Epic Real Estate Investing - Why is Knowledge Power? (It's NOT, but this is...) | 575

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

If you have ever wonder why is knowledge power and how it impacts your success, today, we are adding layers on that philosophy, revealing another ingredient, which unquestionably dictates the prosperity of your business and shapes it more than education does. Learn how we established The Epic Pro Academy, why people don’t succeed in real estate even if they get a good education, and how we developed our teaching to help students bridge that obstacle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terio Media. Hey there, I'm Matt Terrio here at Epic Real Estate. And I was wondering, have you been wondering? Have you ever wondered why they say knowledge is power? Well, stop wondering because it's not. But I'm going to tell you what is on today's episode of Financial Freedom Friday. So I'm in the car, obviously, doing the obligatory podcast in a car. But not to be cool.

No, it's kind of overdone. but I am doing it to multitask and get some things done because I'm getting ready for the Epic Intensive. I'm actually coming back from Newport Beach right now, back up to L.A. Because I've been sequestered in a hotel for three days, working on the presentation for the intensive. And if you're watching this right now on the day that it's released, that means you're not at the Epic Intensive because that's where I'm at right now. I did this in advance. Maybe next time you can join us, Epicintensive.com. You can get all the details there.

Anyway, as I was putting the presentation together, I was thinking about what can I teach, what can I share, what's going to have the biggest impact, what's going to make the biggest difference for the people that are there? Because, you know, knowledge is power, right? Or is it? Because I've been thinking about this for the last couple years, and I started thinking about, you know, when I got out of the Marine Corps, I spent the next 15 years of my life in the music business. Did really well for myself, made my million by the time I was 30, living the dream, having a blast. And this digital download thing came along. And it changed everything. It turned that whole industry upside down. It changed so many lives. Tens of thousands of lives. I remember. Sony music laid off 10,000 people, then Universal music laid off 10,000 people.

Then it hit the newspaper that Sony was laying off another 10,000 people. I mean, it impacted so many people, put so many people out of work, including myself. In six quick months, I found myself bankrupt, divorced, and bagging groceries. I literally went from a seven-figure salary to $7 an hour. That's how fast it can go. Before I took that job, though, bagging groceries. It's not like that was my first choice. I was out there looking, got my resume together, tried to reach out to some connections, and there was a lot of people in the marketplace looking for a job.

And I found that there was very little value at that time for an out of work music entrepreneur because there was a bunch of us out there. So I was like, well, I'm almost out of money. I got to eat. I got to keep a roof over my head. So let me just take what I can get until I find something better. And that ended up being at the grocery store. While I was doing my research, entertainment was no longer going to be an option. So I had to learn something new.

and I really missed my money. So if I was going to learn something new, I knew I wanted to go learn something that had a big income earning potential. Long story short, that led me to real estate. I spent a few years as a real estate agent because I thought that's what I was supposed to do. I guess I was a rather slow learner

because it only took me four years to figure out that, hey, if I really wanted all that money that real estate promises, I should probably be sitting on the other side of the desk because it's not here being a real estate agent. So I made that transition, made a large investment in my real estate investing education. It was very comprehensive program. It taught you just about everything and anything that you'd want to learn about real estate investing.

I'm forever grateful for that experience. So after a couple years and I'd achieved a certain level of success applying that knowledge, I looked back because I would sit in a classroom with up to 300 people sometimes learning the same information from the same instructor with the same workbook, with the same textbook. Once everybody left and went out into the real world to apply that knowledge, there was wildly different results. There's a handful of people that, and to this day I still know that handful of people, and they're still successful in real estate, and they're still doing it.

But so many, I've never heard from again, and they complained, and you can see complaints online on how it was a scam and it didn't work, all this stuff. And I was like, well, I sat in the same room as you did. How come it worked for me and it didn't work for you? You know, people just started to ask me, how did you do this? Can I pick your brain? Can we sit down for coffee? Can we go have dinner?

Can we have lunch? And I was like, okay, well, maybe teaching this stuff is the next evolution for me. And when I started to make that addition to my business, this is what I'm going to do differently. I remember all those people that got all that information and they got nothing for it and they were pissed off about it. So this is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to take all that education because where I think they were really lacking because it was very modulized education. Like you sat in a classroom and learned about short sales. You sat in a classroom and learned about multifamily. You sat in a classroom and learned about wholesaling. You sat in a classroom learned about creative financing strategies. And the education was amazing.

But once you took it out into the real world, you're kind of at a loss of where to start. They didn't really give you a step-by-step process. So that's where I thought I was going to be really different. So when I create my program, of which I did nine years ago now, what is now known as the Epic Pro Academy, I've made sure that I'm going to put this in a step-by-step process. I want to make it so simple that a five-year-old could follow it and do real estate. That was my intent. That was my goal.

So when we opened that up, we got some really good success stories right out the gate. Then it kind of slowed down and then there'd be one pop-up every now and then. But what I noticed was as we were promoting the Epic Pro Academy, and we would show evidence and proof of what was inside actually worked. I found myself sharing the same, I don't know, six to eight stories every single time I had the opportunity to talk about the Epic Pro Academy. And after a few years of that, I started thinking like, why do I only have these same people? I'm tired of talking about these same people.

Let's get some new success stories. Why isn't anybody succeeding right now? So I went through and called a bunch of our students and did a survey to find out where they were stopped, what wasn't working, where they needed help, what was missing, what was broken. And what I started to learn was people would consume the information and either one, they never took action or if they started to take action, they were getting burned out in just the setting up phase. They would get overwhelmed with how to set up a website or they'd get overwhelmed with which phone system should I use. and they'd take a survey amongst all their friends or take a survey inside of Facebook and find out which one are you using, which one are you using?

They'd get totally stopped. They did that with CRMs and they did it with the email service providers. And they just got to the point where they never got out of the setting up of the business business. That's the business that they were in. And they'd get burned out on that. You know, it'd be 60, 90, 120 days in that process, nothing to show for it. And they'd walk away with the idea that real estate doesn't work. Well, the fact is, they never actually got to the real estate.

real estate part of the business. For those that were getting some good results, they had just skipped setting up the business entirely and went straight to the actual business of real estate. But because they didn't have a business setup, they didn't have the system set up, they had limits onto what they could achieve and they would get confusing, it would be overwhelming.

They were having to work a lot harder than was necessary to get the results that they were getting. So I collected all this information. I met with my team, I met with Miguel, I met with William. I said, okay, if we're gonna continue to charge for education, then we have to make sure that's actually making a difference. If we're going to feel good about it, we have to make sure

that it's making a difference for people. So what can we do differently with the education? So it actually has an impact on people that sign up and put their trust in us. They actually get what they signed up for. All of the promises that real estate makes. How can we help them bridge that gap? Or what we came up with was, well, what if we just start doing stuff for them? And all the stuff that they get confused with, all the stuff that they get overwhelmed with? What if we just did all of that for them? That way, we can get them into the real estate portion of the business and out of the setting up of the business business sooner so they can get into a money-making position and income earning position much faster. And so we thought that was a great idea. So we started doing that. It started to work. It

started to show some really great results. And this is what's now known as the REI-ACE program. But it continues to evolve. So now after every time we have a new group of students come through, we're like, okay, now we know a little bit more. We've learned a little bit more. We're seeing the results. What can we do to get them even closer to the goal line? So that's kind of the metaphor that we use is how close can we get our students to the goal line so that all we have to do is just kind of give them the ball and they can just step across the end zone and score. After about two years of this, our success stories have multiplied by 10. Obviously, we've had a breakthrough in getting our students' results.

And this really came to me as I was setting up the epic intensive presentation. There's certain sections where we put the little testimonials inside of the presentation. I've got too many to use now. I can't use everybody's. really want to because there's so many great stories and they all come from so many different walks of life overcoming so many different challenges and they've all achieved amazing success defying all odds and overcoming all their challenges and I just want to share share share but I couldn't but that was a good thing because it says what we've done is making a difference so the conclusion that I've come

to is knowledge is not power and because it's not power that's why we've decided to no longer charge for it. In the day of Google, you can get just about any question answered that you want with a quick Google search. It's all out there for free. So how can we charge for this? Through the Epic Real Estate Investing podcast, through our YouTube channel at epic rei.t.t. We hold nothing back anymore. You might have heard us say that or myself say that a little bit more frequently because that's the new motto. We're just giving it, giving it, giving it. It's all yours. Because knowledge is not power. Applied knowledge is power. And because applied knowledge is the powerful portion of that equation.

That's what we charge for. The information is now free. The implementation of that information is what we charge for. I'm no longer a guru. I'm a recovering guru. Guru's sell information. I no longer sell information. We're a service provider.

We provide systems and services for real estate investors to help them get the results that they're looking for. That's the business that we're in. So with that said, what did you notice? What did you learn? What is opened up for you? Go ahead and share with me what you notice, what you learn. share that with me below. I read them all. I'm looking forward to reading them. If you have any

questions, put those down there too. I'll be happy to answer them. If you like what you heard, go ahead and click the like button. If you know somebody that this would help, go ahead and share it with them. And now you know the truth. Knowledge is not power. Applied knowledge is. I'll see you next week on another episode of Financial Freedom Friday. This podcast is a part of the C-suite radio network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio. com.