BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 271: Buying 12+ Real Estate Deals Every Month (And How to Lose $750,000) with Sam Craven

Episode Date: March 22, 2018

Real estate investors love to talk about their successes, but most refuse to talk about their failed deals. On today’s show, we hit both of those points hard when we sit down with Sam Craven to talk about how his wholesaling business generates hundreds of thousands of dollars each month in revenue — and the mistakes that led to him losing over $750,000 from his rehabbing business. You’ll also discover the exact strategies Sam is using to fill his deal pipeline, plus advice for those of you who are just starting on your real estate journeys. In This Episode We Cover: Who Sam Craven is and how got started investing six years ago Figuring out your one thing How Sam lost 3-quarters-of-a-million dollars Focusing on what you are really good at How Sam’s business has evolved Why he spent $1 million for marketing in a year Do you need to get your real estate license? Direct-mail marketing and other paid marketings Growing by acquisition What does wholesaling mean to you? Having a closed group of buyers list How Sam motivates himself to keep going And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Podcast 033: How to Close 27 Deals in Your First Year While Working Full Time with Sam Craven BiggerPockets Podcast 137: How to Use Systems to Scale Your Real Estate Business with Sam Craven Growth Con BiggerPockets Podcast 113: Becoming a Millionaire Real Estate Investor Using The One Thing with Jay Papasan Zillow Realtor BiggerPockets Podcast 108: Building a $350 Million Real Estate Empire Using the 10X Rule with Grant Cardone BiggerPockets Podcast 250: Grant Cardone on Multifamily Investing and Why You Should Never Buy a House! BiggerPockets Podcast 260: The Ultimate Guide to Negotiating (for the Negotiation-Averse) With Former FBI Hostage Negotiator Chris Voss Books Mentioned in this Show Set for Life by Scott Trench Long-Distance Real Estate Investing by David Greene The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Relentless by Tim Grover Fire Round Questions What is the one thing a wholesaler should know before starting? Best cities to buy multifamilies for buy-and-hold in 2018 Tweetable Topics: “Know what you’re good at and know what your end results to be.”(Tweet This!) “You cannot have success without failure.” (Tweet This!) “If your goal and your why is bigger than any other problem you can face, you can overcome anything in the planet.” (Tweet This!) “Systems make your business a business.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Sam Sam’s BiggerPockets Profile Sam’s Facebook Page Sam’s Company Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is a paid advertisement. This is the Bigger Pockets podcast. Show 271. I think if you're starting off, it's be relentless. Don't let one thing hold you back. Don't let that one sale that fell apart that you really needed keep you from pushing and finding the next and finding the next and finding the next. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What is going on, everyone? this is Brandon Turner, your host today of the Bigger Pockets podcast, here with my wonderful co-host, David the man, Green. How you doing? How did you know that that's my new nickname? I'm going to start doing that, I think, on the Bigger Pockets podcast. Every week, come up with the new nickname for whoever the co-host is.

But anyway, how you doing? Welcome to Hawaii. You're here with me in Hawaii. This is awesome. This is an amazing place. And I just want to say that I think that my nickname as the man should just stay for every, ever, you can have a new one every podcast and I'm just going to always be the man. The man.

Okay. Good. I'll work on that. So yeah, Dave and I, for those people, not watching the YouTube version of this or the Facebook or whatever, we are actually together live, sitting like awkwardly close to each other. Like I can smell him. Our leg hairs have touched several times. It's kind of awkward. They just did. So we're actually live, well, not live right now, if you're listening to this on a MP3 or whatever. But anyway, we are here together in the wonderful state of Hawaii because I'm still here for a while. And David decided to come out and hang out, talk real estate, talk investing, talk business, talk life, and maybe do a little bit of surfing. Yeah. I'm here to be the pinky to Brandon's brain as we try to figure out to take over the world. I made that reference to Scott Trench was here last week. And I'm Scott Trench, author of Set for Life, you know, now president of Bigger Pockets Corporation, because he's kind of running the day-to-day operation stuff.

And Scott, I made the, he said, what are we going to do today, Brandon? And I said, the same thing we do every day, Pinky, try to take over the world. And he had no idea. He just looked at me. And I was like, Scott, tell me you know Pinky in the brain. And he said, what's that? And I was floored. I guess when you're like this 24-year-old wonder kin,

who's already a published author in President of Bigger Pockets, it's awesome except for the fact you're 24 and you don't know the animaics. I know. It's so good. Anyway, all right. So let's get on with today's show. So today's show we are interviewing Sam Craven. Sam has been on the show a couple times before,

but we take a very different approach today. Today we talk about a ton of stuff. We talk about marketing. They're actually spending a million dollars. in marketing, which is just absolutely insane every single year. We also talk about how, like, I don't know, I mean, in times of how to run your business, how to get over failure. He lost three quarters of a million dollars over the last few years.

We talked about all that. Before we get to interview, today we have to talk about today's quick tip. Today's quick tip is brought to you by David Green. What do you got for us, David? Today's quick tip will be when you are planning on growing from a newbie into a successful, whatever it is, investor, wholesaler, house flipper, buying, hold owner, whatever your fancy is, keep in mind that systems are what make your business a business, and without systems, you can never exit. So in our interview today with Sam, we went over how he's actually buying other wholesale

businesses. So someone could theoretically build up a really big business, create systems, sell it to him and then back out and go do something else with their life or coming out with Brandon and I in Hawaii. I think that that sounds like a really good idea. Now building systems is usually a pain unless that's kind of your thing, but it's very, very important to do. Not only it won't make your life better, but it will also give you a business that is a business and has a value and can be sold. And I would say you can't put a price tag on that, but you actually can. And people like Sam will pay you for it. So that's a really strong incentive to do it. So as you're learning new things, and in the beginning, most of us, our initial problem is

confidence. We're trying to get over the confidence and we're trying to learn what we're doing. Well, keep in mind that as soon as your confidence comes in and you figure out how to do something, systematize it right away and let that system evolve over time as your business grows. And you'll find that not only will you enjoy your job better, but you'll also have something you sell to somebody else. That was really good. So let me tell you something funny. So I did not tell David he was going to do the quick tip today.

And I just sprung that on him right here live. You heard it. Like that was off the top of his head. He came up with that quick tip. So that's why they call you David, the man, green. And that's why they call you Brandon the jerk Turner. All right. So let's get on with this show before we.

get to Sam, I will ask one more thing. Leave us a rating and review over on iTunes. It helps us reach more people. Please do so. And then do me a favor. Let me know that you did. Hit me up on Twitter at Brandon at PP or on Instagram at Beardy Brandon. Let me know that you left me a rating review. It just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and I'll give you a virtual high five. All right. With that, let's get to today's interview. All right, Mr. Sam Craven, welcome back to the Bigger Fockets podcast. Another three-peter. I think you're one of the few three-peters here on the show. How are you doing? I know. I think I get to say that I've been in the podcast more than Grant Cardone at this point, right?

That you have, that you have. Like, say, no, we're not even close. I love that guy. I actually just went to, took the team, took a few guys for my team and one gal to GrowthCon. Oh, yeah, I wanted to go to that. I did not, well, I wanted to go to it. I was in Hawaii.

How was it? I was in, I don't feel sorry for you. Not even a little bit. Good, good. Was it as amazing as it looked? It was. It was really good. Phenomenal speakers.

Came back with like a laundry list of things that I wanted to do in my business. And so same with the team members. It was awesome as well worth it. Very cool. All right. Well, Sam, for those people who were not aware that you were on the show before, haven't heard your other episodes, can you kind of walk through? Who are you?

And let's give it like a five minute recap. Who are you? What's your story look like the last, you know, X amount of years you've been in the game? Cool. Yeah, no, a really great place to start. So I started this business. It's actually six years ago now. I started the company with my dad.

Fast forward a little bit. So started with my dad. We started the business. We were doing some flipping. We were doing some wholesaling. We didn't really know exactly what we wanted to do. We just knew we wanted to be in the business. And so that really kind of stemmed from like, I didn't want to have the job anymore, right?

You know, it's the same story that you always hear. You get tired of making other people money. You get tired to work in everyone else's hours and not your own. And that was me. That was my dad. And we decided to start the company. And so, you know, our first year in business, we did 20-something housing. You know, that was just absolutely phenomenal.

And we've just grown and been fortunate enough to grow exponentially year over year. And so what we did those, we realized it is. we get more and more focused on one particular thing, be it wholesaling or rehabbing or whatever the case is, that we get better and better. And we make more and more money. Because for a long time, actually, probably for the first three or four years, we were doing some rehabs and some wholesale. But it got to the point where the rehab started to be a distraction. We realized we're not as good at rehabbing as we are as actually sourcing property, adding value to homeowners, adding value to buyers, and bringing that wholesale inventory to the market better than our competitors.

And when we realized, okay, that's our, you know, I know you had the author of the one thing on your show, the more we got focused on our one thing, the better we got, the more profitable we got, and the bigger the impact we can make. So I think that's an awesome point for the listeners, Sam, that you recognize this is not my one thing. I'm better suited to be a wholesaler than a rehabber. For the people listening who are trying to figure out, like, what's my one thing, right? They're getting started and they're trying to figure out how do I get there.

Can you share with us how you knew that was your one thing and how you recognize this is what we should be focusing on and not that? Yeah, I was losing a lot of money. So, you know, we were going off into the world and we were doing. And actually, we found that it was really one niche of the market that we were losing all the money in on these rehabs. And let me just quantify that for your listeners real quick. Okay. When I said losing them all the money, I'm not talking about $20,000, $50,000, $100,000. I'm talking about $3 quarters of a million was lost over.

two years. Seven and to be exact, it's like $767,000 on some change. Okay. I want to hear more about that. Yeah, I want to hear more of that. Absolutely, I want to share that because I believe, I strongly believe that we learned just as much from the big checks as we do from the big checks that we write. Okay. So I'm really happy to be able to share that stuff with your listeners. And I believe we as an industry don't like to share a lot of the bad things that happened to us. You know, it's all rainbows and unicorns. We're all making a lot of money out there. But there's definitely some pitfalls in some ways you can get in trouble. So let's absolutely take some time to talk about that. Okay. Yeah. So how did, let's go into that next. How did you lose three quarters of a million

dollars? Oh, man. And let's go back to the exact point we just made. And it, I wasn't focused on the one thing. We were not focused on what we were good at. So, and we did it over the course of a relatively long period of time, almost two years that we lost all this money. And while we're losing all this money, our wholesaling business is growing in very. volume. It's growing in profitability. It's growing in per deal profitability. And I'm hiring more and more people and putting more and more systems in place where not only are we losing three quarters a million dollars, but we're also still making a lot of money while, you know, there's this vacuum at one side of our company that's losing money. And so one of the things that why we were losing

money is because we weren't good at it. That wasn't our one thing. And if you could even more niche than that, we weren't good at the high end of the market. That's where we're losing all of our money. I mean, all that money was lost over maybe nine or ten different deals all at the, you know, just all in, you know, one after the other. It wasn't like it was just one big deal or like a whole lot of little deals. It was like, we found ourselves in a part of the market that we should not have been and we learned our lesson. So Sam, tell us when you say you're losing money, were your, were your rehabs going over budget? Were they taking too long? Did the person who was kind of looking at your ARVs not know what they were doing and they were coming in higher than they should have been?

And can you walk us through what you did wrong so people can know like, hey, this is what you want to avoid or if you find yourself doing this, maybe you're in the wrong spot. You need to find a different place. So phenomenal question. And those are questions that we were asking ourselves every step of the way. And what we found, the issues were everything that you named. Okay, we miss an ARV. We missed a rehab number. We bought it at the wrong price. Got screwed by our contractor, which even though the contractors, you know, okay, yeah, they screwed us out of 50 grand, which happened a few times. Whose fault is that? really, is that their fault or is that our fault? It's our fault. It's absolutely our fault. Yep. You know, we take, we have to take ownership of that. And actually, having been, having been screwed by contractors so many times drove us to start a construction company, which we now have a construction company that only services real estate investors in Houston. Okay. And we can talk a little bit more about that later because it's, it really ties in really well to the, the way that our business model works now and how focused we are in adding value to our clients. But how we can, how we

we lost that money, added up to everything that you said and then some. And it's not that we were stupid. It's not that we only made one mistake. It's like we made all the mistakes. Every single mistake you can make, we did it in pursuit of trying to get better and better. And so we kind of kept making a different mistake every time and we tweak and we tweak and we tweak. And we got better at it, but it just meant we lost less money each time. But then so meanwhile, we're literally getting kicked in the balls and on stop on our construction and our renovation company on the

high-end deals. And at the same time, we're just accelerating phenomenally on our wholesale company. And at one point, we finally just popped a head up and said, look, this whole thing over here is just phenomenally profitable, rounding a ton of value. Let's focus on that. And as soon as we made that mindset shift and that decision, like, this is it. This is our thing. We grew even faster. I mean, it was absolutely beautiful. You know what I love about that? Like, so many people focus their entire time and their life on like trying to improve their weaknesses, right? Like, oh, I'm really bad at this or I don't, I'm not good at this part of the business. I better try to get better at it. And so they just keep trying to get better at it. But I love

that you're just saying like, look, just if you're not good at that, just stop doing it. Focus. Like, what are you really good at? I think that's fantastic advice that even somebody who's brand new just getting started. Like obviously there's a learning curve with everything. And so you got to figure stuff out to figure what you are, you know, well conditioned to do. But yeah, I love that. And it's tough too, especially when you're starting off because everything is sexy. You want to, like you get the shiny object syndrome, you want to go after, oh yeah, those big rehabs, like that's exactly what I want to do. And, you know, I spent a lot of time sitting down with people that are getting started

in the business. I've traveled around the country for the last few years teaching people how to get started in this business. And a lot of them always say, well, I don't even know where to start. And the biggest piece of advice I give people is know what you're good at, know what you want your end result to be, okay? Because I'll have people come to me and say, I want to start wholesaling housing I want to start flipping houses. Meanwhile, they have a job that's making well in the six, sometimes seven figures that they say they love and they don't want to stop. I'm like, well, why do you want to build yourself another job? Why do you want to build yourself another business? It sounds like what you really want is passive income. And lots of times are like what? Passive income? And so the sexy part of this business is the wholesaling, the big checks and the renovations and things like that. But that's just not the right thing for everyone. It's the right thing for everyone. It's the right thing for me and my team and my partners. But it's not the right thing for everyone. And actually,

I want to talk about too. We spoke a minute ago about, we started this company with my dad. My dad's actually running a fund now that we're involved with. And I have my new partner in the business. My dad's still a partner, but now my new partner in the business is actually a friend of mine from high school, Matt, who was our very first hire.

And I didn't mention it earlier. I have to mention it now that he's a phenomenal partner. And I couldn't be luckier to have him there with us because he was right there with us in the bad times and he's here with us in the good times, and he's a huge part of our success. So, Sam, my guess would be you guys were crushing it with your wholesaling business, and all your attention was focused on that. So you weren't paying attention to what was going on with the rehab business,

and that's how things got out of hand because you were doing so good. You were bleeding from one end because you're doing great on the other. And then you finally, like, you know, cut off that area that was bleeding, and now you're focused on what you're good at and where you're profitable. Can you tell us a little bit about how your business has evolved? How many deals are you doing? How much revenue are you generating now? what's your profit margin like,

that kind of stuff. Oh man, you just want to get like, just tell you everything. Yeah. Yeah, so let's, so let's talk about that. So,

you know, when we were doing real estate, I guess, you know, back we were losing all the money, we were kind of, we found ourselves stuck. We kind of plateaued

at like 60, 70 houses a year. And that was it. We did two years in a row where I think one year we did 60 and the next year we did 75. And as far as I'm concerned, that's stagnant.

Now, at the same time, our profitability grew by 20% at that same time, which again shows you that, you know, we had this beast at work. You know, our average profit per deal increased quite a bit. But then as soon as we got focused on, okay, we're just wholesale, our business jumped. Okay, so we're from 6070 to 130 in a year. And now we're doing 15 to 20 a month and we're spending a million dollars a year in marketing.

Whoa. Okay. A million dollars in a year. I mean, it's even crazy for me to say it now because my first budget when I started off in the business. Not long after I was on the first podcast, my marketing budget was $100, $300, $300 a month. And now it's like $90,000 a month. So our business is really, since we've gotten that focus, we've been able to grow our average wholesale profit. I think the first time I was on the podcast, my average wholesale profit may have been like $5,000 or $8,000 a deal, which is pretty good,

right? Except now, I think our average wholesale profit for this year is $35,000 a deal. So, that comes along with, and we can talk about this too, kind of like our sales philosophy, which is adding value everywhere. We add value to our sellers, we add value to our buyers. I'm here in this podcast to give away a bunch of information. I'm not a paid educator. I don't have a guru program. I won't have a guru program.

But one of the things I like to talk. But act now. No, no. But one of the things like I'd like to talk about is the fact that, you know, one of the things that we do for all of the people who buy houses, from us that are in our ecosystem, as I call it, here in Houston, or all over the country that buy houses from us, is we give away all of our education. You want to know how to buy rentals. You want to know how to, we do everything from accounting to deal analyzers, to

walking a property estimating repairs, to what makes a good deal for you. We give away all this education for free. There's not going to be an upsell for it. I want you to come in and I want you to learn. Now, what we've learned over the course this last few years is that people come into this business and they get frustrated and they don't get a deal, right? I mean, like, typically speaking, if they don't get a deal within the first three to six months, they move on, because they're frustrated, they can't get a deal. And it's difficult. And so we have all these people that are coming into this industry that, in my opinion, we as an industry, we're here to change lives. You want to invest in real estate. You want to change where you are in your life,

buy property. It will change your life. I firmly believe in that. And so we have all these people that want to change their lives. They try to take some action, but they're just, you know, a ton of information out there and they never take that action. Well, what I want to do is through this ecosystem that we have, I want you to take action. I want you to be successful. I want you to buy houses. I want you to buy houses for me, but I want you to have what it takes the confidence. The biggest thing is the confidence is build the confidence in yourself to go out there and take action and buy a property. Whatever it is, it looks like a good deal for you, just take that action. So tell me, for the people that are listening that are like, wow, that sounds great. That's what

I need to start doing. I need to take action today. The first question I want to ask you is, what are you doing to spend a million dollars a year in marketing? What can people do to start marketing to look for a deal? And then once you explain that, can you tell me a little bit about how your business is kind of structured? I'm imagining you guys have a big marketing division where you're doing whatever you're doing to get the phone ringing. Then you have a division where the people got to answer the phone. And then you got a division where, okay, now we know who the serious people are. These are my negotiators that are going to put under contract. Well, in the beginning, everyone's going to be wearing every hat. And they're not going to know what they're good at in the

beginning, right? So kind of walk us through what it's like, what you do to get started, what you can expect, and then how you can evolve that into having a business with different people that specialize in different things. Oh, geez, that's a lot of questions. Okay. So I think let's start at the beginning. And so, you know, I think the majority of our listeners are probably not doing the volume that we are. So let's talk, let's talk directly to the people that are trying to get a start. Okay. They hear a million dollar year marketing budget and they say, holy crap, I don't have that kind of money. And the good news is you don't need it. You don't need to have that kind of budget in place in order to get started in this business.

But there is one really important for instance. I want all your listeners to understand is that you, if to get started in this business to start finding deals, you have to start spending one of two things. You're going to spend time or you're going to spend money to source these deals. In our business, we call it the cost per acquisition. How much do I have to spend to get one deal? How much do I have to spend in time or how much do I have to spend in marketing? And depending on your market, that cost per acquisition can be $5,000, or that cost per acquisition can be $25 hours, or that cost per acquisition could be $500. It just depends on where you are. Big metropolitan cities like where I am in Houston, you know, it's going to push up, it can push up pretty high into the thousands of dollars.

But the good news is that you don't have to spend money, but you do have to spend money. but you do have to spend time. A lot of people come into this business. They want to get in the business. They want to get that first wholesale check and they don't have any cash. That's okay. I believe you can find deals.

You're going to bust your ass, but I believe you can find deals and it's just hard work. Now, let me give away a couple nuggets here. So what's the one place you can go to, work hard and find that deal without having to spend any money? Now, I think some of your listeners

are going to think I'm nuts when I say this, but the MLS. Okay? The MLS is an absolute treasure trove of deals. But you got to spend hours working it. Now you can spend hours working it and dollar for dollar or time, you know, hour for hour putting work in, making offers, following up with people, things like that just from your computer. However, what we have learned in our office, and I'm putting my money where my mouth is here because I literally have salespeople

in my office and their only job is to network with real estate agents. But that's that key term. It's network. So they're going out there, they're meeting with people. They're talking to people. They're putting on CE events. They're hosting events, things like that. And they're broadcast their message out to as many people as they can. And then the properties are starting to come in. Okay.

Now it takes time, but you've got to put in the hours to get that stuff in. So if you're just starting off in the business, you don't know how to find deals. I would say go to the MLS to find deals because not only can you find deals, we are finding deals through them. All right. So let me ask you if somebody's brand new, they want to go and look on the MLS, which by the way, people, for those who don't know, with the MLS is like where all the real estate agents put their leads, right? So, but I'm not a real estate agent. So I don't have direct access to the MLS. I mean, yeah, I can go search Zillow or Realtor.com, right? But those aren't like, so would you recommend that somebody should get their license before doing that

or just start networking with agents or what's kind of that first step in that process? You don't have to have your license to actually get on the MLS and start networking with agents. You don't have to have a license and network and talk to people. Just go talk to people. That's the most important thing is just go talk to people and network. Make sure you know how to add value to them. So we add value to agents by saying, hey, you've got that deal. It's an ugly house. You don't want to list that house.

Send it to Senna. You'll get a check. It's as easy as that. Send it to us. We'll get to the offer. We agree on the terms. And then we'll get you a check within a few weeks. And so if you're unrepresented, you can actually offer your 3% commission to the agent.

So instead of them making only 3%, they're actually making 6%. So again, you're able to add value to the agent in that way too. So if you have no money, I recommend starting off in the MLS. If you have a little bit of money, start doing something. some bandit signs or something like that. I'm not a big believer in bandit signs. We don't do them in our business, but they still remain an effective way to market for properties. So what do you do for paid marketing in your business? I'm happy to tell you. So I'm doing SEO advertising. We're paying someone to manage the search engine optimization on our website. We're doing Google pay per click

advertising. We're doing Facebook advertising, which is showing a lot of promise. And direct mail. direct mail as well. And also we do some skip tracing and things like that. But the majority of like the big money stuff is our direct mail and our web stuff that we do. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Can you can you give any like tips for people who are just getting started with direct mail maybe? I know we talked about that in the last, I think both the last show as we talked to you. But anything just like, like low hanging fruit that people can just do right now with direct mail marketing to get started. Yeah. The best way to get started is to actually get the mail out the door. You know, I don't know exactly how many letters we're sending right now. I think it's somewhere around 80,000 a month,

maybe a little bit more than that. And that can be kind of daunting if you're new, and especially for me, I think when I started off, I think I started off sending like a few hundred mailers a month, and we were getting responses from it and we're getting deals from it. And I can tell you in the marketplace now in Houston, if you're only sending a couple hundred mailers a month, even sometimes maybe only 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 mailers a month, it's unfortunately not enough to get a deal. And so you've got to find ways to get the marketing out in mass as much as you can afford as consistent as you can afford. If you're going to afford to do 10,000 mailers, don't do it all in one month. Break it up. Get that first deal, get some cash, roll it back into your marketing and

grow your marketing up. That's everything that we did. When I started my company, I mortgaged to my house and I sold a car for all the cash that I could in order to start the company. And then even still only had a very modest marketing budget. And again, it comes back to goals. Like if you're saying, I want to be the next biggest wholesaler, or like for us, we want to be the single largest house buying company in the country that's privately owned, you know, we have big goals. That means we're growing the company as quick as we can.

We're actually even looking to grow through acquisition right now. What do you mean by that? Can you explain that? What does it grow back acquisition? It's a good question. So what we're doing is we open up in new markets and we're exploring opening up in another market ourselves, but at the same time, we're looking to buy operators that are wholesaling in A and B class markets that want to sell, that want that payday. You get a nice, a big payday as well as,

you know, some residual income over time if you decide to sell your company. And that's the ultimate lifestyle business, has been able to sell your business, live off some residuals, get a nice little check up front and you're done. And so instead of going into a new market and completely reinventing the wheel or having to learn the way buyers buy and sellers, sell and understand all the little nuances that it takes to wholesale effectively in a market, why not go in and buy someone who's already killing it? That's fascinating. I've never heard anybody actually doing that before in like a wholesale.

I mean, obviously I've heard of people buying and selling businesses, but not wholesaling business. So you're saying like if I, if I'm a wholesaler and let's say I'm doing, I don't know, I don't know if you have a minimum. Let's say I'm doing 50 deals a year, right? But I'm just kind of worn out of wholesale. I don't want a wholesaling anymore. I'm tired of it.

I just want to go buy rental properties or whatever, right? I could just shut down the business and just lose everything, or I could, you know, you're looking for people like that that would just sell you their business. Is that right what you're talking about? That's exactly right. That's exactly who we're looking for. I want good operators that focus on customer service, that focus on delivering value and have some systems in place. I don't have to have a ton of systems in place, but some systems, some employees, things like that, that show that they understand what's going on in the market. And of course, the longer they've been in

business, the better. But, you know, there was one operator I was talking with. I've been in the business for a couple of years and was already doing at a high level that we're talking about buying. So we can grow ourselves organically or we can grow a little bit faster through acquisition. And you're right. I have never heard of anyone doing this. And a couple people who are very, very respected in the industry, I sit them down and I say, hey, I want to start growing my business through acquisition. And they say, holy crap, Sam, that sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. But, you know, that's okay. That's just not right for them. And this is what we believe is going to give us the competitive advantage as we grow into more markets and achieve our goal of being the largest

privately held house buying company in the nation. Okay, so Sam, so let's say that I have a wholesale business and it's doing well, but I want to move on to something else. But I don't want to just completely give up this business that I've spent the last couple years working on. Can you tell me what can I do to put my business in a position that somebody like you would want to buy it? Good. Let me tell you kind of like the overreaching criteria that we have as we're reaching out to these companies and as we're learning about these company. So if you have a wholesaling company that's doing between 75 and 100 houses a year, you know, you are profitable and you have enough employees and systems in place where you're

able to kind of focus on the high level. I don't want to buy from someone who is still the one that's primarily out there buying where you've been able to train a few people, things like that. What we have done really, really well in Houston is we've got systems, we've got processes, we've got a big team, we've got managers, sales managers, general managers, things like that in place, as well as a beautiful ecosystem of systems in place that I can inject into any business. So you give me a business that is fundamentally good, that is fundamentally profitable, and I can take the systems and processes that I have in place and explode that business. But it takes a good operator, it takes a good core business to have that in place in order.

for that to work. Now, I mean, it's a hundred times more complicated than I just made it sound, but that's our goal. Our goal is to find that and pour the fuel on the fire. Yeah, I think that's really encouraging, though, for anybody who wants to get started in real estate to understand that, you know, there's all these fears and anxieties that come when you first get started and you feel like you don't know what you're doing. And then you hit a level of competence, which usually leads to confidence. And you're like, okay, I got this and you start making money. But not a lot of people really take it to that next level where you systematize what you're doing and you kind of organize it all so you can really just smash on the gas and get into like extreme wealth building.

But what you're saying is that's what you've done and now you've got it down so good that you can literally go into somebody else's good, solid business that's maybe not performing like yours and apply your systems to it. And boom, it's going to be performing much better. That's got to give you like an insane level of confidence that you know I can go into any market. I just basically need the infrastructure and then I can put my systems in place and take over and take it to the next level. That's exactly right. And that's exactly right.

And, you know, the right kind of operator, too, would be able to play in the upside with that as well. Because lots of times, I mean, when you have, you know, at least for me, I've been in the business six years. Like, this business is my baby. This business is my life. And for a lot of us, we feel that same way. And so some people think, well, I'm not going to sell my business.

That's my child. But one thing that wholesalers and wholesaling businesses have that don't have, that a lot of other real estate investors do, especially you buy and hold guys is long-term cash flow. You know, wholesaling business, we're lucky if we have three months of cash flow planned out, okay? Because it's a kill-what-you-eat-business. And because we stay relatively small and we're a service business, it doesn't build a whole lot of cash flow. I mean, I know of a guy in a beautiful market that was netting a couple million dollars a year in his wholesale business,

and the business just shut down, and now he's got nothing to show for it. Whereas you could sell that business and create some cash flow for yourself and a nice little payday at the same time instead of just shutting it down. Yeah, that's super cool. Yeah, I just never thought about that idea before. It's just acquiring somebody else's whole selling business. And I think that's fascinating from both ends, right? If you want to get out, you can sell it to a guy like you or if you want to get in, you can buy somebody else's company. Yeah, just fascinating.

Well, good luck on that. I'm actually looking forward to hearing how that goes for you the next year. and we'll have to schedule another interview to come on and talk about hopefully it's going to be holy cow this is awesome we're in five cities or it could be like hey that didn't go too well but you know who the heck knows how it's going to go but all i know is we got to give it a shot yeah and what i like about that is that you're you're basically like you're not afraid to tell people if that does suck like you know like hey we lost three quarters of a million dollars the last few years on bad rehabs great it sucks and that's one thing you said earlier you know i think

it was before we said recording maybe it was on the call but like this industry is so big into like, look at this big check I just made and people posting checks all over the internet and forums and stuff. And like it just gives this appearance that everything is great. You get in real estate and you're just awesome and you're instantly going to be good. But you know, like people only break about the successes. We've been talking about that actually a lot here on the podcast lately. People just break about the successes.

Right. And it's the age of social media. I can build the persona I want and my persona can be the guy that's only successful, not the guy that struggled. You show me a guy that has been successful. I can show you a guy who has struggled. He may not be, he or she may not be open about the struggles, but I promise you, you cannot have success without failure. And for us, we got kicked in the balls a lot. We learned a lot, but it's because of that that we are successful. Yeah. And I believe anyone out there, even the guys who like to post the big checks in front of the rented Lamborghini about how awesome they are, like,

I promise you they have failures. I promise you, they have faced adversity in their life or they're freaking liars and they haven't had to or failure. But frankly, those people are here today. They're gone tomorrow. They just, they don't matter. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right.

So before we move on to the fire round of Famous Four, I want to ask you about something I probably should ask you the first question. What does wholesaling mean to you? What does that look like? Because everyone's got a kind of a different definition of wholesaling. Like, what do you do? I mean, somebody calls you, walk us through that process. and how you kind of organize that. So what's always what bugs me about wholesaling in the beginning

was that it was you start off with a lie, okay? You meet with the homeowner, you tell the homeowner that you're the end buyer. And everyone always says, oh, just give them a one page contract and a fake proof of funds you can download from the website and just tell them, hey, I'm the end buyer, everything's going to be okay. And I think that's bull-h-h-hick. I don't think you start off a relationship where you're trying to help a homeowner.

And that's what we do. We make our money when we solve problems. of the homeowner. I don't believe you start that relationship off with lie. Every single person we sit down with that my team sits down with in their living room and explains how we can help. We are telling them, we are not your end buyer. And everyone thinks that's a big deal. I tell colleagues of mine, you know, that have businesses that are twice as big as mine that I do that and they think I'm absolutely bonkers. But we do it. The process is easier. Our reviews are better. The seller is happier. But at the same time, so I'm a big believer in adding value. Okay.

I'm going to add value to the seller and we're going to tell them that, yes, I am wholesaling your house. But then let's talk about what it means wholesaling on the buy side. Okay, so when I'm bringing you a deal, what does everyone always complain about with wholesalers? A RV's wrong, repairs are wrong, you're wrong, you're ugly. I don't like you. No one likes wholesalers, it seems like, right? So what we have done on the sell side is we've changed that too. I told you I got screwed by contractors.

So we started a construction company. Now, when we put out our email blasts, not only does it say, okay, this is what you can do if you have your own crews. This is what you can renovate the house at, okay? I'm also going to include most of the time we're doing this. Now this is relatively new. So not every single deal has this,

but most of them have it where you have a construction bid. It says, not only do I believe you can get it done at this price, you can pay me to do it at this price. You put my money where my mouth is you can pay the company to do the construction work for you. But then some people are saying, well, you're still going to overinflate the ARVs. I'll hold your horses, okay?

So when it comes to the after repair values, we've teamed up with a hard money lending company in town. And when we put a property out, chances are it's going to have a construction bid that goes along with it and a third party appraisal. Third party, third party appraisal. We've got them going out now

where we supply the appraisal to it from a hard money lender that says, you can renovate this house for this, you can come this much cash out of pocket, you'll make this much money. It's almost like turn keying a flip or turn keying a rental. But we didn't even stop there, okay? What we've had in place now for a little while is I guarantee our ARVs. I guarantee our rental numbers. If we miss our ARV by 10%, I'll write you a check for $1,000. If we miss our rental ARV by 10%, I'll write you a check for $1,000. Now, before we did that, we had this idea. We went back and we looked at all

these different houses that we did. And we're like, okay, how many checks would we have to write? And we looked at it. We're like, okay. And I think we looked back to 150 houses. And those 150 houses, we'd have had to write the check one time. Since we've done this guarantee, we've written the check one time. Okay. Wow, that's awesome. That's a cool idea. I'd never heard of a wholesale doing that. So, but, and we're putting our money where our mouth is there. So we're taking this whole thing, this entire industry. We're a used car salesman industry. No one trusts us. No one trusts the numbers we put out. And so we now are putting in steps to make sure we're getting as close as possible on our ARVs. And now we have a construction company that people could come in and say, Sam,

I want you to renovate that house for $30,000. Great. We'll do it. Okay. So we're, again, everything is about making it easier for investors to come into the market and buy properties and take action and change their life. We want to change the lives of our sellers. We want to change the lives of our buyers. And we're not going to be able to do that if we're lying to them and telling them, do all your own due diligence, check your own stuff out. No, by the way, I forgot to tell you about the family of termites living underneath the house. Like that just, it doesn't fly well with me. And it's just, I don't believe that's the way that you should be doing business period. Yeah, I love, love, love that because I tell people all the time that the two ways

that I can mess up the most in my buying hold business is one, my ARIVs wrong and two, my rehab goes bad. Those are the two things that are the hardest to control. And really, I think you can control your rehab even more than you can control your ARVs. There's some subjectivity to it. And then if you don't know the person you're buying from, whatever they tell you the RV is is what you're operating by and you're basing everything off of that. So the fact that your company is providing appraisals and you're actually standing by your ARV, it really takes a lot of the risk out of it for the buyer.

And it also takes away a lot of the excuses. Because if you're being provided with information that's that accurate, and like you said, that's a really good idea. You have a hard money lender who can get involved. And maybe that's where they're getting the funds to buy the property from. well, that person's got some skin in the game too. So he definitely doesn't want to give you a pumped up ARV. He's not going to be trying to help your business.

He's going to be trying to protect his own. So when you've set things up like that and you've got multiple layers of protection, that's a big thing I talk about in my book, that you need multiple layers of protection from people that have an objective stance in this whole deal. It's kind of hard to mess up, frankly, when you've set things up that way. So I think that that's great that you're doing that. I would definitely buy houses from somebody who has things the way you're set up. Come to Houston, man.

We got plenty of cash flow here. So, okay, that's a good question. What does it take? I mean, a lot of people probably want to buy from a company like yours, right? I'm a new investor maybe. I want to buy from a wholesaler, a legit wholesaler who's doing what they say they're going to do and they can maybe even guarantee it, like if they're your company or somebody else, right? How do I get on your radar?

How do I get you sending me deals? And not just you, but just any good wholesaler. How do I get a good wholesale to send me deals and not give them to the other guys? So what we've done is we've created a closed group of buyers. So we have a buyer's list of, I think it's 80,000 people, 50, something like that, 80,000 people in Houston of people that pay cash for properties that I send an email to when we get a deal. Okay. So, but what we learned, yeah, it's, okay, it sounds impressive, but it's not. Okay. It's just not. It's ineffective. When I send that blast out, I'm happy to get 9, 10%, that open a, that email, okay? It's one thing to say, hey, raise my hand, put me on your email blast, send me a deal, okay? That's ineffective at best, okay? Because you're going to get the deal, you're going to look

at stuff, you get analysis, paralysis, you don't take action. So what we did is we created a closed Facebook group. There's only one way you can get access to this Facebook group, and that is to go to our website, to fill out a form, and then someone in our office will give you a call, and then they're going to ask you questions, and they're going to say, tell me what makes a good deal for you, tell me what your experience level is, what part of town do you want to invest in, how much cash flow do you want, how much ROI do you want, how much flip do you want, what kind of finance do you have? I mean, I think we have 30-something different questions that we ask.

And it goes into this database. You get on the database number one, okay? And the database is going to be clearly what you want. And so what's going to happen is when you fill out that database and you say, I want this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. As soon as our team gets a deal in, they're going to go to the database and they're going to fill in the specifics. They're going to say this house has, you know, 20% ROI, 200 months, whatever, whatever the cash flowers are, whatever the flip numbers are. And it's going to say, call these 100 people, call these 10 people, call these two people.

It fits their numbers exactly. Super cool. Well, so one final question I got before we go to the fire round. Like, how do you motivate yourself? Like, what I mean by that is like, you make good income already. Your business is crushing it, right? You're moving along. How do you, without a boss over you?

because this is something that a lot of newbies really struggle with. Without a boss telling you what to do, how do you motivate yourself to just keep going, keep pushing? Man, you know, I struggle with that question. You know, we all have times that we need motivation. We all have times that, you know, you just realized you lost quarters of a million dollars. You need a little bit of motivation to get out that day,

and that's kind of difficult. But you really kind of have to have your vision. And for me, it's the vision. You know, I have, I told you, I've got a few friends that are in this business. They're doing this incredibly high level. They're making seven figures a year net, and they're working five hours a week in their business. I mean, for a lot of people, that's beautiful.

That's exactly what you want. I don't care to work five hours a week. I work 50 hours a week, and I'm perfectly happy with that. And my motivation comes from, you know, we've got deals I've made $150,000 on a wholesale fee. We make a few six-figure wholesale fees every year without fail. And it's funny for me that check clears. and then I forget about it. I don't care.

I'll come home to my wife after losing $100,000 and making $100,000. How was your day? I'm like, I think it was good. I think we made some money today. But the overall vision for me isn't just like, okay, hey, I want that check. I want that money.

I want that car. I love cars. I can blow money on cars. Like you wouldn't believe. However, my goal is bigger than the car. My goal is bigger than the money. My goal is impact. I want to change.

And this is, I'm stealing this line from a very close friend of mine. It was a CEO of a beautiful company. I want to put my thumbprint on the way this industry works. I want to change the way that they do things. I want to change the way people invest in real estate. And I believe you do that through a high performance impact. That's one of our things on our Code of Honor. I'm going to make a high performance impact.

I'm going to be in as many cities as I can. And just through brute force, I'm going to change the way people wholesale houses. That means providing ARV or providing appraisals. if that means starting a construction company in every city, whatever it takes. If that means I'm telling the truth about wholesaling the house to sellers, whatever it takes, I'm going to change the way the industry is done. That's what drives me every single day. I'll pop my head off that pillow.

It doesn't matter if I'm facing a huge loss that day or a huge check. And man, I'm getting after it because that's my big goal. And so for your listeners who are maybe facing a little bit of that paralysis and whatever it is that's hitting that paralysis, think about what your big goal is. Think about what your why is. What is it that drives you? it's probably not money. If it's money, you've got to dig deeper.

You're not being vulnerable enough with yourself. It's probably something bigger than that. Because the money came. The money's here. I don't give a shit. It's about making that impact. Yeah, I love that. I love that.

Well, super cool. Well, it's been a lot of fun, but we're not quite done yet. We're going to head over to the world famous fire round. It's time for the fire round. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time-consuming, and expensive.

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So number one of the forum, let's go with this one. What is the one thing a wholesaler should know before starting? If you could summarize up in one point, the most important thing they need to know before they get started wholesaling, what is it? And that is a really good question. The one thing that you should know if you're trying to start a big wholesaling business like me, okay? Like what me and Matt and Robert have done, be relentless, okay? Don't let little things hold you back. When you're starting off in the business,

you're going to be frustrated with like no other. Even as you grow the business, that frustration is going to be there, but your problems are just going to be different. I think if you're starting off, it's be relentless. Don't let one thing hold you back. Don't let that one sale that fell apart

that you really needed keep you from pushing and finding the next and finding the next and finding the next. Yeah, keep pushing. Yep, I love that. Number two. All right. So, Sam, do buyers real estate agents try to get you the lowest price possible or do they

usually not bother to negotiate? What's the incentive for them to get you the lowest price on a home that you were trying to buy? Their incentives should be just to get the check. Okay, getting, you know, if they negotiate the price down $20,000, that's this much to them on their check. But they should be incentivized to get the deal, period, because that's how they get paid if you're trying to have a buyer's agent represent you. You can incentivize them a little more you know, by trying to find people to bring you deals and saying, hey, you can get the 6% instead of the three. And then you can incentivize them by saying, hey, I know you there's that house. It's been listed a long time. How about I just get you a check on that thing real quick?

And then you can move on and start doing the stuff you're good at. That's a really good point. There's a, there's a lot of kind of back and forth between agents and the investor world. Are they good or are they bad? And to me, because I am a real estate agent now, it boils down to the mindset you have. Agents are not trained to work with investors. they don't think like investors. The majority of their clients are not investors. It doesn't make sense for them to learn investing. If you're going to a real estate agent who works with people like helping them find pretty kitchens, you're going to be very disappointed that they don't understand your world. And the same is probably two the other way around. If you're, you know, looking for the pretty kitchen and you go to the

investor agent who keeps sending you ugly houses that are great deals, you're going to be frustrated. I think it really boils down to the responsibilities on the person who's looking for the deal to find the right person to help them. It makes much more sense to go to a wholesale business like yours if they're trying to find a deal. It makes much more sense to go to a real estate agent if they're trying to find a house that they want their family to live in. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. All right, number three, number three here. I like this one. Best cities, do you have any recommendations on the best cities to buy? I'll say all real estate. They ask multifamily, but I'll say all real estate because you're a house buyer. Any cities that stand out, I mean, Houston obviously sounds like a really good

city, but anything else that you've heard of is just being like, yeah, I think that's probably worth looking into? So I'm a little biased. I really, really believe in Houston, especially after the flooding event that we just had, there's a lot of opportunity here for single family or multifamily. I think multifamily in Houston is a little, at least for our class Cs, I'm seeing the cap rates come down pretty dramatically on those. The Dallas market seems to be even more hot than Houston to invest. But if you're asking that question, I feel like that you need to you get focused. If you're trying to think of where to buy or things like that, anytime you're looking to invest in multifamily or in any market, especially if you're asking multifamily for long term,

understand where you are in the market cycle and where you want to be and what kind of asset class property you're looking at. The Grant Cardones of the world, he looks at A plus properties that cash flow really well. They're going to be around for a long time. And because of that, he can continue to buy in Houston. He's not really going to be affected by. And I know he just closed a huge, huge property here in Houston recently. But then you got little guys like us that want to go and buy multifamily. Well, Houston for the little stuff right now in your B minus C plus type areas, it's frankly overinflated. Cap rates are getting way, way too low. If you want to buy single family, I believe that this is a great time to buy single family in Houston. In fact, that's what the primary purpose of fund is. We're raising

$5 million to go off and buy single family property here in Houston to hold long term. So yeah. So tell us, Sam, what can you expect? if I want to move out to Houston to start buying single family homes. How low under ARV can I get? What kind of repairs am I going to be looking for? What's my price to rent ratio? So it really, what I love about Houston is it really just depends on what you want to do. And I could literally and have literally taught classes on how to buy for long term,

whether you want to buy for cash flow or you buy for appreciation. I know in my own portfolio, I've made more money on appreciation than I ever made on cash flow. And I've got people that come in and buy properties from us. they'll buy a house built in 2008 at 95 cents on the dollar. However, when you get older and some people, the houses get older, they want to see more cash flow. They want to see that equity spread there. And so I've see equity spreads. We sell equity spreads anywhere between for flips 70 and 80 percent for buy and hold 75 and 95 percent. It really just depends. I mean, it's funny because my portfolio that I have, my rental property is all stuff that we could. sell that other people said they couldn't make money on. However, at one point, my rental portfolio was returning a 60% annualized ROI. And that's from buying the scraps that other people didn't want. So I believe that exactly what you see in the market just depends on what your goals are because there's no wrong way to buy property. I mean, I'm sure you guys buy your rental property

slightly different from one another. It's just what matches up to your goals and understanding what it is you want to do. Literally, so my partner, He buys rental properties totally different than me. Completely different. Him and his partner look at that stuff totally different. However, we both make a crappy flow of money. So I think the most important thing you can do is just take action, understand exactly what it is that's important for you, is a cash flow, is it equity, is it a combination, is it appreciation, whatever the case is, and push forward in that.

Just know what your numbers are. Okay, so your business is clearly crushing it. You're doing great. You've got these incredible systems put down in your own. only growing. Just out of curiosity, how many hours of sleep do you get a night? How many do you think you need in addition to that? So I love my sleep, but after reading the miracle morning, by how Oh, Rod, my whole philosophy has changed. And I'm curious what yours is. So I need to be reading that book because it talks about at a growth conference. And I've actually, I've kind of changed

the way I do my mornings. I wake up and I work on my goals in the mornings. However, so my day, like I tell you, I work a lot. So I typically roll in the office about 8.30. And then we have our sales meeting 845 and then I work till about 530 maybe six maybe 5 maybe 430 just depending on what I have going on but then I come home I eat and then I go back to work and I sit on the couch and I get on my computer I work on some of the things that aren't necessarily task oriented maybe they're the overreaching goals quarterly goals things like that but I'm still getting seven eight hours of sleep a night I think one thing that is suffering is you could probably go back and watch the videos of the previous podcast versus now I'm a little fatter so I think I'm not

I'm not working out as much as I want to and by as much, I mean, ever. And so I think that's kind of suffered a little bit, is that little bit of self-care. But I just, I love it. I mean, who has a job where they can work, you know, 9 to 5, take a break and then work again, 7 to 10 and just still wake up every day and do it and love it? I mean, that's, I just really enjoy it. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome.

Well, you don't look fatter to me, huh? But, you know, I'm not there in the room with you. Who knows? All right. So let's get to the last segment of the show, which we lovingly refer to as our Famous for. All right. So these are the four questions we ask every guest every week.

Having been on the show twice before, this is going to be your third time answering these questions. Maybe they're different answers. Maybe not. But let's get to them. Number one. Sam, what is your favorite real estate related book right now? I don't have one.

I've been so focused on business and growth. and, you know, kind of being a coach and a leader from my team and a manager for my team that those books have kind of shifts a little bit. So we've actually been reading a few books. I'd like to share them with you. I can talk about those. Are they business books? Because that's going to be the next question. Oh, well, okay, let's talk about it. I'll like Dave ask about that question. Yeah, so what are your favorite business books? Great question. I'm prepared for that one.

So I know you guys had Chris Voss on the podcast not far, not too long ago, right? I love that guy. So I actually have his book right here. It says it right there. So I have his book. It's actually the second time that we've read his book. We read his book as a team last year and trained our sales team on the way that he adds value and listening for those unknowns unknowns, those black swans with every seller and every buyer

and knowing how we can add value to that person. So Chris Voss is one of them. Never split the difference? Yeah, Chris Foss never split the difference. Love that book. And then the other book that we actually just picked up is Religious. Letless by Tim Grover. Also an awesome book so far.

We're just a couple chapters into it, but there's something that our sales teams reading together right now. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So when you're not reading books and you're not expanding your business, what are some of your hobbies?

And I love cars. I love working on cars. I love racing cars. So I, everything. I love all of it. I just, I hadn't worked on something in a while.

I used to work as a mechanic on professional race teams. And so I used to be able to work on cars, but all the time. But recently, you just bought a house that had a five car garage. and I hadn't been able to do anything in it yet.

So I just spur the moment. I love my wife for this. She let me buy a BMW M3 and a BMW station wagon and make an M3 station wagon just in the garage because I needed to build something. I just really needed it. So I took the time off between Christmas and New Year's and thank you to the team for supporting me

and letting me take a week off work and build that car. And so anytime I can build something, I can work on cars or I can go race my cars and then travel and overland with my wife. I think the last time we recorded a podcast was from a library in middle of nowhere, Colorado, because my wife and I were traveling. Nice. And even I think in May, we're going to go to Iceland and we're going to camp around Iceland for two weeks

and then do our usual long road trip and stuff like that. So that's really what we love doing is traveling, camping, and then working on cars. That's awesome. All right. So last question of the day, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from all those who give up, they fail or they never get started? You got to have a goal. If your goal and your why is bigger than any other problem you can face, you can overcome anything on the planet.

And so just understand what is that that just burns deep inside you that says, look, this is what I need. This is way bigger than the $1,000 I just lost, the $100,000 I lost. Three quarters of a million dollars I just lost. That goal is bigger than that. So if you can have that Y, if you can have that goal that's bigger than any other problem that you have, there's nothing that's going to get in your way. All right. Sam, where can people find out more about you? So the best way to get in contact with us is our website. Senna Housebuyers.com. That's S-E-N-N-A. Housebuyers.com.

You can also check out, actually, please check out our Facebook page. We post some shorter free content on there, some training and things like that. So like that Facebook page. But if you want to get access to an hour of free coaching with me, go to the Facebook page, like the Facebook page, and share it to your own timeline. and just take that screen grab and email it to BP that's bigger like bigger pockets at centerhouse buyers.com and we'll make sure we get you hooked up with that free hour or coaching. Also, I'll give you my personal cell phone. Well, yeah, okay. So you want that? Okay, yeah.

It's on my website if they want to jump up and look at it, but I don't know if I want to get inundated with it. But I can't tell them give my office number. Sure. Okay. And actually, I'll also give you guys this. Let's just give you our direct office number. It's 713-489-8,000.

That's 7-13-489-8,000. You'll talk to Liz. If you got any questions or anything like that, feel free to reach out. You want to get on our buyers list. Absolutely reach out. Guys, this has been awesome. This has been a ton of fun.

I love coming back here. Yeah, this has been awesome. Well, thank you so much, Sam. It's been fantastic. And, you know, we'll see you next time here on the show again. Awesome. Sounds good. And that was our show with Mr. Sam Craven.

That was pretty awesome. Oh, yeah. mind blown. That guy's business is doing incredible things. Yeah, like what is they, 12 to 15 deals a month? Like, and they're $35,000. I mean, we can do that math. They're, they're making massive profits in their business. But you know what I find fascinating is like the same process that he works in his business to get to 12 to 15 deals a month, whatever that was, like it's the same thing that a newbie can do, right? Like, they need to go out there and get leads somehow. We talk about this all the time. They need to get leads in their business,

whether or not, you know, it's direct my marketing, whether or not it's SEO like he talked about, which means like a website, whether or not it's like Facebook ads, whether it's not working with a wholesale. It doesn't matter, right? You get leads and then you've got to figure out how much you can pay for them. So you kind of do some numbers, figured out. Then you go after them. And that's where a lot of people just stop, right? They just like, oh, I don't know. And then of all the ones you go after, some are going to work out and some are not. But the ones that work out, I can change your life forever. And again, that can do that with one deal a year or 300 deals a year. I don't know. The same process works no matter what. And what I love about what Sam said is that he was actually

very clear on the fact that you don't have to have money to do this. You can have time. In fact, as he was talking, what I was thinking is really all money does is replace time when you become more successful and your time matters more to you than what your money is. But in the beginning, you don't have to worry about having money. I mean, his company is spending a million dollars a year on marketing, but you don't need to do that. You just have to have time to get out there and look for deals and time to convert them. You will convert them into money. Then you'll have more time to spend towards finding deals. And eventually, you won't need to use your time because you'll have money instead. Really, that's so, so encouraging for everybody who's out there that says, well, how could I ever do what he does?

You start with just giving your time, learning it, chasing deals like what Brandon said, converting them into leads, learning how to get good at doing that, building up the skill set of doing, and then just hammering it once you've got to figure it out. Sam talked about how he lost a lot of money trying to do rehabs because that was not his one thing. And then he ended up making a lot more money because he put all that time into wholesaling instead of rehabs. Now he has an incredible wholesaling business. Don't be afraid to get out there. Do all the different things you learn about it. in real estate investing through Bigger Pockets, and then figure out, like,

what do you enjoy the most and what are your best at and then put all your time into that. I love to hear you talk. All right, guys, we've got to get out of here. Thank you so much for being a part of the Bigger Pockets podcast today. And we'll see you around the site for BiggerPockets.com. My name is Brandon.

And this is David. Signed enough. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, You're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com.

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