Your Blueprint To REI Success: World Class Marketing Tips From Jason Roberts And Rachel Schneider

Episode 397: Your Blueprint To REI Success: World Class Marketing Tips From Jason Roberts And Rachel Schneider

 

When you find yourself in the bottom, there is nowhere to else to go but up. Jason Roberts and Rachel Schneider, the Founders of REI Blueprint, have been through this ordeal. With perseverance and a real passion for what they are doing, they managed to reinvent themselves and thrive. Jason and Rachel have always been passionate about real estate. In 2001, they opened a mortgage company and eventually built that business into a multimillion-dollar company where they closed over 3000 real estate transactions. When 2007 came, they were among the worst hit by the crash, losing millions of dollars in revenue for two and a half years. Failing to resuscitate a business that has already lost its relevance to the market, they turned their talents elsewhere – real estate investing, where they made good use of the strategies they honed over time to build a thriving business. Taking their talents even further, they are now teaching their strategies to other real estate investors through their coaching program. Listen in as they share some of their world-class REI tips on the show with Mitch Stephen.

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I’m here with Jason Roberts and Rachel Schneider. They’re from St. Louis, Missouri. They are some incredible teachers and have a bootcamp. We’re going to talk about who they are and what they’re doing. It’s always fascinating to see some of the numbers that people put up and then to figure out how they’re doing it. Before we do that, I got to pay homage to my sponsor. TaxFreeFuture.com. If you do not have a tax-deferred or tax-free savings account or a retirement account, you have no idea the size of the tool that you are missing in your toolbelt. It is phenomenal and you won’t believe what your financial advisors are not telling you. We’re going to tell you what they’re not telling you.

We’re going to tell you why they’re not telling you, and then you can proceed at how you want to, but I’m sure that you will have a tax-deferred or tax-free account in your future. Give us the little micro information there, promise we won’t beat you up every day or with a bunch of random bullshit. You can watch the 37 little video vignettes there and look at what you can do with these accounts. You don’t have to start with a lot of money. That’s the biggest clue in those whole things. You can start with nothing and be big in an account where you can only put so much per year. There’s always a way isn’t there, Jason and Rachel?

Yes.

That’s right.

With no further ado, Jason and Rachel, give us a little background about how did you end up doing all these properties.

It happened in an accident. Rachel and I opened a business in 2001, a mortgage company. We built that company up big. At one point, we had close to 100 employees. We’re doing billions of dollars a year in revenue and then 2007 hit. It brought us to our knees. Within 90 to 120 days, we were down to 8 or 9 employees. We went from making millions of dollars to losing $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 month-after-month for 2.5 years of losing money. It didn’t recover. It didn’t rebound. The loan products that were there before weren’t there anymore.

That’s heartbreaking too because you have those people that are loyal and you don’t want to let them go. You have an infrastructure and took you so long to get all this in the order. I understand holding on but sometimes when the writing’s on the wall, you take your loss and shut quickly.

Hindsight is 2020. We would have driven off with a truck full of cash. We had good reserves. We weren’t spending beyond our means.

Do you know what it says about you all? It says that your relationships and your loyalty to people are more important than your money. That’s a great thing. I know that’s why you didn’t do it. I don’t even know you that well but I know that for someone to do that has to care about the people that they’re working with. They’re thinking about their families and what they are going to do. You’re over there writing checks out of the negative because you’re the kind of people that you are.

We appreciate that and it was like a family for us. We were working twelve-hour days. The mortgage business is a grind. We spent more time with those people than we did with our own family. It was exactly that. I lost my own home to foreclosure, car repo, the whole bit. It was as bad as it gets.

I can interview you one of these days on the psychology of that if you’re up for it. It’s embarrassing but I wrote a whole book, My Life & 1,000 Houses: Failing Forward To Financial Freedom where I wrote about every time I fell, wine, got back up, and everyone asked me like, “Are you sure you want to tell people all this stuff?” I say, “It’s the truth.” That’s where the real meat is. Everyone can get up there and show you big checks and everything but who’s going to show you the horrible parts of this business and how do you deal with them before they break your legs? You need to know what’s coming so that these things don’t come. We could talk sometime on that psychology. I find the thing that people relate to and they’re the most vocal about is when you talk about your time in the woods. Everyone’s pain is real to them. Some people might be in that pain now. You had this mortgage company. The recession comes, everything goes to hell in a handbasket, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and all that then what?

We ended up at a four-day Short Sale Bootcamp. We started doing some loan modifications for our mortgage clients that couldn’t pay. As quick as the loan mods worked, the banks got all that tarp money and they were giving people loan modifications. Like the mortgage business, overnight, nobody could get approved for a loan modica. I got an email or something. I didn’t even know the guy teaching the class but it was free and we were broke. If it would have been $1,000, I couldn’t have paid to go to it. It was that bad.

You’re going through this process of knowing you have to reinvent yourself. I’ve reinvented myself for 3 or 4 times in my life. The first time you’re doing it out of necessity, you don’t know that’s what you’re doing. The second and third times, it’s like, “It’s time to reinvent myself. I already know how this works. I open all the doors. I go through all the windows. I do everything when I find something where I morphed to it.” You’re reinventing yourself. What was it?

It was a Short Sale Bootcamp. It was a four-day bootcamp strictly on short sales. I don’t even know that we knew what a short sale was but exactly as you said about reinvent yourself. I don’t know that we knew that we were doing that either. It was out of desperation. It was, “What are we going to do?” We’re not going to go back to corporate America. We’re not going to go back and take a 9:00 to 5:00. I don’t think that was in either of our hearts to do, but we didn’t know what we were going to do. We were lost.

There’s also a lot of freedom at the bottom, isn’t it? It’s like, “They can’t kill me.” You can’t get any worse than this, so what the hell?

 

That’s what it was.

You went to the thing so obviously, it got your attention.

It got our attention. We took that blueprint and completely ran with it. You brought up something so incredible that we didn’t know we were reinventing ourselves and we were at the bottom. We were so desperate. We were willing to put in whatever is required of us in order to make this successful because going to a 9:00 to 5:00 was not an option for us.

It’s a terrific motivator, isn’t it? It’ll make you work eighteen hours a day and not even complain. Show me a light at the end of the tunnel. Where am I supposed to go? I don’t care what it takes. I’ll get there as long as that’s what is doing to make money.

It’s amazing what we can figure out when you need to eat.

Backs against the wall. That’s the fun thing. The human body’s the most adaptable thing in the world. If you get it in a big corner, it’ll come out and figure it out. If you won’t let the fear paralyze you. I don’t want to go over it again, because I’ve talked about it a lot, but I had that happen in my life. I put myself in those corners to make myself get to another level. I cut things off and say, “You can’t anymore. What are you going to do? You little wimp.”

That was 2010. We took that blueprint that we had received there and we followed it completely. From our mortgage background, we were known in that industry for doing things differently. We’re always ahead. When we got into it was the big refinance boom after 9/11. We knew that that wouldn’t last forever, so we thought, “How do we get these real estate agents?” We started doing some creative, unique, out of the box marketing strategies to bring agents to us so we would have all these buyers leads. We took what we learned at that Short Sale Wealth Bootcamp and then put our marketing spin on it. In 2011, our first year in investing, we closed over 100 houses and right up at $3.6 million. We hustled and worked hard for that. We were digging ourselves right out of this enormous hole because we had nothing.

This is what I find incredible. All is somewhere down the street. A faster gunslinger, a better shot, or someone who’s doing more. That being said, I bought a house about every 4 to 5 days, which is about 100 houses a year for 22 years. There’s not a lot of people that can do that. Somewhere there’s a guy doing 2,000. I already know that, I don’t know who they are, but I’m sure there is because there’s always is. I’m just saying, 100 houses a year is a hell of a feat. No matter who you are and where you are. One of the reasons though you were able to do that, for a fact, was because it was the recession and you had put two-and-two together. I’m going to guess that you had private funds somewhere, or you had some access to some major funding. You said you were broke and then you did 100 houses. Where did the money come from?

The first job that we ever had, I started there when I was eighteen. I worked there for 2 or 3 years. Rachel also worked there. It was a collection agency in St. Charles, Missouri, where we’re from. We excelled and did well there. At 21, I left and opened the mortgage company and Rachel came too. We stayed in touch with the guy that owned that collection agency. We had a good relationship with him. He knew what happened to us and the wipeout. He knew that the mortgage business went under. He always had a lot of respect for us because we weren’t one of the only people that quit, didn’t come, and ask for our job back six months later. We went out and made it.

The first deal that we got was a short sale approval that we could buy for $80,000. We had a buyer at $120,000. I had a 350 credit score. I had filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy. I had a $500,000 deficiency judgment from my house that went to auction. Nobody was going to touch me with a 10-foot pole or at least I thought. I didn’t know about hard money lending, REIA’s, podcasts, any of these resources, or any of these education places. We learned how to do short sales. We didn’t learn how to get the money or any of that. I called John, the guy that owned that collection agency and I said, “I got this house. I can buy it for $80,000. I’ve already got it sold for $120,000 but I don’t have the $80,000.” He said, “How about we split the profit 50/50?” That sounded fantastic to me.

Fifty percent of a number is way better than 50% of zero. I try to teach that to people. Some people are so hung up on like, “I’m giving away half of my deal.” I said, “You’re going to have no deal if you split half.” If you do enough half deals, you can eventually start doing deals on your own and everything. My thought on the thing was there are the people that you go to that are 50/50. You don’t make the first call to them next time or you look for someone to borrow the money but you’ve got them there. You’re always trying to up your game. The next person loans you money at 12%. You got enough of that 12% of the money you start talking. I never tried to switch people’s deal. Whatever they in it, that’s what they’re at. You don’t like a back trader or you look greedy if you try to switch the deal. The new people that come in your life, you’re offering the new offer. Work your way to where you want to be. Smart though. True entrepreneurship, it’s common sense to you and me but a lot of people don’t come that easy. These are good to hear. How many deals do you do with that guy?

We did 111 with them but not on the 50/50 split. We 50/50 split the first three. We went and had a face-to-face meeting. He knew our track record, we did well with the mortgage business, we were trustworthy and he said, “We want to turn this into a business but you’re a businessman too. You know that we can’t turn this into a business with a 50% margin. We need to hire staff, employees, delegate some things before we’re going to grow it.”

He was totally in agreement with that. That’s exactly what you described is what happened. We had that conversation. First, it was three points a month. It was where we went. We went from 50/50, do three points a month, which is essentially 36% annual interest. It is still significantly less.

Are you flipping it?

We’re in and out.

Being at the bottom is a great motivator to reinvent yourself. Share on X

I want everyone to hear that. It was 36% interest on the face of an annual interest rate, three points per month but when you’re in and out of deals in 60/90 or zero-days, some of the deals you did, you had an hour between closings. It’s not the cost of the money. It’s the availability of the money. Don’t be fooled. Some interest rates could seem high but if you’re not going to have the money that long, it doesn’t matter.

Doing the deal is all that matters at the end of the day.

The deal makes a profit.

We went from paying $20,000 on a $40,000 profit deal to $6,000 on a $40,000 profit deal. We use dramatically improved our situation even though it was still 36% annual, who cares? We made $34,000 on a $40,000 deal.

This guy got to be happy because he’s getting extra checks all the time. It’s damn passive. He’ll get on the phone and transfer some money but the cool thing is people are wealthy of this. He was wealthy. The cool thing about what I’ve learned about wealthy people, you can confirm. They’re quick studies and once they do something with you, they’re all-in. They can almost overwhelm you sometimes. The smart people might spend a little time researching, talking, getting the lawyer’s advice, talking to the CPA, or whatever but when they pull the trigger, they don’t look back. My guy said to me one time after courting me for 90 days. He said, “I’m in.” I said, “How much do you want to get out?” He was a coup and he said, “Duke can’t get out enough money.” I tried to find out if he had a bottom. I did 150 deals that year with my partner Simon. We never hit bottom. The ones that rinky-dink around and everything, when the smart business people decide, they don’t worry anymore.

Those first three deals we did with him was his test to see if we knew what we were doing. Once he knew that we knew, he never looked at another hire.

They put their little finger in for a little bit. They check out the paper. They see if the payments come hell, they’re supposed to come. They see if everything you told them was the way you told them. If it is, Katy bar at the door. Is there more to this? You reinvented yourself. Now you are reinvented, you’re not worried about money anymore. I think you’re talking about how much of it can I get?

A big lesson in that and something that I would like to share with anybody that’s reading is we always taught that there are three steps to building a business. One is you need a recipe or blueprint. Number two, you need to take massive action. Number three, you need to follow in the footsteps of other successful people, mentor, coach, podcasts, whatever. Learn from the people who are doing. There’s a fourth one and that fourth one is called having a vision for what you want your life and your business to look like. We didn’t do that in the mortgage business. We were a slave to that business. We serve that business. It did not serve us.

How true is that? You can own a business that’s worse than your job.

That’s exactly what it was. It was cool because we own the business but it owned us.

Isn’t it cool because you are making a ton of money but then the downside of it is you’re the owner of this business and you also own the downside, and you owned it all the way to the bottom at one point?

Not only that. You can make a ton of money but if you’re alienating your family, friends, husband, wife, and children because you’re working 60 hours a week, then what good is the money? At the end of the road, they’re not going to be there anymore. People aren’t going to stick around for so long while you neglect them. Many business owners do that. I had a guy crossed my path that said, “Jason, it’s interesting that you and Rachel can figure out how to build these businesses. You’re successful. Whatever you put your mind to come to fruition. What would be cool is if you could figure out how to make the same amount of money, but only work 3 or 4 hours a day instead of 12 hours a day. Anybody can make a lot of money if they want to work twelve hours a day.”

I work about the four-hour workweek in that stuff. Rachel looked me straight in the eyes. Is this bullshit? The four hours a day or whatever. Tell me.

No. I have a nine-year-old, I take her to school every day, I pick her up every day, and I’m about 40 miles from where our office is. The few days that I do come into the office, that’s my schedule. When I’m at home, I either have my youngest one with me or I’m doing something that’s serving me more than the work.

I’ve always had a challenge with that balance. At one point in my life, I worked myself into a nervous breakdown not because I was nervous. It’s because I didn’t ever let myself sleep. My body finally said, “You’re going to sit down.” I said, “No, I’m not.” It said, “Watch this.” At first, you think it’s cool because you can carry all this weight or everything. When I hear people bragging about how many hours they work, you’re not impressed at all. I would rather you brag about how little hours you work and how much you’re spending time doing other things. I was that other guy for a long time. I was so proud of what I could work.

 

There’s a hustle period to get anything started. When we start a new project, we tweak those hours to put that time into what it takes to build. I don’t want to take away from that’s your instant thing. You’ve got to put the time in but it’s a short term sacrifice for a longterm game. You have to be committed to pulling yourself back out of that or you end up, which is where we were. Even with the short sale business where we were making all this money and we were doing all these wonderful things but our life wasn’t first.

That was well put, Rachel. There’s got to be a hustle period. I liked it. This is another clue for other entrepreneurs because one thing about entrepreneurs, they see opportunity in everything. We want to open up a branch and an offshoot. One thing I’ve learned is, everything you decided to take on, any one thing takes everything you’ve got for a period of time. That’s maybe a year, probably more like two years before you can even start to sink are in. “I got the money. I got it down. I understand it. I’m going to start putting some people in places, so I don’t have to break my back so much.” Is two years a fair number? How long did it take you guys to start getting automated on the second business?

When the guy said, “What would impress us if you could do it in three hours a day instead of twelve hours a day.” That was the first time I had ever thought about that. I told you before we started, I was raised in a brewery family. That business was also a much twelve-hour day shifts, 6 or 7 days a week. You grind and work. That was beat into me from a young age. I was proud of that. That whole concept of working less like four hours a week is a stretch. We worked 4 hours a day, 3 or 4 days a week as our schedule and it’s been that way for a while. It depends on how you set it up to begin with. If you go into it, assigning yourself every single job that there is to do in this business, you’re going to work twelve hours a day.

If you have to do that, you need to be documenting every one of those jobs takes so that you could at least have a roadmap for the person you get to try to take them. You have to work for 12 to 14 hours. When I started out, sixteen hours was nothing. I was on fire with it. I loved it so much that it didn’t seem like sixteen hours. I was having fun. One of the greatest attributes in my life as I love to work and you can’t tell if I’m working or playing. Am I working or playing now? I’m talking to two nice people that are smart. I’m going to be able to get some of their knowledge before this is all over. Am I working? Is this work? It’s less than that way. Remember, when I said the human body is the most adaptable thing.

What always happened to me was I would get sick of it. I got sick of selling houses. One day, I said, “I’m never going to go show a house again. What do you do now?” The phone is ringing now to go sell houses. I said, “I ain’t answering that phone and I’m not showing a house.” It’s making me sick to my stomach because I know that this customer has paid advertising dollars for this person to make this phone ring but I’m not going to answer that phone. What am I going to do? I figured out. It took me a couple of weeks. I lost a few sales but I refuse to sell a house. Here’s a good analogy. If you two or if I were in a jail cell with a computer and a phone, we’d figure out how to make money from that jail cell, wouldn’t we? Put yourself in jail.

You nailed that on the head of how we transitioned ourselves out of those businesses as quickly because we started to put boundaries in place. For me, it was my health. I was overweight. I had been saying for several years I wanted to go to the gym and more healthy but there was always another appointment, loan app to take, or sell our house to look at it, so that got killed every day. One of the first things that my mentor did for me is he’s like, “You said you wanted to go to the gym. I want you to hire a trainer and pay him. At 2:30 every day, you’d go to the gym and that’s the end of your day. All you have is from 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning until 2:00 to get as much shit done as you can get done.”

Isn’t that amazing and then you start to figure it out. One of the major things about that is the guilt. You’re used to being a worker. You seem like you’re slacking. I feel that often.

It’s extremely uncomfortable. You can talk about even that with your family. Rachel is the one who organizes, oversees everything, and make sure everything works. Her hands are in everything and she’s exceptional on what she does. It was a weird feeling for you to step back and trust others with our livelihood.

A huge struggle for me is getting introduced to that vision and then being crystal clear of what my why was. Why do I want these businesses? Why are we building these things? What is that bigger purpose besides the money? The money is what everyone says but there’s something so much more than that. For me, it was freedom but freedom to be the mother that I knew that I wanted to be. When we went to that event, I was pregnant with my first. That challenged and forced me to have to trust and manage with delegation. A lot of people like to delegate but they don’t manage along with it. It made me sharpen my skills in finding the right people like A-players only and forcing that if they’re not the right one, I get the next one in here right away. That way, I could build this team that I knew that I could trust and rely on, in order for me to experience that bigger why, which was that freedom of I take you to school every day. I pick you up from school as far as you know, I’m here at all times although I’m running all these businesses at the same time.

You have spent at periods of time more time together than you have with your families. Do you guys ever get in any arguments?

We used to argue a lot. We’ve been business partners for nineteen years. We used to fight. In the mortgage business, it was extremely stressful. I would say that someone was in tears almost on a daily basis, for real, not an exaggeration. We are polar opposite in skillset that she would give me things to do and I wouldn’t do them because I suck at them. I’m terrible at them. She looked at it like it was laziness like, “What the hell? I could have done that in five minutes.” Vice-versa a little bit. Not as much this way going that way but that way going this way.

Somewhere along the line, we learned what she is gifted at and what I’m gifted at. I should stay in my lane, she should stay in hers. Do what God put you on this earth to do. Do what you’re good at.

Do you know what my office has learned about me? Don’t ever give Mitch Stephen a check or a piece of paper to deliver anywhere because it will never make it. It will go all around the world but it won’t make it there. Sometimes, you got to know your depth. The whole office starts to know him and it’s like, “I’m going by there. I’ll take that.” “No.” Fire the carrier, move along.

You insulate around your weaknesses.

I have a lot of weaknesses that worked way to my benefit when I finally figured out how to delegate. She said, “Let’s delegate what you’re weakest at.” I’m like, “I got a whole long list of it. I can do that.”

Have a vision for what you want your life and your business to look like. Share on X

It’s like if you need to hire some more people.

You guys are interesting to talk to. I want to do this again but I would like to talk about those darkest moments. How you handle it and what you were going through, if you don’t mind. It’s a big request but if you want to do that, I’ll get it rescheduled. Let’s talk about your bootcamp. What are you offering at this bootcamp?

This has been a labor of love for us. We didn’t intend to educate. We were part of a mastermind group with an inside of that mastermind group. Other students in that group were people who own these things called REIA, a Real Estate Investor Associate. I didn’t know what they were but they said, “You guys did 111 houses on your first year, will you come to our group and teach them what you did?”

We’re like, “We don’t have a presentation or anything but we’ll come and teach what we did on how we closed 111 houses.” That was back in 2012. We started going around to these groups and then people love the message and said, “That was a great 90-minute presentation but we need a step-by-step what to do. Tell us what to do.” That’s where REI Blueprint came from was we wanted to create a blueprint for people that were new at investing that hadn’t done this before. Not to get you excited and pumped up, give you half of the stuff that you need to be successful and then you have to go figure it out on your own but a real blueprint, a real step-by-step, do this and do this then you end up at the finish line.

As we were traveling, we encountered many people that there’s a lot of excuses in our industry, “I can’t do this. I can’t do that. We let our personal situation PR read it.” Some people weren’t being taught what to do next. The people’s biggest fear is not knowing that next step. I thought, “How do we eliminate all of that?” A way to eliminate is when you get a blueprint for a house, there’s no guessing, you follow it. That’s what we did with real estate. We started with marketing strategies because you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to get the money, what title company you’re going to use, or what your business card looks like if you don’t ever start your marketing because you’re never going to have a deal.

I bought a lot of houses before I had a business card and a website. Sometimes people get caught up in all like, “I need to set up an LLC.” No, you need to make sure this business is going to work for you too. Do 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 houses. You don’t own anything, don’t worry about getting sued. No one will sue you because you’re broke. Let’s get something going first and see if this business is for you and if you were for the business. My one-on-one coaching is a 45-minute conversation with someone. Be it $15,000, $20,000 to $25,000, it’s a lot of money for anybody but some of them are over the top money. It’s life-altering money. I don’t want to take that money if I don’t think that you’re in the right market for the right strategy, for whatever I got to give you if I don’t think that.

I’ll say, “Get on the Tuesday night coaching calls, it’s only $3,500 and figure out if this is business is for you. Make the house buy this other level. If you’re any good at it, you’ll make enough money, you’ll stroke a check, and it won’t be that big a deal.” Especially if you have naysayer spouses but I don’t take a lot of people on a one-on-one because I got a life myself and I don’t take everybody. I’m looking for someone that’s a good match for what I do and how I am. Not everybody fits that. Some will get mad at me about it but I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t think I’m the right guy. You got this three-day bootcamp. Where is it at?

It’s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I want everyone to go to REInvestorSummit.com/JasonRachel. You’ll be able to learn more and all the details about it. Do you want to do a 1,000-foot overview of what’s going to happen in those three days?

Do you want to break down the five weeks? We teach the five stages of real estate investing. We got our name in the education space from the marketing that we teach for real world-class marketing stuff that you’re not going to find anywhere else. Steps are going to pull in the 10% to 20% response rate, not 1% direct mail. Even though the experienced people that are reading and the guys that are doing 5, 10, 20 transactions a month, I guarantee you, the marketing that we teach is going to provide a huge increase in your business.

It’s all about marketing, didn’t even matter what business you’re in. You’re either a marketer or you’re not. The better marketing you are, the better business is.

You’ve got to make the phone ring. You want to talk about the five stages that we teach over the three days.

We start out with the marketing strategies because that’s where everything needs to start. We go through four different strategies and as Jason said, some of them you may be heard. Some of them are unique. What’s unique is the multitouch lead exhaustion that we teach. We break into how to evaluate the deal. We also now are lenders to other real estate investors. We have a good pulse on most of the markets in the country, understanding what a property is worth. You have to know your numbers. We think that’s imperative that you get a blueprint for how to evaluate and look.

To evaluate repairs. What does it cost to do in your kitchen? What does it cost to do countertops and then evaluating the deal itself? How do you know what the after repair value is?

Is it how do I evaluate the deals number two and how to evaluate rehab number three?

 

We lump that in number two. Evaluating the deal covers analyzing the property itself and the repairs.

We dive into running the homeowner appointment.

Number three is the homeowner appointment. Step-by-step on how to communicate with the seller and how to position yourself with the seller. We have a cool process after thousands of homeowner appointments. You start to learn what works and what doesn’t.

There’s a lot of fear built around that. We get into exit strategies and finding the money. Everyone’s always concerned about where they’re going to find the money. A lot of people don’t understand what your best way to exit out of the deal is what’s best for you.

For those that don’t know exit strategy, what do you mean by that?

We talk about wholesaling, lease optioning, traditional rehab, getting in and out, and some whole tailing. We did a ton of that when we first got started because our risk was so limited to that but then everything you need to know when you go get money from somebody. You need to be betting these people and then overall deal due diligence. The money goes in that deal due diligence, the closing, finding the money, and title companies to work with things like that.

Number three was the homeowner appointment. Number four was an exit strategy and funding. Number five was?

Number four is an exit strategy. We’re diving into every possible exit strategy. Number five was finding the money closing the deal.

That is the five of it all. I want to point out a lot of times, people are afraid to go into the marketing or all that other stuff because they think they don’t have the money and that’s exactly wrong.

When I was wiped out and with Chapter 7 bankrupt with all that shit, the first thing that my first mentor said to me was, “Jason, when you find a deal, the money will show up.” I remember I’m almost laughing in his face and saying, “That’s easy for you to say after you’ve done hundreds of deals and you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars in your checking account. People give you money. People don’t give money to 350 credit scores, judgments, and all that stuff.” He’s like, “No, you’re all confused. You’re used to traditional mortgage lending where they’re looking at pay stubs, bank statements, and W-2s. This is a different world. Hard money lenders or private lenders, they’re looking at the deal.” I couldn’t wrap my head around that.

I’m passionate about this because the most important things we will ever do as a coach is unwind someone and rewind them from a different point of view, and change their limiting belief system. That’s one of the things. I have a course called Private Money Changes Everything. I have $24 million with private money from about 32 people. It’s not about you, it’s about the deal. I’ve said this before and I won’t belabor the whole thing but Charles Manson should have been able to get money from the warden for the deals I bring. If Charles Manson had the deal I had, he could have put his face to the bar and told the warden about it and the warden would have loaned him the money. The warden’s either going to get paid as agreed or he’s going to get this piece of property that’s even a better deal than getting paid as agreed. It doesn’t matter how many people Manson murdered it. I need to quit using that analogy because it’s gross.

It’s an interesting analogy but it does bring him home.

I want you to go to REInvestorSummit.com/JasonRachel. Get over there into the show notes. This thing will expand once my people talk to their people to get a whole bunch of goodies over there. They have some giveaways or some things that’ll help you in your business that you won’t have to pay for, but also give you an explanation of the bootcamp. When is it?

May 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 2020.

May 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 2020 in St. Louis, Missouri and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. People start to say, the live seminar or fly to the seminar thing is dead with the advent of Zoom and all this other stuff. It’s simply not true because there’s one thing you can’t replicate in a conversation like this or online. You can’t replicate the energy of the audience, what you learn and get. How you bring everything together at a table at lunch, dinner, at the pool, or wherever you’re at talking to the other attendees about what was going on and their life experiences compared to your life experiences and it all starts to match. That’s how you’ll never replace going to a real seminar. Half of the thing is the people in the audience, the connections, and the networks that you make. I still have lifelong relationships with the first people I met at the first seminar I ever went to 24 years ago.

The better the marketing, the better the business. Share on X

I agree with you. Number one, there’s no way you can keep your attention for eight hours on a Zoom call. It doesn’t happen. You’re at home, you got a million distractions, there’s no way you’re absorbing that. Number two, the network. We had almost 200 people at our last bootcamp in January 2020 that came in from all over the country. We did it in KC and it was freaking awesome. The funny thing is we’ve been doing these three-day events, we do them three times a year and there’s a group of 15 or 16 of them that they met at some bootcamp we did a couple of years ago, now they all traveled together, they do deals together, and they loan each other money.

They vacation together probably.

They do.

This is another form of vacation that you can write off because you’re going in some place. You guys are fantastic to talk to. I love your energy. You’re going to learn about the multitouch lead generation, how to evaluate deals, which by the way is one of the number one assets that you can have. If you can’t figure out how to evaluate what a deal is worth, quick sitting out in front of the property within a few minutes, then you need to go back and stop everything until you figure that out in my humble opinion, how to evaluate the repairs which are always tenuous. There’s a reason why contractors begin with the word CON. Homeowner appointment, how that’s supposed to run, what the goal is, how do you get into the conversation you want to have, and how you present your offer without offending people or how to negotiate these. Number four is the exit strategies.

There’s a lot of different exit strategies. You may learn to become a house whisperer. A lot of times the house will tell you what it needs to do and what has to happen regardless of what you want to do, the house is screaming, “Flip me, I’m trouble.” Other times it’s like, “Fix me up. I’ll be worth a lot more money.” Last but not least, finding the funding. It’s not as difficult as you might think but like everything else, you got to become a student of it and immerse yourself in it. That’s what a three-day bootcamps good for, immersion. Set yourself aside in three days and immerse yourself. If nothing else, figure out what you think is possible and figure out the other sides that you think, “I’m going to have trouble with this because I don’t believe.” That’s what you got to go get help one. The things that you don’t believe in. Once you believe in something, it’s almost done.

It all starts up here. Many people are looking for mechanics, the majority of what you believe you can accomplish, and what you believe you can make happen.

Anything we should add before we wrap it up?

I don’t think so. Our three days are the favorite thing that we do. We don’t bring any other outside selling speakers. There are not people hammering you to buy stuff. It’s three full days of content. It’s interactive. We’re super proud of it. It’s a labor of love for us. It’s our favorite thing that we do. Watching people’s lives transform, change through real estate, and a different way of life. As Rachel said, being able to experience freedom. We’ve taken many people out of Corporate America to where they’ve gotten rid of a 60-hour workweek job. They make $200,000 or $300,000 a year in real estate investing and working twenty hours a week. It transformed their lives and marriages. It’s cool to witness. I hope to see you guys there.

That’s the higher reason because, as you said earlier, Rachel. People that don’t have money, it’s not registering for them. I get it. Once upon a time, someone says, “It’s not about the money I’m going.” One of the most disappointing days of my entire life was the day that I had life-altering issues and it didn’t matter how much money I had. It wasn’t going to fix this problem. That money couldn’t make me happy because of some things that were going on. I realized that money to a certain point and then at some point to keep going, you have to have a higher reason. For me, it’s the same.

One of the reasons is the same as yours. I have helped a lot of people calling and tell their boss they no longer need their services. That’s my big thing. Dale Ramsey, you get debt-free ring the bell. At my house, I’ll do the primal scream. Around here, we ring the bell when you tell your boss he’s no longer necessary. It is emotional sometimes and that’s my high. That’s what you’re saying too. It is real. If you’re out there doubting and I’m telling you, it’s real. One guy told me, “The only thing money would ever buy you is freedom of movement. If you need to be at a funeral tomorrow because you found out, it’ll get you there or you won’t be happy.”

REI Blueprint: If you don’t ever start your marketing, you’re never going to have a deal.

The only thing it can do is give you freedom of movement. You can be where you want to be when you need to be. That’s the biggest thing that it buys you. There’s a lot to be said about that but the higher reason is always the best. Jason and Rachel, it’s my pleasure, my folks will get with your folks. By the way, it’s evergreen. When this one passes and you want to go put on another date, we can put on another date and I’ll tell everybody here. If it’s past May the 1st through the 3rd, it still goes to the show notes because, as you said, three times a year.

We have more and more this 2020.

We’ll keep it current. Do you go to the same place?

We go all over the country. We’ve got Atlanta, South Carolina, Ohio, and Milwaukee.

Let me know when you come to San Antonio.

I will.

We will. Thank you.

Thank you for having us. This was awesome.

This is Mitch Stephen with the Real Estate Investor Summit Show. I’d like to thank all of you for reading to get you some Jason Roberts and Rachel Schneider. I want to thank TaxFreeFuture.com. Please go there. If you do not fully understand the power of tax-deferred or tax-free retirement funds or accounts, they are incredible. Watch the 37 little video vignettes. You got to give us a little microform. There was some information we promise not to beat you up with a bunch of crap and you’ll be excited to see them.

 

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About Jason Roberts & Rachel Schneider

Jason Roberts and Rachel Schneider have always been fascinated by the world of real estate. In 2001, while still in their early 20’s, Jason and Rachel decided that instead of working for someone else, they would rather be in charge of their own destiny and opened a mortgage company. They eventually built that business into a multi-million dollar company, where they closed over 3000 real estate transactions. Then the market crashed and they had to find a new way to use their real estate talents. That is when they went into real estate investing and started down a new path. Implementing the real estate strategies they have honed over time they have since closed well north of 300+ real estate transactions (pre-foreclosures/short sales, wholesales, probates, etc.) Having seen pretty much everything, they decided to funnel that expertise into their true passion; sharing their knowledge with other investors. They now run a top coaching program with the nation’s leading investors, own a profitable hard money lending company, with over 2 million dollars in loans out to their coaching students at any given time, share their wealth of knowledge as co-owners of their local REIA all the while continuing to flip houses.

 

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