How to Achieve Your Goals by Inspiring and Helping Others

Mike: Welcome to the FlipNerd.com podcast. This is your host, Mike Hambright. On this show, I will introduce you to VIPs in the real estate investing industry as well as other interesting entrepreneurs whose stories and experiences can help you take your business to the next level.
We have three new shows each week, which are available in the iTunes store or by visiting FlipNerd.com. So without further ado, let’s get started.
Welcome back for another exciting VIP interview, where I interview some of the most successful real estate investing experts and entrepreneurs in our industry to help you learn and go.
Today, I’m joined Trevor Mauch. Trevor is a real estate investor and a serial entrepreneur, and he’s the CEO of onCarrot, which a lot of real estate investors may know. He helps small businesses in many ways, and even real estate investors generate more leads for their business. Across everything that Trevor has done, there’s a common theme here, and that’s that he helps others achieve their goals through automation, systemization, and really helping entrepreneurs optimize their business.
There’s a lot we could talk about today, but now that it’s the beginning of the year and everybody is starting fresh, we’re going to talk about how to focus on your goals and achieve your goals by helping and inspiring others to be successful.
Before we get started with Trevor, 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, Trevor welcome to the show.
Trevor: Mike, how’s it going, man?
Mike: Good. Glad to have you on. I know we’ve been talking for a while, and I’m glad this day has finally come, my friend.
Trevor: I know, me too, and I apologize because we had to reschedule, but we made it and I’m excited, man. It’s fun just sharing trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship with other entrepreneurs and see what we can pass along.
Mike: You know, what I’ve found very literally is a lot of us are so busy, you just put your head down and you kind of crank, and you know lots of people, you talk to lots of people, but you never really sit down and kind of sit back and talk about what it’s all for, right?
Trevor: It’s funny you say that. As a really good example here with my company, with Carrot, leading into the end of the year, we’ve got the end of the year stuff, you know, you’ve got your normal goal planning and whatnot, but really, since we started Carrot, and with my other companies as well, we always look at what the impact is that we want to make. Not just our financial goals, not just how many customers you want to have or how many deals you want to do, but what the impact is that we want to make.
And I can share it now or we can share it later, but we did this little exercise with our team that got people thinking about immediately by doing that day the impact that we as a team can collectively make. It’s a really cool exercise. I can let you know about it or let the other people know about it now or later.
Mike: Yeah, go ahead; share it.
Trevor: So one of the impacts we’re going to make with Carrot – and it’s something I’m really passionate about, like you mentioned before, of really sparking that inspiration in people, whether it’s entrepreneurs or whether it’s just someone walking down the street who might be having a bad day, or might be someone who could spread goodwill or cheer to other people, what we try to do at Carrot is we try to be beacons of positivity and possibility. It’s one of our core values. And we know that when we can be a beacon of positivity and possibility to someone, the odds are that if they grasp that, then they can do the same to their community, right? So they can do the same to their friends, their family, whatever. And it kind of keeps on growing and spreading just by doing a small act of kindness to make someone happy or to help someone along.
What we did leading into this year to get people going is along with their Christmas bonuses, we gave everyone on our team $100. We said, okay, here’s $100 in cash. You can’t spend it on yourself, you can’t spend it on it presents for your friends or family or people you should be buying presents for or doing something for anyway, you have to do it for someone you don’t know. All that we really care about – I don’t care what you do – is you spread some Christmas cheer. You make someone smile and feel better about themselves and the world that they live in than they did before.
We’re seeing some cool stuff with our team pop through our online collaboration tool; just some really neat things that they’re doing. It’s a mindset shift. It’s going from how do I get mine, to how do I get someone else get theirs, and spread that cheer and spread that goodwill. And that’s something we can all do every day. It’s been really, really fun for our team.
Mike: That’s great. I’d say even in myself, I coach and mentor a lot of real estate investors, and for years, I really just talked about more of just general financial goals. A lot of times, it was even units that don’t even really matter at the end of the day. So it’s like, well, what is it that you want to accomplish for the next year? Let’s go through this detailed planning exercise. And maybe some of it is me maturing a little bit and having a son and things like that, but now I talk a lot more about, well, why you want to achieve that? People will say, I want to double my revenue, and it’s like, well, maybe cutting expenses is the solution here. Maybe you don’t have to do – maybe you could do more with less.
I think some of it’s a maturity thing, but you just start to question why do we work so hard, and is there a way to kind of accomplish your goals with working less potentially.
Trevor: Yeah, totally. One thing that I’ve found, too, is – this is kind of veering off of the topic of what we’re going to go in, but it’s really important – is there’s these cycles that we all as entrepreneurs go through. You know, a real estate investor getting going; you’re looking to flip houses or wholesale or whatever, all the way up to someone who has built a big company, we all go through these lifecycles. And for the majority of us, when we start, we have this motivation that we’ve got to make money. We’re trying to quit our job, we’re trying to pay the bills, whatever it is.
With me, my motivation was out of college, I said I’m going to give myself a year to make this thing work. I had already bought some properties by then. I’m not going to get a job for a year; I’m just going to try to make this entrepreneur thing work. I was married at the time; we moved to a new city. I didn’t have any money. I was bringing in $1,500 a month, maybe $2,000 a month in revenue. I went into debt about $15,000, $16,000 that year on my credit card. I paid my taxes on my credit card that year, which I didn’t know you could even do. But that was my motivation. That’s like the first thing is our motivation is to survive and pay our bills. When you start making some money, your motivation changes. That’s where I started to go, why am I doing this, and how can I make it matter more? What can I trim out of my business and out of my life to just the stuff that matters? I focus on it more.
So people listening to this, no matter what phase you’re in, just recognize that we all go through phases. If your back is against the wall, you’re in the phase where you’ve got to survive. And that’s awesome, that’s your motivation. Once you get some money in the bank account, that money means less and less and less, and sometimes it can be demotivating. At least it was for me.
Mike: Yeah. The interesting thing is it doesn’t – what we’re saying here, I think you’ll agree with me here – it doesn’t mean, well, don’t be so worried about making money that you make less and just accept the fact, it’s that if you can have a mindshift to how you can help more people, or build a team – there’s a lot of different things you could do – to enable others to win, then you can win in the process, right?
Trevor: Exactly. I’m probably going to butcher the quote, Mike, but I heard a quote from someone several years ago, and it really stuck with me. I think a lot of people have a little bit of a mindset lack as far as wealth comes in. We’ve all heard the phrases, you know, money is evil and money is the root of all evil and all that kind of stuff, but there’s a different mindset shift of rather than us going after money for the sake of going after money and money being evil and those who are trying to be wealthy are trying to be evil or whatever it is, the mindset shift is broke people have a really tough time helping a lot of people, right? So if you’re broke, the influence you can have, the impact you can have on more people is not going to be as much as someone who has money. It’s inherent that if you have a bunch of money, you tend to have more pull and tend to have more opportunities for helping people.
So the more money that we can make, the more opportunity for helping more people in a bigger scale is possible. If you look at guys like Bill Gates, you know, if he was broke, there’s no way he could ever say I’m going to cure malaria. He can cure a disease single-handedly with the wealth he’s created because of that wealth, and wealth can be used in a good way, for sure.
Mike: Right. Awesome. I know that you’re in one of those cycles at least, and probably a change in your life to where you understand the power of enabling entrepreneurs and helping other people build their businesses. And really, just to kind of feed to exactly what you just said, I know that probably deep down, you feel like one, you’re adding value to them and their businesses and people that they employ and making money that they can go do good things with, and in exchange for doing that, your businesses are making money as well.
Trevor: Yeah, totally. It’s kind of going back to our core values at Carrot. We’ve got a bunch of core values that are really – they speak to what we live at and also how our business is. Every single thing that we focus on in business, no matter if it’s Carrot or my other companies, it’s always looking at how we can help that person reach their benefit first?
It’s so much more fun to do business that way, too, because if you’re always chasing that dollar, chasing that deal, chasing that new customer and not focusing on the fun part, which is how do I make that person insanely happy and help them move the needle on their life, if you’re not doing that, business gets really boring. It really wears you down.
So that’s the way that – I think everyone should try to mix in some things into their business. Even if you’re trying to get those deals to make ends meet, how can you make a part of that deal you did make a bigger difference for someone’s life?
Mike: And I think even as a business owner myself, for years, my primary business has been buying and selling houses, and without getting into a lot of details here, we’re launching the new FlipNerd.com in the months to come, and we started to add employees. Historically, it was always about I’m trying to do deals so I can make money because I need to – usually it was because I needed to feed the monster, right? I need to rinse and repeat and do it again.
But our employees – I say right or wrong; really, in many ways, it was wrong – but for years, they were employees, and my wife and I are trying to do deals and make money from it. You know, we donated a lot of money; there’s a lot of things that we do for other people, but not necessarily for the people in our office.
I guess what I’m saying is there wasn’t a common charge to we’re going to go make a difference here, and we are doing that with FlipNerd. I mean, we’re trying to do many of the same things you do; enable real estate investors to change their lives for their families and their communities and things like that. It makes it a lot more fun.
Trevor: What you said right there, that’s a big, big thing that I want to kind of pull out there again, because I think a lot of people probably on this call maybe did what I did at the start and I’m still trying to get over is when you’re an entrepreneur just getting things going, especially when you’re learning online, you know, learning from the gurus out there, especially from the online marketers, or – and I’m not saying there’s anything bad about it, it’s just a different way to run your company – is I was always taught that employees equals bad because it’s responsibility; it’s payroll. Every training I ever went through was like, avoid employees because they’re a pain in the ass, right? And always said outsource; use just VAs. Another thing that I totally bought into at the start, which I think is personal preference, once again, is work out of your home; you don’t need an office, an office ties you down, all that kind of stuff.
And for me, anyway, when I started my companies working out of the home exclusively and with that mindset going on; I’m going to do everything I can to not hire people and I’m going to get these virtual assistants; I don’t even want to take on business it if requires me to hire people, it was miserable for me. And once I made a mindset shift to go, you know what, I’ve seen companies where they have happy employees. I’ve seen companies where they love their employees, and their employees are awesome people and they’re not just being a pain, or they’re not perceived as being a pain.
And I made that shift, and I go, if they can do it, it means it’s possible to grow a company with awesome people that is fun, and that’s what I chose to do. I also chose, hey, I don’t want to work out of an office every day, but I don’t want to work out of my home every day, either. I want to work around people. So I went and got an office, but I work out of the office two-and-a-half, three days a week, Starbucks or a coffee shop half a day maybe a week, and then I work at home a little bit.
So that to me was a big mindset shift, not totally buying into all the conventional wisdom and lure of the work-at-home type business. Find out what works for you, and just make the mindset shift that great people, if you get great people, they can add to your happiness, add to your wealth, without adding to your burden.
Mike: No doubt about it. I think one of the challenges, especially for real estate investors and probably all small entrepreneurs, or at least that start small, especially real estate investors, is this is a feast or famine business usually. And so even when people do really well, they’re always worried about the famine, so they try to keep things lean. And they’ve seen people in the markets that we’ve seen over the past 10 years get wiped out from going too big, if you will. And so it’s almost like real estate investors – so some of the old sages that have been real estate investing for decades know this, but for guys like me and you that have been through maybe a couple of cycles now, it’s almost like you’ve been through the Depression now and you’ve got this – it’s easy to get this Depression-era mentality of how you either need to keep it lean and mean or, you know, go big, but always be worried about are you going too big.
Trevor: One thing that kind of helped me with it – and this is one of my biggest growth periods right now – is team building and actually being a leader. I’m really good at creating income streams, which I didn’t realize until this year that creating an income stream and creating a business are two totally different things. I thought that they were one in the same.
I got really great at creating income streams. Like, a spin was up, money was coming in, but when it came time for me to step back and not do all the work and actually grow the company, then it came to, okay, I’ve got to get great people in here. Now I actually have to manage them and I have to build a company with processes and systems. And it sounds complicated, but I found that it was a lot more complicated when I was the only guy in the middle doing all the work.
And now it’s great, and we have a good small team. I don’t want to overwhelm people thinking you’ve got to have a big team. I’ve got a good small team. It’s great people, and that’s just one mindset shift; one team you got to make. It’s like, okay, we can build a small team; we can make it work. And every single person I hire I make sure that – even if it’s a virtual assistant, I go, okay, how can I fit something in their job role that produces revenue? Even if it’s just like an admin type role.
As an example, my personal assistant, I go, okay, just the way my mindset works, I hate having expenses, right? And if I can make an expense turn into revenue, I’m like, okay, let’s do this. So about five hours a week maybe max of her time is doing this one thing that I stopped doing because I didn’t have time to do. But it brought in about $1,500 to $2,000 a month in revenue. And I wrote up a process and I’m like, alright, Jen, so you continue to do all the other stuff in the business, but let’s carve out five hours a week to do this. And now that pays for a huge chunk of her salary.
So if you’re bringing on an expense, figure out how to make that expense or something related to it actually bring in money to offset it.
Mike: So talk a little bit about, while we’re kind of on the topic in terms of employees, building a team out. This is true even for an individual real estate investor that’s hiring contractors and things like that, how do you inspire people? Give some kind of words of wisdom here on inspiring others to meet some common objective that they normally, for them, it would just be a job, which you and I both know whenever you have an employee that just sees their – the opportunity provided to them as a job, that’s not going to end well one way or the other, but how do you inspire people within your organization to have a common goal that you’re all out there trying to achieve, which is helping other people?
Trevor: Yeah, totally, Mike. So being honest, that’s something I’m still learning.
Mike: I’m going to write down your words of wisdom here. I’m actually recording this, as you know.
Trevor: I love it. So I’m going to pass along the things that have worked for me this past year, because we’ve seen our biggest growth this past year, and the things that have not. I wrote a blog post on it this last week; I need to publish it, but the things that work the best around that are number one, I really discounted the value of vision. And that’s something that everyone has heard of; you need to have a vision, especially if you have a team member or team members that they know what your vision is.
I had this vision in my mind where we were going to take our company, and I had told people about it, and I even put it in our project management system somewhere, but I didn’t make it a consistent effort to make sure that everyone knew exactly where we were going, to really be preaching that vision, that mission all the time. I just inherently thought, well, I told it to them once, and I just assumed that that’s going to be locked into their mind like it is in mine. And it’s really easy as the entrepreneur for us to – we’re excited about our vision, we’re excited about our idea, or at least hopefully we are. We should know where we’re going. If you don’t know where you’re going, that’s step one. There’s no way we can inspire a team to do great things and to actually help us in business unless we know where we’re going; unless we know where the company is going. So that’s step one.
Step Two is you can’t just write it down and give it to your team members and hope that they’re going to remember it. You can’t just write it down and put it somewhere and hope that your team members are going to be motivated daily about this mission and vision, because they’re not wired the same way that we are. Some of them love their job and they’re great at it, but they want to come and get their check. They’re not an entrepreneur. They’re working their 40 hours a week.
This last month or two – we have a three-month old, and we’re wrapping up the end of the year stuff, and it’s been really busy. I’ve been working a lot more than I wanted to. And going into the last quarter of this last year, I realized that we went off track a little bit as a team in the middle of the year, and it was because I hadn’t consistently preached that vision and mission every single week, every single day. I hadn’t given them concrete ways to show that we’re getting closer to that mission and vision or that we’re having wins. So that’s another big thing is make sure you build into your culture a really simple mechanism for every team member to share the wins that are happening every single day.
Mike: That’s great.
Trevor: Because with our company, it’s a technology company, so our programmers, they’re not talking to the customers. They’re not the ones who are interacting with the customers on a daily basis and seeing the great stuff that’s happening. I am. You know, we’re on our Mastermind calls with our customers every week, and I see people saying, hey, I got my first online lead; I’m talking to my first seller today, or, I did my 50th deal with Carrot this past year, I did it this week.
I see that stuff every day, so that jazzes me up. I’m like, that’s why we’re doing this, so our customers can be free of the technology issues so that they can do more of what makes their heart sing and they’re making more money.
So what we did is we created a simple thing with free software that you can get called Slack.
Mike: Yeah, Slack is great.
Trevor: So we use Slack. We set up a room in there called the Thread of Awesomeness, and anything great that happens for our team, we put them in there. Any great comment that happens from a customer, it immediately goes in there. The whole team sees the Thread of Awesomeness, and we celebrate it.
So those two things are things that you have to be really consistent with. Having a vision, a very clear vision. Making sure it’s in front of people all the time so everyone knows where we’re going, because if you’re on a ship where you don’t know where it’s going, it’s really tough to know where to put the sail. Everyone is like throwing rows everywhere and putting sails randomly, because they know we’re going somewhere, but they don’t know where. And then make sure you celebrate those wins, which I’m going to do a lot better job of that this next year.
And on a quarterly basis, this is working, making sure that we’re looking at that vision and not just going here’s where we want to be in two years, or here’s where we want to be in a year, it’s going, here’s where we want to be, but what’s it going to take every quarter to get there? And we set a goal and a plan for each quarter, work it back, goal and plan for each month.
We just did our marketing call today. It was 45 minutes to plan out most of this next year. We’ll have another 45 minute call next week, and then we’re done doing our planning for next year. So it doesn’t have to take a lot of time.
Mike: That’s interesting that you say that. This is a little bit off-center here, but a lot of real estate investors get really hung up on marketing. You can pretty much define at the beginning of the year, especially if it’s direct mail, what you’re going to do for the year and be done with it instead of trying to rehash that every single time. You could say that for all businesses, right?
Trevor: Exactly. That’s the big thing. Like you mentioned, if you know you’re already good at direct mail or you know that direct mail works and you’re going to become good at it this next year – one the biggest mistakes we see Carrot members make, and myself included, is you know that there’s 400 ways to market. I could do direct mail, I get my web site ranked on Google, I could do pay-per-click, I could do bandit signs, I could do billboards, whatever, and people get caught up in the fact thinking I’ve got to do it all, or I’ve got to four of these things this year. But if you can pick one thing and make that one thing work, get it repeatable, so it’s rinse and repeat.
It’s really good with online stuff, because if you work hard to get your web site ranked well on Google for a phrase like ‘Sell my house fast Houston’ or whatever it is, your site is going to be there for a while. You might need to do a little bit of work to get it to stay up there, but that’s rinse and repeat. You get it ranked, then you’re going to get leads coming in.
Once that happens, you go, okay, now what other marketing tactic can I tackle? Now let me go stack direct mail on top of this, or let me stack pay-per-click on top of this. So pick one thing that you know you can make work, make it work, get it repeatable, and then stack something else on after that. Don’t try to do them all at once.
Mike: So we talked a little bit about how running your business and thinking of other successes and trying to make other people successful kind of comes back to you and your team ultimately. Tell me a little bit about how those customers feel that, like, how they know that you’re trying to help them and you’re not just a service provider that there’s a million of online? Without going out and saying, tell me how great I am, you know? I mean, how do you make people just – you and I both have some services; there’s some tools out there, even like Slack, but you’re like, this is just freaking awesome. Like, who doesn’t love this? How do you get people to feel that way about you and your business?
Trevor: I mean, that’s a good question. I guess number one for me and for us, I kind of have that in my core. Now that I’ve got some money in the bank account, like, that’s what makes me happy, that’s what jazzes me up is getting those reactions from customers.
But also, if you look at from the financial return side of it rather than the quick hit, okay, we got a customer, we did a deal, and then I’m going on to the next one because I’ve got that one already, thinking of every single customer interaction, every single customer you get as a part of a chain. It’s not an individual link, it’s just a part of a chain.
And what experience this customer has here, I feel directly relates to the experience that the deal 20 down the chain has. And even if it’s a very inconsequential small deal, making the experience of that customer really, really good, like having them walk away and actually smile from a transaction that they normally wouldn’t smile from that type of transaction.
But also not being afraid to make sure that you’re asking customers the right questions to get them to relay what they feel to you, good or bad. So yeah, it’s really at your core of knowing that you’re not just there to make money, you’re trying to improve people’s lives and make them happy and joyful and have a better day today than they did yesterday.
Another thing is actually being available, but available in a different way. They way that I was always available in the past was if someone reached out to me on email or in a phone call, I’d hop on the phone with them, I’d answer their email back, and they’d ask a question and I would answer their question based on the way that they asked it, which is obvious, right? And that would eat up a lot of time because what would happen is I would be answering questions and I’d be giving them options, not answers.
I heard this actually from WordPress; the guys who developed WordPress. My programmer, he’s just a really good programmer, and he goes to all these Word Press deals, and he said that WordPress’s new mantra is ‘decisions, not choices’. Because in the past, they would give you so many different choices, like, hey, you can do anything and everything with this. Some real estate investors do the same thing. Hey, I can do your deal in 20 different ways; just pick one of these choices.
Instead of going in and going, you know what, there are 20 different ways to do it, but these two ways are really the ones that you should really do. I’m going to make a decision for you. And once I started doing that, the customer experience went way up because I wasn’t answering the question the way that they wanted it to be answered. I said, you know what, that’s the wrong question to ask in the first place. Here’s what you really need to be asking, and here’s what you really should be doing. That whole string of questions and that thought process you were going on before, get rid of it, because it’s not serving you.
That has been a really big deal when we’re on our Mastermind calls or talking with customers. They appreciate it, going, you know what, it’s refreshing not having someone BS you and just answer something just to answer it, or be totally truthful with you and when you’re being stupid and you ask a stupid question or you’re going along a path that isn’t going to lead you toward success, I think we as customers, we need to be calling our customers on it in a good way. We as entrepreneurs need to be calling our customers on that in a good, empowering way. And that’s great.
Mike: You said something that kind of made me thing of in the real estate investing space, because obviously, most people listening to this are also real estate investors, we’ve bought hundreds of deals, and I will say that for the most part, up until fairly recently, most real estate investors are transaction oriented. You’re probably never going to buy another house from that person again. When we sell houses, we’re probably never going to sell another house to that person again, unless it’s a wholesaler. But even then, if you’re in a big market, I mean, there’s such a huge pool of investors you sell to that it’s easy to get transaction oriented.
But you’ve had some people on the show talking about your personal brand and things like that about not just the brand of your company, but what is it that you stand for, and that gets around. So what you made me think of a second ago is how there are some houses we bought in the past that were referrals from people that we bought other houses from. They were church friends, and they said, well, you really need to work with these people. And when it happens, and you haven’t fostered that, it’s like, how many more houses could we have bought if we didn’t just sell – we didn’t buy that person’s house and close the book on them and never talk to them again, and we went back to them and said, can you tell me how we could improve next time, or thank you, just simply thanking them. Not that you have to do anything elaborate, but a just a simple thanks sometimes. And then just to remind them, hey, if you know anybody else that I can help, can you please give them my contact information? And over time, that stuff is huge.
Trevor: It’s way bigger, honestly, than I predicted, especially with Carrot. With Investor Carrot, when we went to create this company, the core of our product, of course, is not anything revolutionary. It’s web sites, right? But the way that we started growing fast at the beginning – we haven’t done any paid advertising really, we haven’t done the big old JV circuit or anything, but the way that we grew, I didn’t discover the way that we were growing that fast until I talked to one of our main customers. Like, if you picture the ideal customer for your business, have some sort of an avatar, like a visual for them – I always like to do this exercise.
If you’ve done deals, or if you have a company, think of your top two or three customers that you’re like, man, that person right there, I would hang out and have a beer with them; they’re just fun, but they also implement my product the way it should be done, and they’re just great to work with. Picture that person. I hopped on the phone with some of them about six months into the business, and he said, you know what, I love what you guys have. I love the product, I love the software, but the reason I keep on spreading the word about what you guys are doing, and all I tell people when I’m talking with them and this gets them to sign up, they didn’t even look at the software, is I say, they have the best customer service I’ve ever experienced, and here’s why. And he’s sharing some experiences that he’s had with us.
He said people are signing up because of that. Like, not even knowing exactly how our software works and all this kind of stuff, they just go, you know what, I want to work with a company that is going to put that effort out to make sure I’m having a good experience. And if they’re doing it now, just wait until the product gets even better and better.
And that’s been one of the biggest ways that we’re growing people. Every week, they pop through and say to give Jake, our tech support dude on live chat, a kiss. That’s what we want. We want our customers to be virtually kissing our team members because they’re doing such great work. Not just saying thank you.
Mike: Well, Trevor, we’re running out of time here, unfortunately. I wanted to see if you could share a couple of things. First off, maybe share how folks can learn more about Carrot. Maybe just tell everybody what it is, if they don’t know, and how they can learn more about a number of the projects you’re working on.
And then also maybe just follow it up with some kind of words of advice as we go into the new year for how to basically help achieve your goals – kind of the topic of the day – help achieve your goals by inspiring and helping others.
Trevor: So, our company is Investor Carrot. You can Google us, Investor Carrot, and find us there on Google or go to Oncarrot.com. What we focus on, just for those of you who don’t know, is we are the most effective inbound online marketing platform for investors. So you can spin up web sites really fast. We have automation built in place to make it easier for you to rank them in Google. They convert really, really well, and we’re continually monitoring our data to make sure they convert even better, which no one in the industry is doing to the level that we’re doing.
We’ve got epic support. That’s the part that we’re the most proud of that nowhere else in the industry can you not just get something that works really well to get your web sites and get leads for sellers, buyers, rent-to-own, but you’re not going to be alone, and it’s not going to be where you just send an email to support and get a reply back. We have all kinds of tools, access training and personal access to me on a weekly basis that helps you get results. That’s what we’re happy about.
As far as how to help people in this new year be more successful in your business and in your life by inspiring others, first of all, kind of peeling back – and I’m just going to share it really quickly -you’ve got to be inspired yourself before that can even happen, right? So it’s kind of like when you’re on an airplane and they say, if the oxygen mask comes down, you’ve got to put it on yourself first, and then handle your kids or handle someone else next to you.
If you’re not mentally improving yourself all the time – and we all have to do it. I know you’re probably mentally improving yourself all the time reading books or listening to podcasts that help you get mentally in the game. We go through these phases. No matter how successful you are, I’ve gone through phases where I’m just in a trough, like mentally, and I’ve got to come back out of it. When I’m in a trough, I’m not very inspiring at all.
And I try to keep those troughs as high as possible and not as often. But you have to inspire yourself. Listen to more podcasts like this. Go read books that help you mentally think about where you’re going in life, mentally think about impacts you can make, changes you can make, things like that.
Then number two is go out and create your own little community. It doesn’t have to be anything big. With our local young entrepreneur group here in small Roseburg, Oregon, where we’ve really had a big impact for rural entrepreneurship, all around Oregon, people are looking at Roseburg now because of the efforts that we’ve done here in the last two years.
We started with two people, and it’s grown to 180 people over 4 years. All because we started with two people and were saying, hey, here’s what we want in life, here’s what we’re passionate about, improving everyone’s lives in this community based on entrepreneurship. Go out there and create a small group. Like I said, it could be you and one other person get together on a monthly basis and grab a beer and just talk about life and entrepreneurship. And then you guys invite a couple people, and then it’s 4, then it’s 8, then it’s 10, and now you guys are making a big, big impact on yourselves and others, just by starting small. Get around a person or two that think the same way as you do who think positively and connect with each other on a monthly basis at least about what you’re doing in life and business.
Mike: That’s great. That’s a great piece of advice, because we talked about this a little bit earlier, especially real estate investors, but a lot of entrepreneurs, you kind of have your head down and you get blinded to what’s going on, and in fact, many ways by meeting with people, it forces you to be held accountable.
A lot of times, people will start to kind of waver from what their goal is because it got too hard. And you might run over the finish line, but is that really the finish line you wanted to run over? And if you’re not held accountable and you didn’t kind of surround yourself with other people that push you and challenge you, you’re probably not going to be quite as successful.
Trevor: Exactly. Love it.
Mike: Well, Trevor, thanks so much for your time today. I definitely appreciate it, and I look forward to talking to you again soon, my friend.
Trevor: Likewise, man. I appreciate it, Mike. Thanks for the invite.
Mike: Yeah. Have great day.
Trevor: You, too.
Mike: Thanks for joining us on today’s FlipNerd.com podcast. To listen to more of our shows and hear from incredible guests, please access all of our podcasts in the iTunes store. You can also watch the video versions of our shows by visiting us at FlipNerd.com.