Meet Ups And Networking with Adam Adams

Episode 294: Meet Ups And Networking with Adam Adams

 

With massive strategies presented from growing audience to attracting investors, meetups and networking are two of the most proven effective. The host of Creative Real Estate Podcast, Adam Adams gives away the hacks to growing your meetups and getting the message out there to keep them posted. A firm believer of creating engagement to appeal to more audience and investors, he reveals how to spot certain pockets of people potential to pitch deals on. On top of that, learn more about Adam’s Raising Money Secrets course.

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I have Adam Adams today. We’re going to be talking about raising private money. Before we get to that, let’s pay some homage to my sponsor. Please visit TaxFreeFuture.com because you will not believe what your financial advisors are not telling you. If you don’t have a tax-deferred or tax-free retirement account or financial savings account, you’re missing out on a big advantage. We can show you through about 37 videos, why, when and how to take little chunks of money and make them into big chunks of money in a relatively short period of time. A lot of great case studies.

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The first thing is how to make the money. After that, you realize very shortly the minute you’ve made the money it’s like, “I’ve got to learn how to keep it now because they want to take it from me.” There are plenty of ways and the educated keep a lot more of their money and the uneducated don’t. What we’re going to talk about is one of my favorite topics. I’ve been doing this for my 22-year career, raising private money. It is an art and science. Adam Adams has a course out called Raising Money Secrets. I have a course up called Private Money Changes Everything. I’m open to anything that’ll help someone. If there is something that you’ve got going that my people need to know, I’m not territorial about this stuff at all.

Adam and I had this conversation, he’s not territorial either. Our hearts are in the right place. We’re going to give some content, some information and see if we can help you raise some private money because it’s no secret. Finding the deal is one thing. Funding the deal is a whole other thing. The more money you have to fund the deals with, the bigger, faster you can grow and the sooner you can get to your financial freedom or chase whatever dreams you want to chase. I’ve raised $14 million from 44 people in my 22-year career. I didn’t do that quickly. I did it over a long period of time because I didn’t know any better. It kept pace with where I was at that time. I didn’t need $14 million several years ago.

I always had enough and if I needed some more, I call everybody for references. The funny thing about borrowing money, when you pay people back, they want to give you more money and they want to refer you to their friends. I have most of my lenders been loaning me money for over a decade, some of them over two decades. When people call my references, they are completely at ease. Adam Adams, who is he? Where’s he been? What’s he doing? Let’s catch up on Adam. Tell us about your journey?

I grew up in Utah. My stepfather was a real estate investor, an entrepreneur and a general contractor. I grew up putting up walls at our fourplexes at our condos. I grew up going to tax lien and tax deed auctions. A young boy learning how to invest my dad’s money. Eventually, my dad was so mad at me that I hadn’t yet gotten into real estate myself. I was just in college. His way of correcting the problem child was he bought me a piece of land and he gave it to me for Christmas. He said, “You have to pay me.” I was like, “I thought this was a Christmas present? You paid for it and you’re asking me to pay you the exact amount that you paid for it. It’s like I went and bought it.” He’s like, “You have equity and you’re going to learn a lot.” About a few months later, I got a tax bill. I was like, “What is this, dad? Why do I have to pay taxes? What did I do wrong that the government is making me pay them?” He was like, “That’s normal.” I was like, “Another $100? I have to work two extra weeks to get that extra $100.” Long story short, it was one more year after that first tax bill, the second tax bill came up and someone offered to buy it for way more than I bought it for.

I made about $12,000 on the piece of property. That was my decision where I said, “I’ve got to be involved.” I studied Robert Kiyosaki. I don’t know if you knew this but Robert Kiyosaki, even though he might preach to buy a single-family rental, he doesn’t do that himself. He was doing multi-family. That’s how he got his money. I was like, “Learn what he’s doing, not necessarily what he’s saying.” I started immediately in 2007. I managed multi-family properties turned a $1 million property into a $2 million property. I made the owner of $1 million and it took me a year to do it. I made $10 an hour. I said, “Now that I have the experience and I can make someone $1 million in just a year, I need to do this for myself.” It was 2008 when I started getting into multi-family. That’s where I started. A few years ago, I decided to syndicate. Do you ever talk about syndication?

I haven’t talked about it. I probably should but it’s not something that I’ve been interested in myself because I don’t understand all about it.

Make a bigger thing bigger than you and bigger than your meetup. Share on X

To syndicate, you have to learn how to raise private equity. That’s where we learned it. Most of the equity that we’ve gotten, it’s strange. I would have never thought about this before, but it all came from the meetup group that we’ve been running for the last few years.

I may share a commonality. At a point in my career, I needed to raise some more money desperately. I was fine. It’s just I have a lot of deals that I couldn’t buy that I wanted to buy because I didn’t have enough money. I started a meetup. I held it on the third Thursday of every month. I’d have lunch. I already had the room setup, the sandwiches, the Cokes, the water, the chips and everything. I also had a choice for in the evening at 7:00. You could either come to my luncheon or you could come to my little happy hour mixer.

Right after every meeting, I started promoting the next meeting. I had three weeks or a month to get that room. Unlike you, I never had a lot of people there. Sometimes it was only three or four people at my lunch, but it didn’t matter. They were there for a reason. They were someone to talk to. I had told myself I was going to do this for a year. If no one showed up at lunch, I was going to commit to doing it for a year. I was going to have twelve days that I was going to have this meeting. I had to quit after six months because I wasn’t sure I could get out all the money. I didn’t have the numbers you had. Let’s talk about your meetups and how do you get all these people there?

Here are a few hacks. One of the things that we would do is one of the things that you mentioned. That is to always be promoting the next meeting. That’s very important. Most people miss that. They are always behind the eight ball and I could tell that you were already ahead. When you’re at a meeting and people are high on meeting people, learning and wanting to be involved in whatever it is your meetup is about, let’s say real estate. All of a sudden you can mention, “Next month, we’re going to do this.” Not only just mentioning it, which is a huge benefit but also telling them why they can’t miss that one. I’ve seen a lot of people that do meetups and they have a meetup group. It’s like, “We meet and we hang out once a month or once a week. All we do is hang out and get a network with each other.”

When it comes up to a meetup and most people reading, if they know what meetup is, they’ve found themselves in this situation. They RSVP and then it comes to the date of the meetup and all of a sudden they’re like, “My kids have this. I’ve got a showing. I’ve got this other thing. Maybe I won’t go.” Because that meetup was planned out in a way that, “We do the same thing. It’s not a big deal. We’re always here.” There’s no urgency. There’s no reason for them to get a babysitter. There’s no reason for them to extend at closing. If they knew that this one meetup was going to change their future, they’re like, “I’ve got to get that babysitter because I have to be there.” That’s one of the things we do.

I recognize them and I saw that fallout. I started when people would RSVP, I would have someone call them and say, “I saw your RSVP. I want to make sure. Are you a vegan or do you have a special preference?” I’m making this plate for you. I’m ordering and spending money to obligate them in a subtle way like, “Don’t stand this guy up. He went out of his way for you.”

The other things that we do would be to use private messages. You’ve got some excellent ways of marketing, Mitch.

To me, I didn’t think about making the next meeting unique all the time so that they can’t say what you said. I’ll make the next one because they’re all the same. I didn’t get that. I’m learning too. That’s one reason I love to be the host of a podcast is because I learned stuff myself from other people like you. That’s one of the great things. You’ve got this podcast. You made them RSVP. You’re always promoting the next event. You’re always making the next event somehow unique and it’s not going to be another one like it so that people don’t flip out on you. I said this, “Call them and obligate them to come to the conclusion that this man is counting on me. He’s spending some money on a plate in the dinner for me.” Make it harder for them to say, “I know you planned to have a plate for me, but I’m not going to come.”

 

It’s been insane. One other thing that you can do on that topic is using the direct message or the private messaging through the meetup group. You can say something like, “My groups, we have questions.” You’re talking if people have RSVP’d and I meant to say when people haven’t yet RSVP’d but they’re in the group. This is just a way to get more people to start thinking about it and use the trick that you have, Mitch. The one thing that you’ve done is you give them some accountability. I can do that also when they have not yet RSVP’d.

I’ll say something like, “Welcome to the group. I don’t know if you’re going to the meetup on Friday, but I noticed that you’ve been doing wholesales for three years and that’s awesome. I’d love to talk to you more about that. Maybe we could talk at the meetup on Friday?” It’s people that they haven’t even planned on coming but all of a sudden they’re like, “He took an interest in me. He noticed that I’ve been doing this. I want to go, hang out and see what this person is all about because you’re going out of your way to chat with me.”

It’s a difference in a generic invitation and a personal invitation. It’s what you did, you made it personal. I’m putting down here, make your invitation as personal as possible.

The other things that we did, we tried to have a no sales pitch event. We tried to let people talk about who they are. I studied by going to a ton of different people’s meetups and I noticed how much better I felt when I had the opportunity to say, “My name is Adam Adams. I buy apartment complexes with my friends. If you want to be my friends, come and talk to me.” If I could at least say that in someone else’s meetup group. If somebody wanted to buy apartments with me, they would come and talk to me because they knew what I was doing. If I didn’t have the opportunity to share, it would be more difficult because I would have to go and shake everybody’s hand and ask them a bunch of questions and tell they were willing to ask me what do I do and I can say, “I buy apartments with my friends.” It was more valuable whoever organized that group allowed everybody in the meeting to introduce themselves.

I had a problem at first. When people came, they weren’t signing in. I didn’t know who was there. I didn’t have their personal information, their cell phone number or I didn’t have anything on them. People were showing up that RSVP’d. I made sure the next time that I had a spreadsheet that they had to fill it out to get into the room or to get their plate. As I started to rise up, and some of them would rise up higher than others in the interest level of loaning me money when I was talking about this stuff, I would give the eye to the girl and said, “Don’t let that person leave without me talking to them.” What happens is after you finish talking, people come up to you and the people that don’t have one thin dime to give you, occupy all your time. The millionaire guys walking out the door because he’s busy, he’s a different caliber of guy and they don’t linger long. I was missing these guys going out the door. When I’m talking to somebody, I’d look up at the girl and that was a signal for, “That’s the guy right there. Don’t let that guy go.” It helped a lot too. How do you get the word out that you have this meetup?

There are two things that I’ll share. One is collaborating with other meetup organizers. It’s one of my favorite ways because you can hack into their whole network. You’ll partner with somebody who has a meetup group in your area. Mitch might have his Wednesday night bar meeting. You used to have those, 100 people coming. What you might be able to do is also collaborate with two other meetup organizers and say, “I want you to talk about wholesaling. I want you to talk about fixing and flipping and you should bring your whole groups. I’ll know your people. You’ll know my people. We’ll both know John’s people. John will know your people and my people, it will grow all of our networks. Let’s do this together.”

That’s one thing that I’ve done is make a bigger thing bigger than ourselves, bigger than me, bigger than my meetup. It’s something where people can get behind it. They want to have a meeting where it’s something that they’ve never been before and they can’t get it again. You’ll never partner with these two meetup organizers ever again. That’s one way you can bring a lot of people and they start to get to know you. The other way that I was going to share is how you market. Most people, all they do is just click up on meetup and they add their meeting to their meetup group. What you can do to get in front of a lot more people and start taking pictures while you’re at your other meetup groups. Start talking to people one-on-one, start posting on your Facebook, start posting on your LinkedIn. You start to market it everywhere. Those are the two ways that I would say to grow that meetup. One thing that I would share also is the email list. Some people don’t even use the email list of the group that they have. They don’t regularly send those emails and going back to what you were saying about having people get on the list in the first place. Mitch, tell me did you notice that people wanted to dodge the sign in sheet?

Yes, that brought me to the conclusion of why I started doing things a little different.

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What I did is instead of having someone else besides me at that table, I started going to the table because I truly love people. I am truly and genuinely happy to see people. Especially if I’ve never seen them before, I want them to feel welcomed. I said, “I’m not going to let other people run that table because if other people run my sign-in sheet, I’ll get half of the people signing in.” What I did is I was there but instead of sitting down, I stood up when they walked in. As soon as somebody walks in, I would stand up. I’d be like, “My name is Adam. It’s so good to meet you. Welcome back, John, it’s so good to meet you.” I would talk to them for a second. I’d be like, “We need to catch up. Here, sign in and then I’ll meet you in there.” I slide the sign-in sheet over to them. It’s hypnotizing. It’s hard to explain. All of a sudden, you become connected with each other. When they’re signing it, they’re not like, “I don’t want to sign this.” They’re more like, “This is just what I do.”

You’re talking about having a personality engaging someone and making them feel warm and wanted. It’s not rocket science. Although, if you don’t plan to do that in the hustle and bustle of a meeting, you’ll miss out on that one most important thing. You have to think about these things to get the most out of them. They’re orchestrated in a way but they’re only orchestrated on paper. It should be all natural to you when you go to step one, “I’m going to be at the front door, I’m going to greet people with enthusiasm, try to recall their names. If I don’t know their names, this is what I’m going to say to them,” and get that planned out but it’s no wonder because I didn’t do that either. I had someone else. It’s not my face out there. I like your way better, more engaging. You’re the guy they wanted to meet. I got another lesson learned from me.

Share your way. I need to interview you on my podcast to get your brilliant mind out there. I love what you’re doing.

I own a company called LiveComm.com. You buy phone numbers there for $2 a month. You get to pick your own area code. Every phone number comes with a text distribution list and it collects numbers of incoming callers who use their cell phones. Anyone who calls a LiveComm number, if they call from their cell phone, it’s going into this text distribution list that you can text anytime you want to at will from your phone or from your computer. What I did was I had this bar that wasn’t doing too well. Wednesday was my slowest day. I thought I’m going to hold a real estate meetup to try to use a little bit of my whatever celebrity I have in San Antonio to get some people to come. I wasn’t interested in the meetup, although I wanted to deliver value.

I needed to get some butts in some chairs, drinking some beer and eating some burgers at this place that I was part owner in, and Wednesday was horrible. I ran this meetup and it said, “San Antonio real estate investor, a meetup at the Cold River Saloon. Here’s who’s invited.” I explained what the meetup was about and who was invited. Basically, if you’re in any way related to the real estate industry, be it a carpet layer or a real estate broker or investor. I spelled out everybody, so maybe they would recognize themselves even if they weren’t a remodeler, “I’m not in the real estate business.” You’re not, you remodel houses so I put remodel in there.

I gave them all the information and I said at the bottom, “To find out what day each week and what time on that day, call this number.” If they were interested at all, they had to call the number to find out. When they called the LiveComm number, I captured their cell phone number. This was happening automatically. I went into LiveComm and I prescheduled that every Wednesday at 10:00 AM and at 5:00 PM we would send out a text to everyone on that list to remind them that, “The San Antonio investor meetup was at 7:00. Please don’t forget, we’re looking forward to meeting you.” That was automated. All I did was I showed up at my own meetings, more and more people were coming to this meeting and I wasn’t doing anything.

I would sometimes send out a text, “A free beer if you bring a friend.” Whatever I could say legally. Wednesday became my best weeknight. It went from the worst to the best. It was largely due to that automated capture of the cell phones and the automated text messages going out with reminders. Every now and then when I had an idea how to ask these people to bring more people, I would send out that text manually, send it out to everybody and have a contest, “Whoever brings the most people is going to win a free burger and fries.” I don’t know what it was, but it’s something to make it interesting. Unless it’s the four housewives that like to get together to walk their dog at lunchtime twice a week, they don’t need that stuff. If you’re trying to build a group, every administrator should know about LiveComm, should know about that tactic because it’s automated, easy and inexpensive that I don’t know why 90% of the meetups wouldn’t use that theory.

How you’re using it is perfect. I would get LiveComm. Regardless if you’re using it or not, the strategies that you’re employing here are perfect. You’re getting them a message at 10:00. To reward the morning, they’re already planning to be at the meeting.

 

They’ve got to plan their day. They’ve got to let nothing get in the way of that 7:00 if they want to come. I’m warning them at 10:00 and I’m trying to give them a little bump at 5:00 and said, “Don’t forget in a couple of hours.” I can see people all over town going, “I almost forgot.”

I host real estate conferences and I’ve been doing meetups for a couple of years as well. One of my favorite things is to do things like you’re saying. If you have the opportunity to say, “Whoever brings the most people wins a free ticket, wins a free beer and wins a free meal. By the way, if you buy a ticket or if you RSVP, you get two for one.” Those things are genius because you’re allowing the people that are coming to the meeting to start promoting for you. You allow the attendees to start doing the marketing. It’s a genius.

I remember one of the things I did because I would always go out to eat after that someplace quiet. One time I told, “Whoever brings the most people gets to go where I go after a meetup just to come down and relax and then head home.” That was the one that seemed to bring more people wanted to spend that hour with me than anything else I offered. I was going to go sit down anyways and do whatever, so I tried to make the gifts something that fit me naturally. I’m not doing anything extra.

Mitch, what else do you want to talk about?

You were talking about the private money and the branding. First of all, do you see certain pockets of people potential? I see pockets, I see attorneys and CPAs is usually a place you can start to shop. When I get on a binge to find money, I started setting appointments with all kinds of real estate attorneys, contractual attorneys even litigated or foreclosure attorneys. I say, “I’m looking to get a free consult. I’m trying to find the attorneys that are going to be at my round table. I understand you’re involved in real estate. I’d like to come to show you my business, tell you what I’m into and see if you’re my go-to guy for some problems I either have or I’m anticipating that I might have.” Everyone gives you free consultation.

The first thing you have to do is, “Let me explain to you my business.” I never asked people for money. I explain it to them. If they want to play, they’ll plug themselves in but I do a lot of NLP, which is I get them to open up the door to walk into the room, instead of me opening the door and guiding them in. I get them to pull me into the room. It’s a different thing. When you start asking people to borrow money, the first thing they do is they get in that stance. Let’s say I wanted to get you to ask me what I did for a living. Let’s role play. You’re anybody. Who are you? A doctor, a lawyer or an architect? Adam, I notice you’re a very sharp dressed man, I know that you have a nice watch. May I ask what you do for a living? You seemed very successful.

I would naturally tell you that I’m an attorney.

I thought about being an attorney for a long time, but I ended up taking a different path.

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What path did you take?

You can hardly not ask. I help average people achieve above-average rates of return on their money and I give very valuable Texas real estate as collateral. It’s mostly for people who are sick and tired of looking for a ticker tape. Do you ever want to talk about that? Let me know. We go into this attorney’s office. We would say, “Let me show you what I do.” I buy houses at steep discounts. Let’s say I have this $100,000 house. I can buy it for $50,000. I borrowed this $50,000 from an entity. I pay an 8% interest only for five years. I give them a first lien on this property. Don’t you think that entity is pretty well-paid at 8%? Do you think that’s a decent rate of return, Adam?

What if I wanted a higher return?

There are other things that are riskier. This entity either gets paid 8% or it gets my $100,000 house, which they have $50,000 invested in. Given the risks, don’t you think this is a fair return? There’s not much risk.

Yes, I do.

Do you think the entity is pretty protected?

Yes.

I hang on this entity thing that they say, “Who’s the entity?” I tried to get them to say, “Who is this person?” Because usually if they’re business people at all, when you tell them I’m borrowing money at 8% interest only for five years, about 80% of the time they’re business people, they’ll come out and go, “Who’s loaning you that money?” That happens a lot without even provoking a businessman because a businessman wants to know. If they don’t ask that, you say, “Don’t you think this entity is pretty protected and don’t you think given the minimal amount of risk that this is a fair return for this entity?” They’ve done well over the years. I’m begging him what’s the entity. Once they say, “Who is loaning this money?” You take off your glasses, you lean back in your chair and you go, “Adam, they’re private people that got sick and tired of gambling in the stock market.”

 

They used to be worth about twice as much but they got cut in half. They’re never going back and they got their money in 2% CD rates. Why? Do you know someone that needs this help? I didn’t ask him if he wants to loan me money and he automatically plugged himself in. I’m trying to keep him out of that boxing stance. I didn’t ask him. I said, “Do you know someone we can help?” 30% of the time I get to that conversation, “Yes, I know someone. Me.” That’s what they say. I’m using to get in the door with the CPAs. I get myself in a position where I have to explain my business. I concentrate on the money part of the business to try to get them to start asking me questions about where am I getting this money so I can inadvertently suddenly pitch them. How are you doing it?

We’re opposites and I love that.

Either way, it works. You can apply it to yourself.

We brand ourselves and we keep providing content until somebody comes up to us and says, “I’d like to put $100,000 into your next deal.” That’s our way. We don’t have conversations. We don’t sit down with people until they say, “I’ve been watching. I trust you, I want to put my money with you. Can we sit down? Or do you mind if we do a phone call?” We have a podcast and I know that your podcast gets the same type of thing. You keep providing value. You have people that say, “Mitch, I’ve been listening to your podcast for however long. I want to put my money with you.” I know it happens to you because it happens to me and you’re better at it.

It hasn’t happened to me. The last million dollars I got was from Memphis, Tennessee. I got $500,000 out of Florida. They just said, “I have a pretty wide net and I’ve been doing it for a long time, so I have a lot of content to put out there.” Sometimes they said, “I read your book and then I was listening to your podcast.” The main thing they said though in all cases was, “I’ve been listening to you long enough and you’re so consistent in your integrity that you can’t fake that. If you’re a fake, you could get me on one episode or you could wrote one chapter in the book about your integrity.” Every time someone brings up something on your podcast or in your interviews that doesn’t seem integral, you pull them to the side in the conversation and say, “I probably don’t want to do that or let’s try to do this so a little more win-win for everybody.” I’m always pointing that out and people start to recognize the integrity of who you are and that’s important. By having these meetups and getting them talking to people and showing how fair and balanced everything is, you’re showing that you have integrity. You’re trying to get wins and all the checkboxes for everybody and people appreciate that. Have you raised a lot of money for your podcasts?

It’s hard to explain exactly where all the money comes from. I know that we’ve raised $5.2 million from our meetup group because that’s very measurable. From the podcast, I can tell you what I have gotten is people that started to know me. They found out that I had a podcast, so they listened to the podcast. After several months that’s when they decided, “I like you, I want to invest with you.” I might have two investors total that came organically from just the podcast. We never met them. We’re listened to in several countries, so some of the people that listen, you’ve never met them. I can only point out two times that that’s ever happened, and I’m sure they’ve both invested with us.

It helps me to speak at other people’s events. You get off the stage, people come up and say, “I want to put my money with you.” You host your events. That’s been the best because people want to do business with people that they know, like and trust. It’s the easiest to do that in person. It’s easier to get to know somebody likes them and trust them when you can see their facial expressions. The meetups have been a huge benefit for our business. On our Raising Money Secrets, what we teach people how to do is figure out who is their target audience. I teach them to raise money the way we raised money. First, think about your target audience and think about what they want to know.

If your target audience is somebody who is an accredited investor, worth over a million, what you want to find out is what is my target audience doing? Where are they spending their time? Are they on Facebook? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they going to meetups? Are they searching for this on Google? Think about who that person is and how they think. When you can dissect that enough, you can find a way to answer some questions. You can answer the questions like what do they want to hear? I’m going to create the content for that. You might do something like I buy multi-family. I want to attract somebody to me. I’ll tell them, “If you’re going to invest your money passively with a multi-family syndicator, these are the major things you need to watch out for.”

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I’ll add that content to people and the people that are about to put the money out are the ones watching it. They’re the ones that care the most. In the end I can say, “I only had time to share five of them. There are five others. I have this white paper of the ten things that will help you to be able to invest your money passively. If you want to get all ten easy enough, you just download it. You just put in your email and you’ll have the ten things.”

Just FYI, you just generated a lead that you can reach out to because you have the information to give them the five things, which is part of the tactic but I didn’t want to gloss over that.

In the Raising Money Secrets course, it’s thirteen different modules. It starts by figuring out who that person is that you’re wanting to know. You figure out where they are, you figure out this and that and then you start to understand who are you, what kind of content can you generate? Do you want to do Facebook Lives? Do you want to do Facebook posts? Do you want to do a podcast? Do you want to do a blog? Do you want to do a meetup group? We help you understand who you are and which of these can benefit you the most, and we keep going through to help you create what I was talking about and what you mentioned. It’s funnel.

You want a wide mouth funnel, you want to have a lot of people seeing what you’re doing. You want to be able to offer enough value that they are willing to give you their email address. You can start giving them more content through the email address. You might say something like, “I know I gave you the white paper of the ten things. Here are two things that I never thought about that are very important.” You just write one email to all of these passive investors to help them understand those two. Sometimes I’ve noticed that people are like, “If I spent all of the time to go through all those ten things with every single person, it would take me forever. I’ve already known that Adam does these things. Adam, do you want to take my money? I’ve got $1 million. I need a place in the next year.”

A lot of times I’m showing people how I make money. After I show them how and who I’m borrowing the money from and I get past what I wanted to do was see if they are remotely interested in loaning me money. They like to take another step when I show them how I make money. I make a lot of money and I show them a couple of case studies. At the bottom line, I’m making $20,000, $30,000, $40,000. Inevitably they say, “I caught you, you’ve given up all your secrets.” They say to me, “Why don’t I just do what you do?” They call that money and just do that.

My dad was a salesman. He said, “Never go to sleep when there’s an objection you couldn’t answer,” because next time you’ll have it in your back pocket with the answers. They kept doing that to me and I finally came up with the perfect answer. I would say, “Don’t do what I do. Why would you do what I do?” Do what Tom Brady does. He makes $35 million a year. Before that I was saying, “That’s okay. Go ahead, call the building. Tell them you’re going to cancel your lease. Pay the early cancellation fees. Fire all those people. Do the severance with them. Take that placard off the wall that you spent seven years with and still owe $200,000 on and let’s go get in the house business.”

One of the things that I’ll share, and I do it intentionally. Hopefully, the readers are getting good value out of this. I mentioned how hard it is to do our business. I have seven people on my team. Only one person focuses 100% on asset management. A separate person focuses on nothing but administrative duties. One person focuses on all acquisitions, getting their name out. Only one person focuses on underwriting deals all day every day. We make good money but it’s not simple. There are a lot of moving parts. I run a podcast. I’m full-time at speaking at events, hosting events, speaking at the podcast and going on interviews on podcasts. This is like my job role. That way the whole rest of the team can do what they do. That helps a lot. I always say, “If you want to do that, that is the best way to make even more money.”

It’s not passive. That’s the other thing they say, “Why don’t I just do what you do?” I said, “You can if you want to, but that’s another job.” I have a thing that I got to wake up and do every day, “I’m sorry. I thought you just wanted some passive mailbox money.”

The only passive money is when you’re literally being passive. A rental is not passive but a lender is passive.

I don’t believe in the word passive. It’s an oxymoron. If you think about positivity. You’re burning energy when you sleep, so how can owning something on top of that be passive? I like to say, “Financial freedom happens when your wants and your needs are exceeded by your passive income.” I changed passive to the word, “Financial freedom happens when your wants and your needs are exceeded by your cashflow.” I took the word passive out. Even if you have $100 million and you’ve got an invested at 4%, you think that’s passive? Don’t watch what’s happening with that money every day and watch what happens to your money. It will go away if you don’t watch over the people that are watching your money.

 

I want to thank all the audience for taking time to stop by and get you some Adam Adams and hope you learned a little bit about the meetup groups. You’ve got me inspired because I am on private money raising binge myself. I feel like we’re cutting both ourselves short. This is a great subject and it’s near and dear to my heart.

It’s been fun. Thank you.

Do you want to do another little continuation of this with me?

Let’s do it.

Hopefully, maybe I can be on your show sometime.

You’re 100% invited. I want to learn more about your LiveComm.com.

Watch the video on the homepage and find out why I have nine days on the market and average 12% down on the houses that I sell with owner financing for 30-year fixed. I invented it because there was a need. It doesn’t sound original in the future. There are a lot of phone companies doing some things, but when you start looking at it closely, there are subtle differences that I had to invent it myself because they weren’t doing what I wanted it to do exactly and how I wanted it to do it and at a price. Sometimes when they were doing it, you couldn’t afford it because they were priced the way I wanted to use it. I was going to spend a fortune. I tried to make it affordable. Go there, check that out. What’s the name of your podcast?

Creative Real Estate Podcast.

I want to say thank you to TaxFreeFuture.com because you have no idea what your financial advisers are not telling you. Please go to TaxFreeFuture.com and check it out. There are 37 videos over there. Short vignettes you’re going to find very interesting. Thank you for stopping by to get you some Adam Adams. We are going to be back with Adam Adams again because of the wealth of knowledge and there’s so much to know about raising money and these meetups. Until then, we’ll see you in a bit.

Important Links:

• 1000houses.com/Machine
• 1000houses.com/VAHelp
• 1000houses.com/100
• 1000houses.com/101
• Adam Adams
• Private Money Changes Everything
• LiveComm.com
• Creative Real Estate Podcast
• TaxFreeFuture.com

About Adam Adams

Adam Adams has educated hundreds of thousands of investors through hosting conferences, radio & podcast interviews, speaking, mastermind groups, meetups, and his coaching program. He is the organizer of one of the most famous and highest rated Meetups in the world and the host of the Creative Real Estate Podcast. Adam’s efforts to educate and inspire other investors has earned him the prestigious title “Master Investor of The Year” from Think Realty and the “Adds Incredible Value” award from Lifetime Cashflow. He is also a 3X Hall Of Fame winner in RE Mentor for his successes in multifamily syndications.

Adam got his start in real estate through investing in Tax Deeds way back in 2005. Soon after buying a piece of land and getting the annual tax bill in the mail, Adam realized that true financial freedom wasn’t created merely by owning a piece of real estate but through cash-flow. So in 2007 and 2008, Adam utilized creative strategies to get involved into his first cash-flowing multifamily apartments. Today Adam is partnered in over $50 million of multifamily real estate. Together with his company, BlueSpruce, Adam focuses on finding cash-flowing apartment communities for passive investors.

 

• Here’s How »

• 1000houses.com
• Real Estate Investor Summit Facebook
• Real Estate Investor Summit Twitter
• Real Estate Investor Summit YouTube
• Mitch Stephen LinkedIn