Stay Focused to Succeed as a Real Estate Investor

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 all new FlipNerd.com yet, please go check it out. A lot has changed and we have a lot of stuff going on, thousands of new members and it’s an exciting place to be right now.
For today’s show, I’m joined by my friend Matt Theriault. Matt is a real estate investor. He’s a turn-key provider. He’s a mentor and a coach. He’s an entrepreneur and he’s got a lot of stuff going on which we’ll talk about today.
He’s also a veteran of the Marine Corp and a fellow podcaster. He actually operates several podcasts and again, a good friend of mine.
A common issue for real estate investors is that it’s easy for us to get distracted, especially the entrepreneurial types that are distracted by shiny objects and those that can never get enough education and want to just keep learning instead of taking action.
It’s real easy to get distracted and Matt is here today to tell us how to clear that distraction, how to get focused and how to achieve the results that you want. It’s going to be a great episode from somebody that really knows what he’s talking about.
Before we get started with today’s episode though, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.
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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, Matt. Welcome to the show my friend.
Matt: Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me back.
Mike: Good to see you. We were just talking about it right before we started recording, you were on the show almost 200 episodes ago. It was show number 27, way back when I was just a little infant figuring stuff out and now I’m not an infant but I’m still trying to figure it out.
Matt: Right. I think we always will be trying to figure it out. Congratulations by the way, that’s a lot of episodes.
Mike: Yeah, thanks. No, it’s been fun. I really love the chance to hear other people’s stories and meet new people. I mean, even guys like you, we didn’t know each other before and now we see each other regularly in the same mastermind and a number of other things.
Aside from just growing the show, it’s been enriching for me to make a lot of new friends and new friendships and learn what a lot of other people are doing, because as soon as you think you’re the smartest guy in the room and you get around a bunch of smart people, you realize that you’re not.
Matt: Sure.
Mike: Hey, before we start talking about getting focused, I know you’ve got some good stuff to share with us today. Tell us your story again about how you got into real estate investing, how you find yourself where you are today.
Matt: Sure, I’ll cut to the chase, so to speak.
When I got out of the Marine Corp, I spent the next 13, 14 years of my life in the music business, pursuing my passion, living my dream and I made my millions by the time I was 30. Then this little thing called, the digital download, came along. This old company called Napster. I don’t even know if they’re around anymore. But they came along and just turned the whole industry upside down and it changed the way people consumed music.
Mike: Yep.
Matt: I made all of my money off of selling CDs, compact discs, that’s what CDs stands for in case people don’t even remember.
I think about my son now, he’s four year old and he won’t even know what a compact disc is. That just blows my mind. Let alone, a cassette or an LP or an eight-track cassette.
Mike: Corded phone.
Matt: Right? What’s this thing on the phone that’s tied to the wall? As that digital download came along, it basically . . . in six months, it happened just really fast that it put me out of business. I ended up bankrupt and when the money goes, so does the wife. So I was divorced.
At age 34 years old, I’d found out that I wasn’t really qualified to do anything else as far as the job world or the corporate world goes. I ended up bagging groceries. I had to eat, right? So I did that for about six months. A whole lot of soul searching, had no idea what I was going to do next. All I knew was I wanted to do something that made money because I missed my previous lifestyle.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: I said, okay, I got to go learn something else. Where is the best opportunity . . . or where are my chances the best of success of where I can make a lot of money?
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: Of the most unlikely source, a quote came from the grocery store manager. He had said, “Real estate has created more millionaires and billionaires than any other industry or investment vehicle.” I was like, well if it’s created more, it must be the easiest place to make it happen knowing human nature, how us, humans, follow the path of least resistance.
That’s where it was, then that’s what I was going to pursue and within 24 hours, I was in school to get my real estate license, thinking of going the path of the real estate agent was the way that I wanted to go.
Mike: Right.
Matt: Not that I wanted to go. I thought that’s just what I was supposed to do.
Mike: Right.
Matt: After four years as a real estate agent, I realized that if I wanted to make all this money, I’m probably sitting on the wrong side of the desk.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: I had some clients that were doing very well, some investor clients. I was like; I would rather do what they’re doing that doing what I’m doing.
I’ve invested in a very large educational program and as they say, the rest is history. About that same time was when I read the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and I got introduced to the concept of passive income.
To escape that rat race, I had to get that passive income to exceed my expenses. Once I had that formula and armed with the education, I was off and running. In three and a half years, I was able to do that to get that passive income to exceed my expenses.
Mike: Share some of the lessons, a little bit of having done well at another space and then moved over in to real estate. Obviously, it was a hard . . . I’m sure that wasn’t easy. That’s not easy for anybody.
But I know that you get something inside of you when you went successful as a real estate investor or as an entrepreneur to where . . . since I know you personally, I know there’s more to this, is that you’re constantly finding other irons to put in the fire because that’s never going to happen again. You’re never going to allow . . . something might do well, something might not do well, but you’ve got multiple things going on and you know how to just pick it up and recreate it at the drop of a hat if you need to.
Matt: Right. You know, the big lesson that I learned from the music industry . . . actually there’s two big lessons. One was, you don’t have to do it all yourself. I was such a control freak. I didn’t want anyone to have any input on the music, on the artwork, on the artist that I signed, or where we’re going to perform, where we’re going to advertise, where we’re going to promote and what format we were going to release each project in. I had my hands in all of that and I wouldn’t allow anybody near any of it.
That’s a really tough way to build a business. It’s only going to get so big if you operate your business that way.
I made sure that I’m not making that same mistake again. I’m still a little bit of a control freak, still a little bit more . . . or still difficult to let things go. But I know it is for the greater good and that’s for the best of the company.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: That’s one big thing that I’ve learned, is to delegate more.
The second thing that I’ve learned is to eliminate all single points of failure. That’s where I got that lesson.
I sold CDs and that was it. I had one distributor that sold those CDs and that was it. When the public stopped buying those CDs, I lost my income stream in about . . . I mean, well after . . . not well after, but about six months after I went bankrupt and was out of the business, I believe that distributor sold their whole CD manufacturing plant.
That was done and I had no other stream of income coming in, only t-shirts and some of the stuff. It didn’t even register in the books.
Mike: Yep.
Matt: As I’m moving in to real estate, I decided that I’m never going to go back to bagging groceries again. I need to diversify. I need multiple streams of income.
Mike: Right.
Matt: I started with the single family resident, that’s what I was focused on in one part in the north mid-west up in Illinois. I picked up enough property there to get me out of the rat race.
Mike: That’s why you were living in California, right?
Matt: Yeah, that’s why I was living in California. I’ve made some good connections through that educational program.
Mike: Yep.
Matt: I had that and I was kind of looking at that like, oh my gosh, here I am. All of my eggs are in this one small little basket managed by this one person. I need to start diversifying.
So I moved to Memphis, started buying properties there. Then we moved to St. Louis, started buying properties there. Then up in Cleveland. Now we’re in 10 different markets.
About halfway through that journey and that expansion, one of our property managers in Memphis went down. We were without property management on 60 properties in that area. I was like, okay, so I’ve diversified markets. But now I need to diversify my team. I need to diversify my property managers. I need to diversify my contractors.
We started diversifying that. Now in each market, I’ve at least two property managers, at least two contractors, at least two realtors.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: Then, we started to diversify the property type. I picked up multi-families. I’ve got multi-families, I’ve got duplexes and I’ve got single families.
Now, I feel like I’m pretty well distributed across the country, distributed throughout different teams and throughout different property types. I feel pretty secure in my real estate.
Mike: Yeah, that’s great advice. I think a lot of people . . . it’s hard especially when you’re starting off, if you have just a few rental properties. It’s hard to split those up into two property managers.
Matt: Right, right.
Mike: I had a property manager early on and we bought a house that was a little bit more “hoodie” than what he wanted. We tended to have more B class properties and this was probably like C-. He was like, “Well, why don’t you give that to . . . find somebody else that wants to manage those.” So I like went out and tried to find somebody. He was like, “I’ll take that one but I want all the other ones too.”
Then I went back to my property manager and he was like, he wants them all. Why would he split these up, I can’t just give somebody my crap.
Matt: Right.
Mike: That’s when my property manager realized, I can lose all this. It’s hard to split it up if you don’t have a lot of properties.
Matt: Right, I think once it hits a point . . . when I got my first four or five properties, it wasn’t really necessary because if I lost four or five properties, it didn’t mean I was going back to bagging groceries.
Mike: Right.
Matt: Once your portfolio starts representing your livelihood, then that’s the point where you really want to start diversifying.
Mike: Yeah, man, I know you mentor and coach a lot of people and you have a lot of great programs. You and I both know that it’s super easy for people to get distracted in this business and people have the stuff that we all have; jobs, families, other responsibilities that you have to do in your life.
On top of that, real estate investors have a lot of noise of the coolest strategy of the day or the next investing strategy. There’s just a ton of education information out there that gets people thinking about, I want a wholesale, no, no, no, maybe I should just buy notes. They’re just kind of all over the place because there’s a different flavor out there. There’s a lot of noise out there to get distracted.
Matt: Right.
Mike: How do people clear the clutter and just say, I’m going to do . . . this is exactly what I’m going to do and I’m not going to let that other stuff get in my way?
Matt: Sure, regardless of what strategy you’re going to chose whether it’s fancy and if something seems brand new, or if it’s I just want to do commercial, I just want to do single family, I’m only going to do duplexes and in the southeast of the country, or whatever it maybe. I’m going to flip least options.
People have all this stuff . . . different stuff they’re going to say.
Mike: Right.
Matt: Reverse wholesaling . . . all these words that don’t even exist a couple of years ago.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: Now, they’re strategies.
Mike: Yeah, have you heard of the upside down rehab?
Matt: I did not hear of that one yet.
Mike: It’s coming, my friend.
Matt: Regardless of what strategy you’re going to pursue, first of all, pick one and understand that they’re all difficult. They all have the sizzle in the beginning; they all have great success stories that are going to draw you in. You’re going to get to a point with each one of those strategies where you get stick. Like, oh wow. This is work. This is more difficult than I thought it was going to be.
Mike: Right.
Matt: You hit that point in every single strategy. If there’s money to be made there, you’re going to hit that point.
Seth Golden had the book called, The Dip.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: That’s called that part, the dip. They all have a dip.
What they all have in common and this is I’ve had this amazing breakthrough with my coaching clients in the last six months, is you’ve got to generate leads. If you’re not generating leads, you don’t have a business. That’s got to be the primary focus; you have to generate enough leads, enough people to talk to, enough people that own property that are likely or potentially willing to sell to you. That’s your number one job as a real estate investor.
Mike: Right.
Matt: You’ve got to have that.
Second, I think this is so funny, but people hear me on that and they start working and they start generating these leads. Then they don’t call them all back. Or they call them back once and then, ah, he didn’t answer the phone. No, you’ve got to call them all back. Every single one, whether they left a message for you or whether they just hung up. You got to call every single one of them back. A good portion of our deals came from people that did not leave a message initially.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: So you can’t let those go by.
If they don’t answer, you have to keep on following up.
We have a system in place right now where we call the person back eight times within the first six days. They’re going to call back right as soon as the lead comes in, if they don’t answer, they get called back within three hours. Then, one more time before the end of the day. Then, each day for up to six days. Then, they drop and do a 30-day follow up.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: But you got to hit them quick and you got to follow up. I forget what the sale statistic is but most people don’t get contact or you don’t reach your full potential until that seventh or eighth follow up is where all the money is made.
Mike: A lot of people give up, I think. I’m sure we’ve seen the same stat before, all the people give up after a third time. They don’t even call again . . . or second or third time, something really early on.
I don’t know if I’ve shared this on the show but a few people lately, this year alone, or in the past couple of months, I know of a couple of deals that we’ve had, the lead was 52 months old. We generated it 52 months earlier and we had a few that were a year or two plus.
In that time, sometimes people would . . . we use virtual assistants to do a lot of our follow up . . . phone call follow up because I would give up after two or three times. I have got to outsource that.
Matt: Right.
Mike: There’s issues in there where people say, call, left message, call, left message, call, left message. But they just kept calling every 30 days or so like you say.
There was even an issue where as soon as they heard who I was . . . I heard the TV in the background and they hung up on me. They didn’t say stop calling, so we kept calling. Eventually we bought the house.
It’s crazy that people would get up after this. If somebody hung up on me or they said, “No, I’m not interested in selling” and they hung up. It’s like, well they didn’t say stop calling.
Matt: Right.
Mike: We’re going to keep doing it.
Matt: Yeah, about eight or nine months ago, and you witnessed this, everybody’s witnessed this. If they’re in the game, they’ve witnessed this shift in the market.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: That we went to this analytical sterile environment where you go to auction houses or you could buy Hud homes, or all the number of the online auction site. It was just a numbers game, just keep submitting offers, keep submitting offers and you got deals that way.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: When the market started to shift and a lot of that inventory start to dry up, or at least the profit margins started to dry up as well, we all had to go back to becoming marketers. We had to do that direct selling and direct marketing to potential motivated sellers.
Mike: Right.
Matt: When that happened and everybody flooded the market with the direct mail, we noticed right away that our response rate on our direct mail started to drop as well. I was pretty steady over the next few months.
What we decided is like, direct mail, it’s too expensive to let any of that go to waste.
Mike: Sure.
Matt: We made sure that we kept the lead machine going. We did not pull back on that. We made sure that everybody got called back. That’s when we implemented that follow up system.
The third thing that we did is everybody gets an offer. Everybody.
Mike: Physical offer, you’re saying?
Matt: Physical offer.
Mike: Okay.
Matt: We’ll go ahead and mail them out one. Then we follow up with a phone call saying, “Hey, I just sent an offer to you, would you like me to email a copy to you as well, so you can see it right now?”
Mike: Yeah, wow.
Matt: Then we get the email address. Now, we got the email follow up, we got the mail follow up.
Kind of what you are saying is, you hire a V.A. follow up every 30 days. Then you get this lead a year or two later that actually turns into a deal. We do the same thing, but also having a physical piece of paper in that person’s house that sits on their desk, sits on their coffee table or sits inside the drawer of their desk.
Mike: Right.
Matt: That physical copy. When if that need comes . . . because they called you for a reason. They called . . . when was the last piece of junk mail you called? I’ve never called a piece of junk mail because I’m not a motivated seller.
Mike: Right.
Matt: But the person that called you, they called you for a reason. It might not be urgent today, but they might see something coming down the line that might cause them to be a little bit more motivated.
Mike: Sure, things happen.
Matt: Absolutely. I don’t know, I guess in life, if things are not going well, they tend to get a little bit worse before they get better.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: When that urgency hits a point where. Okay I need to sell the house now.
Mike: Yep.
Matt: Who’s the person they’re going to call? They might sell that house to the person that calls that day and if you’re lucky then you can land that one. Or they’re going to say, “Hey, I got his one offer. Where did that offer go? I remember there’s an offer here, let’s see if that’s still valid.”
And so, between those three things, generating the leads, make sure everyone gets contact, make sure everyone gets an offer, that’s turning our whole business around and it’s turned around the business of all my coaching class as well.
Mike: That’s great.
Matt: They’ve read all the books, they attended all the online webinars, they’ve gone to the workshops, they’ve been other people’s coaching programs. They’ve learned stuff and they’ve got little bits of success here and there but this was the real breakthrough. They’ve got to have these three systems in place or else I don’t allow them to ask any other questions.
Mike: Yeah, so leads, follow up and what else?
Matt: Offers.
Mike: Offers.
Matt: Offers.
Mike: Leads, offers and follow ups.
Matt: I don’t even allow them to talk about anything else, Mike.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: If you don’t have those three things in place, you can’t talk about it.
I don’t care about the guy whose thinking about selling. I don’t care about this might or might not be a deal. Or what do I do, because the last three calls I got were all short sales. I was like, well, how many leads are you generating? And have you called them all back? And did everybody get an offer?
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: Almost always, they’ll say, no. I say, “Okay, great, we’ll talk about what you want to talk about next week but we need to get this done first.”
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: And once they all started to get that, it all started to click and they all started to make money. Now, they’re all doing really, really well to where they don’t need me that much anymore. All that noise around the outside that some people worried about, it goes away if you have those three systems in place.
Mike: Yeah, and once you get a deal or kind of a taste of . . . when the light bulb goes off that “Aha. This works. I get it now,” and you see that, it’s easy to get all the more focused.
Matt: Exactly.
Mike: You just want to do that again. You’ve seen it work from idea to money in your bank account. Then it’s just easier to just say, “Okay, that other stuff it might work but I know this works because I just saw it myself.”
Matt: Right.
Mike: We go rinse and repeat.
Matt: The thing is Mike, it all works if you have those three systems in play.
Mike: Right, right, right.
Matt: Every strategy will work.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: But if you don’t have those, none of them will.
Mike: What do you kind of coach people on in terms of lead generation? That’s another area where it’s easy to get distracted because there’s so many different ways you can generate leads.
Obviously, direct mail is pretty common for real estate investors and kind of the first place most people go. But, you’ve got people that want to go out and do bandit signs, or I need to . . .
Matt: Right.
Mike: There’s a whole bunch of different ideas and what ends up happening is similar to some confusion in just your overall investing business is, everybody is going to tell you something different in terms of what works from a lead generation standpoint. How do you help people focus there?
Matt: Well, I think there’s two ways to generate leads. There’s the best way and then there’s the fastest way.
And I believe the best way is through relationships. It’s creating a network that you can contact saying, “Hey, I need a deal, I need a deal, I need a deal.” Or, “hey, I got a deal so are you ready to buy? Are you ready to buy?” That’s the best way and that’s how a big portion of my business is built.
But that’s takes a while. I mean, those are relationships.
Mike: Right.
Matt: And it takes to create relationships. The fastest way, it’s direct mail. The road side signs work but that’s kind of labor intensive. And then if you . . .
Mike: Kind of illegal in some places.
Matt: Kind of illegal on some places. But they still work and I still use them and that’s fine. I’m just a little bit lazier than that, that I don’t like to go out and run the streets.
Mike: Yeah, at 3:00 in the morning with black ski masks on.
Matt: That’s right. Yeah, I’ve done that too many times in my life.
But, I haven’t seen that real need to go outside of direct mail. Until the phone stops ringing, I’m going to keep on doing it. I think . . . yeah, it’s the easiest, it’s the fastest, the drawback is it does come with an expense.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: But, it’s the fastest way to generate business and the leads that come in, you’re going to get calls from . . . particularly if you’re promoting the absentee owners, all you’re doing is talking to other real estate investors all day long.
Mike: Right.
Matt: So you create some amazing relationships. If you’re posting ads on Craigslist and the online classifieds, wholesalers call you, so there’s more relationships that you’re generating and creating.
Start creating those relationships and nurturing those relationships from day one. But, if you want results quickly, start mailing at the same time and pretty soon, those things will kind of . . . they’ll kind of cross where you can do less and less mailing and the relationships can take over.
Mike: Yeah, and I know that this is a big part of your business, the networking part of . . . creating a network, not just for people that could send you a lead but students or groups of people, masterminds and stuff like that, where people do deals amongst each other. And I think a lot of real estate investors when they’re new, think, I need to go direct to the source and I need to sell it and cut out all the middle men. But you and I both know that there’s a lot of opportunity when you bring enough people together to share deals amongst each other to where everybody wins.
Talk about that a little bit because I think it’s counterintuitive, especially to a lot of newer people,
Matt: Yeah, I think people that have never done a deal before, or maybe they got lucky and got one done, I think they view other real estate investors as competition.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: And I don’t . . . that’s the wrong way to go about it. I mean, there could be certain situations where you’re competing for the same deal, but I think there’s a lot more value to get from real estate investors than there is of that fear of losing anything, from interacting with other real estate investors.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: So, people are always buying, people are always selling. And they buy and sell back and forth to each other. People are upgrading, they’re downsizing, they’re retiring or they’re going to restart their business or they’re going to a different area. The thing I like about dealing with other real estate investors, it’s almost always numbers driven.
Mike: Right.
Matt: It’s not . . . you’re not talking to someone in pre foreclosure or someone in bankruptcy or just went through a divorce and they ‘re thinking you got to have . . . you have this extra emotional element in the conversation.
Mike: Right, that is emotional.
Matt: Right, now you’re part psychologist and counselor.
I like dealing with other real estate investors just because it’s a numbers game. You’ll get deals even though it is a numbers game because I might held a property for five years that I got a 33% cash on cash return from at the very beginning, after three years, I was whole and complete. And then, the next two years were all profit for me.
So yeah, if I need to get rid of this to free up some cash or just because I want to go somewhere else, then I’ll sell it at a discount. I already got my money out of it. I already made money back.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: And everything I’m going to sell right now is going to be more money as well.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: That’s going to be 100% pure profit.
Mike: Right.
Matt: You get that mentality with the other investors and they’re more open to those types of deal.
Mike: Yeah, I think that’s an evolutionary thing. You realize overtime . . . I always say early on, I felt like everybody was my competition.
For awhile, I felt that way and then until you start to realize of, well maybe there’s a way for us to work together or there would even be people that I couldn’t pay what they wanted for it, but I said, “But I can close in 24 hours, so if you have any problems selling that, then come back to me.” Every once in awhile they did and it’s not that they didn’t want to get more, it’s not that I didn’t want to give them more for it, which I guess probably is true, I didn’t want to give them more for it. It was like; I’ve served a purpose because I was able to get them out from under something they needed to sell quickly if another deal fell through or something else.
Matt: Sure, sure.
Mike: There’s a win-win there for in a lot of instances that people don’t realize early on, I think.
Matt: Yeah, totally. I love the question that, “well, if you’re so good at finding deals, why don’t you just keep them all?”
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: I don’t have enough money to buy them all. And I don’t want them all.
Mike: Right.
Matt: [Inaudible 00:26:20] deals but they just don’t fit my criteria.
Mike: That’s another reason, not everything . . . I had somebody else on the show earlier and we’re talking about they just rehabbed a 100%. The problem is you’re going to end up getting something that’s too far away from where you live or it’s in the hood or there’s something that you don’t want to rehab. I mean, it’s hard to be a 100% rehabber.
Matt: Right.
Mike: Invariably, you’re missing out on deals that you don’t want to rehab that you could wholesale to somebody else and make money on and do good for somebody else too.
Matt: Absolutely, absolutely.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: The best analogy is a guy who used to work here in the office came up with . . . when the tuna fisherman goes out to the ocean to catch all of the tuna, he’s going to catch mackerel as well, he’s going to have little stingrays in there and he’s going to have bonito in there. He’s going to have all those other types of fish that he accidentally caught while he was fishing for the tuna.
Mike: Right.
Matt: He can bring it all back in and he can still sell the mackerel at the fish market. He can still sell the bonito and he can keep the tuna for himself.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: Maybe he’s got too much tuna, so he’s not going to eat all of the tuna.
Mike: Right.
Matt: When I heard that analogy, I was like, that makes a whole lot of sense. That’s exactly how it works.
Mike: Yeah. Very insightful.
Well Matt, what kind of . . . just share, kind of wrap it u here, in terms of a summary of . . . in terms of how people can really kind of stay focused or get focused if right now they are all over the board. A lot of time, they may not really realize that they’re all over the place. But what advice would you give to people to just kind of get focused, how to stay focused and maybe check up every once in awhile to make sure that you haven’t gotten off the reservation.
What’s some general advice to get there and stay there.
Matt: Well, if your business is failing to meet your expectations, regardless of what level you’re at, if it’s not . . . if you’re not doing as much business as you want to be doing, you got to . . . a little bit of reiterating myself, but go back. Are you generating enough leads to do the business that you want to do.
That’s number one and forget everything else. If that piece of the puzzle is not in place, it doesn’t matter how much you hope for your business to grow or how much sleep you lose or how much you stress out over it, if you don’t have the leads there, you’re not going to do the type of business that you want to be doing. That’s the first focus.
The second, is don’t waste that lead generation money. Don’t waste all that energy. So make sure that you actually contact the leads or have a system in place that those leads get contacted whether it’s . . . you and I Mike, we don’t really like to do that anymore. One or two phone calls and we’re done. But we know, you and I know that they have to be contacted seven, eight times to really maximize that lead.
Mike: Right.
Matt: And so, that’s number two, is put a system in place to make sure every lead gets contacted.
And three, make sure everybody gets an offer. Don’t think about anything else. You’re not even allowed to think about anything else until those three pieces of the puzzle are in place in your business.
Mike: Yeah.
Matt: It doesn’t matter what strategy it is whether you’re a wholesaler or a rehabber, buy and hold, wholesale and lease options, reverse wholesaling, what’s the upside down fix and flick? Whatever strategy that you’re doing, that’s what they all have in common. If you don’t have those three things in place, you’re not going to succeed at any of them.
Mike: That’s awesome. Awesome.
Well Matt, one more thing I wanted to ask about is I know you have a live event coming up real soon here. Tell us about what you have going on there and how people could learn more.
Matt: Sure, it’s June 18, 19 and 20 at Universal Studios, California. That’ll be a three day event where we’re basically teaching the exact three systems that I just kind of went over with you, on how to generate those leads and keep those coming in steadily. Keeping them coming and consistently in spite of yourself.
Second is a contact system, so everybody gets contacted with not just a phone call, but a text message and an email. And I’ll show you how to get their text message numbers and I’d show you how to get their email addresses and how to put that whole thing on auto responder so it happens automatically for you.
Mike: Wow.
Matt: And then we’ve got a push button offer system, that’s absolutely amazing. You just click a button and boom, it’s automatically mailed out. I can’t think of anything easier to do.
So that’s what we’ve implemented in our business. I’ve helped my coaching clients implement it in theirs and now they’re getting the results that they’ve always wanted.
It’s not going to just be me either. The people, the experts that helped me implement me this in my business are going to be there as well.
Mike: Awesome.
Matt: So there’ll be sharing of all that information live on stage. It’s our first live event.
Mike: That’s awesome, man.
Matt: It’s exciting.
Mike: How do people learn more? Where do they go?
Matt: You can go to epicintensive.com. Epicintensive.com, that’s where you can sign up for either the two day pass or a three day pass. The three day, the third day is sneak peek, you get to look behind the curtain of our epic insiders mastermind and then you’ll also be able to attend the VIP dinner with us as well that night. So that’s the difference between the two day and the three day pass.
Mike: Awesome. Well, so epicintensive.com, we’ll add a link down below the video for the people that are driving right now. But cool, good luck with that. That’s exciting.
Matt: Awesome. Thanks Mike. Congratulations to you on this 200th and umpteenth episode. Congratulations on the launch of FlipNerd. I know you’ve been working on that for a long time.
Mike: We put a lot into it. Hopefully we’re on to something here. But to be honest, I’m thankful for you and a lot of other people that have been on the show, coming back a second time. We’ll have you back again for sure because I think, learning from a lot of other people, what we’re trying to do basically, really truly, give people an opportunity to learn from experts. A lot of the things you talked about today is, there’s a lot of different information out there and we’re trying to bring it all together and say, “These are the best of the best. Listen to what they’re saying and doing and learn from them.”
Matt: Thanks Mike.
Mike: I’m glad you’re here my friend.
Matt: Yeah, I’ll see you on Episode 400. Right?
Mike: Hopefully it won’t be quite that long. But we’d love to have you back again. See you. Bye.
Matt: Bye-bye.
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