Smart Ways To Use LinkedIn Leads With Yakov Smart

Episode 400: Smart Ways To Use LinkedIn Leads With Yakov Smart

 

How can you use your LinkedIn profile to your advantage as a real estate investor? As it turns out, there are many ingenious ways you can use those LinkedIn leads to build connections, create relationships with investors, and raise capital for your ventures. Raising private capital can be a headache for real estate investors; it often takes a lot of work to find the right investors and make a successful pitch. You can do all of that a lot faster through LinkedIn if you know how to use it smartly. Yakov Smart, the President of Linked Lead Enterprises, joins Mitch Stephen on the show to share to us the powerful potential of LinkedIn as a marketing tool and platform for real estate investors and just about every other kind of business. Your LinkedIn profile is a smart weapon. Don’t be afraid to learn how to use it.

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I have Yakov Smart with me. This is going to be a very interesting show for me too because I’m not taking nearly the advantage of LinkedIn that I should. Yakov is an expert at this, more importantly than LinkedIn, it’s the exact niche that we’re going into. How to raise capital using LinkedIn. We all need private money and private investors. I don’t care what business you’re in. If you don’t have some private money, at least in the waiting, you’re going to miss out on something that has to happen fast, the banks won’t move fast enough and you’re going to be sitting there flat-footed because you didn’t lay some groundwork. Yakov, how you doing?

I’m well. I’m happy to be here, Mitch.

Where are you sitting physically? What city? What state?

I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I got lots of friends there. I have students on the calls and I have people I’m personally coaching from Phoenix. That place has a lot of investors and a lot of activity, doesn’t it?

It’s bustling. It’s one of the fastest-growing markets too. A lot of people happen to be moving here. There’s a lot of action happening.

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The biggest plus that people need to be aware of is the caliber of person and the type of potential investor you can reach directly. Let’s start with a few stats. There are about 675 million users on LinkedIn. These are people from all over the world. The average household income of a LinkedIn user at the time that we’re having this conversation is $115,000. The people on LinkedIn tend to be a higher-income earner. They tend to be more fluent and they’re there for different reasons than a place Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media. They’re there to build relationships, learn, grow, make key business contacts, and learn about new opportunities. As someone who’s a real estate entrepreneur, you have to understand the caliber of person that you can reach on LinkedIn and what LinkedIn allows you to do when you know how to work it.

I’m sure we’ll be talking about some of this on this show as well. If it allows you to build a hyper-targeted list of potential private investors within a matter of minutes as opposed to paying a list broker a few thousand dollars for a list that by the time you get it, it’s not the most up-to-date list. LinkedIn is a place with data and you can pull that data in real-time. Some examples of lists that you can build on LinkedIn, you can find C-level executives at large corporations. Think Google, Amazon, Boeing and Tesla. You can find people who are already in venture capital, private lending and hard money lending. Also who work at family offices or even institutional banks who finance deals sometimes. You can find dentists, doctors, attorneys, CEOs of tech companies, college professors or fellow alumni of the university you attended. There’s a lot of different list building angles. You can find these people on LinkedIn, who you can reach directly on their mobile devices. I’d like to say that it gives you the control of building your investor list and finding the type of private investors you’re looking for.

People like to put all this stuff on their websites and stuff, but this is an addiction too. How was the website different from your LinkedIn profile or how do they mesh?

LinkedIn is a great tool to build your investor list and find the type of private investors you're looking for. Click To Tweet

A website is very different. I would say that LinkedIn has changed a lot, even in the past couple of years. Microsoft purchased it for about $26.2 billion. They’ve completely revamped the platform. First and foremost, your LinkedIn profile has a very powerful SEO. I don’t care if you haven’t logged into LinkedIn in a few years, when someone Googles your name, that LinkedIn profile is going to come up as one of the first few results. Even if you meet a potential contact or investor offline, they go and they Google you, that LinkedIn profile is coming up either right after your website or before your website. It’s important to make that first impression. The difference also when your LinkedIn profile is it’s your personal profile.

This is a new way of using LinkedIn that a lot of people aren’t familiar with yet. When you do this, you can create a marketing asset that positions you a certain way. It positions you as an authority in your space that accelerates trust with potential investors and gets the right people to take the next step and take action. You can be very specific and very concise in using your profile. What I recommend people do as well is that they have their profile link on their website and vice versa. The other great thing about your LinkedIn profile is business pages on LinkedIn. There’s a difference between your personal LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn Business Page like on Facebook, you can have a business page on LinkedIn. What’s great about business pages on LinkedIn, they’re getting a lot of organic juice.

They’re like Facebook Business Pages that used to be. If you remember years ago where you could have 1,000 likes on your Facebook Business Page, you could post something and reach a large percentage of those people without having to Pay-to-Play. On LinkedIn, that’s how business pages are. For example, you can have 100 followers on your business page. If you post something on your business page, I go when I engage with your posts, people in my network are going to see that concept for free. It’s another way to accelerate trust, build up your credibility, get eyeballs, and exposure without having to Pay-to-Play necessarily.

Are you offering to do this for people or do you offer to show people how to do it for themselves?

There’s an article and we talked about delegating versus outsourcing. My personal belief is as a real estate entrepreneur, you shouldn’t be doing this yourself. You shouldn’t be pressing the buttons and in the weeds of the day-to-day. It’s not the highest investing strategy. With that being said though, a lot of people think when it comes to LinkedIn and lead generation marketing, that if they outsource, that solves all their problems. They don’t need to understand the strategy behind it and that’s also a flawed way of thinking.

In our programs, we show people how to build the system because the strategy is what is most important. Strategy trump’s tactics and then how to delegate and automate it because you can automate 90% of this using different automation software. The rest of it, if you’ve got what we call your LinkedIn Lead Generation Instruction Manual, you can have either a virtual assistant or an intern press the day-to-day buttons for you, it’s going to take them about 15 to 20 minutes a day. Most of that is responding to inquiries, leads, and booking for calls or getting your leads to fill out the form and take the next step. I’m big on having a delegatable system that you keep in-house so you cut costs, you know the metrics, what’s taking place, and you take yourself out of the weeds of the day-to-day management.

You’re giving away a free webinar, and this is key because you’re also offering incentives for people to go to the free webinar which is LinkedIn Capital Raising Accelerator. If you guys want to see the strategy that he’s talking about, how to raise capital using LinkedIn and the business profiles that are out there, go to 1000Houses.com/LinkedInCapital. Get signed up for the free webinar. The reason why you’re going to want to do this is you’re going to get a promo code that if you want to get deeper and involved in the strategy that he’s talking about. He has a how-to and a course of $997 regularly, but you’re going to be given promo code if you watch the webinar that you can use within a couple of days to pick up this educational system for $497.

That’s quite a savings. It makes perfect sense. Go to the webinar, see what’s what you think it is, learn more about it, and then if you’re serious, you get a couple of days to get a major discount. I want to thank you for the discount, Yakov, because we always try to get some unique offer for our audience. When I go to other people’s shows, I do the same thing. I try to do the same thing for them as a return for the favor for all the people that did it for us. That’s quite a discount, 50% off. Tell us a little bit about LinkedIn Capital Raising Accelerator.

I’ll tell you about the webinar and the course too because they go hand-in-hand. The webinar is a great introduction. It gives you an overview of my methodology for using LinkedIn to attract investors and raise capital. The title of the webinar is How To Raise More Capital And Make Key Real Estate Contacts Using LinkedIn. You’ll see a demonstration, some specific examples and what the methodology is. You’ll have your wheels turning and that next step is LinkedIn Capital Raising Accelerator. The LinkedIn Capital Raising Accelerator covers the entire step-by-step system for attracting your ideal investors using LinkedIn. It also shows you how to turn it into a system that takes 15 to 20 minutes a day to manage you can delegate and is 90% automated.

It’s all the Ninja strategies, all the different possibilities for you on LinkedIn, and it’s as in-depth as any program you’ll find on the topic. It’s specifically for real estate entrepreneurs who want to raise more capital and attract investors. Some of the things included with that program, there’s a couple of bonuses available out there as well. For example, I give you an entire library of scripts and templates for what to say in your messages that you can plug and play based on your audience and on the type of projects you’re raising capital for that are highly effective. I’ll show you how to automate a lot of this process. You’re also going to see different content strategies, what to post, how often to post it, and how to find the specific investors you’re looking for. We talk about five different ways to do that.

 

I show you step-by-step examples plus included with that program. Every other week, we have a Q&A call. If you want specific feedback or you have specific questions, you can hop on the call, ask me to live, I’ll work with you personally on that group Q&A call. We have a private Facebook Group to go with it as well. Between calls, if you want me to take a look at your profile, messaging, or you’ve got a new type of investor you want to attract, you want to get my feedback on some strategies, I answer that question in the Facebook Group. Not only is it an on-demand training program, but there’s a group coaching element as well that a lot of people find to be very valuable.

I have a course called Private Money Changes Everything. I have somewhere between $24 million and $26 million of private money out on the streets. I already spent and I’ve already bought things with houses and properties. Private Money Changes Everything is the name of that course because it’s God’s truth. You have enough capital behind you at rates and terms that you’ve decided. When I say you’ve decided, that’ll work for both people, but you also have to have terms and rates that work for your business. You got to have a win-win. If you go to the banks, the banks will tell you what they’re going to do. “This is how we’re going to loan you money, sir. This is what you’re going to pay. This is how long we’re going to loan it to you for.”

When you’re raising private money, it’s like, “Who wants to loan me money at this amount, at these terms and this?” We try to find lenders that suit the business that we’re in. We would all like 0% interest, but you got to be fair on the other side too. I want to talk to you about your course in with some of the mentors or some of my courses too. There’s maybe a marriage there somewhere or not because this is definitely a different avenue to generate leads.

I’m teaching people how to convert leads when they come in about a specific strategy that I teach which is seller financing, how to talk to private lenders, and show them how they’re protected about this specific strategy. You’re talking about a lead source to get people into that funnel so that they can do the presentation that I have. Again, noting a very niche inside a niche. Real estate has a lot of niches and the deeper you niche down, the smaller your bullseye is. When someone comes into that bullseye, you’ve got a good chance to have success with them. How long is the webinar that they have?

The free webinar is about an hour.

It’s good because it’s hard to say anything worthwhile in fifteen minutes. I’m glad that it was at least about an hour because it takes about that much time to get into the meat of anything. What are some of the methodologies? What list can you build on LinkedIn? Is it one list or how many lists can you build?

There are five different ways to build lists. I show some examples on the webinar and we get into it inside of LinkedIn Capital Raising Accelerator but I’ll give you an overview of the five different ways. The first way, there’s a free search on LinkedIn where you can search for free and find people based on basic criteria like job title or where they live, those types of things. The second way and this is one of my favorite ways is you can search by groups. This is people have self-identified their interest in real estate or learning about real estate. You can search by groups and find people who are already in the community. The same things with strategic partnerships who may already have access to a list of the people that you’re looking for.

A third way to do it is if you’ve already bought a list of accredited investors if you’ve got a spreadsheet from other sources, or you’ve got an email database, you can integrate that with LinkedIn and contact those people through LinkedIn as well. The fourth way and this is one that isn’t going to be the most relevant for most real estate entrepreneurs at the moment but LinkedIn advertising. Using the LinkedIn advertising platform to build those lists and use paid traffic on LinkedIn. The fifth way and this is my favorite way is to use a tool called LinkedIn Sales Navigator. There are about 15 to 20 criteria that you can filter by. Not only can you pull people up based on job titles, companies they work at, or where they live, but you can go a layer deeper based on behavior and psychographics.

For example, if you want tech founders who have expressed an interest in investing in real estate or learning about real estate, you can find those kinds of people. If you want hard money lenders who are specifically focused on real estate lending in a certain area or niche, you can find those types of people. The same thing with institutional investors. If you want to reach people in a certain affluent zip code who is also interested in investing in real estate or private money, you can find those types of people as well. There’s a lot of different criteria. In a session one of LinkedIn Capital Raising Accelerator, we talked about angling your list. You mentioned we’re so aligned on being specific too so we talk about being very specific in how you generate those private investor leads.

I want to caution people. People think, “I’m in real estate, I want to borrow money to buy real estate.” This doesn’t just pertain to people in real estate. Any business that you have that needs money, you go out and try to raise capital for it but I’m using this as an example. You’re in the real estate industry so people that are real estate investors, I want to hit them. I don’t think I want to raise capital from people that are swimming in the same pond that I’m swimming in. They need what I need. I need to go find people that I haven’t ever even thought of. I would go through the tech people that are interested in investing in real estate.

With LinkedIn, you have a marketing asset that accelerates trust with potential investors and gets the right people to take action. Click To Tweet

They’re making a lot of money in tech. They’re trying to hold onto it now and they don’t want it in a 1% CD and they’re tired of gambling in the stock market. I don’t know if you can search for retired people or people over 60. I don’t know all the different lists, but people over 60 that live in prominent neighborhoods, now you’re starting to narrow it down to people who might be more interested in what you’re asking and looking for. You’ve got to get creative when you think about the list and you have to try a few things.

Inside of the LinkedIn Capital Raising Accelerator, I give you 25 different list angles and how to build those lists. Some of the things that you mentioned by neighborhood or that tech founder were interested in real estate investing, and it’s all about the better and more specific you angle your list, the better results you’re going to get. It’s fascinating how specific you can get on LinkedIn and what people you can have access to directly for raising that private capital.

What are some of the major mistakes that people make when they start trying to raise capital?

I’ll give you some of the LinkedIn specific ones. There’s a lot of them in general. The biggest one is not quite understanding the difference between online and offline when it comes to building trust. I’ll give you a very easy to understand example. Offline, you meet someone at an REI club or a networking event. If you start talking and they’re not resonating what we have to say, chances are unless they’re rude, they’re not going to turn their back, walk away, and give you the cold shoulder. People tend to be more compassionate, even if they think you’re full. Online, you’ve got a couple of words to capture their attention. They don’t know you, if they’re not interested, “Next.” They’ll move on.

It’s very different. You have to be much more concise. You need to start with where people are at. A lot of people like to get into the features, benefits, and all those different things. I’m big on education-based marketing and having an educational process for accelerating trust. You want to start with where people are at. You think about all the big REITs that are raising capital or crowdsource investment opportunities online that are big, that are raising millions, if not billions of dollars online. They’re leading with education and trust before asking for anything. It’s important to follow that type of example when using a place like LinkedIn for attracting those investors and raising private capital.

The next mistake that people do is they’re not specific enough in the type of investor they’re looking for. Anyone who’s accredited and who has money is my investor. It’s a very uphill battle. If you’re not going to be specific enough in your messaging, it becomes that much harder to build trust. The next big mistake is about working smarter versus working harder. There are people out there that say you need to post by times on social media, that’s BS. You don’t need to post at all, oftentimes, if you’re going to attract those investors. It’s about building those relationships directly and working smarter instead of working harder. A lot of people aren’t intentional enough and they don’t have a system. I’m big on having a system in place, working the system, and reverse engineering your outcome. The other big mistake is in using automation, and having it to be systematic, something that’s based on numbers, metrics, and results so you have very good data to show you what’s working.

If something isn’t working, there are certain levers, I call them to pivot levers where you can pivot and make it start working even better. That’s all based on numbers and metrics. The final mistake that even a lot of people who are reading this, some people say, “I can find all these people on LinkedIn. Let me start pitching them.” As soon as they connect, here comes a long-winded sales pitch about why would they have is the next best thing since sliced bread, asking someone to invest, or telling someone about their deal right away. It’s a little premature and it doesn’t accelerate trust online if you don’t know yet. You’re much better off having what we call an initial lead gen offer. We’re asking them a question, get them to raise their hand, and engage interest. Those are a few of the biggest things that I’m seeing constantly. What we’re talking about, Mitch, is a new way of thinking and perspective. It’s a perspective that’s highly effective for online lead generation, especially generating investor leads using a place like LinkedIn.

Most of the audience that we have here are entrepreneurs, but a greater percentage of them are real estate, investors/entrepreneurs. How can real estate investors specifically optimize their LinkedIn profile?

I’ll give you the most important parts. The very first piece of prime real estate on your profile that I see a lot of people leave blank is that cover photo. Understand that when most people take the first look at your profile, it’s going to be on their mobile phone. Behind your picture on LinkedIn, if you don’t have this cover photo-ready, it’s a big blue space. You can use that cover photo to establish your branding, to direct people to your website or landing page, and to show the keyword or the types of projects you’re involved with. It’s a great chance to make a first impression, come off as credible and professional. That’s the cover photo and one-off thing that’s important.

The next thing is you’ve got your LinkedIn headline. The mistake I see a lot of real estate entrepreneur is making is their LinkedIn headline says, CEO at XYZ, LLC, or something like that. You want to make your profile all about your prospect and potential investor. Instead, let people know that you’re expanding your pool of strategic partners or investors, what type of project you’re specifically specializing, and that headline is designed to grab their attention. If you know they’re facing a very specific problem, let them know that you’re aware of that problem sooner rather than later. You’ve then got your About section. What’s important about your About section is you want to use a technique I call pre-framing. It’s a technique that comes from NLP. Instead of your ideal investor raising objections, or asking you difficult questions, what if you were the one to pose those questions? It creates a level of trust, respect and authority.

 

When you understand the conversation happening in their mind, when you are the one to raise those common questions that you’re asked, and when you demonstrate to people that you understand because you often have investors approaching you, it flips the script. You’re giving people that educational value, and leading with, “Here are your questions. Here is where to start this educational process.” With the About section, it’s used for that. It’s also used to tell a bit of your personal story, your background, why you’re someone who’s credible, and who they can trust. We might have some people on this or in the future who are getting started with real estate investing.

They’ve been in a job for a certain amount of years and they’re thinking to themselves, “How do I establish my credibility and build trust if I’ve only been in the business for a few months?” I’ll give you a couple of different angles. Whatever experience you’ve had before you got into real estate investing, chances are you can leverage that experience. Maybe you were an engineer. We see engineers as trustworthy, analytical, and intentional. These are all strengths you can demonstrate with the messaging and positioning in your profile. If you’re someone who comes from tech, innovation or you’ve had other businesses, and now you’re getting into real estate investing or entrepreneurs, for example, you can talk about a fresh perspective, or you can talk about the strength of your team that you’re working with.

You don’t have to be in the business for 30 years to build that instant type of trust and credibility. More importantly, it’s about making the other person feel seen and understood. If your profile can do that, that’s a powerful way of communicating. Lastly, what I’ll say about the About section is giving people a clear and concise call-to-action. They’re interested, what’s the next step? Where can they go to learn more? What’s the next thing for them to do? I recommend that you make it black and white for them. What’s going to happen when they go there, what they can expect to receive, and give them the link. Otherwise, they’re going to say, “This is interesting. I’ll check it out later.” I’m going to be more intentional than that. There are a couple of more important sections on your profile that I’ll mention.

When you’re offering to give someone a link, do you post the link or do you want them to give up some information to get where they’re going? I’m curious as to your stance on then.

In an ideal world, if you’ve got something that’s a juicy offer. For example, you’ve got a cheat sheet on three ways to do something that they’re interested in or three ways to invest in real estate in the new economy. If you’ve got something like that, ideally you want them to go to a simple landing page. You don’t want to send them to your website because it’s an easy place to get lost for most people. They go to a simple landing page, they enter their information, and they get the cheat sheet. Now, they’re on your list and you’ve got a lot of different ways to nurture that lead. Ideally, you want them to do that unless you’ve got something that’s very informational, extensive, and you know they’re already prequalified. You know they’re accredited and they’re the right person. You can then give it away for free without them opting in, but you can also retarget them which is a different rabbit hole.

I own a company called LiveComm.com where you can put up a recording and you can offer a pre-recording of the 21 Objections to Loaning Your Money to a Real Estate Investor or 21 Things You Need to Know the Answer To. I can then put that in your free recording. What happens is I’m going to capture their phone number when they call to hear the recording. Every LiveComm phone number comes with a text distribution list attached to it. If they call from their cell phone, you’re going to get their phone number. Inside LiveComm, you could click on an instant call connect button, which means whenever someone starts listening to that recording, you get a text saying, “Someone from this number is listening to the recording about LinkedIn Private Lending right now.” Posing the question like, “Give them a few minutes to get through this.”

They’re engaged right now and you should call them. Make contact, see if you can answer any more questions for them if everything was clear. I’m already starting to think about how am I going to implement some of the things that you’re doing because I never run out of the job of raising private money. I’m carrying 30-year mortgages. When I borrow money, I’m borrowing for 10 years, 15 years. I’ll borrow $1 million in 10 to 12 houses or less. That money is out for an extended period of time. I have to go get some more to do some more. I’m never idle in this thing. I was wondering, have you ever experimented with recorded calls and capturing cell phone numbers?

Recording calls is interesting. I personally have not captured cell phone numbers I have. I’m big on text message marketing. My preference is I’m not going to be someone who calls people without having it to be by appointment. Being an online guy, it’s my generation but I will have an automated text message that goes out and drives them to book an appointment. If the call is prescheduled, there are different ways to do it.

If I got a text message that someone is listening to my 21 Things You Need To Know Before You Loan Money To A Real Estate Investor, I’m going to calling that guy the minute he’s done listening to the recording. It’s going to be me because I’m the one personally that wants to borrow the money and I’m the one with a reputation. In my personal opinion on how I looked at it, it’s a highly valuable target. I don’t want anyone else to talk to them. I know that it can only go so far. I’m not trying to 10X, I’m trying to pick up another $10 million if it’s one person at a time or if I need fifteen people. Can you poke holes in that for me?

One thing that I talk about is marketing and selling in a way that’s congruent to you. Some people love picking up the phone having those one-on-one conversations. Some people are more asynchronous where I like automation. If they listen to my recording or when people watch the webinar, they’re going to get follow-up emails or in some cases, text messages. If having the phone call makes sense, I like it to be by appointment only. In the context that you’re talking about, especially if you know what to say when they pick up that phone, you know how to follow up and you’re feeling confident, absolutely, because you’ve got that person’s attention.

You don't have to be in the business for 30 years to build instant trust and credibility. Your LinkedIn profile can do that for you. Click To Tweet

It’s worth it and they’re highly valuable to me. I want to introduce myself. I want them to hear my voice. I want them to know there’s a real person at the end of this thing. This is me. It could get to a point in my life where I have so much or so many people know my reputation now that I don’t have to do that. I still have to because when you say the name Mitch Stephen out there, everybody goes, “So what?” I’m not famous. In that tiny little pond, I’m a little more popular than the average person, but still a long way from things. In asking someone to loan you their money, that’s a tall drink of water. You’re asking people to consider doing something significant. I feel like I need to do something, at least at this point in my career, I’m very significant to get them to pay attention.

I would add to that too if they go and they watch your recording, there is a technique or a rabbit hole. I don’t necessarily think we’re going to go down in this conversation but you can retarget them. Over the next seven days, every time they pull up their social media or their email, they see a little reminder or a piece of content, “There’s Mitch again. He’s omnipresent.”

“He is famous,” or they say, “This guy is everywhere.” I understand retargeting. It’s unlimited, but also has to do with how much budget you have. A lot of people start with a very little budget so we have to do what we have to do. As you get some success, you can try to build that budget a little bigger. I couldn’t afford retargeting last month, but this month I had some good hits so I’m going to try my hand at retargeting or try retargeting. It’s all baby steps for most of us. How about you? Did you start out broke? When you started all this stuff, were you broke?

Absolutely.

Here we are stealing political bandit signs so we can turn them over, write our Cash for Houses post, and nail them. When I say stealing, it was after the election. They were supposed to pick them up within 48 hours to get the trash off the street but they don’t. I figured they’re fair game. Everyone starts broke. That’s why educational tools like yours are very important because we don’t have any time and any money to waste so why don’t we get some education before we jump out in the middle of something we don’t know anything about and start figuring it out. You’ve already figured it out. We’ve got a free webinar for an hour. If you want to go further, we’ll get you half off the educational course on exactly what to do, how you might do it, and how you plug yourself into it. Go to 1000Houses.com/LinkedInCapital and check it out. Also, you can get all kinds of information.

I’m going to tell you, Yakov, it’s evergreen. If you have bootcamps or anything come up, you get your people to get with my people and you put in whatever you want your people to know like, a number to call or a website to go to. You can change it at will. I appreciate you talking about this subject. I’m very interested in the subject myself because I know that I have not used LinkedIn to the level that I should. I haven’t used them hardly at all. I’m there but I don’t even know if what I have there is any good. You’re causing me to rethink this whole thing about LinkedIn. There is no doubt it’s something I should have tried way before because I’m having success posting minor things on Facebook. Imagine if I was in a business environment and was targeting the right people. There are only 5,000 people that I can reach on my Facebook page because I’m tapped out and that’s the limit. What would you say to the entrepreneurs out there and the newbies before we wrap it up? First of all, did I get everything off your chest that you want to say or is there something important that I left out because I’m not familiar with this topic?

I love what you said that you’ve raised $28 million and you’re still raising capital. You’re constantly looking for new investors and raising capital. Regardless of someone’s raising for their first deal or if someone’s already seasoned, this can be very applicable and it’s a way to fill that funnel for raising future capital. It’s important. You asked some good questions. It was a good introduction. I want to encourage people if they’re resonating with this to check out the webinar. I love what you said about this is the message that I have around education too. How important it is to be able to sharpen that sword. Before you go at it, before you embark on that hustle, and take that action is to have the right strategy, be confident in what you’re doing and to not waste any time reinventing the wheel. I’m big on mentorship and learning from people who’ve been there, done that who are very proficient in very specific areas. It’s one of the wisest things someone can do as a business owner in building their business.

I thought of something while you were talking and I’m going to get this out of the way because a lot of people think that raising private money and they have a lot of limiting beliefs about themselves in that topic. “I don’t have a track record, why are people going to loan me money? I don’t have good credit, why are people going to loan me money? I’m too tall, I’m too skinny, I don’t speak the English language that well, I’m the wrong color, I’m too young, I’m only 22 years old, who’s going to loan me money?” What I teach in Private Money Changes Everything is, first of all, it’s not about you at all. It’s about the deals in the what-if scenarios, what’s the worst-case scenario?

If the answer to that is okay and satisfies your potential private lender, then it didn’t have anything to do with you. The kind of deals that I teach and the way I teach you to borrow money using real estate as collateral. Charles Manson could have got these loans. It wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t care how many people he murdered. If he doesn’t pay me, I’m going to get X over there. I’m going to get 123 Main Street which is going to be fine with me. Be careful of your limiting beliefs on raising private money and set your goal. If all you do is find one person to make you alone that you’ve never met before in your life, your confidence level is going to skyrocket because you’ll have that same feeling or thought that we all did when we got that first stranger to loan us money.

If I could do it that one time, I can do it over and over again. Sometimes you need that one. It’s like your first wholesale deal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve made $15,000 in your wholesale deal or you made $1,500. The point was you took something you’d never done before, you went out, and you turned $1. I always tell people, “It doesn’t matter how much you make on your first deal, just make something. Get it under your belt. Get it going.” The same thing with raising private money, “Get one success story, even small, and then your whole belief system starts to open up.” We accomplish things that we believe we can do. The problem is until you do it. You’re not sure.

 

Some people may have this self-doubt in the back. We all have self-doubt when we’ve never done something we’re going out to do it, especially when you’re listening to people on Zoom recordings selling courses. You’re thinking, “That’s a bunch of crap.” It’s not. I started my whole career with Carlton Sheets, Dave Del Dotto, and buying courses from people who were telling me I could and were trying to explain to me how. Robert Allen, “You can go buy a property with zero down. You’re a little limited in the things you can buy, but since you don’t have anything, these are your choices, X, Y, and Z. You got mine in these departments.” I went and did what he said. I bought my first house with nothing down. I realized I could buy the whole world under those circumstances. Let’s get out there and educate yourself. This is a great place to start. LinkedIn is way better than Facebook, Craigslist, or any of this other BS where people are a lot more serious on LinkedIn. I want you to go to 1000Houses.com/LinkedInCapital. Check it out, get the free webinar, you’ve got a promo code, and you can get a $1,000 course for $500. If you decide it’s for you and act within 48 hours or something like that.

They can get four days from the promo code.

It will give you a little time to soak in. I love it that you’re not putting a lot of pressure on people to do it right this minute because I hate that time crap. Give it time to settle in. You got four days to pray to your wife, talk to your God, and see if they’ll let you do it. Thanks a lot for being on. I appreciate it. Is there anything else you want to add?

This was good. I appreciate those insights at the end there. That’s such an important topic is the mindset of it all because that determines a lot of success and a lot of getting out of the gate. I thought that was excellent.

You were already shooting yourself thinking, “What? No one’s going to loan me money. Why would I even do this?” I said, “You’re already lost. Now you need to go get it because you’re screwed up like a football bat.” You can’t fix that. The only one who can fix that is you. You got to get in and change that belief because you’re never going to raise any private money with that belief. We can change your mind. I can change your mind and Yakov can change your mind. You’re going to have to get in front of somebody and you have to listen to them. I’m not telling you to buy anything anyone tells you, but I’m saying pay attention. You’ll see some things that ring true that you don’t have to do a lot of research on it.

Some truths are self-evident. You don’t have to go do a bunch of research. When I say, “Probably 80% or 85% of the renters wish they own their home if they could pay the same amount of money,” I never did a statistical study or interviewed ten billion people to find out, but I know that most of the renters out there wished they own if they could pay the same amount every month as rent. These are the things I’m talking about. Our sponsor TaxFreeFuture.com has had a lot to do with how I have raised private money because a lot of the people that you’re going to meet are going to have 401(k)s and IRAs that they’re not able to self-direct.

You have to educate them on how they can take these big pots of money that they have limited access or future access to but they can’t do anything about anything. Tax-Free Future teaches you how to talk to these people, “You can take that $2 million you have in that 401(k) and you can put it over here with TaxFreeFuture.com and you can self-direct it.” You can say where it goes, you can quit letting these yahoos on Wall Street take control of your financial future, and gamble your life away. You can say, “You can loan me $50,000 on that $120,000 building.” When you do that, you’re either going to get paid as agreed or you’re going to get my $120,000 building for $50,000.

This is a much stronger position than the stock market because the stock market is a big club for big people and we’re not in it. No one’s sent me a notice about the last crash before it happened. I had to learn with you all out there the same day. Tax-Free Future, our sponsor, is a great place to start to because I can’t tell you how many of my private lenders and the leads that I started talking with, I had to teach them how to self-direct their funds before we could even do anything. It’s all hand in glove. It’s all good stuff. Yakov, thanks for taking the time.

Thank you for having me, Mitch.

We’re out of here. Thank you so much.

 

Important Links

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• 1000Houses.com/Grow  
• 1000Houses.com/Livecomm  
• 1000Houses.com/100
• 1000Houses.com/101

 

About  Yokav Smart

Yakov Smart is considered to be the leading expert when it comes to attracting A-List investors and raising capital using LinkedIn. He’s the Author of Disrupting LinkedIn and a sought-after authority by top business owners and sales leaders worldwide. Yakov has shared the stage with Samantha Debianci of Bravo’s hit TV show, Million Dollar Listing and been a guest on numerous media outlets.

A resident of Scottsdale, Arizona, today Yakov is the proud leader of Linked Lead Enterprises, where his webinars, on-demand training programs and strategic consulting accelerators give people proven tools and techniques for transforming their LinkedIn Profiles into priceless, Relationship Building Assets.

 

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