2008 yeah okay all right yeah somewhere okay all right cool man so then and I love this part so reading kind of your bio and hearing about you you read Rich Dad Poor Dad in 2016 which is like right around I think it might have been 2015 for me and totally a Big Catalyst but yeah I was curious like what about that turned you on to real estate and got it rolling for you it took a few years for those ideas to percolate my high school band director actually gave it to me at our high school graduation I totally forgot I read it through college um but then it wasn’t until after college where I had worked for somebody that had rental properties and I was like hmm why do you have rental properties instead of stocks and he was like well if you manage them right you can actually make sure that they always continue to cash flow unlike the stock market that goes up and down and so I was like putting two and two together I’d heard Warren Buffett say never lose money that’s rule number one rule number two is never forget rule number one and then put two and two together I was like let me reread this Rich Dad Poor Dad thing then I played the cash flow game and I saw how you can get out of the rat race if you buy rental properties that cash flow and you keep using that cash to buy more cash flowing assets and eventually you can earn enough passive income that you don’t need to work in order to live and cover your basic living expenses so that was the next phase of my motivation nice so yeah what was your like next step after that kind of how you started the progress oh boy it was a roller coaster because I certainly was encouraged to see somebody in real life with rental properties but at the same time it was kind of discouraging when he said well in 2008 I bought these properties and that’s how they were able to cash flow sit for sale the rent payment would not cover the mortgage payment so nothing was Cash flowing so I felt pretty disheartened I went to a local real estate Meetup though and I saw a lot of people who were finding discounted properties and I took their advice to find my own discounted property by looking for rundown houses looking up who owns the property and sending mail to the owner asking if they want an offer on their house and so I set off to do that and find about one to two hundred houses like like that that were distressed nice driving for dollars from the start man yeah it’s called driving for dollars I always felt like that was kind of a goofy lame name but everyone knows it yeah yeah and what Market was that in that she first started doing that I was living in Indianapolis in Indianapolis yeah and just yeah so that was just you how you would just go around get as many addresses and start marketing to those people was initial yeah so I I met somebody that came to Indianapolis once a month to buy 30 properties per month and that just blew my mind I was like who the heck comes and buys 30 properties every month what do you mean but really they were buying properties that they could sell to turn key and the way that they uh were finding properties were they would go to the auctions and then they would host some Meetup once a month for Real Estate like wholesalers people who are just getting into it they wanted to find a property and they wanted to actually you know flip 500 into ten thousand dollars by finding a discounted property and then flipping it really quick to Brittany this girl who was coming to buy 30 properties per month and what I later found out is called wholesaling we don’t need any of your money your cash to make that type of flip and so anyway that was really the next step and she told me rewind so I was trying to find one of those properties okay and she told me I should probably find 100 run down houses and I was on my way I probably found 40 or 50 but I missed out on what could have been an amazing first deal I drove by this property I’d written down three weeks ago someone else was working on it and I looked it up sure enough somebody bought it for a price that would have made sense I mean Brittany had this chart that was like I can pay this much and this ZIP code so I was like this made sense I could have made ten thousand dollars on this deal but I had not been following up you know I was having too much fun driving around so basically I built this really basic tool because I’m a software developer that would allow me to click a pin on the map tell me who owns it and then send a piece of mail to the owner so it was helping with my follow-up problem and then I was like super pumped when Britney heard about this app and I was like she’s like hey well I’ll spend a thousand bucks to try any new marketing and I was like worth a mail and I ended up finding my first deal both with this little widget that turned out I ended up calling it deal machine and making it an app that others could use too but that’s kind of how it started how I got my first deal and how I even put it on the App Store it was just for Brittany nope so this is cool this is what I wanted to dig into so with that that all look like because had you you literally created the the this the app at the time I mean what did it How family influences your future look like from the like groundbreaking was it was when you were actually using it yourself and just you using it was just a just an app you just created on your phone just yeah I mean it was like super basic it didn’t look great um I’m a software developer but I had never built a mobile app and so what I did was I had just brought this map uh kind of like a puzzle piece is like let me give it a map and let me pin an address and then from there it didn’t even look up the owner’s address but it just created a spreadsheet and then I had like a assistant come and look that up on the Marion County Indiana property records website but eventually we direct connected with that website and then we bought data so it worked everywhere and uh I had to do that because people started talking about it and it didn’t work in their city so I had to pull the trigger license data because I couldn’t connect with 3 000 counties directly on all on my own that quickly but that’s then what allowed it to kind of spread via word of mouth and it really took off in like 2018 like two years after I made the first line of code for myself two years okay that’s one timeline of it so and even before you while you’re looking for those first wholesale deals you were using so you were using that app that you created and it obviously grew to what it is now but from the start huh it wasn’t like most guys were probably just me I’m just driving around writing addresses and a sell sheet or doing something to capture them but you were like literally had the app working from day one huh no no well day one was paper you know day one was paper I spent several months looking for properties but I wasn’t reaching out to anyone because I was having too much fun looking for properties and also at the time you couldn’t send like one-off piece of mail so I had to also build up enough list of properties before I could use a service to send mail so by the time I had written the app I was probably like six months in man uh using How growing up in a strict household led me to join the army that paper but I didn’t have any results yet because I wasn’t following out up I wasn’t reaching out to Property Owners yes okay that makes sense so yeah and that was kind of my next question is like when did you have that aha moment that and you kind of talked about it but was that the moment when uh you said Brittany was like hey I’ll pay a thousand dollars for it I could monetize this or when did you like hey I could make this into a business well I realized somebody like Britney who’s
really trying to buy a lot of discounted properties a thousand dollars in marketing was a drop in the bucket to
her it was worth it to her to discover a new thing that would give her an edge and that was really amazing to me
because I was not a salesperson I did not sell baseball cards before I was 15.
I do not identify as a salesperson I am a very analytical person and I you know
just never never had sold anything you know like growing up and the fact that it was so easy was like holy I need
to do something so that she can do this and I can complete this sale because at this point I’m just taking an order and
it’s obviously something that she’s in interested in probably someone else would be interested in it too so that’s
when I got motivated and it clicked I was like this thing is a is something that’s valuable to other people not just
her not just me heck yeah now that makes sense huh so you yeah so you get it
going and then like what uh so you were talking about the Automation and like the follow-up
because you were like hey I weren’t following up with these people yeah so what how did you like how what did that look like to build that out and and how
to yeah that that impact it was the most simple thing and it still is all you
need to do is add properties and send mail I was sending mail again because I
preferred that I preferred to only talk with people who respond to my outbound
message rather than talk to everybody cold calling who’s going to be really like emotionally tolling on me when most
of them don’t want to talk to me so that was a strategy I picked for myself knowing myself that I would prefer to
talk with somebody who’s responding to my postcard rather than cold calling all these people and so that was it it was
just a map it would look up the address with the county records and then it used a third-party company that I connected
with to go ahead and handle the printing and the mailing of the actual mail and then it would just repeat every 21 days
because I felt like like that was a really good amount of time good frequency to balance your costs compared
to staying top of mind and that was exactly how it started just plain and simple like that it was the same
postcard for every property except the app was designed that I would take a picture and then that picture would be
on that piece of mail that went to the owner because a lot of times these owners don’t even know what condition their house is in and the response I got
was like Hey I could tell you put a lot of time into this because you took an actual photo like I could tell this
isn’t from Google you know you were actually here and took this photo and so that’s why I called you instead of
somebody else who sent me generic looking mail yep love that yeah that was one of my favorite parts so we started
using this I think in 2019 and I just had at the time I was just trying to find more deals and I had some interns
and so I’m in Houston investing up in Wyoming and I had some interns wanted them to find property so it’s like just
start driving for adult you’re just driving and finding properties and then we we got them on the app I was like
okay listen the app is a great the steel machine app is very great way for us to keep track of where you’re driving by
and then pinning the properties because yeah it was the same issue like hey they’re driving by but how are we keeping track of them and one of my
favorite features was hey take a picture while you’re there so you can get hey I can see what the house looks like B they
can when you postcard well what it evolved into was as you do more deals as you earn more money driving around
looking for those run down houses becomes a task that it’s better just to pay somebody fifteen dollars an hour to
do and once you’ve paid somebody to do that the pictures that they’re including with their submissions are critical to
making sure they’re adding the types of properties that you want them to so it becomes a very good coaching tool as
well as a great marketing tool heck yeah good point yeah just the I always say inspect what you expect that’s a great
way you’re seeing it marketing it that’s awesome so on that Cadence though you so
you weren’t you didn’t really have any other marketing channels going other than just hitting them every 21 days with a postcard initially oh yeah
correct I just keep it plain and simple there’s way way too many things that you could Spread Way Too Thin and get zero
results biggest challenge that I see and we’ve helped people close over ten thousand deals in all 50 states now the
biggest challenge I see is when especially somebody brand new tries five different things at once they might do a
Deployed to Iraq
little bit of cold calling a little bit of mailing but not enough of any one thing to get the result that they should
and so that was my I’ve always been a big fan of focus it’s why I’ve continued to focus on Deal machine for the past
you know since 2016 instead of starting another app or starting you know a lot a
lot of people be like well I run 12 businesses I just run one I guess two if you count the rental properties that I
have but that’s it and I’ve really believed in staying focused and for me I think that’s an advantage because it
allows me to to see things all the way through interesting so so digging in then um you’ve got a Cadence of following up
but what what does the follow-up look like uh once you’ve because people will call right on a postcard but then
there’s a whole like are they ready to sell and when will they be ready to sell have you how did that kind of evolve for
you and you do that within mcdeal machine or you do that within another yeah I just approach it in the most practical way is if they call me back
and he said I want an offer on my house then I would go to that up I would just say like can I come at six o’clock and
then I took a bunch of pictures there I asked them like why is he selling oh why is this house why is this part of the
house look different um oh what’s that FM radio toilet paper combo holder that you have in the wall
there I’ve never seen one of those and then he said like how much do you want on your house how much you’re going to
offer me and I really was like I don’t know um but I will tell you in 24 hours I’ll
get back with you in 24 hours so then I went home ran my comps did my estimation costs for rehabs like three times and
then I lowered my offer just to give myself an extra buffer even though I felt very uncomfortable doing so and I
presented the offer the next day in an analytical way I was like look this is best case scenario perfect condition
these are the rehab costs this is what I’m gonna make and probably bump into when unexpected things happen and here’s
why I can offer you what I’m offering you and he accepted it which was amazing and then I did my first deal that felt
great awesome I think you might have been asking something about the app too so let me clarify when yeah when you get
a call you can pull up the lead in the app you can leave a note you could say like leave a task for myself you can
change the status for I’m marketing to this to this guy called me back or this woman called me back and so one of the
future developments is we’ll like integrate a phone number to the mail piece within deal machines so all those analytics are tracked automatically for
you but right now they’ll just call back whatever number you put on your mail piece and so that’s a future development
that we’re excited about this coming year at deal machine yeah no that’s cool you went a couple directions uh got me
excited there too but let’s go with the rental property so at what point did you so you mentioned you want to do rental properties where all these deals that
you were I mean how did you kind of balance the now you’re finding deals maybe you were selling them to Brittany or somebody else wholesaling or maybe
you were keeping his rentals how did that Evolution look like because some people start rentals first some people start wholesaling first I’ve always and
A new chapter in life
started with the idea that rental properties could help you escape the rat race through reading the Rich Dad book
and playing the cash flow game and talking to my boss who had five cash flowing rental properties and so my
mission at the beginning from the beginning was always to build passive income and so I really fully planned on
keeping my W-2 job and funneling that money into buying more and more rentals once I figured out you could get a
property at a discount then I really became very interested in that and I did
a couple of deals that were technically free houses because I got it at such a good discount I was able to fix it up
and it was worth so much more than I had put into it for purchase and repairs and so then I kind of focused on doing that
again I haven’t wholesaled the deal because I was like this is an incredible deal I could take ten twenty thousand
dollars now maybe or you know I could fix it up and I could get fifty thousand in equity I could be closer to my
passive income goal and I could get all that cash back and that’s what I just continued doing is I decided to keep
every single deal that I did because I thought it was a good deal and I wanted to build that passive income nice and
still to this day are you wholesaling many of them or you’re just keeping mostly also I have eight properties um in 2018 deal machine took off we went
from doing twenty thousand dollars in Revenue to 1.3 million dollars in Revenue in one year and then six million
in Revenue the year after that and so I stopped uh focusing on finding discounted properties myself because we
were focused solely on making sure other people could find discounted properties with deal machine and so for that reason
I actually have only done oh I’ve done like 10 deals okay I did I have eight rentals now but that was my path I’m
very interested now though that it’s been five years and I’m I haven’t paid much attention to the rental property
since 2018 and now I’ve looked back and I’m like man this property that you used to rent for 1800 is now renting for 2
800. I bought it for like 190 and now it’s worth 350. holy cow there’s like
eight of these that have done that so why don’t I start buying more properties and now I’m kind of becoming more
interested in it but you got to realize like with with the app growing so fast like that was just like full Focus for
me now I’m very interested after seeing how the rentals have performed over you know the course of only four or five
years and I’m kind of more in tune with that now as a great opportunity man that’s uh and just to your point you
said earlier you’re like focus on one thing right focus on one thing that’s driving it and you you clearly did that
from start to like finding your deals and focusing on one way to do it and then this took off and I mean totally
makes sense and I’m glad he alluded to the fact that like then you just the beauty of rental properties is you just
set them and forget them pretty much right I mean mean I’m sure you did some did you have did you use property
management companies or did you just manage it I just manage it myself via text message you know so if the if the
toilet is clogged then I asked the tenant if they’ve tried plunging it you know and if they say yes we did then
I’ll call a plumber to come you know drain the the main line right do you do the plumbing snake and I never really
set foot in the house so that’s it’s been pretty nice and pretty low effort actually one of the benefits of buying
it at a discount buying the property at a discount fixing it up and creating a lot of value in the property is you
pretty much have like a rent or a maintenance free rental property for 10 years because everything’s brand new there’s not a ton of stuff that’s
probably going to break yes love that when you’re yep when you’re fixing stuff up and redoing yeah and it’s not that
same case if you buy an existing property an existing rental from somebody else that you’ve got all that
deferred maintenance so that’s a huge one when it comes to just really and you’re running your performer your your
estimates right on like how’s this property gonna put form it’s a completely different it’s a different percentage right for your your operating
expenses or I mean if you’re trying to estimate and project him yeah totally and yeah I mean I was like pretty loose
with the pro forma’s and stuff I really just um bought all my properties for like I was like Hey like let me let me
just get like the the one percent of the purchase price for rent every month and that was kind of like a loose you know
estimation method for me yeah I’m glad you mentioned that because that’s still one we use to this day and it’s fun it’s
it’s honestly like I think a controversial metric to where some people like oh that’s just a newbie thing it’s just you can’t even get that
in some markets but there’s some markets where like hey if you’re getting one percent you can save a lot of brain damage just the deal is going to cash
flow if you if you hit that metric I mean there’s other variables yeah now with the interest rates a little higher
you might want to actually check you know what the interest what the payment’s gonna be but yeah as a general
rule of thumb I have found that to uh line up some good deals for me yeah 100 so you I got a note in here about the
the polites so that was a family that’s done over half a million dollars with deal machines so like what what is it
about they you’ve talked about how you use it but how specifically are they using deal machine to just Crush man they actually hired their mom to go out
and drive and every time they close the deal they’d give her a thousand bucks and they’d take a picture of her with all that cash in her hands
and they were doing some direct direct to seller marketing like they were
pulling like absentee owner lists in North Carolina and uh it’s a husband and wife right so you know Dedrick he didn’t
think that you know driving around was a good idea but crystal said where I’m going to do it anyway I’m gonna get my
mom involved and Dedrick was answering the phones and uh he couldn’t believe that so many of their calls were coming
from these driving for dollars leads and so Crystal was like Z told you and uh
they’re trying to build a big rental property portfolio as well and so they were able to acquire a lot of properties
that have a lot of equity because they were finding them at a discount they’re finding distressed property owners they
couldn’t list it on the market for sale because maybe they were a hoarder and they were a private person and they
didn’t want to clean it up or have the ability to clean it up and they also like didn’t want to Market it as is that
Overcoming tough situations
way they’d prefer to sell it directly to an investor and just you know be done with it so that that was how they use it
um is they really hired drivers rather than just looking for the properties themselves elves got it and I think and
that’s another thing I was going to ask you is like what is it about this form of marketing that’s so effective right because you can again you can cold call
you can text you can do Facebook ads Google ads pay-per-click SEO all all different radio TV but like yeah
anything else you would add to like what just really makes this marketing channel so potent so one of the things that
makes um looking for distressed properties driving for dollars so potent is because
all the other lists and marketing methods can be done from a computer with a click and driving for dollars is a
slight barrier because you have to go out and look for the actual property it’s something that not a lot of people
are willing to do but that extra effort generates a list that you can’t easily buy plus you know the properties to
stress so those two things combine create a great formula for getting a lot of people that do end up wanting to sell
their house or get an offer on their house because of those two things and then they’re not talking with a lot of other investors which allows you to have
better control goal over what price that they’re willing and interested to accept Barry yeah I think hit it on the head
couldn’t agree more because yeah it’s such a niche list and yeah the barrier entry big time yeah you just yeah
anytime there’s a bear you’re gonna make sure you’re just getting that much Quality quality leads good stuff hey so tell me about Josh and Dave so you you
these were these were friends of yours and and turned in to be kind of business partners so business 50 Dave owns the
business 50 Josh came along after the business was founded and he’s like hey you guys are selling this for 50 a month
that’s really cool I bet we could sell an annual plan for 200 a month by
packing it with a couple more features that allowed you to hire drivers and we said well we don’t have money to pay you
Josh but if you can create that plan and sell it yourself you can earn a commission on any of those types of
plans that you’ve sold and so Josh came on and did that he’s actually moved on from the company now but he was with us
for several years and really did create that Elite level plan it’s more for the teams that the polites for example have
a lot of success with man that is cool so that was a future yeah that kind of came in and then yeah that’s another
game Shader too again I’ve learned about that one in a mastermind a couple years ago I were talking about deal machine they’re like did you know deal machine
you can actually go hire drivers which Mastermind it was a game changers actually they’re
out of Austin James Hodges no way and uh I was in Austin no way I didn’t know that
yeah it was talking to my I forget his name uh Mike wow I wish I get his last name but yeah this guy out of Virginia
he was the one talking about it cool and they they use it a lot too I’ll get you Mike’s name I forget it older older
guy video call and say thanks for referring yeah heck yeah heck yeah man well cool
so how do you so as a business owner kind of more broad question like how do you balance like overworking um yourself
maybe part one and then also like curious how much how you how you balance like what to reinvest back in the
company and then what to kind of keep a huge breakthrough for me this past year was doing the 75 hard which requires two
Getting into Real Estate
45 minute workouts and I would get up and I would do my first workout and then I would work and then I would make sure
that I do my second workout at five o’clock every day so I can just get up from my desk or get up from whatever I’m
doing and go do that workout and then have the rest of the evening to do whatever I need to do so scheduling that
time to stop working and get up and do something that I need to work in was has been really critical and refreshing for
me so that I come back to work the next day feeling amazing my business partner also has a he had a kid and a wife when
we first started the business so he was always like dude I gotta protect my time with my family and so I’m single that
wasn’t really the top of my mind but as we started hiring people to respect his wishes we all said hey no slacks no
messages no emails after 5 PM unless it’s an emergency we’re going to use the
send later option so that way you’re not in dinner and get a slack and then mentally you’re away from your family or
whatever you’re doing so that’s been something that has been a value of ours for quite some time since almost the
very beginning that’s those are you know two things in the way that we handle that at deal machine
super cool man I love that as a business owner like just because balancing that stuff at night because you can’t not
look but you like the you like the instant Alert on your phone when it’s needed but not at those times just to
send later that’s a great feature you get a lead that comes in at 7 pm you should probably take that but our
philosophy at deal machine is well is there a service that we could use to take those calls at that time or is
there something we could set up so if we do have to work in the evening we don’t have to do that and so I would those are
just two suggestions the way we think about it because we know sometimes you have to but our goal is to do like a
retrospective later and answer that question how can we change what we’re doing so that this doesn’t happen again
yeah so follow up to that too and better way to answer the kind of second part is like so yeah you again you were
initially gonna use any passive any extra income you had or get creative in buying properties at a discount to go
buy out and buy more properties right so that’s how you were growing to get passive but then deal machine takes off
you guys are just crushing it in Revenue um so then I’m just curious how and then
what does it look like for you to reinvest either either pulling like and it could be percentages right maybe like
what do you started to I’m just curious like because you guys have done well and then like hey are you excited to go redeploy that into or maybe you went and
paid off all your rental properties but I’m just curious because you think like a real estate investor and then you’ve done well in terms of like generating
cash what’s that look yeah absolutely so most of my 20s you know in order to be a
millionaire in my experience you’ve got to make decisions that are opposite of what other people are doing at that time
and for me I was doing everything that was the opposite of my friends my friends were graduating from engineering
school they were buying their first house they were also buying a new car to park in the driveway I lived with
roommates I drove a 10 year old Honda Accord until the transmission broke and then I replaced it with another 10 year
old Honda Accord and I did that I didn’t go on trips you know a lot of my college friends after college they would go on
trips they would go see like other college games and travel for this or that and I’d have to opt out because man
I was trying to save 50 of everything I made at my W-2 job to funnel into something that was really important to
me which was investing and I knew time was on my side so those were some examples of how I did the opposite of
what everyone else was doing for several years so a lot of years have good decisions then when I finally did have a
lot of rapid growth at deal machine um I will say it first you know I I really had to go the other way I had to
get out some uh built up pent up energy and I had to spend some money so I got a
6 000 square foot house downtown Indianapolis and I I paid for a Ferrari
cash you know I I bought art to go in the house it was really cool so thankfully you know that that all
happened and that that kind of like scratched the itch and then I am interested and have been interested in
putting some of that money into real estate now because I think that that’s what is um just kind of been the natural
pendulum swing to balance out most of my 20s yeah it’s good now that’s great
perspective I like it because it’s like yeah if it swung as you said the pendulum great way to describe it cool
man we’ll go yeah I’ll keep it rolling so these are a couple more like kind of more personal like lifestyle
um stuff but uh so you did two Habitat for Humanity builds this year tell me about the habitat and I’ve heard habitat
can be like a buyer yeah absolutely that was a shock to me because I figured for Habitat they needed to get the house for
free or whatever and they said no the real estate markets actually gotten competitive over the years that they are
willing to pay really well to wholesalers that want to sell their deals to them because they have no other
way of finding great deals so they’ve found other ways to finance those deals mainly through just getting corporations
to sponsor like big corporations in Indianapolis Eli Lilly sponsors the
local habitat chapter so that’s where they get their money that is why they can spend money good money to reward
wholesalers for finding deals a lot of wholesalers just don’t know that and so in every Market pretty much there’s a
Habitat for Humanity that you could send your your deals to and that could be a great buyer for you we really felt it
was time to give back because we help people on both sides of real estate transactions right the power of real
estate can be creating wealth and power that we can provide somebody who wants to sell their home is that speed and
convenience and we work all day behind our computers most the time with our minds but getting to actually help
somebody a real specific person with our hands side by side seeing what Financial
education that person’s going through seeing how they’ve helped build other people’s houses to then receive their
own was really cool and it was a it was a fun way to give back and our team really liked the physical angle of real
estate for a day and I think it made them appreciate the way we approach things you know working as like
knowledge workers rather than hammering nails and painting closets but we really had a good time and we learned a lot too
about how habitat sets people up for success and ensures that they’re also giving back before receiving so that was
fun yeah super cool yeah I love yeah I love the aspect of just being a part of
the Habitat for Humanity and get your team getting into it it’s something we’ve thought a lot about but I never thought about hey could actually
um could be a business relationship too so that’s super cool so you talked about the fitness thing earlier I meant to
follow up on that but I’ve also had it had a note for it um so you yeah tell me that again so when and when did you
start kind of that you said it was 45 minutes in the morning and then 45 minutes afternoon yeah so the 75 heart
is a mental toughness challenge you have to do like 10 things every day including
Balancing multiple jobs while learning about Real Estate
two 45 minute workouts and if you miss one thing you have to start over from
Day Zero and go all the way back up to 75. so that’s pretty much what I did to
start off my fitness journey but I took it several steps further I got even more serious with working out and I’ve lost
35 pounds I got six pack abs and I really enjoyed that since I moved to
Austin and everybody’s very fit here and it’s so warm year round people are always you know walking around the Lakes
the trails and in the heat you know there everybody’s just wearing swim trunks so it was really good and nice to
be able to do that as well without feeling like as you know self-conscious and it just felt great the discipline
just gave me so much context for like like I’ll tell you what I took a challenge I’ve never never really
marketed you know real estate investing I’ve never really marketed my own business right most people have shared
it as you said you heard about it through somebody at a mastermind so a personal challenge that I’m taking is
learning marketing learning how to Market how you can earn a living how you can build wealth through real estate
investing and so I took this challenge of you know I need to post you know if you post stuff on the internet people
will see it for free how amazing is that before you know social media that wouldn’t have been available there is no
place to post something and have thousands of people see it for free right you would have had to pay for a billboard you would have had to pay for
a TV commercial but that’s the world we live in today and I realized that so I took a challenge 16 times per day over
four different platforms every day for 30 days and a lot of those posts didn’t get a lot of traction and I was really
discouraged I was like man nobody likes me and uh I kind of then thought about it in the fitness con context and I was
like you know I really was discouraged after the 75 days of 75 hard
Rover and I I still didn’t look as good as I wanted to and I was like then I just gave up trying to get a result I
just kept doing what I needed to do with my trainer and then I was like well then I got the six-pack apps then I lost the
35 pounds and it wasn’t until I forgot about the result just started doing what I needed to do so anyway that’s
translated to business in my social media challenge because it was kind of brutal that just eat crow not knowing
how to do the stuff right and really the challenge was just to get you to start doing the things that are going to make
you learn over time but just doing the posts is what I should feel good about not how many likes it gets and so I will
say dude yesterday I had one of the best posts that I’ve ever had got 13 000 organic views in a few hours and just
put in perspective most previous to that were getting like 200 you know and then I was like aha this was a formula that
worked well I’m gonna do another one really similar and then sure enough that one got the same organic reach I was
like yes like finally I’ve got a breakthrough I’ve got to win you know and it’s been about 30 days but I felt
like the fitness discipline has really helped me in business and that’s in that specific way yeah so you’re just saying
like just yeah even though you’re not seeing the breakthroughs you just it’s really just grinding through grinding through eventually seeing it and because
on the fitness one was it like eventually what what did click it was it the fact that the personal trainer kind
of finally guided you to get you to do the exact right thing or or was it just it finally just had a compound over and
over and I think that it just takes longer than you expect sometimes yeah good point and to your point about the
the market when you’re when you’re really obsessed with the result it makes you feel bad when you’re not getting it
but if you flip your mind to like man I just love getting up every day and getting this done it feels good then you
can just do that as long as it takes you know you don’t get anxious you don’t get depressed that you’re not getting your
result you’re just happy to be doing it and then that allows you to go long enough to figure out well now I got the
result here you go I like it reminds me of Ed mylett right just one more right one more just keep doing one more and
then eventually um I I don’t know Ed mylett and what you just said is the the only thing I know about him but it
sounds like one more is a healthy way to think about it it’s kind of like every no that you get is just closer to a yes
right it’s flipping the way that you’re thinking about things if I am reading Ed bylette’s mind right is uh just changing
how you’re thinking about things and getting excited to do one more yeah I’ll send you a quick little reel you’ll like it it’s it’s pretty inspiring he wrote a
whole book on it and it’s just about always doing I’ll just try one more you think you can’t or you’re not ready to get up the next day just do one more and
one more and get you through the hard times get you through the battles but cool well you talked about Austin
earlier so yeah how’s that been how’s the relocation been maybe personal and business-wise from Indianapolis to
Austin in February last year it was 80 degrees and sunny and so when I came on that trip I just stayed for six weeks
because I didn’t want to go back to Indianapolis cold cloudy 15 degree Fahrenheit you know and so it is exactly
the same way right now which makes me very happy I will say this most of our environment at deal machine was work
from home instead of doing tours of my properties when they needed to be rented out I got the show Mojo lock boxes that
allow somebody to show themselves the property inputting their credit card and their driver’s license into show Mojo So
that’s an enhancement that I’ve made I still property manage via text message so I don’t need to go in the property and Austin’s great for doing outdoor
workouts I’ve basically made it my mission not to be in my apartment like any night of the week I have something
to do so dude I joined sand volleyball I knocked on all my neighbors doors and I invited them to a game night I took a
storytelling class I’ve taken an improv comedy class I’m about to do a stand-up open mic uh comedy and there’s like all
kinds of comedians here there’s a lake I learned how to wake surf man it’s it’s been fantastic and to be able to do that
year round I’ve been out wake surfing in December I haven’t gone in I did go in January actually so it’s it’s it’s been
really fun I really really enjoy it and from a business perspective it’s not like a great rental market so I think
I’ll keep buying rental properties in Indianapolis it’s actually cheaper for me to rent this place than it would be to buy it and pay the mortgage the
mortgage would be more expensive than what I pay in rent downtown but there’s so many entrepreneurs here it’s just a
Taking risks and exploring new opportunities
great energy to be around because there are so many entrepreneurs here it’s almost the default and it’s you know
it’s always good you’re always like the average of the five people around you or maybe you’re gonna earn the average of
the five people around you and if you’re around people that are earning more have created wealth you know through
entrepreneurship that’s very positive and I think that’s just exciting to be around and so certainly would help help
me on my journey love it yeah have you read tribal millionaires that’s another good one he’d love it’s big on that the
whole like surrounding yourself and then just a bunch of other accountability and yeah I’ll share that one too thank you I
that’s part of the 75 hardest to read 10 pages every day so I actually read 15 books last year after reading probably
like one the year before and I really enjoyed that habit as well because it always feeds your mind positive things
right on a daily basis no matter what else is going on yeah that’s probably a better way it’s a you just summarized
why I probably love I do Audible and listen to stuff and all the whatever stressed out about something but I’ll go and listen and then I’m like mood
completely changes feeling way better ready to go ready to New Perspective agreed
nice well oh look since yes since he said that one what was your what would you say share the top book I’m sure you
got a ton of them but what’s the one that popped out from last year if you read that yeah my favorite book was humor seriously why you should use humor
at work and not be afraid to make jokes as long as your joke is not inappropriate even if it’s not funny
people will think of you in a more confident way and that’s a proven scientific fact based on this book so it
really encouraged me to just have fun make jokes crack jokes knowing that they don’t even have to be funny it takes the
pressure off it still has a positive result on how people see you and especially in a leadership position that
that enables like a much more relaxed culture one where I’m having more fun and one where my number two guy at deal
machine says he’s never had a more fun work environment ever in his whole life than the last two years at deal machine
and he even said the way that you’ve loosened up over the past year David has just made me enjoy my job so much more
so keep doing what you’re doing so the one thing is though that the book was given to me by my assistant and so I
think that might have been an underhanded compliment that uh my jokes aren’t very funny in the first place
because uh the cover said if you’re in charge and people are laughing it doesn’t necessarily mean your jokes are
funny so but she promised me I wasn’t she promised that it wasn’t she just thought
I would oh that’s good man good stuff all about culture and yeah that’s that’s cool that’s one I haven’t heard of and I
can totally relate to that sweet man um a couple last couple to wrap it up let’s see yeah well yeah easy one or
maybe different perspective popular one what’s your thought on interest rates how are you what’s your outlook maybe
how it’s changing how your plans or mind-blowing news today they just dipped below six percent man 5.9 as of this
morning and so that’s really exciting I would buy a deal no matter what the interest rates are man because if you
take the last 20 years the average interest rate is like six seven percent and if the deal cash flows I want it
there’s never a perfect time to buy a rental property well there might be but you’re gonna wait around forever and you
First check from real estate
might miss it you know it’s like so you know that was what I was told at the beginning to bring it way back to the
beginning of this conversation was my boss had five rental properties that he bought during 28 to 2008 when those
prices dipped after the crash and I obviously was getting the impression from him that there aren’t as good a
deals right now and if I waited I probably wouldn’t have a single rental property but thankfully I didn’t wait and I’ve now got a hundred sixty
thousand dollars in Revenue per year from the rentals and then have added seven hundred thousand dollars in equity
and so it’s it’s put me at a really nice Equity position as well as the cash flow so I just I really think if you’ve got
to buy good deals in any Market condition love it well you you kind of answered this question just now but we’ll Tee It
Up in case you want to add anything else to it so you’ve given a ton of nuggets on like how people can start and how
people can utilize deal machine and like how effective driving for dollars could be also just good perspective on like
keeping things stay in your lane focusing on one thing but yeah what’s the one thing you would give somebody who’s kind of starting out going into
this environment with with high interest rates and maybe in a down Market maybe you cannot somebody can always tell you
a reason not to buy not to not to do it but what would you say to somebody getting started I would say if you’re
waiting for the perfect time right is that is that the hesitation it’s like if you wait for the perfect time without
the skill and the muscle of finding a deal understanding how to talk to somebody understanding you know how to
close that deal at a discount then you’re going to miss the window of opportunity I would most definitely
start looking for distressed properties analyzing those deals and making offers that make sense for the interest rates
today that you would have to use I wouldn’t wait for a perfect time there’s a quote that like imagine you’re going
on a road trip and you wait for all of the stop lights to be green at the same time before you get started you would
never actually get started and so that’s always a great visual to remember that you just need to take the very next step
you don’t need to worry about all of the other steps to align perfectly and you need to figure it out with what we call
Managing a team
on-demand knowledge right which is the ability to direct message you on Instagram with a question when it comes
up when I’m actually talking with the seller and have a real situation and that’s when the best learning is going to happen so that’s what I would
encourage anyone listening this you know to do I’m volunteering UKC but I figured you wouldn’t mind is to you’re right
like dmu like they should get started looking for go look for distressed properties go look for the rundown
houses start getting in touch with people and when someone calls you back go on the appointment and when you have a question DM Casey you’d be like what
do I do in this situation right do you have social media that they could do that on 100 yeah I’d love for people to
do that because yeah it’s like I mean you’re spot on David because it’s like go out and do it and then when you get to the point ask questions because if I
answer them all now or tell you how to do it all now it’s not going to matter you’re gonna you’re gonna have questions when you get in the middle of it on
demand knowledge I’m gonna steal that one David you’re like yeah I’m glad you like that yep but 100 well cool well David’s
giving you guys a ton of tips ton of nuggets also again created um created a great platform and I’m
telling you guys the thing we didn’t get into on field machine is like this is a great way to get started you don’t have to go buy a super expensive CRM do all
this money on these other marketing channels do SEO there’s you can spend a lot of money believe me we’ve done it
you can spend a lot of money in marketing or you can go do it kind of the the hustle way to where you go out
drive find houses find addresses and Market to them so David’s created a really cool way to get in I would say
low barrier of Entry but maybe well I mean it’s in terms of capital you can
get in and you can start doing this right away right David like people can start driving getting addresses and mailing for not a whole lot of money
yeah and get deals right you can do it with you can do it with pen and paper and that costs zero dollars you can
knock on their doors and that costs zero dollars you could spend some money use an app and then have that mail sent for
you and I might say start that that total cost all in might be 500 right because you want to find two three
hundred properties you want to send mail to each of them like five or six times over the course of a few months so plan
on spending 500 bucks over the course of a few months um the app obviously makes it a little faster so up to you guys that’s one of
the lowest cost ways to go get a deal and one that you could then flip to turn around and make ten thousand dollars you
know if it’s a deal selling it to somebody like Casey selling it to somebody like Habitat for Humanity or
selling it to one of those hedge funds out there that are trying to buy up a ton of real estate and uh that you’ve
got options and you can definitely get in without spending a lot of your money love it cool well you mentioned social
media David where could people find you if they got questions they want to ask about Fitness sleep getting six-pack abs
get it ask about Austin my my Instagram is D let go d-l-e-c-k-o and that would be a great
place to connect with me I’ve really been enjoying the community and posting there yeah awesome just like you said
you’ve been putting persistence into that investing into that uh yeah David’s he’s very that’s how we kind of
connected connected through Instagram I love the stuff he’s putting out hey I’d encourage you guys to do the same thing and yeah man I’m excited to watch you
David you’re doing some cool stuff thanks Casey thanks for having me on I really appreciate it as you may have
learned by tuning in to this episode of Gregor sense the easiest way to make real estate investing hard is by going
at it alone so as you continue learning and seeking knowledge of the industry I want to encourage you to build
relationships with other professionals who are passionate about real estate whether that’s an agent a business owner
or a managing investor like myself there are Pros that want to see you succeed and are willing to help you by sharing
their experience you can always reach me by visiting Casey gregerson.com and scheduling a call I look forward to
connecting with you and continuing to share my experience with you here on Gregor sense mobile until next time I’m Casey Gregerson thanks for tuning in
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