How To Find A Mentor If You Have No Money

Read Transcript for “How To Find A Mentor If You Have No Money”

 
What should a good mentor teach and how should you go about finding one? If you can’t afford a mentor, here’s how to find a good mentor and some of the things they should be doing and teaching.

“I love what you teach and I truly would love to be mentored by you, but I just can’t afford your partner program. Can you give me some tips on how to find a mentor without spending any money?” – Darrin Dish, Newport, Connecticut

Joe: Absolutely. Sometimes it’s not possible to come up with the kind of money I charge for a program like this, and I understand that. That doesn’t mean you should give up your dream. I get emails all the time that say, ‘I’m just going to have to wait, Joe. I can’t follow my dream. I can’t do real estate investing and I can’t afford to learn from you.’ Well, there’s two ways that you learn in life. One is using the method of hard knocks and the other is where you find somebody to teach you.
 
Joe: The hard knocks method is how I went about it, and that’s why I had built a big business very quickly but I lost it all. I learned a lot from that process and I wish I’d had somebody teaching me so that I wouldn’t have made those mistakes. My goal for everyone is to get them making money without making the same mistakes that I made so that they don’t have to go through what I went through.
 
Joe: But you can find a mentor. You can find somebody to work with. Here’s a couple of ways you can do this. You’re either going to have to spend money or you’re going to have to spend time to do it. So if you’ve got more time than money, which I know some of you do, then it makes sense to spend the time.
 
Joe: What I would suggest is that you put an ad on Craigslist and that you contact the people that have ads that say, ‘We buy homes’ or ‘Buy for cash’. They’re all through the newspaper, on Craigslist, etc. They’re all over the place. Find those people and go to them and tell them, ‘I’ll come work for you. I won’t charge a dime for me to work for you. I’ll give you my time. I’ll work for you 20 hours a week if you will teach me what you know and take me through the process so that I can learn how to make this work, I can use your resources, ideas and marketing. In return, I’m going to bust my butt for you. I’m going to do everything that you need me to do in order to make your life easier, because I know that what you’re giving me is worth thousands and thousands of dollars because it’s going to make my career…’ And I believe you can find somebody to work on an apprentice sort of way of doing this.
 
Joe: What I encourage you to do when you find that person is to meet with them. Make sure it’s somebody that you can trust, that you feel comfortable with and that you think is competent. Make sure that they have a track record and that they’re actually doing the things that they teach and that you actually get to talk with them. If all they’re going to do is have you do some grunt work like painting houses for them and you’re not actually going to work with them, that’s not going to be very beneficial to you. You’re going to learn how to paint but you’re not going to learn how to do real estate investing.
 
Joe: So you want to make sure, even though you’re doing grunt work for them, that you’re in the middle of their deals and you’re in that process, learning how to make offers, find properties and how to make sure that those deals make sense, how to structure the deals and learning the different techniques to make that happen.
 
Joe: Make sure that you’re learning how to talk to sellers and buyers and how to do marketing to bring those people into it and the methods they use to automate that process so they have to do less and how to outsource their business to other people to lower paid employees so that they have to do less. You want somebody who’s working and active but who also isn’t killing him or herself and is also making a lot of money.
 
Joe: So, look for that kind of person and offer them your time, your sweat and your effort and give them six months of your time to learn this process and I guarantee you’ll learn a lot from a good person, and it won’t cost you a dime; it’ll just take some time to do it.
 
Joe: The other thing that I encourage you to consider is that it might be cheaper, ultimately, to pay somebody like me to teach you, somebody who is already set up for this process who can give you their resources, knowledge and who can talk to you personally. If you’re paying somebody to learn how to invest in property, you want to make sure you have access to the person who created the program, not some coach that they pay $35 an hour to sit on the phone and take calls from people. You want to be able to talk to the man or the woman in that process. Make sure that you’re talking to that source of the information who really has the experience.
 
Joe: It might make sense to do that. If you look at what it costs to go to college, you’re going to pay $50,000 to $200,000 to go through a four year college and you’re still not going to have any guarantee that you’re going to make any money from that process.
 
Joe: If you buy a business, even a really cheap crummy business, like carpet cleaning for instance – I saw a carpet cleaning business up for sale for $20,000 not too long ago. Now, this is a business where you’re going to be working 60 to 80 hours a week in order to make $40,000-$50,000 in income. It’s not a great business to be in and there’s an awful lot of businesses out there that are similar to that where you’re going to bust your butt and you’re going to have to have other employees and all of these other things that you don’t have to have as a real estate investor.
 
Joe: The point I’m making is that it costs a lot of money to buy a business like that, which is a business that essentially is a job. What you want is a business that is like a franchise. 80% of all new businesses fail across the board, but 80% of all new franchises succeed. If you start a McDonald’s, you have a pretty good chance of succeeding. It costs a lot of money to start a McDonald’s and you have to give them pieces of your income over time, but you know that you’re going to have the systems in place in order to make that business work.
 
Joe: Systems are what I do. Systems are what I teach, so that you’ll know, ‘Step 1 – do this, step 2 – do this, step 3 – do this.’ If you’re working at McDonald’s, they have a 200% turnover in employees every year, and they’re paying those people peanuts to work for them. So they have to systematize everything in order for that business to be consistent.
 
Joe: Now, if I go into a McDonald’s in Berlin or in Paris or in Milwaukee or in Indianapolis, I’m going to get the same burger. It’s going to taste the same anywhere I go. It’s going to be consistent. It’s consistent because they have systems in place to make it happen over and over again, to take a low level employee who hasn’t been there very long and who’s probably going to be leaving pretty soon and make them perform on a high level so that they all do it the same way.
 
Joe: That’s what I’ve created with my Mentor Program. I’ve created systems so that I can take people that are brand new in this business and show them a system that they can use to do exactly what I do, except do it on a very high level, right from the beginning, to start making money as soon as possible in this process without using a lot of capital and without using down payment.
 
Joe: So, you what you want to think when you’re thinking, ‘Should I get a mentor?’ – Do I want to spend my time — do I want to spend my money?
 
Joe: And also keep in mind that we do zero down deals, but that doesn’t mean that we’re paying nothing for the property. We’re not getting these properties for free – we’re financing them. But we’re not using banks. I don’t believe in using banks except in special circumstances. We want to find seller financing and we want to do zero down types of deals, but you can do the same thing with this Mentor Program – you can do it zero down. I’ll finance most of it for you.
 
Joe: With the way it works right now, it’s a $10,000 program; not cheap. 10000 bucks, but you can do it if you’re a member of the Cash Flow Program, which is my $39 a month newsletter that I send out. If you’re getting that newsletter (and if you’re not, by the way, you can sign up) you can get 30% off so that its $7,000. You can pay $2,000 up front and $416 a month for 12 months and that pays for it. Or, if you pay it all off in a lump sum, I’ll give you an additional discount of $1,300 so that it’s only $5,700 instead of $7,000. It might make sense to do it that way.
 
Joe: So, all you have to do is come up with $2,000 to make this work. I’ll finance the rest for you. You’ve got lots of resources in your life that you probably haven’t thought of. The first one I’d look at is my credit cards. Is it possible to get the limits raised on them? Is it possible to go out and get a new 0% interest rate that’ll last for a year on a new credit card and put the money on that and pay it off from your first deal?
 
Joe: You only have to do one deal and I guarantee that you’re going to do that deal, and if you don’t do that deal, I’m going to give you your money back. Now, the only thing that I ask is that you do the work and you follow through, because I guarantee that you won’t make any money at all if you don’t do the work.
 
Joe: But, if you put this money on a credit card or if you go to your 401k and you can pull money out of that, or you go to your parents, family or friends and have them invest in you and have somebody that also believes that you can do what you say you’re going to do and that you’re going to follow through invest in you…
 
Joe: I’ve had people that sold their old cars or automobiles in order to be able to come up with enough money to be able to make this work. I’ve had people sell jewelry on eBay to do it. I’ve had people come to my Buying Event who were just scraping by just to make the payment and they slept in their car at the Buying Event because they couldn’t afford a hotel room who are now making six figure incomes. Those are the people that you’ve got to admire – those are the people who just busted their butt to make this happen.
 
Joe: I don’t do this for free. I’ve set this business up so that I can monetize it so that it makes money and so that I enjoy it. I want to partner with you as you come through this process as well, but you have to take a little bit of risk. You have to take a step forward as well to make it happen. Anyway, I hope that helps and I hope that answers the question. Good luck, now.