Profitable Lessons Learned From A Non-Foreclosure Seminar!
I was in Cleveland back in November for 3 days for a seminar and I learned a lot - funny thing is that the seminar was NOT on real estate investing. But I dont discriminate - good information and especially information that you can take and apply to your business is hard to find.
Its takes a lots convincing for me to go to a seminar. Money is not an issue - leaving the girls for three days is! I do go to lots of seminars - in 2005 alone - I am going to 6 of them already scheduled. To me it is a shortcut to learn from people who have already done it before me.
But this was a rare seminar - the quality and quantiy of information was over the top! I did not spent way too much money - only $2000 on some materials from John Carleton. Apart from that I was just networking with other people - there were lots of real estate investors in the room and also paying close attention to the speakers and taking copious notes.
So even though you missed it - here are my notes and how i have taken some non-real estate ideas and applied them to my foreclosure business.
The BIG lessons learned from Cleveland Seminar and How to Apply Them in Your Real Estate Business!
1. Somebody will always object to what you are trying to do - anticipate and prepare your explanation. While raising private money, most private investors would usually bring up their concerns about the preservation of their capital - they want to make sure that their original investment is secure!
New homeowners buying your home will bring up their own set of objections about being able to afford the payment or ask you to drop your price - anticipate and be ready!
I learned this great mental exercise from Todd Duncan where I try to picture a potential meeting in my mind and think what they might bring up - positive or negative - and quickly jot down all their objections and answer them when I still have time.
How many times we have kicked ourselves after we walked out of the room with a perfect answer to a hostile question?
2. Testimonials - I am guilty and so are you - what other people say about you is 300% times more powerful than what you can say about yourself. If you have a private investor who is very happy with you, ask him to write his or her feelings down. If you have a homeowner who just bought a house from you and loves the way you treated her - ask her to write it down and take a picture with her - standing in front of her new home.
I can go on and on. But here is the big lesson - by leveraging these testimonials you can raise more money, deal more houses - faster than you ever thought possible. Take a cold hard look at every aspect of your real estate business and ask yourself where can I tack on testimonials to make my life easier?
3. Live and Die by Checklists - one of the best books ever written on starting and managing a business is Emyth Revisited by Michael Gerber. This is a book that I keep coming back, month after, year after year as my business as flourished, floundered and came back stronger than ever.
Understand this, you can take any part of real estate business - finding deals, getting money, fixing homes and selling these homes - and automate most part of it.
If you don’t have a written, bullet style, checklist for doing all the above, your real estate business will be acting more like a yo-yo. Pretend you are about to sell your very successful real estate business - and you are buying and selling 3-4 properties every month and somebody wants to buy it - for cash - but their is only ONE problem, your prospective buyer has no idea about real estate - pretend that is happening tomorrow and attempt to make checklists for each one of your real estate business activities. 586-493-0911
4. Where would you want to be money wise next year? Easy question - everybody wants more money next year. But this is a trickier question - I have very ambitious goals for 2005 but I still want to take weekends off to spend time with Hailey, Sage and Nora. So I cannot just write an insane goal about making money next year and work myself to death.
But you definitely need to know the number - by year, by months, by weeks, by days, by hours. It is very tough NOT to do something in your real estate business when you know that you could be making some serious dollars today and you didn’t do anything.
5. This is a biggie - I spent as much time inside the ballroom where the seminar was being held as I did in the lobby and hallways - walking up to people, introducing myself, asking everybody what kind of business they are in and how can we help each other?
I cannot give you an exact dollar figure because I can tell you that just the four ideas that I picked up while talking to different people plus three more numbers for my black book should had at least low six figures to our bottom line in 2005.
Sometime we get so preoccupied about what we should know that we forget the importance of who we know!
And this was a big seminar - and a chance of being faceless and nameless was huge. I have seen this in small workshop settings where people think that the value is in taking notes - and completely miss the point of masterminding with their peers.
6. Ask! It will never hurt to know more! Ask realtors, private money investors, potential bird doggers, first time homebuyers - what are they looking for, what are their biggest concerns and if you could solve ONE big problem in their life - what it could be?
Back in the days when Nora and I used to sit in open houses, we always asked the people walking in what it would take for us to convince them to buy this house. I will tell you it is not easy to take criticism on your hard work. every single piece of feedback we got has helped us in more than
one way.
7. The internet is changing the face of real estate investment. Say what you may and yes may be you really don’t have funds to invest in a website but dear members, you are probably insane in thinking that this is the same game that was being played 10 years ago. A website can create almost instant credibility in front of your prospective investors and home buyers.
You can direct traffic to your website so they can see pictures of your homes, virtual tours, financing details so they don’t bother you all weekend. You can raise private money (Man Oh Man! You should have been here yesterday when my Apprentice group meet
8. John Carleton blew my head away in one single moment. During an open question and answer session, he was asked how could he consistently produce such quality in his work and what was his big inspiration? Was it a trick to getting into the zone? How come he is so focused?
To which he applied to a hushed crowd, that he is not focused, he likes to sleep in every morning and he is no idea what being in the zone means but here is what he thinks we all need to think and answer for yourself,
“How long are you going to stand on the precipice of life, look at the pool of humanity swimming around and keep asking if the water is cold? Jump, swim, and see what happens?”
Look, if you are standing on the sidelines, and not playing, you are quite simply missing out one of the biggest wealth creation opportunity happening in Michigan. Lack of time, money, credit, experience is barriers to success that you have created. All of the above could be borrowed, leveraged and learned - sometime for free, sometime for a fraction of what they bring back in return!
Question is how bad do you want it?
And don’t put a dollar figure on it! Money is great, especially when it come in big chunks like it does in my real estate business. Believe me, I like seeing checks for $20,000, $40,000 coming in with my LLC name on it. But better still is what this allows me to do -
Which is whatever the heck I want to do!
Now that is priceless.