EP NNA 9 – Ten Basic Blunders of Note and Real Estate Investors

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

There are a lot of very basic blunders that unfortunately most people just don’t know and nobody’s ever sat down and told them how to avoid these things. Most people that come into real estate don’t have the marketing and business background. Scott Carson talks about the ten basic blunders that we see people make, especially in their first year or two, in real estate. These are things he believes every serious note investor need to learn not to do so even though they switch some things up, it doesn’t shoot them in the foot going forward. One big thing you need to look out for is overanalyzing. If you’re constantly over analyzing and trying to overdo things, your biggest problem is you. Understand that not every deal is going to be perfect. Sometimes you just got to focus and roll with it.

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Ten Basic Blunders of Note and Real Estate Investors

I’m always glad to have you. We’ve got some great stuff to go through. We are in Note Night in America. We were going to discuss the ten biggest blunders I see. One of the things we always like to start off is that we have a big goal over the next five years to help educate and create over 10,000 new note investors. We can’t do that without you. If this is your first time here, we’re excited to have you. Thank you for being here. Always excited to try to help new investors either take a bigger step in their real estate business or to come onto the note side of the dark side of real estate by investing in notes.

Who is on Note Night in America? We have a variety of people, obviously. We have real estate investors. We have new note investors. We have people looking to get into notes, either funding or buying notes. These calls are recorded. I have hit the red button to record this. If you have to step out, the recordings are in two places. One, you can often catch them sometimes for a little short time on WeCloseNotes.TV. That’s where most of our videos are at. One of the things that we’re doing though is our replays to the Note Night in America’s are going to be either available only for our WCN Crew Members or they’re going to be available also on iTunes.

That’s the nice thing, our NNAs have their own specific podcasts now. If you just joined us for the first time, you can go back on to iTunes and listen to Note Night in America from the beginning. There are seven or eight of them on there for you. I’m excited about that. Our Note Closers Show podcast just went over the 85,000 mark. We’ve had our best month yet and we still got a week to go here with downloads. I wanted to let you guys know about some upcoming events. We have our biggest event of the year, Note CAMP 5.0. It’s something you do not want to miss out on, 30 plus speakers, four days of content, and just a lot of great stuff for you. We have the Note Mastermind Group in Cape Coral. If you have not RSVP’d already with Stephanie, you are missing out. After that, April 26th to 28th is the Paper Source Symposium taking place in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, we will not be able to make it there as we’ll be out on vacation. Looking forward to hopefully you have a great time there. After that, May 11th to 13th is our next Fast Track Training, and then after that, May 17th and the 19th, the Laughlin Magnify Your Wealth Summit taking place in San Diego.

Quest does have a special going on this month if you’re joining us for the first time. If you open a new IRA, educational savings account, HSA, whatever it is, Quest will go ahead and donate $125 to cover your first transaction. They’ll go ahead and pay your first transaction fee. The whole idea is to be you using your money, not have it just sitting there doing nothing. Let’s get you working. If you’re opening a new account, you better use the code WCN Crew at the account opening. That will let them know you were referred by us. Go to QuestIRA.com or 188-FUN-IRAS and anyone of the IRA specialists can help you. Once again, Note CAMP 5.0, 30 plus speakers, four days of content. We have two speaking rooms. That’s a lot of people don’t realize.

On our virtual events, we actually will have two speakers most of the time. You don’t have to sit in and listen to somebody you’ve heard before. You can flip over and listen to somebody new. It will be recorded. The replays are included with the cost. We’re shooting to have roughly about a thousand plus attendees for this thing. We’re on our way to getting signed up for that. Ticket price is $197. This is the last week for that price. It ends Sunday. It goes to $249 starting on Monday. Make sure you take advantage and get your discounted tickets and your replay tickets to that. You definitely want to be a part of this. We got some great giveaways, some great door prizes. People that are active are going to love this. You can go to NoteCamp.Live and get signed up for it.

I see a lot of real estate investors as I go out and speak across the country. I meet them at different events I’m speaking at, expos, real estate seminars, or even just seminars. I go to probably a seminar on average about once every six weeks, once to eight weeks whether I’m speaking in them or attending them. I got a lot of real estate investment clubs across the country. I see just some very basic blunders that unfortunately most people just don’t know. They just don’t because they just don’t know. Nobody’s ever sat down and told them how to avoid some of these things. Most people that come into real estate don’t have the marketing background. They don’t have the business background to build specific things. That’s why I thought we talk about the ten basic blunders that we see people make, especially in their first year or first two years of real estate. It’s just something that they need to learn not to do. Switch up some things so it doesn’t shoot him in the foot going forward.

Basic blunder number one, the “Jack of all trades” blunder. This is where I’m going to do everything. I am going to do it all. I’m going to add everything to my tool belt. The fix and flip side, the wholesaling side, the raising capital, the apartments, the wholesaling, the note stuff. That never works for anybody. You have to pick one. Possibly have two techniques and just work those two strategies. If you’re working three or four trying to do all these things that you do, you’re failing. The biggest thing too, is you are going to workshops. You’re going to trainings and stuff like that the first time. You start marketing. You have to give your marketing time to work. It’s not going to happen overnight. You’ve got to give yourself roughly 90 days to see results.

I had somebody reach out to me like, “I got to make money in 30 days.” I’m like, “Then you need to get a job.” It takes time to go out and find assets. It takes time to do due diligence. It takes time for you to get things transferred. If you’re trying to make money in 30 days, note investment is not the way to go. Can you wholesale a few assets? You could do that. That’s not going to make you long-term money. Hopping from training to training is not effective at all. If you’re too busy going from one seminar to another seminar, you never have time to implement. When I was first starting off, I was very fortunate to have some people that mentored me. We would go to a lot of these Ron LeGrand Expos. Ron is very famous. 40 years in the real estate industry, selling his master’s program where it’s like a dozen, six, seven, or ten classes that you go to. It’s all part of one package.

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

Ten Basic Blunders: You have to give your marketing time to work. It’s not going to happen overnight.

What happens is that people are so busy trying to get their whole masters done in the first year, they never have any success. All they’re doing is forking out money for travel costs and more workshops. They don’t have the time to market. If they do, they don’t have any time to follow back up with the marketing. They’re constantly getting frustrated and deeper in the hole because they don’t have any time to do it. Please don’t fall into that. I guarantee that 80% of your profits as a real estate investor are going to come from doing basically 20%of your activities. Focus on those one or two things that generate that 80%. You will be a lot happier, a lot more profitable, and a lot more successful.

If you work a full-time job or have a career as well, you only have time to focus on one technique. That’s one big thing there. If you’re working a full-time job, you don’t have time to do four things. You can sit here and call me a flat out liar. That’s fine. I will be sitting here and I will hold that to my dying day. You don’t have time. It doesn’t mean you can’t work one system or build it up. If you have a general manager or somebody you turn it over to, that’s a different story. Most of you aren’t sophisticated enough to be trying to do four different things at a time. The idea of that, “I’m going to do everything or that every deal that comes across is going to be a deal,” honestly, it’s not the truth. That is a moonshine being sold up the river. Don’t do that.

Basic blunder number two is the business card blunder, especially when I go to events and people don’t have a business card. I can understand running out of cards. You know what you do with your last card? You take a picture of it. Scan one card and then you can send a text message out. When you get to the people that you’d want to give a card to, they’d give you card. It’s very easy to do. Business cards are cheap. I’m always amazed at how cheap people go. They do it themself at home print with the perforated lines. I’m sorry, it just looks like shit. Your business card is the first thing and a lot of times the only thing that new people that you meet get a chance to take with you. Most of you aren’t doing swag or you’re doing fun things at your booth. You’re not paying $5,000 for a booth to be giving away flyers. Most of you have a card. That’s your one chance for marketing. I’m a big proponent of putting your face on your card. Some people say you are your marketing. If I’d go and I meet100 or 200 people, I’ll try to take notes in the back of the card if I remember. A lot of times you’re bombarded with meeting people over a three-day event. Put your freaking face in the card so people know who the hell you are. Pay the extra $5 or $10 from whomever you’re buying the business cards to throw it on there.

Make sure you put your email and your cell. It doesn’t hurt to put a social. If you got a hashtag, put that on there. Put it on the back. I see people where they just put their name and email. That’s okay but give me a damn cell phone number. I don’t need your mailing address. Tell me what you do, who you are, and go from there. This is another thing. When I see people that hand me a business card that’s got twelve different things on it, I don’t take them seriously. I literally throw those cards in the trash because those people are never going to be serious. They’re a private investor. They’re also a wholesaler. They’re also a fix and flipper. There also a Bitcoin expert. Screw that. They are not experts. See business blunder number one. Just focus. It’s okay to have different business cards for different things. If I’m in a note event, I’ll take my WCN cards. If I’m going to a Podfest pool, I’ll take a business card from my podcaster my different entities. Stick to the one thing. Put your face on it. Spend a little bit of money on business cards. They’re relatively cheap. Don’t nickel and dime these. This is one thing you do not want to do. It’s the one thing people take if they get to know you. You want to put a face with a name and your contact information so they’re like, “I need to call this person.”

Ladies, use a professional photo. Use something that looks like you. Don’t use a photo from ten years ago. This goes for guys too where you’re 100 pounds lighter. Use something that looks like you. It doesn’t hurt to do that. With your phone, you can take good stuff. Lean up against the wall and use that photo in your marketing across the board. Brand yourself across Facebook, LinkedIn, and stuff like that. Please get your business cards. If you’re going to go to any event, get your business cards ordered now. If you can afford to buy a ticket to an event but can’t afford business cards, you probably should not go. Ladies, I know some of you are like, “I don’t want to put my face in the card because I don’t want stalkers.” I get it. They’re still going to stalk you. If they’re going to stalk you, they don’t need your business card photo to stalk you. They’ll stalk you anyway. Basic blunder number three is “beating the dead horse” blunder. I go to REIA’s all the time and this is why I’m seeing it. If everyone at your REIA is doing it, do something else. I’ll give you an example. One of the biggest things I see for people going to a REIA all the time is, “I’m going to be an apartment investor. I’m going to be a wholesaler. I’m going to be short-sale expert.”

If everybody in your REIA is doing it, go do something else. If your system hasn’t worked in two years, put it out to pasture. Take a gun, go out to your dead horse or your to-be-dead horse and put a gun in it. That strategy is dead. Always ask the people that are supposedly teaching, “What deals have you done lately?”especially if it’s a person in-charge of a REIA who’s promoting this. “What deals have you done lately in the last decade?” you’d be very surprised some people are out there teaching things they have not done themselves in the last 24 months. This is an important thing. You’ve got to learn to adapt to market conditions. What used to work in your market may no longer work. Short sales may not always work in a market like Austin, Texas that only has 40 foreclosures every month or less. You have to adapt what you’re doing. That either means changing the deals you go after or changing your markets that you invest to. If it’s a dead horse and you’re not buying anything, quit trying to squeeze water or blood out of a rock. If your market only has 30 foreclosures, then that’s not a viable option to go to your foreclosure market.

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

Ten Basic Blunders: You’ve got to learn to adapt to market conditions. What used to work in your market may no longer work.

You also have to realize this too. Is your REIA club working for you or are you working for your club president? A lot of real estate clubs are focused strictly on stuff that the club president does. There’s a large real estate club just south of here, South of Austin in a big town, where the guy that runs the club is solely focused on building his title business. He’s an attorney and anything that he will talk about is focused on what can drive him business. That’s not an effective business model. Maybe for him, but he’s doing everybody in this club a disservice. There’s lots of incest going on at REIA clubs. A lot of people pat each other on the back for the stuff that they did years ago. This is different. If you go to a conference on something that’s different, if you see where everybody’s doing it and there’s nobody else going the opposite way, everybody’s going with the flow, that’s not a good sign to go. You need to go against the grain. When there’s blood in the water, you need to go towards the blood, not to run away from it like a lot of people do. Basic blunder number four is “I need to prove the concept” blunder. I see this from people that come to our workshops. They come in and I get a chance to do them. I meet them at my conference like, “I need to prove the concept.”

If lots of people are doing it, the concept is sound. For the most part, people have been doing the concept is sound for years or decades. You want to prove the concept. If there are conferences, the concept is usually pretty sound. This is not to be confused with basic blunder number three, the dead horse model. When somebody is saying, “I’ve got to prove that I can do this note business,” it’s been around for years. You’re always going to have mortgages bought and sold by banks. I’m willing to bet it’s a pretty basic concept. Do not try to break things down. Most real estate deals are pretty simple. This isn’t rocket science. You’re not Albert Einstein over there where you’ve got to make sure and prove the concept. You’re not coming up with a theory of relativity. Save your time and money. If you’re going to use that excuse, you might as well not do it. Go do something else. If you can’t commit, don’t do it. Trust me, you’ll be a lot happier. If you find yourself, “I need to prove the concept blunder,” if you see yourself saying that, you probably need to just go ahead and save your time and money. Go back to the job. Give up on your dreams.

Moving on to basic blunder number five is the “I’ll use my own money first” blunder. This often goes with number four. Learn to market for capital now. If you’ve got money, congratulations. You’ve done a great job. There’s nothing wrong with it. If you are lending your money out making 12%, that’s a beautiful thing. I’m not talking about you. What I’m talking about are the people up there that have some money. They need to make the bigger money in five years and they have no money. They’re just like, “I’m not going to market because I’m lazy.” I’m talking about people that want to make active money. You have to realize to leverage other people’s money. It will help you get to your goals faster and accomplish things. If you’re trying to use your own money, at some point you’re going to run out of capital and then be like, “I guess I can’t do anything now because I don’t know how to market.”

There’s nothing wrong with funding your own deals and then refinancing your funds out. That’s a completely great thing to do as long as you’re in the process of marketing. You want to make sure though, if you’re not going to use other people’s money, you’re buying some awesome deals. Most money partners are happy with a 50-50 split or a flat rate of return for the most part. There’s trillions of dollars sitting on the sidelines. If you’re not going to use it, somebody else will. It might as well be you. It might as well be you to go out and do it. The most valuable thing you learn to do is how to leverage your time and your money. Time is often more valuable than money. The best things that happened early on in my business was that I had no money. I had to learn how to market. It wasn’t always the easiest thing but I learned how to use that, to leverage my time and help me take a lot more deals down.

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

Ten Basic Blunders: Most real estate deals are pretty simple. This isn’t rocket science.

Basic blunder number six is “stepping over dollars to save a nickel” blunder. Examples of this are somebody using the US Postal Service, the Pony Express versus paying the extra $4 to ship something like documents albeit FedEx or UPS where you get a signature and tracking number, sending them and relying on your borrower to go get something notarized versus email the documents to a mobile notary and having the mobile notary go meet your borrower. Those are two big things that we see a lot of problems with. Marketing-wise, a lot of people are like, “I’m going to use this to Vistaprint because I can get really cheap, 25 postcards, versus going like postcard mailing and buying them in bundle.” I get it. I understand. Sometimes you’re on a tight budget. Literally, Vistaprint is great for a few things. When it comes to nice quality, use somebody who’s good. Jack your stuff up.

You’re going to buy those postcards and you’ll have to use them to get your money back on versus trying to, “I’m just going to nickel and dime my way to success.” Nobody ever nickeled and dimed their way to success. Another thing I hear is, “I’m going to do my own special servicing versus hiring a professional.”That is a recipe for doom. That’s recipe for losing money, trying to do your own servicing versus hiring professionals. I saw somebody on a webinar the other day. Not one of mine, somebody else’s. They had a guest who’s notorious for stepping over dollars to save a nickel. If you can get something done now, why put things off a week just trying to save$5? Going the cheapest route is often the longest road to success, if not a road to failure. Don’t always go cheap. Pay for the service. Trust me, it’s going to be well worth it.

Some of you guys need to quit asking opinions. I see opinions are free and everybody’s got one like an asshole. That’s not the same thing as having a coach or actually going through a workshop. I was on a thread on BiggerPockets, something about$40,000 for training.$40,000 is a big chunk of money. It’s not my coaching. They’re bashing coaching, bashing coaches or people like that. I’m not a fan of it. I have had very good coaches. I’ve paid for coaching. I still pay for coaching to this day. It helps me out. I’m not here to advocate sign up on my coaching. Although it’s pretty damn good. What we’re trying to get at is if you just sit around and watch webinars, you go around and read books, try to read what’s on LinkedIn or BiggerPockets. Will that be good information? Yes. Will you ever get to where you want to go? No. A good class or a good webinar can save you six months to six years on teaching you the nuggets, what’s in somebody’s brain who’s actually doing the things?

The basic blunder number seven is the “shoe box full of business cards” blunder, if you have a shoe box full of business cards, if you got this at home and you have put nothing but business cards from all your conferences, the meet ups, the NoteWorthy’s, the Paper Source’s, and the real estate club. Maybe it’s full of business cards and that’s the only place that the information is at is on the business cards in the shoe box. You just wasted your whole time. You just wasted all that money that it took you to either go there, to travel, to pay for the class or the workshop, all that time. You just pissed it all away. Start putting your contacts into an email system. This is one of the things that was hammering my head when I was early on doing my Series 6,63s.

Everybody you need to meet need to go into your contact database. I have to thank Ron Marks and Tom Hopkins for that. The best thing you can do, and nobody does this, I rarely see this anymore, is emails, “Hi. It was nice to meet you.” When I do see that, I’m overwhelmed somebody took time to actually send me a follow-up email. One of the things I always try to do is the day after an event or even the night of the event, if I’m wrapped up and I got some time in my hotel room, just type in at least the first name, last name, email and cell phone number into a spreadsheet. Use CardScan or Evernote to scan the business cards and put them in your database. It’s helpful. Get an email out to them. “It was great to meet you.”

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

Ten Basic Blunders: Going the cheapest route is often the longest road to success, if not a road to failure.

The class we had a couple of weeks ago, only five people actually asked for emails. I purposely didn’t put it in Basecamp because I wanted to see who would ask for it first. Only five or six people asked for it out of 185 people. It’s normal, less than 3%. It’s definitely less than 5%if we’re doing anything with the list. I talked to people all the time and I see people going to Note CAMP or the Virtual Workshops and like, “Why don’t you have any database?” “What do you mean?” “I know you had that list. You were on that list. Did you not upload that to your database?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because I don’t think I need to market.” “You thought wrong, Bob. The price is wrong, Bob.”

You have to realize, if you’re not marketing and sending the email out to somebody in six months, that email is probably going to die. People change emails, not quite as often as they change underwear, but you get what I’m saying. Email still has a 4,400% ROI if you use it. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you should generate back $4,400. I don’t know about you but that’s a pretty good payoff. That’s better than Bitcoin or anything else that I’ve seen out there. It’s an easy service to use. Just use MailChimp. It’s one of the easiest to use. They’ve got some new cool features. I use Infusionsoft. That’s my big bat that I carry.

MailChimp is so easy if you’ve got less than 25,000 connections to get your contacts up until you get the business cards you scanned or the business cards you’ve taken. Put them in an email service provider like MailChimp and drop an email. Send a hello. Share your story. “It was great meeting you. I met you last week. Have you made any offers? What are your goals? Are you looking for accountability? I’m in a specific area.” The question I want to ask all of you is your cable bill is larger than your email bill? Very few of you, I guarantee it, your cable bill is much larger than your email bill. Some of you bitch and moan about paying $50 for an email service. When you start dropping in $500 a month on emails, you’re doing something right. You better be reaching out. I guarantee you it’s making you money if you are doing it. Most of you out there are trying to nickel and dime on Gmail or Yahoo, or trying to do a free account with MailChimp. That’s okay. You’re only hurting yourself if you do it, trust me. Start paying for it. Start using it because it’ll make you look a whole lot better than what you do most of the time.

MailChimp just added a new feature where they can allow you to do landing pages now as part of the service, along with it allowing you to create direct Instagram and Facebook ads directly in MailChimp. I just saw that. I was blown away by that. Too bad I have way too many contacts for it to work in MailChimp. If you use it on a regular basis, you’re going to see a 4,400% return on your money. I guarantee you that. Use it on a religious basis. Get the habit of writing an email out at least once a week to your database. Once every two weeks or once a month to the asset managers. Those are the biggest bang for your buck. Share your story. Share the deals that you’re making off of. Share the tape you got in. “I got this big tape. I’m working on getting us in these clubs. I’m buying in these markets. Who here was looking for deals in those areas? Maybe we can partner up.” Those are all little simple story deals. Share your story. Share your journey. I guarantee it works. All those guys out there and gals that are doing it, those of you that are using email in your marketing are seeing that type of return, I can guarantee you that. Whether people sign up to be a funding partner or you’re finding deals from you sending an email blast out, I guarantee it. If you want to get some activity going, start sending the emails out on a daily basis and you’ll see it.

Basic blunder number eight, “I can only offer on what I have” blunder. This goes back to those that only have money. You have to realize a lot of people are like, “I only have $50,000 on my own savings in my IRA. I can only offer on these three assets. If they all get approved, it’s $48,000. I won’t have any more money for any more deals.” You have to realize, you only have about a 10% closing ratio on average everybody. It means if you make ten offers, you probably get one accepted. Instead of making just one offer and getting it not approved, you might as well make ten times the amount of bids to get one closed. Bids are killed due to values, collateral condition, neighborhoods, etc. all the time. You look online, it looks good. You make ten offers and then suddenly you have a realtor drive by. It’s a burnout. There’s just an empty slab there. There’s a crack deal going on. It’s right across from a toxic waste dump or something like that. Those are viable reasons to kill a bid. Don’t be scared of that. If you want to get to where you want to go further in life, you’ve got to make more bids. Don’t sit here and short your bids off short, be afraid that, “I hope it’s all going to work,” becomes a short change. If you make a bit of ten, they countered back at eleven, just accept it. Get the deal done. Don’t sit here and nickel and dime back and forth for $500,000. It’s stupid. It’s not worth it.

If you can’t squeeze $500 or $1,000 out of a deal, you’re doing something wrong. Don’t be afraid, which I know is like saying, “Don’t breathe,” when you’re brand new. Literally the more deals you make, the more deals you work through, the more you get outside your comfort level, the less blunders you will have because you get better at it. You’ll learn more by working through those assets I can guarantee you that with everybody out there. You learn more by working through the assets and then learn to kill them versus not make any offers at all and just being too scared or being too big a chicken shit to not doing it. How do I know this? I was like that at one point. I had this amazing take from Wells Fargo Financial,72 assets. I could cherry pick it for things at $5,000, $10,000, $4,000, $2,000. I should have bought the whole damn take and figure it all out. Instead, I made an offer on six assets because that’s all the money I had. I look back on it and I want to kick myself and I want to kick that investor for not making more offers. I only say this and only calls with you because I have made most of these blunders myself. I called myself out before I call you out.

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

Ten Basic Blunders: The more deals you make and work through, the more you get outside your comfort level, the less blunders you will have because you get better at it.

Basic blunder number nine is the, “I don’t have any time” blunder. We all have time. Trust me on this. If you are like, “I don’t have any time because I’m still busy working,” I don’t want to hear it. Gary Vaynerchuk, some of you are very familiar with that motivational guy. Most of us have 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM or we have the weekends. If you aren’t accomplishing things, if you’re not getting to wherever closer you are in your dream, you don’t have time for your Bowling League, or you’re drinking nights or your charity that you went over to everything, if you’re not accomplishing the things that you want to accomplish, you need to change your priorities. I’m not talking about work all from 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM.” That will be ridiculous. You can’t burn both ends of the candle and come out doing well. You have to take time to recharge. I’m talking about spend two hours a day, two hours every other day. Look at all your stuff and organize your time. I guarantee most of us waste time. I know I waste time on things too. Organize your time. Organize what you’re doing. Just take a second or two to figure out how to do something a little bit more efficient. If it takes you an hour and a half to get home and sit in traffic, if you wait and left an hour later and you got home in ten minutes or the same time for them to get home, you might as well stay in the office or walk down to the coffee shop and work on your note business for an hour.

If you work later, get up early. Make a few phone calls. Get your emails up. There are so many things that you can do with odd times, LinkedIn connections, email blasts, social media posts. You can get a lot of stuff done in the off hours. 30 minutes is better than none. 60 minutes is better than 30. Fifteen minutes is better than none. My trainer, Thomas, is known for saying that. He was sitting there waiting on me. He comes to my office everyday at noon. We’re in the gym 12:00 to 1:00 most days Monday through Friday, usually. He was telling me these three ladies that he saw when he stayed in there and she’s like, “You’re the trainer?” He’s like, “Yes, Ma’am.” “I don’t have time. I really wish. I only have a 30-minute lunch.” He’s like, “30 minutes is better than nothing. Five minutes is better than nothing. Seven minutes is better than nothing. Why don’t you just get on? Go on there and walk on the treadmill for ten minutes. It’s better than nothing.” A lot of us tell us or give ourselves excuse, “I don’t have time to do. I’m going to do anything at all.” We just don’t do anything. That’s such a negative Nancy attitude to have. Just take a little bit time. Maybe you don’t have five hours every day, so take an hour. Send connections out on LinkedIn. Reach out to asset managers that way. Pull a list or go to Lane Guide. There is so much that you can do with two hours a day, ten hours a week. Spend a little more time on Saturday or Sunday looking at assets. You can do these if you do it.

Number ten is the “I don’t need to plan” blunder. Many people drift through life. Most people don’t have any type of business training. I used to coach people differently than I do things now. We used to do webinars. We do eight weeks of webinar as a group of coaching students. The first two weeks was always on business plan, planning up their business. What do they want to accomplish? What do they want to see? Where do they want to buy? What kind of price range? It’s a very basic thing. It also helps you paint a picture. Now we’ve changed it up, “What’s your number you need to be in a year? Let’s focus on getting you at that point in twelve months. How many deals do you need to close? What kind of properties you make? What’s your game plan?” Planning those numbers out and writing it down is better than nothing. Create a very simple business plan. Planning for your business is simply an executive summary.

Just simply write up a little about yourself and what your business is focused on, your markets. I wonder how many of you have actually written up an executive summary about your business? It’s a one-page or two-page thing on your business. Probably not too many of you. Probably just a handful. Probably just my students, people who have been through the Fast Track or the Mastermind Group. Just putting that down is more valuable. Sharing who your vendors are. If you know what you do and where your target audience or target markets are, that helps provide clarity to you. It allows you to talk smarter. It allows for you to develop a better elevator speech when somebody tells you, “Actually what’d you do?” You say, “I buy notes you,” instead of saying, “I’m a Jack of all trades, a dead horse beater.” “I buy notes in most of the major metroplexes. I’m looking for assets of $50,000 to $250,000 of value. Our goal is to proverbially try to modify or reinstate the borrowers.”

Set your goals. Create systems so that you’re doing things so you maximize your two hours, three hours, ten hours a day, whatever that might be. Set goals to get things done. Create systems. You’re going to fail sometimes. I feel like I have been in mud the last couple of weeks. It’s such a busy thing. We’ve had a few employees leave here and it’s put a little burden on some things. That’s okay. We’ve been interviewing people. We’re going to get that all taken care of. We’re going to get through it. I’ve set my goals. I’ve created systems to help out with things. We’re going to get through the things. I’m still accomplishing more in two hours a day than most people accomplish in a week because I have our systems.

I have my things in place. I know which way to do it. My staff knows how to accomplish that stuff too. All you got to do is rinse and repeat. Note business is a rinse and repeat business. It’s doing a lot of the same things over and over again. Every day is a little bit different. The most important thing I can tell you is to be accountable to yourself. If you’re not going to be accountable to yourself, be accountable to your family. If you can’t be accountable to you and your family, I can’t help you. Sometimes you need a stranger, sometimes you need a friend. Sometimes you need somebody you’ve met to help hold you accountable. It’s easier to be accountable to somebody else than it is to ourselves often times. Be accountable to yourself. Trust me. You need to plan it out. One of the most important things you can do is plan out your week. Plan out your month. Plan out your year. Steph was telling me that we don’t have that many weekends left available for the rest of the year. We’ve got stuff planned for the most part.

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

Ten Basic Blunders: Note business is a rinse and repeat business. It’s doing a lot of the same things over and over again.

I’m going to give you a bonus blunder here, the “I need to reinvent the wheel” blunder. Do you find yourself with the need to reinvent, to break something down and put them together? Don’t. If there is a tool already, just use that tool. If there’s a service or a vendor, quit trying to reinvent the wheel. Just get stuff started. A product delivered is better than a perfect. An email sent out is better than being perfect. An offer made is better than waiting for the perfect offer. There is always a version 2.0 to what we do. What do I mean by version 2.0? You sent an email out, maybe you forget some stuff. Maybe you forget to hit spell check like I did last week and twelve people let me know. I’m like, ” Great.” At least it got out. If you’re all worried about an A versus an E, you’ve got bigger issues than I do and I’m glad to hit the unsubscribe button on you. You have the right to build. You realize you’re not going to be perfect at what you do in this life. Perfection is a myth. You can try to be perfect and that’s all that we can ask of you because you’re still going to mess up. You’re still going to forget to change the links of these things. Those things happen all day, all the time.

Stop tweaking things, send a damn email, make the offer, submit the bid, post it to Facebook, whatever. Stop tweaking it and just post it. Just do it. All you accomplish by just sitting there trying to tweak it is wasting time and delaying success. Trying to get the perfect bid means you’re often not going to get any bids accepted at all. Waiting an extra couple of days to get things done versus at least getting the bid in the draw is going to delay your success, delay you even having the chance and the opportunity to control that asset. I’m a big proponent of jumping out the airplane and building your parachute on the way down. Maybe you don’t have to build the whole thing all the way down, but you have a plan of action so that you can take action, tweaking and build things as they go. I’m a big believer that people can achieve success well beyond their wildest dreams. I know that I have. I know that I’m seeing things and doing things that I’ve never thought I’d be able to do and accomplish. If this guy can do it from a little small town in Ingleside, Texas, all of you can do big things.

We have a question here, “Being a complete newbie, what would compel someone to accept one bid over another? Is it the cost or what?”

I’m not sure what you mean by accept the one bid over another one. When I’m talking about making offers, it was make more offers on that. Be a new person. Go through some training. Get your feet wet. Network. Talk with people that you’re in the same business. “Can you sit down with me and go through some deals with me?” That’s all you got to do. I have been very busy. I know some people sent some deals in, I just have not had the chance to look at those deals. We have been swamped, a little short-staffed, plus we’ve got some big things going on. I am just not the right person with your deals for now. That’s the beautiful thing about what we have with Basecamp. If you’ve been through our Virtual Workshops, Basecamp rocks along with you having access to WCN Crew, the Facebook page. Our Facebook group is phenomenal. There are lots of great people there, just under 650 members.

We have another question, “What is your experience with asset managers dropping you if you do not carry through with your bid?”

It depends. If you just drop the bid and run and hide and don’t tell him why you’re dropping the bid, they will blacklist you. If you say, “The reason I’m not going to follow through my bid is because the house has burnt down. There’s $6,000 in back taxes, not $600.It’s a very high crime rate.” If you can provide proof of why you’re canceling your bid, they’re going to accept that. They may not know it. You got to realize these asset managers have hundreds, if not thousands of deals that they’re working through or have on a portfolio. They don’t know every stick in detail. “There’s a blue tarp on the roof. I need to adjust some things.” Just tell them. Maybe they’ll adjust their bid down. Maybe they’ll save their own bid.

We have another question, “Paid for email services, can you suggest a few?”

Most often, MailChimp will work. We use MailChimp. I use Infusionsoft. If you have less than 25,000 connections, you might as well use MailChimp. It’s a great starting point for you.

“Going to Vegas in the Note Boot Camp, is that okay?”

NNA 9 | Ten Basic Blunders

Ten Basic Blunders: If you’re constantly over analyzing, trying to overdo things, your biggest problem is you.

That’s great to network. You going out to Paper Source or going to the boot camps. Those are great things to do, but just be prepared.

You’re going to make some blunders. Don’t be afraid to take action because you’re afraid to fail. Everybody fails. I fail every day but that does not stop me from going out and continuing to work to better myself, to get better at what I do. You may think I’m the best at what I do, I don’t think I’m the best at what I do. I think I’m good but I’m constantly honing myself. I’m constantly trying to tweak what we’re doing to make things better.

A comment says, “MailChimp is good for less than 2,000 subscribers. More than that, you need to find something else.”

You need to pay for it. MailChimp is free for 2,000 or less. MailChimp is fine. It works. Hundreds of thousand people use MailChimp. I don’t think AWeber is good. I think Constant Contact or iContact are horrible. MailChimp is good. MailChimp is pretty damn good for just an email service provider. I have seen way too many people that send out via MailChimp that have much bigger databases than you do who are doing a good job of it. If you’re trying to do everything cheap and free, I’m sorry, this is the wrong business for you. “I’m going to go with the cheapest. I’m going to go to the cheapest email. I’m going to go the cheapest BPO company.” You know what you’re going to get? You’re going to end up with cheap returns. Your biggest problem is that you’re constantly being cheap or trying to nickel and dime everything. Your biggest problem in your business is you.

That’s same for quite a few people out there. If you’re constantly over analyzing, trying to overdo things, your biggest problem is you. It’s not me. It’s not your investors. It’s you. Sometimes you just got to focus and roll with it. Every deal’s not going to be perfect. Sometimes you have to roll with the punches and move things out. If you’re going to do something free, go do something else. If you want to be free, go do something else. Honestly, if you want something free, go do something else except the note. Don’t waste my time. Don’t waste anybody else’s time out there. If you’re always worried about free, then you can continue to be broke, have a broke mindset. You can just sit there under your REOs or your REI clubs and just sit there with the people that aren’t doing anything in the back of the room. I don’t care.

Hopefully, all is doing well. Go out and make something happen. We look forward to seeing you all at the top at some point. Have a great day. Thanks for joining us on Note Night in America. If it’s your first time, don’t hold it out against me. See you all at the top.

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