Beginner Investors With Viktor Jiracek

Episode 492: Beginner Investors With Viktor Jiracek

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Do you want to shift gears into investing but don’t know where to start? Well, this episode is for all beginner investors out there. Joining host Mitch Stephens is Viktor Jiracek, a real estate investor and mentor to real estate beginners. They discuss the roadblocks that hold people back from venturing into real estate and ultimately preventing them from the potential profits and exponential gains. Viktor also offers advice stemming from his own experience on overcoming mental and economic obstacles and pursuing investing in real estate and flipping houses.

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My guest on the show is Viktor Jiracek. He will be talking to us about those new entrepreneurs and new investors coming into the industry. He has a mentoring program for them. I got to say it’s a specialized niche because when you start out, there are a lot of things you don’t know and limiting beliefs, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you’re going to have to get through. Hopefully, you get the right person, listened to the right show or YouTube channels, or whatever and get through a lot of this stuff quickly. If you just sit there by yourself, it may take you a long way to find your way out of this maze. We’re going to be talking to Viktor about that.

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With no further ado, we’re going to talk to Viktor Jiracek.

Thanks for having me.

Jiracek, what is that? What nationality?

It’s Slovakian. My family is from Slovakia. My parents were born there, and I was born in Gainesville. We still speak the language and still visit once in a while. We’re supposed to go last April 2020 for the cousin’s wedding, but Corona happened, so we had to not go.

A little backstory, my grandfather’s name was Joe Stephen Van Eck. When he landed in Ellis Island, he wanted to be American. He dropped his last name and the rest of us got a screwed-up name from then on after. No one understands it. There’s no S on the end of it. It’s two first names but that’s how it happened. We’re from Prague.

Very cool, the Czech Republic.

Where do we start here? I have an idea for this, so after you state yours, I’ll state mine. If we’re talking about people getting into the industry, what’s the biggest roadblock for someone to get into this business mentally?

I think the biggest thing, as you said, is it’s a mental roadblock. People always ask like, “How do I get the deals? How do I get the money?” That’s the two things.

What do you think the biggest block is? Everything is mental. They don’t know that yet but we know that. What’s the biggest one? I can’t do this business because?

I think there’s always some fear behind all of it. It’s maybe, “because I’m too old, I’m too young or it won’t work in my market. The market’s too hot, the market is too cold, I want to wait.” There are always these excuses behind it if you look back and ask deeper questions. I’m afraid of losing money. I’m afraid of this and that. It’s the fear. That four-letter word is holding it back.

My opinion is one of the biggest obstacles and there could be a couple of them right at the top real close together is, “I don’t have any money. I’m broke. It takes money to do that. How am I going to get in the real estate game without any money?” If you think you need money for this business, then you screwed up right from the start. If it took money for this business, then none of us would be here because none of us had any money. 99.9% of the people I know started out dead broke, and I’m one of them, so let’s just address that. When you don’t have any money, you’re going to get paid to be a professional deal finder, contract writer upper. You have to learn how to find extraordinary deals and you need to learn how to write them up. Whoever has a contract in their hand signed by a seller at a fantastic deal, has got himself an asset waiting to be funded.

All of us started out as professional deal finders, contract writer uppers. That’s what happens. Let’s put it into layman terms. Let’s say I don’t have a pot to piss in and I don’t have $0.02, but I do know where I can negotiate with this person that’s selling this house that’s in bad shape. I know it’s worth about $200,000, but I can get it under contract for $75,000. I don’t have any money but I got 30 days to close. Do you think someone will bring the $75,000, $100,000, $80,000, or $60,000 and split the $125,000 and profit with me? Do you think they’re going to split with me? Let’s just say there’s only $50,000 profit after all the repairs and everything. I have no money and I got half a $50,000 for this out. That would be $25,000, not a bad day for a broke guy. If you get excited about that, you might learn how to do those 2 or 3 times a month. Take it from there, Viktor.

Beginner Investors: It’s always the deal and not the money. If you get a good enough deal, people will throw money at you.

A couple of things with that. It’s always the deal and it’s not the money. If you get a good enough deal like people throw money at you just to use your example. That’s how I did my first fix and flip. I found a great deal and found what I call a money partner. The money partner putting all the money to buy it, renovate, and sell it. I was the boots on the ground, sweat equity, and the one making happen. I found the deal. I’d help manage the renovations and the sale. I was the sweat equity person. I was the one out there doing it. We split the profit and that’s how I got started. You get started somewhere. Don’t let money hold you back. What’s the use of the money? Where are you going to put the money to use? If it’s going to get a great return versus someone having money sitting in the bank, putting it towards real estate where they can make much greater profits. That’s going to happen all day long.

That’s probably the number one. The number two objection I hear is people think they’re damaged. They have bad credit like, “My credit is not that good. I have filed bankruptcy.” It doesn’t matter. No one cares about you. I like to use this bad example. Charles Manson should be able to get the money from my deals from prison after killing a bunch of people. It doesn’t matter because the person lending the money is either going to get paid or they’re going to get the house. If the house is worth $500,000 and I’m only asking them to loan me $250,000, they hope that I don’t pay them because I’d rather have my house. It doesn’t matter about me. They hope I fail because if I pay them on time, they’ll make 8% to 12% of their money. If I don’t pay them on time, they’ll get a house that’s worth $250,000 more than what they had in it. That’s the story behind that. It doesn’t matter about your credit. Certainly, doesn’t matter about your color, height, weight or whether you speak great English or not. You just have to be able to convey that your deal is very worthy of looking at.

To tag onto that, just as you said, people don’t care about you. What’s your background? Do you have a degree? What’s your credit? They care about what you can do for them. They’re in it for them. How I like to think about it is you’re not trying to make money. If you do real estate, you’re a professional problem solver. If someone has a problem, you solve it for them. If you solve it for them, then you’d get a big check. Solving it typically involves real estate like I need to sell this house, I need to do this, I have a divorce, or whatever they want to sell the asset for. You’re solving a problem for them. In solving a problem, you don’t need good credit, a diploma or anything like that. You don’t need to be XYZ. You just need to be able to solve the problem. If you can do that effectively, you’ll get compensated.

There’s always the big question, what happens if I fail? What position is the person in if I don’t do what I say I’m going to do? Are there going to be in a worse position or a better position? If you can orchestrate it to where they’re in a better condition, if you don’t do what you say, then it’s hard for them to turn down. It’s like, “I’m going to pay you back this money. This is the interest rate and these are the payments. If I don’t pay you back the money, you get my house.” That’s a winning proposition for the lender than they ought to loan the money.

I like what you said though, we get paid to solve problems. Can I tell you about my last problem? I’m closing on an 822-acre ranch. It has a problem. It has the two highest peaks in the county. There’s a saddle right between it, but the saddle is even very high. The two mountains go right across the middle of the property. When you come in the front gate, you’re looking at these two mountains. You can’t get to the back 400 acres because there are these two, we call them mountains. They’re overgrown hills. To solve the problem with the ranch, you got to get a road up and over into the back. That’s a $100,000 proposition, but I take it on that rant. I’m taking on that problem. Once you get that done, you can divide the ranch in half to 410 acres apiece and make money. We get paid to solve problems, whether it’s title issues or repairs. Tell us about your first deal. What did you buy off on your first deal? What did it look like?

It is in Gainesville. We bought it at $105,000, we put in a little under $30,000 in renovations, and we sold for about $170,000, so we made about $28,000 net profit. It’s not a home run deal but it got me started. It got me building a track record. Your first deal is your hardest because, as we talked about the mindset, fear, and what if things go wrong, sometimes, the best thing that can happen to you is your worst nightmares to come true because you realize your worst nightmares aren’t scary. We were like, “What if a contractor doesn’t show up?” Then a contractor didn’t show up. “We just found someone else pretty quickly.” It wasn’t a big deal or maybe this happens. “What if it sits on the market? That one sat on the market a little bit but not too long.” All our fears came true. I was like, “That wasn’t that bad. Let’s do another deal.” That was the first one. It was a pretty cosmetic flip. It is like paint flooring, kitchen and roof repair. It’s pretty minimal. It didn’t need much.

I would suggest that on your first houses. I wouldn’t go into some major repair problem because learning to deal with contractors is a whole other art in itself. There’s a reason why the word contractors begin with the words CON. They’re not all bad. Even in our industry, there are crappy real estate investors that try to sell shit, they covered up, have buried in the backyard the title issues they didn’t want to clear up and all kinds. There are bad people in every business, bad doctors and bad lawyers. You have to learn to navigate your way through that field. I would try to deal with a lighter rehab if it was my first. That would be my suggestion. With someone who’s done a lot of it and you’re just partnering with them, they can show you the ropes.

I’m going to recommend you. I call it a simple flip. It’s like paint flooring in the roof kitchen, something like that. No foundation and no fire damage. Nothing like that because that’s pretty costly, expensive, and hard to deal with. It’s just Murphy’s Law. As I see it, any things that can go wrong will go wrong. If you have all these issues, things are going to go wrong and you don’t want that for your first deal. Your first deal should be like, “That wasn’t too bad. Nice check in your hand. Let’s do more.”

The first deal is always your greatest blessing. You can read about concepts all you want to but in order to own the concept right here in your heart, you got to get a check. It doesn’t matter if the check is $5,000 or $25,000. It’s a proof of concept. It worked and I got paid. I’m doing to the good side of it. If I could do it once, I can do it again. I read a book by Robert Allen, Nothing Down. It was all about buying houses with zero money. The reason why I read that book is because I didn’t have any money. This guy had the audacity to suggest that I could be rich in real estate, and I didn’t even have to have my own money.

I thought I got to read this. When I read the book, five years later, I stumbled into a deal. It took me five years. I’m not a quick study. I understood the concepts. I just didn’t own the concept in my heart. One day, I stumbled into a deal. I did a nothing down deal and then I slapped my forehead and said, “That’s what Robert Allen was talking about.” I just made a deal and I don’t have any money in it. Now, I own the concept of my heart and I was out trying to buy the whole town with no money because I saw it happen. You’re limiting your belief system just changes to different switches to a different mode. That’s the most important thing of the first deal.

Exactly, that was the first one. You can watch all the YouTube videos, podcasts, the value of getting started. The other thing I want to add to what you just said. I know it took you five years to get your first deal, but look at where you’re at now. It is that exponential growth. It’s so important to get started as soon as possible. This is how it was for me too. The first year I did 2, then I did 8, then I did 20. My goal is 30 for 2021. It grows exponentially. By not getting started, you don’t miss on that linear. You miss out on everything below that. Who knows where you would’ve been if you started those five years earlier.

I want to say, I wasn’t out there trying to find a deal, and it took me five years. I didn’t believe the concept was me or it would work for me, so I put it off. I didn’t jump in or apply what they were telling me for a long time. I limited my belief system even if the guy was sitting there telling me how to do it and interviewing other people who had worked for, I was somehow telling myself that doesn’t work for me. It’s not going to work in this town. Typical bullshit that you tell yourself that we drowned ourselves in. I shudder to think where I would be if I had broken through those barriers earlier in my life. Everyone is saying the hot housing market. For some reason, people think that automatically means that there are no deals to be made. I never get that. “You’re not finding deals out there now, are you?” I said, “People quit dying, getting a divorce, or getting cancer. Of course, there are no tragedies out there.” There’s plenty of deals out there. You have to live with the chaos where there’s a major change. You didn’t cause that change but that change happened. Usually, there’s some real estate tied to it and something’s got to be done with it. There’s an old saying and it’s anonymous I think, “Wealth comes from chaos,” so find where the chaos is.

From chaos to order, that’s where you make your money. If the house is trashed, going through a divorce, you clear up some title issues, or you bring order to the entire situation and sell it for retail price, that’s your value. I’m just dealing with that entire situation.

Talk to us about coaching. Did you hire some coaches yourself? How did you get to where you’re at?

Beginner Investors: Sometimes, the best thing that can happen is for your worst nightmares to come true because then you’ll realize your worst nightmares aren’t that scary.

I went full-time in real estate a few years ago.

How do you go full-time? Did you have enough in the bank to last a year? Did you just call your boss and jump off and say, “I’m going to jump into this business and gamble?” Did you get fired and didn’t have a choice? Tell me how that happened.

It was a smoother transition. That’s what I recommend for folks. I don’t hear this show and I’m like, “I’m going to quit everything now. I’m going all-in on real estate.” That’s not how I do it. I wouldn’t recommend that. What happened was I was working that corporate job as a home health administrator. It wasn’t working out for several reasons. I always had the real estate bug, so it is always in the back of my mind like, “I want to do this. I want to make this happen. How do I make it happen?” I slowly start doing more research and looking into it some more. I came across a friend of a friend, Cris Chico. He does like Facebook Ads for wholesaling.

I reached out to him and I couldn’t afford his mentorship, but he had a position open for a cold call. He was like, “It’s commission only. Whenever you can bring in, I’ll give you a percentage.” I’m like, “I’m in.” He would mentor me and teach me for free. I learned a ton and that relationship ended but I’m still on good terms with him. I started doing wholesaling. I made three on my first wholesale and three and a half on the second wholesale. I started fix and flipping, and that’s where I am now. It was a smooth transition. I was working full-time, did Uber on the weekends, and then I started to get some traction with real estate. I quit the full-time job and still had the Uber income coming in. Once I started getting those checks and I was like, “Let me go all-in. Let me make this happen.” That’s the story.

I know Cris. I was in a mastermind with him. Most of us that started on the business have a similar story. We’re burning the candle at both ends. You’ve got your daytime gig, steady income, and enough to pay the bills and everything. Every spare minute you got, you’re driving for dollars, making offers, or tying to prove the concept so that you can quit your job. Just so everyone knows, the object of this show is to help people figure out how to quit their job to replace whatever that is, income-wise so that they quit.

When you walk away from that job, you’re going to free up about 2,600 hours a year that you get to work on just you. Dave Ramsey did the primal screen when people get debt-free. We ring the bell around here when people call up and say, “I was able to quit my job yesterday. Thanks to the things I’ve learned.” That’s tremendously important because 2,600 hours is how you’re going to become an expert. It’s how you’re going to get your 10,000 hours. It’s hard to do four hours at a time to get 10,000 hours after work on the weekends. It’s hard. We can try to replace our $3,500 a month.

I think the first goal should always be something very small, which should hopefully be your income. For once in your life, not having a lot of money could be your greatest asset to becoming free and finding yourself. If it doesn’t take very much money for you to get free and if you only need $2,500 to quit your job, then that’s tremendous. Someone who’s making $250,000 at a corporate job hates it. It’s got a whole other challenge ahead of them. It’s pretty easy to make $2,500 if you concentrate on that. What did you have to replace when you jumped off? What were you making?

It wasn’t a lot now that you mentioned. I was making $500 a week. I would do weekend Uber, so Friday night and Saturday night, a little bit of Sunday. With the job, I think it was $15 an hour. It’s about $30,000 plus the Uber, so like 40,000, maybe. One good deal.

That’s what I’m saying to replace that income. I swear, when I talk to my students, I want to know what their freedom number is. The lower that number is, the more excited I get because if you average $500 a deal positive cashflow and you need $3,500, that’s seven deals to freedom. That’s not the kind of freedom where you’re flying a Learjet or traveling all over the country. I’m just saying, you decide when you wake up in the morning, what you want to wear and how the day is going to go, because there’s nobody to tell you what to do when you tell your boss goodbye. I think that’s a very important first step. I want to make $1 million to be a multimillionaire, but I never set any of those goals. My first goal was no job, eat. This scared the living crap out of me.

I think the key is little baby steps. I’ve seen people hype themselves out. They set this huge unattainable goal and they don’t do it. A lot of people may work full-time and they’re like, “I’m going to go all out this week. I’m going to spend the entire weekend making offers. I’m going to make 50 offers in one weekend and I’m going to make a deal.” They hype themselves up and then Friday roll around, nothing. Saturday rolls around, “I’ll start tomorrow.” Sunday rolls around, nothing happens. You’ve got to take those baby steps like building these daily habits, so you can get out there and start making offers. As you said, if you hype yourself up like I’m a millionaire or a billionaire, you still hit the little smallest roadblock and there’s that huge gap. That gap is painful. You want that little gap because you can hit that next gap like, “I’ll make an offer and I’ll get a deal this year.” It’s something small and attainable so you can build that momentum and you don’t feel the emotional burn every time you miss a goal.

Are you married? Do you have children or what?

Single.

That’s a little bit different too. I was single when I started on my quest, which was cool because I didn’t have to ask permission, and I could sleep on a floor if I wanted to. I could eat rice and beans because I knew I could do it. I was willing to sacrifice whatever it takes. Sometimes it’s a little harder to ask someone else in your life to do that, especially if you have kids, but I have had people use that excuse before. I say, “You don’t use your wife and your kids as an excuse not to do it. You use them as a driving force to do it because they deserve better than what’s going on, probably.” They all deserve to have more of you, earn your financial freedom and personal time freedom to the point of both jobs. Most people start and all they have is a financial goal. It usually turns into, “Now that I have the money, how do I buy my time back?” If you go with time and money as your goal to begin with, it’ll help out a little bit. When you teach people how to do this stuff, are you doing it over the internet, by the phone, Zoom, or do people come to you physically?

It’s a group coaching program. It’s a Facebook Group. All the students are in there as an online course. People can learn the basics and fundamentals on their own and then they can come back to me. They have Voxer access to me. It’s a little walkie-talkie app. How that works? Anytime they want to hit me up, they can ask me questions directly. That’s been working out well. We have group calls twice a week on Zoom if there’s anything I missed or anything they want to talk about to go through. It’s like a group coaching model but they get direct access to me. It’s been successful. Students are getting deals and getting out there. I’ve seen this too that the value of community is key. If you feel like you’re doing this solo then you’re not going to have as much success versus if you have a community of people like this person is doing a deal, it’s a nice kick in the butt like, “I need to do a deal too.” Those barriers start to break down like, “This person had no money and got a deal. They’re in Texas. This person did a deal with bad credit and they’re in Washington.” All these limiting beliefs start to melt away if you start to see other people doing it.

Beginner Investors: It’s always mindset first because everything else is going to come from that. It’s not going to help if you don’t have a good foundation.

That’s the one great thing about having those communities. It’s seeing other people have some success and knowing that it’s not fabricated like, “That guy did that because he was talking about it last week.” Being able to size up and this is a bad example but, “That guy that I’ve been listening to for the last three weeks isn’t that smart and he just made $25,000. We can do this.” Go to 1000Houses.com/Viktor. You can sign up with this free Facebook Group there, get in that group, and find out what all there is to offer over there. What do you think one of the most important daily habits is?

I always break it down to three things, but I’ll rank them in importance. The first thing is work on mindset. That’s key. The second is to make offers and the third is to push deals forward. Push deals forward is if you’re in the middle of a renovation, you have to take it to the next step or if you’re just trying to sell it, push the next out of contract. It’s always mindset first because everything else is going to come from that. If you don’t have a good foundation, it’s not going to help. The mindset is key. Anytime I’ve had a leap in my income in a positive way, there’s a mindset shift first. Something like eliminating belief got released or something happened, it was a little bit of mindset quantum leap forward. It’s been going like that. Luckily, I’ve been doubling my income every year. I name it mostly to the mindset. It’s not like, “What’s this cool technique that works or what’s the marketing methods?

Go to 1000Houses.com/Viktor, join the Facebook Group, and get a sense of this community. See if it’s the right place for you. All we’re trying to do here in this show is help you find your way to your financial independence so that you can be the person you’re supposed to be. If this seems like the natural way for you to go, then try it. It’s not going to harm you. Keep trying until you find where you belong. It may not even be in real estate, but you don’t know until you start checking things off the list, what you’re good at, what you like, and what you don’t like. I sincerely hope that everyone gets there. I’d like to thank everybody for stopping by to get you some Viktor Jiracek over in Florida. Viktor, it’s been a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/Viktor
• http://1000Houses.com/Livecomm
• http://1000Houses.com/Moat
• http://1000Houses.com/Coaching
• http://1000Houses.com/aof

About Viktor Jiracek

Viktor Jiracek is an entrepreneur out of Gainesville Florida who is a full-time fix and flip real estate investor.

Viktor helps others get started flipping houses.

Viktor is a real estate fix and flipper out of Gainesville Florida. He completed 20 flips last year and his goal is an additional 30 flips for this year (2021). Ironically, his best flip was a $64K

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