Cole Ruud-Johnson (00:00):
Today you guys are taking the first step in your journey from going from hustler to operator. Today you guys, I'm talking about the foundation of your business that you're gonna build your whole real estate empire on. That's data, people speed, however you got here. Thanks for being here today. Let's get going. 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 in all of real estate, which is finding deals. I'm Colver Johnson and in this podcast I share the exact steps I've used as source 400 deals by age 24. And this will allow you to do three things, control your deal flow, make a limited income, and build your empire as an off-market operator.

(00:49):
Well today you guys we're talking about my favorite part of this business. Everyone that comes to us asking for advice comes to us with one question. And that's the question I want you guys to ask yourself throughout this episode, which is how do I start buying back my time and getting myself out of this hustler phase, this constant hamster wheel of chasing the next deal and having to do everything with no system, process or organization. So today you guys we're talking about data, people and speed. Before we get into that, I'm gonna start with just talking about the foundation of all of this. So foundational systems that you guys have to have in your real estate company allow you to build up from there. Have a team come on board. And I'm we talking about a few basic things you guys, and it might sound boring but you guys have to listen to this part of the show or nothing else is gonna matter.

(01:37):
So the first thing I want you guys to make sure you guys have is a solid c R M system. I'm not going into depth. So you guys have to have a solid CRM system that can do a few things. You can call outta that system, you can text outta that system and you can email outta that system as well as put people on long-term drip sequences. So guys, again, before we get into data, people see data, people and speed. Make sure you are paying attention to this part of the show. Otherwise none of this other stuff will matter and it seems boring, but this is the stuff that truly moves a needle and can take you from hustler to operator and eventually architect of your company. So other things you guys have to have as a good internal communication system for your company, even if it's just you and two virtual assistants, you guys have to be using something like Slack internally.

(02:21):
And the main reason you guys is because you're gonna have 3, 4, 5 escrows going at one time eventually and you can just not scale a company with the amount of chaos that goes around with each deal, especially off market deals, unless you can communicate about each deal all in one location. Okay? So that's two things. CRM, Slack. The third thing you guys have to have is somewhere you can organize your whole company. And I like to use Google Drive for this. What I recommend is creating a different drive folder for each section of your company. So you're gonna have an admin folder, a marketing folder, an acquisitions folder, and a dispositions folder. Okay? Your admin's gonna have L O C docs hiring information, SOPs, your marketing folder's, gonna have all of your workflows for marketing, same for acquisition, same for disposition. Okay you guys, those are three simple foundational pieces of your business that if you do not have, you are never gonna get outta the hustler phase.

(03:10):
Okay? So now I'm gonna start talking about the first thing, and this is my favorite part of this business, is data out the three pillars, data, people and speed. First things first. If you guys go cheap on data for your business or you don't truly understand data for your business, you will never scale a real estate company. There's so many of us out there that are looking for the cheapest skip tracing, the ske, the cheapest data. What that does that puts you in a position where you can't get a hold of anyone. And in this business you guys and the initial startup phase, the only way you're gonna get really get scale and get a good OPEX account building is by outbound low-cost marketing. And that's built on data. So that's cold calling, that's texting, that can be R V M, but my favorite two are cold calling and texting.

(03:53):
So why am I telling you that you can only really get traction at the beginning with these two things? Because what I've seen in the past and what we've experienced when you're first starting out, mail is very expensive. Pay-Per-Click is very expensive. SEO is very expensive. Facebook ads are very expensive. The stuff that is very expensive, you need a longer run rate for. And in a business like ours, you guys, your average lead to a contract is going to be roughly 60 to 90 days. Best case, sometimes much longer. We have deals we get that came into our system 16, 18 months ago and you guys don't wanna put yourself in a position where you're outlaying 40, 50, 60 grand outta your pocket for pay per click when you're brand new without being able to see your return on that for six months. That's not a good way to bootstrap a company like this.

(04:37):
You're gonna be stuck in that hustler phase for very, very long time. So how do you get out of that trap? The first thing you have to focus on is data. This is where you get your data from, what you spend on your data, how you organize and prioritize your data. First part of that is where you get your data, okay? So for you guys that think there's a magical list out there that's gonna magically bring all these deals into your pipeline, it does not exist. There is no magical marketing list out there that's gonna make you guys a millionaire and bring you infinite deal flow. Most data companies are not great, most lists are not great. What we want to do is give ourselves the best chance possible to, to get in contact with the most motivated prospects as soon as we can. So what does that look like?

(05:19):
So for us, that looks like we start by having a warehouse for our data that is called for us. We use REISift, I'm not affiliated with them. It's an amazing easy service, great ui, easy to use, ton of demo videos in there. But re ei sift is the warehouse for all of our data. So once you have an account on there, what I recommend going and doing is choosing whatever county you're looking to do business in. And I recommend sticking in your backyard if it's a decent population. And the good way to know that is if there's a Chick-fil-A within 30 minutes of your house or another really common in and out within 30 minutes from your house, you're in a good enough location to start doing this business end. So what you're gonna do to start once you have your REISift account is go into a software like ListSource or PropStream and I, I think PropStream's UI is easier to use and it's pretty solid data if you guys wanna start there and you're gonna pull an absentee list for your county, you're gonna upload that absentee list into your data set and then you're gonna layer on top of that.

(06:16):
So you're gonna go back into prop stream, you're gonna pull every motivated list from that, your tax delinquents, your pre foreclosures your liens, your divorces, your pre probates and also add those to REISift, okay? Why is that important? Again, like I talked about, data is very faulty, but what isn't is giving ourselves the best chance of success by layering, layering multiple data points on our prospects. So once you have 4, 5, 6 lists and r e iif, now you can do what we call list stacking, which is the foundational part of the data side of our business that allows us to get good outbound marketing, allows us to get low cost leads in, allows us to start getting out of our hustler phase cause we can predict future revenue once we get enough KPIs from this. So going back to re e iif, now when you guys go into your REISift account, you're gonna be able to see records who show up on 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 lists.

(07:05):
Why does that matter? Skip tracing is expensive. We don't want to be wasting skip tracing dollars on properties that are not likely to sell. So now what I want you guys to do is anyone that shows up on two or more, for example, if someone's an absentee record, we don't want to just skip trace them. Skip tracing is expensive. We don't want to go cheap on skip tracing. The two services we use internally is needtoskip.com and easybuttonleads.com. And neither of those are cheap. There's a lot, there's much cheaper options out there, but I hear time and time again from everyone that we've coached and that comes to me that I talk to the cheaper you go on skip tracing, a lot of times the worst the quality of the data gets. So now we're gonna take our, our our records that have two or more motivating factors, right?

(07:48):
That's an absentee pre foreclosure that's an absentee with a lien. That's a lien with a tax delinquency that's a divorce with a bankruptcy. And we're gonna skip trace all of those and skip tracing you guys if you don't, you don't know. It's a way for us to append phone numbers and emails to those properties and now we're gonna have a database. You guys have actually motivated prospects with phone numbers and a couple things on that I talked about that you have to pay attention to is do not go cheap on your data and make sure you guys build that database cuz it's gonna get you more motivated leads in the bo in the door way quicker. An example of this I call box marketing and this, this puts us in a really simple to understand analogy. So in box marketing in a real estate business like ours, you guys have one box of 50,000 absentee leads.

(08:30):
That's awesome. There's probably a lot of deals in there, but the problem is that might be literally your last call at a 50,000 leads. That's that deal. So we want to give ourselves a higher chance of success. So instead of that we're gonna break that down into one more box, which is absentee and maybe absentee outta state. And that might be, you know, 10,000 records. So now we have an even higher chance, higher likelihood of getting to those leads before our competition. And then I'll break it down even further. I'll even further, I'll go absentee and absentee out of state and pre foreclosure and that's gonna game you say maybe 1500 records. But that's gonna give you a higher likelihood again of getting in contact with these people before your competition, maximizing your cost per lead, maximizing your cost per deal. And this is what allows us to get on what I'm talking about next, which is our people funnel.

(09:15):
Okay? So our people funnel you guys. The second part of this funnel is taking all the data we've procured and finding a way to get in contact with these people as soon as we can in the most efficient way. Your guys' job as a marketer and a real estate company, especially if you want to get outta the hustler phase and be able to predict revenue as making sure you're getting a yes or a no from every individual human being inside of your database. And a lot of us in this business, you guys, we forget that every single prospect in our database is a human being going through real life situations. We think they're just numbers inside of our list stacker or on our spreadsheet. These are real humans. So how do we as a marketer do our job? We make sure every single human that is likelihood to sell on the next six to 12 months and our database is getting an answer to us that's yes no, or maybe maybe is a yes in this business.

(10:09):
So yes or no, how do we do that? We make sure we're using what I talked about, outbound marketing, outbound marketing and what I recommend doing is cold calling and texting. So what does a cold call funnel look like in a business like ours and why does that mean we get meaningful scale and it allows us to move quickly out of that hustler phase into an operator phase? And I'll tell you why. The reason is because as business is all about at bats, when you start moving from hustler to operator, you're gonna be hiring your first person, you're gonna be hiring your second person and unless they have a significant amount of at bats, you're not gonna be able to to one develop internal KPIs or two, have enough volume of leads that train them and hand the baton over to them so you can start getting out of the each individual role in your company.

(10:53):
Cuz most likely you guys, you're not good at everything in your business, you're doing a lot of it because you have to because you're bootstrapped. And when you start bringing people on, the one input you can't control for them is reps. And your job as a business owner is to get as many people in that funnel for them that are saying yes or no. So they have reps on the phone, okay? So people's huge, make sure you guys are using outbound marketing channels to get a yes or no. That's all the the data people speed part, the people part of this is making sure you guys are interacting with people as quick as possible and getting a yes or no from them. And what's a yes, A yes from someone is someone from a cold call or text that says yes, this is my property, this is my name, this is my phone number, this is my email.

(11:33):
And yes, for one reason or another I'm considering selling my asset, my house in the next six to 12 months. That is what elite is, you guys, you don't wanna be qualifying, which you talk about a lot in this podcast and other episodes. You don't wanna be qualifying them on anything else other than those couple things right there. Getting them into your CRM, which I talked about as a foundational piece before this and being able work them throughout the months until they're ready to say yes and sign an agreement. It's very rare that someone's gonna come in and sign an agreement the day a lead comes in. It takes nurture, especially in this business you guys. And that is why the people aspect is so important. Getting people into our system as quick as we can so we can work them, nurture them, build rapport, and be there for them as a service when that time comes for them.

(12:15):
So speed is the third part of this. Speed you guys isn't what I was just talking about of the speed of reaching out to people. Speed in this business is day in, day out. What I refer to as speed is how much we're maximizing the inputs we're con we can control and how quickly. So a lot of people will do the first two parts. They'll spend a bunch of money on their data and they'll spend a bunch of money on their marketing, their cold calling, their texting. What they're not doing is there's a, there's a resource in this business, you guys, it's not money. That's time, energy and effort and becoming a business owner. And that is a speed, when I talk about speed, I talk about how quickly are you improving your capacity as a business owner. And that's what truly takes people out of the hustler mindset to a actual operator.

(13:00):
Cuz even bigger than the tactical marketing pieces, hiring pieces, the biggest thing that blocks people from going from hustler to operator and then beyond is the framework We believe in our ha in our head, we all have this get shit done mentality that we wake up and we scramble nonstop looking for the next busy work thing we can do that will never get you out of the hustler phase of your company. I promise you that. So the speed part is just as much a mind part mindset part as it is a tactical part, but is how quickly are we learning? Are we using our revenue to pay for courses? Are we using things like this to improve ourselves as a leader of a company so we can move out of a hustler phase, unlearn the things we've learned and move into that, that operator seat and then eventually beyond that.

(13:42):
So those are the three phases, guys, the three foundational pieces of a real estate company and why do they matter? Again, these things matter because the whole point of the show is to help you move from hustler to operator to architect, which is the only way you'll be able to sustain a real estate business long term and not just build yourself a high paying job and make sure we're building a real business. And what I like to say, if you do all this stuff, you'll put the fun back in your business and you'll wake up with a, you know, a a, a jump and a motivation and an energy that will just serve your business in a way you can never do if you're stuck on the hamster wheel of being a hustler.

(14:22):
To summarize, you guys, we went through data, we went through people, we went through speed. And if there's one thing you're gonna take from all of this and just one thing you're gonna implement, at least start in that data section and do the steps I talked about of getting all of your data organized in one place so you can start giving yourself the best chance to get good cost per lead in and get good leads in the door as quickly as you can that are actually motivated. So thank you for listening. Tap the follow button on Apple Podcast or Spotify so you do not miss the next, which drops in just a few days. On Apple Podcasts, it's just a little plus sign in the upper right corner. On Spotify, just tap follow. And if you prefer to watch, we publish all of these on my YouTube channel, just search my name and subscribe to my channel. So until meet again, you guys remember: you're only one deal away.