BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 377: The Riches Are... on the Radio? How to Dial in Your Marketing & Do 100+ Deals a Year with Chris Arnold

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

Today's guest does 125 deals a year in Dallas—from his home base in the Caribbean. How? Well, he bailed on direct mail marketing and doubled down on radio ads. And when others froze up as the coronavirus spread, his team put in new systems and closed a $23,500 wholesale deal... without even stepping foot inside the house. Chris Arnold zigs when others zag, and today you'll learn how he sets up his business so he can consistently work ON it, not in it... while enjoying a great lifestyle in Tulum, Mexico. Chris shares timely tips for how to orchestrate deals while maintaining safe social distancing (he even holds "Zoom open houses" with multiple cash buyers at once); breaks down which team member handles each aspect of a transaction; and delivers a fantastic tip for new real estate investors struggling to stay focused. Plus—Chris shares how advertising on local radio stations has elevated his home-buying business to new levels. Look, he says, you might prefer podcasts... "but you are not your seller!" We play one of his ads on the show, and he guides us through how to research various audiences and negotiate the best rates with stations. This show covers it all—from the finer points of buying properties at deep discounts to the mindset shifts Chris has made along the way. Check it out, and if you enjoyed this please share it with just one family member or friend. We appreciate you, and we'll see you next Thursday. In This Episode We Cover: Why Chris runs his business virtually from Mexico His #1 lead generation strategy: good old-fashioned radio! 3 major demographics he markets to Why "bouncing" is the reason so many newbies fail 3 shifts he's made to adapt to COVID-19 How he decides whether to wholesale or fix and flip a property The exact workflow his team uses to work leads from start to finish How he inspects houses remotely Closing deals over the phone How he puts together "Zoom open houses" for cash buyers How he's finding cash buyers who will buy sight unseen How the market is reacting to coronavirus Ways to back out of a contract if necessary And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Coronavirus Relief Programs BiggerPockets Webinars How to Build a Deal Pipeline Realtor Zillow Pandora The Multipliers Mastermind BiggerPockets Business Podcast Real Estate Rookie Podcast BiggerPockets Money Podcast GoBundance Check the full show notes: http://biggerpockets.com/show377 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast, show 377. This is not a spray and prey approach. We are not buckshotting. We are coming in and we are choosing a different demographic and we are targeting that demographic based on reports, based on when we know behaviorally they're listening. And we know that that's what makes like Facebook so powerful is how much you can niche it. You can actually do some really good niching with radio, which I don't think a lot of people understand.

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, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast, coming at you with my, host, David Green. What's up, man? How you doing? Just another rainy day in California. Some of that Seattle weather that you knew so well has moved down here. But I'm doing good. We're sheltered in place. We're still selling houses. We're doing a lot virtually. Bay Area market was so hot that this like corona thing really, it didn't stop it, but it slowed it down enough that people have a chance to actually get a house where before they didn't even have one. So we're taking advantage of that. Nice. Nice, man. Well, very cool. Yeah. I closed on a flip last week or I bought a property last week.

the one that we've talked about on the show last few weeks. I did actually buy that. I'm actually pumped about it. I'm excited. I saw that on your Facebook page, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I showed it there. Yeah, so I'm still buying and put on Instagram and put it kind of everywhere because I like to talk about my successes.

But yeah, I mean, the thing is this, though. And just for those people who want to understand the mindset behind it, like I still went through with it, even though the market's kind of crazy right now, because I believe we have enough profit, like over 100K in profit to justify. Like, even now, I think we can make that. If we don't, if the market continues to get tough, I can about, like we talked about, about break even ish. And the fact that I make good income and I've got good like passive income,

I can handle the about break evenish, even if it means like we have a big repair. I can handle that. So in my situation, I think it's okay. So worst case, I end up renting it for a while and sell it with the better tax benefits later on as a long term rental.

So anyway, I just want to let people know I'm like, we're still working. We're still doing this thing. It's just a little bit different world. So on that note, today's episode, we just recorded it like this.

week that this episode comes out because we want these like, you know, fresh interviews coming out that we can talk about what other people are doing during this situation. But this ended up being such an amazing interview. Like, because we talked about the COVID stuff and how our guest, his name is Chris Arnold, like what they're doing. I mean, they're buying 100 plus houses a year, their company while he lives in a different country. Like, I mean, if you're talking about you can't invest locally, you're, you got to invest long distance. Like, this guy is like the master of it. So we talk about how he does that, but also like how they're doing that in spite of the fact that they have the shelter in place things going on and they can't go visit property. So they're doing these

virtual open houses and all this cool stuff. I mean, he even tells a story of one of the recent deals that they just closed on. They made like 23 grand. They never entered the seller's house. And the end buyer was a wholesale deal. End buyer never entered the house. So he talked about all that. He talked about his number one lead source that you probably have never considered. You guys, I'll give you a hint, radio. It's so cool his conversation about how radio works. And kind of how he manages his business, like the different business philosophies. In other words, like, which business books guide his, like, actual management of his team, especially from a distance.

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So there's lists of like state-by-state stuff. There's a huge list of what different banks policies are, a lot about the CARES Act and more. So really, we just wanted one place where, like, everybody could go in the world of real estate investing to get up-to-date information about this whole COVID-19 thing. So BiggerPockets.com slash COVID. Totally free. Go check it out later. And with that now, we can get to today's interview with Chris Arnold.

All right, Chris, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast, man. Good to have you here. Man, glad to be here. Appreciate the invite. Yeah. Did I read here that you are in Mexico or is that New Mexico? No, that is actually the country of Mexico. So I live in Tulum, which is about an hour and a half south of.

of Cancun on the Caribbean side. Been here now almost three years, full time. Wow. Okay. So why are you, why are you in Mexico and investing in real estate? I'm assuming you're investing in real estate because that's why you're here today. And I mean, how's that, how do you get into your story about how do you get in Mexico? Like, that's a, that's a unique thing. Yeah. And so we operate our business out of Dallas, Fort Worth. So that's our main hub. but we were really intentional starting about six years ago to move everything to a virtual model. And what I mean by that is literally no brick and mortar and the ability to have staff east to west coast all over the state. Because for me, that gave me the ultimate freedom, which I believe is freedom of location, right?

The reality is, you know, would I want to live in Dallas forever and would I want to be locked in there because my business was there? No, I'm a beach guy. I want to finish my day and go paddleboarding. I want to do like what I did yesterday, spear fishing with some buddies out in the ocean. And so for me, it's always been about lifestyle. So people are like, why are you in Mexico? Because I can't think of a better place to be than the Caribbean for my personality right now. So absolutely love it.

That's cool. Well, this is why I'm excited about doing this show because a lot of people live in areas of the U.S. or around the world and they want to get into real estate investing. They want to find deals. but they think, oh, there's nothing in my market. I can't do it here. And you're like, I'm in Mexico and I'm invested in Dallas. So, like, we're going to talk about how you do that.

I want to go real in depth on the how to today. But before we get to the how to, let's go about like you. I mean, what's your story? How did you get into real estate to begin with? Yeah, so I actually am a seminary graduate. So I got a master's in theology. And people's first question a lot of times, like, shouldn't you be like a pastor or like a missionary?

That's not me. I just really didn't fit that convention. role. And one of the reasons I went to seminary was, man, I'm the kid that got in a ton of trouble in high school, like, arrested the whole like nine yards. And so I went to seminary to really kind of figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And so once I finished up grad school, I remember sitting at Chick-fil-A, eating a chicken biscuit, looking up on the mural that Kathy Truitt had created in the Chick-fil-A's. And it had pictures of how they were utilizing the business to impact the world. And that was the first time I'd ever really registered as a seat in my mind that what if I

utilize business as a vehicle to impact the world the way that I want to? Because my heart and my passion is people. And so I kind of looked around and I'm like, what would be a great vehicle? And the one that made sense to me at that time. Again, early 20s, right? Don't really know a lot about business, not much about the world at that point. But real estate made sense as a great vehicle. And that was the reason I took that first step to cross that line to become a real estate investor. That's cool, man. All right. So what did the first deal look like? My first investment deal, that's really funny. So I actually remember the street address. It was on CalMia. And at this time, I was already a real estate broker. I had a team doing all of that, but I hadn't got on to the investment side. And one of my

best friends understood the construction. I understood the real estate side. And I remember eating a pizza together and talking about how we should do a deal. It was probably about two weeks later, a deal came across my table of a guy that wanted to sell us this house so that we could fix and flip. And I remember we actually took them out to lunch. It was a Mexican restaurant in Dallas. And we were negotiating like while we were eating. And so if my business partner and I would have to make a decision that we needed to talk privately, we would get up and excuse ourselves and go to the bathroom. And then we'd come back. We'd talk some more. And I remember just the excusing ourselves like four times to go chat it up on how we wanted to close this deal. And we ended

up closing it. Again, definitely not a scalable model for closing deals, but that's always the funny part of how you did your first deal. So it was over chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant. I think all deals should be done over chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant. That should just be a law in real estate. I might have to contact our president and see if he'll institute that. So, all right, So what was this deal? I mean, like it was a fix and flip. But what was it at? What was it like? Where was it at and how'd you do on it? Yeah, it was actually probably two miles away from my office in Arlington. I think we rehab. If I go back, it was like what I would call mid rehab. So we probably put somewhere around 25 grand in that property. And I remember like, I had a buddy that was kind of coaching me through

the process. And he'd be like, well, did you get insurance? And I was like, oh, I need insurance on. I mean, it's a ready fire aim approach on your first deal. Like just get off the bench and do one. And so we definitely made some mistakes. But I do remember on that first deal, we cleared $21,000 as profit. And the light bulb went off for us. That was like, that was fun. Let's rent, repeat, and do it again.

Yeah. You know, you make a really good point there. This idea of like what like making money, especially on your first deal. not everyone makes money in their first deal, but when you get like that big check, like that's such a huge motivator to keep going. It's kind of like if you're like, you know,

getting into fitness and you're like, you know, if you were to work out every week and then you keep going on scale and every week, you're the exact same weight. It's just demoralizing, right? And like sometimes it might take a month,

two months, six months, 12 months, two years to get that first big check. But man, isn't that just like amazing that feeling of like, I can do this.

This is like a legit thing. Like, I'm moving forward. Yeah, I love that. I love that. So, to get that first deal to not give up to keep after it right because we know that once your mind is

expanded right it's it doesn't go back to the original position that it was in right you see things in a different way and that first deal just catapults the brain and just the spirit to get out there and do more and so that's why I think it's so valuable to do your first deal yeah definitely I was scared I can actually remember that feeling. We have bought so many houses now. You lose any type of nervousness with owning a property. But I remember the fear of actually being on the line and owning a property. And what happens if we couldn't move it?

And I can actually remember the physical experience I had of the fear of like, oh my gosh, we're about to buy this house and we're about to own it. And then when you get to the other side of it and it's always the same, you look back and you reflect and you realize, man, that wasn't as difficult and hard as I thought that it was going to be. And that's where you go, man, I can do this again because what we kind of pitch up in our mind as like how difficult we think something's going to be. Isn't that the value of getting out, doing something, making it happen because you reflect back and go, man, I made that a lot more difficult in my mind, which is probably what holds most of us back.

I know we're going to talk about running a virtual company. You know, that plays into a lot of the mind holding us back. It's usually us as the limitation. Yeah, that's so true. Hey, I want to go and kind of get an idea of your business from where it's at today. So then we can work backwards to figure out how you got there. So why don't we just get like a quick, like, yeah, what's your business doing today? What is it like right now?

What's your team set up? Like how many deals you doing that kind of thing right now? Yeah. So where my business is at right now is from day one coming in, you know, I really read some books that really push my thinking around how businesses should be run. Things like, you know, Michael Gerber, the E-Mith, this whole idea of building a business that would run without you, that would bother you potentially as little as possible. So you could be on it, not in it.

So we currently have six directors in our company, which, is fundamentally our leadership team, and they run the day-to-day. So that's all the way from a COO down to director of sales, to disposition, to marketing, et cetera. So the best way I could say it is our org chart is built out, and we have everyone on the bus in the right seat. And so that's actually freed me up to really not have to be in the day-to-day as much. And transactionally, right now, We close around 125 properties per year. And that's fantastic, considering that I'm not doing any production. That's fully on my team handling all of that, which is great.

Yeah, that's crazy. And most of those deals like flips or wholesales or rentals or vacation rentals, what are those things? Yeah, it's mostly fix and flip and wholesale. So it's a kind of a combination. So our strategy has always been, we don't want to be pigeonholed into any particular exit strategy. we want to look at each deal. I mean, we actually have a committee of four people in my company that will analyze each deal and go, should we do a fix and flip on this?

Would this be better to actually send out to our cash buyers list and maybe get a check that way? And so that's how we look at our business is making sure we have extra strategies, even retail, right? We list properties because I'm a brokerage. So it's all about being solution oriented and not getting stuck into any one way of doing it so that you can make sure you leverage every deal and get the most revenue possible by having several tools in your belt. That's smart. That's very smart. So a deal comes in and we'll talk about how you get those in a minute. I'm really fascinated by what you're doing for marketing when I read in the notes here. But before we get there, like, how do you decide? What does this

committee decide? Because there's a lot of people listening right now going, I'm not sure if I should wholesale a deal or flip it or keep it as a rental. So how do you decide which is the avenue you want to go? Yeah. So there are four people that make up that committee. And so they will meet once a week. That meeting can last anywhere from an hour to two hours. So just giving you the actual process, right, for how to do this. And in that meeting, they all kind of have a different perspective. One is our director of disposition.

So her understanding is moving a deal, right? It's particularly with cash buyers, that whole mindset. You also have my business partner in there who's really savvy at just doing deals. He's a real deal guy, very tactical. We have my COO and my director of sales. So you have a combination of personalities in that meeting. And they'll literally pull up a deal. They'll start running numbers.

And what it is is it should be a debate. So any good meeting is built on debate. And so consensus actually wins in that meeting. And so that's how they drive decisions. And, you know, I'd say a good chunk of the time, they usually come to an anon, like everyone's in agreement on what to do with that. deal, but sometimes they get stuck. But the whole deal is that we're creating debate with inside the team to make sure that we are making the best decision with every property. And in that amazing,

I mean, that's an hour to hour and a half meeting. Can you imagine how much revenue that drives by making sure that every deal goes into the right bucket? That is an income producing meeting, in my opinion, really important. Yeah, that's cool. So leads come in and then you got to put them in a certain bucket. This is going to be this bucket. There's going to be this bucket. And everyone's deciding that. Now, is it primarily a financial question? Like, we're going to make more as a wholesale or the flip. I mean, because then you're going to make more as a flip. Usually, but I mean, maybe not. But usually, you know, like the flippers make the most amount of money. And by the way, if people are confused when I say wholesale, all I'm talking about is there's a whole side of real

estate, which people go out there and find good deals. And then using a couple different methods, we're not going to go in the detail right now because some are, you know, state specific and how you can do this. But basically, you get that deal to somebody else who ends up doing the actual fix and flip or keeps it as a rental and you make almost like a fee in between. Is that a good way of kind of explaining wholesaling? Yeah, absolutely. And again, I wouldn't get caught into any particular way. The overall mindset is being an investor and growing your tools. I mean, you might do owner financing, right? You might do different fix and flip, you name it, retail. But yeah, and a big sense of what you're saying with wholesaling, that's an easy definition, right? Absolutely. So, yeah, so you decide which one you're

going to make. So yeah, are you thinking more like, yeah, is it financial or is it, hey, how much work do we have? Where our contractors lined up, I mean, is it kind of everything. It's a mixture. I mean, that's what the debate becomes. If it was black and white, then you wouldn't need debate. There's great. It's because you get preferences like how much money do we have out on the streets right now on our fix and flip, right? So there's that side of the risk. There's also risk when it comes into days on market or maybe it's a deal that has a very high ARV, right? So then you go, well, do I want to assume that type of risk right now? So there's a lot of variables I feel like come into play. And so that's why my opinion that it takes a group of people to make that decision because month to

month can change season to season. Let me tell you this. If you were to run and sit in our financial committee right now with everything that's going on, right, in our environment, that meaning is much different than it was two to three months ago on determining whether or not we're going to buy a house or not. Does that make sense? So it allows you to be flexible with whatever direction the current market and the environment is going. That's what I like about it. It's very nimble. It can shift. So on that note, like what are you seen in this COVID post, you know, like, I don't even, what do we get to call this time? Like the world needs to like come up with a name for this, but this COVID period of life. What do you, uh, what do you guys seen here? What are you doing?

how are you reacting to it? Just for context, everybody who's listening, we're recording this, what, just beginning of April of 2020. So yeah, what are you doing right now? Yeah. So the very first shift that we made, which I think is the most important, is we knew that we had to flip to a virtual model that kept social distancing, meaning I cannot interact with three people now face to face. I cannot interact with a seller. I cannot interact with a cash buyer if I'm deciding to whole sell it, right? Or right, if you're going to fix and flip a little bit different. And the other thing is, I can't interact with the title company. So how do you build a model in which you don't do that? And that was the very first thing we shifted. And I still feel as of today, you just gave the date

that that was probably the fastest thing that we executed on that created the biggest chain. So let me give you some examples. If you're dealing with a seller, right, I don't care if you're building your rental portfolio. I don't care if you're looking for a fix and flip. It doesn't matter. We're all interacting with sellers, right? So there's three ways to get what you need from a seller. You can't go into the house so you can, number one, have the seller do photography and videography for you, which is great. Number two, you can throw them on Zoom if they have comfort from a tech standpoint, hit record, and you can do a walk through as they walk you through the house, which is great because then you can guide the tour and be like, well, what's that there?

Can you explain that? If someone is tech deficient, right, and they don't know how to do video or email, these are for our demographic that's usually over the age of 50, which is actually a huge demographic for a lot of us. What we do is we deliver a tablet to their door. we have it open to where they can take pictures and our inspector literally passes it through the door is like wearing a mask, right, sanitizes it down, which is important, right? Because we know that elderly people need to be cautious and we need to respect that. And they'll take pictures, pass it back

through the door. If we don't like what we see, we just explain it and pass it through. So in my opinion, those three things will remove any excuse that you cannot get what you need to see the inside of that property virtually without ever going in. Now, on the flip side, if you're fixing and flipping, you're just going to take that deal yourself. But I will speak to part of the audience that might be moving this over to a cash buyer, right? You can take all of that information that you just gathered and you can do one of two things. You can embed it into an email that you send out to your cash buyers and they can watch a video. Now, when we first did this, we didn't know how it was going to work.

We were like, because investors are like, I'm not leaving my house. So how are you going to convince me to buy a property? Well, we sent them videos of the house. And again, if you're building your rental portfolio, you should be talking to people that are sending you deals to do this for you so that you can see them. But they jumped on it. And we actually sold our first deal.

That one was particularly just a wholesale. And we made 23,500. Now think about that. We never entered the seller's house. and the person that bought the deal from us as an investor never had to enter the house either, which is fantastic. So it was a completely virtual process. And then the other thing you can do with your cash buyer is you can do an open Zoom, like open house, right? So if you're, let's say, someone building a rental portfolio and maybe you buy from a wholesaler, some of us do that, right?

Or you're on the opposite side. You can put a bunch of people on Zoom and do a walkthrough of a house if it's vacant with just one person being in that house. So now everyone can see the house and you can create some competition by everybody being on the Zoom call together. And then the last piece is the title company. How do you deal with that? Well, we know obviously that if you look at real estate right now, that's been deemed as an essential business. Title companies are still in business and they can close deals. So we do mobile closings. They literally go out to the house. They pass up. everything through the door. They've marked where they need to sign. The seller signs it and then passes it back through the door to our title person. So now you have an entire virtual model

between the seller, your cash buyer if you're needing that and the title company. And once we put that into place, boom, things started taking off again. Fantastic. We got real excited. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. One of my fears always, because I've never bought a property necessarily without looking at it first, right, going there and looking at and checking it out. So my fear is like, well, what if you didn't notice that the floor was super squeaky under the floorboards? Because you can't see that in a video and you can't see that, you know, the plumbing is 1912

and it's all cast iron. Like, how do you get around some of those fears for those people listening who want to do some virtual investing one? And David, I would ask you the same question because you do this as well. You buy at a distance. Like, how do you, like, is that a legitimate fear that there are going to be things that just do not show up on a camera or that I might miss out on. Well, let me also say that along with those pictures, we provide an inspection report as well. And so I feel like any deal that we're doing,

we should have an inspection report that's filled out. So the decision's not just made off of photography and videography. It's also based on a written report. But you're right. This is what I've found. There are two types of investors now. And we had to understand. understand that people were going to fall into one to two camps. You're going to have some and I'll give you more objections, right? I'm not buying anything right now until I see what's going to happen in the market. I can't manage my rehab crews because I'm not going to get sick and bring that back home to my family. And you have just a list of objections on that side. So rather than us coming in and trying to break down every single one of those objections, what we said is we're

going to focus on those right now that don't have those objections. So rather than us coming in and trying to break down every single one of those objections. And there are investors right now that I'm telling you that have no problem saying the time to buy is now. I have no problem buying off a video and an inspection report. And so now you have two camps of people. And so our focus has been to go after the people that go, I'm still in the game. Let's keep playing. And I think that there's more opportunity to the fact that the competition has been really weeded out because people are fearful and scared. And so I'm going to stay in the game because I realize there's less people in the game. And that's enough incentive for me to get off the bench. And so now you're dealing with two different philosophies that are out there.

I like one of the points you made that you still get an inspection report. I think the people who get hung up on the long distance investing and they worry about missing something. And tell me, Chris, if you agree, they tend to think that you got to get it all done in one fell swoop, that you're doing a complete inspection on a property before you even write an offer on it. And And the way that this typically works with people that do this at high volume is you break it into like the Henry Ford type assembly line where you get a lead to come in. You talk to find out how motivated they are. You see if you have a reasonable chance of putting in a contract, you do a step of due diligence. If that looks good, you do another step.

If that looks good, you write an offer. Once the offer is written, you do a deeper level of due diligence. And that might be where you actually pay for a home inspection type of a thing. But you don't see professionals that are good at this that try to do it all. on the very first step. That just isn't how business works. It's not one step in a funnel that turns a lead into revenue. I talk about that all the time that, like as a realtor, I've got a funnel.

Like a lead comes and says, I want to buy a house or I want to sell a house. We put them through a process of steps. And if that goes well, out comes revenue on the other end. But it's not going to do that for every person. And the cleaner that you have those steps set up and the more skilled the people on your team are at their job, the more we'll make it all the way through. I want to ask you about where your leads come in, but before I do, I kind of want to know if you can comment on how your funnel is set up, when due diligence is done, how you've structured the

jobs that need to get done from someone saying, hey, I think I want to sell my house to ultimately you closing on that deal. So do you want like our lead flow from the time a lead is coming in until we close it? So like when the phone rings to the point that it's at the title company and it closes. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give kind of a broad stroke of the phone. So lead comes in again. Everything we do creates an inbound call, right? So that's first and foremost. We love marketing and we love to talk to people that first call us. That's how our whole system is built because we think that that's more efficient at the end of the day. So lead comes in. That actually goes to what we have as our calling assistance and they are on the front lines and their job is to pre-qualify

that lead to make sure the motivation and the capacity to do a deal is there. Once that's done, it's actually live transferred in the moment to our sales team, right? So that sales team can pick it up, be debriefed by the calling assistant that says, hey, I've got this person on hold. Here's the situation. I'm sending them up to you because I think you can go ahead and get this deal done. So once it gets kicked up to our sales team, their job at that point is to do more due diligence, make sure that this deal is going to work.

But more importantly, set the inspect. right? Because in our world, we want to buy properties based off of data, not just wrap up deals to wrap up deals and go back and try to renegotiate price and all of that later. So we run through our inspection process. We run our comps. We get all that data back as quickly as possible. Usually our turnaround on that is 24 to 48 hours because we have to be fast because we know that this game is obviously about speed. And at that point, the salesperson will go ahead and lock up that phone deal over the phone primarily. So that's another thing as well. I definitely believe face-to-face works. There's times that you need to do it, but the more scalable model is to try to lock up deals

over the phone and minimize commuting and getting stuck in traffic. And so once that deal is locked up, it goes over to our closing manager that deals literally everything with the title company, title issues, gets that property cleaned up, title looking pretty, and make sure that it closes out and the deal is done. So what do you say to people who say, I don't want to lock up that deal until I've seen this or I've seen that? Can you explain why you feel comfortable locking up a deal when you haven't seen it or you haven't done a lot of the due diligence yet?

I feel like for us because we know our area. So if you were to ask me, I do think for us it comes down to just experience. And so let me say this. Would I be running that approach if I was brand new to the business? if I had to because the environment required me to and I had no choice, I would do it. But normally what we would say under normal circumstances is build up some experience. Know your area.

We live and do deals in Dallas, Fort Worth. You can throw us an address in a city and the street. And we can probably tell you off the top of our head what the value of that deal is work, if that makes sense. So, well, for us, that just comes, I think, with just experience of doing so many deals and having a comfort level. Again, there's a risk that we're taking there, but it's minimized because of experience. When you lock up the deal, do you also have step in the contract that allows you to back out?

Yeah, I think that's the same thing. Of course, always. I mean, we're utilizing our three-page contract written by our attorneys that work in our favor. Absolutely. I get people all the time being like, well, when you make an offer, what if you get two of your offers accepted? Because I say make a lot of offers. I'm like, what if you get too accepted? I'm like, it's not like you put an offer in and you're automatically like, you know,

now there's the guy with a gun to your head saying, if you don't buy this, I will pull the trigger. Like, you get, you get the back out if you need to. I mean, I don't like to. And if you got two deals under contract that you analyzed, like, that's a good problem to have, not a bad one. I use the analogy of dating, like buying a house or getting married. You could date multiple, multiple people at one time. If you do it the right way, then yeah. I mean, not if you're serious, right? Like, not if this is my girlfriend, but if you're like, I'm getting to know this person, because I want to know if we can get married. I mean, we don't really do that that way now. but for a long time, remember that phrase going steady?

That was like a step in the process. It went from I'm dating a couple different people to I like this one. I'm just going to date this one. We're exclusive. It's kind of like that. Yeah, we're exclusive. There you go. What we would say now is I'm talking.

We're talking. You could be talking to several people. That's like negotiating with a seller, right? We're going back and forth. Putting somebody in contract is not getting married to them. You can get out of that situation, just like you can get out of a boyfriend, girlfriend, situation much easier than once you've actually closed. And I think where a lot of newer investors get hung up and they don't take action is they think if I write an offer, that's a marriage proposal.

And I need to know way more about this deal. I got to review this thing super, super deep. And while you're waiting, somebody else goes and asks that girl out to be their girlfriend and you get nothing. And so what Chris is saying here is the most important part. And I tell this to my clients all the time when we're buying houses is we get it under contract before somebody else does. Right. The minute you put a house in contract, all you've done as a buyer is eliminate all your competition. The other guys or girls that were trying to date that other person, they're out of the game.

You get to slow down, take your time, get to know them, decide, do I really want to marry you? Or did you just look it on the outside and it's got more problems? It's actually bad for the seller when they actually go into contract because they don't really have a lot of power. They can't back out of the deal with the buyer in the way most contracts are written. The buyer's only one they can back out. Sellers can't ask for more money if it appraises high. They can't say, wow, that inspection came out super clean. You owe me another five grand.

that was better than most. It's better for the buyer when you go into contract, not for the seller. The seller loses the ability to find other clients. And that's why people like Chris can move so decisively because they understand that. I want to lock this thing up, get all my competition out of the way. Then I'll put the time into actually, you know, seriously dating this person and seeing what I've got. I agree. It's funny. You said that the very first advice I got into real estate because I had that same fear about getting deals under contract. And you said, and I'll never forget, this guy, this coach would tell me the same thing all the time. Chris, just lock it up. Just lock it up. I mean, I can just hear him in my head, quit overthinking, just lock it up and then start to make

decisions after you lock it up. Yeah, this is, so I've been teaching these webinars, you know, on Bigger Pockets every week now for like four years. And I talk a lot about this lapse funnel, LAPS, like every real estate investor in the world does this funnel. Just some recognize it and some don't. Like you have to have a way of getting leads, LAPS, got to get leads coming in. You've got to run those numbers and determine how much you can pay for the lead, like, you know, pay for the property. Then you have to pursue it. Now, sometimes that's an offer. Sometimes that's a conversation on the phone. Sometimes it's a formal written offer. But you got to pursue it because you're never going to get anything. So this is the point. People always say, I can't find any deals. And so the question I

always ask them. And I want everyone to hear listening right now who says, I can't find any deals. You know, there's a quarter million people listen to this. And I'm sure half of them are saying that. Ask yourself, how many offers did you make last week? Like, and if the answer is zero, we found your And then usually it's like, okay, well, I don't have any deals at off front. Okay, well, how many did you analyze to figure out how much you can pay? I didn't analyze any. I didn't have any leads. Okay, well, how many leads came in?

Well, none. Okay, well, now we have your problem. You can, pretty diagnose a problem pretty simply. And so, Chris, what I'm hearing you say today, I mean, like, you've got a very, like, I want to get to leads here in a second because I'm fascinated by this idea of what you're doing. But you get leads coming in. Your team looks at them.

They process. When I say analyze, that's what I'm talking about is going through this, this assembly line of due diligence and, and, and, and, you know, analysis and bringing up over the team and all that and then moving it to making an offer trying to get it locked up because if you do that enough if you're consistent with that the final part of the lapse funnel is as success you're going to get success eventually now i do want to give one a bit of encouragement to everyone listening you said you said one of the reasons you feel comfortable making offers and being able to do that is because you've just got a massive amount of experience

and so there's people listening to it's going well i don't have a lot of experience this is why everyone listening needs to like start analyzing deals in your market like pick your market where are you going to invest? So at least you can start building that experience right now. And then maybe set a goal. I'm going to analyze five deals every day. And I don't care where the deals come from. Just go to realtor.com or Zillow and get them.

It doesn't matter. I'm going to analyze five deals every single day in my market for the next, let's call it, three months. If you did that, you'd have analyzed 100 deals. Is that going to help you feel more or less comfortable when it comes time to making an offer? You'll be like way more comfortable.

So like, don't use that as an excuse everybody of like, well, who's got yours of experience. So I can't do that. You can build the experience. especially right now when most people are sitting at home, start analyzing deals, start getting near your market, call real estate agents and property managers and just become an expert at your market. All right. Off my soapbox. Yeah. And I had a fix and flip coach early on that we worked with. And you want to know what the first homework was that he gave us. He gave us an insane amount of

deals to do nothing but analyze and walk. There you go. And it was literally a quota that we had to meet. And it wasn't because we were going to buy him. He just wanted us analyze. analyzing deals. Yeah, I love it. It was smart enough to understand that we didn't have to wait years to become experience. And I hope the audience listening right now will grasp onto what we're saying. And that is accelerate your learning, speed up your process. And you can be experienced at analyzing deals actually pretty quickly if you put the pedal to the metal on this and start doing your due diligence. Yeah.

Years do not equate experience. That's such a good point. You made out. repetition determines experience. Agreed. So I had this talk with my assistant. She's awesome, Krista. And she got her license,

but she always feels like, well, I don't know as much as the other realtors in the office. And it hurts your confidence. They've been a realtor for 10, 12 years. I've only been doing this with you for three years. And I finally was like, okay, Krista, here's what I need to understand. The average realtor in our office closes like four deals a year,

maybe five if they have a good year. Over that 10 years, they've done 50 deals. Okay. We do that in one year. you've seen 150 deals come across your desk. I mean, this year we were going to do like 300 deals. It was going awesome for Corona hit. But you've seen three times the amount of deals that they've seen in your three years with me.

You have way more experience with them. You know way more about what can go wrong. Your confidence is based on the wrong thing. It's based on years when you should be looking at repetitions. And that's true for everything. You want to be a great martial artist and get to Black Belt fast. If you go every single day, that's different than the person who says, I've been training for eight years and they go twice a month.

It's not the same. When I was at jujitsu, a couple months ago before I shut down, I asked the guy, I was like, how long have you been, how long you've been doing this? He goes, well, that's the wrong question. That's what his point was, it doesn't matter how many years I've been doing these. Like, I've actually been doing it for 20 years, but I took like 15 of those off. And so I'm nowhere near as good as I should have been. And I was like, oh, that's a really good point.

I shouldn't ask people how many years they've been in it. It's, you know, that's why we have the belt system, right? That's exactly right. And that's why I tell people in long distance real estate investing when you're looking for a realtor. You want one that sells a lot of houses. And sometimes they don't respond to your email as fast. And sometimes you have to deal with their assistant. But if they do it a lot, they're way more likely to be good at it than someone who says, I have 15 years of experience and you look it up and they sold two to three houses a year for 15 years. They're not

going to be nearly as good. Is that the same thing that you feel like you've seen in your business, Chris? Agreed. What's the whole saying you don't have 10 years experience. You just have one year experience 10 times. Yeah. That's good. Did you know your house gets bored when you leave? I can't actually prove that, but it probably misses out on the action, the footsteps, the late night fridge raids.

Yeah, when you're gone, your place is basically on unpaid leave. It's sitting there in the dark thinking, I could be contributing right now. Your side room wants a side hustle. Even your Wi-Fi is like, we could be networking. You're on vacation, spending money. like it's a sport while your staircase at home is fully capable of sending your income upwards. Here's the twist.

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that matter for your bottom line. Things like occupancy, delinquency, and net promoter score. And they have the results to prove it. Go to mine.co slash show me to see how mine performs and get your first month free, which is much cheaper than learning the hard way. So I love that we covered like what goes on in the funnel, because I always like to break

things down into smaller pieces, right? And every business is two parts. It's a lead and it's a funnel. If you get leads into your funnel, like Brandon just explained, out will come revenue. You can improve in two ways. You can get better at how you run through the funnel, more efficient. Those are leadership skills. Those are hiring skills. Those are efficiency skills, right? Like what CRM you're using, the flow charts, that kind of stuff. or you can bring in more leads. That's the other thing, or maybe better leads. So can you share with us?

You've told us about the funnel part. Now tell us how are you driving leads to this business for your team to convert? Yeah, there's a few pillars we have, but I'll give you the one that has worked for us for like nine years now. Think about that. We go through different pieces of lead generation because sometimes they work for a period of time. They might get oversaturated because of competition. the pricing might go up and down depending on your area. That would be example of like payper click might get expensive.

But we've had one that we have stayed with tried and true now for all those years. And that is radio to find discounted properties. And people, here's the first people saying like, radio, are you serious? Like isn't that old school? Hasn't that been around forever? And I say absolutely. But the application of radio for us to find investment opportunities to, to build our rental portfolio or to fix and flip is literally virtually no competition on radio.

And people go, well, who listens to the radio? Doesn't everyone just download Spotify on their phone, right? I listen to Pandora. And I have to remind people that you are not your demographic. Your demographic is primarily over the age of 50, and their habit is still twofold. They watch TV, and yes, they still listen to the radio when they get in the car. And so we love radio and it's worked really, really well for us. So what does your ad, what does the radio ad say?

And I think my producer Kevin said he actually had a recording of one. Can we play that? It's one thing to be stuck in your house due to COVID-19. It's another to be stuck with your house. We have good news for homeowners listening throughout the area. My home sold is still buying houses in North Texas. More importantly, we offer sellers a completely virtual selling process that maintains social distancing standards. sell your home now call my home sold at 4669 that's awesome that's a really good ad i love i love the

southern accent well you want to know why because it's being advertised on a country station yeah oh funny so now brandon is the best marketer that i've ever met in my life i'd like to have i'm going to put brandon on the spot breakdown of why you think this is a good ad or what would have to be changed to make it better that's funny man well the southern accent things really stood out to me right it's just like I'm one of you guys I'm like it's not like some like yeah I don't know yuppie New England like voice

it's a all the New England people now just quit listening to the podcast no I mean the whole thing was like benefit driven I mean you're right it's not like feature driven it's not like we're awesome and we buy lots of houses and we do this it's like here's what it's in it for you and we're to maintain social distancing which is everyone's fear so anyway I'm that

I mean that's like the thing that's start out to me is just yeah it's benefit driven it's hey I'm this person. It's short and to the point. Yeah. I think people to go too long. But I don't know. How did you guys come up with that ad? I mean, like what was your thought behind it? Well, yeah. So when COVID-19 hit, you have to shift. You have to adapt, right? So we talked earlier about adapting everything from a system and process standpoint or a funnel as we were talking about it over to virtual. Well, now all the marketing that we need to do, we need to communicate two things, right? Yes,

we're still here doing business, we're open, right? The public needs to know that. And the second thing is, they need to know that we have shifted to in order to maintain social distancing and we have a solution for you to still get what you need by running it through the current environment that we're in. And so I don't care if it's radio or whatever you're doing. Those are the two messages that needed to be driven very quickly. Do you get better results from country radio? or is there a certain genre that tends to give you better results? Yeah, so it depends on your area. So the U.S. can be broken down into three demographics when it comes to the radio.

And that depends on where you're located in the U.S. So demographic one is over the age of 50. Number two is what we call rule, right? So you heard a country station. And then number three is what we call your urban demographic. So depending on where you're at, you might have one or two demographics. In Dallas-Four Worth, we actually. have all three. So we advertise on country, we advertise on like old school rock, right,

that our grandparents would listen to. And then we advertise on urban stations. And so we actually go after all three demographics in Dallas Ford. Weird question. Were you able to get any information on which demographic tends to have the highest percentage of homeowners? I'm curious of like country music listeners tend to own homes more than other radio station listeners. Yeah. So we're, this is very data have driven, we're not just coming in and going, hey, I live in a country area, so I'm advertised on a country station. We actually go in and pull data from the stations. A lot of people don't understand this. There's three sets of reports that you can pull that are really important that let you know how many people are listening and how many people actually own homes versus

rent them. So these are things that you can actually know based on reports. And so what I would tell you, again, generally speaking, usually people over the age of 50 are the ones that have the highest home ownership. But it can vary station to station. So that's why we don't choose stations blindly. Definitely when we help people do this as well, we want to make sure we get in and analyze each station and the data to make sure the home ownership is there. So it's station to station.

There's a lot of variables that can do that. So you're looking for a lot of George Strait and a little less Florida Georgia line, that older generation. Yes, exactly. I know this is going to be a ton of variables as well that will, that will, yeah, you can't answer this straight out. But what does it cost for a radio ad? I mean, what was it cost?

What's a lead cost because of that? I mean, yeah. So I'll give you the exact numbers, what I call the NOS numbers, right? So the first reason that people have cleared away from radio, because here's the question that everyone's asking. If radio is so good, why more people not doing it? That's the real question that everyone asked. It's based on assumptions.

We already hit first assumption, and that is, I don't think that I don't listen to the radio, so no one else that I'm selling houses do. You're wrong. You're looking at yourself as the demographic. The second thing is I assume that it's not affordable. That in order to do radio, I got to start with a budget of like $10,000 a month. That is not true. Your budget for radio, even in a major market like Dallas-Fort Worth, starts off at $1,000 to $2,000 a month.

That's any market and people are usually spending more on that than direct mail, right? The very first station that I bought in Dallas was $1,500 total. And that got us on our way to start doing more and more radio. So it's very affordable. And then what people really want to know is what is the dollar per dollar return. So let me break that down if somebody's listening on that. You have a lot of metrics you could look at cost per lead, cost per acquisition. those are going to vary depending on people, right? But what we care about is what comes out the back in.

So we talk about dollar per dollar return. For every dollar I spend, how many dollars I give back. A simple analogy is for every dollar I put in the Coke machine, how many dollars does it spit back out at me? For us in Dallas-Fort Worth and for anyone that's spending over five grand a month on radio, it lands somewhere between three to four dollars, which is great. That's solid. Every dollar I'm spending, I'm getting $3,000. three to four dollars back. For us, in Dallas, Fort Worth, it's $3.50 is where we sit. And if you're spending just a couple grand on radio, you're probably your dollar per dollar return, which has been reported back from us, from other people that have set this up, is they're getting $5 to $7 back. And the reason that's higher because the law of averages is working in

their favor because they're spending a smaller amount of the budget. But those are good, healthy returns. But here's the most important thing. It sticks there. It's consistent. It stays. It go up and down and that's why we love radio because we can depend on it. You know, in 2018, we got hammered on direct mail. We were getting a one to four return and in 2018 it dropped down to a one to two in Dallas, Fort Worth because you could walk into a house and see 50, 60 postcards stacked on somebody's table. And you're in trouble when you're competing with that many people around marketing. And that's why I love about radio. There's virtually no competition. Yeah. Yeah. Have you, have you, have you, have you,

test a TV at all. Have you gone that route? Yeah, we're testing TV now and working on really trying to crack the code on it. We've cracked the code on radio. There's a ton of variables you have to answer, like, how long should your spot be, what stations should you be on, when should you advertise? There's a lot there. And so we figured that out. And right now we're trying to do the same thing on TV. And what I will tell anyone listening is there's definitely a lot of overlap between TV and radio. And so I believe there's a force multiplier between the two for sure. Well, one thing that intrigues me about radio and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but you know, when you buy a radio pack, an ad package, you get multiple like, you know,

it plays over and over and over throughout the month, right? Like you get a number of, it's not like one quick ad for a couple of grand, right? No, no. So when I tell you this, I'll break down the numbers. When we say you can come in and own a station for a thousand to two thousand. What that means is when we launch onto a station, we launch a hundred ads per month on a station, right? That's five ads. ads per day, five days a week. So when I say my first station was $1,500, I was running a hundred ads. And that means, yes, do the math, that my 60 second spot was $15. People are blown away. They're like, we didn't know that you could buy radio. But if you understand how to buy,

let me put it this way. We buy our radio, like we buy our real estate, we buy it at a deep discounted price. And if you want to make money, on a deal, you have to buy it right. If you buy it wrong, I don't care what you do on the back end, you're probably going to lose money. And the same is true with radio. If you get that part right in the beginning, then everything behind it, the ROI, the cost for league, cost for acquisition, will all fall into place and it'll become a very profitable marketing channel for finding deals. So you have any tips on how you can get discounted radio ads? Yeah. So generally speaking, what we do,

is we go in and we look at the reports of a station and we base our decision on what we're going to buy that station at or the amount based on those stats. So let me kind of break it down this way. Here's a better way to say it. Each station has reports and the value of the station is hidden in those reports. And if you can get access to the reports when you come in and I negotiate against your station, I don't ask you what I can advertise on your station for. I tell you. You you. And I tell you because I'm looking at your reports, which is fundamentally a way of getting in and pulling down the pants of the radio station to see really what they have at play in the sense of the listenership, how many people own homes, all of those type of things. And we do a mathematical

formula that dictates what price we buy at. And that is a very different conversation than just calling up a sales rep going, hey, I want to advertise on the radio station. Can you send me over a packet? they're going to slaughter you. They're going to sell you in retail. I guarantee you you'll be paying three to four times the amount that we're paying for the same at. Guarantee. Yeah. I've heard that from multiple people who have done different radio ads for different business over the years is that if you just call them up and ask them, you're paying retail and you can get massive discounts. Yeah. But a couple more benefits, I think are really important that around radio that I love if you were to ask me, right? Why get excited about it? Number one, celebrity status. You tell me another

marketing channel that makes you a local celebrity. You don't get that through bandit signs. You don't get that through text, blasting, ringless voicemail, everything that everyone is doing to try to locate deals. You have celebrity status. That allows you to beat out the competition in your area. Because if I go head to head with you and I have celebrity status and the seller doesn't even know who you are, then we're going to beat you out. And the other thing that comes behind that is what we call instant credibility. Here's the assumption that the listener makes. If you're advertising on radio, then you must know what you're talking about. There's the automatic assumption, which gives you instant credibility. So this is what I love for the new investor, right? Someone's new to the game and

they're like, how can I get in and compete against the big boys? Launch your radio, you can probably afford $1,000 to $2,000 a month and know that as soon as you're heard, they're going to assume that you're an expert, even if you're a couple months into the game. Isn't that great? That's awesome. Yeah. I have a couple questions. What are the name of the reports that you're asking for? Yeah.

So we look at different reports, like an example of one would be a ranker, right? Which shows you like the listenership or size. So that's an example of one report. Another report you can look at would be like hour by hour, which shows you the traffic and so forth. So those are some examples of particular specific reports that we're looking at. Great question. This is probably a stupid question, but I feel like I've never known this my entire

life and I should know this. Radio just goes out. Radio is not internet. Where internet, I can tell, I mean, I can tell exactly how many people right now are on the bigger pockets website. You know, there's, you know, whatever, thousands of people to the person I can tell and where they're at, where what their IP address even is. Like, I mean, like, internet's crazy. Radio, I mean, I just trying to dial on a on a car. So how does a radio station know or do they know? Is I mean, is this, are they digitally advanced as well? They know. There's a program that they subscribe to, which, okay, I want you to think of like the MLS system, right? So the MLS system is there to collect data for all of us as real estate people that need to

understand what's happening in particular areas. So the radio world has its own MLS, which is called Nielsen. And what that does is it collects all of the data. So you can know exactly how many people listen, when they tune in. They can tell you that more people tune in at this hour than this hour. I mean, it's amazing how far you can break down the data. So let me say this. This is not a spray and prey approach.

We are not buckshotting. We are coming in and we are choosing a different demographic and we are targeting that demographic based on reports, based on when we know behaviorally they're listening, based on to the type of music that that person listens to. And we know that that's what makes like Facebook so powerful is how much you can niche it, you can actually do some really good niching with radio, which I don't think a lot of people understand. Yeah, that's fascinating.

So just kind of the tie-in one point we made earlier, and I'll make it again here. Like, you became, not only did you become an expert at your market and you understand every street in every area and every, you know, like demographic within your market, you also became an expert at a marketing channel. And my guess is that changes over the year

since you've been in real estate now. You've probably changed the different things. You mentioned, you know, direct mail, and then you got killed in that. But you sought to become an expert and right now you're choosing to be an expert in radio, which I think is awesome. And so again, to make that point I made earlier, if you're listening to this going, well, I can't compete with that.

Why not just choose a marketing strategy that maybe you think is unique in your area, you can be the best at, and then become an expert at that. Like, you should know what the word ranker means if you want to do radio, right? So my question then for you is, how does somebody become an expert at radio? Let me actually step back because you said something that's really important. And I'm speaking to people that are newer to the business, right, that are listening, right now. The biggest mistake I see made, which was the first mistake I made from a marketing standpoint, is we come in and we try to do like seven to 10 different marketing strategies at the

same time. And what we end up doing, honestly, I'll just say it, is we end up half-assing them. And my deal is you should never have really more than about two to four pillars for marketing in your business. And my deal is when you start one, you don't get to earn the right to go launch another marketing channel until you become an expert at that one. Yeah. But people say, well, it doesn't work or that's the I see this all time. And what people end up becoming in the marketing world are bouncers. They bounce from thing to thing and they're throwing off the vista.

Everyone works. You can build a business off of coal calling. You can build it off of bandit signs. You can, I mean, it's crazy. I know people that have done this on the retail side. if you want to talk retail referrals. I see people that build an entire brokerage off of referrals. So they all work.

And so if I would tell anyone, the secret is learning to focus and get rid of all the chasing of the shiny objects around you and earn the ride and become great and an expert at it. That is so, so powerful. I want everyone to rewind the last like two minutes and just listen to that again like every single morning when you wake up. Because like this is like the biggest,

I mean, I talk with a lot of investors, especially a lot of new investors. And I would say this doesn't apply just to marketing, but people are bouncers with everything, right? Like they want to get into flipping. And then it's like, well, I think wholesaling will be better. And then maybe I'll do rentals and then Burr and then vacation rentals will be good. And they jump from thing to thing to thing.

Or I'm going to do an Amazon business. No, I'm going to go sell Mary Kay products door to door. And I'm going to go do Tupperware. And I'm going to do wholesale. And then I'm going to do this and they jump. And the fact is, like it all works. Like you said, I love that you said that. It all works.

But it doesn't work if you try to work at all. So like, you know, I use the analogy, and I did it at BPCon last year. I'll probably do it again when I talk this year because I think it's just a good analogy. It's like you're building a bridge from an island you're on right now to another island. And the more bridges you try to build, the more you're spread thin and your bridge will never hit that other side. So if it takes 100 or even a thousand hours of research and testing and trying certain marketing techniques, but you spend an hour on this one, then you go try an hour on this one and an hour on this one, like you're never going to get that

bridge across there where either somebody else is running and managing your bridge for you or you've just made us the promised land and you're just retired now on a beach in Mexico like some people. To sum it up, the secret of concentration is elimination, right? Eliminating everything about around me and concentrating on the one to two key things. Man, how applicable is that in all of our lives, not just in marketing. Yeah. Yeah, it's so good.

So good. Do you have any final tips? I mean, I love that point. But how does somebody say no? to all the great things that are out there and all the different. You listen to a podcast and you're like, that sounds fun. And I want to try this marketing technique. I'm going to try this thing.

And how have you learned to harness that part of your mind that just wants to go and do everything? Yeah. That's actually a really good question because I struggled that. I tell you, I used to hate going to like masterminds and events. And my teammate did too because early in the day I would come back and go, all right, here's everything. My team is like, oh, here we go with Chris again, right? He's to literally launch 10 different changes in the business.

I think a couple things, if I were to break it down. We said it earlier, and that is building the right principles in your life. Like, I really learned and actually began to believe in the power of focus. And I don't think there's a person not listening that doesn't understand the importance of the ability to focus. If you've not heard that, I guarantee you've heard it 50 times. But the deal is, have you really come to the belief system that that's true? And I think that that comes via pain. I mean, how much money have I lost? How many times have I come in and changed everything in my business when it wasn't necessary to do it? And that cost me money and that cost me pain. So I think

that that's one thing right there. I think the second thing, which is really important, is counsel, whether that's counsel within your team, whether you're a lone solo investor right now, and that's relationships that you build around you, whether you're in a community like the one you're listening to right now. What keeps us on track and not getting distracted is making decisions and funneling them through a few key people that we trust that are always checking us. Because when we're left to ourselves to make decisions, that's when we get in trouble. Yeah. That's so good. I did a webinar for bigger pockets last week. And I made this point that you could do everything right in real estate and in your journey, like all the investor journey.

Like you could do everything right. You could get the leads right. You could do the negotiation. But the fact is that most people just give up because they lack like they lack focus or persistence to after you get through things. And so I offered like three suggestions that have worked for me. And I'm guessing they've worked for you as well. I mean like number one like is having like an accountability group of some kind, whether it's a mastermind group of like, you know, three, four, or five people. I've done a number of those over the years have been huge for me. The second thing I've done is like journaling. That's why we have the intention journal of bigger pockets. There's a lot of other journals out there if you don't want to use the BP one,

but just some kind of like daily habit. Like every single morning, I write down my three goals that I'm working on. So then when I get distracted, I want to go to something else, every morning I get recentered onto that. And the third thing would be like a performance coach. Some kind of like both David and I have been huge on performance coaching where it's, I'm not talking about like the $50,000 or $100,000 guru who's charging you for his, you know, CD package. I'm talking about like somebody who every week or every other week is basically doing what the accountability group does or the mastermind group, but he's doing it just with you. And it's like, hey man, last week you said you were going to do this. Why didn't you do that? So I mean, those three things that you've used or

do you have any other suggestions as well? You literally are like speaking my heart. Everything you said is literally applicable in my life all the way from the group setting down to the one-on-one. And I tell you, the moments of my life where I was cheap and decided not to pay for a coach for a period of time, Right? Where I didn't renew to be a part of that particular mastermind or community. If I look back, those are the times I slowly unraveled. Yep. Because I would just, again, I think it's, you know, one of the biggest problems we have

is entrepreneurs is, and I want to speak to this because I think this is really happening right now. You want to really talk about what I think the biggest challenge in the entrepreneurial world is this is when the crap hits the fan. we isolate as entrepreneurs. We go and we hide and we want to deal in the corner with these things by ourselves because we have fear and we have shame and we have all of these things. And if you're listening and you're not plugged in with someone somewhere doing something

right now and you're alone, it's dangerous right now. And so this is why I feel like community is going to win above all, particularly with what we're going on right now with COVID-19. man, entrepreneurs isolated. It's the biggest problem I see. And you want to ask, okay, so what happens? Let's get real raw about that, right? It comes out sideways, and now you're getting into substance abuse, alcoholism,

all the addictions that you see are rampant in the entrepreneurial community. That comes when people isolate. Yeah, so true. David, you have any thoughts on this? I know you also are huge on this performance coach stuff and communities and mastermind. I mean, you and I are in Goabundance. And I know, Chris, you have a group as well. Well, Chris, what's it called?

Yeah, the multiplier's brotherhood. And so it's about the internal side, right? It's about the connection about men having each other's back regardless of what happens. It's powerful. I know you're in Go Abundance. It's the same philosophy. It's so powerful. So, David, what do you think on this stuff?

I think that one thing when Chris was talking earlier about the mastermind he's in before we started this group with a couple guys we knew, they're all house flippers, they're all investors. There's some of them are established. Some of them are just getting started. But ideas travel virally just like viruses do. Ideas, one idea can get into a group. All 100 people or 50 people realize, oh my God, that's a great idea.

They all use it. And then they all spread it to the people that are in their world to, right? When people here on the Bigger Pockets podcast, you or me or one of our guests say something that sounds brilliant, they tend to attribute that brilliance to the person who said it. but there's 99% chance that person got it from somebody else. Amen. Amen. Nothing original. Right.

And so we end up looking much smarter than we probably really are because we were smart enough to get into a group of smart people, which some people may say is privileged, but it's a privilege is open to anybody that gets into the group. And then they all hear the idea. And then eventually everyone does the idea and it stops being effective and someone comes up with a new idea and boom everyone benefits. The difference is nobody is smart enough to come up with all 50 ideas on their own. all it takes is one out of the 50 having one good idea that year and all the other 49 benefit from it.

And then one of the other 49 has the next good idea and then everyone benefits from that. And it amplifies the results that you get. This is why masterminds are really big. The second way that they help people a lot is like Chris said, there needs to be a consensus when there's a decision to be made in the business because we don't know our own blind spots. I don't recognize my weaknesses. I don't know the way I rub people the wrong way. Brandon doesn't know the areas where he could be doing better,

but I look at it like, oh, if you could just change that one thing, you'd be crushing it in this area. Well, when you have people that care about you or even if they don't, they just committed to your success because you're in a group, they can point those things out and they can give you advice for how they would handle it, which is what you need because the way you look at the problem is wrong. You have a blind spot there. You don't see it the right way.

That's what's been super big for me is the performance coach that I have will help point out this is why you're having trouble hiring. And then my accountability group will, hey, have you fixed it? Have you fixed it? Have you fixed it? Are you still doing it? And it's very difficult to stay the same when you've got that much people around you that are pushing you.

When you isolate, you tend to just beat yourself up. You're telling yourself thoughts like I suck. I'm failing. This isn't working. But you're putting on a smile to everybody else, especially if you're promoting yourself on social media. You're always going to be smiling and you're always putting that, today is a new day, a new year, new me.

I'm going to go crush it. And then you never do anything. That always happens. And then it's double bad because you went and wrote this check on social media that you can't cash and you don't want to tell anybody that. I know there's a lot of people that are hearing this and realizing, oh, that's normal. Everyone's going through that. Yeah, everyone's going through it.

The ones that are successful, the ones that get out of their own way, they don't self-isolate and they get into a group of other people that can help push them through that. Can I ask you guys a question? When this whole COVID-19 hit, how many Zoom calls or community calls did you guys jump into as the immediate response to get help and guidance from people in your network. Like I found like the first week or two weeks, that's all I was in was Zoom after Zoom group after group. And that was the highest and best use of my time to get as much brainpower that we had access to at that point to come up with these ideas. Did you guys find yourself doing the

same thing and you realize how valuable to have that network was? Yeah, very much. I mean, my team and I, now. I mean, like, we were already, we're already digital anyway, but we've just picked up the pace and done it even more. Same with bigger pockets, like the company itself, like that everyone's now no longer at the office. And so like, yeah, it's just, it's constant Zoom calls. And it is, it's super helpful. I think, uh, just, just learning, I guess to rely on one another, like on that, like, yeah, because you have to trust people a little bit more. Like, I feel like when everyone's working from home and everyone's working their own thing. But that's been super powerful as well and just in getting through a tough time together. You kind of like, again, I said this last

week, but difficulty in crisis like that forges like change in life, just like you have a heart attack and you become a different kind of person. I think it's kind of the same thing here, but we're doing it as a company and as a group and as a bunch of other people. And that's why I've been pumping out videos and doing interviews on Instagram live. Same thing. It's been huge, man. Well, I want to go one more place before we get out of today's show because I know it's a long show already, but you're managing a team. How many team members do you have in your company now? With the investment side, I think we're around 15. Okay.

Somewhere around 15. So how do you manage this? I mean, especially being from living in Mexico, you got teams in Dallas. And I'm curious of like when I say how do you manage it. It's not just like, you know, where is everyone located kind of thing?

But like is there an investment of a management philosophy you follow? Is there a book like, you know, we do this system, you know, or you made up your own maybe and this is when we meet. This is how we meet. This is our goals. what does that look like in terms of getting everybody align and moving in the right direction and have an accountability within your company? Yeah, there's two systems that we've built our entire

company off of. On the operational side, not the sell side, right? We run EOS, which comes from the book traction. EOS stands for the entrepreneurial operating system. What it does is it just gives us a flow of setting priorities and what types of meetings we should have. I think you're about ready to hold up the book. Boom, there it is. So I really do believe you have to have an operational model to be able to do that. On the sales side, the model that we run is called four disciplines of execution. He's about to pull out that man. You're a man. After my own heart, dude. Look at you. I run two up. I run two in my business as well. It's four DX and are you running the exact same ones. Yeah, we do the same thing. Those two. That's all. I feel like that's all we need. Yeah, four disciplines is on the

sales side and the other one's on the operation side. We are the same thing. That's exactly what we do. Those have been perfect for us to be able to do that. Now, I do want to speak to management as a whole. Here's what people don't realize about the virtual world and I think management in general. People that are hatched or birthed in the virtual world, meaning they've been in the virtual world for a long period of time.

I have found those people normally to be more self-driven, self-man. motivated and self-discipline. They do not require the structure that someone coming into the office does. And there are people that do well outside of structure and those that need it in order to be able to work and to get things done. So what I would tell people is as we began to hire people out of the virtual world that had already been there, we really didn't have to do much management at all. And I also believe just getting down to the overall principle, talented people do not need to be managed. I remember one of my coaches used to tell me, I'll never forget it. He used to say, Chris, if I have to manage you, I don't need you.

He said, that's what I tell the people in my staff all the time. And he's right. If I have someone in my company that I'm managing, for any particular reason, managing to be on time, whatever that looks like, they don't belong in my company. Now, it's taken us a long time to get there. I made a lot of bad hires to get the type of team that I have right now. Again, I've been doing this now for 15 years. So if you were to say the thing I'm most proud of is the fact that we have self-driven, self-managed people that literally make almost all the decisions in the company without me. And for me as a leader, I mean, isn't that really the goal to raise up leaders to empower them to be able to run something? thing without you. I love what I heard someone say one time. The most selfish decision a leader can make is to make a business dependent on them. And the success of your business is how long it would run if you stopped working in it today. That's the world and kind of philosophy that I live by. And so that's why we work so hard to create the team that we have. You know, I heard my neck's going

to hurt after this interview because I'm just nodding so much. I'm just like, yes. I wish that the people listening could understand how impactful that is to those of us that are running the business because I think most people that want a change in their life, they look to real estate as the magic bullet that's going to fix it for them. And it's never a magic bullet. For some people, they can do better in the world of real estate than in their real job, but that's probably a lower percentage that most people think. I think what motivates a lot of people to get in real estate investing is they're not happy where they're at. And the problem is if you're not happy where you're at because it's a toxic environment, you will do better in another one. But there's a very good

chance that you're not happy where you're at because of your own attitude or your own mindset or like you just said, Chris, that you're not driven. You're not self-motivated. I hear a lot of employees say, I don't know, I'm just not motivated to work here. They just don't make me really want it that much, right? And when you were mentioning, you said something about showing up to work on time. And I thought, when someone doesn't come to work on time unless a manager makes them, whether it's by punishing them or giving them an incentive, you're basically transferring the responsibility of getting to work on time off of yourself and onto the manager. And then I started thinking, well, that happens with like everything. I don't want to make my calls. I don't want to produce. I don't want to give my best. It's somebody else's

responsibility to make me want it. It's not my own responsibility. And that's why they become a drag on us because they're taking everything off of themselves and putting it onto the company. And now the company is bearing the burden of what should be coming from them. And so the number one piece of advice to give people that want financial freedom is that you probably don't need to look for a different opportunity. You need to look for a different attitude first. If you're not already crushing it where you're at and hitting a ceiling where there's nowhere to go, you're probably not ready for the next jump.

Now, this isn't applied to everybody, but that's what I've noticed is there's so many people to say I want another environment, another opportunity, another thing to learn. And those are typically the people that like you guys said earlier start one thing and they don't finish it. They move on to the next, right? They don't stick through it. You're ready to move when you've already done everything that you possibly can within the job that you have.

And you're being held back because either the like you just said, Chris, the owner says, I don't want another leader here. It's dependent on me. This person's now a threat. Or they don't have more opportunity to give you. That's when you should be making the next jump.

If people could just get in our heads and understand how badly our businesses are looking for the person who will come in and give their very best and run with it, like the Ryan Murdoch that came in and changed. Brandon's life. I really think there'd be an epiphany that just went on across the world of, oh, I have way more control over my financial future than what I think. If I gave it my all to somebody else, they're not going to take advantage of me. They're going to give me more opportunity. They're going to give me more chances to make more money. They're dying for somebody to step in here and do a better job and not be dependent on us to like take their hand and hold them and say,

this is how you hold your pencil, right? There's, I guess I, I know I beat this, this drum a lot, But it's because so many people come to me on social media saying, how do I get out of the situation I'm in? I want more opportunity, but they're not crushing it in the situation they're already in. And I know when I put them in a new situation, they're going to have the same problems that they're having right now. Ben Kinney had a comment that nobody's a great leader of mediocre talent. And it was very similar to what Chris just said, where I think you said, if I have to lead you, I don't want you. Right. Like the right business.

I don't need you. Very good. If I have to manage you. Yeah, not lead. If I have to manage you, I don't need you. The right business will offer you the opportunity and give you the tools that you need to be successful. But they're not going to like take your hands and swing the axe for you. That part is your job.

Yeah, so good. Well, dude, Chris, this has been fantastic, really, really good stuff. We're going to get out of here in just a few minutes. But before we do, I wanted to get our last segment of this show. It's time for the famous four. All right. It's time for the famous four questions we ask every yes, every week. But before we hear your responses, let's hear from others on what's going on this week on the

Bigger Pockets podcast network. Hey there, Brandon and Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast listeners. This is Jay Scott, your co-hosts for the Bigger Pockets business podcast. This week on the business podcast, we have Nigel Geisinger with us. He is both a real estate expert and a business expert, and he's figured out how to put both of those passions together to create a business model that is absolutely unstoppable. and one that works tremendously well in the current economic environment. So check us out on the Bigger Pockets Business Podcast this week.

Now, back to your famous four. All right. So make sure you guys are listening to those other podcasts. They are fantastic, full of good ideas that actually help real estate investors as well, like the money and the business and like obviously the rookie show. These things help you as a real estate investor. So make sure you guys are listening to them as well. And now, Chris, number one, do you have a current?

favorite real estate related book? Yes, a book called The Outsiders. And so it's a book on some of the top CEOs in the world and how they were able to look at themselves as chief investment officers. And that's just a fancy way of saying they understood the value in building a business and cash flow and how to reinvest that back into the market, whether that's real estate or anything else. And so that's what made them the greatest eight CEOs ever. So love the tie in there and it gives the right philosophy on how to look at your business. It's meant to be utilized as a vehicle to invest. That's really, really good.

So they look at generating income like this foundation that they've built and then investing is how they stack up on top of that. And what made them the greatest CEOs was how wise they invested the money. I'm talking like CEOs of like GE, different things like that, right, at real, real high level. So it's not just being a CEO, it's being a CIO, a chief investment officer. And so that's a really powerful thing. I don't know a lot of people realize I didn't until I read that book. That's what made the great CEOs was how they reallocated that money back that they made. Whether they hired new people, they bought new materials, they bought new supplies.

Businesses invested, yes, how they invested it. Interesting. Okay. What's your favorite business book? I tell you the one I'm going back to now a lot. and it's one of my favorite. It's called Organizational Physics, and it's by Lex Sysney. And the reason I'm going back to it is it takes the laws of physics and applies them to business. So let me say it this way, what traction did for me and giving me a model on how to run my operations, organizational

physics gave me a philosophy on how to look at my business as a whole. It was that impactful. I put it up there with traction and what it did for my understanding. in business. I love that book. That's awesome. Very cool. Nice question. All right. What are some of your favorite hobbies? Yeah. So a couple of things I'm into right now is paddle surfing. So it's taking a paddle board out into the ocean and riding waves. So you can actually paddle and ride more waves because we don't have really big waves here into Lume. And then the other thing I've gotten into recently is spear fishing, which is fun. I've always. thought that looked like so much fun. It's one thing to snorkel. It's another to put that mask on with

the spear going, I'm actually snorkeling with a mission. I'm on the, I'm hunting something under the water. That just feels different than swimming around and looking at tropical. I say that all the time. I'm glad someone else gets it. People always say like, would you want to get your pilots license? And I'm like, eh, like you're just like a bus driver in the air. I would do it if there was like a missile I was shooting at something, right? Like that sounds really fun. What about skydiving? Does that sound like fun? you're just kind of waiting until you hit the ground. But like, if there was, I was trying to get in behind enemy lines and I needed a parachute, that would be a blast.

Like, you're 100% right. When, when there's no mission involved in what you're doing, it's not that fun. That's funny. That's really funny. All right. That was one of my favorite analogies I think you've used. The bus driver. All right.

Last question of the day. From me, anyway. What do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from all those who give up, fail, or never get started? Lack of clarity in two ways. People don't take the time to understand and get clear on how they're wired what their unique ability is, their genius zone. And because they don't function in that genius zone, it's always going to hold them back because they're doing things that they're not naturally gifted at doing. And then it's also lack of clarity around opportunities and resources.

And that goes back to what we were saying is being around the right people, reading the right books that present those opportunities. So my opinion, it really always comes down to a lack of clarity around those two things, myself and the resources that are around. Yeah, so good. This has been great. I mean, we went into everything from becoming a radio expert to building a big business, to how to do business in the Corona age.

What else your boys want to do? That's exactly right. Yeah. The psychology behind masterminds and coaching. There's a lot of good stuff here. Driving a bus in the sky. Yes, absolutely, spearfishing. That's something I definitely want to get into at some point.

I think that would be a blast, Brandon, if you could figure out a way to make that happen. They do it out here all the time. Yeah, I mean, I got a lot of buddies that do it. We should go on that. I would be curious, like, how do you know what to fish to shoot, though? Because I'm sure you don't eat all of them. My deal is I just shoot the biggest one I can find. And then figure it out later.

It's like I can kill that. That's big. Sorry, Jerry. I thought you were a fish. We're in that bright colored bathing suit. Confused him under the water. His goggles got fog. Yep.

It's rough. All right, Chris, for people that want to know more, where can they find out more about you? Yeah, a few things. If you just want good, free content,

right, and just a little bit more about my story and how I do what I do, you can go to my YouTube, which is Chris Arnold, real estate. If you're curious about multipliers and want to learn a little bit,

bit more about the brotherhood that we've created that is my passion that is the hill that I'm willing to die on I think you guys know the value of community you can go to the multipliers brotherhood.com and of course if you're interested in this whole radio thing and hey I love this I think this would be a great tool for me and you want to learn more you would have to just see if your your market's even open but go to wholesaling inc.com forward slash r-eI radio very cool Thanks, man. Appreciate it. This has been amazing.

It's been really good. I've been thinking about doing radio for a while out here in Maui. Now I'm even more fired up to try it. So I appreciate the answer. I really enjoyed it, guys. Thank you for the opportunity. It was a lot of fun and definitely connected. I think we got a lot in common philosophically and all that.

So super cool. Cool. Anything else? Awesome. I don't know. I think that's it. David, you want to take us out?

Absolutely. This has been an awesome time. This is David Green for Chris Arnold and Brandon, the Spear Fisher Turner, signing off. 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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