Becoming A Self-Employed Real Estate Investor With Bill Allen

Episode 373: Becoming A Self-Employed Real Estate Investor With Bill Allen

 

 

How do you become a self-employed real estate investor? Scaling your business enough for you to delegate huge tasks to trusted employees can give you the financial freedom you deserve. In this episode, Mitch Stephen talks to a veteran and real estate professional, Bill Allen. From the military to the house investing business, Bill teaches us some strategies on successful wholesaling and flipping, including how to handle the major pitfalls. Learn more from Bill as he shares how you can become a successful self-employed real estate investor and still fill your routine with family and fun time.

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I have Bill Allen with me. He’s quite the go-getter. He has a military background. Early is on time and on time is late. That’s how he was raised, so we should all take that lesson. He’s a house flipper, wholesaler. He’s got a lot going on. How are you doing, Bill?

I’m doing good, Mitch. Thanks for having me.

You started out in the military. Could you take me how you ended up from the military to the house investing business?

I had a CO, Commanding Officer, when I was a military student. I went to Georgia Tech and I had a Commanding Officer there at the Navy ROTC Department. He said, “I bought a house everywhere I went. I moved, bought a house, always made money.” I implanted that in my mind. My parents weren’t real estate investors or anything. When I moved to San Diego in 2006, I bought myself a 700-square foot condo on the beach. I said, “You’re going to make money on this.” That’s what got me going. I ended up selling it for about $185,000 less than I bought that one for in 2009. I paid $385,000 for a 700-square foot condo. I didn’t know what I was doing. I did 80/20 loans, signed on the dotted line, 100% financed. I sold it for $200,000.

Fortunately, the military had a bailout program called The Housing Assistance Program for anybody that knew about it. It was almost like breaking even. I lost a little bit of money, but it wasn’t $185,000. That was a wakeup call for me. I ended up buying another house at the next duty station I went to before I sold that one. I started fixing it up and learning about real estate. I fixed that one up myself. I was still single. I didn’t spend a lot of money. I moved around and built this rental portfolio everywhere that I went for the next three duty stations. I’ve moved sixteen times in the last several years in the military. I move all the time. I constantly have the ability to pick up a property, live in it for a little bit and then rent it out. I did that for a while. That’s the start of the journey.

What do you do now? Where are you right now?

I live in Nashville. I’m about twenty minutes South of Nashville, a suburb outside of Nashville. We invest in pretty much the Southeast. We invest in Pensacola, Florida, Nashville, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Huntsville, Alabama and Bowling Green, Kentucky. It’s Kentucky, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee. It’s all there in the Southeast.

When did you retire from the military?

I’m still in the military. I’m a Reservist right now. I did almost fifteen years of active duty. I have three boys. I have 5, 3 and 2. My three-year-old now had a heart condition when he was born and needed open heart surgery. That was the time where I said, “I can’t keep deploying. I need to be home for my family.” I had built a multimillion-dollar company at that point while I was active duty still. I was able to leave active duty, but I still fly for the reserves part time. I go down to Pensacola 60 days a year and fly for them.

Hat’s off to you. Thank you for your service.

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You’re welcome. It’s been my pleasure. I’ve enjoyed myself. In fact, probably the highlight of my life so far is I got to have a phone call with a family. We had renovated a house and gave it away to a Gold Star family. A woman who lost her husband in combat has two girls and we were able to give a house away to them 100% mortgage free as a donation to charity. It’s one of my passions that we get to do. The impact that you can make in real estate is amazing. That was unbelievable. To hear her voice on the phone was awesome. It’s a pretty cool stuff that we get to do.

That would be a big moment in your life to give someone a house. Congratulations on that too. When do you find yourself up to your eyeballs in real estate?

It’s pretty much all the time now. I will say I started wholesaling. I started as a flipper and I was flipping houses. I didn’t understand the concept or think it was fair to the sellers. I met some wholesalers with real high integrity that were doing a lot of volume and doing it right. I modeled what they were doing. We got to doing hundreds of houses a year and building a team. I have a COO that runs my company now. I only work about two hours a week in that real estate company. The other podcast education-type business is where I spend most of my time building that out. Hopefully, I’m hiring a COO here in the next few months. I don’t see the houses anymore. What I love is that I have a team. I’m focused on building my team and my staff right now, which is cool. We got fifteen people that live and breathe it on a regular basis and I get to lead them. That’s what I like to do. I found my passion there after a few years of swinging the hammer and doing the houses myself.

That’s a whole different ball game from being the guy in the business to run the business and not seeing that. It took me a long time to get there. I finally have not seen the last 350 houses I bought and I have not talked to, spoken to, shaken the hand or met the 350 people that bought my house. That feels good. It leaves you free to do other things. I started out to retire, but then that gets boring pretty fast. You think, “What can I do?” I went into educational space too because so many people were asking me how and why. How many units do you average a year? How many houses?

In the past few years, we do anywhere between 165 and 200 houses.

That’s a hell of a volume. Anyone who can do that volume has to have some systems and has to have something going for him because you don’t do that by accident. That’s a concentrated effort. The reason I’m saying this stuff is for the audience to know that Bill Allen knows what he’s doing. His organization knows what they’re doing and he’s the leader of it. You always want to talk to someone who’s done what you want to do or is doing what you want to do. You also want to get a mentor or coach that is someone you would like to emulate on and off the field. You sound like a pretty standup guy off the field too. You go around giving away houses and flying fighter jets for the country.

It’s important to figure out who you want to follow and go follow them. I’m not for everybody. I’m sure you would agree. The people that I work with, I love working with them. I have a lot of passion for what they do and helping them grow their business and become financially free and hit the goals that they want to hit. I saw somebody doing exactly what I wanted to do and I went all-in on that person. I replicated everything. I took pieces from their business, made a Frankenstein model and then it became my own. I can start innovating and doing the things outside of that and get past where they were. That’s important.

It’s always morphing and improving. I’ll say the same thing. I’m not for everybody. There are portions of this country that don’t even look like where I live and don’t feel or have anything going for the same thing. I would be a fish out of water in Los Angeles or in some places. My seller finance strategy, we do about 100 houses a year. I’ve done 100 houses a year for over two decades. I seller finance about 70% of my inventory. That’s a whole different thing than flipping and wholesaling. It’s a completely different model. We both probably can cross over each other’s space. I know how to flip and wholesale. In fact, the other 30% of my houses, that’s what I do. I’m looking for houses that I can carry the note on for 30 years, no balloon and no need to refinance. I make 30-year notes. I know when I got started, and it still continues to happen, the pitfalls. Tell me about some of the major pitfalls and how you can avoid them.

I run a marketing company. Marketing and sales are what we do and it happens to be houses. We should be able to plug in anything. When I look at wholesalers and flippers, at least flippers that are marketing for themselves. All wholesalers are going out directly to the seller and marketing. What I find the biggest pitfall, and I fell into this in the beginning, was scratching the surface in a bunch of different channels. My recommendation is pick one channel, learn it and go deep into that before you add another one in. I see so many people say, “I’m going to do these five different marketing channels,” and they only scratch the surface. The deals are under the surface and you have to go deep. Direct mail was my bread and butter when I started about seven years ago. I still get about half of my deals from direct mail. It used to be 100%. It went to 80%. Now it’s about 50/50 direct mail and online. I didn’t even add my online channel for about 6 to 8 months before I got good. It hit the direct mail in my market as deep and wide as I could.

It didn’t make any sense to spend more money there. The return wasn’t there. I see a lot of people do that. I also see people that turn their marketing channel on and after a month, they say, “This isn’t working,” and they try something else. It’s consistency that does deals. Mitch, I’m sure you’d agree doing this for many years. Consistency in your channel, what you do, your niche and your specialty is what made you successful. The people that bounce around from lots of different things saying, “This doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. I’m going to keep moving around,” they don’t give it enough time to determine, get the data and analyze it and see if it works. Those are my two biggest pitfalls that I see in coaching and mentoring a lot of people on the wholesaling side too. They do that all the time and it’s pretty common.

 

Ships in the channels of marketing, but they’ll jump ship a lot of times in the strategy. They’ll be in apartments, flipping and then in mini storage. You got to hone in on something. You got to become an expert at one thing first. You’ll find the off sheets that are close to it or the residual. I have eight companies. They’re all very closely related. Half of them run off the exhaust of each other. I had so much private money coming at me that I couldn’t get it all out. I couldn’t find enough deals. It’s my belief that because you have a lot of other people’s money, it doesn’t mean you go out and start buying crappy deals. You’ve got to keep your underwriting the same.

If you have more money than you can spend, what else can you do with that money? I opened up a hard money loan business to loan out to my competitors who happened to find some houses before I did at great prices. I don’t loan them any more money than I would pay for the house if I wanted to buy it. I have a hard money loan business since 2005. Right now, to this day, it’s not a major going concern. It’s how I keep my extra residual money in play so they don’t go do something else with it until I need it. The hard money are six-month loans with an option to extend for six months at a time. Any time I need that money, I don’t extend anymore.

It was a way for me to keep the money out, keep it in my court and keep it in what I wanted to do. The business is more of like that. I have a note servicing business. I’m already collecting 500 notes a month for myself. What’s another 500? I’ll get my office run for free. That’s how it works. I was experts at these things before I started. You’ve got to be an expert, know that one thing well and be able to make a living off that one thing. I have automated that one thing because any business you open up will take everything you have for a year or so.

I’m an offender. I’m on this show talking about what I shouldn’t have done. I was a deal junkie. I still own a piece of land right when I got started in real estate that somebody told me was a good deal and it wasn’t a good deal. I still own it. I pay tax on it every year. Every year, I look at it and go, “Why did I do that deal?” I didn’t know what I was doing. I was looking for places to grasp. I’ve now gone into hard money loans. We do some self-storage. We do multifamily. We do lots of different things now. That’s me personally. That wholesaling and flipping company runs in itself. I was able to put a COO in place so I could remove myself completely and go do something else. I’m working in a second company right now. I spend 60 hours a week at least in that company. I’m going out and hiring a CEO of this quarter to be able to delegate and elevate myself to go figure out what the next thing is that I want to do, take off all the administrative and little detailed burden for me, be able to do the things that I love to do instead of the things that I have to do to run the business.

The hardest thing of entrepreneur will ever do, and this is a Mitch Stephen original quote. I don’t quote much. I haven’t been in hardly anything, but this is one of two. “The hardest thing an entrepreneur will ever do is have one great idea and finish big.” As entrepreneurs, we see an opportunity in everything. We can see how that would work. I can make that a company. The problem is it takes everything you have to get all the pieces in place, the money and the minutia organized so that you can get it done. Do you have also a large family?

Yeah. I have three boys. We have three kids, five and under right now, so it is a challenge. My middle son, he’s special needs. He’s had four open heart surgeries the first six months of his life. He’s got a chromosome anomaly. He’ll have another surgery. That should finish them up, we hope, on his surgeries. That takes full-time care for me and my wife. We have some help around the house to allow both of us to work and do the things and get away a little bit. That’s the heaviest lift that we have is James. He’s an awesome kid though. We absolutely love him.

That’s one of the things I ask my students sometimes. They think it’s an odd question. I ask them if they have any challenged children. They said, “Why do you ask that?” I said, “It takes a lot of time and commitment. We want to make sure that we don’t leave that to the side.” That’s one of the reasons I ask that question because it’s a big commitment you’ve got on.

When I was starting my business, I was flying full-time. I was flying 10 or 12 hours a day, five days a week for the Navy. One weekend a month, I would have to go leave the area, work that weekend and fly. That was the requirements that we had. A lot of people say like, “How did you do that?” I sat my wife down and said, “We’re probably not going to see each other that much for this year.” I want to get this business up and going. I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning. I’d work 2 or 3 hours in the office. I’d go fly for 10 or 12 hours. I’d come home and have dinner. We had a baby at the time, our first son. I give him a bath, play with him and put him to bed. I was in the office for another two hours. That was pretty much every day.

Every weekend, I was on appointments and I had to put in the work in the beginning. It’s the commitment and dedication to building a business from scratch. That’s where some people miss. They think it’s going to be easy. We have a family. I told her, I said, “We’re going to do this for a year. I’m going to get this thing up and running and then it’s going to provide for us and allow me to make my own decisions going forward.” Fortunately, I did because when James did come along, I was able to pull the plug from the military and not even think anything of it. We already had a million-dollar income coming in from another stream. It was amazing to see what’s possible in real estate. If I can do it, anybody can do it, especially if you don’t have such a demanding job of 60 to 80 hours a week flying for the military.

I used to think anybody could do it. I understand what you’re saying. It can be done because the roadmap’s out there. People have to find a business that’s right for them. This business is not right for everybody. I don’t know why. I used to think everyone could do it. I try to get everyone in my family to do it and they would fail miserably. I thought, “Why is this so hard for them?” It’s not for them. I have a passion for it. You have a passion for it. You don’t have to do 100 houses a year to make a great living in this business. You could do five houses a year and be extraordinarily ahead of where you’re at. I don’t want to paint that picture.

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For people like you and me that want to make a bigger mark with this business, I was working eighteen hours a day doing it. You were working eighteen hours a day, but you were having to divide yourself. My saving grace was I made so little money on the open market as, “Mitch Stephen, do you want to hire me?” I made $30,000 a year many years ago. To flip 1 or 2 houses, I jumped off full-time saying, “I’ve got a year in the bank right now. I’m going to keep my same budget. I’m going to spend it exactly how I spent it now. I’m going to see what I can do in a year.” I did 45 houses that year, saw more money than I ever dreamed I would ever see. It kept going up from there, but I was putting in eighteen hours a day.

Here’s the catch, you couldn’t tell if I was working or playing. I was having fun. You couldn’t tell me I was working. They go, “You’re going to get stressed out.” It wasn’t stress for me because I wasn’t going out on limbs. I only bought if it was a no-brainer because I was scared. I wasn’t in a hurry for anything. Back in the day, many years ago, you could get in the Classifieds at 8:00 in the morning and by noon, you’d have a house and if you screwed up, you’d have two. They were perfect fits for the model. You would be wondering how you’re going to pay for it. I was putting in that time. You put in that time. I’m going to guess that even when you quit the military, you’re still working a lot of hours, but it’s not work to you.

I always said that I’m going to keep flying as long as I’m having fun. I want to work because I want to work, not because I have to work. That’s what I’ve always said my whole life. Nothing I’ve ever done has felt like work. There are a couple of things like when I was deployed and it’s 120 degrees on the ship and stuff like that, it felt like work sometimes. I love what I do. My assumption in saying that anybody can do it is the audience already have their ‘why,’ you’re interested in this. What I tell a lot of people is, if you already knew your path and where you want to go and what you should be doing, it would be easy. Life would be easy.

You could go from point A to Z and already have the path laid out for you. You’ve got to find your way. Sometimes that means doing something and not being successful at it and realizing that’s not for you. If it’s something that you want to do, go do it. I was an engineer. I was a test pilot in the Navy. Everything points to the fact that I should be a test pilot for Lockheed or Boeing or somebody. That’s what I should be doing. The government spent $1.6 million on my education for one year in England and that’s what I should be doing, making a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I found a different path that I enjoyed that fulfilled me and filled me up. When I say, “If I can do it, anybody can do it,” I have certain skillsets that I am and I would build a company slightly different than other people. If you got the ‘why,’ you know what you want to do, go do it. It’s not impossible. It’s a challenge, but if that’s what you want to do, go for it. I see a lot of people that are afraid to jump into it.

You’ve got people that say, “I spent $30,000 in this course. I didn’t get anything out of it.” I said, “Welcome to the club. You’ll spend a few more bucks. You’re going to find the one and then you’re going to be in the way.” That’s how it worked for all of us. It’s how it works for everyone. We all spent some money and didn’t feel like that was the right guy, but we got better at figuring out what we wanted and who would want to teach us. It was part of the path of almost every real estate investor I know is that they spent some money on some courses and stuff that they didn’t feel like they got the optimum out of it, but they’ve got to the person. They finally got to where they were where they did get a mentor with the optimum. I’m going to bet $1 million that you are never without a mentor.

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, it’s funny because that comment that you made resonates with me deeply. I was so cheap. I went to Georgia Tech undergrad. I went to a Master’s program where I got a Master’s in Aeronautical Engineering. I’ve been to test pilot school. There’s about $2 million being spent on my formal education that I haven’t used at all since I left the colleges. I only spent two years as a test pilot before I went back to be a flight instructor for students again. I don’t even feel like I’ve ever gotten the return on that money that was spent by me or the government. I never looked at self-education like something that I would commit to. I was reading free forums. I was reading books and people were like, “Don’t give anybody any money. Don’t spend any money.” In my mind, I’m like, “This is all scam. It’s scary. Why would I give other people money? I can figure it out myself.” I’m always the, “I’ll figure it out,” guy.

You’re going to pay the streets what you said you’re going to do. I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to pay the street tens of thousands of dollars learning my lessons, which is way more stressful than paying $10,000 or whatever to someone saying, “You’ve already done it. Show me how to do it. Let me have a sounding board. Let me tell you what I’m thinking. You tell me why it’s not going to work.” You agree you’re going to pay the street or you’re going to pay the mentor.

I paid the street. I bought that piece of land. I made a bad hard money loan. I bought a poorly performing house. I did all the things wrong in the beginning. I thought I was saving money. I also did a lot of work on my houses in the very beginning. I was probably working for about $10 or $12 an hour when I went back six months and said, “How much time did I put in? How much did I make? What was my dollar per hour?” It was embarrassing to look at that. All of those things added up. I was the guy with the library card going to get a book from the library. I won’t even buy a book. That’s how cheap I was.

I’ve had high level coaches and mentors. I was a pretty high performing soccer player. I played semi-pro soccer. I’d always had serious coaches that had developed me. My dad was a huge mentor of mine. When I finally woke up to this, I reached out to my dad. I was listening to a podcast and this guy was selling this thing. I was like, “This is the guy I want to emulate. This is the exact business model that I want.” He’s says he doesn’t see any houses. He’s doing hundreds of houses a year. At first, I was like, “This guy’s lying.” I started to get to know him and understand that our core values and the integrity was there. It started to attract me.

I bought a $25,000 mastermind program from a podcast without talking to anybody. I put it on my credit card and that was the first purchase that I ever made. I didn’t go to an event. I didn’t do anything. I joined a $25,000 mastermind and it changed. I went from flipping one house a year and having no idea how to do it to a repeatable system. You might find the right person eventually. You might have to go through a couple people to find them. Fortunately, I found my guy on the first try. Sometimes I wish I had done that a little bit earlier right. This is our journey. I did pay the streets for a while. That $25,000 investment I made year after year has returned itself 100 times over every year.

 

You’ve said you probably have coaches. I spend six figures per year on business coach. We run off traction of the US model. I have an EOS coach in both of my businesses that meets quarterly. That’s not cheap. I go to four events a year. I pay for other masterminds that are outside in the marketing space and other spaces for us to grow. Even my team can plug into in different things because I want to shortcut the learning curve. Once you get a taste of that, it’s hard to remove yourself from it because the return that you get is so high. My time is way more valuable than the money that I have in the bank. That is the most important thing. My time is the only thing that I’m not going to get back. I can replenish the bank account.

It’s an investment in myself and was looking at it as an expense. It’s a huge difference. When that mindset shift happened, I have mentors and coaches for everything. I’m watching this documentary that they have on ESPN with Michael Jordan. This is the extreme ultimate athlete that I followed when I was a kid growing up. It’s taking me back many years ago when I was playing basketball, watching this. He’s the best performing athlete and they all have coaches. When I see that, I was like, “Why wouldn’t you do it? It’s makes no sense.” I pushed so hard on this because when I realized it, it was such a game changer and so many people fight it. Many people spend so much money on their formal education. They won’t spend any other self-education where the self-education can take them to the moon and back.

I tell everyone I graduated from Calle U, the most expensive college in the planet and they go, “Where’s that?’ I said, “The Calle means the street in Spanish.” I got a diploma. The diploma is from the scars I have and the horror stories that I learned. Let’s talk about your course. You’ve got a course where you take people through the whole thing. Let’s talk about your course from beginning to end. What does it include?

The mastermind company that I joined, I ended up buying that company. I moved up as a coach. I moved up in the ranks after five years. We started doing so much volume and then I bought that company. What I tried to do when I bought it was, we rebranded it. We made a lot of changes to it. I said, “We need a repeatable system. We have the system, but we roll it out in pieces or people ask in the Facebook groups like, ‘Do you have this?’” What I wanted to do, and I did it primarily for my company. I have fifteen people in my company all the way from the marketing department, all the way to the dispositions and project management team on the flips that we do.

I wanted to document every single thing that we do in our company. How do we get leads? How do we pull a list? How do we market? How do we run the appointment? How do we do sales? What contracts do we use? Put it all in a place that I could hire someone, plug them in there and they can teach themselves how we do business at Blackjack Real Estate. It’s my real estate company and how we do many deals a year, where they fit and where all the other departments work. We built this out and then we launched it as part of our mastermind group, which is anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000 a year. That was the piece that they had to replicate my system and what we’re doing as a company.

Mitch reached out to me. I said, “Let’s see if we can make this available to your audience.” This is a soup to nuts, everything that we do in my company from the mindset of getting started as a business owner to the introduction to it. Do I need an LLC? Do I need a website? What are the actions I need to take as a wholesaler or is this only for wholesalers and flippers? We have two tracks that you go down and the course include all of it. If you’re a wholesaler and you want to become a flipper in the future, it’s there. If you’re a flipper and you want to become a wholesaler in the future, it’s there. The mindset and getting started, the whole wholesaling track. What is the assignment agreement, walking through that, all the documents?

It’s the same thing for flipping, “How do I do a scope of work? How do I budget it out? How do I hire contractors? What documents do I need there?” Then into the sales and the marketing side. We go through every marketing channel that is out there right now. Ringless voicemails, cold calling, direct mail, pay-per-click, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, Driving for Dollars. We have a system for each one of them. What I tell people in the videos is go into that system. It starts from, “I have no money and I have time,” all the way to, “I have no time and I have money.” It goes in that order.

You pick that thing that you want and it’s the systems right there. You should be able to plug it in, get going without any questions afterwards. The sales and the negotiation all the way from the sellers to the buyers, how to squeeze as much money out of the deal as you can with the contracts. The way I think about it is if we’re going to franchise our company, here’s what I would give to a franchise owner to be able to turn the key and start the business in the beginning. It’s me or my staff walking through our entire business model on video and we recorded it. We gave it to our mastermind members. It’s been incredibly successful for them. It’s primarily what they get for their membership as well as a couple meetings and things like that. This is the gas.

Most podcasters are always trying to help each other out. We only have a price that’s out there in the world. If someone else signed on the podcast, we give a discount. Bill Allen was very gracious. His course usually sells for about $2,000. He’s offering it for $1,497. I’m sure there’ll be contact information if they want to learn more or figure out more before they commit. I’m sure that will all be there too. I’m going to read you something I put in the quote in one of my first books, My Life & 1,000 Houses: Failing Forward to Financial Freedom. I was in that time where I had no money, but I had time. I needed to become an expert so I can make good use of that time. Like what Bill said, you don’t have money, you’re going to substitute time and expertise.

You can make the time, but if you’re not an expert at what you’re doing, you’re going to flounder around. Courses like this or mentorships are what helped you grab the expertise so you can make good use of that time. What I wanted to show you is I put this quote in the book. It was the first time ever, my wife said she fully understood me. Even if I went out to eat with people or I went to happy hour or whatever. She’d say, “You’re not working. You are out having fun.” I said, “Not really. The guy I sat next to was worth a lot of money and we’re having a meeting tomorrow now about him loaning me private money.”

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She read this first quote in my book from James Michener that said, “The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.” That’s why we can put in our 10,000 hours without blowing up or being exasperated is because we don’t even know when we’re working or playing.

It’s a game. I tell people all the time that are good on these video games. I’m going to say, “How many hours do you spend?” They spend an extraordinary number of hours and they get paid nothing for this. There are a few diehards out there that get paid a little bit for testing games and stuff. I said, “I play an internet game too. It’s called how much money can I make this computer crap into my bank account?” It’s called marketing. Pick anything you want to become an expert at. If you spent that many hours studying marketing and you hit the nail on the head, no matter what company you have, you’re a marketing company or you don’t have any customers. I don’t care what you’re selling. I want to thank you for coming on. I have no doubt with your background that you’re well-thought out, well-planned and well-delivered.

Your quote made me think of one. This whole Last Dance, Michael Jordan has a quote that I absolutely love. Your quote reminds me a lot of it and what we’ve been talking about. It says, “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down, and the level of everything that you do will rise.” That’s what I got from having a mentor and following a proven system was that instead of me searching around for what’s happening, I was able to build the foundation strong.

What that did was it allowed everything that I do now. You can take away all my money, my team, my staff, everything tomorrow. Drop me on a corner in any town in the USA, anywhere in the world, with no money and they can’t take away my experience, my knowledge, all of the things that I got from that. That investment is something that I had never made in myself. For me, it’s an opportunity for you if it’s the right fit. If you’re wholesaling and flipping is where you want to go, the fundamentals are what it’s all about. It’s my goal to make sure that we make an impact on as many people as possible.

I’m sure Mitch would agree the money was good in the beginning. That became a game and it became time. I got the time freedom. Now, it’s more about the impact that I can make and the people that I see in the lives that we can change. A lot of people talk about educators and put them down. What fills me up now is the impact that I can make on my team, my staff, the other people that are out there. We could go franchise this and take this video series. We can sell franchises all over the US and take residuals from people. I don’t want to do that. I want to figure out how I can help somebody else because I’ve been helped so much by the people before me.

My mentor helped me. We’re creating this family tree where he’s like the grandfather on the tree and all these people are being impacted and improving their lives. It’s amazing to see. I love this quote. I think the fundamentals and the foundation, it allows you to do everything in your life to a higher level. I do everything at a higher level now. It’s not just my business. It’s my spiritual life, my family, my friends, my athletics. I take it all to the next level now. It’s allowed me to up my game and spend time with the right people.

First, you need to make the money. It’s all about the money because you’re broke. You need to make a strike. You’ve got the money and you’ll have any time because you’ve got all this money now and you’re worn ragged. You’re wearing all these hats. You go to the next challenge of, “How do I systematize this? How do I get a business running without me?” I can enjoy what I’ve made. After that gets boring, you go into retirement and you do all that for a little while. It’s like, “I’ve got to do something and it’s not about the money anymore because I don’t need any more money.” Would I like to make some more money? Sure, because that’s part of our game.

You’d be better next year than you are last year because we wouldn’t feel good if we made less. We still continue to grow, but it’s not about that anymore. It becomes, “How do I give a hand up to someone now? How do I bring something else up?” Dave Ramsey rings the bell. He does the primal scream when they get debt free. Dave Ramsey would hate me. I did my first 100 deals on credit cards, but I’m a student of the difference between good debt and bad debt. We ring the bell at my studio when someone calls in and goes, “I told my boss I don’t need his services anymore. The reason is because I don’t. I make more money from the part-time business that I started with you, Mitch, than what I made at my deal. I can quit.”

When they retire their ‘why,’ that’s the second time we ring it. The one spouse goes full-time and becomes their own person. The next time we ring the bell is when their wife quits their job. That’s very rewarding. I’ve had people drive hundreds and hundreds of miles to knock on my door or shake my hand. We both have a good cry. He gets back in his car and he leaves because they’re so grateful that someone took the time to show them how to be their own person. It’s emotional. It’s rewarding and you can’t buy that with the money.

We have this quit your job calendar that we create for our mastermind members. We have them all on there. We’re calling them to say, “How’s that going?” That’s a huge celebration. Something momentous like that is awesome. I love that.

 

I was thinking of trying to come up with something more original. I went back to when you pay off your house, you had a mortgage burning party. You took your mortgage papers, burned them and roasted marshmallows over them.

Military challenge coins are big in the Navy and flight community and things like that. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one. We have a challenge coin for people that when they enter the seven figure clubs, so they hit seven figures in their business per year. In October at our event, we have a ceremony for them where they get this big plaque and a military challenge coin. I shake their hand like they would in the military. That’s one thing that we have. That’s high level. You’ve got to hit seven figures to get there.

You got me thinking, this is what a mastermind does. You ping pong and you keep one up. That’s what happens. That’s how I got free. I paid $30,000 so I could finally figure it out. I tried a lot of times to systemize my business. I failed. I paid $30,000. I got in a room with people that already did it. It happened and that year, it was over. When you do your first deal, there ought to be a coin. When you quit your job, there ought to be a coin. It should mark all the levels like Boy Scout pins or whatever. If my coach or mentors would’ve had that system when they had me my coins, they would be framed on my wall right now, all of them, in order. They would be framed.

That was very helpful for me. I love that first deal coin, maybe a quit your job coin or $100,000 coin. There are different levels of coins. We have a plaque that they do put in their office that I sign and write a note. It has a place to put all your coins like a collection.

“The first house I made $20,000 profit on. The first house I made $50,000 profit on. The first deal I made $100,000 profit on.” It could go on and on. It would be a hell of a board.

This was like a last-minute thing before our event. I was like, “We have to have an award ceremony for our people,” because they need to feel special. That’s what we need. Sometimes we need that feedback and that continues to fuel us. We see that result. It changes our belief and then our actions explode after that too.

I’d like to thank my sponsor TaxFreeFuture.com. You won’t believe what your financial advisors aren’t telling you. Please go to TaxFreeFuture.com, give the micro information there about yourself and open up those 37-video vignettes. You won’t believe what having a tax-deferred or tax-free retirement can do for you in your finances and retirement. It’s unbelievable but it takes people that know what to do. You can’t just put $200 in it and expect $200 million overnight. I’d like to thank all of you for stopping by to get you some Bill Allen.

 

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