Epic Real Estate Investing - How to Find Deals for Creative Financing + a Bonus Strategy with Michael Griffiths | 1113

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

When it comes to marketing your real estate business there is got to be a clear plan, strategies & actions to implement in order to generate quality leads and turn them into new opportunities! Therefore, in today’s episode, Matt is joined with Michael Griffiths, the world’s leading authority in making these endeavors happen! Tune in and learn how using creative marketing tools can help you find motivated sellers and put valuable deals under contract! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terrio Media. Success in real estate has nothing to do with shiny objects. It has everything to do with mastering the basics. The three pillars of real estate investing. Attract, convert, exit. Matt Terrio has been helping real estate investors do just that for more than a decade now. If you want to make money in real estate, keep listening. If you want it faster, visit REI.

iAse.com. Here's Matt. Hey, happy new year, Epic Investor. It's Matt Terrio from Epic Real Estate, where we show people how to invest in real estate with an emphasis on retirement early. This is the Epic Real Estate Investing Show, and they do this show.

We've got going on, I guess we're about in the middle of our, how do we do it, in the middle of 10th year, 11th year. So we started 2009, 2021. Kind of get that math messed up. I guess we're a little over 10 years.

And I do this show because I know that most people, they're just, they're living a life of financial sacrifice. They're struggling with money and they're being led down a path to, quote unquote, financial freedom. But it's more of a betrayal. So what we did is we built a system that creates an opportunity for one's money to work harder for them than they did for it, saving them and their families from a lifetime of financial worry and financial concern. And I know that real estate works and I believe everyone deserves a chance. So that's why we're here. And if this is your first time here, really glad that you found us. If you like what you hear, make sure you hit the subscribe button before you go. And if this is not your first time here,

welcome back. And again, happy new year to you and to everybody and you and yours and your family. Thank you for sharing this with your friends and family, by the way. You're the absolute best for doing that. All righty. So today, I'm going to get right into it. If you want to know how to find deals for creative financing, I'm going to give you the seven methods plus one bonus method from our guest today that worked and continue to work best for me. And they're all fairly inexpensive and relatively easy to do. So you might want to get something to write with. Get a pen, get a paper, some paper to write with.

So I'm going to give you some domain names. I'm going to give you some resources that you're probably going to want to remember. All right. So if you want to know how to find deals for creative financing, there are seven different methods that I've used over the years. There's actually eight, but I'm going to save that eighth one for our guests for them to share. And I continue to use them today, that routinely turn up sellers that are open to seller financing. So number one is or are distressed landlords.

Most sellers, they're not going to be open really to any sort of creative financing unless there's a need to sell. You have to understand that the foundation of every deal and particularly when it comes to creative deals, lies within the seller's motivation to sell. And this motivation that's caused by distress. It's distress that creates this need. Or like I said, the motivation, right? It could be personal distress. It could be financial distress.

It could be property distress. And I like to contact homeowner lists with multiple levels of distress. For example, out-of-state landlords of vacant houses that also have some sort of lien on the property. And I have found that landlords, they can be more open to creative financing than resident owners. I think they just have a little bit more of a business mind, I guess, in a little less personal attachment to a property. And so you can access property owners with multiple types of distress like this, like everything that I just laid out all in one place at propstreamepic.com. Propstreamepic.com.

It's pretty amazing what type of information they reveal over there about landlords. it's been an invaluable resource for finding creative finance deals. And right now you can get free access for seven days and just see for yourself. Just try it out and see what it turns up in your market. Propstream epic.com. And what I do is how I contact them. I contact them with a multi-touch campaign. Almost all of my marketing is a multi-touch campaign at the moment.

I'm not depending on any one single direct mail piece. And you have to coordinate that with multiple. touches and multiple forms of communication. And so it routinely consists of a ringless voicemail announcement that, hey, something's coming in the mail, and then something distinguishable that arrives in their mail, and then a text message saying, hey, did you get that thing in the mail? And then followed up with a phone call. And that sequence of contact happens really quickly, like within a seven-day period. So that's like four contacts right in one week. And I use REI black. Blackbook. There's a lot of great CRMs out there, a lot of little great marketing services and

stuff like that. But I use R-E-I Blackbook. It automates the entire process for me. And if you want to give this one a try, you can. You can get a special deal at blackbookbonus.com. Blackbookbonus. All right. So I told you, we got some more resources coming, but those are two. Okay, so that's the first place, distress landlords. Number two would be pre-foreclosures. I don't know necessarily what that looks like in the current environment, but pre-foreclosures have historically been a great resource for me. And what I say, when I'm saying like in the current environment, I'm really thinking about the, the forbearances and stuff like that.

But foreclosures, from what I understand, are still going on. If they didn't opt in for their forbearance and they're behind on their payments, they're at least getting, what do they call it, the notice of defaults, NODs. So notice of defaults are still being. filed. So you can still find those. And, you know, investors, they talk a lot about pre-foreclosures or referred to as notice of defaults. But most investors don't know how to turn them into deals because the properties typically will have low equity or sometimes no equity or oftentimes no equity at all. So these are ideal for subject to transactions. And a sub two transaction is where you leave

the existing financing in place in the seller's name and then you take ownership of the property. So you get ownership of the property, but the debt stays in the seller's name. But you are then responsible for the maintenance and the payments. Don't take it over and then not make the payments. You still have to make the payments. And it means it's not in your name. And you just do that and continue to take care of the property. Continue to make the payments until you're able to either sell the property or refinance the property or pay off that debt.

Okay. And then if you'd like to go deeper with that subject to strategy, by the way, I put a playlist. together on YouTube. And it'll walk you through all the different creative strategies, but it'll go right to the creative, the subject two strategy as well. That's at creativefinancing.us. And it'll walk you through all the different creative financing strategies.

Creativefinancing. Dot us. And it's hosted right there on YouTube. You don't have to log in or opt in or anything like that. All righty. So creativefinancing. So that's number two, pre-foreclosures. Number three, free and clear vacant homes. Free and clear vacant homes. Now, I'm going to contradict myself a bit here because earlier I said you need a

motivated seller for creative financing to be a real possibility. But there's another small, unique category of property owner that's open to it, one that has really no motivation at all other than an open mind and a desire for a return on investment. I find frequent. I find frequent that owners of vacant houses that have no debt attached to them at their own free and clear, haven't sold those properties primarily because either they're looking to avoid tax implications or they don't know what to do with the money once they do sell the property. So being able to show an owner like this how they can get better than Wall Street returns without tenant headaches by selling to you via owner carryback or seller financing,

it's a great source for creative finance deals. Most people just don't realize that more than one third of all homes, I think it's 34, 35% of all homes in the United States are owned free and clear. And you can find all of them at also propstream epic.com. You can find them all there too. All right. So that's number three, free and clear vacant homes.

Number four, the LOI follow-up, LOI standing for letter of intent. And I got to tell you, after I taught private R.EI.A.A.S. Client Josh Miller how to use a tool called a three-option letter of intent. He came back six months or so later and essentially taught me a new way for me to use it. So the teacher and student kind of swapped places in this scenario where when he showed me that he merely put this three-option letter of intent in the mail to every lead that ever said or says, no to his all-cash offer. And so just imagine that. Every lead that ever said no to you, if you sent them a three-optional letter of intent, might get a deal.

It certainly worked out for Josh. It resulted in 55 extra deals for him in a 12-month period. And I implemented the practice, and I'm seeing a very similar response. So if you'd like a copy of the letter and the calculator that I used to put it together, the same thing that Josh used as well,

you can grab a copy at epicl-loi.com. L-O-I.com. All right. So number four, L-O-I follow-up. Number five, other investors. So check in with other investors in your network. And this actually came up tonight on the follow-through crew coaching call that people are,

a few people there are working Craigslist. And they're getting a lot of phone calls from other investors and wholesalers. And not necessarily people to look into sell houses, they're getting a lot of calls from people that are looking to buy. So other investors. And because if the LOI follow up works for your dead leads, it worked for theirs too. So offer investors a small kickback for any deal that you get from the old leads that they've given up on. Ask them if they've got their old leads and, you know, do you got any names and numbers that I could just start calling and something comes up?

I'll go ahead and I'll cut you in. They've got nothing to lose and they've got everything to gain. And you'll also get good results by cold calling these times. types of leads. Because most investors, they just don't follow up in the way that they should. And if they've generated a lead and they've given up on it, I promise you, they've called them a couple times and that's about it. So these are really, really good sources. Or it's a good, yeah, good source. Number six, OPTs, OPT's, otherwise known as overpriced turkeys by real estate agents. And I look for properties, and I've shared this with you several times,

it's kind of one of my main strategies, and I'm still doing it. I just got to connect with a new real estate agent that's going to work for me with this. But I look for properties that have been on the market on the multiple listing service for more than 90 days. And then I have my agent, call their agent to present a creatively financed offer. And these are properties that have, that have been on the market for a very long time, and for one reason or another, they haven't sold. and it's typically because they are overpriced. But either way, at this point, the logic here and the reason this works is the seller is frustrated, the agent is frustrated, not to mention the agent is spending time and money every week trying to sell this overpriced turkey. And the idea is that fatigue is setting in and hopefully those minds, those fatigue minds will open up to some creativity.

Now, we submit the offer, assuming that it's going to be. owned free and clear. And by the way, it's about, I think we're averaging about 50 offers to get that one accepted. So just like any other lead generation strategy, it's a numbers game and you've got to work the numbers. You're going to get a lot of rejection. You're going to feel like it's not working, but you only need it to work once every once in a while for this to totally be worth it. So when we submit these offers, we're assuming that it's owned free and clear, even if it isn't. and this is intentional because if one agent is trying to sell another agent on the idea of a subject two, it rarely goes well, if ever.

I mean, you need a really savvy agent on your side and you need a really open-minded agent on the seller side. So what we do is we submit under this free and clear assumption so that when the agent calls back and asks how we're going to deal with the underlying mortgage, then we show them how we can accomplish the same outcome by either taking it over subject to or maybe renting it for a little while and then buying it later via a lease option. So those are the overpriced turkey. That's another really great way to do about it. Number seven, driving neighborhoods. And in this book that I have right here, it's one of my favorite books, my favorite real estate books,

the millionaire real estate investor by Gary Keller. It's a big, thick blue book. If you don't like to read, probably don't recommend it. It's pretty thick. But it plays really well on Audible also. But the millionaire real estate investor, highly recommend it. And what the author did is he interviewed 100 millionaire real estate investors, and he asked, how do you find most of your deals?

And they did a little pie chart of how they found their deals. And the number one answer was via referrals from their network. So that was number one. And the number two place was driving neighborhoods and looking for signs of distress. Like, you know, a house with overgrown grass or abandoned cars, parked in the driveway or on the lawn even maybe. Boarded up windows, broken windows, worn roofs, roofs and disrepair, any sort of vandalism, anything in need of paint or updating. and then looking for for rent signs or for sale signs or any sort of public notices even. Anything that causes the property to look in worse condition than the surrounding houses.

Because I guess if you think about it, there could be some neighborhoods you drive down where all the houses qualify. So you're kind of looking for the houses that look worse and worse condition than the surrounding houses. And back in the day, when you found a house with any of these conditions, you'd have to write down the address. And when you got back to your office, you'd look at it. look up the owner to contact them. And real estate investors have been doing this since people have been investing in real estate. But now we're spoiled.

It's so much easier because you can now just turn your phone into a deal machine when driving neighborhoods. So when you see a distressed house, there's a cool little app that you can download. You pull out your phone. You take a picture of the property and up comes the seller's information. And then you can call or text them right there while you're sitting in front of the house. And if they don't answer, then you just go ahead and click a button and you can send them a letter or a postcard telling them that you'd like to buy their house. It's pretty slick.

It's a huge time saver. It's one of my more favorite tools that I use right now. So if you like to give this little wonder app a try, you can get full access for 30 days plus $30 of free mail, free mail credit. So you can try it for 30 days with no risk and they're even going to give you some money to do some marketing. So go to epic deal machine.com. Epic deal machine.com. All right. So that's number seven.

So number eight, this is the bonus method I was telling you about for finding deals that, you know, they lend themselves to creative financing. And it's how I get most of my deals today. This is where Mercedes and I get almost all of our deals to the point where we don't really have to do that much marketing, not like we used to. We still do it and we still get deals that way, but not nearly at the volume that we used to. And in fact, this method that gives us most of our deals costs almost nothing. So, I mean, if you don't have to spend the money, why would you? Right? And unfortunately, for most real estate

investors and really business owners overall, it's kind of like throwing mud at the wall and just hoping that something sticks. So, I mean, with no plan, no system, no strategy, they rely on just pure luck to get deals in this area. And I'm talking about referrals, partnerships, and your network to produce warm leads for you. I mentioned Gary Keller's book, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, the number one way that those hundred investors got their deals is from referrals, from their network. So if you want to go fast, you want to learn how to market, right? But if you want to go far, you want to develop those relationships so you can generate those deals. And I've only had one student that I know of. I mean, there has to be more over the last 10 years,

but there's only one student that I know of. And it's so weird that I've got so many stories about my very first student. They just were a total, I guess, I don't know, just they just thought we're good at following directions. And I'm talking about Brad Donnelly and St. Louis. And I told him that very thing, said, if you want to go fast market, if you want to go far network. He's like, well, what if I do both? I said, well, that would probably work too. And so he did. And he generated a lot of business through referrals. But for most business owners, they believe that, you know, getting leads like that and getting referrals, it's all about, you know, asking their clients or the people they know, like, who do they know, or providing just great service and then sitting and waiting

for the law of reciprocity to do its work, or teaming up with maybe one or two other professionals that have similar clients or paying people to pass you a new business. And while these are all valid and they work every once in a while, it's almost impossible to grow a business this way. So just like with any form of marketing, there's got to be a clear plan, a clear strategy and clear actions to take to implement that will ensure you can generate as many warm, qualified, free leads into your business each and every weekend, turn those into new opportunities to find new sellers, to find buyers, to find lending partners. And my guest today is the world's leading authority in making this happen for business owners.

So I wanted to introduce you to them. So please help me welcome to the show, Mr. Michael Griffiths. Michael, welcome to the Epic Real Estate Investing Show. Thank you, that. Great to be with you. Yeah, it's great to have you here. We've been talking about this for quite a while. And I'm really intrigued about the idea of referrals because it's how Mercedes and I,

to this day, generate a significant portion of our business. And when people ask me, how do I generate the referrals? How do I make those networking things? I'm just like, it just takes time. You know, you just build a relationship. and it just kind of the, you let the law of reciprocation do its work and we get business. And that's really nothing actionable there, right? That's just kind of having a relationship.

But you've been able to put a system to make that very intentional and to make it even scalable, which is something where a lot of people just, they think if you have a referral business, you don't really have a business, but you think differently. And so you helped business owners and build businesses through referral relationships. So I want to talk all about that. But how does someone get involved in this and the first? first place to be teaching people how to do referrals. Can you give me a little bit of your background? Yes, certainly. And so true in terms of most people will say you can't grow a business

through referrals. And 100% agree with them. You can't because the majority of people are lucky if they get two to three referrals a month. And therefore, it's impossible to grow a business on referrals. Yet when we get 10, 15, 20 a month, well, hold on, we can grow a business and a pretty good business through referrals. So that's what we have the pleasure of being able to show our people exactly what to do and how to be able to do that. So here we were, well, let's go, a bit over a decade ago, 2009 and a primary school teacher, elite level basketball coach had actually just come back from University of North Carolina and doing a stint over there with their women's basketball program. And back we came to Sydney, Australia and within six months, so I'm sick

the lazy teachers. So away we went and we went, well, you either have to put up with that for the next 40 years or go do something else. So what does any teacher do? Well, you start a tutoring center. So you provided tutors to people's homes and I thought we're doing really well. We had four, five students that would see every single week and living the dream with not having to go and teaching the classroom and it was like, you didn't have a business. You just had a glorified job. and it was when I was actually sitting at netball here in Australia is very similar to basketball and I was sitting at courts like there was 34 courts that go full on from 4pm to 10 p.m. on a Friday thousands of thousands of families.

It's like these are all of our clients and the light bulb hit. I have to go to the association and we've got to see how do we team up, how do we partner up, how do we collaborate and within four or five, weeks we had gone from five students to 440 and it was like yeah that's what you need to do so that was the first sort of big light bulb moment around how do you leverage through partnerships and someone came along bought that business and then all we went to the next business and that was a health product and we teamed up with personal trainers and had over 400 personal trainers that would on sell this product to their clients i wasn't going to go sell this purple powder health product in

2010 no one knew what antioxidants were but they trusted their personal trainer so that was a good person to be able to sell it uh literally within four months we had over 110 000 customers that would repeat by this every single month so they started to become a good of a pattern and as we continue to sort of go through this and this is our seventh business and sold six along the way everything was done through how do you create more referrals how do you use your networks more and how do you leverage through partnerships? So when we have... Real quickly, Michael, so you said you done seven different businesses.

So can you give me just an idea of what those seven different industries are? Yeah, so we had the tutoring center, and then we had a health product. Then we went into mineral makeup and anti-aging cream, and we used beauticians and hairdressers and makeup artists to go and sell that for us. Then we had a jigsaw line, jigsaw puzzles. And then we had a previous marketing agency that pretty much I actually did everything from done for you websites and apps and graphic design and online, offline marketing strategies. And I remember there in 2013 just before selling us.

And it was just like phone call after phone call after phone call. Why aren't I on the front page of Google? I'm just like, do you want me to call Google and ask them? And that's when I realized that I was probably done with that. And we were doing something which got results, but it wasn't my passion. My passion was to be able to show people how to be able to grow their business without having to spend a cent on paid ads. Right. And that, unfortunately, people don't believe can actually take place where I tend to say, hey, unless you're a seven-figure business, you don't need ads and you probably shouldn't be using ads because you're more in a great phase rather than a scale phase.

And you're probably going to throw a lot of money down the drain because you haven't worked out a whole bunch of other stuff yet. So that's sort of the little background that sort of got us to go in. Hey, we've created all these businesses and we actually need to show people what to do to be able to get clients without him to spend money on paid ads. And that's what we've been doing now for the last seven years. It's fantastic. So I asked you to run down the different industries because my audience consists of real estate investors.

And they collectively spend a lot of money on ads and a lot of money on marketing. and it's always nice. It's a huge win when you get that one referral that turns into a deal because that can be a $5,000 to a $50,000 payday or maybe a property that essentially pays them forever. So referral is a really big deal and the cost of getting deals these days seems to be rising. So you mentioned free, right? So can you kind of, I guess, give a 30,000 foot view of how this would work? like how someone can be intentional about that rather than just waiting for the phone to ring.

Yeah, and I think you said something really prominent at the very start of you grow your business through referrals and they just happen. Right. And time in the game will always give you more referrals. But if you're just starting, you don't want time in the game. You don't want to have to wait for another decade for that to be able to take place. The more you are known, the more people can talk about you. But there's another point to that equation. It's more, the more you are known plus the power of the relationship you're willing to keep

equals how many people will talk about you. And we live in a world now, which is so different to even, say, 10, 15 years ago. Take 30, 30, 20 years ago, going to networking events was pretty much like a number one way to grow your business. We didn't have Facebook ads. we really didn't understand SEO, you would go, you would build relationships, you would turn up every single week

or every single month, and after six, seven, eight, nine, 12 months, someone would feel like they trusted you enough

that they were willing to be able to give you a chance. Well, that's how it used to happen. Well, today, sort of as human beings, none of that has actually changed

in terms of our behavior. What's changed is that we could speed this up through technology and social platforms, and the various widgets we have, such as smartphones. So we don't have to wait anymore for time in the game. But the overall premise being simply, someone is going to refer business to you,

open doors for you, promote you, talk about you, think about you. All of those things are just as important. The more you keep the relationship with them. And to simply go, just because of how we are in society, instant gratification and being pulled in 10 different thousand directions every single day, it only takes 45 days before you're forgotten.

So to have a conversation with somebody in September and then think that they're going to talk about you in February, March, April the following year, nah, they probably aren't even remembering you. And unfortunately, we don't grasp that concept enough. So we can speed up how quickly someone builds a relationship with us, how quickly they resonate with us and how quickly they want to help us by doing a handful of things. And I think the biggest mistake that we tend to make is we sit on our hands hoping that something's going to happen rather than actually taking action and making something happen.

So I know a big thing we talk about all the time is, hey, when you find a referral source, so when you find somebody who sells to the same people you sell to, okay, so that might be a mortgage lender, it might be a real estate agent, it might be someone who's within that particular community neighborhood that you want them to keep a watch out for for particular types of properties. When we find a referral source and we build a relationship with them, and that can happen pretty much instantly, and we create an action plan on how to be able to help one another, then all of a sudden, you've now got this tentacle of a web out there of people who are willing to do things for you and we'll be doing things for you.

And instead of just stopping at finding one or two, which is what most people do, how about we get 10? How about we get 20? We've got this partner whiteboard just sort of down to the left of me with 400 referral sources on it. But you always have to have plenty of opportunities happening if you've got that many people. So I don't expect you to go get 400 referral sources. But what I want you to see there is don't sit on your hands and wait.

when you could be the proactive person. And that's what you need to be. Got it. All right. So being the proactive person, one of the scenarios that comes up for my audience is building an alliance with a real estate agent. And getting it in the challenges, most real estate agents don't really like real estate investors unless they prove themselves first to be someone that's actually going to be a good customer. Yeah. So, you know, if you're going to be proactive about.

that in getting somebody to want to refer to you, what are some of the things that you can do to create that relationship? Yeah, good. So I'm going to take a step back here and people are going to think what on Ersi talking about, but you'll see how this comes really back in it, and it's probably at a completely different level of thinking than what we generally go to. So all of us as human beings have primal instincts. Whether we like it or not, subconsciously, we are making decisions.

every single day based on our primal instincts. We're hunters. We were out there millions and millions of years ago as caveman to go and survive and to hunt. Well, that hasn't changed. So the majority of people out there are very much what's in it for me. So therefore, what we need to understand is that every single person you talk to or you want to be able to help you has a driver. and that driver does not necessarily mean it's going to be the same as what your driver is. So some people's driver is financial.

Other people's drivers around getting clients themselves. Other people's drivers around, hey, you just make me look good and it's more around their ego. So the first thing we've got to really do is that we've got to come from the position of, what can I do to help you? And we've got to start understanding their driver. So if I was going to a real estate agent and you're spot on and it doesn't matter where you are in the world, they all seem to be the same, that they're very much bought up around the hunter mentality, what's in it for me, they're all taught pretty much the same way. So a real estate agent is very much, well, how are you going to bring me a deal? How are you going to bring me a listing?

How are you going to bring me a buyer? How are you going to bring me a seller? And that's their whole mindset. So if you understand that that's their mindset, then you need to go in with that approach of, hey, I'm going to, I'm doing this and I'd like you to do this. Well, no, that's not going to work because they don't give a hoot about you. They give a hoot about themselves. So that will change because the other big thing is in understanding human behavior is where all emotional beings. We make decisions based on feel, how we feel.

how we feel. So at the start, that real estate agent, I don't know you, I don't like you, I don't trust you, so they're feeling towards you is very different compared to if you've had four conversations over the last three weeks and you've started to go out and have a beer with one another. The feeling changes.

So you've got to understand that what your job is, is you've got an end outcome. I love that real estate agent to be looking out for me and to be talking about me and to be able to help me when the deals just don't suit them. So what I've got to do is

I've got to understand their driver. I've got to understand how they feel about me right now and trust me it's not positive and then what can I do to change that feeling so that they're more on my page. I call it get them to resonate with me.

So what sort of things can you do? It's about brain chemicals. It's about how do you make someone feel good? how do you create dopamine in somebody? Like we all need these brain chemicals every day. And the nice thing is you can influence that. So you can influence it by doing nice things. You might be able to introduce them to somebody.

You might be able to connect them to someone else in your network. You might just simply reach out with messages going, hey, I hope you have an amazing week this week. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you. And you might have to do that for a couple of weeks, maybe a month. but what you'll start to notice is the person's behavior will change because you're actually changing how they're wired. So we've got a lot of power at our fingertips to what we can do.

But I think the big thing that people need to take away is you can't go in expecting someone's going to help you the way you feel you want them to help you because you just don't understand what the driver is for them. And it becomes very much around how do you, how do you get curious? How do you just constantly ask questions to then find out, is this a person I actually want to do things with or not? Right. Sometimes there's just not a good fit. That's what I was thinking as you were talking. One was how do you uncover what their driver is? But then I was also thinking, you know, how do I choose which agent? And this could be

CPAs. It could be attorneys. It could be anybody. But we'll just keep an agent focused. But how do I determine if this person is worthy of my, my, my, favor and are they going to reciprocate? You know what I mean? Yeah. Like how much giving, you know, I'm asking this because, because you're the expert, I kind of have my own answer, my own ideas, but, you know, how much giving do you give before you say, okay, that's not working, let's move on or do you? Yeah, good. I probably don't give it all. I have a conversation. And this conversation, and unfortunately, because sometimes people are a little bit afraid of what the answer might be they don't like having this conversation.

But you've just going to have an honest conversation. And let's just go, Matt, you're the real estate agent and I'm the investor. And we've come across each other a couple of times and we seem to get along and I go, hey. So, Matt, I'm always looking for great real estate agents to be able to sort of collaborate with and team up with and to be able to pass referrals back and forth to. Not sure if that's something you're interested in, but love to have a chat if you are. That has to be the starting point. Because if they're not even willing to be able to say, yes, I'm interested in that,

straight away, you've got a dug person. So you want to go and find the next person. So that has to be the starting point in just simply asking. And then if Matt says, yeah, that sounds really good. What did you have in mind? You get great. Well, let's just have a sort of like 10, 10 minute chat or so whenever you've got 10 minutes. And let's see how we might be able to help each other and whether there's a fit or not.

So I'm actually using that language, and it's very much around, are you a good fit for me? Are you the prize to be part of my world? Right. You're doing the interviewing. Correct. Yeah, you're not going to be the interview. And I don't care, and this is very much mindset and no matter where you are in your investing world, if you've just been doing this for a month and you've got a real estate agent,

who's been in the game for 10 years, it doesn't matter. Right now you are equals. You're going to have a conversation. You know more about how to be able to create referral relationships than probably what they ever will. And you've just sort of got to build a bridge and get over yourself and not go, oh, it would be absolutely unbelievable,

putting them on a pedestal. That's got to stop. It's like, I'm looking for referral partners. I'm going to talk to every real estate agent who's in my little area, and I'm going to find the best fit for me. And that's how your mindset needs to be. And if you do that, you're going to have people who really want to work with you because you're coming across as the prize to work with rather than as the needy, insecure, begging type person, which, as we all know, we don't want those people around in our life. Right. Right.

this is really good that I don't know if it's a coincidence or not but this wasn't planned in this fashion but I this is this is the first episode of the new year and uh you know we the family we kind of set our own little versions of new year's resolutions and one of the things that I set up for was I haven't kept in touch with people that I really care about very well and I have a lot of regrets around that. And there's also a lot of people that I want to get to know, and both personally and professionally in certain categories. And I came up with a list about 75 different people. And I can, you know, there's some people that I have enough of relationship with. I can just call and say what's up and start talking. There's some other people that I don't know yet.

And I have an idea of how to reach out to them. But it's those people that I kind of know and I haven't talked to in a long time and I'm a little bit reserved about reaching out to them and having them wonder, you know, why are you calling me? You know what I mean? Like, like, what's this all about? What's the angle? And the angle is, for me, is just to have that relationship, but I'm afraid there's going to be suspicion there. Can you give me an icebreaker or two on how those conversations should start? Yeah, great. And this can be done at any level, no matter how long it's since you've spoken to somebody. Straight away, our brain is only there to protect us,

therefore we go into a fight-and-flight mode, and we make up all these things in our heads that probably have got no meaning whatsoever compared to the other person. I always would reach out to anybody through technology. So what I mean there is SMS message, social media message, email, because people aren't sitting around these days going, I can't wait for Matt to call me.

So rather than them have to be interrupted or you've got no idea what's going on in their world right now and you happen to get them in a huge argument with someone close to them or that emotion naturally comes onto your conversation, I just send it through technology and they can get back to me whenever they get back to me. I think the first thing is to not have an attachment that you need a response. So that's the first thing. If they respond, great. If they don't respond, so be it.

because I'm reaching out because I generally actually care about how they're going, and I'd love to be able to find out. And I would use the actual those words. I think we beat around the bush. We don't say it how we need to say it. And I think that just comes from just needing to be probably a bit more of a secure, confident type person, and I know that you are that, but there are a lot of people who aren't.

It's like, say how it is. And it's like, SMS, hey, John, so sorry, I haven't been in touch and was thinking of the other day and thinking, like, I just need to reach out and just say hi and see how things are. Again, sorry I haven't been in touch for so long, but love to hear how things are going. Talk soon. Guys, this is so funny because I teach this stuff, right? And I teach this whole thing. But when I'm thinking about myself, I'm like totally in a fog, right?

I would say like the best form of communication is being like over the top transparent, right? So like saying, you know, Mike, it's been a long time and I haven't kept in touch and I really regret that. And I'm just really sorry and just wanted to see if you wanted to hop on the phone and catch up. Yeah. Holy. I got it. I mean, I do it every day with sellers. It was total strangers.

Why can't I do it with people that I know? Yeah. I would go, I just wanted to see. I just tend to be more of direct and just. and we just go, hey, really, sorry, I haven't been in touch. Hope you're doing fantastic. Love to hear from you when you get a chance. I just presuppose that that's what they're going to do.

And if they choose not to, I can't do anything about that. I've done my bit. And away we go. And I remember reaching out to someone I would send the day before their birthday, the day before Christmas, I did that for like four years straight and never got a response back. and this Christmas I actually got a response back. So how's that?

Two messages a year for four years and just sent it. I didn't expect an outcome. It didn't matter. They obviously had a whole bunch of stuff that was going on in their world that they were whatever about with me and I was just like,

so be it, I'm going to just, it makes me feel good to be able to send that. And yeah, so after four years, I finally sent a message back and thank you so much. of enjoy getting your messages. That's awesome. It's great.

You know, I know next week we've got a, we're going to go into more detail and kind of get into a business structure and how to be really intentional and build a system around this to really, you know, be able to scale your business and generating free leads, right? So I'm going to invite everybody to that. Actually,

you can write this down if you'd like Wednesday webclass.com. Wednesday webclass.com. You get all the details there. And we're going to do this on. This will be Wednesday, the 13th, January 13th. So I'm going to try and do these every single week. And, you know, with something that I, when I meet someone really good at what they do and I think it'll create an impact for your business, I'm going to go ahead and keep this going. But right now, Mike's going to

be the first one with me and I'm really grateful of these, because I think this is a great subject and it's an invaluable skill set to learn as a real estate investor and an overall business owner. So that's Wednesday webclass.com. So Mike, for those that, have the intention of making it and miss out or those that just don't make it. Can we leave them with like, say, three actionable steps to get started and generating more referrals for their business? Yeah, I think that the good one for these, for this particular industry and this particular group of people is you have a lot of referral sources probably outside the box that you don't

think about. So certainly inside the box are like your, your lenders and your, your real estate agents or your CPAs, they're inside the box. That's what every single investment property person is looking for. And let's think outside the box. So who else sells to the same people you sell to, who else are around the same people that you would normally want to deal with who are your clients? Try to make a list of those.

So you can come across those sorts of people. because ultimately we're looking for people in some level of distress to where selling their property fast would alleviate that distress right yeah and for personal distress financial distress or maybe the property itself is in distress so those are kind of who we're looking for so what is one one good example and this is this person using social media so we've got uh one person around us and right now they're in Croatia because I had to leave the US on on to renew their visa and haven't been able to get back in because of COVID. But they're just constantly popping up on their social and going, hey, I just found this

particular property and it's sort of all boarded up and so forth. If you happen to be in X, Y, Z and see properties like that, love for you to be able to reach out to me because I'd be really interested in knowing whereabouts it is. Like you think, how easy is that to be able to do and start to, you know, to you. use the people you already have around you to start thinking about you. Yeah. And even being able to, the next property you go into, do a little live stream, do a little recording.

Hey, I'm just walking into this property now. And I found this property by X, Y, Z, and I'm really excited to see how we might be able to turn this around and to be able to help the owner of this property get out of distress. And, hey, if you happen to see properties that sort of look like this in your neighbour, I love for you just to shoot me a message or let me know and we can see what's going on with that property too. So I think the big thing is to constantly think that every single person you're around is a referral source for you. Because they all drive cars through their neighborhoods.

They all speak to people who speak to people who speak to people at family gatherings. So what you've got to start seeing is that every single person around you is potentially, referral source. So are you doing a good job of letting them know that you are on the lookout for more opportunities? Yeah, I think that the message gets missed for a lot of people. Because a lot of people do display what they're doing online, but it's more along the lines, hey, look at me, look what I did, look how much money I made. This is what I'm looking for and this is how I help them. If you see anything else like this, you know, feel free to, if anyone else has a service in this like this, I'd be welcome the introduction or something like that.

Send me a message. Yeah. Just changing that framing a little bit. Correct. And it's about you removing your own ego. So look at me. Look what I did. Look how much money I make.

He's very ego driven. Right. So to be honest, who cares? Right. Vers, look what I did for the distressed person. Look how we helped them. I would love more opportunity. It's doing exactly the same.

in terms of what you're showing, but changing your language, that's going to be chalk and cheese to how many more people now reach out and actually want to help you because you're helping other people and not yourself. Yep. I can see that. I can totally see that how that could snowball into some real results if you just made that a practice with every deal. Yeah, correct.

So start with this mindset. Every single person you know is a referral source. And if you start with that. Is that step one then? if we're going to create like a three-step action plan? Correct. So that's step one. See every single person around you as a referral source.

Step two is you've got to make them aware of what you're doing and how they can help you. Now, we just don't do that enough. Right. It's like, I don't want to be an inconvenience or I don't want people to say whatever they're going to say about me or whatever. Like we've got so many meanings going through our heads that we could write a book on them. but you're going to move all that to the side and go, I think it comes back to this, if you don't mind,

Matt, I'm going to just go on a different tangent real quickly here. It comes back to a welcome. I'm going to go to a different tangent real quickly here, if you don't mind. Okay, but you just said before that. It comes back to...

It comes back to this. So it comes back to what sort of impact do you really want to make in the world? Mm-hmm. Sure, keeping a roof over your head, doing deals, putting money in the bank account,

great. That's not you making an impact. And I know you want to do more than that. I know the way you help people get out of distressful situations, the way that then you can impact on society that they go on and have a better life, the way that instead of them being in foreclosure and the bank taking their place that they get away from the property with some money, like that's making an impact.

And if you're driven by that and you start sharing that, then this step two, sharing what you're doing and how you're helping people and therefore how people can help you will be completely different for you. And you will never have a problem in sharing what you're doing when you come from that way of thinking rather than an ego, look at me, look how great I am way of thinking. I like it. So it's so important. Okay.

I like it. Because people like to help those that are helping others. It's how we are. We're bought up in tribes. So it's about how do we look after the tribe? But if you're trying to alienate yourself from the tribe because you're going, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me. Well, the tribe's going to say, hey, get stuffed. But if you're saying, hey, tribe, look at the greater good I am doing for humanity, society, these people, you're going to have a lot of people who are going to go, hey, I want to, I'm cheering you on.

I want you to be successful and therefore they're going to create a lot more opportunities for you. So that's a good, the good second part. I think the third part is getting to more conversations with how you can collaborate

and create wins and create opportunities and action plans with one another. We just don't have enough conversations. So when I go getting to conversations, I've got a simple little thin in terms of like I've got just sitting in front of me just a little framework. It's got like 12 activities on it.

And I just go, what days do those activities have to happen? And start 10 conversations a day has to happen every single day. Yeah. Right? It's just a non-negotiable. Okay, so 10 might be too many for you to start with. So how about you just start with one or do two, three times a week?

Mm-hmm. But you've got to get into a habit of creating more conversations with people who then could open doors or could collaborate with you. Because at the moment, again, if you're sitting on your hands, you're not in the game. Right. I love it. So, number one, see every person as a referral source. Number two, make them aware of who you help, how you help them and how they can help you.

And number three was have more collaboration conversations. I get that right? Yeah, spot on. Sounds great. So those are three very invaluable tips, particularly if you actually implement them. So, perfect. So, Mike, it's been a great pleasure. If people want to get more in touch with you or connect with you, what would be the best way for them to do that?

Just go, Michaelgriffiths.com.com. So, yep, we're in Australia. That's a funny accent. You've been trying to pick up. I didn't even. I couldn't even tell. So Michael Griffiths.com.com. From there, there's plenty of free guides.

There's connect with us on different social platforms. Everything you need you can find from that one spot. Perfect. So we're going to do a live training together on Wednesday, the 13th. That's going to be at 5.30 p.m. Pacific Standard time. And it's not just going to be a presentation. We're going to interact and you get to ask your questions. And he's going to show you how to show you how to.

put this together inside of your business. And if you'd like to join us, you can go to Wednesdaywebclass.com. Wednesday webclass.com. And then Mr. Michael Griffiths and myself, we'll see you there. Perfect. Looking forward to him. That really exciting. Fantastic.

Thanks, Michael. Have a good one. And I'll see you next week. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, everyone. All right, make sure you head over to Wednesday webclass.com to register for this class to learn directly from Michael on how to generate free. leads for your real estate investing business through your network and partnerships.

And heads up, the next Epic Intensive is coming up. It's here at the end of the month and tickets are on sale right now. They are ridiculously cheap at the moment, but they won't be for long. So go to Epicintensive.com and grab your seat. You can get either a live seat. You can join us live via our VIP entrance or just join us from your home virtually. So you can join us at the next Epic Intensive, unmask the market, certain real estate success strategies for uncertain times. That's January 28th through the 30th, 2021. Can you believe it?

2012. That feels weird to say. But anyway, the Epic Intensive, it's the transformational event of the year for real estate investors, epicintensive.com. All righty. So if you found this episode valuable, who else do you know? Because there is a good chance that you do know someone else who would. And when you think about it when their name comes to mind, please share this with them. And then I ask them to click the subscribe button when they get here. I'll take great care of them. All righty. That's it for today. God loves you, and so do I. Health, peace, blessings, and success to you.

I'm Matt Terrio. Living the Dream. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. You didn't know, home world, we got to cash flow. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.