My First Deal Made Me $3,000 For 5 Hours Of Work

My First Deal Made Me $3,000 For 5 Hours Of Work

Ed: My name is Randi and I’m from Las Vegas, Nevada. I heard about Joe probably when I was sixteen and I’m almost forty now. So, my dad and my uncle were studying his program, some of his material that he had about creative real estate investing and it piqued my curiosity. I got involved with my dad and my uncle’s business and I was in charge of finding the lease option tenant buyers and then it just always kind of stayed with me.

Ed: My name is Edward, Ed Smith, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin by way of Chicago. My son was born September 11, 2016. And at the time I lived in an apartment on the east side of Milwaukee which is a pretty nice area. But, I’m, I was thinking to myself okay, hey, I need to buy a house. Need to get a house. I’m going to have a kid so we need to have a house. And, B, I don’t want to work forever. So I started looking online for ways to accomplish this and I stumbled across Joe, Joe’s program. I remember watching a few videos maybe once a week and I think I just, yeah, I just started watching videos and before you know it I was calling him up and became a student.

Ed: I started really in the mentor program in January and had to go away to Illinois on a training trip. So I was traveling, I was making calls from my hotel room on training for my new position at my new job. I got back, I think later in February, and that’s when I made my first deal. Basically very soon after I got back. I believe it was from the Automarketer because I was, I had the Pushbutton method first.

Ed: That’s kind of how that happened. It didn’t take very long. I was kind of shocked at how easy the Automarketer was at first and was kind of, I was kind of expecting that. That it was always going to be always that easy. But it did require a little bit more work to kind of get the deal done. As far as the amount of time it took to close the deal, so, it was actually in Rockford. I wanted to choose an area that if I screwed up nobody would know my name. So, I chose an area that was really far away from my house. The deal itself, honestly didn’t take more than an hour to do.

Ed: The driving, though, between the two places, because Rockford’s pretty far from Milwaukee, so that was about four hours to go back and forth. So, all together, five hours for three thousand bucks – not too bad.

Ed: So, the best deal, I’m actually getting ready to sell it off, actually. So, the best deal, because I went through the entire For Rent- I read the material a hundred times. So I learned some of the other methods. I did a no money deal for a three-unit duplex. And where I am, you can get a three-unit for an unbelievably cheap price. I was able to get into a three-unit with minimal work on my end and immediately started cash flowing, like, $2,500 a month of cash flow just from no money out of my pocket other than they be doing some, putting some new paint on and getting some clean up. That was it.

Ed: I’m selling this deal, I actually had a closing scheduled for Friday that kind of fell through. It’s going to net me about seventeen grand for almost no money out of my own pocket in addition to all the rent that I collected the last year. So, it’s a pretty good deal.

Ed: It’s a bit tricky because I’ve got, I got fat and lazy in between deals. You know, you do a couple of deals and you think you’re Mr. Bigshot and you kind of get to resting on your laurels a little bit. Realistically speaking in that area the average deal is about three grand. I just, you know, the duplex doesn’t happen very often, but it’s about three grand. Seems to be kind of where we are.

Ed: I close deals consistently when I do what Joe tells you to do. You can’t, you know, don’t freelance. Just follow the steps. Don’t reinvent anything. Put in your eight hours a week which is eight Game of Thrones episodes. So, put in that time and you’re good to go and you get the deals done pretty consistently. Any time I’ve done the work, the deals come my way.

Ed: The main key to consistency I would say is just having the work ethic to do the work consistently. I think everyone kind of likes the idea of kind of being your own boss, but there’s a lot of, you know, freedom, you know, a lot of freedom that comes with that and responsibilities and you’ll get, you can get easily distracted when you have a little bit of success. You can get really easily distracted. Plus I have a kind of a toddler at home, two-year-old. Easy to get thrown off your game and before you know it it’s Saturday and you haven’t made any calls.

Randi: So, it’s just make sure you just set some time up and make the calls, whether that’s, you know, nap time or whether that’s on a weekend, putting in an eight-hour day. Just make the calls, set an itinerary up for yourself to get the work done. If you do that it’s kind of hard not to make any money.

Ed: So, my personal goal, so I recently left my job. I was a lender and my person goal is to not go back to work. So I gave myself a timeframe of you know, either, you know, what they say of get off the pot, right, I’ve got to make it work. It has to be enough to be a livable income for me and my fiancée and my son. So I don’t need to be a millionaire, but I’m not going to say no if it happens. It’s really just to be comfortable is my goal and that’s the number I have in my head on what I need to be comfortable, just do what I need to do to get to that number. That’s the goal.

Ed: It’s going to be an odd answer. So, it’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing. I’ll go with the bad first. The reason I say it was a bad thing because once you realize you can do this without having an employer, when you know you can go and make money on your own, you start to stick your chest out a little bit and put your head up and you know, you just, you probably don’t focus as much at work as you probably should. Because you know if I did A, B and C I could make more than my market manager is making, multiple six figures, right, if I do my job. It’s kind of the bad thing in a strange way.

Ed: The good thing is that if you do the work, you’re making more than your boss and you’re probably your boss’ boss. So, it’s, again, it’s all about what we said earlier. It’s the discipline, having the discipline to do what you’re supposed to do to make the money.

Ed: I had six conference calls in a day. Six. Six conference calls in one day of work. No. I’m not doing that anymore. So, once I, I think Joe has the email that I sent him on I think conference call No. 2, I was sitting there just daydreaming and I’m like, okay. What’s the point? Why am I doing this? I’m not, I mean, I’m good at my job. I’m fairly good at my job. But, my son’s two and I want to spend as much time with him as possible. That’s’ kind of, that’s what drew me to doing it. But those six calls, man, I don’t understand that. That’s craziness.

Ed: I am looking to find other ways to generate leads, because in my area there’s a ton of competition. I need to find ways to differentiate myself between you know, myself and kind of what some of the other investors in the area are doing. So I am always looking at automating as much as I can and so it’s one of the reasons I’m here.

Ed: The main thing is kind of education is key. You know, everyone wants to, I think we, there’s a lot of real estate fans. Like, people love to talk about real estate. But they’re kind of scared to take that dive. I say education. Find someone, find a mentor, which is very important. Find the quickest way, not the quickest way, but the best way for you. Typically, when people want to start in this business, they all start with one way. They all start wholesaling. That’s what everybody does.

Randi: But there are other ways that are, that can work for you. You just have to have a way to find someone that can help you do that. And you know, there shouldn’t be a hurry, you know, make sure you have a plan in place on what you want to accomplish and actively take steps to get there. So, that’s my advice.

Ed: So, again, what we said earlier was that I had success immediately doing the program. That’s a good thing and a bad thing because I saw success early so you get a little big headed and you start kind of deviating from the program. Good deals that sticks out are the deals that I made them stick on because I deviated from the program. So, if I was to give some other advice, don’t deviate from the program, because I’m dealing with a headache that I should have known better at the very – looking back at it, there was some things that I probably shouldn’t have done, but it just seemed too good to pass up.

Ed: So just don’t skip any steps. Follow the steps. Don’t deviate and don’t make the mistakes that I did. Make the calls and do the grunt work is what Joe tells you to do. Do the grunt work and make the calls. You have to put out some bandit signs, put those signs out so you understand what it’s going to take to have someone else do that if you want to automate it.

Ed: Make the calls. Come through with the calls. Think of the Automarketer. That’s kind of what I would tell folks.