The Benefits Of Building Virtual Teams For Your Business Needs With Miquella Gaunt

Technology has shown us so much of what is possible in the workplace. Pushed by the pandemic, more and more businesses and organizations are opting for hybrid work. Thus, we have virtual teams. And while a virtual team has multiple purposes, it always has a specific goal in mind. In this episode, Moneeka Sawyer interviews Miquella Gaunt of Backdraft Home Solutions about how they transitioned to virtual teams and how they are building them to help support their specific needs. She takes us across their hiring process and marketing avenues, then shares how they’ve adapted through COVID to now as we’re coming out to the other side of it. Plus, Miquella talks about the onboarding system she uses that helps her become the successful real estate investor she is now.

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The Benefits Of Building Virtual Teams For Your Business Needs With Miquella Gaunt

Real Estate Investing For Women

In this episode, I am so excited to welcome Miquella Gaunt. This is what she says about herself. You ladies know that I read bios. Normally, I try to change it to the third person, but this bio is so sweet the way she wrote it, so I’m just going to read what she wrote. What she says is, “My new husband and I started this home buying solutions business to add value to families and the local community. We know what hard times are and we want to be a good option for people experiencing them, especially when the typical home selling process is complicated and lengthy.

We have created an amazing experience of relief for many families that we have worked with while connecting with them on a personal level. We have always thought with a positive mindset to impact our local community and calm people during times of stress and chaos. We are ready to stand by their side to accomplish their current goals, simplify their problems and make them suddenly organized, easy, and convenient so people can move on to a stress-free life they didn’t even know was possible.” Miquella, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

We have a lot of people that talk about, “I do this business to help people.” Most of them mean it. You can tell a difference in people in how deep that goes in their heart. Some of it is they’ve been doing it so long so they’re like, “This is how I run my business,” and it’s not quite as connected to that anymore. They’re still out there doing those things, believing it, and feeling it, but it’s not quite as deep and connected to their heart as it might’ve been in the beginning when they started their businesses. I love the way that it came from your heart. I know that you’re young in this business and that energy is so inspiring. Thank you for that. Could you tell us high-level your story?

I wasn’t always in the real estate business. A lot of people always come and say, “My parents were in it and I was ingrained in it,” but I wasn’t. I came from a marketing side. My mom had a very successful marketing and advertising agency. I worked with her since I was thirteen making collection calls. She’s like, “You’re not busy for the summer. Come work.” Even as I got older, I was more on the project management side. I was running the orders or anything like that, but I got to see firsthand how my mom handled marketing for other businesses which helped in doing what we’re doing now.

After that, I went to work for another company that was in promotional retail merchandise. I was a project manager and operations. I was handling everything on the backend. That’s where I strive and am good at that. I met my now-husband. Talk about a visionary. If anybody has ever read the book, Rocket Fuel, it talks about the visionary and integrator. He is a visionary and I’m 100% the integrator.

You complement each other perfectly.

He comes to me sometimes with these ideas and I’m like, “What?” He’s got a big idea and I come in with how to implement it. He does as well, but it works. He originally started this business. He was a firefighter. Long story short in a custody battle for his baby girl and it was how do we make a lot of money to be able to afford attorney fees? Those things in family court rack up quickly. Both of us have read Rich Dad Poor Dad. He knew that real estate was where he want to go. I was already actively working on getting my license because I knew I wanted to end up in the real estate.

He started the wholesaling business. I ended up leaving my job to help him with his daughter. He ended up getting primary custody of her. I got to help raise a little baby girl. I decided that the retail side wasn’t for me. I liked the investing side better. I liked getting to help people because these are difficult situations for some people. Long story short, we got into it together and now we’re a few years in. We have grown exponentially. I can’t even imagine what’s going to be in store for us.

You are a client of Zack Boothe. Is that true?

Part of our original journey is we had done his Driving For Dollars course as the regular students and built our business off of originally Driving For Dollars and his whole process. As we grew, he saw that we were taking massive action. We ended up doing one-on-one coaching with him for about a year, which helped us break that learning curve and break through a lot of barriers. Instead of us having to learn by failure, he helped us through that. He married us. He was our officiant. It’s grown from a student -mentor to a best friend. I love him and his wife. That’s where we started and now we have what we have.

There are so many people out there that teach wholesaling. Why did you choose him?

We’ve chosen Zack originally because when we first started out, we didn’t have all the money to invest in buying these big lists. What everybody else talks about is buying tons of data and marketing to it. That takes a lot of money and extra money that we didn’t have at that time. We knew driving for dollars was the gateway into it where it just needed your time to go and drive around, find distressed properties, and the market to them. We took his course because we had seen everywhere that he was the driving for dollars guru of it.

We did his course which was great and made a lot of processes for that. Both my husband and I would go driving. We’d take turns. He’d go for an hour for a day. I’d go for an hour for a day. It started with that and then started ramping it up. We started getting some good deals. I remember we had one big deal coming in. Zack had randomly facetimed Aaron for some reason. He was like, “I just want to check on you. You’re one of my students. I don’t think we’ve ever talk to you one-on-one.” We talk to him about what was going on. Aaron was still at the fire department at the time because we had talked about, me being the very like, “I got to have the numbers in place.”

I was like, “Let’s make sure before you quit the fire department, we have reserves so our family is okay, especially since I wasn’t working anymore.” Zack called and Aaron had him on speaker and he’s like, “Your wife is probably going to kill me right now, but I’m going to tell you to quit now.” It was because we had a large deal coming in and it gave him the opportunity to. I remember Aaron got off the phone and I looked at him like, “He’s not wrong.”

Aaron was calling out of the back of his car. He’s at the fire department. He got in trouble for this too at the fire department in between calls, of course, not going to save people’s lives. He was in the back of the car making sales calls, cold calling, and trying to seal a deal. He did whatever it took. I’m like, “You’ve already done it this hard this far. Why not bet on yourself? Imagine if you had a full day where you weren’t out putting out fires or going on a medical call, what if?” The day the deal closed which gave us enough reserves for a little bit, he put in his two weeks. He said he kept refreshing his phone and as soon as it hit, he put in his two weeks and we haven’t looked back since.

How long ago was that?

That was in June of 2020.

How long have you been working with Zack when that happened?

The course was only a few months. Aaron started studying and going through different student courses in September of 2019. He did everything pretty quickly. Once he left the fire department, we started our actual one-on-one coaching with Zack in July of 2020.

It was less than a year from when you decided to go start the wholesaling thing and take Zack’s course to where you went full-time. Is that true?

Yeah. We don’t do anything smaller around here.

Virtual Team: We’re very big on “don’t message us on the side; keep it in the group because you never know somebody else that may have the same question.”

The thing that we’re going to talk about that you wanted to focus on was the whole idea of building a virtual team. We’ve had people come onto this show and talk about this before, but you have a little bit of a different perspective. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to this? We were talking in the green room. I’d love for you to share that story with the ladies.

We originally steered away from the virtual. We’re both big on building a culture. We did feel like originally you needed people in the office to have that culture. It is a limiting mindset. You can’t create a culture without being face-to-face. We had a few cold calls. We had about four in-house for maybe five months. People’s lives changed. They had to go on their separate ways, which was fine. We loved everybody that was here. As we were trying to hire new people, it was hard. As Zack says it, “People in America just don’t want to work.”

I know that sounds so bad, but it was the most difficult thing. I was surprised. It blew my mind, first of all. The other thing was, even if we did, they didn’t have any experience in cold calling. It was the minimum wage in California plus then training somebody from the ground up, which takes a lot of time. We had listened to a podcast and again, somebody was talking about virtual cold-callers. Finally, we’re like, “We need to take the action and just try it.”

What’s the worst that’s going to happen? It doesn’t work and we go back to what we wanted. It’s not a big deal but we were very strategic with it. We had a hiring process. We had certain questions that were asked. We put them through training. We’ve built better training along the way as we’ve grown. It went from having four cold-callers in-house to, at one point, we had twenty virtual cold-callers.

We’re down about fifteen now, which we think is a good number. We took one of the cold-callers that was good. We put her as a manager. Now, she manages them. She trains and watches their numbers. She pulls them aside, “I listened to your calls. They need to be fixed here.” She now hires all of them. The reason why she’s able to do that is we also built processes and an onboarding process so that it makes it quick. It’s not, you have a sheet of paper and, “Do I send them this? Do I send them that?”

It’s all on a website that you just give them a login. The person goes through everything from, “Here’s the script. Here’s how you call,” down to, “Here’s how you log in to the WhatsApp group.” The WhatsApp groups are how we continue the culture. Everyone celebrates their wins. Our cold-call team is in one group. We tell everybody. They send a little bell emoji when they get a lead. They encourage and celebrate each other. That’s how we have found that keeps that culture that we wanted going. Everyone is able to hold everybody accountable. If one person has a question, we’re very big on, “Don’t message us on the side. Keep it in the group because you never know somebody else may have the same question.”

Also, a better answer because they’ve been through it themselves.

We’re quick to fire. If somebody is not matching that culture level, if they’re not taking instruction well, we get them out because we also know how toxic a bad worker can be for everybody else. We’re very uplifting people. We’d like to be uplifting, happy and encourage everybody. We want the best for everybody. We try to keep that as much as possible within our people.

You’re in California. Where in California are you guys?

We’re in Temecula. It’s in Southern California.

Is it in Burbank?

No. We’re an hour from LA and an hour from San Diego. We’re right in the middle. It’s a little wine country.

You’re in Temecula and you’re doing the driving for dollars locally in that area. I want to point that out there. A lot of people that read this show and they read it over and over again, “You can’t invest in California.” I do. I like to make sure that I point out that people are doing this in California because as much as people think it’s difficult here, it can be difficult in a lot of places. Just because a market might appear difficult, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful. I wanted to point that out.

This market is difficult in its own way.

There’s no such thing as the perfect easy market. You might find something that’s perfect and easy in this way, but it’s going to have different challenges. That’s true for California too. My next question is, when did you decide to start hiring help? It sounds like your hubby Aaron was doing all the calls initially. You were trading off on dialing for dollars, but when did you decide to start hiring?

We hadn’t had an office yet. We were doing this at our little condo in our dining room. We had our big old whiteboard up in the dining room. We had no dining room. He originally did dabble in a little bit of the virtual cold-callers. I think it was two people, but it didn’t work out very well. It left a bad taste in our mouths and that’s why we didn’t. We were still in 2020. We went and saw Zack’s office around October of 2020. He came back going, “We need an office. We need to get this out of our house.” The office we got is only about 900 square feet. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s something where you disconnect. You’re not at home. We’re all guilty of doing it. I’m sitting there and trying to work and going, “I should mop the floors.”

“I got to get that laundry done.”

Let me go through the laundry real quick and I’ll come right back. Now your laundry and then your dishes. It doesn’t work. Even our day is we get up. We take our little one to preschool. We come into the office. We’re here from 8:00 to 2:30. We leave at 2:30. We pick her up and we’re home because we have that six or so hour that we focus and it’s the disconnect from the house.

Don’t you work after you pick up the little one?

We do. There are escrows going on. There are people calling all the time, but we try to come in and knock everything out for that six hours so that when we go home, it’s answering a text message or a phone call. After we saw Zack, we went out to Utah in October of 2020. We literally came back and I think within a week or two, we had an office. We started hiring cold-callers within the same month, but that was the in-house people. Our last in-house person was left around June of 2021 and then we went full virtual.

Was there a series of parameters that you use to make that decision to start spending the extra money on hiring help?

Is it for the in-house?

Virtual Team: We’re very big on pouring ourselves into all of our people.

It is for anything because that’s where you started.

We had to wait until we had some deals coming in and closing. We know that it takes money to spend money. I know it’s such a used saying, but it’s true. You need to spend it to be able to make it. We had to watch everything carefully. We are good about watching our spending and our marketing lists and where we’re at because we do believe in taking care of our people. If you take care of your people, your employees, and your team, it’s going to benefit yourself as well. We didn’t have a parameter of when to do it. It was just like, “We need to.”

First, you wanted to have in-house people and then you went virtual. Did you go with a virtual company or did you pick individual people? Tell me a little bit about how that worked out. How did you find the virtual people that you’re working with now?

We went on Upwork. Again, in a podcast or somebody posting or something, everyone talked about using this site Upwork. We would put our little job posting out there. People would apply. We had certain questions. You have to have Skype because we’ve learned that if they’re calling out of the country, they need Skype to connect to the platform we were using, which was Mojo Dialer. Have they called for investors before? He was throwing out a random questions to make sure that they were engaged. He said like, “What’s your favorite animal,” which had nothing to do with anything. It was more of like, “Are you answering the questions,” and to break up the interview a little bit.

He would then do an actual Zoom call with them to hear how they talked. You want to make sure, especially with cold-calling, that they speak clear English, that they can come across and not stumble on the script. After that, you hire them and we usually do about a month’s worth of probation per se, we were still watching their calls, critiquing, training or anything like that and then go from there.

You got them individually. There are a lot of companies that offer all of that virtual support for real estate companies, but you opted not to do that. You wanted to go with individuals. Why did you do it that way?

We could control a little bit more what they were saying. This isn’t for all the companies out there because I know some are different. We knew sometimes when they’re under a company, they are being trained a certain way. Not that our script deviates from that, but we want to be able to change it and have the flow with us. Their culture was more about working with us and not, “I work for this company that I’m contracted out to you.” It was more, “We’re a team.”

It does definitely create more work, but that’s why we made the systems and the processes that we do so that it’s simplified it over time to where now we have a cold-call manager. She posts the job out on Upwork. She sends out the Zoom interview. She goes through them and she hires them. The way she does it is exactly the way we would do it but because we wrote it down. We recorded every interview so she could see it and see how it should be so she could be in our minds so that we weren’t doing it. She was now doing it.

Does she work full-time?

She is full-time. She’s also virtual though, too.

When you started to hire these people, were they full-time? What were you offering them, 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week or 2 hours a week? How did that work initially?

For cold callers, we don’t like to have them calling more than 4 to 5 hours a day. I feel like, after that, it gets tiring. You lose that energy. We offered two shifts. You either can do the morning shift or the night shift. Each shift was 4 to 5 hours and 5 days a week.

Was that right from the very beginning?

At the very beginning, I think we only had done a night shift. As we added more, we split them up and did half and half. Half at night and a half in the morning.

People were getting pretty good hours immediately. They weren’t feeling motivated to fill the rest of their time with other clients. Would you say?

Not really. I think some of them had other clients and we’ve weeded through the ones that did because I’m not going to stop them from filling the rest of their time. You could hear in their calls that it was affecting them working with us. We also do benefit too if one of the leads they bring in converts into a closed contract. They get a little nice bonus for it as well. We try to incentivize as well too to keep the longevity there.

It’s interesting because you said, “I try to keep it to 4 to 5 hours because calling is hard.” If they’ve got three more hours in their day that they want to fill and they fill it with calls for somebody else, now they’re doing eight hours of cold-calling. Either you or the other client is going to feel that level of exhaustion that they experienced especially if they’re doing it every single day.

We track everything. We track the number of leads a day. We average it monthly. We always are on it and we’re always looking at the numbers because numbers, at the end of the day, don’t lie. We let somebody go because our manager was like, “This one person hasn’t gotten a lead in two weeks.” I’m like, “That’s not going to work.” This is not the first time we’ve had this conversation. Aaron’s like, “I did the cold-calling. I know what to expect.” We’ve done all the parts of our business. At the end of the day, we know what should be coming through.

We’re going on a little bit of a tangent because I know that you started this business basically right before COVID. You were building it through COVID and now we’re on the other side of that. Are you seeing changes in the business, both with the work ethic of the people that work with you and also with the numbers of leads that you’re getting and the people that you’re dealing with as far as doing the wholesale deals? Talk to me a little bit about all those three pieces.

No. We’ve ramped it up so much. The market, yes, is maybe shifting. How much? No one can know for certain. We did have a pause with COVID for about two months and then it skyrocketed. We watch the numbers and we know how many leads we need to get because we know how many leads it takes to get to a contract. Our morale of people has been great. I think that has a lot to do with how we approach everything. We want to hear people’s concerns. How we can do better? How can we be better for them?

We’re very big on pouring ourselves into all of our people from our cold-callers to our texters. We have five textures that are sending out text messages all day. I have one assistant. Lead managers are positioned. Everybody involved in our business, we try to set them up to be the best they can be because the best they can be will also benefit us. It benefits everybody around. We haven’t seen a drop in morale. If anything, we’ve seen more loyalty, enthusiasm, drive, and teamwork. Everybody definitely sees that we’re here for everyone and how hard we’re pushing. They want to push just as hard as we do.

Right now, you have a cold-call team of fifteen with one cold-call manager. There are sixteen on that team. You’ve got a texting team of six and you have a virtual assistant and a virtual lead manager. How many assistants and lead managers do you have?

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I have one assistant. She directly works under Aaron and me. She’s our go-to. She’s amazing. She handles everybody. We have two virtual lead managers. They’ll handle all the incoming leads, and filter the ones that are nonsense and the rest of them. We have two acquisition managers. Those ones are here in California. One’s in San Diego and one’s up in Northern California. He’s technically virtual. We have a dispo manager that sells the contracts once we get them under contract.

The acquisition managers, what do they do? They take the leads and they’re the ones that do the actual acquisition. Is that true?

They get it to a contract. We have around 40 to 50 leads coming in a day from all our avenues of marketing. A lot of them are just, “You called me. Give me an offer.” Our lead managers filter through those 40 to 50, find the ones that are serious about selling and pass them to our acquisition team. The acquisition team will dig deeper. They go over numbers, go through the condition, and then get it to send out a contract.

What are the different marketing avenues that you use? I know that you started with driving for dollars, but that’s not what you’re doing anymore. Is that true? What kinds of marketing stuff do you do?

A lot of what we do is pull lists. We still market to our driving for dollars. It’s on a much smaller scale now. We pull retired landlord lists, the notice of default, and tax delinquent. The three marketing channels we’re big on right now are cold-calling, texting, and direct mail. Also, a little bit of PPC, but that is a beast in and of itself.

What is PPC?

It’s Pay-Per-Click. It’s Google Ads.

I feel like we could just keep talking forever, but we can’t. What I see in you is this well-oiled machine. I love seeing that you’ve taken it from you were doing all this work to now you’ve got these systems and they help you to drive a really good business that’s helping people. Ladies, just so you know, one of the things that Miquella has offered is to talk about that onboarding system that she uses. It’s based on a particular website with a portal so that she can do all of this onboarding.

She can hand this over to her cold-calling manager that’s going to do the hiring. It’s a system. She’s going to be talking about that in EXTRA. I’m super excited to learn more about that. Ladies, stay tuned for EXTRA for that. Before we move into our three Rapid-fire questions, could you tell us a little bit about how people can get in touch with you?

I’m on Facebook and Instagram. My Facebook is Miquella Gaunt. On Instagram, the same thing, @MiquellaGaunt. Feel free to direct message me on any of those platforms. LinkedIn, I’m on there, but not really.

I know you were going to offer some free time with you. Ladies, this is interesting. Miquella doesn’t coach, but when she does take her time out of her schedule, you can see that she and Aaron make quite a lot of money. Their time is worth a lot. She normally will charge for phone calls to help coach people or get them started or whatever, but she did offer for the first five of you to call her and connect with her on Instagram. Mention that you came from the show and that you heard her on this show and then she’ll give you an hour of free conversation, which is incredibly generous. Thank you for that.

We literally were talking about this on our honeymoon.

I’ve got opinions about that. I’m not going to share that with you, but it’s still funny. This is one of the things. It’s like the blessing and the curse of working with your spouse. It’s hard to get away. It’s also necessary for the relationship to get away. There is all of that stuff. It sounds like you and Aaron are balancing that beautiful.

We’re similar but opposite enough.

Miquella was saying that she is the implementer and he’s more of a visionary. That’s a beautiful matchup.

I was telling you that in the book Rocket Fuel, when we read that, we were like, “This is why companies work because they need a visionary and integrator,” and I was like, “That’s why our marriage works.”

Miquella, you were going to offer a free trial for PropStream also. Could you tell people what that is? What is PropStream? Why is it valuable?

PropStream is your access to property information without having MLS or real estate-based sites that you can see listings on. It helps you be able to do comps and pull property information for different properties as far as who the owners are or if they have anything owed against the property. You can also use PropStream to pull lists. That’s where we have been pulling our lists from. They have a lot of great different filters down to the age of home, if it was bought in cash or under a mortgage. You can fine-tune in there if list pointing something you’re looking for. You can comp properties on there. It has a lot of that information. For the people that don’t have their license, that doesn’t have access to the multiple listing service, that’s your replacement for that.

That’s called PropStream. There’s a whole range of what you can sign up for PropStream. There is the just getting a list and then there’s, “I can get comps and everything.” There’s a whole range of things. I’m not sure exactly what you get for free, but it’s worth checking it out. I hear about PropStream from all the pros. I’m excited that you’re offering this free trial. Ladies, if you want to get that, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/PropStream. Check that out. Thank you for that, Miquella.

Anything we can do to give back.

Thank you so much for that. Ladies, you know that Miquella is a student and friend of Zack Boothe, who we’ve had before. If you’re excited about learning what she learned from him, you can still connect with him and his team. Go to BlissfulInvestor.com/Zack. You’ll get to talk to him or Stephanie, who you have already met. They do have someone else working on the phones, too. I trust that that person would be as fabulous as them. You can go to that link and set up a time to chat with them, and see if this business is a good fit for you. We saw what an amazing fit it’s been for Miquella. We’ve heard from Zack a few times. Here are our three rapid-fire questions. Give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

I think it’s a super tip on getting started in anything. It’s to be obsessed with it and take imperfect action. You’re not always going to have the answer or know what the outcome’s going to be, but just do it. You’ll figure it out along the way. You may stumble and fall, but it’s better than not having done anything. It’s analysis paralysis. Many people get stuck in analysis paralysis. Stop over-analyzing it. Just do it.

Virtual Team: You’re not always going to have the answer or know what the outcome’s going to be, but just do it and figure it out along the way. You may stumble or fall, but it’s better than not having done anything.

What is one strategy to be successful as a real estate investor?

Systems, processes, and document everything. You don’t want to be doing everything yourself. We’re all about reading books. Another good book is Who Not How. Can you do it? Yes, sure, but isn’t that the best use of your time? The only way that you can hire something like that out is by documenting how you do something. The simplest way, you don’t have to write it. If you don’t know how to write an SOP or a standard operating procedure, log in to Zoom, record yourself, share your screen, and then go through what you’re doing. That way, when you have to explain it to somebody, it’s there. You can reshare the video instead of having to re-explain and retrain over and over again.

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

I do try to get some kind of exercise daily as best as I can. We’re up at 5:00, especially up before the little one because working out with her is not possible. She tries to help. She’s so cute. She’ll come down, try to hold the way and count for me, but then she gets bored and then wants to play. Even if it’s going on a treadmill, getting your body moving does clear your mind. When you do start your day, go at it with purpose.

My thing is lists. On my phone, I have a notepad on there a to-do list. Every time I think of something, I jot it down, “I need to do this one.” You don’t forget it and feel like, “What was I thinking?” You are feeling overwhelmed. We come to the office for six hours and it’s just work. It’s not an eight-hour day where I got a break here and then I take lunch. I’m literally at that computer for six hours nonstop going as hard as possible getting it all done for as much as I can.

Thank you for that. Miquella, this has been amazing. Thanks for all you shared at this portion of the show.

I’m more than happy to. If anybody takes anything from it, it makes me happy because I know there are probably questions out there. Some people may not know where to start. If I could even help start somebody’s drive and passion or anything, that is something that I try to do.

You’ve been so generous. Thank you. Ladies, we’ve got more. She’s going to generously share with us her onboarding system in the portal that she uses and how she puts that together for the entire virtual team. Nobody’s ever done this before so I’m super excited. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. There’s more. If you’re not, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free. You could download this episode and as many others as you like and stay or not. It’s totally up to you. For those of you that are leaving right now, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get up there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

Important Links

• Miquella Gaunt
• Rocket Fuel
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Driving For Dollars
• Upwork
• Mojo Dialer
• Miquella Gaunt – Facebook
• @MiquellaGaunt – Instagram
• BlissfulInvestor.com/PropStream
• Zack Boothe – Past Episode
• Stephanie Holleman – Past Episode
• BlissfulInvestor.com/Zack
• Who Not How
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

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Moneeka Sawyer

Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet.   She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market.  Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.

While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.

She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”

Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod,  and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.

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Driving For Dollars: Taking A Leap Of Faith With Zack Boothe

What do you feel when you start something new? Is it excitement for the promising outcomes or fear for the possibility of failure? Often, when we start driving for dollars on a completely different territory, we are overwhelmed by the things around us, and these cause us to tumble down the road eventually. DFD Mastery founder Zack Boothe had his fair share of mistakes when he first got into real estate. In this episode, he sits with Moneeka Sawyer to share how he turned these mistakes into lessons and how he managed to conquer the real estate wholesaling industry. Listen in as Zack discloses the insider secrets you will need to make money in real estate.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Driving For Dollars: Taking A Leap Of Faith With Zack Boothe

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome back to the show, Zack Boothe. We had him on the show a little while ago, and I fell in love with his strategy, personality, and values. I loved talking to him back then. I wanted to chat with him again, and I thought I’d share that conversation with you this time too. I’m excited to have him back on the show. For those of you that don’t remember him, a few years ago, Zack Boothe was a window cleaner. You can even find his window cleaning tutorial videos on YouTube with millions of views.

However, Zack always dreamed of being a real estate investor. Taking a leap of faith, he walked away from window cleaning. Within a handful of years, he was making over $1 million per year from real estate investing. With his successful business, he now spends his time helping others see how simple it is to make money in real estate. He is here to share his insider secrets to finding massively discounted properties, regardless of your experience level. Zack, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Could you tell us your story again? It’s so engaging and fascinating.

I tell the story so much, sometimes I get deep into it, sometimes I don’t get as deep, but my business story is I grew up working because my dad required it. When I was eleven, I started working in the family lawnmowing business. When I was fifteen, I quit the family business and started working for others. I started framing houses and doing finished carpentry.

My dad grew up in a rough situation. He wanted me to become a man very fast. He wanted me to take ownership of my life. I love him to death and I’m so grateful for it because he kicked my butt. It was his way or the highway, but at sixteen years old, he cut me off financially. He said, “You’re a man now. If you want to buy anything, you got to buy it.” He paid for my housing and my food, and that was it. If I wanted to play high school basketball, go on dates, or buy a car, he wouldn’t even co-sign a loan.

At sixteen, I had been working a lot. I found at that point, trading dollars for the time was not possible. I didn’t have enough time to give to do all this stuff I wanted to do, to go to school, play basketball, and have some fun in my life. At seventeen, I started my first business, which was the window cleaning business. I remember the first day I made $100 in a couple of hours. I was like, “That’s $50 an hour. Holy crap.”

I remember the first time I made $1,000 in a day, and I grew that business for almost a decade. By the time I walked away from that business, I had 3 trucks and had 13 or 14 employees at one time. It was a great experience. I learned a ton, but the bigger I got, the less money I made. There was an optimal size for profitability. It was me, 2 or 3 other employees, 2 trucks, and that was it. I had brought on a partner at the time. Our vision for the business was completely different. I felt stuck. The big thing that pushed me over the edge to get out of that and to do something different was the day my son was born.

I remember the day he was born. I was so beat up because all I could worry and think about was how am I going to pay the medical bills. I was so upset about that because I wanted to be an amazing dad and be present for my wife. It was the most beautiful moment to be a part of and then I was mad at myself that all I could think about was the money.

People always say, “just love yourself for who you are,” but there’s more power in encouraging people to be proud of who they can become.

I was upset about the money and I was upset of myself for being upset about the money. It bothered me. I felt inadequate, like a failure, and like I was failing my family. I get emotional every time I say this, “I wanted to give more. My wife deserved more.” My wife believed in me. I remember telling her I was going to drop out of college and be a full-time entrepreneur. I was so afraid to tell her. She said, “That’s fine. I believe in you.” That was her response. There was no fear or doubt. I was like, “I have to prove her right,” and I wasn’t proving her right. I felt like I was not living up to the expectation that I had set for myself. Real estate was what I looked to change all that for me.

You said something that was so key here that transformed me at the moment. We set expectations for ourselves. Sometimes those expectations are based on the people that we love. She believed in you. You wanted to make her happy, but in the end, the only way to get to the place that you wanted to be was to be able to meet your own expectations.

I love that your wife totally trusted you. I love that you wanted to prove her right, but what you said that was so key here was you weren’t meeting your own expectations. Ladies, this is one of those things I want you to know, is that we earn our own right to respecting ourselves. We do that by keeping promises to ourselves and by meeting our own expectations and not lowering them.

That’s so powerful because there are so many people that will say, “Love yourself as you are.” It’s like, “Why don’t you encourage people to be proud of who they can become?” We all have so much potential.

I believe in both, love yourself as you are, and always understand that you have so much more potential. I love that word. Love yourself today and allow yourself to become an even better version of yourself by aspiring to that potential.

I look back when I took that plunge when I walked away from something that was semi-comfortable because I was doing it for several years, but it wasn’t fulfilling my needs and meeting my expectations. I took a risk and I went for something new. That journey of getting to where I am now brought a lot of confidence, self-respect, and happiness, I learned a lot about myself. I had to become a different person and become more of the person I wanted to become to accomplish those goals. One of the cool things is, did I love myself before? Yes. Do I love myself even more now? Yes.

We have that capacity. With the people that we love, your wife and child, you love them so much today, but you hope that tomorrow you’ll love them even more. It’s not true for everybody, unfortunately, but for those of us that want to live a blissful life, the path is to love yourself and the people that you love to death today. Love them to pieces and know that the capacity for that love to grow is huge.

Love yourself and those people even more tomorrow or the next year. That is the true path to bliss and experiencing love in that huge expansiveness. That’s what I teach. As blissful investors, our businesses create a path for growth. They create a path for learning about joy and learning to respect and love yourself.

I had that moment. That’s what pushed me into getting into real estate. I had to have a change. I wanted to change. I needed to change for more than anything for myself. It wasn’t easy. I made a lot of mistakes. I tried flipping a house and I lost a little bit of money, and I realized I hated that. I bought some rentals and did okay there. Even before my son was born, I had bought a duplex a couple of years before that. That went well. I was like, “I need to do more of that.”

Driving For Dollars: Women set expectations for themselves that are sometimes based on the people they love. But they earn their right to respect themselves by meeting their expectations, not lowering them.

As soon as I decided to take the plunge, I had all these obstacles to buy another rental. They needed 25% down and debt to income. There were all these complications to scale. I was like, “How do I go from paycheck-to-paycheck window cleaner to a multimillionaire and making over $1 million a year? How is that even possible before I’m dead, let alone in the next 5 or 10 years?”

I finally found out about a strategy that made it possible, which I talked about in the last episode, is known as real estate wholesaling. It’s the concept that I can do some marketing. I can find someone that will sell their property at a discount and turn the opportunity for profit. I could pass the opportunity on as a finder’s fee for the money. I didn’t have to close on it, get debt, and take a risk. I just had to find someone that wanted the deal that I found.

I didn’t believe it was possible. I thought it was sounded too good to be true. It was like, “Why would anybody sell it that big of a discount that I could then sell it for at a discount to someone else?” I was trying to figure out, “Is this possible?” There are a lot of gurus, coaches, and stuff out there talking about this, but they’re selling courses. I was like, “Are they just selling courses or they’re helping people?” I had a lot of skepticism.

I was like, “I don’t know if I can trust this.” I took a leap of faith. I paid for a mentor for $10,000. It was a huge mistake, horrible mentor. Everyone thinks he would be like, “He solved the problem.” No, he didn’t solve my problem. He made more problems. I was even more skeptical. What happened was I had given up on the idea and I was back to washing windows.

I washed windows for a guy named Stan. He was a wealthy real estate developer. I’m cleaning his mansion. He’s an older guy. I had to know everything. We sat and talked for an hour and a half. He was the most kind-loving gentleman. He was pouring into me and telling me a story. I was like, “He’s an incredible guy.”

At the end of the conversation, I was like, “Stan, if I could find two rentals, it would be life-changing.” He was like, “That’s convenient. I got these two properties. I don’t want to deal with them. I haven’t collected rents in four months. I’ll sell them to you.” I was like, “How much?” He’s like, “$500,000.” I was like, “I can’t buy them. I don’t have cash. I can’t get a loan for that much,” which was at a massive discount. They were 1-acre horse properties. They’re worth $350,000 each. He was selling them to me for $250,000 each.

He’s like, “That’s fine. I’ll be the bank.” I’m like, “Okay.” He’s like, “Can you put 20% down?” I was like, “No, Stan. I can put $2,000 or $3,000 down.” He’s like, “Okay.” I’m like, “Holy crap.” He’s like, “Let me get the paper.” He goes and gets a white paper and he starts writing down the agreement. I was like, “Stan, hold on. Don’t we need an attorney to draft an actual contract?” He’s like, “No.”

He starts educating me on the process. He’s like, “You’re going to take this to the title company. You’re also going to check with a real estate agent and make sure that’s what they’re worth. You got to confirm that what I’m saying is true.” He’s educating me on how to get these good deals. That experience, long story short with those deals, I ended up doing a rent-to-own with the tenants. They both cash me out within two years. I made over $130,000 profit on those two properties.

It was amazing. I made a fortune. The more valuable to me than the money or the best part of this whole story to me was the a-ha moment that it’s real. It exists. People sell their property at a discount. There are educated people that will trade convenience for price. I needed to find more Stans in my life. I was like, “How do I find Stan? I need Stan on every street corner I walk on. How do we do that?” That experience made me start to believe it was possible. That was the very end of 2016.

You have to give to receive.

The next year, 2017, I started up trying again. It was almost a whole year that went by without finding a deal. I spent a bunch of money on marketing. I signed a $30,000 contract with his online digital marketing company that’s supposed to get me discounted properties. Not only did I never get a deal, I never even got a lead from them. They completely stole my money. That sucked and was very painful.

I made mistake after mistake. What changed everything is the very beginning of 2017. I met my mentor that changed my life. I met a guy named Cody Hofhine. He was business partners with Tom Krol. They were two coaches and they don’t coach anymore, but they taught me how to consistently find sellers that will sell at a discount, build a relationship, and do traditional wholesaling of selling the deal without ever having to close on it.

I joined their program at the beginning of that year and then everything changed. In that first eight months with them, I made over $100,000 profit. For the next twelve months, I made shy of $500,000. The year after that, $1.2 million. It’s allowed me to make large sums of cash, but to cherry-pick my favorite deals, pick up rentals, and it led me into coaching as well.

It led me into helping, serving, giving back, and contributing to other people. That’s why I’m on this show. I want to help, serve, give the gift that was given to me, and give the hope that Stan gave to me. I want people to realize that it is possible, not only to give them that hope but give them the tools and the action steps in what needs to happen to find that success.

It’s interesting because you continue to make a huge amount of money in the wholesaling business and you opted to teach. Talk to me a little bit about that transition because I know a little bit about the story. Ladies, what I’m getting at here is he has an established business, making a huge amount of money and he wants to start another business. Some things have to happen on the back end with that other business in order for him to start a new project.

I want you to see what he’s done and understand that you too, it’s important that as we go out there into the world, whatever business that you’re starting, you want to start it, make it successful before you move to anything else. If you’re spreading yourself too thin between too many things, you don’t get the levels of success that Zack’s talking about. He’s also a very successful coach, so he knows how to do this, but there’s a transition that happened. Zack, could you talk to me a little bit about that?

Becoming a coach was never a plan. I will give you the backstory of why I became a coach will make more sense of why I walked away from so much money. I lost a ton of money to become a coach. What happened towards the end of 2018, it was my second full year of doing wholesaling, and I was going to do shy of $500,000. My mentor, Tom Krol, was putting on a live event in Asheville, North Carolina. I went there, and I spoke. I poured out my heart and shared where I was making money, how I was doing it, and how I was finding these discounted properties. I had come up with a system and a process to do it well.

I felt like I had tapped out my potential, $500,000 a year. I was pinching myself. I was blown away. At that event, I met some people. One of the guys that I met invited me to do a self-help journal for the next year, 2019. The journal is called Living Your Best Year Ever. In that journal, the first 100 pages help you create three big goals for the next year. It talks about who you have to become to accomplish the goals and the kinds of things you have to do. One of my goals was to generate $1 million income that next year.

Reading that, I understood that I had to give away $1 million. It was basically what the principal was taught in there, “If I wanted love, I give love. If I want money, I give money.” You have to give to receive. I was like, “How do I give away $1 million if I’m trying to make $1 million? It’s counterintuitive, but I want to do this. How do we do this?”

Driving For Dollars: By nature, women can be more endearing, and people find it easier to open up and be vulnerable to a woman.

I sat down with my wife, I was like, “How do we do this? I want to do this. I want to give back.” She said, “Why don’t you teach some people? You’re amazing at teaching. Why don’t you teach people what you’re doing to make $500,000?” I’m like, “You’re genius.” That’s what I did. I went to my mentor, Tom Krol. I said, “Tom, I need ten people that will implement my marketing system. Find me ten people. I’m going to teach them and coach them because I want to put $1 million into their business. It had everything to do with putting money in their business.”

He said, “First of all, 100%, you’re doing that. I love it. I’m going to help you. I’m going to find the people, but you’re not allowed to coach for free because they won’t take it seriously and won’t implement.” He made me charge him money first. It was only like a couple of thousand bucks. It wasn’t much, but we quickly got those first ten students. I started teaching them what I had learned and what I was doing. The craziest thing happened. The more I taught them, the more I realized how many holes I had in my business and all the mistakes I was making, which were very expensive mistakes.

I look back, it makes me cringe, but because of that, I made $1.2 million that year. It’s because of all the efficiencies that were put in place and what I learned from my students. The more valuable and even better than the money that I made was the love of coaching and the a-ha moment that, “This is what I want to do with my time. This is what I want to do with my life.”

My very first student, a few years later, texted me. He said, “I alone have now made over $1 million from what you taught me.” Michael McLeish in Greenville, South Carolina. Scott Dalinger, his very first deal with me made $113,000, quit his corporate job, and is making an absolute fortune still to this day in Portland. These original students were absolutely crushing it. I found so much fulfillment from it and I wanted to do more of it.

At the end of 2019, we did over $1.2 million and I wanted to go into coaching. I wanted to make that transition. I was still very much a big part of my real estate investing and wholesaling business. I had to find people and replace myself completely, so I didn’t even have to go on appointments. I wanted to keep the business running. The next year after, 2020, when I completely walked away from it, we only did $700,000 in income. Now we’re much higher than we ever were. This last year, 2021 was insane. We made a lot of money. I walked away from money to become a coach.

The first two years of coaching, the first year, I lost $8,000. The next year, I made $600 as a coach because of putting all the people in place to help support my students, infrastructure, marketing, and getting my name out there so I could make a bigger impact. I lost money to become a coach. I did it because I love it. 2021 was the first year that I did make money as a coach. I’m grateful for that because I’m getting paid to do what I love, plus my wholesaling business is blowing up. I’ve been doing this for a handful of years now. All of that money that I have made, I’ve reinvested it. That money is starting to snowball super-fast. I’ve passed the point where my passive income is well beyond what I spend each month.

I feel like I am more blessed than I deserve. It’s incredible because not only do I have complete peace of mind and freedom financially, but I’m so fulfilled by what I do and being able to help these students. That’s a long way to answer your question of the transition period of going into coaching and what that looked like. What it looked like was I walked away from money to get it off the ground. It was because I loved it, and it was what I was passionate about.

I love that passion in you. I love your commitment to helping people. The way that you started with a commitment to make people get $1 million into their businesses, that’s an amazing commitment to people outside of you. You didn’t necessarily know upfront how much you were going to benefit from that. Our students do always teach us. That’s a big blessing also in teaching. I know that they have improved your business and all of that stuff. I love watching how the passion started and now how you’re implementing that out into the world to help more people.

It’s been an incredible experience.

People who are successful in business sometimes forget that they run a business to live a beautiful life.

The two examples that you gave us were men. Do you only coach men? I know that’s not true, but talk to me a little bit about what your student makeup is like and what your focuses are.

Like any other industry, it’s predominantly men in the real estate space, mostly because the larger majority of people that are in the workspace are men, but yes, I have successful women students. You should have them on this show. They are inspiring. Jess is one of them. She’s incredible. As a matter of fact, she’s been a student for several months. I don’t think she’s hit the twelve-month mark. She’s by far the most successful student I’ve ever had in the first twelve months. She made my first twelve months in this space look like I wasn’t even trying. She’s crushing it.

I had her on my show and I interviewed her. This is off of memory and not going to be exact, but she has done around eleven wholesale deals. She found eleven deals at a discount and passed the opportunity on for a finder’s fee, no debt, no risk, and made well over $200,000 profit. She’s completed one flip and made $40,000 or $50,000 grand on the flip. She has two flips she’s working on, 2 or 3 properties under contract, and cherry-picked two deals as rentals. That’s in ten months working with me. She’s a freak of nature. It was super funny because I asked her, “How the hell do you have children and do this? How do you balance it all?” She’s like, “I don’t.”

What does that mean, “I don’t?”

“I don’t balance it,” she said. She was talking about the need of building out the team and having people to support her because she did all of this on her own, which is so crazy. She’s impressive. You need to have her on the show. I have so many. I feel bad even mentioning some because I’ll forget so many. Aaron and Mikayla, I need to mention them.

Aaron was a student first. He was a fireman in Southern California. He had done one deal on his own before he met me, joined my program, and he blew up. In the first couple of months with me, he made $50,000 or $60,000, quit his job, and went full-time. He was dating Mikayla at the time and she quit her job to start working with him. I started coaching those two, one-on-one as a partnership and helping them automate and build their business. They’re absolutely crushing it. I became close with those two and they asked me to marry them, which is cool.

In April 2021, I flew to Southern California and I had to get registered to be able to marry someone in California. I got to go marry Mikayla and Aaron. They’re a cute couple. Mikayla is a lot of fun. You should have her on the show. The thing is, I believe that women have more of an edge on men when it comes to this space. I’ll give you an example. All of our cold callers are women because it’s way less threatening when someone calls you and it’s a female. They feel safer and don’t feel like they’re going to be lied to or taken advantage of. Frankly, it’s hard to be mean to a girl.

Everyone knows what I’m talking about, by nature. I look at my little girl, Kate. She is so cute. The other night, she was constantly screaming over anything. She couldn’t find her little teddy bear. She was screaming bloody murder right before bed. I’m like, “Kate, stop screaming,” in a stern voice and look at her. She had these big puppy dog eyes. It was the cutest little face. It made me feel horrible for rebuking her.

She’s definitely daddy’s little girl.

Driving For Dollars: Wholesaling takes a lot of work, but you do not need a ton of experience. You have to get in front of the right types of sellers.

She got me so wrapped around her finger. I was like, “You can’t scream. When you need something, you talk to me.” I’m trying to be way more sensitive and then I was like, “Guys, come give me a hug and a kiss.” I was hugging my kids and she lit up because she’s like, “He’s not mad at me.” She’s giggling while she’s hugging me. By nature, women can be more endearing. I find for myself, it’s easier to open up and to be vulnerable to a woman.

A lot of the times when sellers have a problem, let’s say they have a property they inherited and their brother’s a crackhead and lives in the back of the house and got a deathbed will and had the parents sign over everything to him. They now need an attorney to fight the brother. There are all these problems and you step in and say, “I can buy the house.” Now, you have to navigate and understand all these problems and get the sellers to tell you what’s going on and to help them through that process.

To be able to buy the property, it’s a lot easier to get that personal information and have those sellers open up to you when you have a relationship or when you’re close. Men can do it. I’m good at it. I’ve done it a ton and my acquisition manager is a man, but by nature, women if they’re willing to put in the work, they have a little bit of an edge because it’s easier for people, in general, to open up. By nature, you’re better listeners, read facial expressions, and have more of an ability to communicate.

It’s true. I know you’re trying to tap down a little bit because we don’t want to generalize too much, but I do think that it is one of those things inherently that we women have a little bit more of a default advantage. I don’t think it’s necessarily that we’re better communicators, but we’re different communicators.

I moved into a place and my business partner is living with my husband and I now because he’s trying to do some moving and remodeling. It’s interesting when either of those guys is having communication with me or when they’re having communication with each other. I’m like, “What happened there?” They sound like they’re grunting at each other. They’re got one-word responses and full communications are happening. When I come in, they can’t plan together with one-word communications, but I can do the whole planning and get the household running, all the rules, and all of that stuff.

It’s so fascinating to watch the complete difference in our capacity to communicate and the way that we build relationships. This was so much fun. Like my contractor, I’m doing a construction project and I asked him to come in and do some fixes in the house. I was like, “Is it all going to be done by the time I move in?” He goes, “It’s going to be when it’s going to be.” I was like, “Don’t ever say that to me. That stresses me out.” He says, “You don’t deal with stress well.” I said, “I deal with stress really well, just don’t talk to me that way.”

He talks to my business partner that way. They’re totally fine with it. Unlike me, I need to have an understanding that you’re going to get everything done that I need before I move in and that you will support me after I move in to get the rest of it done. That’s the communication that I need. It’s so interesting to see the difference. He totally switched it up to make me happy, but as women, we intuit a lot of that stuff. Sometimes we over-communicate, but then if we notice that, we tend to pull back also. Intuitively, I agree with you. We have an intuitive sense by default on communications and building relationships.

I was tap-dancing. You described what I was doing very well. I don’t like generalizing. It’s funny because my mom is a major tomboy. She is not like any other woman I have ever met. One example is she was pregnant with me when she shot her first deer with a bow and arrow. That’s my mother. A few years ago, I was in Idaho, and I went up to see my parents. We were doing this archery elk hunting thing. When I showed up at their camp at midnight, I had driven up, and I was going to crash in their trailer. They have a little base camp area. They were still awake and walking around.

I was like, “What are you guys doing?” My mom’s like, “I shot a bear. We got to go get it in the morning.” I was like, “You’re nuts. You’re crazy.” She’s 59 years old, running around the forest with a bow and arrow still. When I would mess up as a kid, she’d be like, “Steven, beat your son.” I don’t like generalizing because I know that women, there are all sorts of spectrums of personalities and communications types. Same with men, but in a general sense. That’s all I was trying to say.

You don’t want to freestyle dance before you actually learn the dance. You have to get those simple movements down and understand the footwork and what that movement intends to do.

It’s uncomfortable. I want women trainers for my women because we have an understanding of a lot of that stuff because of our default behaviors. We don’t want to generalize. There are many of us women that are living outside the boxes the same with the men, but we do have an inherent understanding and a lot of unspoken rules that women understand and men don’t understand. It’s a little disappointing to me, what comes with that is an expectation of that understanding also.

For instance, talking about wholesaling. First of all, I love that your program works. I love that you have very successful women in your program. You’re obviously able to be sensitive to their needs and communicate with them in a way that they understand and are able to create not little success, but a massive success. I love all of those things. I love that you’re conscious of their kids and the things that they go through, like Aaron and his wife, Mikayla.

There are different dynamics that happen with them. These are important things when you’re working with women, for you to understand that. I love that. I have tried to have five other women who teach wholesaling on this show. Not a single one of them has ended up being on the show. One of them stood me up five times.

One of them, I looked her up and she had a bad reputation in the industry. It’s like that. As much as I want women to teach my women, I also understand that business is business. As women, we have to understand that business is business. We have to be conscious, considerate, compassionate. We have to show up on time and for our people, and all other things.

I have a lot of great women that can teach it, but wholesaling has been such an interesting thing. I’ve literally been searching for a woman and can’t find one that will show up with the heart, promptness, and awareness of what’s required that you’ve been able to show up with. We can have conversations like we’ve had that I haven’t been able to have with any of these other women.

I appreciate you saying that. I’m going to make a confession though. I haven’t always been great at communicating with women. It has been a learned skill. There was a book I read that changed my life. It was called How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It. For a time in my life, I wouldn’t work with women. I didn’t know how to. I served a Christian mission in San Paulo, Brazil, when I was a young man and I had leadership responsibilities. I worked with women and men. I struggled to communicate with some of the women in leadership positions there and so forth.

Even though we were trying to do good for the community, there was conflict. I didn’t understand why they were so frustrated with me. I’m like, “No doubt. I’m an idiot.” I read this book. It not only helped my marriage, it helped me be even more madly in love with my wonderful person, with my wife, Karen, but it helped me understand how I process information, communicate my fears and insecurities as a man and then the same thing with women.

There are different spectrums, but it allowed me to understand how to communicate, encourage, and be a better leader. I have a lot of women that work for me. My right-hand gal that helps me talk to all of the people that want to become students is a woman. She runs my sales floor. She’s incredible. Her name’s Stephanie.

This is something that I had to learn and figure out. I wasn’t born with the understanding of the differences between men and women. When I got on your show and talked to you about being on the show again, we talked a lot about that. We talked a lot about how I truly want more women students. I want to help more women. I feel like I am capable of doing that and I want to do that.

Driving For Dollars: If you find a leader and a teacher you can trust, give them everything you have.

The reason that I’m having you back on the show is that you’ve been able to help women produce these massive results, and encourage the rest of their life. When you were talking about the one woman where you’re like, “How are you balancing this?” She’s like, “I’m not,” but you are now able to understand she needs to balance that because her kids need to be a priority for her. She knows that. You have the experience to help her to put together the team that will allow her that freedom. You understand the value of that.

People that are successful in business forget that the reason we run a business is to live a beautiful life. We don’t live our life to run our businesses. That’s a big distinction. I don’t know if this is true for all women, but the women in my circle, that’s a big distinction. We run our businesses to live our beautiful life. I love that you’re able to tap into that and help them and create that life based on those values. I want to ask you, who is it that you can help most? Do they have to have a lot of experience to get started in wholesaling?

Not at all. You don’t have to have any real estate experience at all. Wholesaling’s one of those businesses where you have to get in front of the right types of sellers. You have to communicate with them and get a signed contract. The process is quite simple. It’s not complicated. It is work. There’s a lot of work that takes place, but you do not need a ton of experience.

You will need to have money for marketing and some time to put into it. I won’t even coach. I do have some requirements because if I bring on a student, I want to be able to make them successful. I found that there are a handful of things that they have to commit to for me to be able to help them. I could go through that. The first one is a personal thing. If I coach someone, they have to be willing to share their success story. They have to be willing to be on the podcast because I want them to pay it forward.

I’ve had a lot of students at the beginning that I coached, who made a ton of money, but they were insecure or shy and didn’t want to be on the podcast. I was like, “You’re not paying it forward.” That’s a personal requirement of mine now. If you don’t want to be on my podcast after I help you make a ton of money, don’t apply. I coached to make a difference. If they won’t help me pay it forward and talk about their success, I’m going to spend my time and efforts elsewhere. That one bothered me.

The next one is you have to put enough time into this. I require at least fifteen hours of work. I tell my students exactly what and what has to be done, and when. There’s no question what you need to do, but you need at least fifteen hours per week. You need to be able to put at least $500 a month in marketing at a bare minimum. I’ll tell you where and how to spend it. It’s not coming to me. It’s going out to find sellers.

Lastly, when you joined my program, I didn’t want you binge-watching the content. One of the things you’ll have is my personal cell phone to go over deals when we have deals on the line. You also will have coaching calls with me on a group call like on Wednesday, a Facebook group, and a community. You’ll have ongoing support, but there’s a course that comes with it, a step-by-step course, A through Z setting you up and getting you started.

I have certain students that will binge watch everything and do nothing because they feel overwhelmed. They feel like they don’t know what to do next. That’s now a requirement. You’re not allowed to watch video two until you’ve implemented action step on video one. It’s not an education program. It’s an action-step implementation program. My goal is to make you money. Remember, I started off to put $1 million in people’s businesses. I learned that there were certain action steps that had to take place. Over years of doing this and a few years of coaching, over 300 people, you have to implement a certain series of action steps.

One of my requirements is no binge-watching content. You implement as you go. If you get stuck, confused, or if you feel like you need to move on because you had a lead come in or something, and you don’t know how to negotiate it, then you can call me or text me. I’ll tell you where to go in the program, but I don’t want you binge-watching content. That’s a requirement because it’s going to screw your progress if you don’t do that.

There will be many times when you’re uncomfortable, but one day you’re going to look back on your uncomfortable journey and be so glad you did it.

The last requirement is when you join my program, I need you to trust me. I need you to do exactly what I say. I have found that sometimes students feel a little insecure still and they think that they need to listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos and do a hybrid of what I teach and what someone else’s teaches.

When you join my program and you do what I tell you to do, it’s my responsibility that you’re successful. I need you to do exactly what I asked you to do and not reinvent the wheel and lean on me. I want you to be laser-focused on the action steps and not do a hybrid, but do exactly as I ask you to do unless you talk to me and I tell you to do something different. Those are the exact requirements that we will go over when people jump on and are curious about our program.

It doesn’t mean that you have to be doing the program exactly this way forever, but you do need to learn a successful strategy first. You can adjust it later when you’ve got enough experience to know what might work better for you, but in the beginning, it’s all hypothetical. If you find a leader and a teacher that you can trust, then give them everything you got. After a few years, depending on how quickly your success comes, you can start to adjust once you’ve got enough experience to make those adjustments. You don’t want to freestyle dance before you learn the dance.

You got to get those simple movements down and the fundamentals.

The basics and understand the footwork, understand what that movement is intending to do, and then you can do some freestyle.

My goal is I want you to do a wholesale deal. The average time to do your first wholesale deal with me as a coach is three months. An average deal is $30,000. It’s a chunk of money to be able to make. I had someone that got upset with me, and I was telling him this. I was like, “No, I need you to follow the action steps.” He’s like, “I want to do it like this. This is how I want to do it.” I was like, “I need you to not reinvent the wheel.”

He’s like, “You’re arrogant. You think you know everything.” I was like, “I want to help you.” This is something I do every day, all day. I’m obsessed with it. I love helping my students. Not only am I teaching this and seeing it implemented all across the country and seeing what works and doesn’t work, but I do this in two different markets.

I make well over $1 million a year doing what I’m teaching. I’m teaching in theory. I didn’t go to college and get a doctorate’s degree and then taught what I understood. I implement, use, study, and I have actual data proving what I do and why I do it. I give them those exact processes. It’s simple. The processes, action steps, and none of the videos are over seven minutes. I don’t brag about how many hours of video. It’s not very much. “This is the action step 1, 2, 3.” You go through the program and implement the action steps. It will be a lot of work. There will be a lot of times where you’re uncomfortable. You’ll be having conversations that you probably never had before.

You might not know someone will say something and you’ll be writing down the word because you don’t know what the word means to google it later. There are going to be moments like that, but I look back on my uncomfortable journey and I’m so glad I did it. I want my students to say the same thing. I look back to what Tom Krol and Cody Hofhine did for me. I want to do that for my students. I want to pass on the legacy that Tom and Cody had. I want to make a difference.

Driving For Dollars: Women have an intuitive sense, by default, of communicating and building relationships.

Could you tell everybody how they can reach you?

If you have any interest in talking to us about the coaching program, getting on the phone with Stephanie, and sometimes I jump in and help when she’s overwhelmed, you can go to BlissfulInvestor.com/Zack.

Ladies, take advantage of that. There are not many times we get an opportunity to have a full conversation with successful people in this industry. Also, I know you have a free gift you want to offer, could you tell us about that?

I wanted to show people what it looked like to implement the process and to also see that it works to give you belief. The reason for this is, in my story, I talked about Stan, how I met him, and how he gave me properties at a massive discount. That gave me all the confidence to keep going even though I had had bad experiences in the past. I remember being up late and I said, “I got to give that gift to others. I need to go a Stan on camera and show the world.”

I came up with a little challenge of trying to make $40,000 in 40 days and I only got $1,000. Not only that, I flew across the country to somewhere I’d never been because I didn’t want to have my connections, my team, because that would be cheating. I flew to Tampa, Florida with $1,000, my smartphone, and a car. I did exactly what I taught my students, but I did it with a camera over my shoulder. I made $93,000 in wholesale fees off of $1,000 investment in those 40 days.

It was an incredible experience. It’s free for you to watch. You guys should watch it. It was horrible to do and create. It’s a ton of work. I didn’t see my family for a full 30 days to do this challenge. That was a huge sacrifice on my part. I’m so glad I did it. If you guys want to catch that, there’s a link that you can go get full free access. It’s BlissfulInvestor.com/40Days. Go catch and watch that. Get some popcorn and have some fun. You can sit in the comfort of your own home and enjoying my pain.

We will be enjoying your pain, but we will be enjoying watching it. Zack, I’m so excited about what we covered. Thanks so much for coming back on the show.

Thank you for having me. Everyone, thank you for reading. Thanks for being with me.

I am going to interview some of those ladies. You need to connect me with them. That would be fun.

I definitely will.

We do have more. Zack has committed something very generous for EXTRA. He’s going to be talking to us about his Driving for Dollars Mastery Actual Strategy. In EXTRA, he’s going to give us the actual steps or specific steps that you can take to drive for dollars and pick up properties at a highly discounted price. It’s going to be incredible. I’m so excited that he’s willing to give that away to us. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned, that’s coming next.

If you’re not, this might be the time to do it. This is going to be amazing content. Go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. The first seven days are for free. You can check out this episode and many others. Stay subscribed or not, but go to that website and we’ll get you to get access to EXTRA. For those of you that are leaving us, thank you so much for joining Zack 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

• Zack Boothe
• What Common Mistake Do Many Real Estate Investors Make? – Previous episode
• How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It
• BlissfulInvestor.com/Zack
• BlissfulInvestor.com/40Days
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

About Zack Boothe

Man, I remember what it was like when I first got started in real estate. I’d wake up every morning full of confidence and courage, ready to attack the day. I had a focused plan and I knew exactly how to find smoking hot real estate deals, and quickly turn those deals for huge profits.

Quite the opposite. In fact my reality was fear, doubt, overwhelm, and frustration. I worked my butt off but I was drowning in bad advice from gurus, and strategies that either didn’t work or just weren’t congruent with who I am.

Five years later and I’ve done over 300 real estate deals and have generated millions. Over the years I’ve made a lot of mistakes and have learned a lot of lessons (sometimes the hard way), and I’ve built a dream real estate business…and I’d love to show you how you can too.

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To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

To see this program in video:

Search on Roku for Real Estate Investing 4 Women or go to this link: https://blissfulinvestor.com/biroku

On YouTube go to Real Estate Investing for Women

Moneeka Sawyer

Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet.   She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market.  Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.

While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.

She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”

Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod,  and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.

blissfulinvestor.com