Cole Ruud-Johnson (00:00):
If I was knocked unconscious and woke up in another city, um, with say $500 to my name, there is a certain strategy and a certain blueprint that I would implement to do my first days, my first deal within 90 days. And that is the blueprint that you are getting in this episode. To make sure you guys watch all the way to the end of this show, I promise you it'll be worth your time. People don't fail at real estate because they suck, they fail because there's too many ways to succeed. That's why I suggest you focus on the most important skill and all of real estate, which is finding deals. I'm Cole Ruud-Johnson and in this podcast I share the exact steps I've used as sorts 400 deals by age 24. This will allow you to do three things, control your deal flow, make unlimited income, and build your empire as an off-market operator.

(00:52):
Starting from zero. Fun topic to talk about. I talk about this a lot on other people's shows, men, person at our events on Twitter, on Instagram, I like to go in depth on if I had to take everything back to zero in regards to I had some cash, but I wanted to do my first real estate deal in the next 90 days, specifically wholesale or finding a deal off market, residential commercial, it kind of applies to both, but that's what today's show is about. As I mentioned in the intro you guys, and going back to zero as a concept, we all, as entrepreneurs, we think about a lot, whether we're aware of it or not, we do think about, Hey man, if everything went to zero, what's my plan B? And this is not a plan B show. This is how would I get back to executing my plan A if, say an example I like to use, I'm knocked out and I wake up in a different city after being knocked out.

(01:33):
I don't remember necessarily, you know where I'm from, but I'm in the city and I know I gotta do a, a wholesale deal or an off-market deal in the next 90 days. What do you do? Right? What list do you call? Where do you get phone numbers? Who do you talk to or what buyers do you talk to? What events do you go to? I'm covering all of that in this episode and I've been excited to record this one for a long time. And I talked about an intro, kind of where I'm at right now in business, but the first part about starting from Z you guys is most people, um, focus on the wrong things. You guys we're in a very, very forgiving business model. Wholesale and real estate off market deals, fixed and flipping. These are large liquidity events so you can suck and if you get one deal on a 90 day period, that deal can be 50 grand.

(02:12):
I've done wholesale deals that are $175,000 on a single family house just for a wholesale deal, not even commercial or multi-family just for a single family house. I've taken home 175 grand where our company has that was in a couple weeks. So you guys, the power of this business, it's so forgiving and liquidity events are so large that it's one of the main businesses. I would say if I had to start from zero, I'd go right back into what I do now. So this is not a Plan B show, like I mentioned. This is a plan A, so the first thing comes down to what do you spend your time doing? You have to be spending your time on revenue generating activities. And I'll say that again, revenue generating activities. You guys getting a business card is not a revenue generating activity. People don't even care.

(02:50):
They wanna see your social media anyways. Getting a L O C set up right away, I wouldn't say is a revenue generating activity. Getting your landing page set up I say is a revenue generating activity sitting on Facebook and telling everyone in Facebook groups that you're trying to wholesale houses and if they have a deal, you're, you're gonna help 'em sell it. That's not revenue generating activity. What is a revenue generating activity when you are starting out? Say you wake up conscious after getting knocked out in a random city, how are you gonna get a deal done? You need to spend 80% of your time talking to sellers and 20% of your time talking to buyers. That is it. And I'm gonna talk about some nuances and how I would do that if I had to start over. But that's the premise of starting over is you're talking to homeowners and then you're talking to buyers.

(03:31):
Cause that is how you get paid. You get a contract with a homeowner and you get a contract with a buyer and you collect essentially what is called an assignment fee, which you guys are all aware of. If you're listening to this podcast, you know what assignment fees are. Either you're chasing down your first one or you pay your bills with assignment fees or fixed and flip profits or development profits. But everything starts with the deal. And so many of us are so reliant on the m ls or brokers or other people for what pays our bills, which is deals and why, like why be reliant on other people? What pays your bills as an entrepreneur? And that's what this show helps you take control of. And that's why I'm talking about this starting from zero in a new city, you know, so going back a little tangent there, but going back to the point, 80% talking to sellers, 20% talking to buyers.

(04:11):
So how do we talk to sellers, right? What does that look like? Am I sending postcards? Am I knocking on doors? Am I driving for dollars? I would do none of those three. Okay? I don't love postcards or driving for dollars or knocking on doors starting out. I don't mind driving for dollars and knocking on doors, but to me it's not the most scalable, highest leverage use of my time. If I was in a new study starting over 90 days to get a deal under contract to be able to potentially wholesale and make a $20,000 or more sign fee, what I'm gonna do in that situation is I am going to, let's say, you know, I had $500, say I'm starting with $500. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into Prop stream or list source or Adam data or all one of the million softwares that I've talked about on the show you guys like, and go back to listen to the data episode and cold calling episode like there's no magical software or data list, but I'm gonna get a list of absentee out of state owners that have some equity and have lived in the home, let's say at least 10 years.

(05:03):
Then what I'm gonna do with that list is I'm gonna skip trace it using a service like easy button skip trace.com, which I'll draw from the show notes below and I'm gonna get back a list of phone numbers, okay? So that takes all my $500. I now have, let's say 5,000 people to call your lead to contract ratio in the business is a number that's very, very important. If you are even terrible at this, you should be one to 50, to one to 75 leads to a contract if you are sitting on the phone making offers and talking to sellers all day. And so now I wanna help you reverse engineer how many leads you need in those first 90 days to get your contract and how many cold-calls you're gonna have to make in regards to spending time talking to sellers. So let's say you get on, you spend another a hundred dollars a month getting a dialer like batch dialer or call tools or mojo dialer, whatever dialer you want to use.

(05:49):
And you know, I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna make, let's say 200 calls a day. Very conservatively, 200 or 300 calls a day is gonna get, get you one-ish to maybe two leads per day. Good. Like decent leads. I would, I would say, so if you know you're gonna get one leads really per day on spending a hundred dollars a month on the, on the dialer and you have 5,000 leads to call, let's say that we're gonna pace ourselves, we're gonna get through those in a month. I'm gonna essentially gonna get five leads a week. Let's say be conservative. So five leads a week, that puts you at 20 leads a month, right? That puts you at 60 leads in those 90 days. So even if you aren't amazing with 60 leads in the door and 90 days, you should have plenty, plenty, plenty of chances to get that first contract and let's low up your, as long as you don't get the unlucky and you don't wake up and it's suited like North Dakota, your first deal is probably gonna be $20,000.

(06:41):
And I'm not gonna go into this show what to do once you get that next check, but I'm just talking about what I would do from zero. So let's rehash that. So I'm gonna spend 500 bucks to get a list, skip trace that list. I don't care how you have to get that money, you drive DoorDash, whatever it is you're gonna do for that money, but you get $500, you buy an absentee outta out-of-state owner list, you can even throw on a vacancy filter on that. It's not very hard to do. You get phone numbers and you sit there and you call, you hit the phones every single day. You make 200 to 350 calls on a dialer, not conversations, but calls on a dialer. And within 90 days you're gonna have, you know, 60 leads to work. And that you guys, that is literally it.

(07:14):
Everyone wants to overcomplicate this business on how to get their first contract. As you talk to sellers every single day and you get better and better on the phone, stop chasing down magical softwares, magical lists, magical phone numbers, magical that it does not exist. You have to do the work. Nothing is going to save you from sitting on the phone or knocking on doors and talking to sellers. The people that I know that crush it in this business very early on, right out the bat, they're aware that this business takes work. And anyone out there that on Instagram or Twitter or TikTok selling you some course or model that doesn't take work or you can do it from your couch. I guess you can't to a certain extent if you're making calls from your couch, but you know what I mean, it doesn't exist. There's no real money on this earth without work.

(08:00):
That's how it should be. That's how it is. That's what capitalism is. It's you get out what you put in and yes, there's other lever you can pull as you start doing deals, you can hire people and you can buy better data, you can pay for better dialers, you can hire out certain parts of your business, but overall you guys don't buy into the BS that you can go buy a course on wholesaling and never have to talk to a seller and just JV people's deals. That is not the reality for 99.99999% of the world, okay? You guys have to be in the game talking to sellers 80% of the time. Now, what I'm gonna do, obviously to get your first deal done to 90 days, yeah, getting the deals awesome, but now we have to sell the deal, okay? If we get a deal, we can't sell the deal.

(08:40):
No one gets paid, seller doesn't get paid, you don't get paid. Title ESCO officers don't get paid. Agents don't get paid. No one gets paid if you cannot sell that contract. And people also underestimate you guys, you create a mini economy. When you guys do a wholesale, even one wholesale deal, you create a mini economy. Think of how many people you employ of one wholesale deal, okay? You're getting title and escrow officers paid, okay? You're getting the seller paid, you're getting the flipper paid, you're getting the city paid, all, all the fees and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. The state paid with excise tax or transfer taxes or whatever. Taxes happen when you transfer real estate in your state that you're listening to this from, but you're creating a mini economy. When you do a wholesale deal that's super fricking cool. There's so many parties involved in the transaction, but you have to get that deal sold to realize that.

(09:25):
And what I recommend, I don't recommend going fancy and going on, you know, I also don't remember going right on Facebook groups. You guys, if I, if I was you guys and I wanted to do my first deal and disposition, my first deal, what I'm going to do is not post my deal on a Facebook group, but most states will have Facebook groups for investment real estate that I've found most do. And so I'm gonna use this strategy, I'm gonna talk about one other's. Lo and behold, if your state doesn't have that availability for you, so you're gonna go into Facebook group, you're gonna type in say whatever city, state the deal is in, and I would find 10 20 emails and I'm gonna send them an individual email. I'm not going to blast that deal on Facebook. I'm gonna send them an individual email and say, I got this deal in this area.

(10:02):
I noticed on Facebook you're buying deals in this area. Do you have five minutes to jump on the phone? I can run this deal by you. That is how you sell your first deal. You get on the phone with 'em, you have a very simple conversation. Do you buy in this area? Yes or no? Are you looking currently for deals? Yes or no? Well, here is this deal I found I am asking X for it. Is that something you'd be interested? Yes. Awesome. I'm gonna set up a walkthrough for you. That is the conversation you have. Okay? If for some reason you don't have access to a Facebook investment group in your area, there's other strategies you can do with this, okay? There's a website called cash buyers plus.com where you can go buy emails. There's websites like investor, there's a website called Town square.

(10:38):
You guys, t wn square.com ran by a really cool team that had actually got the chance to meet in the past few days, which I'll drop from the show notes here as well. And it's pretty much free as a user to go in and start marketing your deals, the buyers, as long as you do it the right way and their platform. And that's another route you can take. But whether you guys can't access a Facebook group, then you can go those other routes. But guys, that is the backend, 20%, 80% of your effort is going into getting that first contract and then 20% can go into dispositioning that next, that, that contract for you guys that don't know, usually after that point, you have another two to three weeks to wait. So, you know, all in 90 days, let's say you get your first deal on a contract in 60 days, you find a buyer, you close, you're gonna get paid within 90 days.

(11:17):
And it's not rare if you guys are in certain markets to get your first check beat, 20, 30, 40, 50, $60,000. And that's why I say this business is so forgiving, so forgiving liquidity events are so large, it's so life-changing. The amount of people I've seen step outta W two s and uh, become full-time self-employed, even if they don't scale it into a big business, they still can make two or 300 grand a year on their own and hang out with their kids and travel and laugh and then live a life that they can't if they're sitting in an office doing software sales or things of that nature. Not hating on software sales, but just saying the W2 life is, it limits most people from what they want to do and express and their time here on this earth. And that is what, um, wholesale can do for you.

(11:57):
It did for me as a 19 year old kid, you guys go look at my Instagram, I put out pictures of them. My first check stub was 105 grand and 19 that I, I didn't net all of that, but a big portion of that, I did net and that was, man, it changed my life forever and I wasn't that good. But it's such a forgiving business. The checks are big and as long as you don't go blow it and you keep investing in your education, you can take the model that I just gave you to do your first deal on a new market and you can expand that thing into incredible business, which is what I help people do and we do every day in our company.

(12:31):
Well, I hope you guys can use this befor blueprint. If you're listening to this and whether you've done some deals or you're looking into your first deal, this blueprint works. It's a very, very repeatable kpi. I do own a call center, so I'm very aware of cold calling KPIs around the country and it's pretty aligned for most people. Obviously it's a little different state by state and you know, average price point and cost, polluting cost per deal. But it's pretty, pretty consistent. And like I talk about throughout the show, you guys one deal can change your life forever. And that's why I always in this episode with a common phrase that you're gonna hear at the end of this again. So stay tuned for that. But as always, you guys, I deeply appreciate any sharing. You could tell two people about this show and that means the world to me.

(13:08):
And please hit me up on Instagram. I'm super responsive. I go back and forth with people all day every day on helping them and their company and grow and take the next step to, you know, blowing up their wholesale business and leaving a W2 or whatever it is you guys are struggling with. Please let me know and my IBMs on Twitter, Instagram, wherever else you guys consume your social medias. And as always, if you guys could give me a share on your story or you can subscribe to this on Spotify, apple Podcast, wherever you like to listen to shows like this. We are, and again, I love feedback. So if you guys either love or hate these shows, the formatting of given have any ideas or creative thought process you wanna share with me, dms are open. I love the feedback and as always, as I mentioned, I promised I would deliver the same prayer they always say because it is true. You are only one deal away.