Less is More…in Real Estate Investing

Mike: Hey, it’s Mike Hambright with FlipNerd.com. Welcome back for another exciting expert interview, where I interview successful real estate investing experts and entrepreneurs in our industry to help you learn and grow.
If you haven’t checked out the new FlipNerd.com yet, please go check it out. FlipNerd.com. Pretty cool; I think you’re going to enjoy it.
Today I’m joined by David “The Diamond” Oswald, who’s a real estate investor and an outsourcing enthusiast. Many real estate investors quickly get to a point to where they’re limited by their own capacity, and many of us left a job to not be in that position, so it ends up feeling like a job versus a business that owns us many times.
So after grinding for many years and facing burnout, David learned that less can actually be more, and became a student to outsource portions of his business to be able to live a more balanced life, something that we all wish we had.
David found that a lot of people who outsource things, who maybe use virtual assistants or have found ways to outsource things, it doesn’t necessarily give them a better life, and today he’s going to tell us why that is and how to avoid that.
So if you feel like you’re working hard but not enjoying all you’ve worked so hard for, you’re going to enjoy today’s show.
Before we get started with David, though, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors. Realtymobile.com is an online marketplace for real estate investing, connecting borrowers and capital from accredited and institutional investors. Get a rehab loan fast and close in as little as 10 days. Rates start as low as 9%.
We’d also like to thank National Real Estate Insurance Group, the nation’s leading provider of insurance to the residential real estate investor market. From individual properties to large-scale investors, National Real Estate Insurance Group is ready to serve you. Please note the views and opinions expressed by the individuals in this program do not necessarily reflect those of FlipNerd.com or any of its partners, advertisers or affiliates. Please consult professionals before making any investment or tax decisions, as real estate investing can be risky.
Hey, David. Welcome to the show, my friend. David: Hey, I appreciate it, Mike. I look forward to a great show here. Mike: Yeah, if you don’t say so yourself, it’s going to be great, right? Just kidding.
I talk a lot about virtual assistants. I talk about outsourcing things. I have a few different V.A.’s that work for me in different capacities, and they’re so important to me. But you kind of said something that made me think earlier, and we’ll get into this a little bit, that just because you outsource things, sometimes if you find more stuff to pile on, then that doesn’t necessarily make you better off, you’ve just found a new thing to kind of drown in.
So I’m excited to learn more about some of your principles and some of the things you’ve done in all of your businesses. But before we get started, why don’t you tell us your background and how you found your way into real estate?
David: Yeah, that’s cool, and I appreciate that. If you don’t mind, I’d like to go into a little bit even before real estate investing.
Mike: Sure, yeah; take it from the top. David: My first job – and I didn’t even mention this to you, Mike – my first job out of college was in the entertainment industry. I worked for a magazine, Vibe magazine, and I spent time in Manhattan working in that industry. I was getting into an industry that I had a love for. I was into sports and music, and I wanted to be around that. They had a new magazine coming out at the time, it was called Blaze magazine, and they were incorporating principles of both.
I got a chance to spend time doing advertising, sales, being around artists, and just being in the entertainment industry in general. During that time frame, I actually disappointingly found out that I was not in love with the grind of it. Even though I was in an industry that I loved, being in sports and entertainment, I didn’t love the grind of it, and therefore, I started kind of looking beyond that.
I wanted to make more money, but on the other hand, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go with being an entrepreneur, which I always had thoughts of that. I kind of had a break right around 2003. A friend of mine had started a mortgage company, and he put me on to it; he let me know about it. It was actually located in New Jersey – I’m originally from New Jersey – and he had gotten an office of around 3,000 square feet and he was the only one in it.
Here he was with this dream of creating this mortgage company, and here I was not knowing anything about the industry, didn’t at the time have a mortgage on a property, was not in real estate investing, and knew very little. But he kind of hooked me with the fact that we were actually in a time period at that time where it was the first round of 40-year lows on those mortgage interest rates, and a lot of people were refinancing their homes. They were going from an 8% rate on their home down to 5.5%, down to 5%, and that was a big deal at that time. People were able to shave their interest rate on their property, and on top of that, they were also able to get cash out and walk away from the closing table with a check for $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 and pay off a bunch of debt and reduce their payment in some cases.
So at that time, refinancing and cash-out refinances were a very big deal, and I went in head-first. He and I started this company; we were working 12-hour days. No other way we had it. It was just come in – he had a stockbroker mentality. He was a stockbroker on Wall Street, and we built a company based on those principles of adding people to a team, and doing it at that time very easily because there were no requirements necessarily in the mortgage industry other than what was called a solicitor’s license, which was easy to get. You just filled out a form and there was not much to it other than paying a small fee. There was no test to pass at that time in the state of New Jersey, so many people were able to get into the industry.
We attracted a lot of young people, and even experienced people in other industries, like insurance and things that they were tired of and burned out. Here was a chance to come in and make yourself $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, and you didn’t even need a college degree. Some of the people that we worked with were right out of high school, and then we had our share of people that were just burned out from other industries, so we had a nice mix of veterans as well as young sales people. My partner and I grew this thing from just him and me to 72 people at its peak. Mike: Wow. And the mortgage industry was blowing up. Everybody was making money. David: Exactly. Mike: And you felt like you couldn’t lose probably, right?
David: Right, right. And we were working our tails off, putting on a suit every day. We had a real strict Wall Street mentality. We had a real strict policy on how we dressed, the way we did things; in the office by 9:00, don’t leave the office until 9:00. Anybody that didn’t do that was a piker and had to leave. In other words, you weren’t going to get the chance to have a desk in this office unless you were going to do what everybody else was doing. So that was my first real introduction to making some money and getting an idea of what things could be and what it could be. I was flirting with real estate a little bit at the time, but I was so in love with that hustle mentality and doing what I thought was going to be – probably something that in my mind, I probably thought, oh, I can do this forever.
However, after about three-and-a-half or four years of doing that day-in and day-out and seeing such a growth from just he and I into this large company and walking now into an office of 72 people, I actually – that thing in my spirit, in my heart, was like, I don’t know if I love this, though. Making big checks month-in and month-out, the money started to not seem as important, and I said to myself, what do I really want to do? If I’m burned out now at the age of 26, 27, whatever it was, what the heck am I going to do for the rest of my time that I’m in business?
I had these little things in my ear about real estate. You know, little seminars. Being in this tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, PA, there’s always these seminars at hotels, and I would check those things out, the free ones. I started to go around and got involved a little bit with Russ Whitney’s things where he had multiple seminars for a set price, and I got an education on a lot of different things.
Meanwhile, I was still doing the mortgage thing full-time, and I started to experiment with some real estate deals; a little wholesaling, a little flipping. I had some success. I became a landlord; bought my first house for myself at that time. And then, after the burn-out of the mortgage thing, I said, man, I wonder if I could do this full-time and make the transition and jump into it?
I met a mentor at the time, his name was [Dan Swaney 09:02], who was very closely affiliated; he was a friend of [Ron Legrans 09:06], and he took me under his wing a little bit and I made the leap. I jumped out one day and I said, I’m done, and I’m going to go full-time in this real estate thing. I became a short sale expert, enthusiast, whatever you want to call me.
I was just sending out a lot of direct mail and getting a lot of responses. Where I was, it seemed like a lot of people had this need for a short sale because that market that had climbed with all of that fake equity was now starting to kind of come down a little bit. This was when the short sale thing was kind of like brand-new. Not brand-new, I can’t say that, but it was when real estate agents didn’t even know what it was. I would teach real estate agents what this was, and they were getting excited seeing the checks that I was making and vice-versa. They were excited learning about some of the things I had learned about at seminars. I thought it was just this underground niche that a few speakers talked about, and in fact, it just grew up and it blew up at that time. So that was my first original foray into real estate investing. Mike: I know we’re going to talk more about lifestyle and outsourcing and some of those things, but I want to ask you – you got into a couple different businesses that you kind of realized after a short period of time that you got burned out or you didn’t like it; it’s not my passion. I mean, the truth is, I think about this stuff from time to time. It’s funny, I would love to play golf more often, but if I was retired, I couldn’t play golf every day. I would end up hating it.
It’s interesting, because I’ve had other people on the show that talk about this, and I think this way more and more as time goes by, and I think people are surprised to hear this sometimes is that I really actually enjoy real estate investing. I enjoy talking about it, I enjoy the opportunities that it creates, but I think it’s just a vehicle to enable something else, you know?
So, do you think – and everybody’s different. Some people really love what they do, especially if you work with kids or things you can really get into. But yourself personally, do you think there’s anything that you could really be passionate about for a long period of time, or is it doing those things that enable you to do something else? Like, it enables you to make the money to enjoy your life more?
David: Right. That’s a real good question, and I appreciate you bringing that up. I think that when it comes to things that are business-related and involve just dealings with people, especially other people who are competitive and also want to make income and you’re just in that circle of dealing with other kind of like competitive people, there are elements to that that burns me out personally.
The things that I’ve found that I can do forever are things that involve the expansion of my thoughts and listening to philosophies and learning about things, whether it’s business-related or other things that just keep me thinking in a forward motion. Those are things I never get tired of. And because of that, I find that I would probably never be the guy that worked one spot for 25 years, had a pension and walked away. I just can’t see that lifestyle, because it’s been true of me where I’ve been in four or five industries already. Mike: It gets to point to where it’s not a challenge anymore, and you’re like, what’s next?
David: Yeah, that’s a good point. And that’s really an entire topic to explore, and maybe that’s a future webinar or podcast that we do some other day. Mike: I’m sorry, so go ahead. Go ahead and continue on. David: You know, getting into the real estate industry and becoming an investor at that time is good. I still do short sales to this day. I still flip properties. I still like teaching people about it and speaking on national stages and stuff like that. That to me is even more fun than the webinar portion of actually being up on the stage and doing that active speaking.
But I’ve found that along the way, me having an interest in the philosophy of how to live and how to live in a way that’s exciting and continues to grow, I’ve developed a mentality of ‘less is more.’ That ‘less is more’ is actually – if you were in my office right now, you’d see a sign that says ‘less is more’ right above me.
Mike: We see it right behind you there. David: Well, that’s actually a different sign, but ‘less is more’, the slogan alone is actually in front of me. And behind me is the Outsource It All system, which is a product that I developed as a result of my thoughts and how it would apply to real estate investing. It could also apply to other industries if you’re out there and you’re into information marketing of any kind. If you’re out there and you want to be the big man on campus as far as your local area and you’re just a plumber, you’re just somebody that works with his hands, doesn’t care about the Internet, but you want to dominate your local market and you want to be considered the local expert when people type in information, which is important now, you should understand about the Outsource It All system.
I’ve had students of all varieties, whether real estate investing was their main topic or not, we’ve also discussed many other businesses. I mean, right now, just rattling off in my head the students that I have that are one-on-one people that work with me, one guy has an eBay business, another guy does mobile homes, another guy is in wholesaling real estate; another person wanted to get into judgments and liens. So the variety of things is out there, and this Outsource It All system allows me to talk to people across all types of genres of business. Mike: Talk a little bit about the philosophy. How do you go from being the doer and doing a lot of stuff yourself to how you realize that you need to find a way to be able to scale, one, and two, be able to not be as hands-on as maybe you were in the past to be able to enjoy your life more?
David: Right. Well, it’s kind of like I woke up a little bit and I said at that time when I experienced this burnout – it was almost like a mini-depression, if you want to call it that. It’s not like I couldn’t get out of bed or anything like that, but I just didn’t have a love of the game. And being an athlete all my life, I played college basketball, and love of the game was so important to me. That’s originally why I went into New York City and worked in an industry around things that I liked. I just liked sports and music, and I wanted to be around stuff that I loved.
So I thought that you could do that in business, too, and for a while there, it seemed like in the mortgage industry and even in real estate, that love of the game was there. But I said, let me do this real estate investing thing more systematically. Let me do it in a way where I could do this maybe for the rest of my life if I want to, because I’ve now defined certain aspects and certain parts that could be outsourced to other people.
In some ways, it’s insourced. If I have my own in-house team, it’s kind of people that I see on a somewhat regular basis and I insource it, and that’s a little different than let’s say outsourcing an entirely different task off to the Philippines or India where I really have no true connection to the person other than the emails we exchange. Mike: Right. So outsourcing does not necessarily mean you’re using overseas help, it’s just taking it off of your plate?
David: Right. When I refer to it in a conversation like this, it’s just the act of taking it off my personal plate. Right now, I’m speaking to the small business owner, I’m speaking to the wannabe entrepreneur who right now is in a 9-to-5 and wants to become a person that is building a business by having the help of some people that they’ve added to their team.
These are big factors. Sometimes I get labeled as a guy that, oh, he’s into outsourcing, therefore he’s one of the guys that’s preventing jobs from coming into the U.S. and he’s supporting that. That’s not it at all. In fact, the people that I work with, a lot of them are actually right here in the good old United States, and I’ve had some of my best success stories with virtual assistants right here in the U.S. There’s no language barrier; I can get them on the phone immediately if we need to talk about something.
Right now, I have a video guy who I work with that I love talking to. We’ve become friends. He understands slang, he understands the vision of what I’m maybe trying to portray in this video. It’s not just combining clips and putting them together, there’s a reason for the video, it’s the understanding of why you’re putting together what you’re putting together, the image you’re trying to create.
And I’m happy to pay a little more to him than try to explain this to somebody only through an email relationship to somebody that maybe doesn’t even understand the culture of what I’m talking about. So the good old USA, they supply me with a lot of the people that have helped me so far in creating online and offline my business. Mike: Sure. Maybe take a minute and talk about how you – it happened because of a couple of bouts of burnout, and you kind of got to a point to where you’re like man, I’m going to get into a new business, but there’s got to be an easier way to do this.
So talk about how you kind of got to that line of thinking, and then where you kind of start – people who are listening to this that that resonates with, where they go from there? How do you kind of get started?
David: If it resonates with you, if you think about it, why are so many people interested in real estate investing? It may be because they like some elements of real estate, but in fact, many people that get in real estate investing don’t know anything about real estate investing, so therefore, what can they really like about it other than maybe reading a Donald Trump book and getting excited for a minute?
It’s like, what do you really like about it? Do you like getting up early, driving out to a home that maybe it took you an hour to get there, finding out the person is not there and they didn’t call you? Or dealing with people that are a lot of times in foreclosure, they’re not maybe taking care of the responsibility – they’re not afraid not to call you as well. So how do you start to create a business that doesn’t rely so much on you? You’ve got to think a little bit more in this way of developing a business from the get-go.
A lot of people tell me, Dave, I want to get into real estate investing, but I can’t even imagine outsourcing it. I say this: I can’t imagine how you could not even be thinking about a team but you want to be in real estate investing.
Your first thought should be, okay, here’s what I’m good at, here’s the things I wouldn’t mind doing, here’s the things I could probably do at a pretty high skill level. Let me be these things in my business, and let me find a few other people that can help me with A, B and C.
That’s how you would pull it off of becoming an entrepreneur. You trying to do all of those things is just a recipe for disaster. In my personal system, I call it the autopilot method. The first step in the autopilot method in this four–step series is find things that you actually like to do. That’s how simple it is to start. Find things that you actually like to do, be in businesses that you like or you have a hunch that you may like, and then from there, only do the things that you’re best at. Mike: I think a lot of this comes from, you know, you say you’ve been to some different real estate training programs and seminars, and if you listen to a lot of those things – not saying specifically any of the ones that you’ve been to – a lot of would-be real estate investors are led to believe that they can start with no money. Just by the nature of starting with no money pretty much means you’re going to have a tough time outsourcing anything, because you can’t pay anybody.
I get asked this question all the time, what would you do if you were starting over and you had no money? I say, well, I’d probably go work for somebody else because I’m not the type of believer that – I think this is a business. I’ve got to advertise; I’ve got to have employees. I mean, I run by business like a business. So, I think there are some ways to do stuff without a lot of your own money out of your pocket, but you’re going to be doing it all yourself. David: Right. I’m with you on that. And when they say no money, can you pull off a deal where your consideration in a deal – and by the way, if you’re just listening and real estate is not common to you, you have to have what’s called a consideration. So, if the consideration to put a property under contract was a limited amount of money, let’s say a commonly used amount is $10 to control a property, you could conceivably do a deal.
Mike: Sure. But what I’m saying is in terms of outsourcing and things like that, you have to find that lead first, unless you’re buying stuff off the MLS or other things. It’s hard to run it like a business if you have no money basically, so there’s some challenges there. David: Right. And for those that are – I don’t know if we’re talking right now to the listener or if it’s just you and I talking right now

Mike: Yeah, no, we’re talking to everybody. We’re talking to the listener. But my point is in terms of identifying – I think what my point is I think that a lot of folks get into real estate investing wanting to achieve that freedom, and because they start frugally, because they don’t have money to outsource or pay anybody or hire anybody to help with things, they end up in a position where they’re doing a lot more than maybe they would otherwise. So then it’s a challenge of how do you bridge that gap from I’ve been doing it all to I need to find some ways to outsource these things. David: Right. And you know what? You get what you focus on. I know you’ve heard that before, and if you’re listening to this and you write down any notes from what I talk about with Mike today, I’d say write this down: you get what you focus on.
A lot of people might think to themselves, yeah, I’ve heard that before, so what? Well, think about it deeper. You will get what you focus your time on. In other words, if you say, I’m going to add a person to my team, and that’s where your thought process is – not talking about money, checks, real estate deals, driving out to other – if you’re focused that day and that week and that period of time on finding someone for your business, you’ll find a person.
You’ll start talking it up at [indiscernible 23:14]. You’ll find a way to magically come up with the words that say things like, instead of talking to somebody about property, you talk to them about, hey, I have a growing business right now; I’m looking to expand it. Maybe you can play a role in my business. You’ll start talking in that way, because your focus is on something different.
I’m the type of guy that thinks that if you got into real estate because you wanted to achieve more of a lifestyle, and your cognizant of that and you think about that every day, you’ll start to think in terms of building a team. You’ll start to think in terms not so much of me doing the work on a real estate deal, you’ll say, how can I have a team, build that team, and simultaneously bring in just enough to create this real estate business?
The other end is that people get into it, they start to have some success. Their first check is $10,000, $15,000. I remember one of my first checks was $35,000 and I started to have access to some income, and had I just kept going for more money, money, money, I wouldn’t have built a team. I would’ve just got more busy in creating and trying to recreate those big checks that I had gotten, and that wouldn’t have been the recipe for what I was after with real estate investing. Mike: Yeah, you could never step out of that. David: Yeah. Mike: You could never step out of that, because if you stop working today, you stop making money today. David: Exactly. We’re faced right now, Mike, with what I call weapons of mass distraction. Mike: Yeah, that’s true. David: When I talk about that, I’m talking about the concepts that prevent us from pursuing more lifestyle are things that are in our minds that make us think that more, more, more and bigger, bigger, bigger is what is the thing.
I mean, if you think about it, you can’t go to a place without them asking you if you want to expand the meal. You know, you can’t even go get a bite to eat without them saying – I went to 7-Eleven the other day just to get a sandwich, and they tried to sell me on an apple and a banana right there on the table. They were having an offer on this apple and a banana. It’s not just Wendy’s and McDonald’s, it’s everywhere, because they’re thinking more, more, more and you’re pushed around with that. And then, we love big things, we love big meals, we love big cars and big tires on our cars. And what happens with that? Well, you get more gas and more expenses with taking care of this car, and before you know it, you’ve got a car where you’re putting $100 into it just to fill up the tank.
So, when you’re in love and you’re surrounded by these messages of bigger, that’s a lot of times what you’re going to get. Do you watch “Shark Tank” at all, Mike?
Mike: Yeah, yeah. David: Everybody watches “Shark Tank.” They love it. Now they’ve got this new version called “Behind the Tank” that’s come out recently. You see Mr. Wonderful talking to those two guys who had a business where they had like 7, 8 locations already and they’re doing gross of millions of dollars, and Mr. Wonderful’s pissed off, like, when are we going to make some profit? Meanwhile, they’re sitting here doing gross numbers of millions of dollars, but there’s no actual profit because everything’s so big. You know, I’m talking think more about HPLC, high profit, low cost. That’s a method I stick by, HPLC. That’s just something I think about every day. I focus on things, and that’s what I get. I get high profit, low cost, because that’s where my mind is. Mike: Talk a little bit about this phenomenon that I think a lot of entrepreneurs have where they say, look, David, I get it, I need to outsource some of this stuff, I need to focus on what I’m good at, I need to get rid of the stuff that is important but somebody else could handle it. And then what happens is I think they originally have the illusions of I’m going to have more time, I’m going to be able to spend more time with my family, and I’m going to be able to take that vacation we’ve been talking about for two years, whatever it might be, only to say subconsciously somewhere in there, man, if I can take this off my plate, then I’m going to have more time to really get after that one thing I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And then, you take something off your plate, and you fill it up with something else. David: That’s there. I mean, that’s always going to come, it’s always going to hit you. And I don’t know if that’s – to me, that’s a disease. That’s actually a disease because it’s based out of a fear. It’s a fear of, can I not do it again? Can I not create the income? Is my family not going to be supported by the income I’m making? It’s really based in a fear. So if you can overcome that fear and do things that challenge you to overcome the fears such as other things in your personal life, you can practice overcoming fear.
Again, where is your focus? Is your focus on overcoming fear because you know that’s the underlying thing? Then you will, because you’ll find a way to become easy with it.
I grew up having migraine headaches. To this day, I still get them, but I don’t get them as bad anymore, and there’s a couple reasons. Maybe I grew out of some of the symptoms of them, but when I do, I recognize what it is. I don’t get anxiety anymore like I used to because I know the pain’s about to come. I might take an Advil or something like that to kind of bring down some of the pain, but then when I’m going through the symptoms – and these headaches used to be extremely bad, but now they’re not as bad – I recognize it, I know what it is, I get that feeling of nauseousness sometimes, and I say, I know what this is. Stop, just stop. Let it run its course, relax, sit there for an hour-and-a-half, two hours, whatever it takes to run its course, relax, it’s just going to go. And that’s usually what happens. I have a lot less difficulty with them than I used to have when I was a child where it would create anxiety. I would throw up, have nauseousness, because I knew what was coming, that pain in the head. So if you recognize what these things are, you’ll overcome them as well as investors and entrepreneurs. Mike: Yeah. We have a few more minutes here. Maybe talk just at a high level where people can start with trying to off-load some of the stuff that they’re not good at.
David: Well, I’d say do something different. I’m not going to talk about real estate right now just because I think too many people will just start talking about virtual assistants and here’s where I go, I get my best deal of $2. I can get all that stuff. I know exactly where to go to get all of those things. If you ever want to pick up the Outsource It All product, it’s got everything detailed.
But try doing things different in your life. For example, this past Mother’s Day, I was thinking, man, I don’t want to deal on Sunday with these crowds. I don’t want to deal with what I know it’s going to be. Parking lots packed, and me taking my mother to brunch. I want to enjoy it. What did I do? I took her out on Saturday instead of Sunday. In other words, we skipped all the crowds. Nobody was talking about Mother’s Day. I got a chance to actually have a conversation with her that didn’t have a thousand other people around me talking and people fighting for spots sitting at this brunch. I actually had a good Mother’s Day, and I hope she did too. And I’m sure she did.
But do different things; start thinking out of the box. Leave your damn cell phone at home sometimes, please. Leave it in the car. I was just at Saladworks today getting a nice salad, and I see three people around me on their phone, and I’m thinking, relax, dude. Don’t worry about the cell. Don’t take it on the golf course, too. You people on the golf course with your cell phones , go work on your game. Stop saying things like 24/7. Stop saying, 365, I’m available. I know we have that encouragement in the real estate industry or you’re new in the game and you want people to be attracted to working with you. Don’t say things like that, though. Why be 24/7? What does that have to do with lifestyle? Say something different like, I’m available between 10:00 to 3:00, and I’m available about 200 days a year. Okay? Isn’t that a goal to shoot for?
My company is called Rivers of Income. I named it after my goal to create rivers of income. I look at it every day. It doesn’t say A&R Home Solutions Equities Trust. That’s boring to me. I named it after something I’m pursuing. And this is not for everybody, because I live my lifestyle. But think about that when you’re creating stuff, business names and things like that. Go for stuff that is going to excite you personally.
So those are my little tips. Just do different things outside of real estate, and then it’ll become more common and easy for you to start living that way. Mike: I’m sure you’ll agree with this, I think it’s important for people to – if you know what your goals are, you know, you’ve got to get an oil change on your car, you’ve got to get check-ups medically every once in a while, kind of go somewhere, it doesn’t necessarily need to be quiet, but with little distraction, and just reflect on, hey, over the last quarter, am I closer to my goal or am I further away, and what can I do differently? I think a lot of us end up setting, if anything, annual goals, and you usually wait until like December 26th to say, am I on track to hit my goals for this year, and what are you going to do in five days?
David: Right. Mike: And so I think it’s important to kind of have those regular periods where you reflect on am I on-track, am I off-track, am I happy, am I not happy, and what do I need to do differently?”
David: That’s a good point, Mike. I haven’t set a New Year’s resolution for so long because there’s no need to. Just because we’ve hit a new year doesn’t mean I have to have a resolution. I’m monitoring these goals weekly, monthly. I’m feeling out my business and saying, do I not quite like how it feels right now? Is there a reason for that? I’m the doctor to my own business. Is there a reason? Am I not spending enough there on marketing, or should we try a different form of marketing? Should I play around with different people taking the phone calls with different scripts? Should I create more competition, to have maybe three people taking my calls instead of two? What are things I can do to create a different environment and change the people’s state? Like Tony Robbins would say, how do you change the state of your business? That’s just something I might do to keep my finger on the pulse of my own business. Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, David, thanks so much for your time today. Can you take a couple minutes – I know you teach people how to outsource some different parts and stuff like that, maybe share with us where folks can learn more about that. David: Yeah, I appreciate you giving me the chance to do that. One website you might want to check out is TheOutsourceKing.com. You can go in and enter in your information and you’ll see a chance where you can actually get started with me on a very inexpensive level and grow from there.
There’s also a new product that I’ve created with a friend of mine, Jamel Gibbs. We created something called Landlord Leads, and Landlord Leads is all about the opportunity to do less is more. In other words, to work with more individuals that are qualified that you’ve been creating a pipeline with. In other words, more cash buyers, and do more business with those particular types of individuals. You’ll see it’s hashed out; it’s a pretty interesting concept, and it’s something that hit me after being in the industry for a while. I’m trying to tell people about it that are early in the business because it may not hit you until later like it did for me that you focus on the people that you’re closing with and really developing strong relationships with those individuals. Look for these cash buyers that are looking for more than one property. Look for other people on the other end that are looking to sell more than one, and start to match up those individuals and work with greater profits with less people. That’s basically the concept of it. Mike: Okay, awesome. David: If they want to check that out, they can go to RiversofIncome.com. Mike: Awesome. Cool, man. Thanks so much for your time today. I definitely appreciate you sharing your knowledge. And for the folks who are listening, I think the bottom line is I think a lot of us get into this business to achieve some sort of financial freedom or freedom of time, and I think probably you and I are the same in the regard that, you know, initially it was a lot more about once I get the money, I’ll worry about the rest of it, and then you get to a point to where, whether you have kids or you’ve been burned out a few times or whatever it is, where you start to say, yeah, the money’s important, but my time is even more important. The odd thing is is once you figure out how to achieve that freedom of time and run your business at the same time, then the money follows. So I think for all of you listening to this, I encourage you to find some additional ways to kind of get to the lifestyle point where you feel comfortable and happy, because that’s why you got into this business in the first place. David: I’m with you, man. Love of the game is what it’s all about. Mike: Absolutely. Awesome, David. Thanks again so much for your time. Stay in touch, my friend.
David: All right. Thank you.
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