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How To Build Your Team To Build Your Business with Kris Ward

 

Even the brightest and most successful people have a team behind them. In this episode, Kris Ward explains why building a team can help you grow and build your business. Understand why it’s important to aim to be replaceable in your own business and why it’s not a bad thing. She talks about the importance of shifting your time away from jobs you can delegate to someone else. Kris believes that if you can afford to hire someone, you should go ahead and do it. She also gives a reminder on why stretching out the responsibility of a single person can be a bad idea. Kris also gives away some tips and shares some platforms you can use to build your dream team for a penny in order to start getting your time back.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Build Your Team To Build Your Business with Kris Ward

I am excited to bring to the show Kris Ward. She is the leading authority in building your business by building your team. She is the Founder of the Win The Hour, Win The Day! philosophy. She helps entrepreneurs easily double their income and triple their time off. After the loss of her husband, she turned full-time to her work as a marketing strategist. She was thrilled to see that her business had not only survived her absence but was thriving. She has completely changed the landscape for entrepreneurs by sharing the successful practices that allowed her absence. She has been interviewed by one of the original sharks from Shark Tank, Kevin Harrington, and ABC’s Secret Millionaire, James Malinchak. She has been featured on award-winning podcasts, radio, and TV shows throughout North America. Kris, welcome to the show. How are you?

I’m excited to be here.

When I was reading your bio, the first thing that came to me is people’s feeling of, “If I’m gone and the business does great without me, I’m no longer needed.” That fear mentality that people have. I hear my husband talk about this all the time where he’s like, “If an engineer has gone and everything that they have set in motion continues to go, then they’re likely to get laid off.” There’s this mentality of, “I need to be active in my business to be relevant.” It’s not true. As business owners, we stay relevant by being the visionary and then having the teams underneath us. I’m excited to talk about that as a time management tool. Could you tell us more about yourself? How did you get to where you are?

I’m a marketing strategist and I was pulled away from my business when my husband was diagnosed with colon cancer. What happened was quick that started to gobble up our calendar like nobody’s business, it’s insane, chemo appointments, surgeries, and specialists. Quickly, that became the new normal. One thing led to another and all of a sudden there I am and many years have passed. After his passing, I come back to work and it became public for the first time. Nobody knew what was going on. Nobody knew what was happening. My clients were completely not aware of it. They started to ask me with a gentle approach under the capacity of time management, productivity, and team building. How do they manage that?

They were not even aware of my absence. I had a renewed commitment to the fragility of life and that business should be fun and that it should support your life and not consume it, whatever your business whether it’s your side hustle or this or that. It should be something that enhances your life, not drains your life. I started working with people because I love helping people. I wanted to create a movement where we weren’t always doing things you hated or you’re hiding in the closet, answering emails because you’re zoning out when you’re with your family. That started with me having a lot of success, offline group coaching, we took it online. I wrote a book and we have our first product, The Outsourcing Playbook for Busy Entrepreneurs. That’s how it evolved is helping other people so that you could enjoy life.

Through the whole Coronavirus thing, one of the things that I realized is that most of what I was doing day to day was not filling me up and not giving me bliss, which made feel I’m not being authentic to my superpower, which is being blissful, but also my message. I have to walk the talk and I’ve walked the talk for so long and I don’t know where I lost sight of that. Fortunately, I caught it, I don’t think I’ve been in that place for long. This particular topic is a topic that has been heavy on my mind. There’s still a lot that I want to accomplish.

There’s still a message that’s important. I still want to do my podcast. I still want to do all of these things, but I can’t have it eating up my life the way that it has. I’m delighted that there are other people that are out there having this conversation because, for the Millennials, it is a cool topic, but for people in my generation, the opposite topic is what’s like, “How much do you work? How many hours do you put in?” All of those things are the things that make you seem powerful as opposed to, “How am I creating a lifestyle around my business? How is my business supporting that lifestyle in a way that brings me bliss so I don’t have to put in as many hours and the priority is the play and feel blissful?”

You could change your life by simply starting your team. Share on X

You bring up a lot of good points and it happens gradually that you start with this mission in mind and you’re going to do this thing, whatever your thing is, and you get all excited and passionate about it. All of a sudden, that thing you do requires a little bit of pre-work, post-work and it starts gobbling up your calendar. It’s like sitting in a bathtub and all of a sudden, “When did this water get cold?” It happens gradually. This is a story that happened to me many years ago and how my team started. The turning point for me was I realized you could change your life by simply starting your team.

I remember many years ago, which seems long ago now technology-wise, and I was still going to physical appointments. I would go to some of these offices, we would sit down, we would plan their marketing, and I would give them different ideas and packages. I would be writing these notes on my laptop or on my iPad, but still, they were temporary notes. I would promise myself hand to God when I got back to the office, I would put them right in my computer. That never happened. What I started to see was a pattern where on Friday afternoons, I had the stress of the whole week and things got distracted. Now, I have to put in a bunch of notes from meetings I had during the week.

What happened with that is these notes are written with the idea that they were temporary. In twenty minutes, I get back to the office, I’ll put the notes in. I found myself when people called the next week to ask, “Let’s do this. I promised them a package. I made them an offer.” I could barely make out my notes because there was supposed to be something that lasted twenty minutes. My fear was, as I panicked, what if I gave them the wrong price or missed one thing off my promise? They will think I was trying to swindle them. Not that I had bad notes. When I started working with building a team outsourcing, it was still the mindset that you were dealing with somebody on the other side of the world who is driving a chicken to work. This seems crazy.

It’s a little bit more mainstream and people don’t understand how to leverage it. My first outsourcer was a transcriptionist. What happened was I would sit in my car after the meeting, I would talk 30 seconds with great clarity and being specific. She would put it in the file, it was there within 24 hours. I got all of Friday afternoon back. I stopped beating myself up all week and because this is what she did and this was her passion, she was fast at it. She had ten clients, but some weeks I needed her an hour, some weeks I needed none. The first week she saved me and got me all Friday afternoon back, I spent $12. When you say building a team, you often get confused with an employee mindset like bringing somebody on and managing them and the cost and the upfront work.

That’s what I want people to understand. No matter what you’re doing, if this is your side hustle, you do real estate on the side, or you have a full-time job, they still admit I’ve worked with people who were gainfully employed and I helped them outsource some of their work so that they could still work fewer hours. The way they were working sometimes from home is that they were still producing as long as you are producing. An average of clients we work with the first month get 25 hours back a week. Even if you had a full-time job and you were building a team under your own umbrella, it’s separate from the company, you still can get eight hours back a week and it allows you to be the creative agent and allows you to move on to the next thing. If you’re holding on to that job at a fear, that is a job and you’re always going to be limited. If you are stuck there, that limits your financial ability. You want to be replaceable.

A lot of the ladies that are reading this show, their side hustle is real estate. They do have a full-time job. They may be moms. We’ve got our relationships and our friends and got many demands in life. This is something I do well is outsourcing housework. I have someone that cleans the house. I take my laundry out. Even if it’s not specifically related to your job, outsourcing a lot of those things that are not the best and highest use of your time is where you can start, which regains your time back. What’s funny about this is that in Coronavirus and I can’t allow my house cleaner in and I don’t have someone else doing my laundry.

I’m realizing how much time that takes and how much time that saved me by outsourcing it so that I could be a better wife, a better friend, better daughter, better business owner, a better podcaster. I can do much more because those hours are not being taken up, but it’s in my face even those little things that we can outsource. Let’s talk more specifically about things that we can outsource in our businesses, our jobs, and specifically in real estate. In real estate, our team is going to consist of our vendors, our tenant, our real estate agent, our mortgage broker, our title company. Those are the people that we think of as our team. There are other team members that are not in the limelight that can help us to be more productive. Wouldn’t you say?

What happens with most of the people I work with. We have 90-day coaching cycles and most of the clients I work with, what they don’t realize is how much redundancy there is in their work. No matter how specific or talented they are or how niche their career is. As somebody that’s doing real estate, social media has to be an aspect of that. You’ve got to be on there. It’s all about networking and relationships. We work with clients where, for example, you have your time allotted and you’re busy. You might pop on and do some social media 0.5-hour in the morning and night, but you could have an assistant, someone you outsource that make sure the way I do it is we have this little thing. If I use BaseCamp or Google docs.

They could tag everybody. Let’s say I was commenting so when I get messages, what I do is I go at the end of the day, my team puts together any link where somebody tagged me, messaged me, asked me about my product. I go in specifically and hit 30 contacts instead of scrolling four different social media platforms and trying to pick up, “I got this message on LinkedIn. I got here, got there.” It’s all put together for me and it saves me a lot of time because then you get seduced into social media and answering this and shiny that, and all of a sudden you bought a pair of earrings and you’re like, “I was up here.”

There are many different things that you think, “I can’t do. Let’s take it even on the grounds of we’re promoting our Outsourcing Playbook For Busy Entrepreneurs.” When somebody asks me about that, I will respond and type it out. When I do that, all of a sudden, I notice that there are fifteen different responses. I keep copying and pasting my response to Google Docs. Now, my team is out there and if somebody asks a question about it because I did a video, they take one of the responses I already gave. It starts off with, “That’s a great question. Here’s what we’re working on.” They copy and paste my language into an answer. It’s the exact same thing only I didn’t manually type it out myself. I’m leveraging my networking, my social media, and doing all these things, but I’m leaning on my team so that I can be somewhere else and not succumb by the overwhelming necessity of being all day long on social media. There are many little things that especially if real estate is your side hustle, where you can say, “Time matters to me. Let’s lean into this.”

Talk to me about how you would find that backend help?

On my website, www.WinTheHourWinTheDay.com, that’s probably the number one question I get. Here’s what happens, people will look at somebody that I have on my team or one of my clients will say to me, “Everyone is envious of my team.” They get thinking that it’s this magical place, this magical well we pulled them from or, “I got this one lucky person.” Everybody needs Ruby. “Ruby’s great. Everyone needs a Ruby.” People will say to me, “Can I borrow her?” That’s like saying, “Here’s my sister. We’re close. We get along well. Would you like to have the same relationship with her?” We have a process. There’s been a history there. She’s been trained, all that stuff, and you can have it too.

What I would tell you is there are different platforms depending on what you need and different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses. A more commonly known one is oDesk, but they take 10% off everything that you pay that person forever. If it’s somebody that’s going to be a virtual assistant, it may not be something you want. Philippines Online is great where you pay monthly and you can cancel after you get your VA for that month and they’re happy with it. You’re done with that relationship and you pay them anyway. There are different platforms for different specific needs.

It’s like, “Can I get pants at Walmart?” “Yes, but you don’t want to wear them to a wedding.” What I think is important in the question is understanding that it’s a process and it’s a talent because people will say to me, “I listened to you. I heard you. I thought you were right. I went off. I hired somebody and it didn’t work out. Kids these days and the economy.” I say, “That’s like my accountant saying, “What you need is a new tax strategy.” I come back three months later and say, “That didn’t work out.” “What do I know about that?” People get confused and think that because you have a business, you run out and hire somebody. That’s not like hiring a part-time at a grocery store. You want to understand that you don’t have the skillset, experience, or training in that area. You’re going to pay dearly on experimenting on yourself. That’s why I created The Outsourcing Playbook For Busy Entrepreneurs. You need to have a strategy.

What is the biggest mistake that someone makes when trying to build the team?

They get one person to do one job and they get excited about how that’s working out. Let’s say you hire a social media person and you say, “I got the social media person. I heard this amazing podcast. Kris gave some tips. They were awesome. She’s right. I saved a whole bunch of time. Copying pasting answers. She tagged all my responses so I could go in 0.5-hour a day, respond to people.” Next week they start going, “That worked well. That saved me much time. I’m happy. I’m going to get her to write some copy. I’m going to get her to do some graphics. It would be good if we have a quote every week.”

All of a sudden, they start stretching that job because they’ve had success and they start being unclear as to what that person’s responsibilities are. The VA person becomes a social media person in social media because they’re on social media, starts becoming the graphic designer because people think, “I asked you to grab messages. You did that well. I’ll start getting you to do some graphics.” It starts bleeding into other areas, which frankly is what’s wrong with traditional employment when you are hiring somebody part-time and, “I only need them two hours a week, but who’s going to come in for two hours a week? I have to hire them for twelve, but then I have to fill the other hours with work.” That creates more work and you have to get a desk and a computer. That’s the beauty of outsourcing is like with the idea of the transcriptionist, some weeks I needed her for an hour, some weeks I needed her for none, but she was zoned in on that and she was amazing at it. That worked. Don’t start stretching the responsibilities because someone impressed you in one area.

One of the things that I’ve had an experience with is that I might have five different people that specialize in something on one particular project. For instance, my show. I record it and it goes up onto a Google Drive. There are five people that touch that show before it gets to my audience. There’s a person that does the editing. There’s the person that loads up into Libsyn and writes a little thing. They also produce the newsletter. Someone else who does the video portion and then someone else that loads all the video out to all the different platforms. Even before that, you filled out a form. Everything goes into a spreadsheet so that guy that writes my notes can get all the spreadsheets.

Get everything off of there and it goes up and it’s like magic, but I will say that because there are many people touching it because those are their specialties. I feel like I’m still constantly managing. It seems like it’s flow, but there are all these portions and if one portion doesn’t work, that means that what I’m doing is checking everybody’s work along the way. These people have worked for me for two years. It’s like there was a problem with one of the videos because it wasn’t sized right and she didn’t notice that. I’ve got a beautifully-flowing process, but I’m still managing all of those pieces, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place.

That is the fear of most people and you get these different people, but you’re still the gatekeeper. Let’s say my process from my podcast, Win the Hour, Win the Day, what happens is there might be 40 steps to that and they go through all the departments you do, I’ve not reinvented the wheel. It’s the same thing. He’s got to edit it and do all this different stuff. What happens is the first thing will be this has been recorded. I flag my VA and then there are all these steps. Her job is to push them through all those steps saying, “I’ve got this and that.” She alerts the graphic guy. There is a separate person other than me that approves it going through and make sure it keeps moving through the machine like a widget.

 

We have somebody that we call audits it. You’re saying, “They didn’t catch that.” When we put it up in Simplecast, that’s a platform we all use for podcasts. Somebody has to listen to that podcast because how do we know until a listener tells us that nothing aired or got cut-off halfway. It’s about the process you have. You have some cracks in your process that can be eliminated and those are the two groups of people I work with. They don’t understand they can outsource it all. They have done it with some success, but there are cracks in there which are causing them as much work as before and they think, “I’ve come far. I’ve made such a gain. I’m doing all these great things yet I’m still being sucked back in like those movies saying, ‘They pull you back in one more time.’”

What’s happening is you’re playing a little bit of game of ping pong. You’re pinging into somebody else. They’re ponging it back to you, then you have to ping it to somebody else. We often hire and teach our clients how to hire. We’ve got a whole bunch of applications coming in for one of my clients for a virtual assistant. My assistant goes in, pre-qualifies, and narrows down that list for me. If I get 200 applicants, “These are the things we’re looking for.” We go from 200 down to 45. You can have somebody that nurtures your process and fills in those cracks. You’re almost there but think about making a batch of chocolate chip cookies. One little step where you don’t put the chocolate chips in after the cookies are baked ruins the whole recipe.

You’re like, “I followed all the steps. It tastes like sugar. It’s sweet. The chocolate chips melt when I put them on the hot cookie, it’s not the same as what I thought it would be.” That’s what’s happening there. You were close, but your process has some holes in it. That’s why people get sucked into thinking, “It’s too much time to manage it.” After I record my show, I spend about twelve minutes on it, and then I never see or hear it again, but the process takes care of checking on itself, proofing it, auditing it, and all those things that go into that. That’s the movement I want to create. This is not magic.

It feels magical to have all of that taken off of my shoulders. I do love this show. I love everything about it, but there is a reality about there are only 24 hours in the day.

You love the show because you’re great at it and you are an on-air personality and this is what you do best. Your readers can tell how vibrant you are, how engaged you are, how much you enjoy interviewing people. That does not mean you love doing all the heavy admin work. You don’t have to apologize for loving your show. You do, but all the post-production work, like somebody who’s an actress, a movie star we all have seen TV doesn’t mean they want to be in the editing room.

When do you think is a good time to start looking for a team? For me, before I got into it, it took about a year to buy into, “I needed all of those processes handled because it was not the best use of my time.” That’s my show business. Different businesses are going to have different timeframes. We perceive that, which is where I was headed. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Anything done well in the history of mankind on any level had a team and especially any aspect of the business. People have this false idea and I had it too. Once they get to a certain financial plateau, a certain number of clients, when I’ve been in business many years and I’ll build a team and when I get a certain revenue and like I said, “I can’t afford it. I have no time to manage the team and I have no money.” That example I gave with the $12. That’s a coffee. For $12, I got all of Friday afternoon back to myself and the stress of the whole week and all I had to do was mess up one client and say, “I gave you the wrong price.” Now, I lost that opportunity. It certainly was worth the $12.

If you're holding on to a job, you're always going to be limited. If you are stuck, that limits your financial ability. Share on X

What I would tell you is like the old saying goes, “The best time is day one. The second best time is today.” You want to keep up with your competition with all the things that are happening online, if you want your business to survive, if you want to get to that next thing that’s going to bring you financial opportunities. Frankly, if you want to stay in business, if you’re tired of looking around and saying, “How’s that person getting that? They got a book out, the podcast, and they’re doing all these things.” It’s because they have a team. A team is the backbone of any success story in the history of the business.

Let’s talk about how that would relate to real estate specifically. Many of the ladies that are reading are agents, but the real intention is to be investors. When we talk about my readers are all investors, this is their side hustle. They’re not selling real estate. There are not the processes of lead generation and all of that stuff that you would normally think of with an agent. There is lead generation, for instance with finding tenants or for finding vendors. There are interview processes to find your agent, you have to go through that whole process so you find the right person. Talk a little bit about what backend processes might work for someone who’s got this side hustle that they’re trying to make successful while they’re working full-time?

Everything comes down to admin work. When I gave the example of social media and having my messages tagged, maybe they’re not lead generations for you, but they might be somebody that’s got, “I saw this property. It’s a good deal for you.” It’s still a business of networking and relationships. I still don’t know any business in this day and age, especially now after this whole pandemic thing, there’s going to be a huge shift where businesses are going to have to be much stronger online. Everything’s going to have to have the security and the backbone of running as efficiently online. Even if it’s something that wouldn’t traditionally do that. Let’s say you’re a massage therapist or something like that. There’s always a heavy amount of admin to anything it’s doing whether it’s chasing emails or people, or whether it’s sending paperwork to those vendors. There is a significant amount of copy and paste.

We don’t realize how much we do that in a day and having to move things from pile A to pile B. What I would tell you is when I’m working with people like that, we first sit down and we do a little audit and we take a look especially when they’ve got a full-time job and the investment is their side hustle. Whatever their processes are, when they take on a new vendor, they send them these pieces of paperwork. Having somebody else do that, “That only takes five minutes.” “We’ll times that to the other twenty things you did today, then we saved you two hours.”

Every time you shift from a five-minute to a five-minute, you lose time. That took five minutes and I have to think about what’s that next project, pull everything up, and do and get into that. Any five-minute project from my own experience takes at least twenty minutes.

In fact, in my book, when the day we talk about whenever you switch modalities, even being interrupted, they say it takes you about 22 minutes. They’ve done studies. It’s in the book. About 22 minutes to get your brainpower back to the same intensity or focus that you had before the interruption. Even like me, I think, “I work much faster and harder.” That doesn’t apply to me. Let’s say you’re superhuman and they’re wrong. Let’s cut that in half and say, “It’s twelve minutes.” The 5 minutes plus the 12 minutes to take you back to get there. It is like your cell phone where all the apps are open and start burning down your battery quicker.

It’s nice to have someone that is turning and doing that thing because even if they’re switching clients, they’re doing the same process so they don’t have to get back into the mindset. They have to find the new client, but they’re still in the flow of that thing that they’re doing.

 

Especially real estate and relationships like that because it’s paper-heavy, it’s admin heavy. It’s full of a lot of paperwork. I’ve got one situation where one of my rental properties is like, “There’s an issue with the plumbing. We have to process quickly. I’ve got fifteen minutes to deal with this because it was out of nowhere.” I need you to respect your time. This is what happens. We have a process for emergencies. Somebody is taking care of that because here are the steps. It’s not going to be the first nor the last time.

That’s the key to blissful investing. The way that I only spend 5 to 10 hours a month building a multimillion-dollar business is because I’ve got the processes and the team to handle that. For me, I’ve trained my renters to be the team, but not everybody can do that. I deal with executive homes, not everybody’s doing that. You have to have a team and for me, it’s my renters, but it’s the process that creates the freedom and the time so that you’re not reinventing the wheel every single time. Because that plumbing problem happened for you, unless you’ve got 100 doors, that same plumbing problem or similar plumbing problem is probably not going to show up for another year. You have to recreate the process and try to remember what you did, who was your contact, and who was it that you liked. If you’ve got a process, now you can say, “Here’s my plumbing issue thing. This is the guy that I call. This is what I tell him. This is what I asked my tenant to do.” It’s done in fifteen minutes rather than the recreation and trying to remember that, which can take two hours.

Many years ago, when I was doing trade shows for my business, I had a process even then, “I need this. I need that.” I was going to a trade show for the first time that was super close to my home. I was looking at my computer and was like, “I don’t need the keyboard because I’m not going to be dueling. There’s no Wi-Fi. I need the computer screen for display to rotate these visuals and stuff.” Before the doors open, I turn and the password comes up on my screen and they need a four-digit password for my computer to work. I left the keyboard at the office because I thought I didn’t need it. I violated my process. No matter how loudly you scream at a computer, it will not absorb the password.

The point is, what happened was I hadn’t done a trade show in a year, even though I had the process, I was tired. It was down the street. I took some shortcuts. I knew better. Whenever I step outside the process, it’s like, “You’re going to get burned.” Some people don’t have that process at all. Every year they’re doing something and they haven’t done 6 or 3 months. You’re wasting all that fuel relearning, “Where’s that phone number? What’s that plumber guy’s name? Did he have brown hair or was that the redheaded carpenter?”

What would you say to expect some getting help would cost?

Anything done well, in the history of mankind, on any level, had a team. Especially any aspect of business. Share on X

It’s crazy affordable. It’s like I explained with the transcriptionist, that was $12. I don’t even know what she does anymore because there are many platforms out there that are $0.10 a minute. It’s a magical time to be in business because with the global economy, we are dealing with economies around the world. In the Philippines, it’s $4.75 a day for minimum wage. When you pay them $5 an hour, they are thrilled and they’re living quite the life. That’s affordable for you. What that also lets you do is give your in-house or people that are local, you can pay them more and you can invest in the company more.

Originally, there were some concerns like, “Are we exploiting them.” I had a couple of people many years ago talk to me, she was an American from the Philippines. When I was first introduced to outsourcing many years ago, I was like, “That seemed like I was exploiting someone.” She said like, “Who are you to tell them what they should spend their money on? We look at the North American lifestyle of wasteful and ridiculous and your family’s all spread out and they’re not in one home.” There were these misguided understandings in the beginning, but you globally can do a lot for a dollar these days. I call it building a rock star team for pennies. It’s super affordable. I got all Friday afternoon off and back in my hands for $12. That you can stomach. If you can’t afford to hire someone, then you need to hire someone.

It will free up the time for you to do the things that are going to make you money. Could you tell everybody how they can reach you?

Tell me you heard me on this amazing show on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. We’ve got some free gifts from FreeGiftFromKris.com. Your readers can go in and grab some stuff. It’s a little bit of a treasure box. There are things that we still charge for that are in there.

Why don’t you tell us a super tip on getting started in real estate investing?

Get in on any level that you can and you will be shockingly surprised that it increases the value. I bought properties where I think, “This is a cute little place in a rural area. I’ll be lucky. I pay down a bit. It’s an investment.” All of a sudden you come back five years later, it’s this crazy amount of money for this little house. Even then you think, “It can’t go up anymore.” We know real estate keeps going up in an insane amount. Get on any level you can and it will grow.

What is one strategy on being successful in real estate investing?

 

Take care and maintain the property. Don’t take shortcuts because it starts to unravel quickly. There is no, “It’s just the garage door.” It tatters quickly. Treat it with respect and put quality into it when there are adjustments or repairs that need to be made.

What is one daily practice you would say contributes to your personal success?

Taking care of yourself first and putting work inside that. If you don’t have your health, you have 100% of nothing. Vitality is everything. I exercise, I stop for a proper lunch, I learned how to chew my food slower. Make sure that there are non-negotiables as far as self-care goes and put the work inside that because there will always be more work.

Kris, thank you for what you’ve offered in this portion of the show. It’s been amazing.

Thank you for having me. There’s nothing more valuable than someone who can give you than their time. I appreciate that.

Ladies, thank you for joining Kris and me for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

 

Important Links

• Win The Hour, Win The Day!
• The Outsourcing Playbook for Busy Entrepreneurs
• oDesk
• Win the Hour, Win the Day – podcast
• LinkedIn – Kris Ward
• Facebook – Kris Ward
• Instagram – Kris Ward
• FreeGiftFromKris.com

 

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• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
• LinkedIn
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How Anyone Can Create Stress-Free Passive Income Through Real Estate With Laurence Jankelow

 

What comes after property acquisition is management, and it’s a whole different ball game that can be frustrating for some. Providing a solution on how to create a stress-free passive income is Laurence Jankelow, co-founder of Avail. Being a landlord himself, he realized the cost that accompanies outsourcing property managers, so Laurence and his partner created a tool and system that can automate most of your responsibilities as a landlord. He also explains the importance of having a defined system and process in place as a landlord and shares some strategies on how you can achieve it.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

How Anyone Can Create Stress-Free Passive Income Through Real Estate with Laurence Jankelow

I am excited to welcome to our show Laurence Jankelow. Laurence is the Cofounder of Avail, an all in one software solution designed for do-it-yourself landlords that are used by more than 600,000 landlords and tenants across the United States. Prior to launching Avail, Laurence spent seven years in data analytics first as a consultant at Protiviti Chicago and then at Goldman Sachs. Originally from South Africa, Laurence has a heartbreaking spirit, and together with his Cofounder Ryan Coon, they developed the idea of their company on a napkin that solves the needs of thousands of landlords. I love that, the napkin business plan that launches something that changes the world. Laurence is also a long-term real estate investor with a passion for three-unit multifamily properties. Laurence, welcome to the show. How are you?  

I’m doing well. Thank you for having me.

I’m excited about this topic because few people talk about tools that can systematize the do-it-yourself landlord process and systems is what I call the key to bliss. I only work in my business and I manage all my properties. I only work about 5 to 10 hours a month and it’s because of my systems. Systems equal bliss. You are our bliss guy. I’m excited.  

I’m happy to be that person.

Could you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what brought you to this?  

I’m a landlord myself. I’ve got six units in Chicago. I started my first foray into real estate buying a three-flat from a friend who I worked with at Goldman. When I was there, you’re a full-time employee. You’d imagine that a company like that you’re putting in some hard hours and I had these properties on the side and it’s tough doing both. My buddy and I, we constantly stay in contact about real estate investments. He was doing the exact same thing. He was at a different bank and we got together and saying, “What are you using?” We would share stuff with each other. I would send him Excel spreadsheets of what I was using for a rental application where I’d merge cells together and make it look pretty, print it out, and give it to a tenant to fill out. He’d have his rent roll in Excel. He would show me like, “These rows are highlighted in green because I received the rents.” We realized that’s not how professionals would manage their property. We went looking for software tools and systems as you’re saying to help us and automate it. What we were seeing were only things available for someone if they had 1,000 plus units at least back then.

For us, we could do those, but the costs would be more than the rents we were making combined. Not feasible. It was then that we decided we’re going to quit our jobs and start a business that helps solve this problem. We realized it wasn’t just us. It was other landlords of our size and nature. What we didn’t know then was how many of them there are and there are eight million do-it-yourself landlords with less than ten units out there. A large audience we set out to build it. We couldn’t get an engineer to come and do it for us. We didn’t have the money. We rolled up our sleeves and taught ourselves to code and built the website completely ourselves and then it took off from there.

We started thinking about, what are the things that we need to do to manage this property that a professional already has access to? We thought if you need to find tenants, you would normally go to the MLS. We couldn’t do that so we started thinking, “Where else can you put listings?” We built a tool that syndicates the listing to Zillow, Trulia, HotPads, PadMapper, Lovely, all the places that tenants look for houses. We hooked into TransUnion to get criminal credits and eviction background reports. We hooked into a payment system to allow tenants to pay their rent online. We provided state and city-specific lease agreements that could be signed online. We took all of the operational stuff of being a landlord and moved it online and automated 90% of it. You could flow through it quickly and get back to either your life or your other full-time job.

Property managers definitely provide a lot of value, but they also come at a huge cost. Share on X

This is the thing and ladies that are reading, understand that the large investors are such a small percentage. It’s a large business in the United States. The biggest percentages of businesses are small businesses. What makes the world go round there? They’re what makes our economy go round. It’s also true for landlords. Most of us are the little guys. You can be a multimillionaire and be a little guy but setting up these processes is going to be key to keeping it easier for you. 

The average number of units that our customers have is three units. Most of them only have one unit. You can see it’s skewed towards more if you don’t mind the term mom-and-pop landlords, it’s the small business landlord.

A lot of people talk about the way to keep it blissful is to get a manager. I have never gotten a property manager. It’s not my way, but I will say that I have all my properties close to home. Mine are all within a 50-mile radius. Talk to me about do-it-yourself versus a manager and let’s talk about distance. If I were to invest outside of California, which I’m looking at doing because of the way prices are and lending mostly is what I’m thinking about, could you talk a little bit about that, Laurence? 

Property managers provide a lot of value but they also come at a huge cost. For most landlords out there, that cost is going to take you from being profitable to potentially breaking even, and more often than not, not making money on that property. Typical fees to find you a tenant can be something a half month’s rent or full month’s rent. If you want the manager to help you with handling maintenance and collecting the rent, then you’re paying 10% of the rent. On $1,000 rent on one unit, you might be paying $2,400 for the year and that might be the entirety of your profit. If that’s you and you’re using a property manager, your best bet is probably to sell the property because it’s not worth it. If you’re not making the money, then you shouldn’t necessarily be in it. The alternative is to try to figure out what is that property manager doing? How can I do that myself, affordably, and not do it wrong? The value that a property manager is going to do is they know what they’re supposed to do and they have access to tools. If you can get access to tools and you can get access to a process when you’re not going to make mistakes, that’s your better path.

Is the cost of the software significantly less? It’s going to be less than 10%, but it’s another one of those things that I think about that’s going to be another cost involved. You don’t need to give us numbers, but could you give us an idea of what that looks like?  

I don’t mind giving real numbers. When we set out to create Avail, we did it with the purpose of reaching everybody who needs that assistance. It’s free. If you want to use us to list your property and find tenants or collect rental line, all of that’s free for an unlimited number of units. We do have a premium version of it. If you wanted to, for instance, have late fees be automatic, you might want to upgrade for that but by no means, do you have to do that? We’re trying to put it out in front of everybody, make the process seamless and easy. If you put any price point on this, especially because most people aren’t making that much money on the rental, that’s probably a misconception that people have out there that small landlords are rich but they’re not. The average person, maybe they’re making $100, $200 a month on a single unit. It has to be affordable for them. When you compare that then to a property manager, it’s night and day difference.

Thank you for that. Talk to me a little bit more about the process of instituting this into your business.  

That’s critical even if you don’t use Avail or software, you should have a process at the very least. The process is always better supported by some system or software, but your process should always be the same. You want to go through a standard way that you screen tenants, find them and you’re describing the property. Those things help you avoid violations of fair housing laws. You want a lease agreement that you know is going to work for you, state and city. You need all those things and you need to create a process around those things. Similar to rent payments, you have to decide upfront, what are you going to do when a tenant doesn’t pay? Do you charge a late fee? How many days, grace period do you want to give? Also, the law dictates some of that too. You want to know those things and set up that process. If you’re trying to save time and money, you might want to also then supplement that with a software solution that’s going to fit your process. The process is first and foremost, the most important thing that you should try to do and set up when you’re becoming a landlord or if you’re already one and you can’t describe your process in those areas I mentioned, it’s a good time to take a look at that.

 

One of the things that I tell people through my coursework is the best way to start setting up a process when you’re going through it the first time is to take notes on what you’re doing because the smaller landlord isn’t usually doing this on a daily or monthly basis, they get rents once a month. They might buy a house once a year. If you have to reinvent the wheel every single time, that takes a huge amount of emotional and mental energy and time. Many of us are busy. A lot of the ladies that are reading this are executive women with high power jobs that are already working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. They don’t have the time to reinvent the wheel and then it hinders them from taking their business to the next level buying that next property when they’re ready. I love this idea of having that process set that is all automated. For me, what I have often said is take notes the first time you’re doing it so that you’ve got those notes and you know what you’re doing the next time. Talk to me a little bit more about if you’re a first-time homeowner landlord and you’re setting up your process for the first house, what is it that you go through to do that? I know that I beat the bush around that but this is what I’m thinking about, Laurence. As a busy woman, do I need to learn a bunch more software and spend a huge amount of time setting up processes that I’m not going to understand is going to cause me frustration? That’s the real question.  

With Avail, you don’t have to learn much. Although we take significant pride in teaching people, we try to do it as they’re going through it in a way where it doesn’t feel like you’re having to sit down and study for a course. In real estate in general, you do want to be educated in what you’re doing and understand your legal requirements and your obligations. It’s time-consuming and hard to go and teach yourself those things and curate that stuff. That’s where I feel like Avail is super helpful in curating a lot of that content for our customers. If you’re a first-time landlord, depending on if the property you bought already has tenants or not, there’s a different path you would take. If it doesn’t have tenants, then you’re going to need to find your first tenants.

Our system is essentially going to ask you to add your units. It’s going to guide you through how to create a listing step-by-step the entire way through. It’s going to tell you where the listing is going to go, why it’s going to those places, what you should do when a lead responds to your listing, how you should screen them. It’s going to give you canned messages to use. A lot of it’s designed to keep you from being in legal trouble. You don’t want to put in your listing something perfect for families or young couples because you’re going to get sued for housing violations. We provide a lot of that material and then next to it, we’ll explain why it’s written such a way. It’s up to each individual how deep they want to go into the learning or if they want to adopt the process we’ve created for them.

Ladies, this is a thing, no matter where you get started, you’re going to have a learning curve. If you can get some tools that are going to help with the learning curve, even if there is learning there is going to be, how long is that going to take you? This sounds like a tool that will speed up that process, right?  

Yeah. If someone’s getting started and they don’t know what they’re doing, let the system do it for you and you can learn as you’re going. If you want to change what the system is recommending, you can, but by no means, do you have to?

Could you tell us about how to find a good real estate deal?  

Good real estate deals are everywhere and hard to identify. I’ve always thought when you make your money as a real estate investor is at the beginning when you buy it. You have to buy it at the right price. I don’t know that I can specifically say, “Go to this website and you’ll find good deals.” When you’re looking for a good deal, there are some things you want to look at. I’ll throw out some terms that are relevant. I don’t want to term wash people here, but for me personally, I look at what the gross rent multiplier is a lot. Each city or part of the city will have a multiple on the rental income that you’d expect to pay. If you can get under that multiple, then you’re essentially getting a good deal. It’s a quick way to assess if it’s a good value or not. It’s a twelve times rent in Chicago standard rent multiplier, where I buy my properties. If I can find a deal that’s less than that, I feel like I’m getting something of value there.

Give us the formula for that because people throw around that term a lot.

A process is, first and foremost, the most important thing that you should try to do and set up when you're becoming a landlord. Share on X

The gross rent multiplier is you take the purchase price and you divide into that, the annual gross rental income, and that will give you a multiple. If you make $10,000 a year on gross rent and the place costs $1,000 then that’s ten times multiple. If you can get what the average is for your area and you get under it, then you know you’ve at least got a good deal for the area. You can’t stop with that though. That’s a quick weed out. You didn’t have to look at the rest of the numbers and how they fall out and what’s it going to cost you to run the place versus what you’ll pull in. Are you expecting vacancies? All those things you should try to use some tool to calculate out a net operating income for the property. What a cash-on-cash return might be for the property and is that better than your next best alternative? For me, I look at properties that have a minimum of 10% cash-on-cash. If I’m buying $100,000 property and I’m putting $20,000 down, I want to make sure I’m getting at least $2,000 a year in net income out of it, or it doesn’t meet my cash-on-cash requirements.

Let’s slow down with that, Laurence. That was good. I want to highlight it. Ladies, we talk a lot about leverage. You buy $100,000 home, but you only put $20,000 down. How much money have you put in? Your cash investment is $20,000. When we’re talking about cash-on-cash, we’re not talking about how much you are making on $100,000. We’re talking about how much we’re making on the money that you put in. It’s so you ladies know, I account for the entire amount of money that I put in. Let’s say, for instance, I put $20,000 in and I had $5,000 in closing costs, my cash-on-cash is on $25,000. I do it a little bit differently than others do it but you should have that number. What does that look like for you each year? What’s important to you? 

I couldn’t say how important that is. It’s critical. You’re going to make all your money by buying correctly. It’s not one of the easier steps to do. There are a lot of online tools that will help you calculate that out. Avail has one as well that people can find, we call it our rental property calculator. It’s something that’s valuable. When you calculate that cash-on-cash return, that’s the thing you should potentially look at, what other investments are out there? No one’s got unlimited money. You want to take what your best option is. If you can get more than that rate somewhere else, by investing in your friend’s hair salon, in the stock market, or in something else, then you potentially should be doing that instead. Real estate generally is a good investment cash-on-cash that doesn’t have the full picture either though, because there is appreciation in a property. You can start to calculate out an ROI or an internal rate of return that runs the gambit of things, but the point is no matter what those terms are, those are easy to google and look up and then try to plug in the numbers and see what you get.

I remember the first time I heard all these terms, I thought, “You’ve got eyes to all these numbers. This is confusing.” I’m good at math. I was a loan officer so it’s not that I’m afraid of numbers, but it gets a little confusing. Understand that all of those terms are out there. If you hear a term that someone says on this show when you’re reading a book or you’re studying and you’re like, “I don’t know what that means,” look it up on YouTube. If you’re more visual, you can look it up on Google, they’re all there. It’s all self-explanatory. Don’t get intimidated by that. As you’re doing your process, do start to learn what those numbers are and why they’re important for you. 

I hope your audience doesn’t take it the wrong way. I feel silly for trying to plug our website, but if you do a Google search for Avail Rental Property Calculator, they can use that calculator. You don’t have to sign up. It’s free. It will explain all the terms as you go. It’s good especially if it’s the first time you’re buying a rental property.

Thank you for plugging your software. I’m excited about looking at it.  

I’ll try not to plug it too much.

One of the things that I’m excited about is, we’re going to be talking more in EXTRA about how to run your real estate investing as a business. We’re going to move into that but before we do that, Laurence, could you tell people where they can reach you?  

 

If they want to reach out to me personally, I’m happy to do that. My personal email is [email protected]. We couldn’t afford the dot-com. They can reach me there or they can go to our website Avail.co. They’ll see it as a live chat widget. They’ll see a lot of different ways to reach out to us or they can sign up for a free account and check it out. I’d love to give people a discount on the price, but that’s hard to do. What I can do is if you sign up and reach out to our service team, we can go ahead and give you a free rental analysis report. You type in the address of a property that you may be buying or listing, and this will return what the fair market rent price would be for that property.

Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions? 

Yeah, absolutely.

Laurence, tell us one super tip on how to get started in real estate investing.  

It will be tough if your audience will think of this as a super tip, but it’s essentially doing it. I know when I was thinking about it, I hummed and hawed for years about it. I was nervous about it. I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. It’s easier when I started because on Google, there’s so much information out there. Maybe that makes it harder to waste because there’s so much to look at and you don’t know where to go. My super tip is, get started now if you’re nervous about it, go in with a friend, co-investing is good. You de-risk it a little bit. You have someone to help motivate you and guide you along. If that’s what it’s going to take for you to get started, get a friend in and do it now.

Give us one strategy on being successful in real estate investing. 

For me, I’m lucky that I was a Finance Major. I’ve always had this mindset because it got drilled into me in college. If you’re going to buy a rental property, it’s important that you realize this is a business that you run. Even if you only spend a couple of hours on it a month, it’s still a business, it has revenue, expenses and some liabilities. If you don’t think of it, a business, you’re never going to be thinking in terms of, “How do I grow the revenue? How do I minimize my expenses? How do I treat my customers well? Tenants, or customers, we want to treat them well.” That’s where you get into where slumlords may come in. They don’t view their tenants as customers. They don’t necessarily view it as that business where you want to reward your retention of customers. Treating it as a business is critical if you’re going to be successful.

What would you say is one daily practice that you do, Laurence, that contributes to your personal success?  

No one's got unlimited money, so you want to take what your best options are. Share on X

I like to end the day knowing that I’ve accomplished stuff, even if it’s potentially the wrong stuff. I want to know that I’ve moved a needle forward. Every single day I make a to-do list. Sometimes I’ll do it the night before, especially if I feel like I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll have a to-do list of 10, 12 items. I won’t end my day until my to-do list is done. That way I know I’ve accomplished stuff and I can keep going. That provides me the motivation to keep things headed in a direction that’s going to be successful.

Thank you. That was such great information. I can’t wait for more in EXTRA but thank you for what you’ve shared so far. 

You’re welcome.

Ladies, in EXTRA, Laurence is going to talk some more of the specifics about how to think of it as a business. I do a lot of mindset stuff around that, like the employee mindset versus the business mindset, but Laurence has specific keys to what makes it a business. It’s not your mindset, it’s the things that you do. How do you structure? How do you look at the numbers? All of those pieces are what he is going to share with us on EXTRA. This is going to be juicy and valuable. If you’re already subscribed to EXTRA, please stay tuned. This is going to be amazing. If you’re not subscribed to EXTRA, but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get your first seven days for free. We’ve got about 50 EXTRAs up there, so you can binge on them and you can get this one too. You decide after that if it makes sense for you to stay subscribed or not. If you’re leaving us, thank you for joining Laurence and I for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time and I appreciate you, but until then, remember goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next time.

 

Important Links

• Avail
• Avail Rental Property Calculator
• [email protected]
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

On this episode, we talk about

• How to handle issues as a DIY Landlord
• What tools and resources are there for you
• Should you use a rental manager?
• How to evaluate real estate deals

 

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How NLP Can Make You a Better Negotiator with Matt Brauning

 

In this episode, Matt Brauning, keynote speaker and entrepreneur, joins Moneeka Sawyer as they discuss the power of NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, and how it can make you a better negotiator so you can best navigate through difficult conversations. Matt and Moneeka talk about learning the recipe and patterns consciously through NLP in anything you want to do and start to find success in your field. When you are aware of the pattern, you can consciously correct them. Matt also dives into ecological NLP and his mission to make the world a better place through better communication and clear intentions. Get in touch with how you create meaning for yourself and learn how you can take control of the narrative.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

How NLP Can Make You a Better Negotiator with Matt Brauning

I am excited to welcome back to the show Matt Brauning, my dear friend, and mentor. Matt has been a writer for Forbes, a two-time bestselling author, and host of the top podcast The Driven Entrepreneur on iTunes and is syndicated on sixteen AM/FM stations coast to coast. He filmed in the movie, The Journey, with Brian Tracy and Bob Proctor. You’ve seen him on television on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Matt has been an entrepreneur since 2002 speaking all over the world including the US, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. He has shared his message at places like The Harvard Club, McAfee, New York Life, The NASDAQ Marketplace, and the United States Air Force Academy. He is an avid motorcycle rider, church leader, and rock climber. He resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan with his amazingly beautiful wife Lola and his awesome son Valiant.

I’m glad to be back. Let’s make this happen. I can’t wait for this conversation with you.

I always love our conversations, Matt. Not only do I get to share you with my friends, but I know I’m going to learn something amazing.

Right back at you. This is one of the top real estate show for women so I’m looking to learn too.

I know you’ve been on the show before, but could you give us a little bit of background of who you are and why you got started in NLP?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the programming of our brains, our mindset, and our subconscious mind. I love this show in particular and you for this because I’ve only had two careers since I was eighteen years old, not including Caesar’s Steak House at seventeen. Since then I have run and owned my real estate brokerage as well as being a real estate investor myself, getting to $5 million in property by 25. I also turned away from the real estate world and decided to go in the coaching world and the speaking and training world because I love the fulfillment of helping an individual transform and change their lives and it’s fun. I love doing training at real estate companies, working with investors because I understand both sides of the mindset, but I also get the practical strategy because I use that in my life so much.

That’s why I wanted you back on this show because you bring a perspective of NLP to real estate. Let’s start by defining NLP.

I’ve gone some times in presentations for twenty minutes and somebody raises their hand and says, “What is it called again?” It’s a foundation for my life and the business. Neuro-Linguistic Programming is what NLP stands for. Neuro is for the mind, Linguistic is for language, and Programming represents the programs that we already have running behind the scenes. Our mind is not a computer by any stretch of the imagination, but in a way, it’s like that as a metaphor where you have these programs running, cleaning up, or taking care of something. Sometimes I find that we have programs that run that serve us and sometimes we have forgotten programs.

Those that we set up at five when we saw mom and dad fight over the checkbook and I thought to myself, “Money must be the root of all evil.” I’ve heard that somewhere. Now, many years later, I’m somehow subconsciously trying to stay away from money, but consciously I want to have it. That’s an example of a program. NLP is studying the programs that our mind runs and I believe how to take charge of them again, how to take control back for your subconscious mind.

A lot of times when people think of NLP, if they’ve even heard of it, they think about the guys on TV that manipulate people to do weird things. It’s a lot like hypnosis because there are languaging patterns and stuff like that with NLP too. Ladies, what I want you to know is I have my own story of why I found Matt. I was a coach for several years for executives. I found that in a lot of the training that I had, I would implement my coaching practices and people would say, “That’s NLP.” I kept hearing that and I thought, “What in the world? I had never taken an NLP training or whatever.”

What I discovered is that through a lot of the coaching practices, but also my life, NLP is simply a categorization of things that we naturally do. We naturally speak certain ways. We naturally connect with people in certain ways, and we naturally create programming in our heads. One of the things that I think is important to success is to live your life more consciously. Running your business more consciously and relating to your spouse more consciously. It was important to me that if I was already doing this thing, to be more conscious and purposeful about how I was doing it so it would improve me. It would improve my relationships, it would improve my business. That’s where I went on my search for an NLP trainer.

Negotiation is not compromise. Share on X

One of the things that I love about Matt is his heart. I met a lot of NLP trainers and they were all about success, business, self-improvement, patterns, and all of this stuff, but they didn’t talk about the thing that was most important to me, which is this is about connection, not manipulation. I think that was a fear that I had about it. It was important to me to find somebody that understood that connection piece and Matt is one of those people. One of the things that he talks about early on in any of his courses about keeping it ecological. Matt, could you talk a little bit about that?

If NLP was a tree, you’ll find a few twigs and the branches of the people that are out there trying to say, “This is a powerful communication tool.” Like any powerful tool, the metaphor has been probably drilled in the ground at this point, but you take a hammer and you can use a hammer as a tool to build something amazing. I flip the hammer around and I can use it to tear down and do all my demo too. A great tool can be used for whatever your purpose is. To me, it’s not about NLP but it’s about any industry that you get into. The question of manipulation is always there versus connection. I think there’s only one question to ask yourself is intent.

When you’re working with someone, when you go to a car dealer, when you go to a dentist, when you go to an NLP practitioner, coach, a real estate salesperson, or whatever it is, the question is, what is their intention? Is the intention to serve, to connect, to give you what you want, and also I get what I want and we have a mutually beneficial or ecological relationship? Is my intent solely to take care of me? Worse, is my intent solely to take care of me at the expense of you? Which I think is the ultimate level of not caring.

If that person with that kind of heart who doesn’t care, doesn’t want to serve, and wants what they want at anyone’s expense, if you give that person kryptonite, they turn to Lex Luthor. If you give that person a powerful tool, they’re going to use that to get ahead. I’m on a big mission in our NLP community. I have a whole membership, a group of people that love to practice ecological NLP. I want to get into the hands of everybody. I want everyone in the world to understand it because if we all understand how to communicate deeper, more effectively, more intentionally, consciously, I think the world will be a better place.

If everyone knows the NLP language “patterns” that you know and that I know, then all of a sudden if you do hear that random 1,000 people trying to lay some pattern on you or whatever and manipulate a situation, you’ll smell it a mile away. You’ll go, “What are you talking about? Get out of here.” I think keeping it, looking at the intention, you never have to worry about that. If you are ever worried about manipulation, learning the skillset that you’re worried about happening to you is one of the greatest ways, one of the greatest armors to tackle that in the world.

I don’t mean to say that other NLP trainers are not ecological also. There are a lot of wonderful people.

Many of them are, but some of them are not for sure.

What I love about you specifically, Matt, is that we talk about this first. It is the foundational piece of what you teach. One of the things that I will say about as a blissful investor, my relationships are key to everything that I do. My tenants are my business partners. My real estate agent is my real estate partner so I’ve got a team of partners that help to grow my business. Relationships are important and those communication things become critical to building my business.

Sometimes I’ll say that to people and people are like, “Moneeka, if you’re using patterns or whatever, you’re being manipulative.” I think that what’s important to understand is that there’s a fine line between manipulation and connection. It’s like what you said, your intention. My intention is to be heard and to fully hear. If you can create a way to do that connection that feels natural and there’s more flow, then there’s going to be a better understanding, rapport, and connection with that person.

You’re likely to hear what their needs are much better. I’ll give this example with NLP. I lived in France for 1.5 years. It was one of the most beautiful times of my life and what was interesting is that when I first got there, I spoke French poorly, so communication with the French was difficult. As I learned more French and I started to speak to people in French, they became interested in speaking to me and would automatically switch to English.

 

Together, we found a way to communicate that allowed us to understand each other better. I feel like these NLP patterns are another way for us to communicate in the other person’s language so they understand us and then they want to reciprocate that communication back. That’s all NLP is. It’s a natural way of doing things. We do it naturally anyway but if you can make it more conscious, you up-level your ability to communicate and build rapport.

Not only up-leveling, but you also talked about consciousness. I think of NLP as a recipe. You have a whole recipe book and that’s the catalog of behaviors and then there are several areas of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Some are language patterns. Some are state control. Some are understanding the process subconsciously of how we do what we do there. There are some in sales and some in negotiation. We have NLP for public speaking. What it all comes down to though is imagine someone who bakes a phenomenal cookie, and you want to replicate that cookie over and over again because it’s good. You ask them, “How do you do it?” They go, “I don’t know. It seems like it’s magic. My grandma has been making that cookie for 60 years and she has no idea how she does it. She puts a spring of this and a dash of that.”

The NLP modelers, trainers like me, we come around and say, “How is it that you do this thing? Like in therapy, was there a language pattern, certain patterns that all put together can accomplish the change more effectively?” We looked at presentation patterns and say, “Are there certain language, types of words, and structures of wording, structures of sentences that are more emotionally impactful than not?” You take two communicators. They said the same thing, but one structures it a different way and it emotionally lands. The other person structures it however it comes out of the brain and it doesn’t emotionally land.

Going back to the metaphor of the recipe. Imagine you have two people trying to make cookies. One makes cookies that taste too salty. One makes perfect cookies. NLP is looking at the recipe and then saying, “Is it manipulative to say, ‘I want to learn that recipe so that when I make cookies, everybody enjoys them. I want to learn the speaking recipes when I have a speech, my message that I intend to land lands. I want to learn NLP in my relationship communication that when I looked at my wife and try to express that I love her, she feels loved versus me doing it however I’m trying to do it?’”

It’s all about the pattern and the recipe. When you do it consciously, you can duplicate the result you want over and over again. There’s another side of NLP, which is also a good side, which is getting rid of the bad recipes. If you have salty cookies, you can stop making those when you become aware of the pattern. Maybe you keep getting into conflict in a relationship, you keep waking up late to your alarm clock even though you want to get up and go to the gym. These are the patterns that I would call salty cookies. You use NLP to scramble, rip up, and destroy the recipe and replace it with a better one. That’s all it comes down to for me.

I loved your example of the beginning when you were like, you see your mom and dad when you were five years old, arguing about money and you’re like, “Money is a bad thing. It makes people fight.” You suddenly have this little seed implanted, which then grows. Here’s the other thing that you’ll notice is the second you have a belief, you’re going to find lots of things to support that belief. Now you’ve got this seed planted and now you look out to the world for all these reasons why it’s true and your conscious mind is maybe fighting that, but that’s what your subconscious mind is doing. An opportunity with NLP is to take out that seed, to pull that weed for instance, and instead plant a beautiful daffodil, a rose or something like that.

A garden has everything. There are weeds, soil, worms, flowers, vegetables, and everything. Oftentimes, we will look based on our beliefs. We’ll look at a garden and we’ll see the weeds or we’ll look at the garden and we’ll see the flowers. Neither one of those are true. The world or reality is much more complex. When you talked about whatever belief you believe you’re going to find a reference to make that true, there’s an actual physiological and neurological reason that happens.

There’s a great book and I’ve talked about this on stage. It’s an old book called Flow written by a Hungarian biologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In that book, Professor Csikszentmihalyi says that there are 2.3 million bits of information coming into our awareness every second of every day and that’s a lot of bits. That means that there’s so much information coming in. Let’s take twin brothers as a random example. They come down the stairwell one morning and they see mom and dad fighting over the checkbook. They don’t talk about it. They see what happened. They go back to their room and they go separate beds and they decide what that means. One brother decides that means that money is the root of all evil. “They’re fighting over money so I need to stay away from money. Money equals conflict and loss of love.”

The other brother saw the same information. He heard the same conflict, but he comes with a different conclusion. This brother believes that mom and dad aren’t able to pay the bills. Therefore, not having money is the worst thing in the world. “I don’t want to lose love and connections. I’m going to do whatever it takes to make money.” The first brother ends up far poorer than he expects himself to be. The second brother is maybe extra rich. He does all the work and becomes successful. Maybe the successful brother is happy or maybe he’s not.

Maybe the poor brother is happy or maybe he is not. That’s a whole other conversation. When we see an example of something, when we experience an event, what does it mean? Humans are meaning-making machines and what we study in the field of NLP is, how do we make those meanings? When you make a meaning that you don’t want, how do you change it? When you have a fresh experience, how do you make a meaning that you do want? Nothing is more important in life I believe than the meanings we give to events and the story we tell about those events.

I like to say to people that no matter what’s happening in your world, you’re making up a story about it. Why not make up a good one? That’s oversimplifying it, but it’s that same thing. We have control over the message that we give ourselves about anything that’s happening in our lives.

When you play the game well, you get invited to more games. Share on X

The only challenge with the control is that most of the meaning we give is unconscious or subconscious meaning creation. This is what we talk about so much. We’ll have these long conversations about how to take back control of the narrative. The problem is going back to those 2.3 million bits. If you have 2.3 million bits of information, that’s like ultimate 4K TV, 1,000, million channels all at once at the same time, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, feelings, experiences, streetlights are going on and the cars are out, people are walking, all this stuff’s going on every second of every day.

We can only consciously process 126 out of 2.3 million. That is the equivalent of a needle in a haystack. Our subconscious mind processes the haystack and finds a relevant needle, and I call that needle the meaning. That’s the meaning and the narrative we give it. How did you discern which was the needle you want to focus on? Your subconscious mind is powerful and that’s the part of your mind that focuses on the meaning and finding it.

After you found it, then we run around and go, “This is what I believe. This is how the world is. Relationships are hard. Relationships are easy. Men are this way. Women are that way.” Whatever we believe, we run with that. NLP is when you study it deeply and we do this course in our membership community and going through these studies and this process, we’re wanting to uncover how did you make the meaning? Not why, but how. How do you take control back so you give the meaning that you want? Ultimately, so you can do the things you want and feel the way you want to feel.

That’s what bliss is about. It’s creating way these habits, because eventually after you’ve learned it, like in the beginning you have to focus on it but over time it becomes this natural default way of being. You can catch it much more quickly, but you also do things that serve your subconscious much more naturally so then you’re able to live more in bliss more frequently without the huge effort that it takes.

Bliss is your default setting. I’ve talked about this with you for years. We’ve been friends for a long time. It’s almost like, “How does that happen?” You said, “Default setting.” I think it’s interesting because people go, “How do I get bliss as my default setting? How do I get peace? How do I get love as my default? How do I get forgiving as my default setting versus holding a grudge?” The secret is we always have a default setting.

You already have it. If you love sushi, you don’t have to keep figuring out if you love sushi every time someone says, “Do you want to have sushi?” Your default setting is, “I’m a sushi guy. I like sushi.” It’s as easy to have a default setting of, “I hate sushi. It’s disgusting. It’s raw fish.” The question is what’s your default setting now? I think the first step to getting an intentional, conscious, default setting that you want is to figure out what your current one is because, believe it or not, you have one.

We all do. Let’s move into a little bit more real estate-specific NLP. One of the biggest things that we do in real estate is building relationships. In those relationships we have to negotiate, we have to build rapport, and we have to have conversations. Sometimes they’re difficult conversations. Talk to me about how we can use NLP specifically with those difficult conversations and with negotiation.

This is something that is one of my favorite topics, because usually when you think negotiation, it’s almost always you have to “win-win” the negotiation. The default setting is negotiation is back to that manipulation of how do I get what I want kind of a thing. I don’t believe in that. Negotiation is, simply put, I have a concept, idea, or desire and it is different than your concept, idea, or desire. How do we come together with the intention of finding an outcome that you and I agree with? An outcome that serves you and serves me? An outcome that gets as close to what you want and as close to what I want as possible. That’s how I define negotiation.

Let’s find an outcome that we can both agree on even though our initial ideas are disparate, separate, and they’re not the same concept. Negotiation is not compromised, and this is a huge writer downer to understand. Compromise is where we meet in the middle. Meeting in the middle is one of the worst negotiation tactics in the world. It leads to some of the deepest dissatisfaction with outcomes. You make an offer on a house and let’s say the house is $250,000 and you offer $200,000. The seller wanted $250,000. They feel like that’s a real value.

You want $200,000, you feel like that’s a good deal. Meeting in the middle means you say, “How about $225,000? Why don’t we meet in the middle?” What does that mean? It means the seller didn’t get what they want and they feel like they sold it too cheap and the buyer didn’t get what they want. They feel like they overpaid so that meeting in the middle compromise is a lose-lose. Here’s a simple metaphor for compromise.

I’m hot, which is normal in my house and my wife is cold, which is normal in our house. We’re sitting in the same room together and I want the window open for the breeze. I want the window open because it’s too hot. She says, “No, I’m cold. Shut the window.” What’s the compromise? “Why don’t we meet in the middle? Let’s open the window halfway.” What does that do? Now she’s freezing and it’s still stuffy so you’re not getting what you both want.

Instead of trying to compromise, instead of meeting in the middle, what you need to do is recover the intention. Recovering the intention is like sometimes in our behaviors and our desires, the intention behind the behavior, the intention behind the desire is lost. We don’t know what it is consciously. We don’t communicate what that is. I say, “Can you close the window?” We don’t communicate that the intention for why I want the window closed is because I’m cold. It’s a simple thing but we oftentimes in communication don’t communicate our intention. We communicate our desire or behaviors. Rule number one for negotiation is to quit compromising and look for the intention. Look for what you’re both wanting.

Rule number two is to recover the intention. I don’t care what the situation is, whenever someone says, “This is what I want. This is what I need. This is what I’m looking for. This is my offer.” You always ask the question, “What’s your intention for that?” Another way to say it is, “What’s the purpose of offering this number? What are you wanting out of that? Why are you offering this number? Why is that the number you landed on? I want to know. The example I gave to a RE/MAX office where I was doing training. I talked about the idea of termite reports and this is a common thing they’ll come up but not as much of a cash investment.

You got to fix the fence. The fence is beaten up. There are termites. The termite guy says, “You’ve got to fix the fence. What do we do?” The seller says, “I don’t want to fix a fence. That’s not fair. We already agreed on the price.” The buyer says, “I didn’t know that the fence was broken down. I think it’s fair. You fix the fence.” Now you have this little detail of a $1,500 fence and it’s make or break it. In my time as a mortgage broker, as a real estate broker and investor, I’ve seen them fall apart over something much smaller than that, but that’s a common one. I’m not willing to do the seller credit thing. What you do is you start with recover the intention.

The seller doesn’t want to not fix the fence because they’re a jerk and the buyer doesn’t want them to fix the fence because they’re greedy. There’s an intention behind it. Maybe the intention is, “I don’t want to fix a fence because I’m already tapped out and we thought we were going to net this much money and now it’s about the cash.” Maybe though that’s not. People always assume it’s money. It’s not always money, especially in real estate. Sometimes I don’t want to fix a fence because I feel I’ve already done many repairs to the house that I feel like it’s too much. I’ve already made it nice and it’s a feeling they get.

There’s also this thing like it’s the principle of it. That’s that feeling of, “I’ve done enough.”

The house we live in when we were negotiating this, it was a small little thing, but we had two things happen that the deal changed. The first one was the appraisal came in less. Now I went in and I said, “I’m willing to pay you top dollar. I like this house. We want to live here.” The appraisal came in short, I said, “We want to pay you top dollar but it turns out top dollar is this much and not a little bit less.” We talked about it and we had a good negotiation and it seemed fair. They liked it. They thought, “We’re still getting the top of the market for this.” I still felt good because coming from California to Michigan, I think houses are 70% off so I didn’t care. I felt like it was a good deal and it’s gone up since then so it’s fine.

A second thing happened and then we had the inspection. We went back and said, “This, this, and this is not functioning properly. We would like it to be fixed.” The principal felt when we uncovered the intention was, “I already feel like I gave you something and now you’re asking for more.” They didn’t want to do it because they thought we were being greedy. What did we do? I communicated our intention and I said, “I feel like these are two different things and we want to pay you the top dollar we promised based on the appraisal and that is that. When it comes to the repairs, we’re not looking for anything over and above. My intention is that we get a fair deal and I know that you want to sell a house at a fair deal too.”

What happened is we both found the same higher intention. We landed on the fact that they want to be fair people and we want to be fair people and as simple as it is. That went so far to use the language and this is where NLP comes in, the language pattern itself. I kept coming back to no matter how detailed we got on the concessions and what’s the price, I want $50 for this or $2,000 for that or whatever it is. We always made sure I wrapped it in the package of, “I think what the fair thing to do would be this. It would be fair to split this cost down the middle. I feel like if I was in your shoes, the fair thing to do would be this.”

As long as we kept the intention alive of we’re looking for fairness, they agreed on fairness, we agreed on fairness. The only question is what is exactly fair? Sometimes you don’t get what you want. I go, “If I want to be fair, maybe we shouldn’t ask for that extra dollar. It’s fair to do this for the person.” What you find is you don’t get as much of what you “want” but you’ll find better deals. You’ll be a better human, a better investor, a better partner, a better seller. Ultimately, more wins happen and you get to play the game.

I talk a lot about playing the games and winning games. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game and that couldn’t be more truthful. How you play the game of negotiation isn’t about winning and losing. It’s literally about how did you play that game? If I play the game well, I will win more than I lose and hopefully, there won’t even be losers. When you play the game well, you get invited to more games. I quoted that from Jordan Peterson who is an interesting professor who talks about the game of life.

Life's about playing more games, not about trying to win the little one you have. Share on X

When you get invited to more games, that means someone thought, “I’ve got a great deal from this investor and they took care of me.” All of a sudden, they send you their uncle and they say, “You should talk to Moneeka too. She got me out from under this house that was a burden and it was a fair deal.” All of a sudden, you get a bigger deal because of that. You get the referrals and you start to play more games. Life is about playing more games, not about trying to win the one little one you have.

The only thing that I like about the way that you present this is you’re finding some mutual ground and some mutual intent. That mutual intent allows you to see the best in the other person, which then brings that out in them. It also allows you to plug into the best in yourself and then that person comes forward. With the game analogy, my husband and I play board games all the time. I always lose and he always wins. The reason we keep playing is that he’s fun to be around when we’re playing.

It’s fun when he wins and you’re fun when you lose.

If it turns around, then it’s fun the other way too. The thing is that we bring out the best in each other during that process because it’s fun for us. We have a common intention. When you’re negotiating, remember that it’s you who’s showing up for that and if you allow the other person to be the best, then you allow yourself to be the best person. It feels much more blissful for everybody, which is the end result that we’re looking for.

When you give a metaphor or an example of playing board games with your husband, you can get worked up and like couples games and Monopoly feels like it’s the end of the world and it feels like there’s nothing more important than, “You cheated.” “No. The rule is you can’t roll three times. You have to pay and then it’s my turn. Get out of jail.” We can get bogged down in this little rule. What happens is this, the game feels bigger than it is. The rule for negotiation is this game is never what it’s about.

There’s always a bigger game and life is the bigger game. If I’m in the middle of negotiating like this house, if we made an extra $2,000 or lose $2,000, it doesn’t matter. At the end of our life, more than the end of the day, there’s a much bigger game I’m playing. If I want to win real estate, I can’t win from one house. You’re going to win from many rental properties, many flips or many combinations of these, or you want to work your way from residential to multifamily or commercial. There’s something you’re doing. There’s a broader game. Remember when you negotiate that, “Is this the hill you want to die on?”

Sometimes it makes more sense to go, “I pick relationship over rules and I’m keeping the relationship with this person. I’ll give up the $1,000 because I’m playing a bigger game.” I hate the metaphor of the battle or the war. That’s not where I’m going. There’s a bigger game in life here and if I want to succeed in life and I want to succeed long-term, there’s a much bigger game and this is Monopoly. It’s a Wednesday night family game, so what if the rule was broken? Let it go. My wife is more important than whether or not the rule says this. What we’ve got to remember is, this game will not last but the big game does.

One of the things that I’d love to do, Matt, if you’re open to this is we’re going to be moving into EXTRA. He’s going to share some of these patterns with us so that we can become more default blissful and play the game better in our lives. Matt, could you tell everybody how they can reach you?

I’ve enjoyed this conversation immensely. I always love connecting with you Moneeka and everyone reading. If this was relevant to you and you’d like to learn a little bit more about NLP, what this thing is, I decided to make a simple gift for everybody. If you head over to NLPWithMatt.com, instead of giving some template or report on something, I decided, “What if I gave everybody interested in NLP and further in the conversation a complete and total NLP practitioner manual?”

This is a 74-page color manual that I use for my advanced certification training. I took the whole course manual and give you the whole thing. You can look from A to Z and learn everything about what NLP is from language patterns, to state management, to mindset, all of it, and then some are all in the manuals. You can follow me anywhere on social @MattBrauning, on Instagram. I put all memes in the family and fun clips and things like that on there. If you want the free manual, it’s right there on the website for you.

Thank you, Matt. That’s generous. I love that. Give us one super tip on how to be successful in real estate investing?

 

One super tip is to act immediately. I think when I look back in my early career, I ordered this home study from Carleton Sheets, the No Down Payment. I never used his method exactly, but it got me motivated and I realized, “Why am I still waiting for the perfect time?” The principle I learned from Carleton Sheets wasn’t about no money down. I put the money down, but I decided to purchase it. I said, “I’m going to get out there and look for something.” I found this five-unit place in Long Beach, California. I bought it and sold it four months later and I made $180,000 profit. I did that when I was 23 years old. I share that story not to impress you, but to impress upon you that concept of start now because there’s never a better time than now besides yesterday.

Give us one strategy on how to be successful in real estate investing?

Here’s the opposite side of it. Stop and think things through. In life languages, it’s called a mover, Enneagram Type 7. When I get a feeling of motivation, just go. If I want new patio furniture and I feel motivated, I go to the store that day and I want to get it home today. If you’re like me, the other side starts acting and goes after it then when you get the deal, when you get an opportunity in front of you, stop and think. If you don’t normally work the numbers, work the numbers backward and forwards, send it through to a friend that knows what they’re doing to hash it out with you. It’s not the end of the world if you say no to an opportunity. Stop and think things through and lay the emotion down, you’ll stop a lot of dumb mistakes.

What would you say is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

It’s changed over the years a lot. It used to be the standard, I read this or I meditate or I journal. What it is now for me as I get busier is always making sure that every day I find a way to create moments with my family. I have my wife Lola of several years and our son Valiant, and we all live at home together. Especially during the year 2020, we’ve been at home more than we probably ever have before when my traveling stopped. Even during these times, I’m up in my office all day. In between my last interview and this one, I got twenty minutes and I went downstairs and I grabbed my son.

I’m thinking, “How can I create a moment out of these extra 5, 10 minutes?” Not just, “Can I sit on the couch and talk to him for twenty minutes?” How do I make a moment in my spare time if every day you can look back and say, “What was the one outstanding magic moment for myself with my creator, myself with my family, myself with my friends, whatever it was?” You’re going to look back at a week of seven magic moments minimum and you’re going to feel like you had a great week.

I’ve never heard anybody say it quite that way. I love that because I think it’s true. Dave and I have date nights every week and that’s our sacred time. We’ve been doing this for many years. It is true that during the week like I’ve got a day like you, I’ve got interviews all day long, I’ve got twenty-minute breaks in-between and feel like I need to scramble instead of thinking, “What can I do for five minutes that would create something magical for me?” What’s beautiful about that is it helps relationships. It also uplifts both of us to then perform at our best wherever we’re going next. I’m going to implement that. Thank you, Matt.

You’re welcome.

Matt, this has been an amazing conversation as always. Thank you for joining us for this portion of the show.

I can’t thank you enough. It’s always a pleasure being with you, Moneeka. Any time, any bad time, any bad channel, I am here.

Ladies, stay tuned. Matt’s got more. He’s going to go into some of those patterns to try to change your paradigm during the show. If you are already subscribed to EXTRA, if you’re not but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. When you subscribe, you get seven days for free so you get to download a ton of stuff that’s already there. Check it out and then you can subscribe if you’d like to. The cool thing is that once you’re subscribed to EXTRA, it will show up.

You don’t need any new apps. You don’t need any new tech. It will show up right there for you. For those of you who are leaving us now, thank you for joining Matt and I for this portion of this show. You know how much I appreciate you and I look forward to seeing you. Until then remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next time.

 

Important Links

• Matt Brauning
• The Driven Entrepreneur – iTunes
• Flow
• NLPWithMatt.com
• @MattBrauning – Instagram
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

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• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
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Stop Trading Hours for Dollars with Monick Halm

 

Sometimes, a six-digit salary doesn’t mean anything if it requires you to work a crazy amount of time and has nothing left for yourself and the people around you. Monick Halm is here to teach you how you can stop trading your hours for money. She is the Founder of Real Estate Investor Goddesses, and has a goal to bring in more women into the industry. Monick shares her story about how a lawyer transitioned into real estate during the previous recession and how real estate became her family’s saving grace. Listen in as Monick talks about the different recession-resistant asset classes that can minimize the risk for your investments while providing quite a hefty return.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Stop Trading Hours for Dollars with Monick Halm

I am excited to welcome to the show, Monick Halm. She is the Founder of Real Estate Investor Goddesses. She is an educator and advocate for female real estate investors and has a mission to help one million women achieve financial freedom through real estate. Monick herself is a real estate investor and syndicator. She owns together with her investors over 1,300 rental units across six states. She is also a number one bestselling author, podcast host, real estate strategy mentor, wife, and mother of three amazing kids. Monick, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here.

I’m happy you’re here too. Could you tell us a little bit about your story?

My story in real estate investing was completely by accident. I grew up a first-generation American. My parents are from Haiti and they always told me, “You can do anything you want as long as you’re a doctor, lawyer, professor, engineer.” I was not into math and sciences. I was like, “I’ll be a lawyer.” I went to law school, then I was in a big firm. The only thing that they ever taught me with regards to real estate was to buy your own home or buy a house. If I get a job, buy a house, put money in retirement, work until 65, get a gold watch, go for a few years, that was it.

I was miserable as a lawyer but that’s a whole other conversation. I was a lawyer for a few visible years and I thought it’s time to buy a house. Even though I had a six-figure income, I lived in Los Angeles. You’re in San Francisco. You understand expensive market values. This was in 2005, towards the top of the last bubble. A modest house in a modest neighborhood. I’m not talking about a mansion in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. It’s a modest house in a neighborhood where you’re not going to have drive-by shootings. It was upwards of $600,000, $700,000. I couldn’t do that by myself, but a friend of mine who was in a similar boat suggested that we buy a duplex together.

He would live on one side and I’d live on the other. I was like, “I can buy half a house. Let’s do that.” Instead of finding a house with two equal sides, we ended up finding this old craftsman. It’s a beautiful property that had a larger unit downstairs, a two-bedroom unit upstairs, and a converted garage in the back. Instead of each taking a unit, we each took a bedroom in the larger unit. We rented out the upstairs, the back house, and even the basement. We were house hacking before that was a thing. I was like, “This is awesome. It’s paying my mortgage. It was great.” I thought of it as free housing but I wasn’t thinking about it as a way to escape law, which I should have because I’m miserable. When I met my husband, he had a duplex. Now we’ve got a single-family together. It was in LA, barely cashflowed but we had it. At the time, I didn’t realize that you could invest out of state. I thought you had to invest where you live.

Then 2008 happened but before that, we got married in 2007 and I got pregnant. When I was about close to six months pregnant, my boss at the law firm I was working called me. I thought I’m going to get a bonus. I’ve been working hard, but instead of getting a bonus, I got fired, which was completely shocking and terrible. That week that I got fired was the week that I’d gone from looking fat to looking pregnant. I would never like that. My sister was pregnant at the same time. She had this cute baby bump from the get-go. I looked back and I had just gotten that bump. I was so excited until I got fired. I was like, “How am I going to get a job? I look so pregnant right now.” I thought, “Forget it. I’m not going to look for a job. I’m going to wait until I give birth, have a short maternity period, then I’ll find another job.” My baby was born in late August of 2008. Within a month, the market was in free fall. It’s giving me a lot of flashbacks of what it was like then. I’m grateful I’m in such a different place than I was at that time. I didn’t have my job and then my husband who is a self-employed graphic designer works in the music industry. His business went down 90% at the same time. It was tough.

Our real estate helped sustain us. It kept a roof over our head. It was still a struggle but we were able to sell one property and we started to flip when houses were on sale. We flipped until about 2015 and they were not quite on sale. It was competitive and flipping is a job. You get the house and hopefully, you make a profit. Knock on wood, we always made a profit but you have to start all over again. There’s got to have something a little more passive. I started looking for a fourplex in LA and it was so expensive, nothing cashflowed. It made no sense. I was frustrated. It was hard to flip and at that point, we were pretty much doing real estate full-time.

At that moment I met a mentor. Robert Helms is the host of the Real Estate Guys Radio podcast. I met him through a mutual friend. She said, “You should meet my friend, Robert. He’s done hundreds of thousands in real estate. He’s going to be in LA. You should come to meet him and maybe he can give you some advice.” I go and meet Robert. I’m telling him about the flipping and the fourplex. He goes, “LA is a tough market. I always say live where you want to live. Invest where the numbers make sense.” I’m nodding and I was like, “Until you said that, I had never thought of that. It hadn’t occurred to me that that was a possibility.” It was like, “What?” That opened up the whole world to me. The next thing he said was, “You can buy this fourplex by yourself if you limit your own capital credits. Alternatively, you could bring a group of investors together and buy a 100, 200-unit apartment building.”

He started telling me about the benefits of that. You could share the wealth and the risk. You can go much further faster. I was mind-blown, “What? I want to do that.” At that point, I thought that you needed Donald Trump’s bank account to do that stuff. I have no idea that was a possibility at all. I also realized that I want to be around people who think 200-units is normal. Up until then, everyone around me thought fourplex was a big deal. I went to learn how to do this thing called syndication, which is bringing groups of investors together. We got started in 2016 and that first year, we went from having our 2 units to over 1,000 by doing syndications. We’ve since sold them and bought more. It’s been an incredible and fun journey. That’s my story.

90% of millionaires get to be so through real estate. Share on X

I haven’t had anybody on the show that does their own syndication. I’ve had one other person. I’m interested to hear a little bit more about how you bring your investors together and what syndication looks like in your world.

When I went to that first conference, Robert Helms and his partner Russell Gray, they do a conference called Secrets of Successful Syndication and he told me about it. I met him on October of 2015 in LA and he was like, “We’re doing this thing. It’s going to be in January 2016 in Phoenix.” I went home that night and told my husband, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to learn how to do this.” We bought tickets that night. When I went there, they were talking about when you are building syndication and you like to get investors, you have to build a brand and build a network. That was important. Think about who do you want to work with. That was a Friday and Saturday conference.

Sunday morning, I’m in the hotel gym. I’m on the elliptical and going through my head is what they talked about. Who do I want to work with? Who am I going to build a brand and network? In between being a lawyer full-time, while I was doing the real estate, I became a life coach. I became an abundance coach for women. I was already coaching women around money and abundance. It’s something that I started to move away from because I was focusing more and more on the real estate, but I already had that thing with women and money. I’m thinking, “Who do I want to work with?” I started thinking about that room that I’d been at that conference. In a room of 120 people, maybe nine of us were women. It was much less than 10%. That’s typical. There were maybe fifteen speakers on their stage and one woman, something like that. All of a sudden it hit me. I was like, “There are no women. I want to work with women. I need to bring women. This is who I want to work with.”

I studied the Divine Feminine for a long time and I’ve been in groups of women. It came as this divine download like that’s what I meant to do. As we set out to start our syndication business, we started working with investors that we’d meet at different conferences. I was focused on how do I invite women into this real estate game knowing that I’ve been working with women around money, wealth, and abundance. This is the best way in my opinion that you’re going to build wealth and 90% of millionaires get to be so through real estate. Nobody’s talking to women about this. Now you are but I was googling and nobody’s doing this.

More of us women are talking to women about real estate, but there are still far too few of us. For the 50% of the population that we are, there is not enough. We still need more voices inviting women into this game. There’s this button-up world that women aren’t told or taught that this is an option for them, that this is something they can do. They’re often not seeing people that look like them. If you go to your typical conference, it’s all men. Mostly, they’re old white men.

It’s so true. You’re like, “I don’t belong here.”

I felt like a unicorn. I was so different from everybody in the room. In certain ways, that worked for me. It was memorable and that served me, but this needs to change. Focusing on women has been one of the main ways in which we have been able to grow our investor list. At first, most of our investors were men. Ninety percent were men on our first few deals. Now, it’s the opposite numbers. Ninety percent are women investors, which makes me happy. It’s letting them know that it’s out there and there are these passive investing opportunities for people that are often at least as abundant and at least has high ROI as a lot of the deals that you do yourself. Our passive investors are making way higher returns than I was making with my properties in LA or properties where I was doing all the work. It’s letting people know that this exists and that it’s possible.

What do your syndications look like? What properties do you offer? How do they work?

We get larger commercial projects, typical ones. We do a B-class commercial or apartment building. Our second to the last project that we did was a 250-unit in Atlanta, B-class, suburb of Atlanta, a nice building. We get bank financing for 75%. We then raised money with investors for 25%, the down payment plus some capital expenditure funds and cash reserves. That was a pretty big deal. We raised $8 million with that one. What we do is we buy these value-add properties. It’s still a nice building but the units could have been upgraded.

The rents were a little bit below market to these neighbors. Property management could have been improved. We brought in new property management. We started improving the units and increasing rents. How it works though is as we cashflow, we give distributions to our investors. They’re getting them every month. Monthly or quarterly, they’ll get distributions of the profit. When we raise the net operating income, we sell the property. The investors get a share of the equity rates.

 

Do you manage that whole thing or are you a partner with somebody else that manages that whole thing?

We’ve done some where we’ve done all of it. As I’ve gone I’ve realized, what do I love to do and what do I not love doing as much. What I love doing more is being on the investor side. I love talking to people. I love getting them to different opportunities. What we do is we vet deals. We have partners that we work a lot with and that have decades of experience, and we know, love, and trust them. They’ll bring different opportunities to us. If that makes sense for our investor, we’ll partner with them. We bring the money. We’re part of the team that’s managing, but we’re not as involved in the day-to-day management.

You mentioned that the strategy has changed a little bit. You’ve gone from increasing rents to mitigating loss.

At least the NOI is the same. If you keep the NOI from going down, we’re like, “This is a win.”

That’s a perfect segue to this next piece that I wanted to talk to you about. I had a summit and you’re having a summit. The conversation is about asset classes that are recession-resistant. Could you talk to me a little bit about what those asset classes are and what that looks like?

I still think that B-class apartments are a recession-resistant investment. It’s one thing if the whole economy stops and nobody’s working at all. That doesn’t normally happen. It’s not going to happen long-term. Normally, it’s not like a full stop on the economy. Most things are not going to do very well in this type of environment. It hasn’t been as bad because a lot of our tenants are more white collar. They’re more able to work from home. It hasn’t been the blood bath we feared. April was okay. As it progresses, people’s ability to pay rent may go down. Generally speaking, in strong metro areas where we invest, whether it’s a diverse economy, you have different industries and corporations. Atlanta is not going to fully go under. They have many different corporations from Coca-Cola to CNN and the largest airport in the world. Eventually, the planes will fly again and people will drink Coke. There’s enough diversity and strong businesses there. Atlanta is not going to end as a city.

There’s always that need for middle-class housing as people might lose their homes. What are they going to do? They’re going to move into apartments. Baby Boomers have been downsizing from their houses to the apartments. Millennials who weren’t able to buy homes because it was too expensive. The prices might go down. They might be able to buy, but people are skittish about buying. They’re going to be in apartments. In most strong markets, there’s always that need for that level of housing. That’s a smart bet.

Mobile homes are poised to do well as well. They are low-income housing. People can buy mobile homes for $30,000. It’s quite a bit in the same area as a stick-built house that’s often 5, 10 times more than a mobile home would be. People can live in mobile homes. They pay a lot fee. They can buy their home for very little. You can invest like buy and sell mobile homes or we have a mobile home park. You own the land. They pay you a lot fee to have their home on the land. There’s the pride of ownership because they own their homes. It’s a low-cost point. There’s a growing need for that.

There are always people that can’t pay their property taxes. They will sell tax lien. There’s probably going to be more tax liens if not less, I would imagine, in the coming days and years. There’s always a need for tax liens. Another interesting asset class that most people don’t think about is land investing. I interviewed a woman on the summit who does that. She buys land and sells it mostly through seller financing. She’s cashflowing, seller financing on her land. She makes $70,000 a month selling land. You can often get it at pennies on the dollar through different strategies. Land investing, with strategies that she teaches, you could do that.

Other things that have the capacity is assisted living or senior housing because of the demographics. It’s a silver tsunami. You have 10,000 people a day turning 65. The Boomers are getting into this. We have a good 15, 20 years of this Boomer generation and there’s not enough supply already for those that are coming. It’s going to be even more every day. There’s a huge opportunity in assisted living facilities and senior housing.

When building a syndication to get investors, remember: build a brand, build a network. Share on X

Other things that have a lot of potentials. We bought a deal that we closed on. It was a cold storage facility for a frozen food manufacturer. We’re looking at a few similar projects that are essential businesses and industrial. Not so much office and retail. I don’t know how they’re going to do, but there’s a lot of demand for different types of industrial space. That isn’t an asset class that we’re looking for, but it’s going to depend on who the users are and how well that does.

Section 8 Housing is a government-subsidized housing. We have some Section 8 portfolio in Jackson, Mississippi. Those are the properties where we don’t know when we’re getting paid on those. Everywhere else we’re like, “Are we going to get paid this month? I don’t know,” but that’s good to go. Low-income housing like the C-class apartments, if it’s not Section 8, that’s a pretty fragile group. A lot of them are hourly. Those are the ones that are unemployed and lost their job. That’s a little more fragile than the B-class, but if it’s Section 8, then that’s a good market to look into.

I know that there are a lot of details around all of those things and people will want to hear more. Why don’t you tell everybody how they can get in touch with you and find out a little bit more about the summit. By the time everybody is reading this, the summit will have passed. Can they still get access to it later? How does that work for you?

They’ll be able to get the replay. They’ll be able to purchase that. You can find me at REIGoddesses.com and @REIGoddesses mostly on social, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Look at REI Goddesses and you’ll find me, but the website is the best place to head.

I liked that she says goddesses because she wants all of us to be the goddesses. She’s not the only real estate goddess out there. I know you have a free gift for my ladies. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

I have The Real Estate Success Blueprint guide that I created. It’s seven steps to take to successfully invest. These steps are foundational principles that you can use that will help you to be successful in any economic environment. It’s like the basics of real estate investing.

I want to dive a little bit deeper into the passive investing model. We’re going to do that in EXTRA. Ladies, what we’re going to talk about is how to create passive income with recession-proof assets.

It can also be recession-resistant.

That’s such a good point. There is no such thing as you can’t lose any money ever. Real estate is like any other investment. It has its cycles. It has its ups and downs and it has its risk. The thing is that you can make different decisions to help to protect yourself. There are higher risks that could have higher returns but are more likely to be susceptible and vulnerable to economic change. This is true in everything. If you’re looking at real estate, stocks and bonds, whatever it is that you’re looking at, there are assets that are going to be more recession-resistant.

 

I don’t want to say that high return equals high risk. Some of these recession-resistant investments or asset classes are quite high return. They’re not necessarily high risks. A lot of them are higher return because they’re not as sexy and not as many people are chasing after those asset classes. You can still have a lot of high returns, but the characteristics of those asset classes make it so even when the economy’s down. I remember the last one, self-storage is also a good recession-resistant asset class.

I’ve been hearing a lot about. Based on what you said, EXTRA got that much more interesting. We got recession-resistant, passive income asset opportunities that still have high returns. I want to hear all about that. We’re going to hear about that in EXTRA. For now, thank you so much, ladies, for joining Monick and me for this portion of the show. Monick, thank you so much for sharing everything that you’ve shared so far.

Thanks for having me.

It’s nice to finally chat. We are two voices out there floating in the wind. I’ve been so eager to meet you. This has been fantastic. Thank you. Stay tuned for EXTRA if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not a subscriber but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. When you go there, you’ll notice that you get seven days for free. I’ve got 35 to 50 episodes up there. You can binge on a ton of those, get as much information as you like, then you can decide if you want to be a member or not. You’ve got seven days to check it out. Go over there and take a look. For those of you who are leaving us now, thank you so much for joining Monick and me for this conversation. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember that goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next time. Bye.

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Thank you for joining me. If you love this show, please subscribe, rate and review it on iTunes. As women, we need to support and empower each other to build wealth and live joyful lives. Your support of this show by subscribing, rating, and reviewing will help other women like you to learn about building blissful wealth through investing. Remember to download your free report so you can get started on your investing journey at BlissfulInvestor.com. I’ll see you next time.

 

 Important Links

• Real Estate Investor Goddesses
• Real Estate Guys Radio – podcast
• REIGoddesses.com
• @REIGoddesses – Instagram
• Twitter – REIGoddesses
• Facebook – REIGoddesses
• The Real Estate Success Blueprint
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com
• iTunes – Real Estate Investing For Women podcast

 

About Monick Halm

Monick Halm is the founder of Real Estate Investor Goddesses.  She is an educator and advocate for women to create real wealth through real estate.  She is herself a real estate investor, syndicator, and developer with over 14 years of real estate investing experience in multi-family, mobile home parks, RV parks, flipping, commercial, vacation rentals, syndication, and ground-up development. Together with her husband Peter Halm, and her investors, she owns over 1300 rental units across 6 states.

Her mission is to assist 1 million women to achieve financial freedom through real estate.  She is the #1 bestselling author of The Real Estate Investor Goddess Handbook and Wealth for Women: Conversations with the Team That Creates the Dream, and host of the Real Estate Investor Goddesses Podcast.  She is also a Real Estate Strategy Mentor, a Huffington Post contributing author, keynote speaker, recovered attorney, certified interior designer, Feng Shui expert, avid world traveler, wife and mother of three amazing kids.

Grab Monick’s Real Estate Success Blueprint: 7 Crucial Steps to Be a Successful Real Estate Investor. realestateinvestorgoddesses.com/free-blueprint-ebook-1

 

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Solutions To Finding Money, Where To Go & How To Ask with Chris Naugle

 

Opportunities don’t just show up in your doorstep unless you make a way for it to do so. Here to teach strategies and solutions on finding money for your real estate investments is Chris Naugle, the Founder of The Money School. He explains why you need to reimagine the way you look at and understand how money works in real estate. Chris emphasizes the importance of setting up a strategy for achieving your goals before entering the industry as well as having a multi exit strategy in place for security. He goes into the details of how you can secure money by not asking for it, instead by solving people’s problems.

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Listen to the podcast here

Solutions To Finding Money, Where To Go & How To Ask with Chris Naugle

I’m excited to welcome to our show, Chris Naugle. Chris is an entrepreneur with high-level experience as a financial advisor, managing over $30 million in assets. Using his expert knowledge and finance, he has successfully bought, renovated and sold hundreds of properties with his work being featured on HGTV. Chris, how are you? Welcome to the show.

I’m doing great. I’m excited to be here.

I’m excited too. I can’t wait to hear about all of this private money stuff. It’s going to be fun. Why don’t you start by telling us your story?

The story starts when I was a kid, I grew up in a lower-middle-class family. My dad was an alcoholic. My mom and dad got divorced and mom had to raise me. It was that story you hear all the time, but that story is not the norm for everybody. I realize that, but that’s how I grew up. I was that kid who always wanted more. I’ll never forget I always was willing to go out there and do what everybody else was unwilling to do. By 2004, that landed me to be a pro snowboarder. I don’t know if any of your readers have ever been to Buffalo, but most people avoid this place like the plague, but it’s not exactly the iconic place where you breed pro snowboarders. We have hills, not mountains. In 2004, I’d accomplished that goal. All I wanted was to be a pro snowboarder. At that point, I also had co-founded a chain of skateboard and snowboard shops called Phatman Boardshop.

I started them when I was seventeen years old. I started it as a clothing line in mom’s basement, which is a whole other part of the story. My mom, who never had anything, as crazy as this sounds, she put her house up on the line. It was the only asset she had in the world. She put her house on the lines for a crazy punk seventeen-year-old skateboard-snowboard kid to chase his dream. That’s how Phatman Boardshop was founded. By 2004, even though I had become a pro snowboarder, even though I had this chain of four skateboard and snowboard shops. Everything in my life seemed like a fairytale, but I still wanted more. I’ll never forget, at that point in time, I was infatuated with the movie Wall Street. Do you remember the original Michael Douglas Wall Street movie? I remember that movie and I’ll never forget it. When I saw that movie, the first thing I thought is, “I want that.” The only thing I could think of is to get that I need to be a stockbroker.

I need to be a financial advisor, which is where that all began because, in 2004, I started diving in and studying and doing everything it took. I became a financial advisor right around that time. As an advisor, I excelled fast. I got all my licenses, got every single certification you could possibly get. If there was a cert, I went out there and I got it. It was because of that, I rose to be one of the top advisors in the firm I was at. That continued on. I was an advisor for a long time. By 2006, I’d been seeing some of these flip shows on TV. We’d be at the shop working and we’d have HGTV on or A&E. We’d see these flips. In a TV show, you see a flip getting done in 22 minutes. It’s entertaining. I said, “I can do that.” I had some money from being an advisor and I decided to start flipping houses.

My first one was in 2006. It was a complete disaster. It’s the only word I can call it, but I got my feet wet. I did that all the way up until 2008. By 2008, this is the pinnacle. I was crushing it. I was literally crushing it as an advisor. I had flipped a couple of houses. I was a pro snowboarder at the peak of my career. By that point in time, I got my retail stores. Everything was humming along with that and I then got my next big idea. This is one of those grandiose ideas because I’ve always been a big thinker. That idea was I was sick of paying rent to my landlord. He kept raising my rent.

Two buildings down, this dilapidated paint store came up for sale. I saw the sign and I’m like, “That could be my new home for my stores.” What I would do is I would convert it to a three-unit strip mall. I’d have the tenants pay for my rent because why should I pay rent when my tenants would pay it for me? That was my big idea. I dove in. I borrowed money from a hard money lender. I call them knuckles in my stories. This was in 2008. It’s perfect timing. I didn’t even see this coming as an advisor, which is a whole other story.

 

In 2008, the small thing called the Great Recession hit me like a Mack Truck. It brought me to my knees. It got so bad during that period of time that I was one payment away from being completely bankrupt. I literally didn’t know how I was going to make it to the next day. What happened is my girlfriend, she’s now my wife, Lorissa. She moved into my house and I had to come home one night. This is when everything was crashing all around me. When you think your life is going one way, all of a sudden, these things happen and then you’re going the complete opposite direction.

I came home and I looked Lorissa in the eye and I said, “Sweetie, I need your help. I need your help paying the mortgage and the utilities. Honey, you’re not going to like this. I have to rent that bedroom out to this guy named Pete. I know you don’t know him, but I can’t make it. This is what I need.” At this point, I threw it out there. I had no one else to ask. I thought, “This is a 50/50 shot,” because she could say, “I’m going to let myself out and good luck, buddy.” She liked me because she ended up marrying me and making it through that period of time with me. Those are exactly what we did. We rented out two bedrooms in my little house that I had back then. That’s how I made it through.

By 2009, Warren Buffett, who was my all-time hero, says three things. I repeat these all the time, “Buy low, sell high and don’t lose money.” In 2009, I understood one of those three things. I understood buy low. I also understood real estate was cheap because that’s what the whole recession was about. That’s what brought me to my knees. I was right in the middle of it. If everything’s low, let’s start buying. That’s what I did. From 2009 to 2014, that’s all I did. I bought dilapidated apartments one at a time. I borrowed money personally for each one of these. I wasn’t using commercial loans. I didn’t know how money works. I thought I knew how money worked because I was an advisor and I knew exactly what I was taught in all the teachings, classes and certifications. I learned exactly what everybody else knows about money, the traditional way of thinking about money.

By 2014, I got up to have 36 units. I was back to making good money in the advisory firm because the markets have rebounded. By that point, I had sold off my stores in 2010. Phatman was sold and I’ve even sold off my strip mall. Right at this point in time, I realized I was in trouble all over again. You would think everything was going well but what I didn’t realize is when you borrow money in your personal name, the banks look at you and they say you don’t fit in their little square box eventually. I got up to 36 units, which were six properties. I brought one more to the bank and the bank said, “You don’t qualify because you don’t fit in a little box called the debt to income ratio.”

I said, “I can’t buy this new six-unit, but I’ve got all my other ones.” They said, “All those lines of credits that we gave you, we have to freeze all those, Mr. Naugle. You can’t use those anymore.” I had a bunch of properties unfinished. At that point, I’d gone from having money back in 2008. I was crushing it to almost losing it all. I had made it back and here I was again, now I was losing it all again. It was getting so bad that I was living paycheck to paycheck trying to make ends meet with all these properties and all my obligations.

I and Lorissa had bought our dream house and that was a big expenditure. It got so bad again that we had to sell off all 36 units, which who cares, they’re investment properties. I had to sell that dream house. That’s when I started thinking about quitting. I was like Rocky Balboa with the towel ready to throw it in. I got in the mail a postcard and this is where everything started changing. It changed because of what I call a magic postcard. This postcard was nothing special. You’ve gotten them. I bet you your readers have gotten them. It said, “Come to this three-day seminar to learn how to flip houses.” When I tell people that, they’re always like, “You’re crazy. What is wrong with you?”

What was wrong with me is that at this point I was humbled by my failures that I had nothing to lose. By going to the seminar, I got a free iPod Shuffle. That’s exactly why I went. I didn’t have anything to lose. I had an iPod Shuffle to gain. Off I went. On day one, there was nothing special but by day two, everything changed. It wasn’t because I learned a whole bunch of new stuff. It was because I learned one new thing. That one new thing was that breakthrough for me. It’s the same with many of your readers and the people you’re around, we don’t need a ton of new things. We need one thing. One thing that will catapult us faster, smarter and more efficiently. That one new thing for me was I learned that with the successful real estate investors and there were two of them. Mike and Greg were their names. What they were doing and how they were using money in real estate was the complete opposite of everything I’d ever been taught in my entire life about money and about how to use money in real estate.

At that point, I realized that they don’t teach this stuff. This is the knowledge you need to seek out and you need to dive in and chase because it’s never going to come to you. No one’s ever going to teach it to you because they’ve got nothing to gain for teaching you. When I learned that, I started questioning everything. Everything I’d ever learned started being questioned. Do you know sometimes in life, when you got hard times, you blame everything else? I blamed the lack of money. I blamed the economy. I blamed everything I could possibly blame. I was in the blame game. At that point, I realized it wasn’t about the money. It wasn’t about the economy. It was about the misinformation that I’ve been given my whole life because these two guys, what they were doing was working and they were killing it and it was everything that I’d never been taught.

That’s the moment when I decided to get off what I call the financial hamster wheel and that’s when I learned how all this work. How I learned all this is I swiped my credit card for $27,000. I told you where I was in 2014. I was broke. I was barely making it. Here I did swipe my credit card. My wife killed me when I came home and told her, “I bought us this thing. Do you know that thing that you didn’t want to go to? I swiped my credit card for $27,000 because what we need is what these guys can teach us.” That’s what changed it all. When I swiped it, I wanted to throw up in my mouth. I did. One of those ones that you got to re-swallow. It was so overwhelming that I was broke and here I was going $27,000 in debt without a hope in hell in ever paying that money back. That’s where the TV show comes in.

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I want to point out some things, Chris. Your story is amazing and it highlights some of these things that people go through or are afraid of going through. What is the biggest reason people don’t get started in real estate? It’s fear. Their fear that they don’t know enough, that they’re going to fail, that they’re going to go bankrupt, that they’re going to end up homeless. There are a lot of things that go on through our mind that are not necessarily rational but are definitely there. What’s interesting is when someone comes on this show and they lived the nightmare. You were one paycheck away or one payment away from being homeless. You had to sell your dream home. You were crushing it and then you lost everything and then you’re crushing it and then you lost everything. This is the thing that I want the ladies to know. Success is there for the taking, but failure is a part of success. We learn through that failure. Failure is scary. Chris can tell you. I’m looking at his face and he gets choked up when he’s talking about this. It was hard. It sucked. He had to talk to the woman he loved and humble up and ask for help. He had to sell their dream home.

That almost cost us our relationship.

Things happen that sometimes we’re afraid, what if they leave? I know I’ve had this with David. What if he leaves me? I’ve made this huge mistake. I said this many times and I want to say this again. Don’t give up on yourself. Real estate is the single most consistent, proven way of building wealth in the United States. It’s safe in general as long as you do it the right way. We know real estate works, but if you get in it and you make some bad decisions, it’s not going to kill you. It will make you stronger. In the end, if you stick with it and you don’t give up on yourself, you will see success. Even if we see failure, even if we see economic crashes, no matter what we’re seeing out there, what’s going on in our own mind is going to determine how successful we are. Fortunately, we have control over our own minds. That’s an important thing. Chris, I love your story of this roller coaster ride because this is the thing that many women fear.

I would never advise people to do that. It’s painful. Jump in feet first without any mentor, without any knowledge, don’t do that. If you do your research and get started, you get a mentor who can help you sidestep a lot of those mistakes and you can see success. I wanted to point that out, Chris, because as people are reading this, we’re all emotionally involved. “I can’t believe he went through that.” I wanted to point out that this is what we fear. This is our worst case. Now, Chris is here talking about his successes. Thank you for that, Chris.

You’re right with everything you said. You could even take and go back into my story and pull up the rest of the fear. The fear of being a pro snowboarder and what that was like, showing up places, and having to hit a jump that you thought was bigger than anything you’ve ever hit. That fear that engulfs you and that was part of life as a pro snowboarder. The fear of when my mom put her house on the line. Even though that was an exciting time, as a seventeen-year-old turning eighteen, my mom’s house was on my shoulders. If I failed, I’d lost my mom’s house. My whole life has been facing fear. Don’t think for a second it’s ever been easy. That whole roller coaster ride you heard there, there are many things in there where I literally want to quit.

I wanted to quit every time, but the only way to truly fail is to quit. I wasn’t willing to accept that even when things got bad in ‘14. Me and Lorissa, she was my fiancée then. We split when that house got sold. Things got hard and I didn’t know if that would ever come back. I had to take a month and go to Thailand to clear this head because I didn’t know how to get through to the next day. It all came back together because I never gave up. She never gave up on me either. When we came back and we went to this training that we spent all this money for.

At first, she was mad at me. She couldn’t believe I did what I did, but then when she saw it and she met Greg and Mike and she met all the other mentors that we were being coached by, she realized that this is what we needed. She realized that this is the stuff we were never, ever shown. I’m going to get right into the show because many people want to know how does one go about getting an HGTV show? How do you get that? That’s the likeliness of getting struck by lightning. A lot of people are misinformed on how you get a show. A lot of people think that they see you on Instagram or Facebook and they call you up and say, “We’d love to have you on HGTV.” No. Here’s how it started for us.

We were in a convention at this real estate training with our mentors and Tarek and Christina got up on the stage. They did a little dog and pony talk and it was great. My wife and I looked at each other and do you know what I said to her? I said, “Sweetie, if we’re ever going to get on that stage, we’ve got to have our own show.” Instead of going out and trying to find somebody to produce the show, I went back and I hired my friend, Kyle. He started going to one of the flips we were doing. He started filming us. I got this crazy idea as a snowboarder that we should do a show that mimics Jackass and Flip or Flop and bring it together. That’s where the first rendition of the show came up, which was Flip Out. How it started is we started filming and we were having so much fun.

 

It brought me and Lorissa closer. We brought one of my ex-pro snowboarders in, his name was Blair. That whole experience, that bonding experience of working toward this pie in the sky thing, which was scary. It’s like, “This may never happen,” but the thought that if you work toward it and you keep that idea strong in your mind, it can happen. It did happen. We sent that video out to all the networks and we got turned down by every one of them the first time. The producer that took us on dropped us because they couldn’t get it placed. We should have quit there. We’re like, “No, we got something.” We went to the next producer.

That producer took my little crazy pie in the sky idea and he made it into their little box. He said, “This is what HGTV is looking for. You guys are this close. We need to squish it together.” We filmed it a whole other flip. That flip is the one that got us on HGTV. It didn’t happen overnight. You’ve got to understand, in 2014 is when we started that dream of getting a show on HGTV. We didn’t air until 2018. Think about that. Sometimes your dreams are not going to happen overnight. There is no easy button in life. It is a marathon. If you want something so bad that you can taste it and so bad that you will never stop, you’ll get it. As Napoleon Hill says, “If you dream it and you believe it, you can achieve it.” That’s exactly what got us the show. Never giving up.

Our show aired in ‘18, HGTVs Risky Builders. You can look it up. It was a wild and exciting time, but that same thing, when the show aired and we aired six times, we didn’t move on to the next season. You think you got it. Your ratings are there. You’re the number two show out of green light and you think you got it and all of a sudden, one thing happens. That one thing that happened for us was discovered about HGTV when our show was airing and they decided to freeze all my shows. That door that we thought was going to open that was going to pave the way for the rest of our life slammed in our face.

Another thing that Chris said that I want to highlight. His dream took four years. We are conditioned to have a short-term vision and immediate gratification mentality is common now. There are many people out there promising us, “You can make $1 million in two years. You have to work ten hours a week for the next eighteen months.” The truth is that I’m not going to say bad things about anybody that’s making promises because I don’t know. What I do know is an assured way of success is to have a long-term vision, especially in real estate. Chris did flips. That’s more of a short-term thing. I have done a couple of flips. It’s not my favorite thing to do because the pressure is high, but you want to have a long-term vision. First of all, if you’re flipping, have deep pockets enough that you can recover from any mistakes. With flipping, you have to be right on target.

We are at 257 flips to date and it would be 258 soon. I can assure you, you better hope you’ve got a good plan for how cashflow is happening.

In the beginning, mistakes happen and that costs money and time. You need to make sure that you’ve got the backing to do that if you want to do flips. Regardless of whatever you’re doing, whether it’s flipping or wholesaling or buy and hold, which is what I do, have a long-term vision. Real estate is not a get rich quick scam or idea. It is a long-term business. Even though his TV show, we’re talking about that and it took four years or whatever, understand that real estate is that way too. You want to stick with the dream long-term because that’s how it’s going to pay off.

The other thing too that you said in there that I want to clarify that it’s vitally important is if you’re getting into real estate, I don’t care if you’re going to wholesale. I don’t care if you’re going to flip. I don’t care if you’re going to do BRRRRs and buy and holds, you should have a system and a strategy. My system and strategy are simple. Each and every single property I have goes through, I call it four, but we’ll focus on a three-step strategy. Number one, every deal we get, first, we try to assign that deal because the quick dollar is always the best dollar. Number two, if we can assign it, we don’t freak out. We don’t worry because you know what we figured out, we figured out how money works.

That’s what I’ve written a book about. It’s what I teach and talk about, money and how money works. We take the deal down. What we do is we look at, can we wholesale this deal? Can we do a quick sale without doing much work or any work at all? If we can’t, if we flip the deal, that’s strategy number 2.5, as I like to call it, because if we can’t pull it out, then we’ll look at flipping it. If we flip or we’re looking at that strategy, we have to be able to make 20% profit. If we’re not going to make a 20% profit, it moves on to step number three or strategy three, which is a BRRRR. What we’re going to do is renovate it like a flip. We’re going to basically get it ready.

We’re going to rent it. We’re going to take it to the bank and refinance it. We’re going to keep it as a long-term rental because once you own the asset and you control the asset, it’s now providing cashflow. It’s appreciating. What we’ve even been doing is taking a lot of our rentals, packaging them together in nice rental portfolios and selling them off to areas like California, Toronto, New York City, where they can’t touch rate of return like what we’re getting here. That’s what we’ve been doing. Because we have that system, we never have to worry about cashflow. There’s always a secondary strategy. That goes right into what you were saying. There’s not one or the other that’s better, just make sure you have multiple exit strategies in your strategy.

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Thank you for saying that, Chris. That is my big thing on how I have avoided my own disasters in my life in real estate is always having several exit strategies. Every business partner I go into business with, they have to understand that I’m not married to one particular exit strategy. I have my preference, but if that one doesn’t work, we are going to number two. In other words, if we’re trying to sell a flip or a construction project and the market has plummeted and we can’t sell it, I’m not going to chase the market down. I’m not going to do that. We are going to rent it. Understanding that you have many options with exiting a project is important. You don’t want to get married to a particular idea and you don’t want to get so bullheaded about it that you will make mistakes like chasing the market down. Instead of chasing the market down, chase rents up. You can do the opposite and succeed. Chris, nobody else talks about the multiple exit strategies. Thank you so much for that.

We did 257 flips and you might look at that and be like, “Wow.” We made a lot of mistakes in the early years. All we did was flip. I can tell you, there were times where I couldn’t even buy groceries because I had so much money out there, I didn’t have cashflow. We started getting smart. What we started doing is getting a rental and that rental cashflow, we’d roll it in. We created a spreadsheet. We had X amount of cashflow coming in and we wanted that cashflow to support the carry cost on the flips. It didn’t happen overnight, but we started figuring out, “If we can build a rental portfolio that cashflows, we can use that cashflow to determine how many flips we can do at one time because the cashflow carries the cost of the flip business.”

You make the big profits on the flips, but sometimes you’ve got to wait for that. We started saying, “If the house doesn’t sell and we don’t make 20%, no big deal. Let’s rent it and move it into the rental portfolio. If it didn’t sell now, it might sell next year or maybe down the line, we’ll keep cashflowing. We figured this out through mistakes. All these ladies that are trying to get into this business, if you take this knowledge and you apply this in your business, you will not go through these roller coasters that I had to. You won’t have to look fear in the face like I had too many times and say, “How am I going to get to the next thing?” You’ve learned from someone else’s mistakes. Although failure is a necessary part of success, you can minimize the number of failures by learning from other people’s failures and then applying what not to do in your practice.

It is why a mentor is so important. Could you tell us a little bit about how you started financing things? I know you started using private money rather than the banks. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

It all came when I learned that the people that were crushing it in the business, I always thought it was because they had millions of dollars of their own money. I learned that they didn’t. They mimicked what the banks did. They used other people’s money. What the biggest thing I started doing, and I was good at this because I was an advisor, is I started going out and finding all these people that I thought had money. Whether it was in an IRA, hidden equity in their home or money that they had set aside in investments that maybe they weren’t comfortable with the risks. I found all of these different sources of money and the biggest source of money I found, to be honest, and this is going to blow you away, permanent life insurance. Do you know how much money is sitting in permanent whole life and universal life policies? These people don’t even know that they can access their cash value. I started going to these people and I started solving their problems. This is a massive takeaway.

One thing I got super good at is never asking for money. I never went to somebody and asked them for money. I went to somebody that I knew had money. I said I’ve learned what their problem was. Sometimes their problem was they didn’t like making their car payment. What I would do is teach them and I would say to them, “What if I could show you how to have your house pay for your car?” You see their problems, their car payment. The thing I know is they’ve got equity in their house. Instead of their house being a liability, I taught them how to turn their liabilities into assets by taking and using that hidden equity that was sitting in their house. That interest that I paid them on a monthly basis, the mailbox money, that paid for their car payment. I started learning that people’s problems weren’t wanting to become a multimillionaire.

Their problem was they wanted to take one more family vacation. Maybe they wanted to take their whole family to Disney World on them and pay for the little thing. To someone, that’s a major problem in their life. To us, do you know how easy it is for a real estate investor to solve that person’s problem? Show them how to take their IRA, their 401(k) money, their hidden equity, either money sitting into the life insurance and how to then take that income from those vehicles that are not doing anything for them in terms of an income. Show how that income will make them have that vacation. The number one thing to raising private money is not asking for money. It’s not knowing a bunch of people with money. It’s going out there and finding the people that you liked, the people that trust you, and teach them how to solve their problems. Their problems are stinking easy to solve.

For you, it was easy because you were a financial advisor. You had access to this information. The layman, for instance, me, I would never have that information.

 

You do. How many people do you know that have employer-sponsored retirement plans, 401(k)s, 403 (b)s, 457s? Every person that’s working in a regular W-2 job probably is putting money into a retirement plan. They’ve been taught to do that their whole life. They’ve got this money sitting in their retirement plans, but do you know what their mindset tells them? “I can’t use that money. I would have to pay tax and penalties to take that money out.” That’s what they think. They don’t know that they can take a loan from that 401(k). When they take a loan from that 401(k), you being the borrower or the real estate investor, can pay that loan back for them and put some extra money in their pocket. If their loan costs them 5% and that interest that they’re paying on the loan goes back into their account, but that’s a cost to them. Why don’t you pay them 10%? They’re making a spread of 5% on that money. Everybody’s got one of these things.

A lot of people have old 401(k)s move into IRAs. Show them how to take those IRAs and move them to a self-directed IRA. You don’t even need to be the expert to say, “I know a person that could basically help you do this.” Everybody wants to think that I’m different because I was an advisor. Maybe it was a little easier because I knew how to identify these things, but everybody knows somebody that has money. Most people will tell you that they don’t have any money because they don’t know how money works. If you get a little bit of knowledge on how money works and you learn how to position your opportunity, which is your real estate deal, your opportunity, you can be positioned to solve their problem. All of a sudden, you start figuring out that the people that you don’t think having money are the biggest ones you can help and the biggest ones that can give you money for your deals. It’s a misconception of where the money lies and how people can use that money.

I don’t know if this happens for you, but someone starts talking about something and then something grabs your attention and you don’t hear anything else. This happened to me while you were talking, Chris. I was going to backtrack a little bit. You talked about they’ve got their 401(k). You can take a loan. You get 5% and then you, Chris, are going to pay them 10%. Ladies, the only reason I am focusing on this is to give you an idea of the paradigm shift that Chris can create for you. There’s one example. Based on what he said, there are probably many opportunities based on what you’ve got, but here’s the paradigm shift that happened for me. You take out a loan from your 401(k) at 5%. I don’t know if you caught this, but do you know that 5% is getting paid back to you? You’re paying interest back to yourself. You’re making 5% and he’s giving you 10%. A lot of people would look at this and say, “I’m getting a loan at 5% and I’m getting paid 10%. This is arbitrage. I’m only making 5%.” How much are they making?

It’s more than 5% because you are paying them 10% and the 5% they’re paying back to their 401(k) is their money. They’re paying themselves back with interest. What they’re doing is the same thing the bank does. You are literally mimicking what the bank does every single day because you learned one new thing that you can change. Everything I teach people is only changing one thing in your life. That is it. It’s applying basic banking principles, the simplest things that are on for hundreds of years to your everyday life. It will change your life. It will completely transform your life if you learn that one new thing.

There are many of those new things that we can learn. Once we focus on one and we start to utilize that, we create a plan like you’re talking about. Now, we have a business.

It’s about the home equity line of credit. It doesn’t cost anyone anything to get a home equity line of credit. Most banks will dish things out and they don’t even charge for the appraisal. It costs nothing to use or to get a home equity line of credit if you’re not using that money. You now got this home equity line and that home equity line taps into the equity in your house. People get excited about having equity in their house, but why? What is your equity in your house doing to change your life? Nothing. Do you know what your equity in your house is doing? I want you to visualize this.

Picture that you come home from work and on your couch is your money sitting there and your money is holding the soda from your fridge. The Lay’s potato chips from your cupboard and there are crumbs and everything all around your couch and your money is sitting there watching TV. Kick back. You worked a hard day and your money looks at you and says, “Did you have a hard day at work?” That’s what your money is doing every day. It’s sitting on your couch being lazy while you’re off hustling because you’ve been taught to go out there and work hard, work long, and you’ll get ahead. Your money needs to work hard. The best thing about your money is you can be a slave driver. You can make your money work hard and it will never ask for a break. It will never ask for a vacation. It will never even get mad at you, but you have to teach it and send it to work.

Your money is sitting there being lazy. Teach your money on how to go to work. Remember my mom. I told that example where she put her house on the line. After she did that, we learned something. After I paid off that store’s loan, what we started doing is mom had this line of credit. We started using mom’s line of credit to buy real estate. My mom’s line of credit was 5%. I would pay my mom usually 8% to 10% on the loan. I’d take a loan and I would pay mom back. That amount that I paid my mom above and beyond her payment to her home equity line of credit was enough to pay for a car. That’s where I came up with that whole idea of having your house pay for your car. That’s what people want. People want their car payment paid for by their house. They just don’t know how. The answer is so simple. Every one of you reading this has the answer to their problem. That answer is in the form of a real estate opportunity. Don’t ask for money, solve problems.

I’ve got one million things that I feel like I could add and we’re already out of time. We’re going to have EXTRA after this and we’ll do a deeper dive on some of this stuff. If you’re subscribed to EXTRA, you’re going to get a lot more. If you’re not subscribed to EXTRA, do it because you’re going to want a lot more. We’re going to talk about more of this stuff then. Before we close out this portion of the show, Chris, could you tell people how they can get in touch with you?

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The best way to get in touch with me is my website. It’s ChrisNaugle.com. They can go on there and that’s the best way. They can also check me out. A lot of people love social media. I am all over Instagram. It’s @TheChrisNaugle and Chris Naugle on Facebook. You can’t not find me. I answer every single direct message individually.

I knew that you wanted to give my readers a free gift, which is the eBook of your bestselling book, The Private Money Guide: Real Estate Edition. He’s going to be giving you that free eBook. Chris also wanted to make another generous offer. Could you talk a little bit about the membership offer you wanted to make to my audience?

I do because we’re talking about money and a lot of times, I can teach people where all the money is and they still don’t want to look for it. What I’ve created is a community of lenders and borrowers. Picture eharmony, the dating site. I’ve created that for lenders and borrowers. It’s a community that you can come into where all the lenders in there communicate with all the borrowers and the borrowers can submit their deals through a standard operating procedure. We do all the work for you. You fill in the blanks and your deal goes on. Literally, you can have all the lenders looking at your deal and they will do that. It’s called The Money School community. What I wanted to do is basically make a special offer and give it to everybody in your community at a very reduced price over what we normally charge. You can test it out. It’s a monthly subscription. You can try it. If it didn’t work, you stopped the subscription, no big deal, but it has literally provided funding for I don’t even know how many at this point. I don’t keep track of all the deals, but that’s what I wanted to do.

The URL is ChrisNaugle.Teachable.com. You’re going to look at the membership. It will show you the regular price, but then when you get an opportunity to put in the coupon code 50OFF and you’ll get $50 off of the monthly membership. It’s month to month. You can try it for one month at this reduced rate and continue at that rate if it seems to be something that is going to work for you. That’s generous and it’s an ongoing gift. It’s not like $50 off the first month. It’s an ongoing monthly gift. That was generous. Thank you, Chris.

You’re welcome.

Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

I’m always ready.

Give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

The super tip to getting started is easy. It’s get started and find one person that is doing what you want to do and latch onto them and learn from them. That would be my super tip to getting started. Stop trying to think you need to know everything and take that leaping start.

What is one strategy on being successful in real estate investing?

One strategy on being successful in real estate investing is to come up with a strategy before you get started. Lay out or map out where you want to be and come up with the plan to get there. If you want to have five properties, come up with that plan of how many offers do you have to make versus how many houses you have to get. Write the plan down. Don’t dive in without a plan. Do the plan first.

What would you say is one daily strategy or daily practice that you use that contributes to your personal success?

Every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up is I get down on my knees and I thank God for what I have.

Chris, this has been amazing. Thank you for everything you’ve offered in this portion of the show.

You’re welcome. It’s been an honor.

Thank you for joining, Chris and I. We are going to be talking about more of this stuff in EXTRA. The question that I am going to be asking Chris is, how do you build wealth through debts and expenses? How do you come out ahead? That’s juicy. We’ll probably be doing a deeper dive on the private money piece also. If you’re not subscribed to EXTRA but would like to be, I know this sounds a little bit confusing, but here’s the thing. You go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get the first seven days for free so you can test it out. You sign up for the subscription. After that, it’s a monthly subscription that’s super cheap. It’s $5 a month and you can get your EXTRA episodes.

If you are on Apple Podcasts, you’ll be able to see it on Apple Podcasts. If you’re on Podbean or anything else, you’ll be able to see it on the device that you’re using. You don’t have to have another subscription to any other device or apps. I want to explain that. I know that was a little bit long-winded, but I get many questions on how do you do this. It’s RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com and then it’s self-explanatory from there. Thank you for joining Chris and me on this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time and until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams so get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. We’ll see you next time.

 

Important Links

• Chris Naugle
• @TheChrisNaugle – Instagram
• Chris Naugle – Facebook
• The Private Money Guide: Real Estate Edition
• ChrisNaugle.Teachable.com
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

About Chris Naugle

Chris Naugle has dedicated his life to being America’s #1 Money Mentor. His success includes managing over 30 million dollars in assets in the financial services and advisory industry and tens of millions in real estate business, with over 200 transactions and an HGTV pilot show since 2014.

In 20 years, Chris has built and owned 16 companies, with his businesses being featured in Forbes, ABC and House Hunters. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of FlipOut Academy™, founder of The Money School™, and Money Mentor for The Money Multiplier.

As an innovator and visionary in wealth-building and real estate, he empowers entrepreneurs, business owners, and real estate investors with the knowledge of how money works. Innovating what it takes to break the chains of financial slavery, Chris is driven to deliver the financial knowledge that fuels lasting freedom. To date, he has spoken to and taught over ten thousand Americans.

 

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• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
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