FlipNerd Freedom Fighters

Welcome to Real Estate Investing Secrets. We’re all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better, more fulfilling lives, but most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else and chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality. My name is Mike Hambright from flipnerd.com, and your questions get answered here on the Real Estate Investing Secrets Show.
What’s up, freedom fighters. Hey, welcome to the show. Actually, welcome to the new show. Now we’ve changed the look and feel around here a little bit with the show and I’m going to tell you some more about that here in just a moment. If you have not already watched our top 10 shows of 2018. In fact, at the end of every year we publish our top 10 lists. Now those are the top 10 shows from that previous year. So over the past couple of weeks here we’ve published, kind of republished, if you will, our 10 top shows from 2018 and they’re just packed, packed, packed, full of incredible information, awesome real estate investors, people that we have a lot to learn from, right? So great, great information. I encourage you to go back and watch or listen to those shows if you haven’t already.
So how’s the show going to be different going forward? Well, let me tell you a little bit about where we’ve been before I kind of tell you where we’re going. So at this point, the FlipNerd real estate, actually FlipNerd as a whole, for those of you that haven’t been around for five years, started literally as just a podcast, just this show five years ago. Now we’re kind of reskinning it, rebranding it a little bit to look a little bit different and to change our approach a little bit, it’s going to be, the improvements are for the better. We’re going to kind of deliver more value here, and truthfully as an opportunity to kind of tweak things at the end of the year and that’s kind of how we go with life, right? It’s like you don’t have to wait until the end of the year to make changes, but sometimes it just makes sense, and that’s what we did.
So the past five years, we started with the FlipNerd Expert Interview Show and we’ve pretty much for the past five years been interviewing other experts. People that are in my network, people that I’m friends with, people that I’ve known sometimes for years and sometimes people that I had really never met before. And so that evolved over five years and we tweaked things here and there.
But for that show, which is still, if you’re on iTunes, if you’re listening to this pretty much anywhere on the podcast, it’s the same feed. We haven’t kind of relaunched a new show. This is the same feed, all that stuff. However, we’re just kind of changing the look and feel and the approach to the show, and I’m referring to this one as Real Estate Investing Secrets, right? And that is to share some more actionable information with you going forward.
But again, where we’ve been for the past five years is primarily interviewing other experts and some feedback that we’ve gotten across literally millions and millions of downloads and video views is that sometimes we talk to too high level or talking with another expert. I’ve flipped nearly 400 houses and I’m talking to somebody that’s flipped hundreds of houses as well. And it’s awesome. It’s great information and it’s amazing to hear their stories, things like that. And we’re still going to have some content like that on here, but what we’re going to do is add in more actionable stuff for those looking to get started or looking to grow their business. And so, we had the Expert Interview Show that we did about 454 episodes. Actually, this is episode number 455 as we kind of make the pivot here and change going forward.
And if you don’t know, we actually over the course of the last few years have launched a couple of other shows that we’re no longer doing any more. We have hundreds of hundreds of shows kind of in the can, information that’s out there. So we have one called REI Classroom that was literally just 5 to 10 minute quick tips from experts all over the country and we have something around 700, almost 800 episodes of that show and that information is timeless. So lots of great information if you go to flipnerd.com/shows that you can get access to all of the different shows that we’ve had over the years. So I encourage you to go check that out.
So what are we doing here that’s different going forward? Well, we decided to make a few changes. Let me talk to you about some typical show types that you’re going to see going forward. So some of it might be just me here talking to you, right? Sharing a lesson of some sort or an experience that I’ve been through. I’d like to get to know my own audience better. Some of you guys have been following me for five years. We’ve had just a ton and ton of information over time, but I’ve kind of found that probably the most common feedback that we get is that I don’t share enough of my own experience, my own background with you guys. So I aim to do more of that.
So, we’re going to try to again, make the content more actionable. Now, if you want to get to know my business a little bit, let me kind of tell you what we do. I’m a real estate investor. I’ve flipped around 400 houses. I have been doing this for about 11 years. As my business grew, things got more complicated. You start to layer in things like rental properties in a rental portfolio. So we have a rental portfolio that is well on its way to being paid off. It’s my biggest regret is that we didn’t add a lot more rentals to it, but that’s grown over the years. Starting to do some multifamily deals now, which is pretty cool, and I’m also a coach and a mentor. I’ve been coaching and mentoring people for about 10 years.
In fact, if you weren’t aware, I’m not the biggest name guy in the industry, right? I’m not one of the big national gurus that you question whether they even have information, whether they even have experience doing what they’re talking about, right? But my students, people that I’ve coached and mentored have literally bought thousands and thousands of houses, have a lot of real world experience because we really focus on the fundamentals of building a real business. So we have our FlipNerd Investor Coaching program and that keeps us hopping for sure. And then we have our mastermind Investor Fuel. Now Investor Fuel is full of many of the top real estate investors in the country. We have over 100 investors that are in our group. Now we meet quarterly. Some amazing friendships have come out of that and we really have some just fantastic people in that group.
And what I want you to do if you’re listening, is I want you to get to know some of our coaching students and our Investor Fuel members more too. So I’ll be sharing some of my friendships and people that I think have great information that would be great for you to listen in on and learn from. I’m going to bring them on the show with me.
Now, one thing that’s kind of interesting that of course I’m not doing right now because I’m in my office here, this is my office by the way, is that 455 episodes. I could be wrong, I might be off by one or two, but I think the number of times that I’ve done a show outside of my office here, we’ve actually moved offices a couple times over the years. In fact, I started doing this in my home office five years ago, but I think the number of times I’ve done it outside of my office and my working place might be zero.
Like literally, I don’t think I’ve ever recorded a show from somewhere out in the field. And we have our mastermind events. I attend lots of other training events, guys like John Martinez that have sales training, Gary Harper that have some amazing operations training. Just a bunch of friends of mine that are doing some amazing things. I go out and spend time with some of those folks. And I very rarely, sometimes I’m there for a day or two and I leave and I forget to even take a picture, but my plan is going forward to be very much aware of where I’m at and how cool some of those experiences would be to share with you. So I’m going to try to record some shows. They might be shorter ones while I’m actually traveling or experiencing some amazing things. And fortunately, I’m very blessed that real estate investing has been so good to me and my family that we get to travel a lot. We travel quite a bit and it’s pretty amazing. We get to go see some awesome things.
And for me, it always opens up some opportunities to have some epiphanies or some, when you kind of get out of the day to day, some opportunities to think of things that I want to share with you. And my plan is, you know, the reality is I have a perfectly capable of production crew right here in my hand, my cell phone, and I’m going to record some shows for you kind of out and about as well. So I got some awesome stuff that we’re going to be sharing with you from different events.
So, that’s it. Those are the big things that we’re going to change going forward. Now, for today’s show, I want to share with you a powerful lesson. We’re still kind of . . . it’s really just the middle of January here, getting things rolling for 2019.
If you made some New Year’s resolutions and you already see those fading and hopefully this will be a little kick in the pants for you. But what I want to share with you as a starter, it’s really a thought starter and it’s going to sound very simple. And please don’t listen to what I say and say, oh, that sounds boring. Let’s turn the podcast off now, turn the show off. This is really important. I promise you, I’ve been coaching and mentoring hundreds of people over the years and this is powerful stuff, even though it’s not the sexy side of our business. You might have learned already if you’re actively real estate investing, that there’s a whole bunch of really important and critical things to our business that are just not sexy, right? It’s not HGTV. It’s just something that has to happen to be a small business owner.
So you’re ready for it? Here’s the question. What is your goal? That’s it. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish in real estate investing? Real estate investing can do some amazing things for you, but you have to know what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. So let me give you a little bit of context. I’ve known some very, very successful real estate investors to the outside world. People that are posting things on social media and everybody thinks they’re crushing it. But inside they’re getting burned out or getting wiped out or their business is actually really struggling and a lot of it comes back to them not knowing what their goals are. Why are they working so hard? What are they doing that for, right? To use maybe a little bit of a cheesy cliché, what is your why, right?
So, now for most people that might be listening to this show, and most people that I would say are trying to get started in real estate investing but haven’t really started yet, I promise you, if you don’t know where you’re trying to go, it’s very, very easy to fail. You wouldn’t do that in any other part of your life. Just get in a car and started driving. I don’t know where I’m going but I’m trying to get somewhere awesome. It’s like, it just doesn’t work in any other aspect of your life. Why would it work in real estate investing?
So if you’re listening or watching this, you know, some of you might, you might be prone to think, “Hey Mike, I’ll worry about that after I do a couple deals,” but I promise you that is thinking that is setting you up for failure. Now I’m not saying that your goals can’t change, but you need to set some goals. You need to chart a path and say, I’m going from A to B and work every single day on executing that, right?
If you don’t know where you’re going, you literally may not even be able to do a single deal. And here’s why. You need to know how many leads you need in your business. Now, at the end of the day, a lot of folks that are getting started, real estate investing don’t understand that just basic math is really, really important.
Let me give you a couple of a little bit of context for that. As a professional real estate investor, I know it depends on the quality of the leads, but it takes most successful real estate investors that aren’t doing some creative financing or some creative acquisitions models, just kind of straight advertising and marketing to distressed sellers usually somewhere between 20 and 30 leads to buy one house, right? It’s pretty consistent.
Now, that doesn’t mean if you’re just getting started, you’re going to go generate 20 and buy 1, 40 and buy 1, 60 and buy 1. Of course, this business isn’t that predictable, right? It’s not. But it means over time if you were getting 20 to 30 leads per month and there were real leads from motivated sellers, you should consistently be closing at least a deal, right?
So it’s really, really important that if your goal is to buy one deal a month, that you’re generating about 30 motivated seller leads every single month and you have the means to do that. Whether it’s paid advertising or whether you’re hustling it up, and you’re door knocking and cold calling and things like that. You have to get 30 leads from motivated sellers to be able to do a deal a month.
Now it could be that truthfully early on, your close rate might not be as good as that because you have a learning curve to climb. Your sales skills aren’t there yet. Your confidence isn’t there yet and it’s going to take that, but at the end of the day, if you know that you want to close a deal a month, then you have to generate 30 motivated sellers leads every single month.
Now in future episodes, we’ll talk a lot more about how to generate leads and we’ll kind of dive into some of the tactics of that, but just know that you have to do that every single month. And just to keep the math simple here, if you need 30 motivated seller leads a month to buy one house, and when I’m saying, buy one house. You know, at the end of the day, let me tell you one of the things doesn’t matter. Units of volume of properties do not matter, right? You want a certain amount of money.
So one deal that could net you say, $15,000, one deal that can get you $40,000, depends on what market you’re in as to how big those profits will be and what you do with the deals will determine how much your profits should be. So at the end of the day, you don’t care that I want to buy 1 house a month and 12 houses per year. You say, “I want . . . ” your goal really is, hey, I want 12 houses a year or 1 a month that will net me $10,000, which is $120,000 a year or twice that, $240,000 a year. Whatever the number might be, make sense? Does that make sense to you guys?
So, it’s really critical that you know where you’re trying to go because back to using that 30 motivated seller leads as an example, what does that work out to a day? Works out to one lead, right? So if you’re tracking and every single day you’re getting a lead, then after you’ve generated about 30 . . . now I know people that have bought a house from their very first lead. It’s not realistic for you to assume that’s going to happen to you. I hope it does. And I know people that took 60, 80 leads to get their first deal and then things start to happen faster.
But what I can tell you is if you get to the end of a week and you look at your . . . If you write this on a piece of paper, how many motivated seller leads did I generate on Monday? How many on Tuesday? How many on Wednesday? And if you get to the end of the week and you’ve generated zero leads and you have not talked to any prospective sellers, let alone made any offers, you should not expect to have bought a house. It’s just not going to happen, right?
So I know lots of . . . We talk to our coaching students about this all the time and I’ve known lots and lots of real estate investors that are gathering information for months. And when we say, how many sellers did you talk to you this week? How many offers did you make this week? Like, well, none. And I was just going to tell you right now, that is a recipe for failure, right? That is not going to get you anywhere. Unless you’re in front of sellers making offers, you can’t buy houses. If you don’t buy houses, you can’t make money from houses. It’s as simple as that.
So, again, this is a little bit of a cheesy cliché, this phrase that I’m going to use, but it’s so true. Failing to plan is planning to fail. That is what’s going to happen to you, and I don’t want that for you. I’ve committed my life, my company now to helping real estate investors achieve financial freedom. That literally is our goal here. Whether you’ve already done hundreds of deals and you want to take it to another level or whether you’re just getting started. So to be a smart real estate investor, you need to create a plan and then spend every single day you have executing that plan until you get the results that you set out for. It’s a simple as that, but it’s not easy. It’s not HGTV.
Real estate investing can absolutely change your life, but you have to know where you’re going. So in the weeks and months ahead, you’re going to meet a lot of successful investors on this show and you’ve met hundreds of them already over the past five years, but I promise you more often than not, they are working a plan every single day or their team is.
So as I reflect on the past five years of what we’ve done with FlipNerd, gosh, I’m more excited than ever about the changes in the show and where we’re going with our coaching programs and where we’re going with Investor Fuel and where we’re going with relationships that we’ve built with you. People that have been following along. So we appreciate you so much. If you have not yet, if you’re somehow listening to this and you haven’t subscribed to our shows on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, YouTube, any of those places, we sure appreciate it as we get going here, if you could either share this show on social media and just maybe a drop us a little note about what FlipNerd has meant to you over the past five years or certainly give us a rating and review on iTunes or Stitcher Radio, YouTube, any of those places. So all that stuff is what fuels me to keep doing this show. It’s a little bit of a labor of love, right?
This show has taken a lot of work, a lot of resources to keep coming to you week after week after week, over five years. And we’re committed to continue to do it. But I can tell you the little stories we hear about how something made a difference to somebody’s life is definitely the fuel that keeps us going. So I hope you’ve gotten a lot of value out of the show. Until the next episode, stay strong, stay cool, and keep fighting for freedom. See you on the next one.
Thanks for listening to today’s show. There are three ways I can help you start or grow your real estate investing business. If you’re a new investor and just getting started, the FlipNerd Investor Coaching program is the most effective program in America. I’ve been coaching and mentoring new real estate investors for 10 years and my students have literally purchased thousands and thousands of properties. Many of them started with little to no experience at all. Our program is a paint by numbers program where we tell you exactly what to do week by week to make sure that you don’t get distracted on your way to results. We show you how to build a real business, not just create another job for yourself. New memberships are limited. You can learn more and apply or schedule a call with me and my team at flipnerd.com/coaching.
If you’re an experienced investor doing a minimum of 10 deals a year, up to 500 deals a year or more, or have a multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio already, you should check out our powerful Investor Fuel Real Estate Investor Mastermind. Over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors are members, and it’s not uncommon for our members to 2 to 5X their business just from getting around other members at Investor Fuel. At Investor Fuel, each of us are business advisors to one another’s businesses, but we don’t stop at business. We focus heavily on becoming better people and living fuller lives. If you’re looking for fuel for your business or fuel for your life, please check out investorfuel.com. Applications and interviews are required as most investors are not a fit for our community. Please learn more at investorfuel.com.
If you’re not ready for coaching or masterminds, but eager to start learning more about investing, please join our private Facebook group by visiting flipnerd.com/facebook. New members get access to free training from us right here at flipnerd.com, and it’s a community to safely ask your questions. A great place to get started. Simply go to a flipnerd.com/facebook to request your access today.