Today I'm interviewing Dan Austin, a former army ranger of eight years. Who's currently working full-time while still flipping wholesaling and has a rental portfolio of over 25 doors. This guy and his partner are bringing in over six figures a month on the side. Now, if you want to understand what it takes. To get a business up and running while you have a family, a kid that's three years old, going to school and get your MBA working 40 plus hours a week and getting a real estate investment business, not just started, but started and scaled in a relatively short amount of time. Too good not to share a few of Dan’s accolades which include: Served 8 years with the US Army. Deployed 6 times to Iraq and Afghanistan. Ranger Squad Leader (Staff Sargent). Awarded the bronze star with “V” device for valorous actions in Iraq Electrical engineering degree from Gonzaga University MBA from University of Washington Scaling a Wholesaling business that produces six figures a month You're not going to want to miss this episode As always if you need anything come find me at billyalvaro.com and billyssecrets.com Talk to you all soon!
Today I'm interviewing Dan Austin, a former army ranger of eight years. Who's currently working full-time while still flipping wholesaling and has a rental portfolio of over 25 doors.
This guy and his partner are bringing in over six figures a month on the side. Now, if you want to understand what it takes. To get a business up and running while you have a family, a kid that's three years old, going to school and get your MBA working 40 plus hours a week and getting a real estate investment business, not just started, but started and scaled in a relatively short amount of time.
Too good not to share a few of Dan’s accolades which include:
You're not going to want to miss this episode
As always if you need anything come find me at billyalvaro.com and billyssecrets.com
Talk to you all soon!
[00:00:00] What's going on guys. This is Billy Alvaro, the Unstoppable BA, and you're listening to unstoppable REI wealth. Today I'm interviewing Dan Austin, a former army ranger of eight years. Who's currently working full-time while still flipping wholesaling and has a rental portfolio of over 25 doors.
[00:00:19] This guy and his partner are bringing in over six figures a month on the side. Now, if you want to understand what it takes. To get a business up and running while you have a family, a kid that's three years old, going to school and get your MBA working 40 plus hours a week and getting a real estate investment business, not just started, but started and scaled in a relatively short amount of time.
[00:00:44] You're not going to want to miss this episode. It's not hype. This is 42 minutes of solid gold. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to unstoppable real estate investing wealth. My name is Billy Alvaro, AKA the Unstoppable BA former billion dollar mortgage banker gone bankrupt turn professional real estate fester where each week you'll learn the tools, strategies, systems, and secrets by.
[00:01:12] And other highly successful real estate investing entrepreneurs use to start, grow and scale their businesses, creating massive profits and how you can too. And we'll teach you how to put those profits to work. So you no longer have to get ready to finally experience financial freedom and generational wealth.
[00:01:31] Now let's get started. What is going on, guys, Billy Alvaro back with another episode of unstoppable REI wealth. I don't know if you guys can see that or watching the video. I got some wealth all over my face. I did not get it. We'll fight. I can assure you. I, what I did is I'm over 50 years old. I'm getting Botox, baby.
[00:01:51] I am trying to keep this youngest living alive today, by the way, I think about welts on the face. This guy. Is his background. He's an army ranger. I'm going to be interviewing today. Dan Austin from you're in Washington, Dan, correct?
[00:02:07] Yeah, that's right. Yep.
[00:02:08] Dan, first of all, welcome to the show. You and I had spoken prior to you coming on and a good story, love what you're doing.
[00:02:16] And I think you're going to be able to share a lot of great information with people who are in that process where they want to do this. Full-time right. Like you're doing it full, but you're actually not doing it. Full-time to get to that story. You went from army ranger to college, to. Yeah. And for the last X amount of years, you've been doing this side hustle, but you doing it at such a level where you guys are like, you're crushing it and what you're doing.
[00:02:38] So let's get a little bit of background Dan and, and introduce yourself and your audience.
[00:02:41] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for that. So, yeah, Dan Austin. Started out, out of high school as a, one of the army. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. College really. Wasn't a thing at the time for me and jumped in.
[00:02:53] So from 2004 to 2012, I was pulling overseas kind of grinding it and out doing the war time stuff. And you were correct? Yup. Yup. Yup. Did that. And so tons of. Awesome lessons. I actually really liked it. I mean, there's a lot of hardships and all that stuff being in the military and being in a, you know, a special operations unit, constantly being deployed and doing those things.
[00:03:15] But the levels of things that I learned that have carried into my business are phenomenal. Right. I carry with me every day. I think about it all the time. And so, you know, even though I loved it, there was this kind of thing for me in my head. I was like, you know, I do want to get a college degree would be the first of my family.
[00:03:29] So I left the military, kind of let's figure it out. And I chose electrical engineering. I had no idea why other than hurt, it was hard to do. And I figured I'd be a better employee. And you know, I'd be more employable with a degree like that. And so graduated with that and went to work, you know, here in my hometown at a local electric gas utility.
[00:03:51] Which is where I still work today. So I've been there eight years now and it's been great. It's it is a good job, great company. I have a lot of good friends there which is also why it's hard for me to leap out of the W2. It's like, oh, really? Actually kind of like my job. It's kind of fun. And I enjoy it.
[00:04:06] But I enjoy making deals happen a lot more than I'm way more fun. Right. And one deal, I can make my monthly salary like that, like no problem. Right. And so you start adding that up. You're like, okay, one deal to make my monthly salary. And it's not hard to do one deal a month. It really is not. And so it definitely changes my partner and I laugh all the time.
[00:04:26] It changes your perspective on money. Right. You know, some people are worried about, you know, selling their house and having like a $500, you know, oh, they want me to make a $500 repair, like who cares. Pay them a thousand dollars and just sell the damn house. Right? Like it's just changes your mind on the velocity of money and how to make money.
[00:04:42] But yeah, the why, once I, right when I started out my W2, I met one of my best friends and mentors today. Somebody told me, oh, he's, he's investing in real estate. And I immediately like looked over the cubes, like, who is this guy? Walked over to introduce myself right here. And started just chatting them up and learning from him.
[00:04:59] And then I was like, okay, I'm going to invest in real estate. And this was back in like 20 13, 20 14. And I basically was like, let's do this. And then I moved from my job and kind of put it on hold, which in hindsight. I should've just been doing it virtually or buying every house in the town. I moved into what I was kind of locked in this mindset.
[00:05:16] I want to buy, buy and hold and the town I want to live in. And anyhow, so moved back to Spokane in 2016 and right away bought my first rental property in 2016. Converted it to a student rental it's right across from a local university here. So. Perfect student rental. And then in 2017, late 2017, the lady next door had passed away and the family approached me to buy the house.
[00:05:41] So I was like, sure, I got it off. Mark is my first off market deal. And I got it at a great discount and renovated that thing top to bottom, converted it to a student rental and both, these are awesome. They're kind of the gems in my portfolio. I keep them they're there for my daughter when, you know, when she graduates high school and all that.
[00:05:57] And, you know, the cashflow a thousand bucks a month and the just awesome. Right. I love it. But then I started looking on MLS and trying to find deals. And I couldn't like, you know, I wanted to scale, I wanted to get at least 10 of these things and it just wasn't working. And so another good friend of mine that I actually met in college, he had recently.
[00:06:16] Just quit. His job just left. He was electrical engineer as well, left his job and had started doing some flips and had a few properties in his portfolio. And he's like, Hey, I know it's hard to find deals on the MLS right now. What if we like go off market? I got this idea and essentially he was pitching me a wholesaling business and I was like, sure.
[00:06:34] I'm and I told my wife, I still remember the conversation. I was like, what's the worst that can happen. We invest 20, 30 grand in this thing and we lose it. Like that's okay. Like, I mean, at least we tried. Right. And so late 2019, we came together, started working on this business model, joined the mastermind, started learning, which was huge to scale, was getting around people that are doing the same thing.
[00:06:54] And then we start our first batch of marketing a summer. This hit March, 2020. So like COVID. You know, it was just starting to blow up. And we were too dumb at the time. We didn't know that everybody else was kind of figuring it out and pivoting and doing things. So we just kept marching through and looking back on it, it was the right thing to do.
[00:07:10] And we just, we've done tons of wholesale deals and fix and flips since then scaled our portfolio quite a bit with some good rental properties. And now we just finished our test market for a virtual wholesaling market and we're getting ready to go full scale there and step into some other virtual markets as well.
[00:07:26] So we're definitely in that scale phase right now. We're growing and we're getting there. Yeah. So I didn't read, you guys are like really new with this whole entire model. A year and a half old. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. We definitely hit the ground running. Yeah. So tell us, tell us the model now. So you have fix and flip, you're doing wholesale and you do a buy and hold with the berm meth.
[00:07:47] Yes. Yeah. We don't want it to be one of those. Yeah. Yeah. So our first intention, our main intention when we started the wholesale side of things was like buy the best wholesale the rest. But we also. Wholesaling is a lot of fun too. And buying, buying hold takes time. It takes resources. So we're really are just kind of peeling off the best.
[00:08:06] And we only got into fix and flip because we had some months where like, we're like, whoa, why we're not wholesaling as much? What if it stops? Like, okay, let's increase our profits, which, you know, you can, if you can acquire it off market and then you can, can do it from, you know, soup to nuts on a, on a flip.
[00:08:22] And I have my brokers license as well. So, you know, it was easy for us to list. And really that's not our, we don't love fixing flipping cars, just not where we want to be, but we do it. But typically it's yeah. Market find the deals, analyze them and then figure out what we want to do with them. And if it's fits into our buy box, it's definitely ours.
[00:08:40] Like if it's a small, multi we're keeping it, you know, duplexes, triplexes, stuff like that. If it's a single family home depends on what it is. We'll, we'll keep it as a rental Britain and we've been fortunate. Been able to cash out on a Burr, all of our rehab funds on everything we've done and plus some, a lot of the times.
[00:08:57] So we're definitely keeping the best. But yeah, exactly. And that's where you make your money, right. You're right. When you buy it. And so the thing with fix and flips is like we were talking about earlier, it's just the contractor piece. We haven't dialed in our construction piece and we've talked about starting a construction business, but when you're.
[00:09:14] Phase of where everything is growing. It's just so hard to get your arms around it all and grow it all at the same time, you need to pick and choose which section of your business you're going to put your focus on. Cause when you come out of the gate and you try to focus on four or five or six different pieces of your company at one time, very little thing, nothing's really happening the right way.
[00:09:34] Right. So if you take all your energies and focus on one segment, one piece for a quarter or a half a year and pound a thing and systematize get the right people, putting the place. Yeah. Always handed it over to somebody who could oversee him it. And then it's are you focused on for the next piece?
[00:09:48] You'll get there. But I made the mistake too early on. I tried to focus on everything at one time and nothing got done. Great. It's like getting done, but nothing was getting done. Great. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? It wasn't until I put my blinders. And I started focusing on one small segment at a time that I was able to structure it systematize with, put the right people in place and then really scale it it's pain in the ass because it's slow, but it's focused is where it's at on things.
[00:10:16] Yep. Especially with a new business too. Everything is shiny object syndrome, right? Like everything is like, oh, that could be a new revenue. That's more revenue. Let's take that on. And then all of a sudden you're too spread and then I'll throw it on top of that with me working on a W2 job, you know, I've got 40 hours a week committed to.
[00:10:30] If I pulled that out then yeah. Maybe I could really focus on, on building a construction side of our business or building out more markets and those sorts of, yeah.
[00:10:39] So I want to get into, I want to get into that. So why, what made you stay in? Well, before I get into what made you stay? I want you to talk to the people who are listening on what it takes to actually get a side hustle up and running when you're working a 40, 50 hour work week.
[00:10:55] So what does it take? Yeah. I would say, so there's easier ways and harder ways to do it. Right. It's a lot of work. It is a lot of effort, but you know, it's not like I'm not working until midnight every night. I'm not doing that. It's about being efficient. It's about using your systems. And it's kind of about like the book who not how being okay.
[00:11:13] We should have hired our act manager, wasting her time. It took us a while to hire an acquisitions manager. And since then our sales have gone up way better. I mean, there, there is so much better and more consistent. Only on that one thing. Exactly. Then we hired a leads manager and oh my God, our follow up, turn it.
[00:11:27] It's 10 times better. Then we hired a project manager. We've got VAs. And as you, so if you, you can do that, I mean, you can get a VA in the Philippines. That just is a rock star that can take a lot of. The minutia of the business out of it, right? All that like little, just busy, where you have so much busy work, especially when you're marketing, you've got data that you're trying to keep clean.
[00:11:46] You've got returned to sender mail. You've got all these things that you should be doing to make your business better, but you just, if you're doing it yourself, you can't actually keep growing the business. You can't network and you can't build your buyers list and do all these important things for your, to keep your business moving.
[00:12:02] And so I would say too, one of the biggest benefits we've had. It's fine. Like-minded people that are doing what you're doing. Get out in the local community, go to your, your RM meet-ups and meet these people. And then for us, join a group. I mean, you can find masterminds out there that are teaching this stuff, you know, for pretty cheap.
[00:12:18] Honestly, it's just like spend the money to get some coaching on it, get some mentorship, do whatever you can to do that. And it's not even just about that person. That's teaching you. It's about the group that's joined that mastermind. So for us, we have really good friends across the country. Where we've JV deals with them and like seeing what they're doing, and then we can match what we're doing in our market.
[00:12:38] And that's the biggest piece, but it doesn't make it easy. It's still tough because you're flipping and flopping back and forth between a W2 job and an entree entrepreneurship, which are two totally different types of mindsets. One is like, you go work for the man. The other is like, you are the man and you have to make it work.
[00:12:55] And that's something you need to focus. How you, how you fit that in though into your, you have kids or no, yes. Yeah. Three and a half year old. Yeah, the family. And I'm juggling a full-time company that you're working for. You're trying to build out this business. I want people on the stand, the mindset of what it takes in here than what it takes, the sheer power, what you have to put out and we're to make this happen.
[00:13:18] Like, are you just Willy nilly and coming in and trying to figure things out or you blocking out time where you're putting in focus to drive and build this business. Talk about that, to get that.
[00:13:30] Yeah. And so I'll, I'll even step back a little bit more just to kind of explain that it is doable. So when I, when we first start our wholesale business, I was working full time.
[00:13:38] I was also getting my MBA from university of Washington. So I was in a full-time program and I had like a nine month old daughter. Right. And, you know, and so all these things are piled up. That that was everything. And it was a mess at first, but it is it's time-blocking right. It's waking up. Getting certain things done.
[00:13:57] You, Hey, I've got an hour and a half here to do this before I have to jump to this meeting. And then it's recognizing like, when you close one, you gotta like, I literally, I closed my laptop for work and it's like, this is what I'm focusing on. And then it's also building that schedule for your family too.
[00:14:12] Like, okay. Which I didn't do very good in the beginning. Right? Like, Hey, from this time to this time, or this date of this time, I have to do these things and this is what it's going to do, because if I don't, then I'm failing my partner. Right. I'm failing my business. And that honestly is more important.
[00:14:25] And then figuring out how to literally it's like a mental for me, it's like a mental separation between them when, like I said, closing the laptops, right? Like which 1:00 AM I closing and saying, okay, this Friday afternoon, I'm going to go pick my daughter up from daycare and we're going to go do stuff.
[00:14:40] But then when I get. Opening the laptop up, I'm going to do these three things. And like, I have my planner here on my desk with like, these are the absolute things I have to do today. And literally prioritizing things. It's not like Willy nilly, like you said. Cause if I did do that in the beginning, I did that and nothing was getting done.
[00:14:57] Right. Oh, I've got these leads to follow up with like, that's my least favorite thing to do, guess what? I'm not doing it. Right. And so if you prioritize it though, what you have to do. And just do it, then it happens. And then the things that we, I don't like to do, I can hire out somebody that's a kick ass person to do that.
[00:15:11] And being willing to hire those people out was probably one of the biggest ways for us to grow our business so much, so much faster. So in a year and a half, when did you hire your first employee or a virtual employee? Yeah, so we hired our first, our first hire was an acquisitions manager and that was.
[00:15:30] Probably about eight months, 10 months into our business. And she came in kicked ass and then kind of fell off and didn't really do well for us. So we had to kind of pivot away from her. And I actually I'll step back. We did hire a VA, probably four or five months into it. And that was our first true hire.
[00:15:48] But we weren't using him to his full capacity yet. Now we've got him dialed in doing a lot of stuff, but yeah, our first like true, like what we would call. In the business person was our act manager. Yeah. I mean, look, you hit it a lot of points in regards to setting this thing up and making it happen.
[00:16:03] Timeline. And abused more of the most important sitting up your goals. Now, the key, the most important, but you said something interesting in regards to shutting your laptop. I don't know if you actually shut your laptop or is that was just the visual that you did, but I know what I do. You know, there's a book Dr.
[00:16:19] Maxwell malls and he teaches in that book, like clear your calculator. I was able to. To get myself going where I'm wanting to go. And I had a million things running at one time. I would actually have to bring forward the item that I wanted to focus on. And that's all it was in my mind is picture. And I would just focus on that one thing and I needed to shut the laptop or shut it down.
[00:16:39] And then I would literally take it and we go in the back of my head and disappear until I needed the retrieve . And if you haven't got the ability to focus, it comes down to one word, man, plan, execute and focus. If you can do that while having a full-time job and a three and a half year old angled at school and having a wife, like if you did it, then other people can do it.
[00:17:01] I want people to realize that it's a hundred percent possible. To do well in this business, they get yourself started getting started is probably one of the hardest things people have to do. But once you get that, that start that wind, you start to get momentum. And once you get momentum, like magic starts to happen because you realize there is 24 hours in a day, everybody has the same 44, but if you kind of like structure your day, that's going to serve you.
[00:17:26] You can get a lot of shit. Not have to be you. It could be your partner. It could be your VA. It could be, you know, who not how you can have so many else do this for you, but every single day, your business could slowly get that momentum slowly start to build without you having to put in 80, 90, a hundred.
[00:17:45] Yes. And Billy, what you're saying is like, I'm just like shaking my head, like yup. Yup. And it's that focus? I didn't have that. When we first started it, it was, it was like stressful, like all over the place. And, but that's what I have to do when you go back to like the time-blocking it's like, okay, this hour, this is what I'm focusing on.
[00:17:59] Nothing else, because your phone's ringing. I have two laptops ringing. If I can't say, shut those distractions off, then you're not going to even produce quality work anyways, in whatever you're doing. And, and, you know, I want to always be doing the best that I can in these, right. That highly important, but it is, it's like that laser focus is so important and I would speak to like hiring.
[00:18:18] Like we were so nervous about hiring, like, well, do we have enough money to hire somebody? It's like, that's an investment in your business. And even if you're just paying them for a while, and you're not, they're not producing revenue for you, they will write like, you know, if it's a VA. And a bucks a week.
[00:18:32] That's nothing right. If it's an act manager that you can put on full commission, that's even better. Right. And they're gonna do stuff and they're gonna produce, but think about it as, as you buying an asset for your business. Yes. People don't look at it though. Like they don't look at it as an investment.
[00:18:46] They look at it as a burn that I'm losing money. I'm putting out all this money. I'm not seeing anything. And it takes time. Like if you do this consistently over time, it's a compound effect. Eventually. It's going to start to pay off dividends and all that hard work that you put in that investment that you put in for whatever employee, as long as they're the right person for the seat.
[00:19:07] Sure. You get a return on your investment could take three months, could take six months, could take a year, but if you're consistent with it now, a lot of people get afraid like, well, I don't have enough money. Europe to, to do this. If I can't afford to, you know, I can't afford to pay my mortgage and hire somebody else.
[00:19:22] So what do you say to somebody like that? If I saw now, like I don't have the money. I know Dan saying it's easy, but I'm $500 a week. So I'm putting out there. What do you say to that? Yeah, I empathize, I get it. That's where we were at. We're like, man. Tough. And that was also part of like why I kept my W2 job was because I wanted to be able to pay my mortgage.
[00:19:40] And so if that gives you comfort, do it until it's, you know, until you realize it's just a crutch, which like for me, W2 jobs, just a crutch, but I would say like, believe in yourself, because if you believe in yourself enough to. I think I'm going to do this. Like keep believing yourself because you are the one that's going to make it work.
[00:19:57] You can't, you can't say an employee is gonna make your business successful, but you can help make that employee successful. So, you know, just like you spend money on anything else with conviction, like just do it with conviction and go with it. Let me ask you a question and this is a, I want a real answer, right?
[00:20:14] Yeah. Do you think anybody is capable of. Of going out and being an entrepreneur and starting something. Do you think it really does take a special individual? I want your life. I want to give them your honest. I think this is a weird answer, but I think anybody can do it, but not everybody will, because I think I'm not the smartest person out there.
[00:20:34] I don't have a unique idea. I'm just doing what other people are doing, right? Like you could go and start a business. Copies other people and you can make money now being super successful at some things, maybe a different discussion. But I think anybody can, if they have the ability to work and to focus and to just have conviction and believe in what they're doing, not everybody will.
[00:20:58] I kind of agree with that. I think there's a certain cloth. People come from a certain fabric that have the ability to do this no matter what. And there's others who I think they'll add a really, a good amount of flavor to an entrepreneurial network. Like you have people that are working with you, and I'm sure that some very smart people on your team, but they have no desire to go out there.
[00:21:19] And some of them don't have the stomach for it because it takes a little bit of crazy to do business full, to do any business. Full-time you have to be a little bit of crazy because it's filled with a lot of ups and downs. It's not a straight path go all the way up. You have to have emotional. To handle the negatives, the crap that hits the wall, things that go sideways.
[00:21:40] And a lot of people when they get into something and they hit that first roadblock and it like knocks them over a little bit. Like I can't do this, I'm going right back to my desk and they want to say, look, we need all different people in life. Right. I mean, you can't use. A world full of entrepreneurs to make nobody be doing anything yet.
[00:22:01] You know, Billy, you bring, I mean, that is a good point. And I think about it cause you know, just me, I'm more of a conservative person. My partner is the opposite. Right. So I've partnered up with somebody that kind of balances that out. However, I think. My time in the military, there's just so many bad things, good things wins and losses, and you just have to have grit and you have to have a little bit of it.
[00:22:21] You gotta have to be a little bit of a risk taker to, you know, jump out of an airplane in combat, right. There's something in there. And I think through my eight years in the middle of. I was able to build that. And so I do take that for granted that not everybody has that where I think, oh, well, I'm just like everybody else.
[00:22:35] But now I look back and I'm like, well, I have a lot of times where I've done things where I've had to stress myself and then you can stress yourself a little bit more over time as an entrepreneur. That's what you're always doing. You know, you've gotta be able to, you have to be willing to watch that bank account tick down almost to zero and know that you're going to make it work to come back up.
[00:22:54] Right. That forever. Not for many people can have. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Let's get into the partnership. Who is Mike? Don? Yep. Mike. And so tell us about how you guys separated your roles, which the roles inside the company. Yeah, so it was kind of all over the place. In the beginning, we were both kind of just trying to do everything and now.
[00:23:17] What I'm doing. I focus mostly on kind of the rehabs, the properties, the management kind of stabilizing things. Right? So if you think about it this way, he's on the sales side. He typically runs our sales team. And the minute they get something under contract, it goes to escrow. He just, it dings me and I'm on top of it.
[00:23:35] Now I'm taking it. I'm running the, the. The refinances on properties, I'm running the contractors, all that sort of stuff. He's doing most of the dispose on all the wholesale side of things pretty much. So you can look at it as just acquisitions with him. And now though, we're pivoting cause we're hiring the right people to where we'll both going to be running sales teams now because we're starting to see that's where we want to grow our business.
[00:23:57] And we can hire. The project manager position, we can hire out somebody to manage our properties, you know, all that stuff. That's, it's not the most valuable use of my time. We're kind of hiring that out and we're both going to start building our sales teams and continue to build more and more sales teams until we can get that kind of sales manager going for us.
[00:24:15] Yeah. Are both of you guys visionary? Both you guys implement those combination thereof. Okay. Yeah, I would say we're both definitely visionaries. My partner. Is really, he's probably more of the visionary than I am. And I'm more of an integrator, like you give me stuff and I'm like, okay, let's systematize this.
[00:24:33] Like, let's build this out. Let's build this process. He tells me that's the corporate in me. Right. I want to, I want to systematize it and make it pretty and move forward and like, try to catch all the loose ends where he's like throwing tons of stuff. Right. It keeps throwing it in the bucket and thinking like really big, right.
[00:24:49] And moving forward with his visions and that sort of stuff. But we both definitely. Being entrepreneurs, having desire to run our own business. We, you have to be a little bit of a visionary for sure, but it's an important fact that you just said point and point, when you have a partner, two people in a relationship and one that has that more integrated person, you know, has that more visionary.
[00:25:09] That's a marriage. Sure like your company could literally take off. It's something that a lot of entrepreneurs who are strictly visionary suffer because they have all the great ideas. They have all these things they want to accomplish, but they don't have that person who could actually integrate it and systematize it into the business because.
[00:25:28] It's a different mindset. You have to have a very organized, very structured mindset to take an idea and to put it into business, to actually get it to the next level. Absolutely. You have. That's great. That's why you guys have grown in a year and a half because you have to realize it's working on one business, which has exponential growth.
[00:25:46] Sure, absolutely. I a hundred percent agree. So let me, let me ask you this. You're already ranger, right? Ram. You've been through. I'm sure. You know, and not just physical training, but a lot of mind training to get you. To understand what needs to happen when you're in combat, how you have to deal with things.
[00:26:05] Why do you still have your W2? Yeah, that's a good question for me. I think it's been two-part right. Like I said earlier, I actually have liked my W2 job. Like I never started in real estate thinking. I just want to quit my job like that. Something that was in my mind. But then the other part is, is it is kind of that security blanket.
[00:26:25] Yeah. We're 18 months into this and now we're starting to see it grow like, oh my gosh, we actually built something that does create money, but I'm hoping to move away from that because that W2 job is really not, it's losing its value, I guess is what I'm saying, but it's taken me longer to see that then some people, like I said, my business partner, he just, he built a spare shit on the way.
[00:26:46] Right. Yeah. And part of it too, for me is I, by the way. Yeah, exactly. Right. For me too, part of it is, is like my responsibilities, having how many, a kid. And I don't want to use that as an excuse why I'm not like, Hey, I can grow a business, but you know, my kids keep me back. Like, that's not the excuse. It's just, that's where my mind has been.
[00:27:05] And I'm in this like mental. Pivot of like, it doesn't have to be that way. Right. I mentioned earlier when we were talking, I joined GoBundance this year because that's, my goal is to be around more and more people that can help me. Cross that chasm of not having that. And it's probably how I grew up to, you know, coming from humble beginnings, like you build an essay and you're like, I don't want to give this up.
[00:27:26] What if I lose it? Right. And so it's a hundred percent mental though. Like you're, you're, you're right. It's right here. And it's unlocking that and I'm, I'm doing everything I can right now to unlock that because that's where I'm going. And that's my vivid vision. That's my goal. I'm going to be. Yeah. I mean, it's just a matter of time.
[00:27:43] I can see it in your face. It's just eventually, I don't know if it's going to be six months or a year. You're going to be out and you're gonna be doing this. For sure. Yeah. That's my goal for sure. Talk to the sitters on how you guys are scaling your business with marketing. Right? We all know marketing is the lifeblood of every business without leads coming in.
[00:28:01] You don't have appointments without appointments. You don't have contracts. So what are you doing? You and your partner to grow your business, to do. To get 25 doors is rentals and to do these wholesales and these renovation flips. How you driving in the business? Yeah. So great question. We've done a lot of testing on what types of marketing we like.
[00:28:20] Right now I would say our bread and butter that we love is mail it's. We, we do a lot of direct mail. We've go from anything from postcards to handwritten letters, and that's just kind of like our go-to we're always going to do it. We, I think you had a podcast recently riches in the niches, right?
[00:28:37] That is where most of our deals come from. And we focus on the niches because like we have, we know all the wholesalers in town, there's quite a few of them. And like, we are rarely competing with them on deals because we're in the niches really deep. But what we also do is we don't just go out and get data.
[00:28:53] We have our VA scrubbed. Data before. So we get a lot of our data from profit stream. We get it before profit room gets it right, because we're out there scraping the county records and doing it right when it hits, if it every week, if it hits, like we're adding that to our list and we're mailing it, we do do cold calling.
[00:29:10] We've kind of. We're playing around with several different types. We've done it. In-house we've hired services in our local market. We haven't had great luck with cold calling or it's kind of ebbed and flowed, and recently it's gotten bad, but as we scale into more virtual markets, we're probably going to start our own call center just for our team.
[00:29:27] We're going to build that out. We've got some great folks that we think can manage that for us and kind of handle that because cold calling, I mean, you can hit it. Over a good amount of time. And if you get some people on the phone that can slay, like you can do really well with that. We don't do texting or anything like that, just for us, the laws and changing.
[00:29:43] And, and we've been trying to focus on some of our other areas. So we have, we don't really do that, but we do, you know, pay-per-click Facebook. And when you get, when you get a Google or Facebook, I mean, that is, it's like hit it right. Sunday night, call those people right now. I don't care. And we get those.
[00:29:59] Yes. Those trickle in, and those are amazing. We love them. They're great. Softball leads. What else are we doing? We don't do TV and radio. We've got, we've had some friends in our local market that have done it. Really it's flopped here. And so I do think, I know people that are really successful at it.
[00:30:13] Right. But that's just not where we've gone yet with the markets we're in and it's cause sometimes I think it is market dependent. What type of marketing you're using that works the best. But I would say definitely mail cold calls. And making sure our data is high quality and that we're getting it before everybody else.
[00:30:30] How much a month you guys putting out from market right now? Right now? I think we're probably dropping around on average seven to 10,000 a month. And the great thing about like mail market. Is that like, if you spend more, you're gonna get more leads, honestly. Like it's really one for one almost. I mean, not one for one, but like you get, that's what we found and it's, we were scaling up.
[00:30:55] Like we're just scaling back up to that. We definitely dropped some big names. And not have the systems in place and you just waste leads. And that, that was another thing to talk about too. What we found with cold calling. So we're dropping mail and we were like spinning up big, lots of cold calling. And the cold calling leads are harder to deal with compared to like a male lead there.
[00:31:14] Hey, they're coming to you. And so our act managers were doing, going through all that. Cold call leads and they'd get to a male lead, which is more costly, but a better lead. And they'd be worn out from getting told to piss off all day from these cold call leads. That just weren't that great. And so that's what we turned cold calling off for a little bit to really kind of get our mail dialed in, get our act manager dialed in.
[00:31:33] And now we're again, spinning it back up with a better system to intake. Those types of leads. Where are you predominantly mailing? Is it Washington? Yeah, so we mail our home market, which is Spokane. We do north Idaho. Kind of that region, Eastern Washington, north, Idaho, and now where we've sent our first full batch of mailers out, not too long ago in Knoxville, Tennessee, that's our second market self.
[00:31:55] So that's your virtual market? Yep. I want to get into that in a second. I just want to speak about your what's, your, your call ratio. Like what's your percentage of mellows versus calls that are coming in. Is there a 1%, one and a half percent our response rate on our mailers? So depending on which mailers we're doing, which list, but we can get up to like two, two and a half percent on mailers.
[00:32:17] Yeah, on, on some of the real niche down lists. I mean that that's, that's not the full $10,000 and, you know, mailers certain little niches that you're hitting exactly, but that, but a lot of our stuff is niche. And so we, once in a while, we'll pull something from absentee owner, which is good. But if it's absentee owner, as you back the list down, that's where we're really killing it and we can get some good response rates.
[00:32:40] And, and that what I just quoted on that was actually from. A new mailer that we got that had actually a price quote on it. And like, we got a really good response rate on that one. So, so let's talk about that. Cause we've had campaigns, we had killer response rates and then our closing ratio absolutely sucked.
[00:32:59] The response was like, I don't want to say it was misleading, but it was to a point where it got the. But to actually convert those leads over was hard as hell. So are you actually converting the people that are, that are coming in at two, two and a half percent response rate? Yeah. Right now in that market.
[00:33:17] Yeah. We're now converting them, but that's, that's these leads 60, 90 days later. And now, you know, looking at our series. We've got tons of offer made stacked up and contracts out to these people. So I think a big portion of those, actually, we didn't think we would convert a lot, but I think we're now it's like catching up.
[00:33:35] Right. Because you, you know, just cause you get a call on one week, doesn't mean you're closing in that same month. Right. We found a 60, 90 day is like a good close rate, but we have some that are, you know, 120 days. So, more to come on that, but yeah, we are. From what I can see in our CRM, I feel pretty confident where to close on quite a few, quite a few more than we would've thought.
[00:33:55] And most of these, if not all, are going to be wholesale type deals. Yeah. Yeah, we have. So our we have one right now that's actually just sold. That was a JV flip in our virtual market which worked great. And that was with somebody that we had met in our mastermind. That are kind of in an adjacent market.
[00:34:11] And so we help, they, they brought the labor and money and we brought the deal. And so that worked out really, really well. But for the most part right now, we're just going to do virtual. It'll be a wholesale wholesale. And what's your average wholesale fee on those, on these portraits? So right now, I think we're in about 12,000 to 14,000, but our cost per deal is like 1200.
[00:34:31] It's so cheap. Wow. Yes. It's it's like, it's like 5,500 to 6,000 for the, oh yeah. Yeah. I believe it. Like, you know, in our home market, it's like around 32 to 3,500. And so we're like, man, maybe we need to that's when we tested the market virtually and we're like, Maybe we need to start going. That's where we want to sit.
[00:34:52] You have me stand up our second team now, or sales team down there and actually start doing that. Full-time cause we're like the people way nicer than our home market, better deals, lower costs, lower cost per deal. And it's actually, it's easier, honestly, because you don't feel the tie to your market locally.
[00:35:09] It's easier to just kind of separate yourself from the property. So I want to get into this now because you speaking about virtual wholesaling, right? Yep. First of all, how did you decide. On a market to hit, take us, take a listen is through that process. Yeah. So I think we probably over analyze it a little bit, but what we did was we kind of looked at, we did a lot of quantitative and a little bit of qualitative.
[00:35:32] So we wanted to avoid some of the big metros Phoenix, for example, or we just, weren't going to go in any of those, those big, giant metros and compete there. So we wanted kind of an offbeat path. We were looking for like 250 to $500. Population, we looked at growth rates. We looked at unemployment rates.
[00:35:50] What else did we look at? I think those are kind of the main ones we looked at and we did still want it to be near a large area. So we weren't trying to go in the middle of nowhere just cause they had quarter million people. But anyhow, so we got it down to. 40 possible counties that we could go to.
[00:36:04] Then we looked at some of the state laws throughout a handful we're wholesaling would be challenging. And then we just got to kind of like our top three. I think one of them was in like South Carolina. One of them was Knoxville and like, we just were like, let's just go with, like, we kind of think that's a good place.
[00:36:19] You know, it's kind of close to Nashville and you know, all these sorts of things that was the more of the qualitative feel and just saying stop analyzing. This looks good. Yeah. So, and then how did you go about understanding your team, understanding how to make office virtually take a listen to that?
[00:36:35] Yeah, so that one is where it almost felt easier because you just don't know what you don't know at first. So, what we knew we had to do is get some boots on the ground. We had to find some people to actually walk the properties, at least take pictures of them so that we're not completely just sight unseen is.
[00:36:52] So now we have a couple of guys down there. We've got, we went through a couple of different folks that didn't really work out. We have a couple of guys down there now we pay them like 75 bucks to walk it and they do great. They take pictures of any damages or major things. They're local. They do a really good job.
[00:37:07] And then we literally just do a virtual, our act manager, calls him up. We will do the pricing, my partner, I will do, we'll do the pricing on the property. And we'll usually do a range for the first call and then feel them out and then we'll give them their max offer. After that, that they can work with our act manager, work off of max offered.
[00:37:24] He's incentivized to get it below the Mao, but do it all over the phone. And then the clients down there we'll either want to a mailed contract, a. So it's a little longer closing. If we have to mail it back and forth, others will just send it out digitally and they'll still sign the contract. We've got a local closing agent, drop it off, they get it all.
[00:37:42] And it, I love it. I love virtual wholesaling. How do you go about selling the properties? You have to have them locked up in the contract, take the commission. Yeah. So fortunately at least for us in Knoxville, there's a pretty active investor group. So first thing we did when we picked it, joined all the Facebook groups, there's like three Facebook groups for that area, for like east Tennessee, Knoxville kind of area.
[00:38:03] And obviously scrape that they actually just have a list that they produce because they get tired of people posting, like who's my buyers out there. So they just have a list. You can just scrape it. So we have that. And then we've just been blasting in the Facebook groups. Awesome response rates like really good.
[00:38:19] There's a risk because you don't necessarily know the buyers yet. Like locally in our market. Like we have some really great buyers that we have vetted that we know like, Hey, if they want it, they're going to close. So there's a little bit more risk perceived risk on our end that we don't necessarily know all the buyers yet, but we're going to that.
[00:38:34] You'll build that over time. Like if somebody screws you over on closing, you're probably not going to go to them next time. But that guy that closes every time, you know, You just send it to that person. And those types of people tend to close all the time you have in the buyers. Could we enter the property like a mini open house type thing?
[00:38:50] Isn't the problem? Yeah, so we depend, it always depends on the seller, right. Depending on the situation, but yeah, we can have them walk it if they have. Typically, we got the Google drive with all the photos and if you're getting serious people typically that are in the area and they know it that's walking the properties, honestly, even locally, we don't rarely have, we rarely have people walk properties.
[00:39:12] Wow. Good for you, man. I love it. This was actually, you gave a lot of good content for the listeners out there. You took them through the whole gamut. And the next thing is, I'm going to get you back on when you quit your damn right. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have some champagne. I'm excited. How do you guys do? It's a really good things.
[00:39:33] If people want to look you up, connect with you in your area, how could they go about finding you? Instagram? Just hit me up investor man Dan. That's me. Yeah, that's me, man. Just to send me up. I got a website too. Same thing, investor, man investor, man. dan.com. You either want to hit me up if you just want to chat.
[00:39:51] If you have questions about anything I talked about today, or, you know, I'm happy to give you some mentoring coaching, just, just. Awesome brother. I really appreciate you coming on. I'm going to keep you in my Rolodex. You and I definitely going to get to know each other a little bit more than just the show.
[00:40:03] Awesome. Thanks Billy. I appreciate it. Gaps. They care about .