Show Summary
Welcome to the FlipNerd.com Expert Interview Show Top 10 series, where we share our top 10 shows from 2017. In this episode, my pay Brad Chandler shares how he went from deep in debt to doing over 2,000 deals in the Washington DC market. Brad shares how he went from hand writing letters himself to building one of the nation’s largest home buying machines, and Brad’s willingness to share critical details to you has won this episode a spot in the FlipNerd.com top 10 shows for 2017.
Highlights of this show
- Meet Brad Chandler: Dominant investor with over 2,200 deals under his belt!
- Learn the importance of seller lead generation, no matter what your budget.
- Join the conversation on the importance of having the right follow up systems in place to maximize your advertising dollars.
- Listen as Brad shares his advice on the importance of marketing consistency in your lead generation efforts.
Resources and Links from this show:
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
FlipNerd Show Transcript:
Mike: This is the flipnerd.com Expert Real Estate Investing Show, the show for real estate investors whether you’re a veteran or brand-new. I’m your host, Mike Hambright, and each week I bring you a new expert guest that will share their knowledge and lessons with you. If you’re excited about real estate investing, believe in personal responsibility, and taking control of your life and financial destiny, you’re in the right place.
This is episode number 355 and my friend, Brad Chandler, joins us today. Brad is a beast and shares how he started by handwriting letters himself and by using magnets on his car while he was $80,000 in debt, starting with nothing and grew his business to having done over $2,200 deals in the greater Washington, D.C. market.
Today we talk all about marketing and follow-up, which are absolutely critical to your success as a real estate investor. Whether you’re starting with a beer or a champagne budget, you do not want to miss today’s show. There’s a ton of great lessons and nuggets in here. Please help me welcome Brad Chandler to the show.
Brad, welcome to the show, my friend.
Brad: Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. And by the way, I do not see many gray hairs, at least not as many as I see on my head.
Mike: Well, I try to keep it tight now. I get it cut every couple weeks so you can’t notice it. It’s funny because you have kids, of course our kids have met before, so you have kids about the same age as . . . my son is about to turn 10 and they just have no filter on what they say. This is a couple months back, my son said, “Dad, when you turn your head that way, I can’t see any of the gray hairs.” I was like, “Okay. Thanks.”
But, hey, I like to think that it is a sign of maturity and wisdom so that’s how we’re going to leave it.
Brad: I hear the ladies like it, so we’ll go with that.
Mike: Yeah. Awesome. Brad, I’m excited to talk, we’re going to talk about marketing and we’re going to talk about follow-up today, two things that I was going to say are near and dear to my heart and near and dear to yours. They should be near and dear to everybody’s heart that’s a real estate investor because they’re critical. So it’s going to be a great topic and I know you’ve got a ton of experience.
And speaking of which, maybe we could start off by you just telling us your background and how you got started in real estate investing and a little bit more about your business because I don’t know many people that are doing as many deals as you guys, especially in a high dollar area market. So maybe tell us a little bit more about you.
Brad: Yeah. So I read a book in 9th grade on how to buy real estate with no money down. Always knew I wanted to do real estate investing. Went to college, worked for a developer, and ended up getting my MBA in real estate. People always ask me, “Did that really help you?” And honestly, it didn’t really help me for this type of business.
So an investor bought my neighbor’s house in late 2002 and I went and talked to him and I go, “What do you do?” He goes, “Well, I buy houses well below market and I fix them up and resell them.” I go, geez, I’ve got two degrees in real estate, had no idea that you could buy a house at such deep discounts. I thought you got rich in real estate by putting down 20% and letting the house appreciate, pay them off and sell them 30 years later and you’re rich. So I was like, “Wow, that’s what I’m going to do.”
So that was December 2002. I decide that’s how I’m going to make this business work. Had a full-time job. My son was just born. I’d come home and put him to bed at 8:00, work 8:00 to midnight, work weekends, and it took me until July just working my heinie off to get my first deal.
Every week that went by, I got more and more perseverance, saying, “I’m not going to quit.” So I got six deals in July and August, quit my full time job in October of 2003 and here we are somewhere around 2,200 deals later.
Mike: That’s incredible. That’s incredible. So your company is Express Homebuyers, which if you’re on the East Coast, certainly in the Washington, D.C. area, I’m sure people have seen your commercials. So talk about how you went from a one-man shop, maybe just take a minute to, I mean, you have a fairly large company now to help enable you to do all those deals. But maybe just share the elevator pitch side of kind of how you grew that.
Brad: Sure. I think if you count our full time VAs, we’re over 30 people now. So we have grown. When I started out, I did have the vision of doing TV advertising, and that’s kind of been our bread and butter, but we’ll get into that more in a little bit.
So what I did is I read this book, Michael Gerber’s book called “E-Myth,” which if you haven’t read and you want to build a business, it’s a must read. It teaches you about how to systematize your business. So literally almost from day one, I started making checklists and flow charts and actually documenting the process so that when I needed to hire . . . at the beginning it was my partner and myself and we were doing everything. I came in one day, I was like, “This is really stupid. Why are we doing this? Let me focus on this area of the business, you focus on that area of the business.”
And then we did that for a couple months and we’re like, “Wow, now we really need to hire the next person.” So I think the first hire was an admin, which I think is logical for most . . . whether you’re a realtor or an investor, it’s usually good to get an admin so you can get rid of some of those $10-15 an hour jobs that you’re doing. And then it just went position to position. The next one was we got an acquisition person and we got a couple of acquisition people. And then we got an acquisition manager. And we slowly just built up our staff to where we are today, using systems all along the way.
We still have systems. We’re still creating systems. We’re still tweaking systems, but that’s how you scale a business is just a day at a time, just building, building, like building a house.
Mike: Yeah. And I know we’ve talked about this in the past before, we’re the same way. In fact, my group coaching program, we call it The Investor Machine because we talk about building systems and processes because it’s the only way you can grow. As you know, a lot of real estate investors and maybe these people that are listening to the show right now, if you’ve started at all, it’s real easy to get yourself trapped at, like, the one and two deal once in a while area, which is just a job, right? You can’t get past that without more people and more systems. I mean, you’d agree with that, right?
Brad: Absolutely, absolutely.
Mike: Yeah. It’s a chicken and egg, right? You want to grow, you see yourself growing, but you can’t really afford it and you just have to make some . . . you just have to bet on yourself is kind of what I say.
Brad: Well, and if you set the systems up properly to begin with, even if you are a one-man show, that means you’re probably going to have more success than the next person. And that success will hopefully equate into dollars and those dollars will allow you to reinvest back in personnel to further grow your company. Right?
Mike: Right. So let’s continue talking about systems. So specifically we’re going to talk about marketing and lead generation. You guys are dominant in your market, the most dominant player. But I know that you wanted to start by talking about the importance of follow-up, right? And that’s kind of counterintuitive to maybe somebody that doesn’t have a lot of experience but you and I both know the money is in the follow-up.
And I think where we’re going to go here is by saying if you spend a bunch of money on marketing and you don’t have follow-up systems in place, then you’re just completely wasting your marketing budget. I don’t want to steal your thunder, though. Why don’t we kind of dive into the importance of kind of follow-up systems?
Brad: Yeah. So a year and a half ago I started a meetup group and my first presentation was how to find motivated sellers on a beer budget. And the next meetup was how to find them if you had a champagne budget. And after that was done, I was, like, “You know, that was dumb of me.” If I could do this over again, I should have started with follow-up systems as being the number one. So it happened to be the third.
But looking back now, there’s no investor that should be spending a dollar in marketing, a dime, a penny, whatever you want to say, until you have a kickass follow-up system. And what does that mean? That means that you have a CRM and there are countless ones now where you can come into the office and you know on a given day who you have to call. Is it sending automated text? Is it sending automated emails?
And there’s InvestorFuse, there’s Podio. You can create it yourself. There’s Zoho, there’s SugarCRM. You can get technology now from $20-100 a month, $200 a month, where 20 years ago even, it could have cost you $50,000-100,000 to have this technology. This is the greatest time in the world to start and grow a business because of these technology calls. So get your follow-up system setup and you could lock yourself in a room on a weekend, you go get Sugar or Zoho CRM for $20 a month and you can create a series of 10, 20 follow-up emails, text. Set up the campaign so that when a lead comes in the system, you know how many times it’s going to be touched.
So when a lead comes in our system, we touch them 15 times in the first four days. And that’s a combination of phone calls, voicemail, text messages, and emails. Again, you guys can do the same thing without going out and saying, “I’ve got to spend $50,000 on a system.” So get that setup before you send out one postcard, put one bandit sign, do anything. You’ve got to have that follow-up system because you’re going to be wasting money.
I guarantee you, over the years, because we weren’t always good at follow-up, we didn’t lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. I bet you we lost close to a million dollars in having crappy follow-up systems. So it wasn’t until five years ago where we switched that and now we are just amazing. We closed 10 deals in 2016 just from calling back missed phone calls.
Mike: That’s awesome. And, Brad, when you say you touch them 15 times, let’s dig in a little bit, 15 times in the first four days. I assume that means if you haven’t made contact, your systems just continue to reach out to them and try to reengage them, right? But you have a different system if you do touch them, then there’s a different follow-up sequence I assume, right?
Brad: Absolutely. So we have “new lead,” we have “no answer,” we have “never contacted.” We have “appointment,” “nurture.” So we probably have about eight different campaigns, absolutely. So if we reach them, obviously we’re not just going to keep hounding them, they go into another system. Have we made them an offer? If we’ve made them an offer, have we sent them the contract? Have we met them in person?
We’re going to touch everyone. Everyone in our system gets touched at least on a 30 day basis whether we’ve made contact or whether we’ve not made contact, and that goes on forever until they sell their house or they tell us, “Buzz off,” and sometimes they tell us that, we might call them back in a couple months.
Mike: Yeah. I’ve kind of said this a few times on the show before. We bought a house last year that we had made our initial offer 54 months earlier. We followed up with them, like you said. All of our leads ultimately get to a point to where every 30 days is our kind of . . . we follow-up every 30 days.
For every house we buy, I always go back and look at the notes because I know . . . a lot of times it’s not a new lead. That’s why we’re talking about what we’re talking about. On this one, they literally . . . the number was disconnected several times throughout those years. They said they weren’t going to sell it. They said they rented it out. But the one thing that they never told us is stop calling. So we just kept on and then eventually they said, “Is your offer still good?” And that’s what we’re talking about here, right?
Brad: Well, you love to hear . . . after 54 months, if someone comes back and says, “Is your offer still good?” you’re like, “Hell, yeah.”
Mike: We actually bought it for less than our offer 54 months earlier.
Brad: Wow. Good job.
Mike: Yeah. But yeah, that’s what we’re talking about, right? So maybe share a little bit why this . . . one thing is it’s important is you’ve spent the money and the follow-up part is much, much cheaper than generating a new lead, working with what you already have. But maybe share a couple minutes of your thoughts on just the psychology of a seller and the fact that a lot of the distressed sellers that we talk to or work with are . . . maybe they’re often in denial and then sometimes their situation, whatever the situation they called us in the first place tends to get worse sometimes. Can you share your thoughts on that?
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Maybe they’re often in denial and then sometimes their situation, whatever the situation they called us in the first place, tends to get worse sometimes. Can you share your thoughts on that?
Brad: Yeah. So when foreclosures were more prevalent, I can’t tell you the number of people that we got calls from that were 48 hours away from foreclosure. The fastest house we ever bought was . . . I’ve lost track. It’s probably four or five years ago. A guy called us, he was disabled, hadn’t made mortgage payments, I think, in like three years. So I don’t even know how he was still in the house. It was a Virginia property, which is unusual. And from the time he called us to the time we closed was, like, 22 hours and we saved him from foreclosure.
So yeah, a lot of our deals and a lot of everyone’s deals in this space are very hairy. What do I mean by “hairy?” There are multiple heirs or the person has drug issues, alcohol issues, they’ve got family members in prison. So it’s not your typical seller that just is getting a job transfer or moving up in houses. But yeah, there’s a lot of hair on these deals and oftentimes situations get worse. Oftentimes they look at the offer originally and they’re like, “No way, I’ll get more money.” But then nothing is done, life goes on, life gets more complicated. So you always want to be there.
What I say all the time is get them a letter, get them a postcard. If you make them an offer, extend the offer in a big, yellow, bright envelope that they’re likely not going to through away. They come home one day and their car breaks down and they see your letter, your big, yellow envelope on the table when they walk through the door and they’re like, “You know what? I just can’t do this anymore. This house is killing me.”
These houses typically aren’t assets for these people. They’re really liabilities because they’re just dragging them down and we, as investors, in times helped them out of terrible situations and allow them to get a fresh start in their life and move on.
Mike: Yep. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, let’s talk a little bit about marketing. I know we’re going to talk a little bit about how to get started if you have a beer budget and then how you grow from there as your budget expands. So let’s talk about beer budgets. Where do you get started?
Brad: Beer budgets, let’s go back to when I started. When I first decided to start in late 2002, I had a whopping net worth of, drum roll, please, negative $80,000. I had a newborn son. My wife quit her job to take care of my son. So didn’t have a lot of money coming in. I had a job but I wasn’t making a lot of money.
So what did I do? I bought a bunch of bandit signs. When the D.C. Sniper was out picking off people, I was dodging him, putting up bandit signs at 11:00 in all black on telephone poles on the sides of streets, everywhere. I’d even go on the interstate sometimes and put them, like, under the underpasses. I got calls from that, of course, but it didn’t cost me much.
So I did that, I drove around with these enormous “We Buy Houses” magnets on my car that said, “We Buy Houses” and then a phone number. Those six deals that I mentioned, three of them . . . of my first six deals in those two months, three of them were from one person who saw myself, I put them on my ex-wife now, my wife’s car at the time and she was driving around, and he saw one of us and he called us. So if you’re serious about this business and you’re not doing bandit signs or you don’t have a sticker on your car, you may think it looks goofy, but I probably made $40,000 off of there. So would you drive around with a sign on your car that made you $40,000?
And then the third component was direct mail. So I would literally go onto the tax assessment website because I didn’t even know that lists existed at the time. I didn’t know that you could go buy a list of people with equity and, honestly, I didn’t even know if that did exist then. But anyway, so I would go in and I would look at tax assessment for people that were absentee owners, meaning that the mailing address did not match up with the property, which means they likely did not live there, it was a rental or they inherited it.
And I would hand address envelopes and I would do 300 of those on the weekend. I would do door hangers. I would drive for dollars. I would go to REIA meetings. Well, they didn’t have meetings back then. Network. Network, network, network. I got one of my first deals by being on a listserv. Most people probably don’t even know what that is now, but it was just a group list where we could post stuff. So those are things that really don’t cost a lot of money. It’s all about activity, activity, activity. Like Nike says, “Just do it.” Don’t sit around and study forever. You’ve got to get out there and take action.
Get out there and do it and then consistency. With any marketing, you’ve got to do it consistently. I have an interesting story on that note. In about 2004, my sister was a stay at home mom. She was hand addressing envelopes in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia because I was trying to get deals there. And I got a call one day, I live two hours from there. I got a call one day and a lady literally said to me, “I just got your sixth or seventh letter. I wasn’t planning on selling but since you keep sending me letters, I’ll sell my house.”
She had a tenant in the property, hence absentee owner. My sister was doing the same thing, pulling the tax records for absentee owners. I got the tenant out. I cleaned out the place, probably cost me $200 or $300. I listed it and I think I made $35,000, $40,000 on that deal.
Mike: Wow.
Brad: So consistency. Had we mailed one, two, three, four, five letters, no deal. I wouldn’t have made the $35,000. So when you’re doing direct mail, if your budget doesn’t allow for at least four to five mailings, don’t waste your time. So many people will mail one series and they’ll drop whatever, 2,000 postcards, 2,000 letters, “Hey, I didn’t get anything. That doesn’t work.” Well, it takes time, just like [inaudible 00:18:52] takes time.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I want to make clear here, because I know sometimes, Brad, when guys like you and me talk that have done lots of deals and people that are newer are listening, they tend to maybe get a little overwhelmed with, like, systems and having big budgets and you’re on TV and all these things. So one thing that I want to make clear to people is these things are all important and I’m not trying to take away from the importance of any of them.
I teach the same thing. Like, you need to have systems and processes in place. But you don’t need to have a Ferrari to haul manure, as I like to say. Don’t let the systems and some of this talk get in the way of you getting started and just taking action because I think today a lot of people hide behind systems, like, “Oh, I need to get this set up. I need to get that set up.” And the truth is you need to do all those things but you need to be generating leads and constantly taking action all along the way. You can’t just sit back until you get things set up. You need to be hustling and trying to find people to sell you houses along the way, right? You hear that, Brad, right?
Brad: So that’s an awesome point and let me go back and clarify because people could have misunderstood what I said. When I talked about I built systems from day one of my business, day one means October of 2003 when I actually quit my job. From November of 2002 until I got my first deal in July of 2003 and then I got six deals in July and August of that year, I didn’t have shit. I didn’t have anything. I was doing everything but I was doing it, I was taking action.
I didn’t go out and spend five years, like a lot of people do, educating themselves on it. I didn’t go out and worry about an LLC. I didn’t go out and worry about a corporate name and am I protected. I had nothing to protect. I had a negative $80,000 net worth.
What I did [inaudible 00:20:43] while others were going out and spending five years on education, forming their LLCs, we were doing deals. I went to a Robert Shemin conference one time in 2003 and I sat next to a lady at lunch that told me that she had been doing research and education for 18 years. And I thought to myself, if 18 years ago she would have bought a house and lost $10,000, she’d probably be a multimillionaire now. But she didn’t do it. What she was doing was is she was paralyzed by the fear of, “What am I going to do wrong?” instead of, “Let me just go do it.”
I’m glad you brought that up. That’s probably one of the best points you can make is just nothing has to be perfect. You don’t have to get overwhelmed and have all your systems. What you have to do is you need to get your phone ringing with motivated sellers. So whatever it takes to do that, do that, get some money and then you can start building on all the bells and whistles and the systems and hiring and blah, blah, blah.
Mike: Yeah, and those things become, like you said, more important when you start ramping up your budget, when you start going from a beer budget to, I guess, a champagne budget. So you’re best leads early on will be the ones you hustle for, the ones you’re handwriting letters, magnets on your car, all that stuff, because, one, they’re low cost, ultimately. Of course, you have more time on your hand so you can afford to spend your time that way.
But as you start to spend money by thousands or tens of thousands or more of letters and postcards a month, then you’ve got to have systems in place to kind of squeeze all the juice out of that fruit. You’d agree with that, right?
Brad: Absolutely, absolutely.
Mike: Yeah, awesome. Let’s talk about as you kind of grow, so like you talk about a lot of hustle tactics, finding investors, magnets on your car, handwriting letters to niche lists. But then as you start to grow, this is one of the challenges a lot of real estate investors face is after you hit a certain number of four, five, six different niche lists, then you’ve got to start going to the mass list which are more of like, kind of a high equity absentee owners. In a market like where you’re at in D.C. or Dallas, I mean, there’s seven and a half million people here. So the list just explodes, so your budget, you’ve got to figure out if your budget can explode or not.
But let’s talk about kind of moving from a beer budget to something bigger than that as you start to scale it and kind of how you did it and maybe how you do it differently, I guess.
Brad: So what we did is I started to, I guess in 2004, we started to put . . . I saw that the popularity of the internet was happening, and so we started putting more and more resources into the internet from an SEO perspective, which means “search engine optimization,” which means just ranking high in Google and the other search engines on a free basis. We started doing pay-per-click. I started really just trying to create a great website. And to this day, I think we have one of, if not the highest ranked website in the real estate investment space. And that took a long time.
So that was one of the things we did. We started TV from a very, very early on. I think we actually started TV advertising in 2003, right about when I quit my job. And then what I would have done differently, we were live on TV from 2003 to probably 2013 for 80% of our business, and that was crazy. It was expensive but it worked. It was expensive. However, we did a terrible job, like I said earlier, at follow-up is what I would have done differently.
And two is we would sit back and wait for the phone to ring and cherry pick these deals. We would literally, like, close deals on the phone. We wouldn’t even go out to the people unless we could get them to agree to this amazing price on the phone. That was a huge mistake. You need to, if you have a seller with equity and they’re motivated, you need to go out there and meet with them because the chances of you closing them is going to go through the roof if you’re in person. On the phone, they can hang up on you. They can’t hang up when you’re sitting across the table.
So that’s what I would have done differently. And then in 2014-ish, we introduced direct mail on a large scale. We started out, I think, doing 50,000 a month in postcards and now we’re doing, I think, over 200,000 postcards a month. So I would have done that differently. I thought that postcards . . . I just didn’t have a great strategy around postcards. I didn’t follow my own advice, my earlier advice about consistency.
What I did wrong is instead of doing consistency, I would do this massive drop and I would do it two times. And it wouldn’t work and I would say, “Okay, well, we can’t keep spending $20,000 a drop. What I should have done is I should have done a much smaller test with some different copy and then rolled that out over six months. So I was an idiot and I didn’t take my advice from early on where I saw that it worked and I tried to go big too fast. And when you go big too fast and you don’t have the budget, you can’t test.
So a great lesson for everyone listening is figure out what your . . . so if you have X amount of dollars to spend, make sure that you can spend those dollars over six months and then just back into, okay, a postcard’s going to cost me $0.40, $0.45, whatever the cost is to send it. Then figure out what’s the maximum number you can do. But make sure, again, that you can send out at least a minimum of four, five, six postcards to a given list over four to six months.
Mike: Yeah. What’s interesting is, and I know you’d agree with this, back to kind of systems and the importance of processes, it’s easier than ever right now to test stuff, right? I mean, if you use . . . I use CallRail. I don’t know if you use CallRail or a system like that. But a basic account, the entry level account on CallRail comes with 10 phone numbers and you can get additional numbers for, like, $2 or $3 a month.
So you could use different phone numbers for different pieces to track whether this postcard is working or this letter is working. But you could even . . . and I don’t do this but I know people that do, you could even use a different phone number for each drop so that you know, hey, the phone rings better after I’ve hit him four times. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways you can track things.
But, I mean, you’d agree, right now, if you went back even just three or four years, things were a lot harder to track, right?
Brad: Absolutely, absolutely. Not only that, and we do use call tracking and we probably have 100 800-numbers. There are websites for pennies that you can go put up three different copy and have 100 people go vote on it and say, “This is the one that I would call off of.” You can do split testing on Google pay-per-click with the headlines because the headline’s one of the most important things.
You can do split testing on Facebook, so yeah. I tell this to new students over and over and over again. We’re so fortunate, if you’re starting a business now, now to be starting a business, because of the tools and how effective they are and how cheap they are. So no one should have an excuse on why they can’t succeed. And given the fact that they have yourself and myself teaching them, like, we’ve proven it’s, like, all you have to do is just listen to what we say and you will be successful.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Awesome.
Brad: Just follow, get the playbook, the [inaudible 00:28:01], and just do exactly what they say and you’ll be successful. For one reason or another, people sometimes don’t do that.
Mike: Yeah. Well, I think some of the challenges and, you know, there’s so many people teaching things or, truthfully, there’s so many ways to . . . I’m not saying the ways aren’t legitimate but there’s so many ways to make money in real estate. I mean, I have shiny object syndrome and due to this show, show number 355, almost every person I’ve talked to . . . you know, when I talk to guys like Jack Bosch I get excited about land. When I talk to guys like Corey Peterson, I’m like, “Man, I really should be investing in multifamily.
It’s easy to get caught up on those things but I guess you either have to have personal restraint or you have to have a spouse that’s knocking you on the head, saying “no” or whatever, or a partner, right? A partner that can say, “Wow, that is interesting, but we’re not going to do that right now.” So you’ve got to have some checks and balances in there. Otherwise, it’s easy to go AWOL in this business.
Brad: It really is, and that point cannot be taken lightly because I’ve gone down that path and literally lost millions of dollars on stuff that we shouldn’t have been doing. So as you guys become successful, don’t think that the grass is greener and jump to something else. If you’re making money with what you’re doing, stick to what you’re doing and just scale it. Don’t try to go do five other things or you hear some seminar and say, “Oh, there’s a lot of money there.” We’ve made that mistake way too many times.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, truthfully, I’m getting to a point now where I think I can start to venture into some other things, but I’ve also kind of realized that the way for me to do that is through partnerships with people that already know what they’re doing. I think in the past it would have been, like, me trying to take all of my focus and trying to go figure that out. And it’s like, if I’m going to get into self-storage units or something, I just want to find a way to partner with the best guy in the business because I don’t have the luxury of a long learning curve and I don’t have the time to do that. So that’s where I think partnerships or working with other people becomes critical.
Brad: Yeah, and that’s really smart. My business now is at a seventh level, which means that I could get on a plane today and fly to Jamaica, stay there for six months, fly back, and I’d be willing to bet you $1,000 that when I came back, my company would be in better shape than it was when I left, and that’s because I put people and systems in place, which is awesome. It’s a great feeling. And that is what has allowed me to decide, hey, what’s my next venture in life, and that’s the coaching.
We’re so good at what we do, so now I’m going to go teach this to people. I’m going to teach them exactly how I got to the seventh level and how they can do it too.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Awesome, Brad. Well, hey, thanks for spending time with us today.
Brad: Sure. It was awesome.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Well, if folks want to learn more about you . . . now, I will tell you, I don’t want to blow your marketing budget up here, but in terms of the importance of marketing, I went to your site a couple months ago, expresshomebuyers.com, and I retargeted everywhere on the internet. So I just want to tell you, I’m not going to sell you my house in Dallas, but yeah, that’s proof that you’re definitely doing what you’re saying there. But if folks want to learn more about you and what you have going on, what should they do?
Brad: So bradchandler.com is a great place to learn about the coaching. It hasn’t launched yet but if you just fill out a simple form, we’ll reach out to you when it does. And then I’ve started a podcast where we take investors who are struggling, it could be a new investor, it could be someone who’s struggling to get their first deal or doing one deal a month and they’re not reaching their goals.
And I offer a free 30-minute coaching session where I literally just break down all the obstacles and you can go to expresshomebuyers.com/free-coaching for that and sign up for a free 30-minute coaching session. It’s going to be live, just like we’re doing now. So you’ve got to be open to me saying, “Hey, you’re doing this wrong, you’re doing that wrong.” But those are the two best ways for people to get in contact with me.
Mike: Got to be willing to get on the hot seat. Also, we’ll add links down below for all that and, everybody, thanks for joining us for episode number 355 with Brad Chandler. Brad, thanks again for sharing your insights and just keep crushing it, my friend.
Brad: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Mike: Awesome. Everybody have a great day. We’ll see you on another upcoming episode.
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This is episode number 355 and my friend, Brad Chandler, joins us today. Brad is a beast and shares how he started by handwriting letters himself and by using magnets on his car while he was $80,000 in debt, starting with nothing and grew his business to having done over $2,200 deals in the greater Washington, D.C. market.
Today we talk all about marketing and follow-up, which are absolutely critical to your success as a real estate investor. Whether you’re starting with a beer or a champagne budget, you do not want to miss today’s show. There’s a ton of great lessons and nuggets in here. Please help me welcome Brad Chandler to the show.
Brad, welcome to the show, my friend.
Brad: Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. And by the way, I do not see many gray hairs, at least not as many as I see on my head.
Mike: Well, I try to keep it tight now. I get it cut every couple weeks so you can’t notice it. It’s funny because you have kids, of course our kids have met before, so you have kids about the same age as . . . my son is about to turn 10 and they just have no filter on what they say. This is a couple months back, my son said, “Dad, when you turn your head that way, I can’t see any of the gray hairs.” I was like, “Okay. Thanks.”
But, hey, I like to think that it is a sign of maturity and wisdom so that’s how we’re going to leave it.
Brad: I hear the ladies like it, so we’ll go with that.
Mike: Yeah. Awesome. Brad, I’m excited to talk, we’re going to talk about marketing and we’re going to talk about follow-up today, two things that I was going to say are near and dear to my heart and near and dear to yours. They should be near and dear to everybody’s heart that’s a real estate investor because they’re critical. So it’s going to be a great topic and I know you’ve got a ton of experience.
And speaking of which, maybe we could start off by you just telling us your background and how you got started in real estate investing and a little bit more about your business because I don’t know many people that are doing as many deals as you guys, especially in a high dollar area market. So maybe tell us a little bit more about you.
Brad: Yeah. So I read a book in 9th grade on how to buy real estate with no money down. Always knew I wanted to do real estate investing. Went to college, worked for a developer, and ended up getting my MBA in real estate. People always ask me, “Did that really help you?” And honestly, it didn’t really help me for this type of business.
So an investor bought my neighbor’s house in late 2002 and I went and talked to him and I go, “What do you do?” He goes, “Well, I buy houses well below market and I fix them up and resell them.” I go, geez, I’ve got two degrees in real estate, had no idea that you could buy a house at such deep discounts. I thought you got rich in real estate by putting down 20% and letting the house appreciate, pay them off and sell them 30 years later and you’re rich. So I was like, “Wow, that’s what I’m going to do.”
So that was December 2002. I decide that’s how I’m going to make this business work. Had a full-time job. My son was just born. I’d come home and put him to bed at 8:00, work 8:00 to midnight, work weekends, and it took me until July just working my heinie off to get my first deal.
Every week that went by, I got more and more perseverance, saying, “I’m not going to quit.” So I got six deals in July and August, quit my full time job in October of 2003 and here we are somewhere around 2,200 deals later.
Mike: That’s incredible. That’s incredible. So your company is Express Homebuyers, which if you’re on the East Coast, certainly in the Washington, D.C. area, I’m sure people have seen your commercials. So talk about how you went from a one-man shop, maybe just take a minute to, I mean, you have a fairly large company now to help enable you to do all those deals. But maybe just share the elevator pitch side of kind of how you grew that.
Brad: Sure. I think if you count our full time VAs, we’re over 30 people now. So we have grown. When I started out, I did have the vision of doing TV advertising, and that’s kind of been our bread and butter, but we’ll get into that more in a little bit.
So what I did is I read this book, Michael Gerber’s book called “E-Myth,” which if you haven’t read and you want to build a business, it’s a must read. It teaches you about how to systematize your business. So literally almost from day one, I started making checklists and flow charts and actually documenting the process so that when I needed to hire . . . at the beginning it was my partner and myself and we were doing everything. I came in one day, I was like, “This is really stupid. Why are we doing this? Let me focus on this area of the business, you focus on that area of the business.”
And then we did that for a couple months and we’re like, “Wow, now we really need to hire the next person.” So I think the first hire was an admin, which I think is logical for most . . . whether you’re a realtor or an investor, it’s usually good to get an admin so you can get rid of some of those $10-15 an hour jobs that you’re doing. And then it just went position to position. The next one was we got an acquisition person and we got a couple of acquisition people. And then we got an acquisition manager. And we slowly just built up our staff to where we are today, using systems all along the way.
We still have systems. We’re still creating systems. We’re still tweaking systems, but that’s how you scale a business is just a day at a time, just building, building, like building a house.
Mike: Yeah. And I know we’ve talked about this in the past before, we’re the same way. In fact, my group coaching program, we call it The Investor Machine because we talk about building systems and processes because it’s the only way you can grow. As you know, a lot of real estate investors and maybe these people that are listening to the show right now, if you’ve started at all, it’s real easy to get yourself trapped at, like, the one and two deal once in a while area, which is just a job, right? You can’t get past that without more people and more systems. I mean, you’d agree with that, right?
Brad: Absolutely, absolutely.
Mike: Yeah. It’s a chicken and egg, right? You want to grow, you see yourself growing, but you can’t really afford it and you just have to make some . . . you just have to bet on yourself is kind of what I say.
Brad: Well, and if you set the systems up properly to begin with, even if you are a one-man show, that means you’re probably going to have more success than the next person. And that success will hopefully equate into dollars and those dollars will allow you to reinvest back in personnel to further grow your company. Right?
Mike: Right. So let’s continue talking about systems. So specifically we’re going to talk about marketing and lead generation. You guys are dominant in your market, the most dominant player. But I know that you wanted to start by talking about the importance of follow-up, right? And that’s kind of counterintuitive to maybe somebody that doesn’t have a lot of experience but you and I both know the money is in the follow-up.
And I think where we’re going to go here is by saying if you spend a bunch of money on marketing and you don’t have follow-up systems in place, then you’re just completely wasting your marketing budget. I don’t want to steal your thunder, though. Why don’t we kind of dive into the importance of kind of follow-up systems?
Brad: Yeah. So a year and a half ago I started a meetup group and my first presentation was how to find motivated sellers on a beer budget. And the next meetup was how to find them if you had a champagne budget. And after that was done, I was, like, “You know, that was dumb of me.” If I could do this over again, I should have started with follow-up systems as being the number one. So it happened to be the third.
But looking back now, there’s no investor that should be spending a dollar in marketing, a dime, a penny, whatever you want to say, until you have a kickass follow-up system. And what does that mean? That means that you have a CRM and there are countless ones now where you can come into the office and you know on a given day who you have to call. Is it sending automated text? Is it sending automated emails?
And there’s InvestorFuse, there’s Podio. You can create it yourself. There’s Zoho, there’s SugarCRM. You can get technology now from $20-100 a month, $200 a month, where 20 years ago even, it could have cost you $50,000-100,000 to have this technology. This is the greatest time in the world to start and grow a business because of these technology calls. So get your follow-up system setup and you could lock yourself in a room on a weekend, you go get Sugar or Zoho CRM for $20 a month and you can create a series of 10, 20 follow-up emails, text. Set up the campaign so that when a lead comes in the system, you know how many times it’s going to be touched.
So when a lead comes in our system, we touch them 15 times in the first four days. And that’s a combination of phone calls, voicemail, text messages, and emails. Again, you guys can do the same thing without going out and saying, “I’ve got to spend $50,000 on a system.” So get that setup before you send out one postcard, put one bandit sign, do anything. You’ve got to have that follow-up system because you’re going to be wasting money.
I guarantee you, over the years, because we weren’t always good at follow-up, we didn’t lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. I bet you we lost close to a million dollars in having crappy follow-up systems. So it wasn’t until five years ago where we switched that and now we are just amazing. We closed 10 deals in 2016 just from calling back missed phone calls.
Mike: That’s awesome. And, Brad, when you say you touch them 15 times, let’s dig in a little bit, 15 times in the first four days. I assume that means if you haven’t made contact, your systems just continue to reach out to them and try to reengage them, right? But you have a different system if you do touch them, then there’s a different follow-up sequence I assume, right?
Brad: Absolutely. So we have “new lead,” we have “no answer,” we have “never contacted.” We have “appointment,” “nurture.” So we probably have about eight different campaigns, absolutely. So if we reach them, obviously we’re not just going to keep hounding them, they go into another system. Have we made them an offer? If we’ve made them an offer, have we sent them the contract? Have we met them in person?
We’re going to touch everyone. Everyone in our system gets touched at least on a 30 day basis whether we’ve made contact or whether we’ve not made contact, and that goes on forever until they sell their house or they tell us, “Buzz off,” and sometimes they tell us that, we might call them back in a couple months.
Mike: Yeah. I’ve kind of said this a few times on the show before. We bought a house last year that we had made our initial offer 54 months earlier. We followed up with them, like you said. All of our leads ultimately get to a point to where every 30 days is our kind of . . . we follow-up every 30 days.
For every house we buy, I always go back and look at the notes because I know . . . a lot of times it’s not a new lead. That’s why we’re talking about what we’re talking about. On this one, they literally . . . the number was disconnected several times throughout those years. They said they weren’t going to sell it. They said they rented it out. But the one thing that they never told us is stop calling. So we just kept on and then eventually they said, “Is your offer still good?” And that’s what we’re talking about here, right?
Brad: Well, you love to hear . . . after 54 months, if someone comes back and says, “Is your offer still good?” you’re like, “Hell, yeah.”
Mike: We actually bought it for less than our offer 54 months earlier.
Brad: Wow. Good job.
Mike: Yeah. But yeah, that’s what we’re talking about, right? So maybe share a little bit why this . . . one thing is it’s important is you’ve spent the money and the follow-up part is much, much cheaper than generating a new lead, working with what you already have. But maybe share a couple minutes of your thoughts on just the psychology of a seller and the fact that a lot of the distressed sellers that we talk to or work with are . . . maybe they’re often in denial and then sometimes their situation, whatever the situation they called us in the first place tends to get worse sometimes. Can you share your thoughts on that?
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Maybe they’re often in denial and then sometimes their situation, whatever the situation they called us in the first place, tends to get worse sometimes. Can you share your thoughts on that?
Brad: Yeah. So when foreclosures were more prevalent, I can’t tell you the number of people that we got calls from that were 48 hours away from foreclosure. The fastest house we ever bought was . . . I’ve lost track. It’s probably four or five years ago. A guy called us, he was disabled, hadn’t made mortgage payments, I think, in like three years. So I don’t even know how he was still in the house. It was a Virginia property, which is unusual. And from the time he called us to the time we closed was, like, 22 hours and we saved him from foreclosure.
So yeah, a lot of our deals and a lot of everyone’s deals in this space are very hairy. What do I mean by “hairy?” There are multiple heirs or the person has drug issues, alcohol issues, they’ve got family members in prison. So it’s not your typical seller that just is getting a job transfer or moving up in houses. But yeah, there’s a lot of hair on these deals and oftentimes situations get worse. Oftentimes they look at the offer originally and they’re like, “No way, I’ll get more money.” But then nothing is done, life goes on, life gets more complicated. So you always want to be there.
What I say all the time is get them a letter, get them a postcard. If you make them an offer, extend the offer in a big, yellow, bright envelope that they’re likely not going to through away. They come home one day and their car breaks down and they see your letter, your big, yellow envelope on the table when they walk through the door and they’re like, “You know what? I just can’t do this anymore. This house is killing me.”
These houses typically aren’t assets for these people. They’re really liabilities because they’re just dragging them down and we, as investors, in times helped them out of terrible situations and allow them to get a fresh start in their life and move on.
Mike: Yep. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, let’s talk a little bit about marketing. I know we’re going to talk a little bit about how to get started if you have a beer budget and then how you grow from there as your budget expands. So let’s talk about beer budgets. Where do you get started?
Brad: Beer budgets, let’s go back to when I started. When I first decided to start in late 2002, I had a whopping net worth of, drum roll, please, negative $80,000. I had a newborn son. My wife quit her job to take care of my son. So didn’t have a lot of money coming in. I had a job but I wasn’t making a lot of money.
So what did I do? I bought a bunch of bandit signs. When the D.C. Sniper was out picking off people, I was dodging him, putting up bandit signs at 11:00 in all black on telephone poles on the sides of streets, everywhere. I’d even go on the interstate sometimes and put them, like, under the underpasses. I got calls from that, of course, but it didn’t cost me much.
So I did that, I drove around with these enormous “We Buy Houses” magnets on my car that said, “We Buy Houses” and then a phone number. Those six deals that I mentioned, three of them . . . of my first six deals in those two months, three of them were from one person who saw myself, I put them on my ex-wife now, my wife’s car at the time and she was driving around, and he saw one of us and he called us. So if you’re serious about this business and you’re not doing bandit signs or you don’t have a sticker on your car, you may think it looks goofy, but I probably made $40,000 off of there. So would you drive around with a sign on your car that made you $40,000?
And then the third component was direct mail. So I would literally go onto the tax assessment website because I didn’t even know that lists existed at the time. I didn’t know that you could go buy a list of people with equity and, honestly, I didn’t even know if that did exist then. But anyway, so I would go in and I would look at tax assessment for people that were absentee owners, meaning that the mailing address did not match up with the property, which means they likely did not live there, it was a rental or they inherited it.
And I would hand address envelopes and I would do 300 of those on the weekend. I would do door hangers. I would drive for dollars. I would go to REIA meetings. Well, they didn’t have meetings back then. Network. Network, network, network. I got one of my first deals by being on a listserv. Most people probably don’t even know what that is now, but it was just a group list where we could post stuff. So those are things that really don’t cost a lot of money. It’s all about activity, activity, activity. Like Nike says, “Just do it.” Don’t sit around and study forever. You’ve got to get out there and take action.
Get out there and do it and then consistency. With any marketing, you’ve got to do it consistently. I have an interesting story on that note. In about 2004, my sister was a stay at home mom. She was hand addressing envelopes in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia because I was trying to get deals there. And I got a call one day, I live two hours from there. I got a call one day and a lady literally said to me, “I just got your sixth or seventh letter. I wasn’t planning on selling but since you keep sending me letters, I’ll sell my house.”
She had a tenant in the property, hence absentee owner. My sister was doing the same thing, pulling the tax records for absentee owners. I got the tenant out. I cleaned out the place, probably cost me $200 or $300. I listed it and I think I made $35,000, $40,000 on that deal.
Mike: Wow.
Brad: So consistency. Had we mailed one, two, three, four, five letters, no deal. I wouldn’t have made the $35,000. So when you’re doing direct mail, if your budget doesn’t allow for at least four to five mailings, don’t waste your time. So many people will mail one series and they’ll drop whatever, 2,000 postcards, 2,000 letters, “Hey, I didn’t get anything. That doesn’t work.” Well, it takes time, just like [inaudible 00:18:52] takes time.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I want to make clear here, because I know sometimes, Brad, when guys like you and me talk that have done lots of deals and people that are newer are listening, they tend to maybe get a little overwhelmed with, like, systems and having big budgets and you’re on TV and all these things. So one thing that I want to make clear to people is these things are all important and I’m not trying to take away from the importance of any of them.
I teach the same thing. Like, you need to have systems and processes in place. But you don’t need to have a Ferrari to haul manure, as I like to say. Don’t let the systems and some of this talk get in the way of you getting started and just taking action because I think today a lot of people hide behind systems, like, “Oh, I need to get this set up. I need to get that set up.” And the truth is you need to do all those things but you need to be generating leads and constantly taking action all along the way. You can’t just sit back until you get things set up. You need to be hustling and trying to find people to sell you houses along the way, right? You hear that, Brad, right?
Brad: So that’s an awesome point and let me go back and clarify because people could have misunderstood what I said. When I talked about I built systems from day one of my business, day one means October of 2003 when I actually quit my job. From November of 2002 until I got my first deal in July of 2003 and then I got six deals in July and August of that year, I didn’t have shit. I didn’t have anything. I was doing everything but I was doing it, I was taking action.
I didn’t go out and spend five years, like a lot of people do, educating themselves on it. I didn’t go out and worry about an LLC. I didn’t go out and worry about a corporate name and am I protected. I had nothing to protect. I had a negative $80,000 net worth.
What I did [inaudible 00:20:43] while others were going out and spending five years on education, forming their LLCs, we were doing deals. I went to a Robert Shemin conference one time in 2003 and I sat next to a lady at lunch that told me that she had been doing research and education for 18 years. And I thought to myself, if 18 years ago she would have bought a house and lost $10,000, she’d probably be a multimillionaire now. But she didn’t do it. What she was doing was is she was paralyzed by the fear of, “What am I going to do wrong?” instead of, “Let me just go do it.”
I’m glad you brought that up. That’s probably one of the best points you can make is just nothing has to be perfect. You don’t have to get overwhelmed and have all your systems. What you have to do is you need to get your phone ringing with motivated sellers. So whatever it takes to do that, do that, get some money and then you can start building on all the bells and whistles and the systems and hiring and blah, blah, blah.
Mike: Yeah, and those things become, like you said, more important when you start ramping up your budget, when you start going from a beer budget to, I guess, a champagne budget. So you’re best leads early on will be the ones you hustle for, the ones you’re handwriting letters, magnets on your car, all that stuff, because, one, they’re low cost, ultimately. Of course, you have more time on your hand so you can afford to spend your time that way.
But as you start to spend money by thousands or tens of thousands or more of letters and postcards a month, then you’ve got to have systems in place to kind of squeeze all the juice out of that fruit. You’d agree with that, right?
Brad: Absolutely, absolutely.
Mike: Yeah, awesome. Let’s talk about as you kind of grow, so like you talk about a lot of hustle tactics, finding investors, magnets on your car, handwriting letters to niche lists. But then as you start to grow, this is one of the challenges a lot of real estate investors face is after you hit a certain number of four, five, six different niche lists, then you’ve got to start going to the mass list which are more of like, kind of a high equity absentee owners. In a market like where you’re at in D.C. or Dallas, I mean, there’s seven and a half million people here. So the list just explodes, so your budget, you’ve got to figure out if your budget can explode or not.
But let’s talk about kind of moving from a beer budget to something bigger than that as you start to scale it and kind of how you did it and maybe how you do it differently, I guess.
Brad: So what we did is I started to, I guess in 2004, we started to put . . . I saw that the popularity of the internet was happening, and so we started putting more and more resources into the internet from an SEO perspective, which means “search engine optimization,” which means just ranking high in Google and the other search engines on a free basis. We started doing pay-per-click. I started really just trying to create a great website. And to this day, I think we have one of, if not the highest ranked website in the real estate investment space. And that took a long time.
So that was one of the things we did. We started TV from a very, very early on. I think we actually started TV advertising in 2003, right about when I quit my job. And then what I would have done differently, we were live on TV from 2003 to probably 2013 for 80% of our business, and that was crazy. It was expensive but it worked. It was expensive. However, we did a terrible job, like I said earlier, at follow-up is what I would have done differently.
And two is we would sit back and wait for the phone to ring and cherry pick these deals. We would literally, like, close deals on the phone. We wouldn’t even go out to the people unless we could get them to agree to this amazing price on the phone. That was a huge mistake. You need to, if you have a seller with equity and they’re motivated, you need to go out there and meet with them because the chances of you closing them is going to go through the roof if you’re in person. On the phone, they can hang up on you. They can’t hang up when you’re sitting across the table.
So that’s what I would have done differently. And then in 2014-ish, we introduced direct mail on a large scale. We started out, I think, doing 50,000 a month in postcards and now we’re doing, I think, over 200,000 postcards a month. So I would have done that differently. I thought that postcards . . . I just didn’t have a great strategy around postcards. I didn’t follow my own advice, my earlier advice about consistency.
What I did wrong is instead of doing consistency, I would do this massive drop and I would do it two times. And it wouldn’t work and I would say, “Okay, well, we can’t keep spending $20,000 a drop. What I should have done is I should have done a much smaller test with some different copy and then rolled that out over six months. So I was an idiot and I didn’t take my advice from early on where I saw that it worked and I tried to go big too fast. And when you go big too fast and you don’t have the budget, you can’t test.
So a great lesson for everyone listening is figure out what your . . . so if you have X amount of dollars to spend, make sure that you can spend those dollars over six months and then just back into, okay, a postcard’s going to cost me $0.40, $0.45, whatever the cost is to send it. Then figure out what’s the maximum number you can do. But make sure, again, that you can send out at least a minimum of four, five, six postcards to a given list over four to six months.
Mike: Yeah. What’s interesting is, and I know you’d agree with this, back to kind of systems and the importance of processes, it’s easier than ever right now to test stuff, right? I mean, if you use . . . I use CallRail. I don’t know if you use CallRail or a system like that. But a basic account, the entry level account on CallRail comes with 10 phone numbers and you can get additional numbers for, like, $2 or $3 a month.
So you could use different phone numbers for different pieces to track whether this postcard is working or this letter is working. But you could even . . . and I don’t do this but I know people that do, you could even use a different phone number for each drop so that you know, hey, the phone rings better after I’ve hit him four times. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways you can track things.
But, I mean, you’d agree, right now, if you went back even just three or four years, things were a lot harder to track, right?
Brad: Absolutely, absolutely. Not only that, and we do use call tracking and we probably have 100 800-numbers. There are websites for pennies that you can go put up three different copy and have 100 people go vote on it and say, “This is the one that I would call off of.” You can do split testing on Google pay-per-click with the headlines because the headline’s one of the most important things.
You can do split testing on Facebook, so yeah. I tell this to new students over and over and over again. We’re so fortunate, if you’re starting a business now, now to be starting a business, because of the tools and how effective they are and how cheap they are. So no one should have an excuse on why they can’t succeed. And given the fact that they have yourself and myself teaching them, like, we’ve proven it’s, like, all you have to do is just listen to what we say and you will be successful.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Awesome.
Brad: Just follow, get the playbook, the [inaudible 00:28:01], and just do exactly what they say and you’ll be successful. For one reason or another, people sometimes don’t do that.
Mike: Yeah. Well, I think some of the challenges and, you know, there’s so many people teaching things or, truthfully, there’s so many ways to . . . I’m not saying the ways aren’t legitimate but there’s so many ways to make money in real estate. I mean, I have shiny object syndrome and due to this show, show number 355, almost every person I’ve talked to . . . you know, when I talk to guys like Jack Bosch I get excited about land. When I talk to guys like Corey Peterson, I’m like, “Man, I really should be investing in multifamily.
It’s easy to get caught up on those things but I guess you either have to have personal restraint or you have to have a spouse that’s knocking you on the head, saying “no” or whatever, or a partner, right? A partner that can say, “Wow, that is interesting, but we’re not going to do that right now.” So you’ve got to have some checks and balances in there. Otherwise, it’s easy to go AWOL in this business.
Brad: It really is, and that point cannot be taken lightly because I’ve gone down that path and literally lost millions of dollars on stuff that we shouldn’t have been doing. So as you guys become successful, don’t think that the grass is greener and jump to something else. If you’re making money with what you’re doing, stick to what you’re doing and just scale it. Don’t try to go do five other things or you hear some seminar and say, “Oh, there’s a lot of money there.” We’ve made that mistake way too many times.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, truthfully, I’m getting to a point now where I think I can start to venture into some other things, but I’ve also kind of realized that the way for me to do that is through partnerships with people that already know what they’re doing. I think in the past it would have been, like, me trying to take all of my focus and trying to go figure that out. And it’s like, if I’m going to get into self-storage units or something, I just want to find a way to partner with the best guy in the business because I don’t have the luxury of a long learning curve and I don’t have the time to do that. So that’s where I think partnerships or working with other people becomes critical.
Brad: Yeah, and that’s really smart. My business now is at a seventh level, which means that I could get on a plane today and fly to Jamaica, stay there for six months, fly back, and I’d be willing to bet you $1,000 that when I came back, my company would be in better shape than it was when I left, and that’s because I put people and systems in place, which is awesome. It’s a great feeling. And that is what has allowed me to decide, hey, what’s my next venture in life, and that’s the coaching.
We’re so good at what we do, so now I’m going to go teach this to people. I’m going to teach them exactly how I got to the seventh level and how they can do it too.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Awesome, Brad. Well, hey, thanks for spending time with us today.
Brad: Sure. It was awesome.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Well, if folks want to learn more about you . . . now, I will tell you, I don’t want to blow your marketing budget up here, but in terms of the importance of marketing, I went to your site a couple months ago, expresshomebuyers.com, and I retargeted everywhere on the internet. So I just want to tell you, I’m not going to sell you my house in Dallas, but yeah, that’s proof that you’re definitely doing what you’re saying there. But if folks want to learn more about you and what you have going on, what should they do?
Brad: So bradchandler.com is a great place to learn about the coaching. It hasn’t launched yet but if you just fill out a simple form, we’ll reach out to you when it does. And then I’ve started a podcast where we take investors who are struggling, it could be a new investor, it could be someone who’s struggling to get their first deal or doing one deal a month and they’re not reaching their goals.
And I offer a free 30-minute coaching session where I literally just break down all the obstacles and you can go to expresshomebuyers.com/free-coaching for that and sign up for a free 30-minute coaching session. It’s going to be live, just like we’re doing now. So you’ve got to be open to me saying, “Hey, you’re doing this wrong, you’re doing that wrong.” But those are the two best ways for people to get in contact with me.
Mike: Got to be willing to get on the hot seat. Also, we’ll add links down below for all that and, everybody, thanks for joining us for episode number 355 with Brad Chandler. Brad, thanks again for sharing your insights and just keep crushing it, my friend.
Brad: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Mike: Awesome. Everybody have a great day. We’ll see you on another upcoming episode.
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