Cold Calling for Real Estate Leads

Mike: Welcome to “Real Estate Investing Secrets.” We are all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better, more fulfilling lives. But most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else or chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you, and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality. My name is Mike Hambright from FlipNerd.com, and your questions get answered here on the “Real Estate Investing Secrets” show.
What’s up, freedom fighters. Hey, welcome back to the show. This is episode number 467. We are here with my buddy John Harcar. Coincidentally, just saw John at a meeting in Phoenix that we had for Investor Fuel just a few days ago. So it’s kind of funny I’m in Dallas, he’s in Vegas, we met in Phoenix. And it’s only been a couple of days and here we are again, John. So good to see you, my friend.
John: Yeah, you, too, Mike. It was great to see last weekend.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So everybody, today, you know, there’s a couple of big trends that have happened in real estate investing over the past couple of years. And some of them are not like cutting-edge, you know, things. What we are going to talk about today is actually cold calling and if you, you know, a lot of us remember probably growing up and, you know, it depends. I don’t want to tie . . . whatever I say here, I’m going to date myself, so I have to be a little bit careful. But, you know, we remember people door knocking or siding salesman or window salesman, cold calling and disrupting dinner and all that stuff. So cold calling has been around forever, right? But it’s kind of had a resurgence here. It’s kind of gotten new again for real estate investing. And John is an expert in that. He’s run call centers for a long, long time, even outside of real estate investing.
But today, we’re going to talk about using call centers from an expert, John Harcar. So John, again, welcome to the show, buddy.
John: Yeah, thank you very much.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Hey, before we dive into this, and by the way, if you guys are listening right now, this is an amazing opportunity to start generating leads. If you’re doing some old school stuff now and you feel a little bit stuck, we’re hopefully going to get you unstuck during today’s show. So John, tell us a little bit about your background and let’s kind of dive into cold calling.
John:All right, well about me. I’m originally from Southern California. Made my way from Southern California to Arizona and now, I’m here in Vegas. My introduction and background, I’ve been, you know, running call centers for, you know, a lot of lead generation industries for the automotive industry, for another company where it was automotive related. And then, eventually, for ReboGateway, which is a real estate data provider.
Mike: Yeah.
John: That’s where I got to meet a lot of tremendous investors and then kind of started ticking the fancy. You know what I mean?
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
John: And then I made the jump as July and, you know, I’ve been doing ever since. It’s a great road. It’s rocky rough road, but it’s always fun. It really is.
Mike: Yeah. So the amazing thing is, if you don’t mind sharing, so you’ve been doing this, you know, you were around it for a while, helping other investors with lists and lead gen and stuff like that. And then, you know, there’s a whole bunch of people that we have in the show or people that I know that were around real estate investing, and then they saw like, “Hey, wow, this guy just made a bunch of money on a deal. Like, I should be doing that,” right? And so you saw a little peek of that and you were like, “Let me get some of this.” So in less than a year, you’ve been in this business and how many deals have you have you guys done?
John: I think our company we did about close to 70. I haven’t done all the exact . . . I’m thinking if [we’re going to 00:03:29] account on these, about 70.
Mike: So remember, that’s like nine months, at eight or nine months you’ve been running, so not even not even a year yet.
John: Yeah.
Mike: That’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s [inaudible 00:03:37].
John: No, actually, today is a year. Today is one year in our business, so I’m trying to, you know, do all the numbers.
Mike: Yeah, that’s amazing. In a market where a lot of people think it’s challenging, a lot of people squeal about too much competition. And, you know, I always love, obviously, there’s a bunch of people that are, you know, in our Investor Fuel Mastermind and people that I know that while everybody is crying about how tough the market is, they are like, they’re bringing home the bacon and out there, what do you say? Kicking ass and taking names or something like that?
John:Kicking ass and take names. Yeah.
Mike:And, you know, at the end of the day, that’s incredible. I mean, for the old dogs that are crying about it’s not the way it used to be. It’s like, “Hey, get over it. There’s a new path there. So that’s cool.
John: Well, it’s consistency, it’s drive. I mean, you know, I look at areas like Dallas. I look at areas like Phoenix, you know what I mean? I moved there before here. There are so many people who are doing so much business. If you really . . . and it goes back to mindset. If you have the mindset that there are no deals, guess what you’re going to get?
Mike: No deals.
John: No deals. You know what I mean? And I collaborate with a lot of the wholesalers here. I met one this morning for breakfast. And, you know, collaboration, not competition.
Mike: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And honestly, I would say that is another big trend that that we’ve seen inside of our group and elsewhere is that people are more willing to collaborate. Like, when I was coming up, a lot of people, you know, just we’re just everybody is their competition. And they didn’t . . . and honestly, I had that mindset for a little while. And then when I started meeting people, teaching people, I’ve done a lot of coaching over the past 10 years. And I just I found ways to collaborate and build my business, through collaboration and relationships, and JVs and all sorts of stuff. And it’s just . . . and plus it’s a lot more fun than being in a hole in the trenches by yourself and not have anybody to talk to you, right?
John: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s not, you know, only collaborating in the business side of the deals, but bouncing ideas, you know, and sharing what works and things that might help each other grow. Because, I mean, in the end, we’re all in the business and we all want to get as many deals as possible. And if I have to give up a little bit to get something which would have been nothing, you know, I’m more than happy to work with other people.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. It’s all better than zero so cool.
John: Yeah, more better than kicking you know what, you know?
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So, John, let’s kind of get into cold calling. So maybe just really high level, I mean, this is kind of obvious, but talk about, you know, what that is and specifically, what it is for the real estate investing industry.
John: Okay. Well, I mean . . . well, obviously, cold calling is, you know, calling someone out of the blue, you know, and asking them to sell their property or to buy their property. The reason why I think it’s such a better churn because you’re being more proactive. You know, we’ve all sent a lot of mail. And, you know, that’s it you’re kind of waiting for it to come.
Mike: Right.
John: So with cold calling, it’s a more cost effective way as well to go out and reach and in my opinion, reach your target faster, and that’s the name of the game.
Mike: Yeah. And it’s a, you know, potentially less crowded, right? I know we’ve given the example a couple of times. I don’t know if you’ve heard this one, but Stinson who works with us here FlipNerd his father passed away a little while back and he got hundreds of pieces of mail in the next like four to six weeks from real estate investors after they filed probate, and he got like two phone calls and one text message. And it just tells you like, even though it seems like everybody would probably be doing that, so many people are still so focused on sending direct mail in mass ways.
And that was really . . . I mean, we kind of know this, but for him to actually have this laboratory experiment and see it happen, [inaudible 00:07:13] amazing. And by the way, he remembered each phone call and he remembered the text messages. But direct mail, you can’t remember anybody because there’s just, literally, a stack of mail there, right?
John: Well, look, I’ve had people tell us that, “Hey, I’m doing business with you because you actually decided to call me not send me pieces of mail.
Mike: Right.
John: And cold calling, being on the phone, it’s one thing when we’re fielding calls, right, we’re fielding that we have an interest. Whereas when you’re cold calling, you have to generate it. So for some people to do that and do it as a daily grind, it’s just not for them. That’s why there are services they can outsource that to.
Mike: Right. Right. And by the way, I’m by no means saying direct mail is dead.
John: Oh, no.
Mike: Direct mail is still very, very important in this industry. But I think the key is even in the direct mail space, you’ve got to stand out. You got to stand out from the masses. And I think that is what some folks have found a way to do now with cold calling and, and some of the new forms of marketing. So you talk about some of the benefits. What are the benefits of that? There’s kind of the direct response, like, if you’re in this, you know, it’s hard to . . . and I’ve done this 10 or 11 years now, or 11 or 12 years, send direct mail, and you sent it like clockwork, but you’re kind of like, send it, the average investor, send it and you’re kind of sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, right? So there’s something about being proactive and going to get it versus, like, sitting back and waiting for it, right?
John: Sure, yeah. I mean, you know, if I wanted to send out mail, and like you said, it’s not dead and it works very well. I want to get to that person faster, because I know a lot of people are mailing and not many people are calling. And also I think with the cold call, it’s getting to that human emotion with that seller a lot faster because we know that that’s a huge part of the process is really finding the why, the reason why they’re selling and dig that out. Cold calling is going to allow you to do it versus waiting for someone to try to call you that might not feel comfortable to talk to you about it.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. And, John, for those that are listening right now that are like, “Man, I hate when people cold call me. And I hate all those robo-dialers like all that stuff,” which I definitely hate the robo calls. You know, a lot of ringless voicemail. I don’t think we’re going to talk much about that today. But you’re talking about literally a real person is physically calling numbers using auto dialers to call through them quickly, right? But talk about, you know, how you overcome that initial objection when people are like not expecting you at all, they’re getting hit out of nowhere. How do you kind of overcome those initial like [inaudible 00:09:36]. Like, what are some of the things you say to kind of open the door to a conversation?
John: I’m going to give a couple shout outs here, right? Today, I kind of took in a couple guys stuff and put it together. So I used a little bit of Brent Daniel’s scripts. You know, just calling up and when you’re calling someone, “Hey, this is John with, you know, First Source Freedom, calling about the property.” That kind of just [bugging 00:09:58] you. You know, whereas I use Brent’s part of the script and say, “Hey, I apologize. I know call is a little bit out of the blue.” So you’re kind of, you know, apologizing at first.
Mike: Yeah, you’re acting confused, right?
John: Yeah, you know, I don’t have the right approach and it’s just kind of off the wall, but are you the so and so owner? And then, once you get the owner or you find out who that is, and I kind of go into a little bit of John Martinez. And okay, great. “Hey, I’m looking at if they’re considering an offer.” I’d like to ask, you know, or really lay it out the agenda the timeline and the preferred outcome, right? So, “Hey, I’m going to ask you a few questions, you know, about the condition. If at any time you feel that this isn’t for you, I really want you to tell me, right? And I’ll do the same if you’re not a fit. But if we are, let’s move on to the next step.”
Mike: Sure.
John: And I think when I incorporated that after John’s training, I really saw more conversations because you’re basically giving them an out. You’re saying, “Hey, if you’re not comfortable, go ahead. You know, I’m going hang up.” “Go ahead.” So, I think, those two parts, by kind of sounding confused and like, you don’t even know if you’re the right person they’re trying to help you. And then also that at advanced agreement John calls it is, is really dropping the guard more.
Mike: Yeah. And John’s approach to like that acting confused and like, “Hey, I’m not sure if I’m even in the right place. I really hate to bother you. But you know you kind of . . . ” The thing is it’s so much more digestible than like some slick talking, like, “I’m clearly running through a list right now trying to reach you,” right? So people are more likely to like, you know, like, “Oh, this,” you know, not the same as this but always kind of confused. Let me, you know, let me . . .
John: Yeah, exactly.
Mike: See if I can help this gentleman here, you know.”
John: You’re kind of dumbing it down a little bit. I don’t even know and then they will want to help you.
Mike: Right, right.
John: So and then, you know, I said then part of the part allows them to really understand, “Hey, look, I’m not trying to get you. If you want to hang up, hang up.”
Mike: Right. Now. So let’s talk a little bit about how . . . kind of different ways to do this. I mean, clearly, the investors that are listening right now, they could do this themselves. I know you have a bigger operation, so you have a team that’s doing it. Sometimes, people just outsource it to a company to do it. Like, let’s talk about the pros and cons of kind of doing it yourself. Maybe having a team do it or even outsourcing it.
John: Okay, you know, for me, I’ve always had the team mentality in-house that’s how all my other calls centers have been. I think it’s a way that that person can develop more. You know, someone can learn with a video, and you’ll learn the basics. But I think there’s a lot of . . . I’m sitting next to someone that’s in a great call, the emotion is there, you can hear it, the tempo and the pitch, you know, all those things being [next 00:12:36] so I think you could feel it a little bit more.
The cons of it, because the guy’s right next door. Sometimes, you just deal with a little bit of the human problems. You know what I mean? And I get it and I’ve dealt with it a lot. But, you know, this business is really built on consistency. And you know, when you don’t have that consistency even in one call, it can kind of throw the whole game off in my sense a little bit.
Mike: Yeah.
John: So it’s just finding those right people. But I love working with them. I’m the type of guy, I love to be in the a [bit 00:13:07]. I like to listen to talk. You know, if they’re saying something, I like to say, “Hey, say this.” But that’s me.
Now, if you don’t have the patience to deal with people in the office or maybe even the budget to hire all these people, you can do the VA route, you know. And that’s a great way because if you’re not comfortable on the phone, which not everybody is, it’s not for everybody, but you understand the value of the cold calling and the proactiveness, then can hire a VA service and they can just kind of help with the leads. You just got to train them and you really audit. You know, from what I’ve heard, I’ve never used VAs yet. I’ve been thinking about it. You just got to really audit them a lot. Just make sure that they’re on the track and speaking, because they’re speaking for you. You know, they’re your first line and you need to make sure that they’re saying the right things.
Mike: Sure. There’s pros and cons of the VA route as well, right?
John: Oh, yeah.
Mike: One of the bigger pros is they’re not in your office. So if you happen to work from home, you don’t have to worry about, you know, housing people.
John: Exactly.
Mike:Of course, there’s always some challenges. Always worried about cultural differences if you’re outsourcing to, say, the Philippines or somewhere else and being able to, you know, out of sight out of mind. So the cool thing is is in a lot of the tools provide reporting, right? How many numbers were called, how many connections they made, how long was the average conversation. And also you can track appointments set, and offers made and contracts, right?
John: There’s a lot of services. And you can, for the VAs, you can even, you know, join on their screen and kind of watch what they’re doing and, you know, live updates with . . . I use CallTools as my as my dialer. And you can actually, you know, you can see their live performance, so you can actually listen to their calls, barge in if you want.
So, you know, what I do as far as auditing my guys, I mean, I do it as much as I can. And once a week or twice a week, we’ll sit down and we’ll spend an hour or two to go over those call audits. So and when you’re doing the VA route, that’s something that, you know, I think you’d have to do as well to keep them on the phone.
Mike: Right, right. And in a call center atmosphere. I mean, there’s a lot of power and energy in that group sitting there around each other. Like, they have the energy of having a good call. They hear what somebody said, and they’re like, “Oh, man. I’m going to start using that.” Like, just there’s some competition that happens, right? I mean, all those things are good, right?
John: Yeah, we have the board. They have to look what their leads up. You know, from Jason Lewis. He just joined Investor Fuel. He gave a great tip about dice game. You know, you get to roll one dice if you do it today. If you do it tomorrow also, then you will . . . So we started doing some things like that to really get that little . . . because that is a hard thing. You know, you got these people that are all together for eight hours a day or six to eight hours a day. And you know, if you don’t keep the energy up, you know, one low person can bring it all down in a sense.
Mike: Sure, sure, no doubt. So that’s one of the things to clarify with your model is, you know, at this point, you could have a local model and, you know, set the leads up. Like, if you guys that are listening, once you generate the lead, the call center, their purpose could be to generate a lead and hand it off to an acquisitions manager, right? Your model is to generate the lead, build the relationship ultimately, doing the sales call, the buy appointment that we call over the phone. Are you trying to do it all over the phone as opposed to [inaudible 00:16:29]?
John: Yeah, 90% of my business is over the phone. You know, and I think it’s just, because how we set it up is a couple of ways. We do virtual markets as well. And we have boots on the ground in there. That’s key, a strategic partner on the ground is huge. And our guy in San Antonio and Idaho, they’re both very, very good. But when we do that setup, it’s more of a, “Hey, are you in this range?” You know, normally it’s like 40 to 60% of Zillow. And I don’t know the differences in Zillow and the real pricing. So I say, “Hey, are you in this range?” Basically, you’re telling them, “We’re not paying full retail. This is kind of where we’re going to be at. If you’re cool, we’ll send our guys. If not, we won’t.”
We don’t send any appointments. I don’t like that. Here in Vegas, usually we go to houses that are ready to go either get the contract signed or just take pictures. Normally, it’s kind of the same thing over the phone. But here we have the ability to be more pinpoint and get the exact ARV of what it is that we’re where we needing to be.
And, Mike, we know our buyers very well here. So I know exactly, you know, what areas, where they’re going to buy and what percentage.
Mike: So and one of the benefits, obviously, of the virtual model is that it’s allowed you to . . . doing the whole thing over the phone, it’s allowed you to move into multiple markets, right? I mean, there’s pros, there’s some challenges with that, which we’re not going to go into today. But once you have the ability to do the whole thing or the majority of it on the phone, it really opens up new potential opportunities, right, for certain geographies?
John: Yeah, because, I mean, if you know your numbers enough and you know your buyers enough, I mean, you can really do everything on the phone. It’s very, very simple.
Mike: For sure.
John: Or erase that. It’s not simple, but if you get it down and you get that process down, then yeah, you can close over the phone 100% of your deals.
Mike: That’s awesome. So you talked about some of the tools you use. CallTools, there’s a lot of people that use the Mojo Dialer. What are some other tools that you use in your business that people should check out if they don’t know them already?
John: CallTools like you mentioned. We also use Call Rail. We use to Call Rail numbers. We’ve started using the Leadsherpa to do text.
Mike: Yeah.
John: They also do skip tracing. And prior to Leadsherpa, we were [IDI 00:18:49], and I was getting used around 80% to 85% with Leadsherpa. I skipped three lists and nothing has been less than 92% match rate, so it’s been awesome. And a great thing that they do also is they separate potential litigators.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
John: [Inaudible 00:19:06].
Mike: Yeah, we’re not going to provide legal advice for anybody here. But there’s always this question of, you know, for any of you that are listening right now, you know, you should try to do your research on the laws and stuff. We know, there’s a lot of people that think the laws may change here with calling. Now, the truth is, is you know, you probably have to try to avoid the Do Not Call list. You should avoid that. And if you’re, you know, I think even though people may not like it, it’s still acceptable to do one-off calls versus dropping. Probably there’s more pressure on the ringless voicemail, people are dropping tens of thousands of voice messages at a time, right, then . . .
John: Well, I mean, that’s like, you know, that’s very much of a gray area. We’re not selling anything.
Mike: Yeah, and that is the other thing is that I’ve heard, you know, we’re not selling, we’re trying to buy and we’re trying to provide a service and so, yeah. But anyway, we’re not going to provide legal advice.
John: Yeah, we’ll abide by the by the DNC. And, you know, if don’t then take me off your list. I’ll take you off our list. I mean, not, you know, like I pound you to death with calls many times. But it’s still very much a gray area. I don’t think that they’ll be able to ever say you can’t phone call. You maybe even able to dial stuff with like the ringless voicemail maybe, maybe the texts, I don’t know. But I don’t think they can ever deal with the cold calling.
Mike: Right, right. So let’s talk about some of the best lists that you found. I know you were doing some broader stuff, you kind of pulled it into some more nichey stuff. Let’s maybe share some of your lists and maybe some of the ones you don’t use anymore, like, because you didn’t think it was it was worthy of your time.
John: Sure. Well, there are different companies we use for our data. I, honestly, still use ReboGateway. You know, ReboGateway has still got a lot of good data. I also use PropStream, PropertyRadar as well, because they’re good on the West Coast. But as far as when I started, we were doing mainly just bigger, bigger zip code lists. We weren’t really doing the niche. And the benefit of that is we’re finding people that weren’t on the digital lists. But the downfall of that is that it took a lot more dirt to dig through to find the niche stuff, the good stuff. So now we’ve started doing a little bit more of that. I’m starting to pull more of the leads from PropertyRadar, and the violations and stuff from Rebo as well. I’m starting to stack a little bit of it to try to get multiple pain points. But really with lot of the niche stuff, I’ve been doing more of the texts. Actually, I also went after five plus, and [crosstalk 00:21:40].
Mike: [As wells as 00:21:41] properties, they own at least five properties.
John: At least five plus properties and I mean, I got in I did in San Antonio, I probably got, you know, six or seven really hot leads that are, you know, six to 37 properties.
Mike: And they’re usually . . . is your thought or what your experience so far is that people that are like, “I’m ready to sell the whole damn thing.” Or they’ve got one turd in there and they’re like, “You know what? I don’t think I’ll sell these things. I got this one right now that I’d love to get rid of.” Is that how it works?
John: That’s more of the angle, I think, that in my vision, my thought of when I was going to do that, it’s like, “Yes, I’ll pick up one or two. And if I landed in a gold mine of 37 properties that he wants to divest the whole portfolio. Boom”
Mike: Yeah, if you’ve got a portfolio, there’s always a dog or two in there that you’re like.
John: Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And also, too, they might just be tired of being the landlord part. You know, and we do some maybe owner financing because that’s another tool as opposed to just wholesaling that, I think, we want to get into that subject to kind of stuff.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing, we haven’t really focused on this, but if you could find those sellers, sometimes, I mean, they might be even willing to sell it and provide financing, because they’re like, let’s be honest, if you’re later in life, and you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m going to harvest this thing at some point.” It’s like, you know, at the end of the day, if you could provide the financing on it, you don’t have to take the hit, the sales tax hit up front because you’re going to get that that sale occurs over time. And so you don’t have all the tax hit right now, and you could continue to make money and not have to manage tenants anymore. And there’s a lot of . . .
John: Yeah, and that’s another part of the thought was that, you know, maybe they’re on the upper side of the age, you know, of [inaudible 00:23:21], but they’ll still want that mailbox money, they’re not going to [approve them 00:23:25].
Mike: Yeah. Yeah, we just got to killer deals. I mean, like awesome, awesome deals from a landlord. He’d started to have some health issues, a little bit older. And, you know, there’s always landlords that are charging way under market rent because they’re like, well, if I charge under market, then they’re not going to leave, they’ll just stay there forever. So they basically charge a lot less to get them to stay there. And these deals, I was about to make an offer and they told me what the rent was, and I didn’t . . . I just caught on to this. And I was like, “I’m paying you 100 times rent. Like, literally, you get rid of the taxes, you get rid of having to do deal with all the deferred maintenance, there’s a ton of it, you never have to talk to tenants again. And I want to, you know, effectively 100 times rent, which is usually kind of the rule of thumb, but they were so far under market that they’re like . . . and this guy was older and, you know, for all I know, he may not have 10 years left. I hope he does. I’m not trying to, like, kill anybody off. But my point was when I told them that, they’re like, “Wow.” I was like, you know, you never have to chase rent again. You never have to go fix anything again. And you’re getting 100 times rent.
And that literally, when I said that is when they thought, “Wow, that sounds like I think we’re going to go with this,” you know. So it worked out to my advantage that it was way under market rent, really, but.
John: I think they ultimately missed some opportunity. You know, to me, it’s just some things that we could have had extra. You know, extra revenue sources outside of just doing the wholesaling part.
Mike: Sure.
John: And it’s learning what’s going, you know what I mean? I think we wanted to get this piece locked down first before going in other areas. But, you know, then again, [inaudible 00:24:55], that would have been a perfect one. That would have been a perfect one.
Mike: Yeah, we talked about this a little bit last week when we met up. But, you know, at the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with wholesaling but, you know, just being in the transaction business and never set anything aside to build long-term wealth and have another stream of income, like eventually you regret that you know. And not that rentals are the land of milk and honey but, you know, having an asset there that can pay you over a long period of time and having another source of income is something that we all should be doing more of.
John: Wholesaling I’m only as good as the next deal, the last deal. You know what I mean?
Mike: You’re right.
John: So, you know, we have to, you know, I don’t think as much as want more than necessity to be able to diversify that because if we can get, you know, the basic coming in each month so that you can just covering the [month 00:25:41], then that’s going to make me maybe keep what [share 00:25:44] I’ve left.
Mike: Yeah, it helps. Honestly, we have a rental portfolio and for years, I was like, “Man, this is such a pain in the butt.” And then, one day, we woke up, there’s been a lot of appreciation in the market, we paid down our debt pretty aggressively and it starts spinning off some cash and it got to a point where I was like, “Man, I should have kept even more.” You know, like I get it now. You know, not that it wasn’t without problems, but it’s a great asset that it’d be a shame if you look back someday and you had sold them all.
John: Well, I’d like to leave some to my . . . and give my daughter some eventually. You know, build a family wealth that leads to wealth. You know what I mean?
Mike: Yep. Yep. No doubt, no doubt. So John, you’re a member of our Investor Fuel Mastermind. We’re such a so appreciative of you been there. You’ve been a great asset always willing to help other people. Would you mind maybe just kind of sharing your thoughts on the Investor Fuel Mastermind?
John: Yeah, no. I mean, as far as Investor Fuel goes, I mean, I’ve been to other masterminds other events and what I really love about Investor Fuel is the family. It’s more intimate, it’s more of that family environment. And I’ve talked to more Investor Fuel guys and learned more just by talking to them than I have in any other place I’ve been to. Now, they’re all great, everyone’s great. But this group, you can’t help but feel comfortable, but you can’t help but learn from the best guys out there. You know what I mean?
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Who is it a fit for, in your experience? I mean, who do you think could get value out of a group like Investor Fuel?
John: Well, I think anybody who’s looking to really grow their business and take it to another level and learn things that are going to help you scale the right way. And I think that’s what Investor Fuel is for. I mean, you know, we do a fair amount of business, so we kind of perfected this. And this goes back to the, you know, me needing to do different things like owner financing is that I can learn things from people that have done it, and helped me level up. And aren’t afraid to or aren’t against getting on the phone and spending the time with me, you know, to do and I think that’s huge. Because, you know, some people in other groups and it’s like you leave a message and they kind of [inaudible 00:27:54]. Well, these guys are there, you know, whenever you need them.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
John: That’s where I’m getting my value.
Mike: Yeah, awesome. Well, we definitely appreciate having you as a member of the group.
John: Thank you.
Mike: So, John, if folks want to learn more about you, want to connect with you on social media or somewhere, where is a good place for them to go?
John: Well, I don’t have any . . . I don’t do a whole . . . I have [nothing to sale 00:28:17].
Mike: I know you have nothing for sale. Yeah, yeah.
John: I don’t do anything on that. You can reach me on Facebook. If someone wants to email me, it’s my first name [email protected]. If anybody wants to give me a call, I don’t mind, or just shoot me a message on Facebook Messenger and I’ll give you my number and we’ll chat.
Mike: Cool.
John: Yeah, I really I love talking to people about the business. I love talking to you about cold calling and, you know, so I welcome it.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, no, you’ve always been helpful. So awesome, man. And this was great information. So for those for those looking to get started doing this. Like, let’s say, they hear all this. It seems kind of overwhelming and like, “I’m not going to set up a call center. I’m working out of the house. My wife is going to kill me if I try to turn our dining room into a boiler room like call center operation or something. Nobody is going do that.”
But if folks are looking to get started, what do you think the first step is? I mean, I would probably, I don’t want to steal your thunder here. The first step is kind of know what your goals are, right? Like how big do you need to be to hit your goals, right? But do folks need to be thinking of in terms of, “How do I get out of the gate here? I heard this today. What do I do today or tomorrow?”
John: As far as getting started cold calling?
Mike: Yeah.
John: Well, it’s really just about . . . I think it’s a matter of and I think a great way for people to do and start cold calling is do driving for dollars. We know that’s one of the best lists out there anyways.
Mike: Yeah.
John: But driving for dollars and just start calling those. You know, start just getting comfortable talking to those people. As you progress, you know, get into a dialer, right? You know, if you’re starting to call, you want to call more and more, start working on a dialer. But, I think, before you try to hire people, and train them to call, you have to be comfortable with the calls, you have to be comfortable with the objections. Brent Daniels has some great stuff on his YouTube channel, you can check him out. Like, and I’ll be happy to walk you through stuff. But it’s really just getting yourself comfortable. Because that’s what calling is about. You don’t know if you can do it or not unless you do it.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. And what if you can’t though? What if the person listening to this, they’re like, “Hey, I am a real estate investor. I’m not giving up on this, but I do not belong on the phone. I don’t like it. I don’t have time for it, whatever.” So is it okay to know that it’s not for you? That doesn’t mean your company shouldn’t do it. Maybe it means it just you shouldn’t do it. But is it okay for people that are listening and so I can’t. Like, my wife is an introvert, like, you know, but she is genius, right? So she’s like, she would never do that. But that doesn’t mean the business shouldn’t do it. It just means, like, maybe, you know, it’s kind of be true to yourself, right?
John: Well, you know, of course. And, you know, like I said before, it’s not going to be for everybody. My wife will talk to anybody on the phone for hours except if she’s told pick up the phone and do a cold call.
Mike: She clams up, right?
John: Yeah. So there’s different VAs you can hire. There’s different services. You know, Martinez has Seller Snipers.
Mike: Right. Right. Right.
John: Lead Geeks, MyDailer. There’s a bunch from out there. You can look at [work 00:31:13] for VAs. But, you know, you can always hire a VA and have them call. But once again, you just got to make sure that you train them the right way. That, you know, they know what they’re saying, and you listen to their calls and audit.
Mike: Yep, yep. Awesome. Awesome. Well, John, thanks again for sharing all this information with us.
John: No, of course. Like I said, I like talking real estate, so anybody wants to call, call.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, everybody. This is episode number 467. I hope you got some good value out of today. Definitely, I appreciate John sharing his knowledge and his experience with us. If you haven’t already subscribed to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, YouTube, wherever you watch or listen to us at or if you’re not watching us on only those places, you could always go to FlipNerd.com. We have over, actually, we have over 1,500 shows that we’ve created over the past 15 . . . I’m sorry, about five-and-a-half years. Lots of great information out there. Truthfully, it’s just an amazing resource to help you and help real estate investors. Our goal really is to help others achieve financial freedom through real estate investing. So we appreciate you subscribing, leaving us any positive reviews that you care to do. We sure appreciate it. So we’re excited to see you on some upcoming episodes until the next one.
I screwed up my tagline, John. I was going to . . . I have this little tagline I’ve been trying to put in here. And I don’t know if I like it yet. I’ve been saying this to you guys. This is a little bit of the bloop. This would maybe be for the blooper reel, but we’re going to include it in here right now. But I’ve been saying, “Stay strong. Stay cool. And keep fighting for freedom.”
So, John, thanks again, buddy.
John: All right. Thanks, Mike. I like that . . .
Mike: Bye, everybody. See on the next one. Bye, bye.