Connect With Buyers Faster With Xavier Major

Episode 398: Connect With Buyers Faster With Xavier Major

 

The hardest thing an entrepreneur will ever do is have one great idea and finish big. What many don’t realize, however, is that getting every great idea off the ground takes a lot. This is where marketing comes in. Joining Mitch Stephen on today’s podcast is Xavier Major, the CEO of The Wholesale Connection. A marketing adviser to a handful of companies on topics from lead generation to digital advertising, Xavier believes that we’re all in the marketing business. From running a campaign and having a winning ad to qualifying leads, testing your follow-up, and conversion – learn all about how to market your real estate investing business to help you connect with buyers faster and achieve your company revenue goals.

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I have Xavier Major on the line. He’s sitting in Arizona somewhere and I’m sitting in San Antonio, Texas. He used to be from San Antonio, Texas. It was a short time there. His mom was in the military. God bless our military, thank you. Were you in the military, Xavier?

No, I never served.

Thank your mom for us, will you?

Yes, definitely.

We’re talking about wholesaling. Before we get started, I’d like to pay homage to my sponsor. TaxFreeFuture.com. If you do not have a tax-deferred or tax-free retirement plan, in which to grow your finances, you are missing a gigantic tool that should be in your tool belt. We’re going to tell you what the financial advisors are not telling you. We’re going to tell you why they’re not telling you, and then you can make up your own mind about what you want to do from there. Be sure to watch the 37 little video vignettes. I especially like the ones where you take a little bit of money and make it into a lot of money in a relatively short period of time. Those are my favorite topics. Xavier, let’s start with your background, a little bit about who you are and where you’re from. How old are you?

I’m 27.

I hate people like you. When I was 27, I had my head so far up my high knee, it wasn’t even funny. I’m an old guy. I have a receding hairline. I’ve lost 50 pounds. I went from 36 waist to 30. I’m trying to get some of my discipline back. My friend was jealous and like, “You got more and more successful.” I could buy anything I wanted, drink anything anytime, eat anytime, sleep in, and I didn’t have to do anything. If it was strenuous, I wrote a check and someone did it for me. I turned around and I had no discipline. I was fat, smoking a cigarette and drinking, then one day I said, “I think I’ve had enough of this shit.” On August 1st, 2019, I stopped drinking and smoking.

The cursive excess, that’s what I call that.

 

It happens gradually. You wake up one day and you’re like, “How did I get here?” Tell us about you.

I grew up moving around quite a bit. My mom was in the Air Force. For me, it gave me a broad experience of the world. I only live stateside for 6 or 7 years. We lived overseas in Northern Japan for most of my life. We were there from seventh grade all the way through graduating high school. I was fortunate enough after playing football in high school to get a football scholarship to a school in Pennsylvania. Somehow, I wound up back here in Arizona where I met my wife and now we have four kids. Through that whole time, I’ve always had the entrepreneurial bug. From the time that I was eight, I was out washing cars. I had a whole little menu item.

I hired my friends to go through door-to-door and sell and car wash for me. In high school, how I bought my first car, I started a landscaping company. I figured out reoccurring billing, I put everyone on a subscription, I went and cut their grass every week, and I didn’t have to sell it. It was nice because I had everyone on subscription. When I came back to Arizona, I got my degree in Marketing and I went to work. I worked at a couple of different places and then wound up falling in love with marketing. Over the past few years, falling in love with the real estate investor space because here in Arizona, there are many real estate investors. You go to the gym, you trip over a real estate investor.

It’s almost like real estate agents out here. That’s how I got into it. My passion over the past years has been marketing. I’m bringing now my marketing expertise to the real estate investor space because for the longest, I worked with online marketers. We’re doing crazy advanced automations on the front-end, back-end, and all these crazy things with CRMs and stuff. We had a couple of clients that were in the real estate space. I and my partner were like, “What’s going on with this real estate space? Why is everyone that we work with successful and crushing it?” We reverse engineered what they’re doing and saw that there were some gaps and some opportunities for us to bring our expertise to the space and that’s where we’ve been for the past few years. It’s been a wild ride but that’s how we got here.

Did you work with some names that are recognizable in the industry?

Yes. There’s a guy named Brandon Simmons here that used to run dispositions for Sean Terry. He’s been a great resource. He was the guy that gave us the schooling. He has a mastermind that we go to where he laid it to us and gave us all the inner details of how it works. We’ve worked with Steve Trang, Pace Morby, Jared Vidales, and then a couple of big investors across the US. It’s been fun to connect with everyone, get to know the different ways that you can work with real estate and the different strategies that everyone has. It’s unique to see.

Sooner or later, you’re going to come to the conclusion that we’re all in the marketing business. If you don’t learn marketing, then I don’t know what you’re doing, unless you’re a day labor and you’re digging a hole where they tell you to dig. We’re all marketers. Think about it even in the most subtle ways. You’re marketing to your wife every day, your wife is marketing to you. Your kids are marketing the hell out of you because they want what they want. They’re trying to get and selling you every day on why they need ice cream or whatever. We’re all in marketing, aren’t we?

We’re all in marketing. We’re all in sales. We’re selling our wives on ideas. My biggest thing is selling my wife on where are we going to eat for dinner. That’s always a tough sell. I’m selling our kids on going to bed on time. Marketing is planting the seeds for those sales opportunities. That’s why I fell in love with marketing because it’s everywhere. It’s prevalent in everything that you do. For me, I always wanted to be an engineer. I grew up wanting to be a pilot so I got analytical in the way that I look at things. I’m the guy that has a notebook, I’m writing down ad angles that I see in commercials, different marketing pitches that I like. I will go through people’s products and buy them and see how they’re setting things up. That’s the way of life. I want to understand it at such a deep level that I’m willing to spend time dissecting and learning stuff.

Marketing is just planting the seeds for sales opportunities. Click To Tweet

You reverse engineer because you’re doing this marketing program for people and you’re starting to see that there’s a lot of real estate-related businesses. What a big genre because real estate is a huge genre. There are more strategies and more ways to make money. That’s one of the problems. Sometimes people don’t stick with one concept for long enough to be an expert at it and they’re popping around all the time. I’ve been the victim of the shiny object syndrome from time-to-time in my life.

I have too.

I’ve got to be honest. The problem that an entrepreneur has, as far as I can see, I don’t have many original coaches but there’s one. The hardest thing an entrepreneur will ever do is have one great idea and finish big with opportunity and everything. What you don’t realize for a while is that every great idea will take everything you have to get it off the ground most of the time. You have to have a partner that’s dedicated to it and you’re the sounding board while you’re doing other things.

I’ve struggled with that and I’m sure most people have, getting into business for yourself and doing it full-time. As you start to grow, you start to see all these opportunities and you’re like, “That’s a great idea. I can jump on that one and I can jump on this, then I can dump on that.” What’s helped us refine our business and the things that we’re doing is building up the confidence to say no to things. It’s hard when you have friends that will want to work on a business opportunity or show you a different strategy. You’re like, “No, I’ve got to master this.” For me, the longest is I was a yes man. I was like, “Yes, I’ll do that. Yes, I can help you with that.” You get burnt out.

The fine art of saying no, that’s not what I do. It took me a long time to learn it. That happened to me. Someone comes up with great ideas. It’s not a bad idea. I love the ideas but, “What does it mean? You don’t like my idea?” I said, “I love your idea.” “Why won’t you come to do it with me?” I said, “There isn’t any of me left. All of me is committed someplace else. There’s nothing to give you.” Most of the time, you can walk away from that other partner and drop him on his ass and then walk over to you, which is not going to happen. What’s your best tip for moving forward in marketing? Where do you start and where do you go?

It goes back to what you’re saying. The first step to moving forward in marketing is understanding what your investing strategy is. If you are looking for creative financing deals, are you looking for regular wholesale deals or you’re flipping deals? That’s going to be the number one thing. The analogy that I use with all of our clients is, where are you going to fish? If you’re fishing in the pond that has no fish then you have no chance of catching anything. If you fish in the pond where they stock the fish and there are plenty of opportunities, even if you put out bad marketing, you have bad systems, and poor follow-up, you’re still going to have opportunities to close deals. If you don’t know where to start out or what you want at the end of the day, it’s going to be hard for you to get any results for marketing.

Where do you go to stay sharp on this stuff?

I have a couple of mentors that I work with. Facebook groups are where I stay sharp. The biggest thing for me is understanding what the challenges and troubles are that our clients are having specifically as they start to build some of their marketing or some of their systems for their business. That’s what helps me refine it because if I can figure out where the problems are, then it’s a lot easier for me to go and find the solutions. For the longest time, I was in a space where I wanted to gain as much knowledge as I could. I was listening and digesting everything, but you get overwhelmed. You can never listen to all the books and listen to all the podcasts that are out there. You can’t read all the blog articles or watch all the YouTube videos but if you start with finding what the problems are and then going back and finding solutions to those problems, it makes it a lot easier for you to stay sharp on the right things.

 

Since I have that engineering mind, I want to digest everything and it’s easy to get shiny object syndrome with knowledge like, “I’m going to read this book.” There was a time where I had six Audible books on my phone that I hadn’t even started yet, but I was buying new books because someone had mentioned it. I was like, “I need to read that one now.” It’s a combination of direct feedback. I listened to a lot of audiobooks. Lately, the biggest thing for me has been listening to CEOs that are running between a $10 million to $100 million a year business because that’s where we want to grow too. Listening to those interviews, how they think about their business, and how they grow their businesses. It has been a good resource for me in terms of staying sharp, both on the marketing side but also to continue to grow our business.

What does an average day look like for you?

Lately, it’s been a little crazy. We had a baby. This is kid number four for us. We’re in the groove. My day starts at about 5:00 AM. I’m up. I’ll change the baby, let my wife feed him, I’ll take the dog out for a walk because of all this quarantine and everything that’s happening. I’ve been into golf, so I’ll go out and hit the range a couple of times before I get to the office. I’m usually in the office between 7:00 or 8:00 AM. From there, I’m taking out our fires. Anything that’s happened overnight, coordinating with our team projects for the day. I’m either into creating content. Depending on the day of the week, I’m creating content for our Facebook group or for our clients. I’m doing client works. I’m on the phone selling new clients, generating new opportunities, and managing our ads. The day dictates it but the majority of my time is spent on marketing and sales.

Do you do a lot of pay-per-click stuff?

On average, I spend about $1,000 a week either between Facebook or Google Ads.

I’ve never ever had any luck with that. I guess I’m hiring the wrong people or something. I’m not going to learn how to do it because I don’t have time to learn how to do it.

The hard part with advertising is it’s one of those things that’s always shifting and evolving. Whether it’s Facebook which has been volatile lately in terms of what options you can use for targeting or how you can run your ads, or it’s Google that you’ve got to pay to play. You’ve got to spend some money with them to get some results. If you don’t spend enough, you get a trickle of stuff in, and it’s never conclusive enough to make a decision.

My biggest problem with things like that is they can manipulate the hell out of you. I got 1,000 clicks, who knows? Who’s telling I got 1,000 clicks? You said, they said, then I get 1,000 clicks or not. If they were clicks, were they real clicks or were they bullshit clicks? Is my competition clicking on me over and over again? Is Google racking up my clicks because they need to make some payment this month? I don’t know if they’ve got to pay some stockholders or something. I get real suspect of this stuff. When it’s not that transparent and people have told me, “What is transparent?” We have Google Analytics. I said, “Bullshit. Google can do whatever they want and change the algorithm.” Are you having luck with it?

The first step to moving forward in marketing is understanding what your investment strategy is. Click To Tweet

The biggest thing to take away from when it comes to paid advertising whether it’s on Google or with Facebook is at the beginning of all of your campaigns, it’s easy to get lulled into this belief of, “I need to create content and build the brand.” Stuff like that which is great for a certain level. For real estate investors specifically, you need to be focusing when you run a campaign on direct response.

I don’t need a name, logo, or brand recognition, I need someone to bring me a house I can buy. “We’ll worry about branding stuff later when I don’t have to worry about paying the bills.” That’s what I say.

All of your campaigns, in the beginning, should be direct response. The way that you can control what you’re doing with Google or with Facebook is you tie it to an end result. You have all these different objectives and Google will tell you to do this one or Facebook will tell you to do this one. Our goal at the end of the day is, can we produce a qualified lead from it? Can we turn that lead to revenue? If we’re not doing that every single day, then that ad isn’t working for us because we’re not in the business of giving away money to Zuckerberg or to Google, they have plenty of money and they don’t need any of ours. We want to generate revenues. When we run specifically in our campaigns, we’re looking for the same day cash ROI. We had leads come in then we turn that into revenue. For real estate investors, that’s the same thing.

If I’m generating leads, am I having conversations with those leads? Are they qualified leads? If I’m not having that, then I’m turning that ad off and I’m testing a new one. Where a lot of people get stuck is the testing piece with ads specifically but there’s a growth curve to it. You have to muddle through this space where you’re getting low results and you’re testing different things. As you continue to test, that’s where the engineering comes in, you’ll get to a point where it optimizes. You’ll see that when you’re running your campaigns and we’re like, “I was getting 1 to 2 leads when I was testing this out but I found one where I got four leads in a day.” You slowly start adding budget to that one and then it starts to build and starts to build. That’s why there’s value in working with agencies that do pay-per-click advertising or Facebook Ads because they can shorten that growth curve for you.

You have the winning ad and you have the other ad competing against it until you find one that’s better than the winner. This one goes away and this one is the winning ad bringing you another one.

It’s a full-time job because you’re not only testing the ad but you’re testing with Google Ads as the landing page that they’re going to and you’re testing the messaging on that one and then you’re also testing your follow-up. The biggest thing that hurts most people when they run ad campaigns is the follow-up especially if you’re doing Facebook Ads, the nature of that platform is people aren’t going there to sell you their house. They’re going there to look at pictures of dogs, their nieces and nephews, what’s going on in the news. You show up with an ad that’s like, “I want to buy your house.” If you’re not following up with them right away and then continuously, you’re basically pissing money away.

Getting the lead is the first step, converting it is the second step. It’s a waste of money to get a bunch of leads and not convert. What is it you want to scale to $10 million to $100 million a year? You said you’re watching CEOs because that’s where you want to go. What business do you aspire to scale?

Our business is the one that we want to scale. We’re looking to shoot for about a $20 million a year business. We have a couple of utility and businesses that are add on to our core company. There’s so much opportunity for us to provide solutions. The opportunity for us to get there is it’s been weird but it’s almost an internal struggle. Getting past our barriers and our hurdles and rewriting some of the beliefs that we’ve had in terms of how we build a business is how we’ve been getting there. My goal was, “Let’s make money. Let’s try and get money in the door like our goal is to make money.” Once I shifted that and I said, “Let’s make an impact. Let’s provide solutions to people’s problems.” The money came with it. Also with that, I lost that attachment to money to where I’m fine if I only make pennies this month because I can bring on a team member that allows us to help more people or to bring on a software solution to help us get there.

 

That’s what I’m learning in those interviews is how to scale a business. Those CEOs don’t have that attachment. They have money as one of their goals. That’s why we all do this a little at some point, but they also have a big why like, “I’m doing this for this specific reason.” Being around that, being in that environment, and hearing how they talk about things shifts your core of who you are. Growing up in the military, I didn’t work with any of that. I wasn’t around entrepreneurs. I wasn’t around people that were doing things, they were self-employed. I was around people that had a certain mentality and that was 21 years of my life. I had to rewrite a lot of things. You’re the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. If I’m spending time with people that run billion-dollar companies via YouTube videos or podcasts, that’s going to help me be in the place that I need to be.

Success begins when your belief system starts to tell you that you can. I’ve seen this a lot. The biggest area I’ve seen it in is the most obvious transformation. I have some students about raising private money and they’re freaked out and certain that they’re not going to be able to do it. We’ll do a few exercises and then all of a sudden, there’s no reason why they can’t do it. The light bulb goes off and they go, “Hell if I hadn’t known that.” It’s always been there. You’re thinking about it wrong.

You’re a true testament to that. You buy many houses. It takes to the first step but for a lot of people, it’s getting that first deal done. Once you get that first deal done then you start to build that belief.

You get the first private lender that says yes. It’s always that first one. That’s why I tell people when they’re going into real estate the first time, “I want to be you, I want to do 100 deals.” I said, “No. Let’s worry about doing one. Let’s do the first one.” I said, “Do that one. That’s an easy one.” They said, “We only make $1,500.” I said, “I don’t care. Get a check and show it to your wife. First of all, we’ve got to get her off your ass. The educational business or the podcast, I had no monetary desire or expectation. I always have monetary desires but I don’t always put it that first. I had low expectations in this show at all.

I’m about to do 400 interviews. I have a reasonable amount of about 24,000 downloads a month which puts you in the top 5% of the world. It’s like the millionaire next door. The guys that are doing the millions and millions of dollars, they’re way up there being divided by 1/100th of a percent and then it drops dramatically. I wanted to know if anyone was even remotely interested in what I had to say, if I can get an audience, or if I was going to like it and people were going to like interviewing with me. I was doing this for me. I get to talk to smart people in their field all the time. If I would walk by and go, “Can I buy you lunch and rake your brain?” They’ll go, “Hell no, get out of here.” If I say, “You want to be on my show and interview you,” they go, “Sure. What’s your show about?” It’s all the same questions. I can bring everybody into giving me their knowledge.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s a testament to you. I was looking at the stats and most people never do three episodes on their podcasts before they stop. For you to do hundreds of interviews, consistency is a big thing in business. I firmly believe a majority of success is showing up every single day, even when it’s crappy, even when it sucks, if you can show up every single day and chip away at it, most people are going to give up along the way and you’re automatically putting yourself, you’re fishing in the right pond if you’re showing up every day.

I told myself I was going to do four interviews a week for the first six months. I didn’t make it. I made it in four months. I couldn’t do it anymore because we were doing four that I was required and then I was trying to do two so I had two to put in the can to make it one week or got sick or something. I made it four because I realized you had to get a jumpstart. You have to push your businesses hard in the beginning. I started with one episode a month or a week. In the first two months, there are four episodes on there, so big deal. You had to load it up fast. I told myself, “I wasn’t going to quit or even decide anything about it until I had gone a year or how many episodes I could do that year?” At the end of the year, I had settled in. It was comfortable for me. I knew more about what I was doing. I still don’t know if I know what I’m doing.

That’s a big lesson. A lot of people would skip over what you said, but making that commitment for a year before you can make a decision on it. If people did that with more things, they would find a lot more success, “I don’t have any expectations of this but I’m going to commit to it for a year and see where it goes.” What you said before that, businesses or podcasts are anything. I call it needs escape velocity like a rocket needs to go fast to get out of the atmosphere. Businesses are the same way. We’re doing something that only a small percentage of people across the US are doing.

There's so much technology available to any business; the hard part is knowing what technology to use. Click To Tweet

It’s hard when we’re in the space of thousands of real estate investors. I’m not the only one doing this but when we look at it in the grand scheme of things of the total population of the world, we’re doing something that only a small percentage of people in the entire world is doing. It’s easy to get lost and think that it should be easy because you see everyone in your immediate space is doing it but in order to achieve anything great, it takes a lot of grit, determination, and consistency. It takes a lot of hard work in the beginning. That was something hard because I grew up playing sports and I was always gifted naturally. I was good at any sport that I played.

I came into the business with that same thing, “I can let my talent, I’m good at marketing or I’m good at talking,” whatever it was. I’m going to let that help me out but then I got punched in the face a ton of times and realized like, “I’m going to have to build some mastery behind this because talent is not going to keep me there.” When you have a family to support, you start to build that why a little bit bigger and you start to feel the pressure, I thrived on that pressure. I had to keep pushing. I knew that I couldn’t work a normal 9:00 to 5:00 because it wasn’t the life that I wanted but I kept showing up every single day, even when it was hard or I was sick. During the quarantine, most people were like, “Let’s take a couple of days off and see what happens.” We pushed right through and kept working because we were at that point where we needed that escape velocity to keep the business growing. What you had mentioned there is a big nugget that I think some people skip over.

I like that term, escape velocity like a rocket trying to leave the planet Earth and to get in the orbit but it needs a lot of energy to get off the ground and start moving as fast as it can to get moving on to break through the barrier that’s trying to hold it down, whatever that is. I love that analogy. You have a Kickstart, you’re helping people learn how to wholesale. Go to 1000Houses.com/kickstart. Go over there and see what Xavier has for you. Everybody starts out as a one-man show, as a wholesaler, broke, and stupid. They might think they’re smart but they’re stupid in the beginning. We all were. Everyone is. You think you know it all, you don’t know jack, you get out there, pick around a few times and then you start to remember, “That’s why Xavier told me to do X instead of Y. I was dumb. I did Y because I didn’t believe Xavier but apparently, Xavier has been around the block a few times so I better start doing what he says.”

It has a lot to do with the CRM, Podio, keeping track of conversations, what you said. As you and I both know, Xavier, when you start doing these lead generation strategies, some of these leads won’t respond for months, if not a year or two away and you have no idea what you said to them, where you were in the conversation, or where their hot button was. You’ve got to take good notes when you’re talking to people because the faster you can remember to connect with who you were talking to 6 months ago or 8 months ago, run a little bit into this conversation, people can be impressed too when you said, “You have a dog named Peppy and your wife’s name is Martha. You wanted to sell because you’re wanting to get an RV and travel the world. Did you get that RV yet?” “No.” “What’s holding you up. How can I help you?” You’ve got to make the conversation fast. I think the oldest one I’ve had was 4.5 years but they’re waiting for granny to die and she held on. She was holding on for every day.

In this business, the truth is the fortune is in the follow-up. Even when we run marketing campaigns, we can get as niche as we want when we do data pools or running campaigns. If we’re not following-up, 50% to 60% of our deals are going to be off of multiple touches. If you don’t have systems in place to keep track of that or your system is a spreadsheet or a notepad, it’s a fallible system. I lose spreadsheets on my computer all the time. I name it something that I go back through my drive and I can’t find it. I lose notepads all the time.

With nowadays technology, you can do a lot of touches automated. I own LiveComm, it’s a mass texting platform and we can do text merge. We can merge the first thing with the property. We can send out to 1,000 prospects on our CRM, starts with their first name, and in the text has their address of the property that we were interested in. Something generic, “Frank, are you still interested? Have you sold the property at 123 Main Street yet? I’m still interested.” It goes out to 1,000 people with their own name or their property address. Ringless voicemail is hard to personalize because of the nature of the platform but you can send out a text with their name and the property and then you send out a ringless voice drop that refers to the message of the text, now it seems like it’s personal like, “I sent you a text on your property asking if you sold it yet. This is Mitch. Give me a call.”

That went out to the same 1,000 people but they think that I picked up the time to text them individually, call them and drop a message on their voicemail. There are ways to tie all this together. LiveComm is a long way. We have the automatic texts to cell phone capture, all that stuff. I have 2,400 people in San Antonio, Texas, population is two million, give or take a few. Two thousand four hundred people that have not opted out. I send out a text, “If you’re not interested in the owner finance home anymore, please reply to this text with stop and get off this list.” I got 2,400 people that want to know the next time I have an owner-financed house for sale and I can hit them for $0.02 a piece. The text, link to go and see everything in the world about that house. Marketing isn’t your daddy’s ‘put an ad in the classified and answer the phone’ marketing. We’re way advanced. It’s sophisticated, to say the least.

There’s so much technology available to any business. The hard part is knowing what technology to use. One of the things that we’ve done is we figured out, “What should you be doing to get started?” That’s why we put together the Kickstart because we’ve worked with so many people where it’s like, “I’m doing 2 or 3 deals a month but I have no systems in place or I have no foundation. My follow-up is terrible. I know if I had a better follow-up, I would close another two deals a month. If I had a way to connect with my buyers faster, I can get these properties sold a lot faster.” It’s one thing to get a property under contract for wholesaler, it’s another thing to assign that contract and make money from it.

 

If you can merge those two together by having the right systems in place and leveraging the technology, you’ll be able to do a lot more than you could 2 or 3 years ago because the technology offers you that availability. It’s almost like you’re Ironman, you bolt on all these parts to you to make you better. One thing that I want to caution is that people think, “I can use all these software and I can do it all myself.” You’re going to need a team to help you put the suit on. In Ironman, he had the suit go and put on by himself. I love that movie, by the way, that’s why I keep referring to it. You’re not Ironman, you still need someone to put the suit on for you. This is the version one of Ironman where he hadn’t had the doctor put it on for him.

We developed the system, you have a basic website mostly for credibility, and you have LiveComm to click the phone numbers and to send the messages out on. You’re driving everybody to a free Facebook page where there’s a community of 8,000 people that are talking about owning their first home or owner-financed homes. It’s showing pictures of people getting their keys to their new house, videos of the rehabs, and everything. That an interesting community there. That’s all fine and dandy but you have to hire a salesperson or a couple of salespeople that have to maintain it, keep it fresh, new, answer the calls and questions, and post replies to build a live community and be active. We do that and then we move on to the next thing, “We’ve got the sales going.” We’re averaging nine days average on the market on the last 300 houses, 12% down so $12,000 on $100,000 house.

That’s moving fast and it’s hard to do that without a team. That’s the thing that I noticed in our business and a lot of people’s businesses is it’s a bottleneck. At some point, you’re going to be the bottleneck. If you didn’t have a team in place to help foster the community, follow up with people, and get properties moved, you would have a bottleneck. You’d have all this opportunity to come in. It’s wide at the top and then narrows at the bottom. Things would trickle a lot of the bottom and it’s hard when you have all the marketing technologies where you can flood yourself with many qualified opportunities. If you run the right text campaign, ringless voicemail campaign, if you’re cold calling, or you hire someone to do your cold calling, there are no limits to the amount of opportunity that you can receive. There’s a limit to the amount of opportunity that you can take action on. That’s where the systems and the team come with.

Thank you to the old leads and I’m not being prepared for it, I’ve done it a few times. Xavier Major is over there in Arizona. Check him out 1000Houses.com/kickstart and see how you can jumpstart your wholesaling and lead generation platform. Get out there and start delegating a few things and use some software to help you alleviate one thing off of your plate if not a few things. Anything you want to say to the audience? Let’s say we’re talking to someone who’s trying to quit their job and they’re thinking real estate is the way to do it. What do you have to say to them?

What I would say to you is if it’s your goal to do this full-time, start slow. It’s okay to start slow and build the right foundation because without that foundation, it’s going to be hard to scale up. It’s easy to get a flood of opportunities and then bank off of the potential but when you’re doing this full-time, you can’t bank off the potential anymore. Your family is going to need that cash, you’re going to need that cash to sustain the business. If you don’t have the right foundation and systems in place, the business is going to run dry and you’re going to have to go back. The worst feeling in the world and I’ve done this before, is to leave full-time to run your business and then have to go back and get a job because you weren’t making enough money. Don’t put yourself in that position by having the right systems in place. That way, when you take that step and go full-time, it’s game on. You can bring in more volume and you can continue to scale and grow.

Are you suggesting that we work part-time until we see so we proved things to ourselves and then by the time you leave, you should already have your income figure it out? It’s like you already know. I like that. There are situations where people have had to jump into full-time when they decided to and I get it. If you lost your job, when you have a little bit of cushion, you can jump off, but I don’t normally suggest that people jump off the cliff both feet into a business that they don’t know if it’s for them or not. I will say, “Why don’t you work part-time a little bit and burn the candle at both ends.” We all did it. I did it. I had the daytime job and then the weekends, every evening, or all the time I could steal from lunch or whatever, I was trying to find a house.

Lucky for me, I didn’t make any money. I was making $32,000 a year. When I did a couple of wholesale deals, three wholesale deals, or whatever, I ended up having a whole year’s worth of money in the bank. That’s when I said, “This job that I have is no big deal. I was looking for a call when I found that job and I’ll find another job if I need one. I wasn’t getting rich.” For the first time, I’m not making any real money work to my advantage because it didn’t take me long to have a year’s worth in the bank then I could say, “I’ve got a year’s worth of money in the bank. I’m going to keep taking it the exact same way I take it from my boss but I’m going to take it from my bank account the exact same timing and amount. I’m going to make this last a year and I want to see what I can do for a year.” That was March of 1996 and I did 45 houses that year and I never went back to the job again.

You stair-step your way into it. Another analogy is, it’s one step at a time when you’re growing a business and you need that escape velocity to get out but don’t be that guy that tries to jump up 2 or 3 steps because there’s going to be a time where you miss a step, you skin your knee, and it hurts bad.

Check out Xavier Major at 1000Houses.com/kickstart. I’d like to thank my sponsor TaxFeeFuture.com. Please go there and watch the 37 video vignettes. You won’t believe what your financial advisors are not telling you. We’re going to tell you what they’re not telling you. We’re going to tell you why they’re not telling you, and then you can do with it, what you want with that information. Definitely, a life-changing event to understand that you can grow your finances or your retirement and defer your taxes for a long period of time until you’re 59.5 or even forever. It depends. Check it out. I’d like to thank you for stopping by to get you some Xavier Major. He’s over there in Arizona. Check him out. I’ll talk to you in a bit. Bye, Xavier. Thanks for being on.

 

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/Kickstart  
• 1000Houses.com/Livecomm  
• 1000Houses.com/TaxFreeFuture  
• 1000Houses.com/Grow
• 1000Houses.com/aof
• 1000Houses.com/100

 

About Xavier Major

Xavier is the co-founder of The Wholesale Connection, an implementation and training company focused on helping real estate investors get back to closing deals.

 

 

 

 

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