BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 93: 0 to 400 Deals (in 5 Years!) via Smart Marketing with Erik Stark

Episode Date: October 23, 2014

Many people take their time in building their real estate investing… but not today’s guest, who has used his incredible marketing skills to do more than 400 deals in the past five years! Erik Stark got his start after he had been flipping cars out of high school and wanted to move on to bigger, better things. Since then, Erik has tried his hand at wholesaling, as well as purchasing single family homes, commercial property, bulk estates, multi-family homes, and more — by his estimation, closing over 400 deals. Learn how he implements creative, eye-catching marketing techniques we can (almost) guarantee you’ve never heard of, as well as how he chooses which types of investments to make within his market. Erik’s business philosophy of adding value to others’ lives through his deals will leave you inspired, and his many unique tips will have you reaching outside the box for innovative ways to grow your business. Don’t miss out on this information-packed episode! In This Episode We Cover: How Erik got his start by flipping cars near Detroit Why embracing networking as a lifestyle can be life-changing The importance of focusing on a well-executed marketing plan How buying a house in a C-Class neighborhood can help finance a house in an A-Class neighborhood (see: napkin sketch below) The benefits of doing business in a market you know How to decide your focus within the real estate market What exactly a “swipe file” of competitors is and how it can help YOU An innovative way to execute direct mail when you don’t have the money What to look for in a partnership The genius marketing technique known as the “drunk letter“ The importance of loving what you do and waking up inspired And LOTS more! Links from the Show The Book on Investing in Real Estate with No (and Low) Money Down by Brandon Turner Books Mentioned in the Show Don’t Get Voted Off Real Estate Island by Mike Cantu (not on Amazon) Principles of Marketing by Theodore N., Maynard, & Davidson, William Beckman Real Estate Rewind – BiggerPockets Community Book Connect with Erik Erik’s BiggerPockets Profile Erik’s Facebook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dorkin. host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host. I'm literally here with my co-host. He's five feet away from me. What's happening? There I am. See, it's crazy. Brandon Turner. What's up, Brandon? Hey, what's going on? It's our, uh, I think this is our first podcast where we're in the same room, right? Well, we did the live podcast when we were at FinCon. That's true. That's true. This is the first time we're actually recording together in the studio. Fancy. So people hear some

echoing, that's why, because you're like sitting like 10 feet from me. Yeah, we, you know, so having some technical difficulties with this, but, you know, hopefully we can work it out. Hopefully we can work it out. Well, listen, this is a, first of all, the podcast itself is amazing. The show is phenomenal. So that in itself, like, I'm really excited for folks to check this one out. There's a lot of really, really cool tips that you'll find in this show that we have not talked about on any of our previous 92. I definitely, definitely encourage folks to really pay attention. Before that, though, this has been kind of a, it's kind of been a crazy week. I mean, first I got Brandon here. That's crazy in itself.

But last week, we launched our new book, Brandon's book, and I got a stack of those puppies here. We're giving them away tomorrow. And obviously, for those of you who are listening, this show comes out this coming Thursday, but tomorrow is actually yesterday, which we're going to. was Wednesday. So it's a little confusing. But the book is the book on investing in real estate with no and low money down. You can find it. Check it out at biggerpockets.com slash no money. Brandon's first book. Our third book on Bigger Pockets within the first couple days, it hit number three on Amazon for top selling real estate books. It's crazy. Tomorrow, Wednesday or yesterday, when you're listening, is our 10-year anniversary at Bigger Pockets. I launched

the company 10 years ago and we're ecstatic. I know I'm ecstatic. I mean, it's, it's been an amazing, an amazing journey. We've come a long way. We've, you know, tens of millions of people have come through bigger pockets. And we've helped so many people with their real estate. I'm really blessed to be a part of this whole. I mean, it really is kind of like a movement. So I'm, I don't know, I just want to thank everybody who's, who's been a part of bigger pockets over all these years. And then we had another milestone on Sunday, this past Sunday. We crossed one million, one million forum posts.

So it's been crazy. It has been insane. It's been like an epic week. It's kind of like last week I talked about that one week where I had like dunked to basketball, kissed a girl, shaved my head into Mohawk. It was like that kind of week, but here at bigger pockets. So nice work. Nice work.

Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Cool. Well, let's go down to today's quick tip. All right, today's quick tip is we did mention this a long time ago, but I just wanted to reiterate for those who are just joining us. If you have not yet read the community book that we put together called Real Estate Rewind, you totally should. It was actually written by eight different members, I think eight or nine, members of our community volunteers who each wrote a chapter answering the question, if you could go back and do it all over, what would you change?

And as we talk about in the show today, our guest actually talks about how there's so much wisdom in that question. So we put it into a book. You can get it. And I will link to it at the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 93. And again, that's Real Estate Rewind. Nice. Awesome. Awesome.

All right, well, while you're there, make sure to please leave a comment or ask a question to today's guest at biggerpockets.com slash show 93. I know that. Especially ask about the drunk letter. You'll love that. Oh, yeah. Love that. Yeah. Wait till you hear about this thing.

It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Before we introduce the guest, I think we want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsor. Also, really quick, if you are a listener of our show, one of the tens of thousands of people who listen to us each episode, I definitely want to ask and beg of the request upon you to leave us a rating and or review on the show on iTunes. We definitely count on that to get people to find out more about the show.

It helps us get the show to a new audience. And we definitely appreciate you guys letting us know how you feel about the show. And I want to hit 1,000 by the end of the year. So just so everyone knows, a thousand by the end of the year. So go vote. There's a link to it on the show notes page, biggerpockets.com slash show 93. Awesome. All right.

Let's get to this thing. Today we're chatting up Eric Stark, a real estate investment. in the Florida market, who is really blowing things up down there doing hundreds of deals in a short time. Not only is he. No, no, no, no, not just Florida. He is working in my favorite town, Detroit, Michigan. That's right. That's right.

So it's definitely a cool show. He's a great guy and we're really excited. So Eric, welcome to the show. Good to have you here. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it. It's a pleasure. It is a pleasure.

Awesome. Well, how did you get into real estate? Number one question. You know, that's a great question. We've got to go back about seven years, but before I started flipping property, I used to flip cars. My first day out of high school, I went to sign up for my real estate license. And I was the only person who signed up for that class. And they had called me to cancel it. So what I went and did is the next best thing is I love the automotive industry. So I went and started managing a detail. center. We got into another thing. I started buying and cleaning up my own cars. And before you knew it, I was the Cadillac and Corvette King of town who used to flip cars to all the people. So I've always had a knack for flipping. So were you guys, were you on like park benches, you know, Cadillac King or something

like that? No, we just had, we had some main street frontage in a very good area of town. And we just used to decorate the front lot with all kinds of cars and make people come in. And we just, we came the number one spot to detail. cars and before long, you know, people would come in and really like it. We'd sell them this one. This guy would buy one. This guy would trade one and just, we just started going flipping crazy.

Nice. That's cool. My dad does a lot of that. He likes to buy a car. He's fixing up. I think it's a 65 or 66 Mustang right now. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah.

He's spent, I think, like, twice what it's going to be worth when it's done, but he doesn't care. He just, he loves the process. I'm the same way, man. I'm the same way. Well, cool. So how did that transition to real estate then? I mean, they're probably fairly similar, right?

I mean, yeah, one day when, you know, when we were managing the detail shop, we were turning a lot of units over there. And we had a gentleman who came in one time who wanted a group of fleet vehicles cleaned out of his. And he kept bringing in all these workmen's and contractor trucks. And finally last he brought his, you know, very nice Denali vehicle in there. And we cleaned it up for him. And I just had to ask, you know, what do you do for a living? You got all these nice vehicles and your personal vehicle is nice. And he says, oh, well, I buy real estate.

And he gave me this little flyer. sign whatever you call it. And he said, if you ever come across something in the neighborhood, you'd be sure to give me a call and let me know. And I knew that there was a guy across the street from our shop who would show up every couple of months and cut the grass and yell at his neighbors to keep all their trash off the property. And finally, I just approached him one day and said, you know, what are you doing with this place? Why don't you sell it? You know, this place is constant distress. There's people breaking into it all the time. And he's like, I would love to sell this place. He's like, I don't even know where to turn. And I said, well, you know, give me your name number,

how I can get a hold of you. And I ended up calling this gentleman and I say, hey, here's a property you might want to follow up with. And he shows up at our office about two months later and he hands us a stack full of cash and he says, hey, I bought that property. I just want to let you guys know. So from that point on, I just started to interact with them more, get involved and, you know, just do everything I could to become a sponge in the flipping industry of real estate. That's awesome. That's awesome. And really quick, the thing that he did is what we tell everybody to do. Yeah. You tell everybody what you do. So he told you, hey, I'm looking for deals.

I'm looking for opportunities. And had he not said that, you would never have gotten started A. Right. B, he never would have made all the money that he made on the deal that he was able to send you a pile of cash room. So, you know, to anybody listening, you guys, this is why you have to tell everybody, absolutely everybody about what you do because you never know who you're talking to. You know, you're a guy at a detail shop, you know, okay, great. you know, you never think twice that the mailman, the guy at the detail shop, the guy behind the counter at McDonald's could be the lead to your next deal. And it was very casual, you know, it's not like he stood up there and gave this big pitch.

It was just, you know, this is who I am. This is what I do. It's just very casual. So there was, I think a lot of people get intimidated about, oh, my gosh, I got to have the center focus. Just be casual in your approach. It makes life a lot smoother. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome advice. That's great.

Well, so how did that turn into your first actual, like, real estate deal? Besides that one, kind of a, I don't know if you call it bird dogging or whatever. How did you actually get your first deal? You know, I have a couple of stories that revolver on my first deal. My first deal that I did on my own and that I also have the first deal that I ever did with my business partner so I can kind of share, you know, both sides of that. But my first deal, I actually carry my check with me. The very first deal that I did back in September 24th, 2007 was the first time I ever did my real estate deal. but my wife used to do home care for a facility in town, and one of her clients had passed away one time,

and one of the time she had said, well, the son is going to be giving me a television from the home, and I was just starting to get into real estate more at that point. I was transitioning from flipping cars, so I had clothes and hats and signs and all kinds of marketing material made. So I had went over there to help her pick up this TV one time, and the son had approached me because I was wearing a cash for a home shirt, and said, hey, you're one of those flip this house guys. You know, so I sat down with the gentleman and, you know, I put together a purchase agreement, ended up flipping that property a couple of days later, made $7,600 bucks on that transaction,

gave away 60% of it to the local Rio president for kind of helping me guide, you know, guide me through that process of overcoming that fear, gave her a nice referral fee. But, you know, at that point, I really didn't care because I made more money flipping that one house, even though I only took 40% of the profit than I did flipping these cars. You know, it take, it take me a good amount of money to make that time to make that kind of money flipping cars. When you say flipping, you're talking about like, I mean, essentially you bought it and then really sold it right away. You're not actually fixed in flipping, right? That was just an assignment.

That was a straight assignment. I took a contract. I one page assigned it over to a buyer that I had met at the Ria and never closed on it, never even had to put up an earnest money, nothing like that. So it was just a simple assignment. Yeah, I find it. Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say, you know, and there's, I guess, some confusion with the, you know, flipping wholesaling, you know, some people use those terms interchangeably.

And I guess for the purpose of this show, maybe we can make somewhat of a distinction to help folks out. In this case, the assignment, I mean, this, I would consider a wholesale deal, right? So you never actually, you know, held the property. You actually assign the contract. So maybe just for the purpose of not confusing any of the listeners, we can do, You use that terminology, even though I know that they are used interchangeably by some folks. Yeah. No, I mean, to me, flipping is when you close on a property. And even if you, anytime you sell a property in under a year, but you take title to it, it's considered a flip according to the industry

standard. This was just an assignment deal, took a contract, handed it off for a fee and got out of the way. Right. And now, is that what you do? I mean, is that, are you a wholesaler? I mean, those people who don't know who you are, do you do other things as well? Yeah. I mean, our, our company, I strictly focus on marketing and raising private capital. My favorite thing to do is just wholesale properties again because I'm a family man. A lot of my time is devoted to marketing, spending it with my wife and our son. But I also have a business partner that we're doing new construction homes right now. We have rental units that we manage in-house.

We do rehabs. But my side of the business is just to keep the cash flow coming in all the time and just to keep turning units. Cool. But we do everything all under one roof. We don't outsource anything. Everything has done in our office. Okay. So how many people do you have on your team then?

I mean, you must have a sizable squad. We have me, my business partner, an in-office assistant, and then two virtual assistants. Okay. And what about, I mean, if you're doing new construction rehabs, presumably also have construction crew, yeah? We just hire the builders, yes. Okay. So not everything's in house. No, no.

Too much liability with that stuff. Yeah. We tried that. We tried that in our early years. to have everything under one roof, and it's just less liability and increased profits just to hire a team to handle that stuff. Okay. So can we go back? And we'll get to this stuff. The first deal, you talked about this flip that you did, the wholesale that you did. How many deals have you done since then? I mean, well over 400. Okay. Well over 400 properties. And I would say about 70 to 80 percent of those are wholesales. Okay. Okay. Okay. And what about you got the same?

70 to 80% wholesale, then it sounds like you've done a bunch of actual flips as well. Do you do buy and hold? Or is it just kind of, I'd say the turnover type deals? Yeah, the way that we're structured now is, is we focus more on marketing just to get leads coming in. And then when a really good qualified lead comes in, we determine if it's, if it's an A class location, we only keep rentals in a class locations, typically that we can get owner financing on. That's what we prefer to do. We don't really go after the single families. We go after multis. We go after commercial strip centers. We really don't want to own too many single family properties just because you're managing too many people. When you get into the multis and the commercial, they can kind of self-manage

themselves, especially in great locations. But we divide everything to say this is either going to be a great wholesale deal to keep the company money coming in or if we can owner finance the rental property, we add it to the portfolio. If it's a great piece of dirt with a crummy house on it, we blade it and build new construction. I love that idea of marketing for whatever you can get and then figuring out where to put it into the puzzle. It kind of goes back to the whole like toolbox analogy that I use a lot, right? The more tools you have in your toolbox, the more projects you can tackle. Absolutely.

I love that. So let's actually talk a little bit about that. First of all, A class location. What does that mean for those people who don't know? And then owner financing, how does that work? Typically we define an A class location with the word romance. You know, it's where everybody wants to live. It's close to the place where you.

you take your wife or your spouse out to dinner on the weekends, it's, it's just where you don't have to manage your rental property and have to be on site to collect rent all the time. The people are working class professionals, you know, suit and tie people. They're not, you know, they're a little bit above the middle class genre. And it's just where everybody would like to own a piece of real estate at. Yeah, I like, I really like that. I really like that. I really like that a class locations. Romance. Yeah, I really like that a lot. Um, so you, you, then you look for owner financing or seller financing in those areas? You know, it's pretty tough to get owner financing in an area where people own incredible

properties because quite honestly, they don't need to owner finance it. They could stick a FISB sign in their front yard or call an agent or an attorney and sell it. So we have a pretty unique system for getting owner financing on less desirable properties. And then what we do is we trade up the collateral when we sell a low run property for cash and then we move it over to the A class property. So I do have a case study that I can kind of explain, you know, as we get deeper into things to show people because quite honestly, most people in romantic locations don't need to do owner finance, but we've done it. I don't know if it's proprietary or if you'd be willing to share your system or at least kind of a synopsis of it.

It'd be kind of interesting to find out a little bit more about that. Absolutely. We had done a deal. Actually, the stems back at the beginning of January 2013. We bought what's called a Booker property. It's a very cheap property. It's not in a war zone area, but it's not in the most desirable part of town. It's where everybody goes to flip homes in like a rental area or just kind of the lower end spectrum, but it's not a war zone.

So we bought this property for $17,500, put $2,000 down, financed $15,5 on a 4% note over five years with $125 payment going to that owner for the term of five years. We plan on keeping that property as a rental, but me, I decided to wholesale at Turnkey to another investor. We pocketed $7,500 from that transaction net. Meanwhile, we were negotiating another four unit in an A-plus location where we took that $7,500 down, or that $7,500 profit, put it down on the four unit, and then finance the difference of $151.5 over a 15-year term at 7%. So we traded from a lower end property where we took the profit from this one to cover the down payment on this one. And eventually we sold the four unit and now moved that over to an A plus location. So we do a series of tradeups. And I would probably have to draw it out for you on a whiteboard, which I do have behind me if you guys need me to show you.

But I mean, it's something that we've really perfected in our business. And it seems to be working well. I think that's cool. I was just going to say, you know, the trade up definitely makes sense. the numbers, you went way too fast for me. I know. I definitely needed something in writing. No,

no, it's okay. But I thought you were actually going to say that you were holding on to that first property. And then you were going to, you know, you were using just the down, I missed it all. It's over my head.

Yeah, I mean, we can slow down and I can break it down. No, it's really powerful. You know, and whenever we have people come to us that want, want to really get into the next phase of their business and they're doing

wholesales consistently. You just can't afford to pass up on the good opportunities. And a lot of times they don't have the ability to take these properties down. Number one, because they don't have the money. Number two, they don't have the knowledge. But when you play this strategy, you really, at the end of your year, you can look back and say, man, I'm really good. I'm really glad that I did take this property down and put it in my portfolio. Hey, Eric, what would be helpful, I think, would be if you can actually write up maybe the one, the A to the B to the C in some kind of written form. give it to us and we'll include it in the show notes so that anybody who's interested can actually see, because this is something, you know, I mean, it's not simple and it's, but

I have a napkin, I have a napkin sketch. I can send you guys on a lot. Perfect. Perfect. That'd be awesome. All right, cool. So that's, that's fascinating. What market are you in? I live in Fort Lauderdale, but my business still operates up in Michigan. So we're just, we're just north of Detroit. So I operate the whole marketing and wholesaling side virtually from Fort Lauderdale. So you are operating remotely in Detroit. Yes. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

So why, let's talk about that. I mean, when you did your first deal, was that in Detroit as well? Well, I just moved down to Fort Lauderdale in the past couple of years. So I'm originally from Michigan. So I know the streets. I know the market. I know the values. You know, when the sellers call me, it's almost like I'm there on the ground because I know exactly what streets and what areas

they're talking about. But we decided to pick up and duplicate our business down here. So we're, you know, we still have a big marketing machine going on up there, but I decided to come down here and kind of get things picking up in this market as well. Would you have been able to do that without knowing the market as well as you do? I don't think at that level of the amount of volume that we've done. I don't believe so. And the reason I ask is this. I mean, you know, everybody knows I beat up on Detroit and there's a reason for it. But, you know, It's one of these places where there's so much marketing that goes to people out of state. You know, hey, Detroit's dirt cheap.

There's other markets too. And I always caution folks, hey, listen, be careful. You don't know that market. Very careful. It's a really tough place to do business if you're unfamiliar. You know, you go one street away and you're in deep trouble. Deep trouble, like life-threatening trouble. Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. Okay. Okay. So I don't recommend. I mean, of course, it's cheap. everybody can come to town and flip, but I give everybody a word of caution. There's life-threatening situations down there, and it's not worth any amount of profit. So you've got to watch Detroit very closely.

Have you experienced, I mean, we're talking about life-threatening stuff. Have you experienced any of that type? Never. No. Okay. Mostly what we do is in the suburbs of Detroit. I mean, we do own some Detroit stuff and we flip there occasionally, but we don't, you know, we don't play in those areas. There's no need for us, too.

Yeah. Hey, really quick, I want to hop back and then we'll kind of move forward a little bit. you had talked about these three segments of your business. You got the wholesale, the buy and hold, and then the new construction, and one kind of, if it doesn't fit this bucket, it fits the next bucket, if it doesn't fit that bucket, fits the following bucket. I think that's really clever. And we've talked to, I think, a small handful of people who've kind of explained their business in the same way. But I think it's really fascinating to see, you know, listen, you have a focus. If it doesn't fall into that focus, it moves to the next focus. And then the next one,

you know, I wonder, could you have organized it in a different manner, right? You know, you got the wholesale, then the buying hall, the new construction. Did you struggle with figuring those three buckets out? Did it take you a long time to decide that those were going to be the three pathways that your business was going to really focus on? Or did that just kind of happen organically? You know what? That's a very great question. It actually stemmed from two different things. You know, Michigan is a very, very saturated market. I know there's a lot of places across, you know, the United States where people are marketing very heavily, but we have a swipe file that we build of every single person who markets in our area because our mentors and our lenders give us, you know,

monthly mailers of who's mailing in that area. But to answer that question, it came out of two different situations. Number one was it was driven by the marketplace. What's going on in the market up there? Values are increasing. The market is kind of exploding with the retail buyers. A lot of people are turning to get new construction finance loans. So we wanted to service more than just the cash landlords where we were wholesaling over to them and then just doing the simple rehabs. We wanted to tap into the new construction market a little bit, but we also realized that we needed to provide a very valuable service to that marketplace. And without being able to provide a service where we could solve people's problems, because one of the issues we were dealing with,

people want so much money for their homes right now because the market's up for what you want to call it. We were losing on a lot of wholesale and rental opportunities because you have to pay more than what a property's worth. The only way you can pay more than what a property's worth is if you owner finance it, or you're going to turn that property into a higher and better use. So when somebody says, I want $125,000 for my junky little bungalow that will never be worth more than $130,000 when it's fixed up, you have to take that piece of dirt and build a big huge home on it that you can now sell for $400,000. So it was really driven by two different things. How do we be service providers for the marketplace and how do we create our niche in the market where we're not losing out on these

opportunities by the masses because again, every seller just thinks they really have gold in this market. We need to play to that. Hey, really quickly, you talked about a swipe file of competitors. Can you explain what that means? I've never heard that term before. Yeah, a swipe file is, you know, one thing I keep with me everywhere I go, it's literally in my, I mean, this would be my Bernie Madoff. If somebody ever found this at Denny's, it would be very, very critical to our business. but we have a couple of very large mentors and lenders up in Michigan that own hundreds and hundreds of properties. And since they own them in their personal names, one of the things that they do is they send us packets of mail every single month with who's mailing and, you know, pretty much everybody who's marketing up in that area. So we know who's sending what, when they're sending it, at what frequency, what the message is, whether it's a postcard, a yellow letter, a flyer, a door knocker,

I mean, if you're mailing to the absentee landlords or the probates, we know who you are. And that's very, that's very crucial to our presentation up there because I know whether you're a wholesaler and have the ability to close. You know, we can explain this to sellers throughout the whole process that, you know, feel free to go to those guys. Call us last if you, if you prefer. When they can't close, we will. Does that allow you to go in and, well, obviously the competitive intel is really interesting? We haven't talked to anybody about this, and it's fascinating to me. I don't share it with anybody, guys.

So, I mean, this is exclusive to bigger pockets. I'm not kidding. I don't talk about these things. No, I mean, it's a really, really, really good idea. Now, do you use that information to, I'm assuming you use it to alter your marketing? You use it to change messaging and all sorts of stuff, huh? Oh, absolutely. I mean, when a seller calls me and tries to pin me in a corner and says, well, send me your best offer

because I got other postcards and mailers. And I say, oh, from John, Jennifer, Kim, and Bryant. Well, yeah, how do you know? Oh, they're wholesalers when, you know, they're just going to bring to your deal anyway to fund it. So, you know, pick whoever you want. I'm going to be able to buy it cheaper from them. And they're like, now you just reverse the scenario on that. Wow.

Wow, dirty, man. That's dirty. No, it's smart. It's very smart. I like it. I like it a lot. That's very cool. You wrote about that on a bigger pocket, like on a member blog.

I wrote it down here because I actually want to talk you about it today. why gurus suck and why most newbies are failing because of it. And that was kind of your message in there was, you know, if you're doing what everyone else is doing and what you, you bought some system that will help you, you know, get unlimited leads and you bought it online, well, so did that guy down the street and that guy and that guy. Like, they all bought that same system,

which is given them automated leads and the same mailers go out. Anyway, I love that article. So I will link to that in the show notes, biggerpockets.com slash show 93. But yeah, people should definitely read that article because, yeah, you nailed it on there. It's painful, man. I mean, I, you know, we meet so many people who are, you know,

they're spending money that they don't have to get into the business. And, you know, you can't blame them because they're just trying to gather any bit of information that they can. And, you know, they're looking here and saying, well, this postcard is tried and true. But nobody ever stops and asks the question, how many other people are sending the exact same mailer, you know? So we, we have a couple of really good things that have really, you know, changed up our marketing.

You know, simple things like here's a quick little tip. Start sending it from a personal home address versus from a main road because now you don't look like the corporate guy. You look like the individual person who just wants to buy your property. Nobody wants to sell to the big dog. They want to sell to, you know, normal Joe's, you and I. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, do you have any other tips without giving away all your secrets?

Our secrets. I do and they'll probably come out as you guys ask questions. I mean, a lot of the stuff I just kind of take for granted. Well, I was going to ask on beating out your competitors. That's really more what I'm interested in. You know, how do you get the deal? You know, you already talked about one way. You know, you can actually cite John, Jennifer, and Billy, who are also marketing.

I mean, that's ridiculous. That's just silly. But, you know, any other kind of good tips for one-uping the other guys? And, you know, we do cover this a lot on the show. And I say a lot of guys say it kind of comes down. down to you're the real deal. You've proven that you can close. You know, you can demonstrate that you're there to solve their problem. But it sounds like there's more to it with you. And it sounds like you've got some other kind of clever things that you do. You know, a lot of it comes down to,

you know, when it comes to our marketing, one of the things that I have on my board behind me is is to be persistent and consistent. You know, if you study the statistics of marketing, upon your fifth mailer, you increase your response rates from like 7% on the fourth mailing to like 80% on the fifth. You know, and most people quit after the second or third campaign just because it's so costly, they're not getting results. You're joining the ranks with all the other people that are there. So when you market with persistence and consistency and you're always tweaking, I just had a gentleman call me the other day that says, you guys have been mailing me for years. When I want to sell, I promise I will not call anybody else, but you guys. but save your stamps from now on and don't, don't mail me no more.

Well, now I don't need to mail you because I got your phone number. But now I'm going to call you. And that's, you know, when they say that fortune is in the follow-up, I can't put enough emphasis on the fact that follow-up with people. You know, when Sam Walton was asked how he was able to become so successful, when he got knocked down, he got right back up again. You know, and that's one thing that we do. We don't have a very elaborate system.

My follow-up system is yellow pads of paper. I have yellow pads. I mean, you follow me around. I had yellow pads everywhere in my life. They're in my car, my bathroom, my bedroom. They're my whole life. So be persistent, be consistent, follow up like no other.

And when you can eventually afford it, get yourself a brick and mortar office. You know, one of the things that are really crucial to our business is everybody wants to deal with the normal person, but they also like having a verifiable address where if they want to check up on you and maybe stop in, because I still get called a scammer quite often from people who, you know, they're looking at my name on the internet and saying, well, I see that you flip houses professionally and you just want to make a ton of money off me. And what you guys do is a scam. And it's like, it's not a scam, but you can verify all these things about who we are.

And I want you to. I want you to know that you're dealing with the real deal. But of course, I have to make money. That's how we keep these postcards in front of you and these office doors open and you know, the economy stirring and, you know, at any time people can call and verify our credibility. Here's, you know, projects that we're buying in your area right now. Go drive by this home. We own it. You know, I had a conversation with the lady yesterday. We were talking forever about her property and she kept talking about this home that was right outside of the hardware store. And after she bragged about this home for 30 minutes, I said, we own that property. That's our, that's ours. We own. that and she's like you've got to be kidding me you know so being able to connect those dots and build

your credibility you don't do it for bragging purposes but i want people to know that we're genuinely vested in this market in this industry and the economy and we're here to provide a service and help you yeah i love that i love that i think that's a fantastic i think a lot of wholesalers and flippers just get a really bad name and some of them deservingly so because they're you know terrible individuals But, you know, you get that in any industry. So, you know, I like to hear you're doing things the right way. And that's very cool. So you're doing direct mail.

It definitely sounds like. Is that your main emphasis on getting leads? Yeah, we, you know, we have a little bit of an internet presence out there. I would say direct mail is probably one of our biggest lead sources that we have out there. But when it comes to being out on the ground and on the field, we don't do bandit signs. We haven't done those in years. just trying to avoid the sign police. I would just rather not be involved in that whatsoever.

Yeah, nice. But one of the things we always do when we purchase a property, even if it's a wholesale deal, is we have a four foot by five foot sign, and then we also have an eight foot banner that in front of every project we ever, even if it's a wholesale deal, we put it at a part of our contract when we sell it, another property purchased by Eric Stark and Steve Mills. So that way people are driving around and are saying, this is the same guys that are marketing to us, you know, month in and month out, we're connecting dots.

You know, you're building your credibility by people saying, these guys are really out here in the field, not just turning my contract for a profit. They're really doing this. Yeah. Well, this goes back to like that classic business thing of like touch points, I think they call it. Like it takes, you know, eight interactions or touch points with a brand in order to buy from them. So like the first time you heard of Coke, you didn't buy Coke. It took you several interactions. The exact same thing you're doing, right? You, you hit them over and over and over and over. in different areas in different methods. They see you online. They research you. They see your signs. And in the end, they know you because you're a local business and that's who they're going to sell to.

I think that's just excellent, excellent advice. It's been pretty crucial. And I love the signs, another deal closed by us, which is again, I mean, I don't think we've heard anybody say that yet, that they're doing that technique. And you know, you'll see realtors do it in a few cases. But from investors, you rarely will hear. about investors doing that. And that's, you know, a lot of the builders will do it, you know, showcase builders, you know, built by so-and-so. But investors, that's really, really, really good idea.

And that's what this is. I mean, it's a four-foot, it's five feet wide by four feet tall, blue and white, same as all of our marketing and, you know, everything you associate the blue and white branding on it. And again, you're associating, you're touch-pointing. Yeah, yeah. Hey, how much does it take to get started with direct mail? I mean, you guys do a lot of it. So what does it take for somebody to get going on that? I would say you've got to have a good, I mean, you can, you can really focus your list. You know, the way that we segment our lists, excuse me, if I run off onto a tangent here, but you can start with as little as, you know, a thousand bucks, but you realistically should have $2,500 plus. And when people come to me with marketing ideas, that's

our first thing is they're working a corporate job, they're barely making ends meet now. You know, they want to know what they can do to really market effectively, and I'm all about focusing your list. You know, everybody in the world is mailing to absentee owners. One thing that nobody's mailing to is the return absentee owners. There's more gold than the returns that come back from the absentee owners because everybody's so focused on following the masses. They're not focused on the 40 postcards that get returned to your mailbox because they've moved. That address is no longer forwarded. They're not skip tracing these people to figure it out. But they're not. There is true gold inside of those return mailers.

And I tell you, here's a stack of my return mailers. Follow up with these people and start going after them. And when you get a lead that's qualified, we'll help you work it. You don't need a lot of money, but again, you have to do the opposite of what most people are telling you to do. So that's an interesting idea. People are listening to this podcast and they have no money really to get started with direct mail. Go talk to a local wholesaler and ask if you can buy or borrow or have their return postcards. And I think that's a terrific idea. I've never heard anybody say that before,

but that's fantastic. So, yeah, wow, I love that. I guess I seriously, I love that. It's awesome, yeah. Yeah, okay. So definitely, like, by mailing to people who everybody else isn't mailing to or doing the hustle that nobody else is willing to do, that's how you can get better deals. Yes. Yeah, you got to go deeper than what, you know, again, everybody's mailing absentees. So that's just a given for us. We don't bank on absentees to really support our business. It's just a given. We stay consistent and persistent on it. They're always going out the door. We're going after probates, return mailers, code violations, driving for dollars. I still spend the better part of every Monday, driving for dollars, looking for new vacant properties, you know,

knocking on doors and just being active in the market, because I'm a true believer in the philosophy. If you spend your Monday building enough activity, that avalanche will come back to you during the next week or two weeks and cover itself in one eight-hour day. You know, so if you really spend eight hours, you grab a Starbucks, you take a lunch, you go out in the field, I don't care if you use a bunch of yellow sticky notes and say, I want to buy your property. Stick it to their front door with the phone number. There's no cost in that.

I mean, what is it, 99? Go to the dollar store. They're 99 cents. Yep. You know, so spend your Monday out in the field because the streets tell you everything. You know, you can only do so much behind a computer, and I'm a computer guy. I love to do things virtually, but down here and, in Florida, I'm in the field every single Monday.

Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. So going back, maybe we can transition to that. This is a good time. You're down in Florida. Your partner is up in Michigan. How do, I mean, let's talk about partnerships. Because, you know, like, I mean, I'm a huge partnership guy.

Everyone knows that. If you guys, you know, bought the book on investing with no money, nor low money down last week we talked about, like you guys know, like partnerships are how I've done it. But I want to know how you did it. Like, how did you find your partner and how do you guys, How do you guys work together? You know, me and my business partner is absolutely incredible. I mean, he's been one of my greatest influences and mentors.

You know, he's helped me, you know, transition from, he started in the mortgage industry when I was flipping cars. And he would stop by the shop every once in a while. And, you know, things just kind of progressed between us. And we were the only kids that we went to school with during high school that really had an entrepreneurial mind. You know, we gathered outside of, you know, the typical, you know, friends in common that we had.

And the reason why we decided a partner is because what I'm great at, he sucks at, and vice versa. Nice. I mean, we have never had an argument. And I'm not kidding. We do not argue about anything. We turn this business into one big game. And that's how it started off between us is kind of a hobby that turned into an actual business. When we officially formed in April of 2008, we did 35, 100.

wholesale deals within the next eight months. And then in 2009, we transitioned over to doing 92 properties, and a lot of those were rehabs. So the game that we started playing was when we get a property locked down, can I flip this contract before you get your rehab bids in? You know, and we just started turning this into a big game. And after that point, it was hands off. If I had a signed contract and I earned his money, that's it. It's off the market. We're flipping it. It's sold. If he's got a contractor bid and my guy's on his way with an earnest money, that's it. We're rehabbing it. So you guys used each other to motivate and push one another, which is awesome.

I mean, that's a really, really great idea. We never focused on the weaknesses. We played to each other's strengths. So, I mean, again, there's no doubt that we would not been able to, I wouldn't have been able to do that level. And I don't think he would have been able to either if we hadn't been a partnership because, you know, we pushed and drove each other very, very fiercely. And what's the structure of it? Is it, are you guys like 50-50 partners? Yes. Yes. Got it. Got it. So if you do a, if you do a flip, are you guys both putting up the cash for it?

Or how would something like that have worked out? Or in the early days before the business had lots of money, which I'm assuming it does today. You know, the way that we got started, here's where I'll, if I can, I'd like to talk about the first deal that I officially did with my business partner. And after I had done that one deal on my own, I was kind of working under the president of the local Rio organization. And I was, you know, bird dogging and wholesaling for him. And I was making really good money. But I was essentially a high paid employee. There was no room for growth. I was not allowed to be creative.

I wasn't allowed to do my own thing, flip my own properties. I was essentially working for him, but making great money. So one of, you know, I always kept in touch with my business partner because he was breaking out of mortgages into real estate. At the same time, I was breaking out of the automotive into real estate as well. So we always kept in touch and shared ideas and masterminded together. And one day he had called me and said he had a property under contract. That was a really, really good deal. And I had been working with a buyer who had brought that deal to my attention a couple days before. So I called them back and said, hey, I got a buyer for this thing. Go ahead and

lock it up. And I'll get my buyer over there and we'll flip this thing together. But when I had mention that to the gentleman that I was working with at the time. That was like a hands-off, you know, like make or break type of situation where if you go forward with this, you're no longer with us. So I kind of had to make like a split decision that day on a Friday. And essentially what I did is, is I walked away from that group that I was working with to join forces with my partner. It turns out that the buyer that I had been working with just boarded a plane to go to Arizona for the month and wasn't interested in that deal. So now I just walked away from the lifeblood that was feeding me on a dream of, you know, potentially flipping this property and growing something

bigger. So, you know, I had to put that call into my, you know, my newfound partner and say, hey, man, my guy is just, you know, he's out on this one. He's not going to be able to do anything. So we knew we had a great deal. I put up the earnest money for it. And at that time, you know, we had been kind of going back and forth in an office where there was a lower. broker that we were kind of working like renting space in his office. And every time we would come into this office and drop off these files, this guy would mention to us, he's like, man, you guys are finding really good deals for other people. Why aren't you guys buying and flipping these properties yourselves? And it's like, well, we don't have the capital to do that. And, you know, he just said,

if you guys ever need money to borrow a property, just come to me, I'll give it to you. And so essentially, that's what we did. You know, we officially incorporated ourselves in April of 2008. You know, We locked that property up with an earnest money deposit. We went to him. He gave us a, I mean, literally, the day of closing, we're like, man, how does all this, we're still trying to learn the dynamics and the ins and outs and how does this go down. You know, we got all these papers ready. We're hoping he's not going to scrutinize this mortgage in a promissory note.

He hands us a $150,000 check, never stops writing in his rental journal, never asked for a mortgage, never asked for a promiscay and, you know, see you guys in Las Vegas. And, you know, we went and bought the property. We came back in the mortgage and the note. and we've just been really going flipping crazy ever since. Wow. So that was our first deal that we did. So we passed up on, we probably could have made five to seven grand wholesaling it to my buyer.

We closed on that property, put it right back on the market immediately and made like 16 grand on it. So that was our first partnership. And now you've got you and your buddy who are partners. And now this guy is kind of a partner. He's your private money partner. It sounds like a lender. Yeah, just a lender. Now, have you been working with him all throughout the,

past X number of years? Absolutely. Okay. So he still, I can't talk today. He still helps finance your deals for you then. Yes, he's still one of our lenders. We're actually working to sell a lot of, you know, because he owns a lot of property, you know, about 160 properties free and clear.

We are working to package his stuff and sell everything. We call it his Paradise Retirement Plan. We are working to sell all his properties, get him cash liquid rich again. And then all he can do is sit in his condo and naples. and just lend us money and we can flip everything and just pay them interest. Nice. And that goes back to the whole thing we talked about earlier, right? About letting everyone know what you do and just and getting out there and networking and talking to people because you never know when you're going to run into this guy.

Right. That's terrific. That's awesome. Cool. Well, we got to move on and start kind of winding down. A couple questions for you. First of all, mistakes. You know, what?

Yeah. Do you have any that you can share that, you know, maybe help other people not make the same mistakes that you did when you were building? in your business. You know, we have a, we have a quote in our, in our office up in Michigan, and as soon as you walk in it says, education is what you get when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get when you don't. And that's good. I have, I have marketing mistakes. I have legal document mistakes. We have deal structuring mistakes. You know, nothing that immediately pops in. I got to actually, this just happened the other day. We, we, we, we, We had a property that we currently have listed on the MLS for sale.

And when we signed the offer with the gentleman who wanted to buy the property, we all forgot to date the purchase agreement. So the gentleman that we had sold the property to happened to be four days past his inspection period and came back and said, said nothing about the failed inspection results. He said his buyer couldn't get cash financing. Well, we said your financing is cash has zero contingency. for financing approval. So we're taking your earnest money because you never came back in a reasonable amount of time.

He says, well, according to this purchase agreement, I have all the reason. So, I mean, this is a recent mistake. We just made, you know, in the past 14 days. I got all the time in the world, baby. We're still learning lessons to this day. But, you know, if I really look back and think about what caused us the most trouble,

work really well with your contractors and your city officials. You know, when we were really doing, you know, 70, 80, 90 rehabs a year and you're getting the building code enforcement and the building departments involved, these people either make your life a vacation or a nightmare. And, you know, a lot of times when they were challenging what we were doing or trying to accomplish with the home, they would tell us that, no, this is our system. This is how you guys have to operate. Well, we knew if we followed their system, we weren't going to be able to maximize this property's potential. And looking back, I mean, we fought and battled and sued and received lawsuits from a lot of cities out there because we were flipping so many properties. And they were just adapting to all these foreclosures.

And they didn't know how to deal with the overwhelm of these junky properties in their city. So we're trying to clean them up. And they essentially made us guinea pigs because we were doing such high volume. They were kind of using us as test rats to say, well, this is how we would essentially like this building code to work. but we knew that the International Residential Code they were working by was 2006. So we challenged everything. And as soon as you start challenging your government, you're asking for a revolt. I mean, that's just the way it was for us.

So I mean, you know, luckily nothing got too out of hand. But when I look back and say, what could have went smoother? How could we have made this more synergized? It would have been working better with our cities and our building officials to say, hey, here's what we're doing. Help us out. Let's play your game. Yeah, and that's what I was going to ask you.

You know, what would you recommend to other people who may not have the, I don't know, big brass ones to go and, you know, fight the local building inspectors and fight, you know, local municipalities about what they wanted. I mean, how do you play nice with those guys? I personally have had some, you know, pretty hellish interactions with building inspectors. And they could, they could really, really make your life absolutely miserable if things go the wrong way. So what's your best piece of advice for, you know, making things go smoothly with these guys? You know, you have to find the perfect balance between, you know, kissing their ass and making sure that you're following your own program. Yeah. But if your goal and objective is to stay small and not grow in life, don't fight the cities.

If you're a growth junkie and you want to accomplish what nobody else is doing, be prepared for a little bit of battle. But, you know, be educated. you know, appear to be a normal guy. You know, when you show up in a nice luxury car and you're meeting these building inspectors and, you know, we were young kids at the time. We were only 25, 26, 27 years old. And these building inspectors are pulling up saying, man, you guys are young flipping a lot of properties. They only think that we're making an absolute ton of money.

So now the jealousy factor starts coming in. You know, now they just have, you know, an eye out to catch you anywhere that they possibly can. So find the perfect blend of being educated. you know, kissing a little bit of butt, but also making sure that you communicate a lot with them. You know, we started to get to the point where we had no other choice but to sit down and say, we've got to find a common remedy or nobody's going to accomplish anything. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, last question before we move on to the next segment here.

If you were to start over today, knowing what you know now, what would you do? How would you begin your business differently if you could do anything? You know, that's a very good question because a few years ago, we did just that. You know, we picked up and, you know, I moved down here to Florida, and we essentially had to recreate the business we built in Michigan and just duplicate it down here. So now our main goal is just to focus on a marketing machine. You know, we have the financing in place. We don't so much identify the buyers anymore that we can quickly turn properties to. So we've only focused on building an outstanding marketing market.

machine that delivers us leads that we can kind of pick and choose and, you know, say no to these ones and focus more on these ones and have the financing behind you to where, you know, because anytime you're wholesaling properties, you're in a pinch, you know, you're racing against time before your contract expires, your inspection period, you're trying to get your buyer in there, and sometimes, you know, it just, you're fudging things together and it's too tight. So we focused on the marketing and the financing to make sure that when we did have an opportunity, we don't have to act fast anymore. We don't ever want to feel the pressure to where we have to sell off the majority of the equity

just because we're in a position. So now we're at a point where we want to maximize everything. And in order to do that down here, it came down to marketing and making sure we had the financing to capture the equity when we found it. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I think that's great. And I love the term marketing machine.

We've talked about that a couple times on the podcast because that's really what it is. It just, it works and it delivers consistent and persistent, like you said, leads in. I love that. I love it. So, cool. All right. Well, hey, let's move on to it's time for the fire round. All right.

These questions come directly from the Bigger Pockets forums. And number one, I'm going to ask you, what is the one essential question that you should ask a real estate mentor? If you're trying to attract, let's say you're trying to attract a real estate mentor, what's one question you should ask them besides will you be my mentor? You know, one of the things that I still ask my mentor every time we get together is what do you wish you would have done differently? You know, and there's a lot of wisdom that can be found in that question because, you know, if we all think about the real reason we got into real estate, it was to have a better quality of life. And I don't know if anybody else is like me, but when I achieve one ground, groundbreaking breakthrough in my life, I'm already focused on my next summit and where I'm going to next. So when you have a conversation with these mentors that have achieved, you know, greatness and

done all these deals, you really soak up that wisdom and what their response is because a lot of it comes back to, you know, when you're making high income, when you're buying and owning your time, what essentially you get back to is living and enjoying a life. And that's pretty much why all of us got into real estate, but we probably all work harder than most people that work, you know, corporate jobs. I mean, it's just a part of the industry is that if you want to be successful, you got to work hard. So one of the questions that I, that I always ask my mentors is, you know, do you have any regrets about your success and what would you have done differently? And I really, you know, I lean in and focus on those responses. Right on, right on. All right. Next question.

For the overwhelmed investor, completely new to real estate, what would be the one thing you would tell them? Learn marketing and negotiation. You know, the way that I view real estate is a lot different than most investors. When people come up and ask me what I do, I'm a real estate marketer and I capture equity for a living. That's what I do. I don't look at myself as, I would say my partner's an investor, but I'm more of a real estate marketer because what I focus on is leads coming in and capturing that equity. I'm like one of those people at the rodeo. You know, I'm sitting on my horse and I got the bowl there, you swing open the gate, you run out, you lasso it up, you run it, you tie up the legs. I throw my hands up and that's me in a real estate deal.

You know, I'm after the, I'm after the pursuit. So, you know, one of the things that has revolutionized our business is being masters of marketing where we control the lead sources that come in and being able to negotiate regardless of what that situation is, you know, whether you're getting a call on, you know, a war zone property that almost anybody can negotiate a war zone deal that nobody wants, but when the call comes in on a 50-unit apartment building, you've got to be a chameleon that can really appeal to that person, provide a little bit of value, and know that you can take that property down. So marketing and negotiation is where, you know, I spend the majority of my time nowadays.

It's great. Cool. Yeah. And I think that's where the like wholesalers especially need to spend the majority of their time. I think that makes perfect sense. Great. What's been your worst investment? You mean as far as, you know, financial wise, real estate wise. You pick. We'll leave it general. Is there anything that stands out as just that was bad? The worst investment is something that doesn't give you a return. So, you know, the way that our lives are set up, we don't go to bars. We don't club it up with our profits.

I think those are bad investments to me. I mean, if I make a bad real estate investment deal that I learned from, it's not a bad investment. Yeah. You know, so maybe I'm not perfectly qualified to answer that question. but anything that doesn't have a return or allow us to grow is a bad investment in my eyes because we're all about growth and experiencing growth. Nice. Nice.

What's the most creative marketing technique you've ever used? The drunk letter. The drunk letter. What's this? Really? I don't know if I don't have one of the envelopes here on my desk. You got all sorts of new stuff for us. Yeah.

What's a drug letter? We had a situation a few years ago where we had a property that we were essentially unable to sell. And the way that we sell, we used to sell some of our properties is when we sold, when we bought a home and physically closed on it and took possession and now we're ready to sell it, rather than just listing it on the MLS, we were ready to get our marketing going the day that we closed on it and mail everybody that recently paid cash for a property within that neighborhood or subdivision. So we had a property that we had called everybody. You know, we reached out to the wholesalers and the buyers and nobody really wanted the deal.

So what we essentially did is I looked at our marketing piece, which was just a white envelope, and it had a yellow piece of paper that says, you know, I need to sell my property near the one that you own at such and such street. And I kept looking and saying, how can I get a better response from this mailer? So what I realized is that our return address was coming from our main street corporate headquarters. So what I needed to do was kind of flip the script because I know how to appeal to people's greed. And when somebody can take advantage of a desperate seller, that's when you're going to find a motivated buyer, in my opinion. So what we did, we took the address of the property that we wanted to sell. And on the outside of that envelope, I mean, we did, I write with my left hand, so I wrote that thing out in my right, so it looked like I was drunk.

So I hand addressed it to all the buyers, did the return. mailer from the property I needed to sell, and then in red ink I drew an arrow and said, I desperately need to sell this property. You tear open that mailer, you flip it open to a yellow sheet of paper that says, urgent notice. I desperately need to sell my property near the one you own at such and such street. I own it free and clear. The taxes are paid. I've had it listed with the realtor, and I need out now. Take a drive by, call me at this number, and I will let you inside. So it makes it seem like I live at this property. So when they call me and say, well, I'm out front, can you let me inside? Yeah, here's a lockbox. Now they've figured out that I'm

a clever and, you know, a savvy investor, but I got, but I got the open rating the response that I, that I needed. And we sold that property. And that allowed us to really, um, we kind of played that out in our market very quickly because people fell, you know, they, they picked on it very quickly. We sold a lot of properties using the drunk letter because that's what people want is somebody they can totally take advantage of the situation. Wow. So you are praying on the greed of other greedy, shady investors.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Wow. They show up. They think this poor drunken guy is going to, and they show up to take advantage of you and you flip the script. Yeah. That is pretty, pretty smart and good on you on taking advantage of those guys.

You're like Dexter. You're like the guy who kills serial killers. You're calling him a serial killer. Yeah, you're like the Dexter of Real Estate. I love it. All right, moving on, moving on. We've got to get out of here. So we're going to end here with our famous four.

All right, these questions we ask everyone. So hopefully you know what's coming. And if not, here you go. Number one, what is your favorite real estate book? Audio or book? Book. Well, if it's an audio. book that counts, but.

You know, I've, I've been glued to everything by Mike Cantu lately. I just had the pleasure of speaking with Mike out in Vegas, and I met him about two years ago. So I've been listening to Mike Cantos, don't get voted off Real Estate Island. Mike is a non-gourouro who has 30 years of no ego wisdom behind his teaching abilities. Again, he's not a guru. He shares it straight from his experience. he has no ego, there's no bragging in his material. So I've really, I mean, I listen to it over and over.

It's been in my CD changer for, you know, 18 months now on repeat. Cool. I haven't read it, though. What's the CD changer? I'm still old school, man. I haven't gotten into the whole iPod. I'm just kidding. All right.

What about favorite business book? My favorite business book. The book I created finance from Brandon. I mean, well, I would have to say, you know, this is a book. book that not everybody, this is a book that was published back in 1927. It's called Principles of Marketing. I don't know if you guys can read it. But this, I mean, this is a book that I found in a house of all places. It's called Principles of Marketing by Maynard Beckman and absolute wisdom in this book. So that's been one of my favorite reads ever.

Cool. Cool. Nobody's ever said that one before. I love new suggestions. I don't even know if we'll find that on Amazon, but if we can, I will link to it. They're 99 cents on Amazon. I had somebody told me that. Nice. Nice. Cool. What about hobbies? What do you do for fun outside of real estate?

What's, you know, what is your life outside of real estate? You know, I'm a family man. You know, I have a wife and a son. We spend a lot of time on the beach at the ocean. We race motorcross. You know, we travel a lot. We spend a lot of time down on the floor of keys. We scuba.

We snorkel. We jet ski. You know, we try to create experiences. We're not really big on material possessions. You know, they don't really provide much about. you to us. We have a pretty simple set way of life, but most of our money is spent on experiencing, you know, what life is all about. So spending time in the ocean, you know, with friends, barbecuing, eating, you know, the simple stuff. Can I come over for a barbecue?

Nice. Anytime you guys are up in Fort Lauderdale, Paul, and we'll have the cruise. I was actually, I actually go to Fort Lauderdale like once a year because I always end up on a cruise that leaves from Fort Lauderdale. My family is, my parents are cruisers, so we go with them a lot. Yeah, I'm coming over. Flying a bear. His family likes to cruise. Double meaning. I don't know.

All right. Moving on. Last question. What, well, for me anyway, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors

from those who fail, give up, or never get started? In my opinion, I think those that have a vision of their own that don't just get into this business for the money side of it.

You know, one of the things that my business partner always talks about is we meet a lot of very, very wealthy people who are emotionally bankrupt. They have no character. They have no drive. Their life has just become a numbed existence where you can make all the great income in the world, but you don't have the character to show any of it. So I think when you're true to your own vision, you wake up, you know, with conviction every day and believe in what you're doing, that's the true side of success. I mean, real estate has the ability to make astronomical amounts

of money, but if you've become a slave number one, if it's really put a shame to your character, you're not truly successful in my eyes anyway, even though you have all the money in the world. I think you're successful when you're living out your dream, even if your dream is to make, you know, 30,000 a year and play video games all day. You know, when you're true to your own dream, not what's your mentor, the latest seminar told you you have to do, your dream, which, why you wake up. up every day and do what you do, that's what makes people successful in my eyes.

Nice. I love it. I love that. I love that. Awesome. Very cool. Awesome. Well, Eric, it's been a pleasure, man.

Really, this has been a fascinating show, lots and lots of, lots and lots of things that we haven't heard before, which is phenomenal. Really, really happy about that. Show 93 on the Bigger Pockets podcast. People can check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 93. where can they find out more information about you, more about you? The only thing that I have available is on social media, Facebook.com, forward slash the Eric Stark.

Nice. And you're on Bigger Pockets as well. Yeah, bigger pockets, yeah. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for being on the show, and we look forward to actually really quick. I forget about this all the time. Guys, if you have any questions, you can ask Eric on the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 93, biggerpockets.com slash show 93.

And he'll be there to help you out and answer them. otherwise, Eric, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you, guys. It's my pleasure. All right. We'll talk you later. Take it easy. All right, everybody. That was Eric Stark on Show 93 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. That was a really, really good show. I'm kind of blown away by a few of these things, again, including that drunk letter, which is really, really great idea. And so we just want to thank Eric again for coming on board. Otherwise, guys, thank you for listening. Show 93. We're getting close to 100.

milestones coming up, more milestones coming up, which is fabulous. But again, to everybody who's been part of Bigger Pockets over the last 10 years, I really, really want to thank you to everybody who's participating in our community, 10 million forum posts, as I mentioned at the front of the show, 10 million foreign posts, which is unbelievable. Isn't that 1 million? Oh, shoot, it was 1 million, but I was thinking about Austin Powers. 10 million. I mean one million foreign posts, one million, which is still pretty darn impressive,

if you ask me, not quite 10. Next year we'll hit 10. All right, all right. We'll get to 10. Well, if you haven't engaged, if you haven't participated in Bigger Pockets yet, there's a lot of people getting involved. There's a lot of cool stuff happening, a lot of people getting together, helping each other out, networking, doing deals, doing business.

So jump on there. Go to BiggerPockets.com slash forums and participate. in the forums. And otherwise, you know, join us on the other social networks. Keep listening to the podcast. Keep getting involved. Keep asking questions. Get out there. Make things happen. Do deals. And I'm Josh Dorkin. 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.

Your home for real estate investing online. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is by Calicoe content.

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