PODCAST

Use the Carrot to Attract Real Estate Buyers and Sellers

Mitch Stephen|By December 13, 2016

Episode 33:

Trevor Mauch cut his teeth in real estate in college and through years of trial and error, learned how to generate leads online effectively through inbound online marketing (to the tune of 84,000+ real estate related leads and counting). He leads the Carrot© team and focuses on helping members get the result they want by attracting the right real estate buyers and sellers to their members’ properties. But, away from business… Trevor loves mountain biking, golfing, and spends most of his time with his wife and 3 young kids.

It sounds corny… but what fuels Trevor in business and life is impact and being that spark of positivity and possibility that helps amplify leaders to better make their greater impact in life and business.

He’s fortunate enough to have never had a real job for anyone else… but that also means that along the way he’s had to make a ton of his own mistakes. Those mistakes and a handful of core operating principles on how he lives his life have helped him do some pretty fun and cool things in business up to this point. His main business gig is as the Chief Experience Officer (CEO) of Carrot, a software as a service company that helps small businesses easily create a website to generate inbound leads through the internet.

In addition, if you talk to Trevor on the phone you won’t be able to shut him up about how important wrapping mission and impact into your business are. So sharing what he learns along the way to help amplify other leaders to do bigger, better, greater, and more impactful things goes well beyond adding some extra zeros to your bank account…
… but make a lasting difference that starts a ripple of awesomeness in the world.

Other random trivia tidbits…

- Has the most beautiful wife and 3 kids he could ask for. They’re why he does what he does.
- Bought a 4 unit multi-family real estate investment property when he was 21 and in college with only $600 to his name (yep, those infomercials weren’t lying. Crazy huh?). It’s profited every month since then (real estate works!). He doesn’t consider himself a real estate expert though. He’s surround himself with great, ethical, honest, successful investors who are experts… for whom Carrot publishes great training programs.
- Started an entrepreneur co-workspace called “The Loft” in downtown Roseburg… it’s the only office building in town with a waiting list and some amazing things are being created in that space

Once biked across the SW coast of Ireland fueled mainly on Guinness and a full Irish breakfast

Graduated from Oregon Institute of Technology (we call it the MIT of Oregon) with a 3.98 GPA with degrees in Marketing and Entrepreneurship (which was cool at the time, but he later learned it didn’t mean a thing once he graduated)

Later failed the LSAT to get into law school… twice, and turned back to his roots of entrepreneurship (thank God)
Received the Presidents Cup in Entrepreneurship at OIT for being the “top college entrepreneur” and 10 years later awarded the Oregon Institute of Technology Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award for this “entrepreneur stuff”. Look ma’, he actually used his degree for what it was meant for! 😉
Helped take a company to the Inc. 500/5000 list in 2008 (and Carrot is heading that direction too)
Has a goal to do one thing on his “life list” a month for 10 years so he has time to make a new life list by the time he’s 40… and this is only just beginning.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

Trevor’s background and how he started Carrot
Why Trevor works with experts and only works on what he’s good at (ex: Trevor doesn’t create websites himself)
What Carrot does to get you in front of the right people
How to attract the right real estate buyers and sellers
Why you need a website for credibility
Why the right domain name is important
Carrot’s weekly mastermind sessions
Why you absolutely need a mentor — and why Trevor wishes he hadn’t waited so long to get one
How to get a mentor without paying for one

Resources:

Transcript:

Mitch: This is Mitch and welcome to the Real Estate Investor Summit Podcast. I have another wonderful guest today. And as usual–as predictable, and just like you would expect. I am Mitch Stephen your host. This guy that we’ll gonna talk to this afternoon he said, what make his life go ’round is that he get a kick out of impacting and putting a spark into people’s businesses. He likes positivity in the possibility that helps amplify leaders to better make their great impact in their life and their business. So, I am excited to talk with this new guest. His name is Trevor Mauch. And he is the CEO of Oncarrot, we like to say, chief executive office, but this case he has coined it, chief experience officer. Because, he has done specializing for years in giving business leaders and owners a great experience using his products. As a matter of fact, this guy has come up from the boot’s straps and created a seven-figure income for himself, and it is always interesting to talk to entrepreneurs like that. But, before we get started, I got to pay some homage here to my wonderful and beautiful and special sponsors, Capital Connections and Livecomm.com. So, standby for this and we’ll be right back.

All right. This is Mitch and am back with Trevor Mauch. Trevor, how are you doing today?

Trevor: Mitch, am doing great, man. I appreciate being invited in your podcast. Been looking forward to it.

Mitch: Well, I just wanna tell you, audience, out there, I am a believer and a user and I have 2 Carrots, On carrot or Carrot, ’cause I see it both ways here.

Trevor: Yeah, Mitch. It is kinda funny that the company name is called Carrot like the vegetable but our domain name is Oncarrot.com. So, we’ve been trying to buy Carrot.com, for the past couple of years, but they want a $100,000 plus for the domain and we are not ready to pay for it. So, yeah our company name is called Carrot. The product that are investors are using this is called Investor Carrot, and we also have agent carrot that we are rolling out here, soon. So, our company name is Carrot, we have different products in this style.

Mitch: Well, I–I used the carrots’ websites and I have a buying site and I have a selling site. And I think I even had a private money site where I raised private money. But, I know for a fact, that my buying site and selling site are hugely active because I get a text all the time that someone’s posted on it and I have people that followed up with the leads that come from there. It is been extremely instrumental on helping me find buyers for my houses. Of course, you know, finding that people wanna sell their houses is always gonna be much more challenging and you have less results of course. I happen to owner finance houses and so am offering houses with owner financing, so, I get a lot of leads coming in to my Carrot website. It is neat to see the activity. I am not the guy that answers the calls, but I get to see that they are coming in, you know that activity always makes me feel good. Who give you the idea for Carrot?

Trevor: Man, and so I kind of briefed into my background. So, I got into real estate in college, for the buying of small properties that are hold for rentals. And the first property was about was a 4 flats. And kind of got me hooked into the real estate game and my wife and I we got married after college, moved up to Portland. We lived here in Oregon, a small town called, Roseburg. And now, our company is based in Oregon and we done a lot things this year. But, we lived in Portland for a while. And been around that time, I was starting to generate leads online for filling my properties with tenants and I was starting to generate leads for clients of mine or some mortgage broker’s company that I was working with, as a client and several other companies. And this was around 2007 or so 2008. And that was when using the internet for marketing. It was kind of relatively new. I mean, I’m not gonna say it was new, but it was relatively new for the mass market, where people just go, “Man, you know I got to get a website online”. But, now I need to find out how to get leads ’cause having just a website where actually getting leads that are gonna turn into business figure company is completely different things.

And over those subsequent, you know, several years. We have got really really good, we get really good at finding ways to get a website rank higher than Google search. We found out ways–but, “Man, we are getting traffic to our website now. But, there’s not people converting into becoming leads. How do we actually dig in and understand how the structure and craft a website and the message on the website and the instruction flow of growing a website that builds credibility and get someone to wanna with you that often get a lead to give you a call”.

Long story short, it would have been in 2014, we launched Carrot. We launched Investor Carrot, because, we are getting a bunch of people, real estate investors specifically coming to us and saying, “Man, am struggling to really get any real results online, can you guys set up some sites for us”. And it is kind of where we at. We are setting up one, two, three sites here and there, literally I just done it on WordPress and manually, we set up sites and we saw a bigger problem out there, Mitch. You know, we saw a bigger play, for a business sites and pose bigger problem when you know, kind of everyone was already online or they use it–they need to be online, anyway. But, the big problem people are facing was they are online but the web presence wasn’t performing. It wasn’t getting in front of their best prospect, it wasn’t converting those prospects into lead. It wasn’t building credibility, so we went out and solved that problem, and here we are 3 years later.

Mitch: Man, I tell you. You’ve done a great job. Am really a fan. So, to the listeners out there. I wanna give you this link right now, so you have it. It’s 1000houses.com/carrot, C-A-R-R-O-T, all lower case. That’s 1000houses.com/carrot, C-A-R-R-O-T. And I love the name, man. ‘Cause you got to the carrot in the right places to get people to do the things that you wanna do. That’s what it is all about, right?

Trevor: That’s right. That’s right.

Mitch: [LAUGHTER]

Trevor: Exactly.

Mitch: Oh, I love it man. That’s a great name. I just wished those guys weren’t charging a $100,000 you know.

Trevor: [LAUGHTER] Man, no, like I said man we got to talk with them and the funny thing is, it is not funny but, they are a venture capital funded business. And they went to poof within a year, they raised millions of dollars, their business was out of business within a year, and they got this domain name and they are trying to salvage. They are trying to salvage some of their investor’s money and they are charging way too much. So, just as like real estate, right. They might not be crazy motivator now, but I’ll stood on it and give it sometime, and I’ll see if we can buy it for two or few months, we’ll see.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just making offers, right? Same old thing. So, did you program stuff yourself? Do you have to hire programmers that always finds us interesting? Like are you, a computer programmer guy. Or were you just a guy with an idea and then you went out and found the programmers to implement your idea.

Trevor: Man, that’s a good question. And before I answer that one. Everyone listening to this stuff, one of the most important things that I learned as I’ve gone and kind of set the stage for before I answer that question is, this business has grown really fast, it has grown really fast than any other company that I built. We went from zero to we got into $300,000- $400,000 on the first year. We were over a million on the second year. And we were over a little 2 million on our third and fourth year. And the reason I say those numbers, Mitch. Because the business is lasting, because my 3 previous businesses, I started to get everything myself, right. I started everything myself. If there’s a problem in the business for technical problem or whatever it was, I would dig in and I would go and try to learn the Html to move this one thing on my website over you know, to an internal web-setter. I would go and do all the ride myself. I would go and do thing. I would go and do this thing, go and do that. And when I really learned with Carrot was, I came into this business, crazy intentional. You know what, I made mistake in my previous businesses, and I can get some stuff going on. But, I was never really fulfilled and happy. I never really felt that the role in my businesses that I created were exactly what–the things that I need to be working on. So, with Carrot, I sit down. And man, “Am just gonna do the things I’m good at”. Which is ideas, which is strategy and marketing and marketing strategy. I really love amplifying people. Amplifying leaders, finding people that really work with some things to bring out their unique genius more, and so, am not a programmer, Mitch. I am not a programmer at all. I’ve gone through the school of hard knocks to learn how to set-up a WordPress, trying to hack some code a little bit. But, am just dangerous enough to worm, I will mess up and falling out and found out an amazing technical co-founder, who lives here in Oregon. And the funny full circle story with this guy, I interviewed him on our Podcast a few weeks on the carrot [INAUDIBLE], and his name is Chris and the very first website that Chris had ever developed was a real estate investor website for a client in Oregon and then he went on to developed all kinds of small business websites. And I got a referral from an investor friend of mine, DJ Sealant, buys a lot of houses and I need a web guy because I cannot continue giving stuff myself. I can’t keep on trying to outsource this programming stuff to someone overseas or someone outside of the areas that I can’t trust. And I decided to get to a real business. Chris has equity in the company, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, we wouldn’t be able to grow the company as quickly as we have, not put all of us in the position where we are best at in this business. Most people were great at outsourcing for us.

Mitch: That’s one of the things about the real estate investing, the whole arena. Everybody comes in their one man shop. And they are trying to be the house finder, the house seller, the money finder. You know, how you gonna find these deals. The advertising guy, the SEO guy, everything, you know. And it doesn’t take long to become overwhelmed and the one thing that you’ll figure out if you take time to analyzed right, sit down and analyzed it. And look at it, honestly, is that when you try to do everything you are not good at any of it. You know, you are just not any good at any of it. You might just be, you are just running around patching holes in the dam. You know, in stretching out with kinda use every finger to patch every hole. It just doesn’t work.

Trevor: And the thing is, we think we are saving money. You know, we think we are saving money, by trying to do everything by ourselves, and—

Mitch: Isn’t that the truth? That all things are saving money. Let me just say this. I bought this just under a hundred houses in 2015. I’ll be pretty– less than that, but I’ll be pretty close to the same number this year and in 2017. In the toughest real estate market, I’ve seen in a long time to find bargain houses in. Because, the real estate market is so hot here in Texas, as it is around the country. I am still buying a heck of a lot of houses because, and this is my point. I didn’t see any of the houses I bought in 2015. Maybe, I saw ten because I was bored, I wanna ride around with the guys. I didn’t have to see anyone of them. I didn’t see one buyer. I didn’t see them, I didn’t talk to them. I didn’t find them up, I didn’t go to closing and meet them. I didn’t see not one of my buyers. This is because, I got people in key places and it took me 20 years, unfortunately, but at least I learned it that people can do a job and they can do it better than me. And they can stay focus, one of the things I learned not to do was, number one, I don’t hire people from the real estate industry or from the clubs that want to be in the real estate. I hire someone to sell my houses. I don’t them to be interested in real estate. I don’t even care if they like real estate. I just want them to be able to sell one of my contract. So, I went out and tried to find the best Hoover Vacuum cleaning salesman or the best Lexus car dealership salesman, or someone who’s tired, tapped out of their job and give them a job. And the other thing is to keep them in their lane. Okay, this is what you do. This is what you’re responsible for. And so, like when my salesperson said, “Hey, I’m gonna look for some houses for you to buy”. I say, “You know what, when you do that you are fired, because that is not what I hired you for”. [LAUGHTER] You know. I don’t need someone to find me houses, I got guys that do that, you know and they don’t sell your houses. So, stay in your lane.

Trevor: Exactly.

Mitch: So, how many people do you have? How many people does it take to run your business?

Trevor: Yeah and so, I think we don’t wanna fix our people realized that we didn’t start gear ’cause really– I know, when I several years ago, when I started to look at growing this business, I’d look at other company, where we wanted to go. And am like, me and you know, 5 employees or 10 employees like, “how we gonna build this business if we don’t have that right away, so”. We started with me and one guy. And then now, we have 10 full time people and we have another 4 people who are in either in part time or you know, there are right now on their 20 or 30 hours a week, as contractors. So, we have 10 full time people on payroll, and then 3 other people bordering on the 4 other contractors about part time. Now, do we need to have all of those people? I think a lot of businesses will probably look at it, and go, “Well, don’t”. So, we really have only invest into customer success. And that kind sound cliché, if you took every company to invest into customer success, but that’s kind of one of our, you know, one of our reasons our clients are getting such great results and we’re growing so fast, is we really do invest, heavily into make it sure that our clients have the resources, for on our team to have success. We have 2 of our–it’s kind of cool story, man. So, two of our full time people, they are both our customer success coaches, our customers of ours that one of them has been a customer almost since the beginning, and then the Adrian, he was working on your sites when you launch with the–

Mitch: Sure, I remember.

Trevor: And Adrian is awesome man, and he just saw the vision that we have in the business, he saw our mission, our core values and he is like, “I just feel like grow with you guys more than what to ask you”. This is the guy who has been a full time real estate investor for years. He still flips properties, he was just in Ohio last week, buying a property. He is working full time for Carrot, helping customers crush it. So, that kind of differentiation there is we have more people than we thought we need. But, we invest heavily on customer’s success, that what makes it working on what makes the margin work.

Mitch: I guess, we–in a short nutshell, tell me exactly what Carrot offers. What’s the elevator pitch?

Trevor: If you would look into get in front of your prospects who are going online, before they are going anywhere else, before they ever look at a postcard, or even show up on a postcard with the direct mailer. Before, they ever probably taken up the phone to call from a TV commercial, they are probably going to the web first. How to sell their house, how to rent the house, how to rent to own house, how to sell their house, how to rent the house, how to owner finance their house. They’ve gone to the web and search like most of us do. Here at Carrot, we help you to teach you find those people more easily and then once they landed in your website, our conversion methodology makes these people convert as a lead a lot higher than the industry average, and you don’t have to be an expert in SEO, you don’t have to be an expert in pay-per-click you don’t have to be expert in conversion optimization to do that. Just leverage our [INAUDIBLE] software, use our training, hire people in our market places if you don’t wanna do the work yourself, and that’s just one email, that’s what we are for. So, if you have to Google any phrase for motivated house sellers or tons of different leads like, sell my house fast, insert whatever city. We buy houses insert whatever city or bunch of owner finance trade places or cash buyer’s phrases or rent to own phrases, too. Usually, you’re gonna find one or multiple Carrot website they’re in the top 5 results. And pretty much every city around the country, because our clients are using systems so much, they are getting such great results.

Mitch: You know, you said so much there, I mean there are thousands comments and questions that are running through my head. Number one is, I teach people how to get moving and buy houses and make some money and hopefully find their financial independence, quit their job and start taking control of their lives. The first thing I tell them is, don’t you dare build your own website. Last year, from that place, and you can do it, a relatively short period of time because you have some templates on it or something, otherwise, don’t do it. I mean, we are not here to build websites. We are here to go find houses and make contracts. I mean, everything starts with a contract on a house, everything. And that’s where I believe and in my humble opinion, that’s where you need to focus, you know. And building websites and doing SEO and all these other stuff, is just not what you are supposed to be doing. Especially, when there are people that specializes in it, like Carrot and you can just go and for very reasonable fee, be up and running in a short period of time. One thing that I appreciate about Adrian was, they had a website for wholesaling, flipping but didn’t really have websites that catered to what my specific niche was, which owner was financing. And today, you do have that, because you know– Adrian sat down with me and we figured out, you know the differences between what they had and what I needed and we kind of custom made a template for the owner financing and so, am sure by now, you know it has become kind of routine and that kind of website, too, right?

Trevor: Yeah. The owner finance where actually were officially rolling out before the end of this month, we’ve been crammed, man– development stuff so that one kind of, if people request we will set it up, you know with them. But, this is not something that they can launch until the end of this month. So, if your listeners podcast in 2017, you can go launch a owner finance site on Carrot, but one of the things that for us, Mitch, is this right here, do you see it in your market, where in every market, the market shift. The market shift and oftentimes, that strategies that gonna help you be successful in that market was, I wasn’t talking about micromarket, like your city, or the national real estate market. Market shift and with that your online strategy, your direct mail strategy, whatever type of marketing you are using, is gonna have to shift and adapt into that market cycle. And so, for me the owner finance site is kind of result of a shift like that. You know it is a result of there being a big opportunity to sell houses in owner finance. But, you had been doing it for years. And when we are looking at it and go, “Man, how do we really helped our clients be more successful in today’s market”? ‘Cause, it does shift, when we first rolled out in 2014 that was still a good foreclosure market. You know 2012 was amazing foreclosure market, and even some short sale stuff. And now, we really don’t focused hardly any at all on our website on foreclosures. There is some language on their own foreclosure, but 3 or 4 years ago, when we were doing online marketing for investors. We are focusing on foreclosures and the messaging baseline. We have foreclosure reports, we have things like that. Now, it kind of shifted more towards on a normal motivated house sellers, we are shifting more towards put more money in your pocket, less hassle. Comparing agents versus investors. You got to shift the model, man. That’s one of the reason we are excited to roll out owner financing with you.

Mitch: Man, I can attest that you know a long time ago, bandit signs is all I needed. Well, let us take it back. But, even before that, before that all I had to do was go to classified ads. I can buy a house a day out of classifieds in 1996. If I wanted a house, I can go to classifieds, if I screwed up I come home with 2 houses, you know it was that honestly, it was that easy. If you want that, just go into classifieds. Then, as you know the classifieds started going away and gotten more competitive and then it became bandit signs. And I could put up you know, 300,400,500, 600 bandit signs over a 60- day period. And I can buy a lot of houses. You know, 30 or 40 houses from those bandit signs. Bandit signs don’t work anymore, at least if not in my region, in my town where am working on. I don’t find it to be effective anymore. And so, you know, you morphed over to doing more stuff online. What are the things about having a website is just the credibility. You know, I say, my house buying site is cash4houses.net. Cash and the number 4, horrible name as far as I am concerned.

Trevor: [LAUGHTER]

Mitch: But, way way way down the road with that name, before I figured out that, that wasn’t a very good choice, you know. It should have been dot-com no matter what. But, you still have– it doesn’t matter, most people are not so sophisticated, if they can just find you, but what they wanna know is that they need to see that you are online and you have a professional presence, and it gives your credibility and at the least that’s why you need a website, you know. This is just for the credibility of it. Now, on the selling side of it. I really like my Carrot website because, I can place the pictures and all of the information about the houses that I had, it is a little bit more fluid because it is always changing, ’cause I always have new inventory but it is a great place to send people to look out the houses, again, the name of my site that I named years and years and years and years ago, was homestogo.net it is a completely horrible name. What do I do? Do I move houses, do I move furniture, and do I sell furniture? What exactly do I do? My name should have been in both cases, mitchbuyshouses.com and mitchsellshouses.com,’cause you know and whoever has a dot-com versions of my names get a lot of business. Thank god they are not in my city. Because, I can’t tell you how many people I sent to cash4houses.com, because everyone puts in dot-com. I mean just by instinct, right?

Trevor: Totally.

Mitch: So, do you help with that kind of idea like, choose their names and all that stuff? I mean how extensive do you go into it?

Trevor: Yeah, man. I mean it is not official service but like one the things that we just really commit ourselves to and we hire our own internal team for, it really has helped our client with strategy. You know, we actually today, we have our weekly mastermind calls. Every Tuesday, which is the time of our recordings anyway. Every Tuesday is a mastermind call day, either myself or Adrian as the team host. It is probably about 90 minute phone. We always talk about certain topics and then we always take open Q&A. And so, oftentimes we get domain questions on those calls or we get into email our live chat and we are happy to help our clients. Because, we think about them, Mitch. I mean, there’s a lot of company like ours that don’t do that stuff. Those that say, “Hey, this is your software, you go out and we really don’t have any strategy for you. We are not gonna dig into details if you are ranking number 7 on Google for a phrase you wanna rank number 1. We are not really gonna tell you what to do”.

With us, we think the other way, because we go, “Man, if a client actually get success which like it is just a noble idea, right? If the client actually get success, they’re gonna stay with us longer”. So, we invest a lot into making sure the clients don’t have road blocks. On the non-domain stuff, we throw a couple of things that people that you guys can take away with you. So, your domain aren’t that bad, you obviously do want the dot-com, it is possible. A few years that domain for offline marketing, if you are using it for TV or radio or bandit signs or even a direct mail, because people oftentimes will see the first part, cash 4 houses and they just go and type the dot-com anyway, if they are not reading it closely. So, if you can buy that dot-com, someone’s got to, I looked it up. Someone’s got that website up literally on it. or go daddy website, I would offer him about $1,000- $2,000 bucks if it is still worth it. Just for the non-domain name. ‘Cause if you-

Mitch: So, you are not [INAUDIBLE] right now?

Trevor: Yeah. I was looking at it some cash4houses.com

Mitch: Just offered him a $1,000 right there. Just tell him. [LAUGHTER]

Trevor: Seriously.

Mitch: If they said yes, give me a call. [LAUGHTER]

Trevor: Yeah, and that’s the thing, Mitch. You see this with direct mail too, sure. Am sure. But, with the online stuff, we look at it and go, “Man, if you can just lose the level a little bit for higher performance, and let’s see if you can move, move it from you know a 5% conversion rate, 5 out of 100 people land in your site, to just 7% conversion, 7 out of 100. A lot of people look at it, and go, “Man, that’s not much of move. What does gonna mean into my business”? Well, if you are closing 115 leads into a deal, which is about average for online inbound based marketing, like we’re doing here. If you are talking direct mail, it probably give you more like 125-145, TV about 130-145, Radio about the same what we are seeing with my client. It is online stuff that is about 115 on average. Some people close a lot more deals, some people got less. But, am looking at it different, I mean if you gains extra 2 leads per 100 visitors and let’s say you get 100 visitors in your website a month that is actually 24 leads a year. That’s over a deal and you just gained by little tweaks that improve the performance and just by buying your domain, that domain.com. You are doing some good marketing, driving people there. You probably literally, are losing at least a deal a year, maybe a deal every 2 years that would have netted you, whatever your average profit it. So, if your average profit for the deal is making 10 grand or 15 grand, Man it would be worth if you would buy the domain for 3 or 4 grand, if you are doing active marketing that thing. And that’s the way I look at it. I don’t look at it, like and go, “Man, let me get my emotions into what I think I should pay for a domain. I go, how much money do am I losing? And how much money am willing to continue losing, because of underperformance”? Or leaky bucket like that, but that’s the thing, there’s so many leaky bucket and things that cost under performance for people website. If you are not expert on that stuff, you got to hire someone who is an expert or align with a company that does that stuff that for you, like we do.

Mitch: So, what time is your Q&A session on this stuff every Tuesday?

Trevor:

So, our mastermind calls are always 11 o’clock Pacific Time. Like it’s gonna be 90 minutes long. It is a blast, man. The reason we started we are doing them is because, obviously, we are getting a lot of people that were have strategy related questions and not questions all about the software, use of the software, we have great tutorials, great support team there. But, about strategy questions and we are answering all these strategy questions one week, using an email, it has taken me forever before I brought Adrian aboard. And it would eaten up my whole day. And instead of email them, let’s have a call once a week and you guys can ask me anything.

And what it kind of become, is oftentimes, they will be the same people, week after week coming asking questions, they go away and implement and they come back. They ask questions, they go away, implement and come back and we’ve had so many stories where in people were struggling with their pay-per-click marketing. They have a campaign going, there are driving through Carrot and said, they can’t get a lead that they think they should be getting if you look at it. And we looked at it, it doesn’t cost anything extra. We looked at it, man, then we diagnosed these issues they had on their pay-per-click account or we say, “Man, you have not built any credibility in your site. People aren’t believing in you. Do add these 4 things to your website and then continue with it”. We have lots of those stories and those are some of the most fun calls that we do then, I like them.

Mitch: So, they are archived?

Trevor: Yup. They are all archived and clients can go back in and listen to this. They can get to become a bare though, we literally had 140 calls or something like that. It’s a lot of content and we suggest people go on and use our getting tour guide, which is just you [INAUDIBLE] this it will guide you through it, what to do. Use our support. And then, start filling out some mastermind calls. And you probably–

Mitch: Do you have to have an on Carrot website or affiliation before you can listen to it or can anybody can listen to it?

Trevor: Yeah. It is for our content pro members. I mean, and above and so, yup.

Mitch: Okay. I know that. I have archived Q&A sessions for the last 5 years and probably, I don’t know. Well, over a 1,000 hours probably. I don’t know. If I do the math real quick, I can tell you, but it’s gonna be somewhere around there. ‘Cause my average Q&A calls go about 2 and a half hours. What’s really cool about Q&A calls or mastermind calls is if you listen to it in chronological order, you can see the growth of the students. Why is it important is, because when you–we first start talking to these students, they’re as timid as and as unsure as anybody who ever started out, you know. And then, you must them, over a period of time, and you can’t you know, in the Q&A recorded archive. You can’t make this stuff up. It is all real time stuff, right? I mean, there’s no “can’t” anything, you go out there and say, “What’s your question”? And then you see them implement like you said, they come back and give you the results. That’s just gives everybody confidence. That’s listening and participating on the calls, like “Wow, that guy can do it. There’s no reason I can’t do it or am if he’s having much success doing that way, I’m gonna try that in my market”. You know and it gives you nerve, you know what I mean, it gives you confidence and gives you some nerve.

Trevor: And here’s one of the thing I love about it Mitch. I love you doing those calls well, because, you could have the world’s top like let’s chef, right? So, let’s say that you want to be an amazing chef. You could have the best chef in the world, film videos to show you exactly how they made this amazing creme brulee whatever it is.

Mitch: Soufflé.

Trevor: There you go, soufflé. So, this chef could make all the– they can make a whole series of videos where exactly how they do it. They can make a little manuals on how exactly how they do that soufflé, and it is from the person who is the best in the world in doing it. But, the problem is, when you go– the way that we learn, when you go and start to implement it, there is no way you’ll gonna do it that the same level of that chef does your first time, probably even 10 times, maybe, you’ll never get there. So, what happens then, we start to implement something from a written training or an audio training and what happens if you have a quest, though. Maybe, ’cause that chef has done it so many times that they forgot to show this little step in between, in between step, that really makes the big difference on the soufflé. And you didn’t pick it up. So, how do you then became better, how then you become you know an expert yourself if you get in front of that Chef, and say,”Hey, chef let me cook this in front of you and what am I doing wrong or what am I doing different”? That chef will be able to see things that you are not seeing. That chef will be able to see things that, man, the way you flip the thing, the way you did this, or the way you did that, if you just do this a little bit differently, because his or her experience, that’s gonna change the world for you. So, for us, we kind of stay learning and with learning you got 3 levels. You got the first level, which is just diving in and absorbing the information, that’s watching videos, that’s reading it, right? Then, the next level of learning, is you got the strategy that makes the [INAUDIBLE] I am implementing this but, I don’t have 10 years of experience in doing SEO or whatever. What am I missing guys? That’s where those calls come in for us, those little calls come in for you, because you have an amazing training.

But, to fill in those gaps, well, when someone read your book or goes through your training course, they need to have the expert, the expert’s opinion. They need to get that expert level of opinion were injected they go, “Okay, let me look at this situation, I’ve done it a hundred times and it will probably take me 3 seconds to diagnose what will gonna take you 4 weeks to try to figure out and that’s the value of stuff like that. Get a get training guys and girls, buy Mitch’s book and then if you wanting to do owner financing, whatever, get on those calls. Because, those calls will gonna fill in those gaps in your mind that the training may not be.

Mitch: I tell you what. I get on there. I got on there, I got the training calls because I thought, you know, I was gonna help all these other people. And I do. But, what surprising was, how much they helped me. And because, when you got a mastermind group of 20, 30-40 of people on a call, and everyone starts bouncing, you know what I mean with bouncing, “What is, how about this, how you solve these problems”, and people start bouncing, it is amazing the conclusions that you can come to it doing the think tank. You know when people are bouncing the idea back and forth of each other and I learn tremendous things from my students. You know, when they come, let’s say you know, I’ve been doing that for 20 years, and you’ve been doing that for a long time. And you know, you and I will bring 90 pieces to the jigsaw puzzle to the table. Yeah, we pretty much don’t have to form together. Every now and then, this student brings 1 piece that we didn’t know that existed. And you go, that changes everything. You know, what can you do with that? How did you figured that out, guy? And you know when they start telling, you know, in technology it is changing so much and the resources are changing so much. That it will be impossible for one guy Trevor, or one guy Mitch to keep up with all of it in the world, you know, so when you have this masterminds, I got to tell you, I will confess hardly, I learn a lot from masterminds myself. From just because of that vast reach of all those brains, all combined into one room. So, masterminds a great, by the way, yours is at 11 o’clock Pacific Time, mine is at 7 o’clock pm Central Standard Time. See, you got to pick Tuesdays, man. You got a whole education day every day.

Trevor: Hey, making both right?

Mitch: All right, man. To learn more about On Carrot and the Carrot websites and you know, there’s wonderful company that Trevor’s put together, go to 1000houses.com/carrot, all lowercase, please. You know what, it’s been a great conversation, I don’t– I really didn’t wanna go down to regular questioning but I do wanna ask you a couple of regular questions. Number one, do you have a mentor yourself?

Trevor: Yes. It is funny. So, I have been the kind of guy who has shun doing the things the normal way. And for years, I never had any official mentor and so, probably about 18 months ago, and I was showed [INAUDIBLE] I hacked my way to be waiting too long, I feel to go through and learn the things that I had to learn to the school of hard knocks because, I wasn’t really willing to spend money or to spend and invest the time and in building those relationships with the mentor. But, now I do, I’ve got 2 now. And the cool thing is, man, they are both here local to me. For me, that was the big deal but, my first mentor 18 months was not local to me. ‘Cause, I need to get through a certain road block of mine and I take that phone call once a month, I got a couple of questions for you. So, a mentor’s critical, man, for sure.

Mitch: Do you pay for your mentor? Or Do you trade or they just like you so much, and say, just mentoring him?

Trevor: The first mentor that I had was actually a friend of mine but a business colleague, he was about 3 to 4 years ahead of where I was, at that time in business. And that was just, I think he was just gracious of his own heart. He sees a lot of possibility and potential and he wanted to help. So, that was the case, we just popped in the phone, but the critical thing is here. It was just kind of good timing. I got a post on my Facebook page today, and some lady, I don’t know who she is, but she found my Facebook page and she probably is going through everyone on her Facebook list that look like they’re into real estate. And bless her heart, she posted this post in there, saying, “A brand new went through a coaching program with x person”. It was a great company that she went to, but she said, she was really struggling to get private money. You wanna lend me private money”? And am like, “OH, man”. So, she’s going on here and posting all these all kinds of people pages that just wasn’t just me. And she got completely cut that learning curve if she actually got a mentor. You know, someone whether to be paid person or not. Find someone that has been through that. That you need for them build the value with first. That she was not doing. She has gone out there asking and not building value first. That’s a quick tip there. If you want a great mentor, where you don’t pay, build so much value for them that they feel like, “Man, I got to invest back in this person”. Help them out. Find out how you can help them. Ask them those questions, if they have a charity that they love. Find out how you can support that charity, even in their name. Invest in that person and they’ll invest back and you– now, I’ve got 2 mentors, one is not paid, he actually works here in my offices, same thing he is several years ahead of where I am, business wise about 10 years my senior but the sold 2 text companies in tens and tens of millions of dollars, just finished an amazing book. He is the kind of guy who I can go to and ask questions like, “Hey, here’s in the moment. Here’s what I’m experiencing in my business. What are your thoughts”? My other mentor is a paid person. I pay him about 2,500 bucks a month. It is not cheap. For him, it is less “Here’s what I’m experiencing in my business”, but it is more, “I need to extract more of your knowledge into what systems we need to put into play here. How do I improve my own leadership”. And so, I’ve got both. One is not paid and one that is paid. But, you got to build values for both, for those committed to you.

Mitch: Yeah. So, that’s great. ‘Cause you gave all the 3 examples. You know, I paid for mentor-ship, you know $25,000 a year, pretty much close to what you are paying and it is gonna be valuable. The reason why I have systems that I don’t have–that they are out there buying houses right now, and selling houses right now, while we are on the phone, is because of the years that I split that mastermind group that I paid for the mentor-ship. To be able to tap those kind of brains. So, look, man we’ve been the on a while but you are very interesting person to talk to. I think the audience say the same, but I know that you got time constraint and stuff, am gonna put up the link there one more time, 1000houses.com/carrot, get yourself some Trevor Mauch and get yourself some On Carrot websites because I am gonna tell you one more time, am a fan, I’ve been a user. And am a happy guy. So, I appreciate your time, Trevor. It’s been really a nice experience to interview you and talk to you about your business.

Trevor: Mitch, I appreciate you, too. And guys, if you are into Mitch’s program show up for those darn calls, Because they are so valuable. It is not too often you get to show up and ask a person like Mitch those amazing questions that literally– one thing that Mitch can notice in a [INAUDIBLE], someone else can might in the call can notice can literally remove the roadblocks that stopping you. So, show up on his calls and we are here for you guys now, and we can help you. Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch: Hey, thank you very much. And this is Mitch and we are out of here, ‘till the next podcast. Thanks for joining us. Have a great day, and fill out and get you some—

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