the woods.

Maybe starting a Special Interest Group, a SIG group in your local RIAs if they don’t focus on note investing, but there are other groups. That’s one of the best ways to grow, experience and accomplish things. If you want to go quickly, go by yourself. If you want to go far, go with others. Maybe you’ve heard that quote. What’s great about the note business is that there are a lot of great ways to partner up with people who have a strength that is your weakness. We’ve had quite a few of our coaching students get together and break down due diligence on deals.

One’s pulling rent rates and one’s pulling pitchers. They’re both doing a deep dive, breaking down, servicing notes, whatever it might be. It’s easier for them to raise capital in a bigger, brighter way because they’re leveraging each other’s strengths and getting things done. I’m a big proponent that if you want to get to a spot and you’re struggling to find success, it’s probably because you’re trying to do it all yourself. What do I mean by that? We’ve had students that have very demanding jobs. If you’ve got a job that you love, great. If you’ve got a job you hate, you’re shackled to get some stuff done.

You come home and you’re trying to get your train done. What happens a lot of times, your other things fall by either side, family, spouses, kids, and you don’t want to do that. You got to live. You got to have some fun with your family. If you’re trying to do it all yourself, you don’t want to create a second job for you when you hate your first job. I’ve got family members that hated their jobs and they’d come home and they’re bears. I’ve been there before when I worked a job I disliked too. You’re like, “I hate my job. Hating life.” It makes it hard to be positive and to keep that momentum going on your side hustle.

What you need to look at doing, if you’re having a hard time, you’re not getting those 30 offers. You’re not getting those emails out to the asset manager. You’re not jumping on LinkedIn because you don’t have the time to do it. You probably need to hire a VA, a Virtual Assistant of some sort to help you get those things done. Now you can go the cheap route by going to Fiverr.com and hire somebody to do some individual things for you. Fiverr’s great for little gigs that you have people do over and over again. I’ve got a couple of VAs on Fiverr that will do list scrubbing for me, another one will do some video editing that we send them and they tweak some things.

That’s it. They are not marketing. They’re tweaking our marketing. What helps me get done more is the VA that works at least 20 hours a week, 4 to 5 hours a day. She goes into and manages social media. She’s creating images, marketing on LinkedIn, posting things, things that I don’t have to do. If I don’t feel good, at least I know marketing is being done for the day. She’s going into my Buffer account, Buffer.com and posting articles, images, and things that help get the word out that I’m doing. She’s also going on LinkedIn.

One day out of the week, going on there and contacting asset managers, sending out invites to them and getting new deals sent to me, new takes, new assets that I can then review and go from there. A lot of people are like, “I can’t afford a VA.” Honestly, if you want to make $60,000 or six figures in the next 12 to 24 months, delegation and hiring somebody is the number one most important thing. You can hire off of Upwork for $4 to $5, maybe $6 an hour for somebody you got to spend time training and going through things.

It’s best to hire a company like REVA Global, Real Estate VAs, over there and have their team help you out because they’ve got some great trained VAs. We have spent a big chunk of time helping REVA Global for our students specifically, giving them videos on how we raise capital and finding how we use LinkedIn to find asset managers. We send out an email blast. We’ve pre-trained or given them the curriculum so that their VAs are ready to rock and roll for you. Do I get a bit of a kickback? Yeah. Do I get an affiliate split? Yeah, if you sign up for something like that, sure.

It’s more important that you’ve got somebody ready and trained that you don’t have to try to reinvent the wheel, ladies and gentlemen. If you’re interested, check them out, REVAGlobal.com. Sign up for them, great or not, but you can start selling off at twenty hours a week. It’s $10 an hour, still cheaper, $210 a week. It’s cheap compared to hiring a full-time employee, having an office, having a hire and a laptop, having to pay the overhead for those folks. We all know that’s going to be less than ten hours a week for most people.

You could double what you get done without the overhead, without having the payroll costs too for you by having somebody help you. While you’re at the job, they’re doing things, answering emails, they’re doing due diligence for you. They’re finding deals for you. If you think about that, if you close on one deal, let’s say you end up closing on one note, I paid you $500 a month over twelve months is $6,000. That’s just on the front-end side. After twelve months, if you bought it and re-performed, you could probably sell it to 20% to 25% or 30% markup over what you paid. That pays for your VA right there, ladies and gentlemen.

Let’s say you ended up buying a deal that ended up foreclosing. You make $20,000, $30,000 on the flip. That’s what you should be looking for. That’s going to pay for your whole VA for the whole year. Many of us can’t understand the fact that paying a VA is not an expense. It’s an investment in your business and investment in you getting things done. You have to learn to delegate. You can’t be the person going out there and trying to do it all because it’s not effective. Anytime I’ve seen a dip, it’s because we went through new personnel and then we’d spend time training them.

Your VAs are going to help you out the most by communicating with on a weekly or daily basis. “What’s going on?” If you realize that 70% effectivity. Effectiveness is the best thing for you right off the bat and you hone and you work them to get to 75%, 80%, 90% of what you would do. Sometimes they’re going to do better than you. Our VAs have always ended up doing a better job than I would do, because I’m like, “I love it.” They are focused on a few things. It allows me to focus on my income driving model, “What’s going to make me the most amount of money? What’s the most effective thing to be doing here versus getting bogged down and to-do lists that I should delegate to somebody?”

As somebody has said to me many times, “If you’re focused on a $10 an hour activity, you’re going to have a $10 an hour bank account.” You have to get beyond that. I know it’s hard. Maybe you do have to wait a month to start with something. Maybe you hit somebody who is also investing and you both hire a VA and split the cost down the road. That’s something that is highly so that now you’re implementing more each week and realize, “This is starting to pay for themselves.”

Tracking And Making Offers

One of the easiest things you could have VAs do is have them reach out to the county records or reach out to private investors to help you raise private capital, then you need one kit to help you find that first deal to help pay for the VA to help you take your business on the next level. Those are the things. Look at your runway. Plan out a year. Plan out the numbers you take a look at. No matter how you want to try, you’re going to have about a 10% close ratio on offers that you get accepted and going from there.

Ninety percent of these you’re probably going to end up killing that you make offers on because the due diligence, pricing, counters, taxes, whatever, you may fade your bid that may not come through. It all comes down to how many offers you make in it. You’re probably going to make four times the amount of offers than you get accepted, if not more. You keep track of this. Keep a spreadsheet. One of the best things and best ways to find deals is to make offers initially. If they get cantered or you come back to the low ball, follow up with that seller.

 

I had that happen and got a list in a 436 first lien. I’m like, “I don’t recognize some of these because I look at specific cities.” There are two in Corpus Christi, Texas, where I grew up. I’m like, “I recognize these addresses.” I went back into my Excel spreadsheets. I made offers on these. They didn’t sell. They didn’t accept my offer. I go back to what my offer is. I’m like, “These didn’t sell three months ago. What’s the situation? Why didn’t they sell? Did you get buyers on above my price? These are the bids I submitted three months ago. They’re still good. I did deeper due diligence or I did more due diligence initially.” You’ll see asset values on a spreadsheet, Zillow, which we know are accurate.

If I pull those numbers, they see it and they get scared and run away. If you understand numbers and the ability to fade stuff instead of canceling the bid, you can fade your bid down and share your due diligence with the seller. It’s a great way to find deals after the fact. 30, 60, 90 days after you made offers that weren’t accepted or they supposedly sold them, follow up with your sellers. That’s one thing that you can have your VA do, “Follow up the seller. See if they sold these assets. If they didn’t close, let’s see if they will accept our offers.”

Summary

It’s that little bit of follow-up, having a personal assistant. You can fall behind, you pick up the crumbs and fill in the gaps because as an entrepreneur, especially if you’re juggling a full-time job, side hustle, family and friends and everything else that we all have going on. We all get 24 hours a day. Those that are most effective are the ones that make the most of the 24 hours a day. You could be like Elon Musk, which he says, instead of working 40 hours a week, he was working 80 hours a week. You got twice as much done. I know that sometimes, is it going to be feasible for us all?

You got to take a break. You got to align a bit. You got to enjoy it. That’s why it’s important. Build your runway, start looking at your hours. Start time-blocking. If you’ve got psyched, extra time at night, in the middle of the day, in the morning, whenever on the weekends, make sure you spend the time to get in there, put the hour or two with the side hustle. Every little bit you do gets you further along that step. You’ve got to go in and take action. Time-blocking, make sure and go through that, if your family has given you crap because you’ve burned a bridge from doing too many side hustles or gives you knives.

Let me say, “Folks, give me a year. Help support me for the next twelve months. If I’m no further along in the next 6 months or 12 months, then I agree and I’ll go and move on to something else.” If you were to go back to school or going to study some things, it’ll all be supportive. It’s the same thing. “I’m trying to launch. This is where I see the opportunity and where I want to go. Help me get there faster. I can go a whole lot faster with your support versus having to fight it uphill.”

Looking at your part-time schedule. If you are a full-time investor and you’ve gotten laid off, you better get to work. That means Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you’ve got to have somebody going out to asset managers. Monday, you probably want to be communicating with investors. There’s a whole thing to do depending on what you’re focused on. That’ll be another episode about which asset classes to focus on depending on your goals and going from there.

Don’t be embarrassed like, “I got to do this for 6 or 12 months.” Everybody starts off with a side hustle. It’s okay. The more dedicated and diligent you are in activities each day or helping delegate that to somebody else. Do you want to know what your worth is? Here is an easy formula. Take what you want to make in twelve months. Let’s use some round numbers. I say six figures, and a lot are people like, “I want to make $100,000.” $100,000 divided by 50 weeks because there are at least two weeks off. That’s $2,000 per week.

If you’re working 40 hours per week, which is a normal aspect of things, that means you’re worth $50 an hour. Anything that’s less than $50 an hour, admin, scheduling things is below you. You’re losing money if you’re doing those activities. If you’re doing something that’s worth more than $50 an hour, marketing, phone calls, meetings with banks, stuff like that, evaluating things, and you delegate that below $50 an hour, you’re now compounding your efforts and making money and being more productive.

Don’t get me wrong. I like working in my yard. It’s COVID, I haven’t been able to go anywhere for the most part. I enjoy yard work. It doesn’t take me long to mow. If I’m at a spot where I don’t enjoy mowing, it’s not something I do. It takes me two hours to mow or two hours doing an oil change. You want to make $100,000, two hours of your time is worth $100 if you can give the neighborhood kid $25 or $50.

I don’t know about your yard and he gets it done in two hours and you can now take those two hours instead of you mowing and put it to something else productive, then you’re merely making $150 in an hour because you’ve got that $100 towards your time. You got back your time because that was a people thing. The kid’s doing it. Somebody make $50 because you got to pay the kid $50. Think about what you can get done. That’s the thing. Look at what your time is worth. Many of us sell ourselves short on time and are working way below our pay grades.

If you’ve ever made $50,000 a year, it’s probably because you’re working at $25 an hour or less. You value yourself as barely above minimum wage. We are all worthy of more if you put the time in. Networking, communicating, marketing, raising capital, and looking at deals are all things that you need to focus on more so than anything else. There are some great tools out there to help you do due diligence and streamline things.

For the love of God, bless your hearts. You need to start taking action and delegate. You can’t do it all yourselves. Trust me. We’ve all been there. I tried to do it. You do not want to be the thing strangling your business. You don’t want to be that focal point in the spigot that holds everything up. You want to let things flow and things get done. Empower your VAs, friends or joint venture partners or people you’re partnering up with. Find an accountability partner is one of the fastest ways, too to get going because they’ll hold your feet to the fire.

We’re more likely not going to flick on our friend, but we’ll flick on the guy we look in the mirror every morning. Take action. If you’ve got limited hours, 5, 10 hours a week, find out what would be the most impactful. Make sure you make the most of that. If you’re not getting that stuff done, then you got to hire somebody and a virtual assistant is a great way to do it to help you get more stuff done in a timely fashion. Being such big in the show, I always see posts from people out there, “I got to edit everything. I got to edit myself.”

I’m like, “You can find somebody for $15 to $20 an hour to edit your show online overseas.” This can do as good a job for you. If you’re filming a show that takes you 30 minutes to record and it takes you two hours to edit it, that’s not an effective use of your time. You should be delegating. Learn to delegate. Try to look at stuff. I get it, it can be difficult sometimes if you’re on a bootstrap budget like many people are. Start looking at those little things that you can maybe cut out of your budget and put it towards more effective tools and staff virtually. It doesn’t have to be next door. It could be the next country over there.

Go out. Take some action, everybody. That’s all I’ve got for you on this episode. If you’re struggling with things and need an idea of what you can delegate, feel free to reach out to me. Our friends from REVA should put together a report on the 100 things that you can easily delegate out. It’s a great starting point to make a hot list of things you look to delegate. Reach out to me. I’m glad to share that list or go to REVAGlobal.com and you can download that report and the 100 things to delegate immediately. Go out. Take some action, everybody. We’ll see you all at the top. Bye.

Important Links:

• Lane Guide
• Distressed Pro
• Scotsman Guide
• Fiverr.com
• Buffer.com
• REVAGlobal.com
• Note Umbrella