We Made $3,500 In Our First 3 Hours – Case Study Interview

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Frank: My name is Frank Berrian. I’m from Terre Haute, Indiana.

Frank: She’s bought hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of programs over the years and she had to drag me kicking and screaming to even listen to anything else. It’s her thing – ‘Honey you do it – if you want to, that’s fine.’ With the first thing that we put together from the book, which I actually had done to my amazement, with dumb luck, we went out and she told me what to say and what to do. That was in the book. I think we made $3,000 or $3,500. And then I was more willing to listen. ‘Wow.’ We had probably 3 hours invested and made 3500 bucks. That’s pretty awesome. If we invest a little bit more, what kind of return on our money would we get? I was pretty much bouncing off of the ceiling. It was really exciting. It was exhilarating at the same time. For as little work as I personally had involved and had invested in it, to walk away with that kind of paycheck from it was remarkable.

Frank: We already wanted to help the community and help people as much as we can. We were foster parents for a number of years and wound up adopting four of them. Two of them we had since birth, they were a couple days old. One had been through several homes and we decided that he needed a home so we adopted him as well. They’re all multiracial; we have one that’s Caucasian, one that’s mixed, and one that’s African American. We also adopted a 15 year old girl because they needed homes. They needed love like every other child so…

Frank: With my background that I come from, I was fortunate enough to have a nice 6 figure income working for the government. Like I said, I was a government contractor and I traveled all over the world. I built U.S. embassies for the government, safe houses and that kind of thing. Budgets were being cut and we started looking at options to get out, and they were already cutting spending on the pretense of the Democrats going into office. So I knew that if that comes to fruition that we’d all be out of a job and that’s pretty much what happened.

Frank: I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to go listen but this is still her deal.’ I will help out in some aspect but I didn’t want to call anybody; I didn’t want to do any of that. But the fact that you can access somebody, you can have questions answered, and it’s the same guy that’s teaching the class – your mentor’s the person that you actually get your answer from – I’ve heard time and time again, ‘Shelly, would say you call somebody?’ and then you get some kid in a cubicle that doesn’t know anything. And you’ve spent $15,000 to $20,000 thousand dollars on this program and then all they want to do is keep selling you stuff. Well, to get those answers you have to spend another $5,000 to be able to get onto some line to access the guru or whoever. So with Joe it was one price and you get all the answers.

Frank: Real nervous – he splits us up into two groups, and the whole time I’m telling her, ‘I’m not talking’ (we’re whispering this) and obviously she’s just smiling, and then she turns her back to me and starts talking and go off, and I’m going, ‘Oh my God, she didn’t just do that. So now I HAVE to talk to somebody.’ And it really wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. And from that moment forward it was pretty easy.

Frank: We role played. We did the call reversal, buyer-seller type thing, and it was really easy. The main thing I think that we’ve learned is confidence. The more times you do it, the more confident you get. It’s all about being a people person and if you can communicate well, then that’s to me, 90% of the battle.

Frank: I believe she called four and had two yes’s. I said, ‘Wow, there’s something to this.’ I was excited but life kind of steps in a little bit; the kids, she has to go back to work, etc. But I dabbled in it a little. But she’s really still carrying the ball. When she gets off of work, she does the calls and that kind of thing. I’m still looking at this as her business. This is her dream, not mine. I just wasn’t sure; didn’t know how I could be involved. Because it’s not something that I really wanted to do but the potential as far as making money intrigued me, and not having to work for somebody else, or travel as much as I was doing. I was willing to invest more time and energy into it with the pretense of not having to go back on the road and only coming home twice a month. And then after the buying event there were several weeks where we didn’t do anything. We were starting to do some deals and putting some capital under us and it slowly just kept building and building until we reached a point to where we were making enough to cover Shelly’s salary. So then we thought, ‘Well, let’s take a chance. If we’re doing this and I’m only working at quarter speed, and she’s doing most of the work when she gets off of work or at lunch, what can we do with her 100% and me at quarter speed, if she’s not working?’ So she went ahead and quit and we started doing it full time and then it just took off.

Frank: Great! Things are just flying. We’re busier than ever. The phones are ringing off the hook. We’re averaging probably like 50 to 60 calls a day from buyers and sellers. Obviously, more buyers than sellers – we would get 2 to 4 calls, I can’t really remember then from sellers, but it’s just steadily snowballed. And it’s exciting, especially when you can put together multiple deals or different types of deals. I think we have by today, done just about any combination of deal that you can think of (which is exciting).

Frank: The one that sticks out to me is (probably just because it has to do with money) – we actually got a very substantial deposit of $10,000 and that was just exciting – I mean it just blew my mind that doing a rent to own you can make that kind of money down. And that just really opened my eyes. And the other one was when we helped out an elderly lady that had lost her husband and she had her home free and clear and it just scared her – she was afraid the furnace was going to go out. The roof was going to get a leak. She was on a fixed income. She was getting part of his retirement and her social security and she was just terrified that something was going to happen and she wouldn’t have the money to keep the house up. So she contacted us after she had had the home listed I think, twice with the realtor – I’m not sure if it was two 6 months or two years or 24 months – I’m not sure of the time frame, but basically we put that deal together in 48 hours of talking to her. We met her and she was willing to sign the agreement. We actually took that one on subject-to and it was supposed to actually happen like two weeks later. She called us that following weekend and said, ‘I found an apartment. I’m moving out. Can you come help me move?’ because she didn’t have any family. She had nobody. So we got the trailer, we went over, and we helped her move and she said, ‘I know this is the right thing to do because I could eat today for the first time. I haven’t been able to eat because I’ve been so stressed and worried. And I just know that this just is the right thing to do.’ It just makes you warm all over and so good that she’s excited about this. It was kind of ironic as well because she didn’t have anybody, so she said, ‘I guess you just pay me until I die.’ And I guess somebody that doesn’t have any morals would say, ‘Okay’ but we immediately said, ‘No! That’s not right. You have to have somebody.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, really, I don’t.’ So we worked it to where the mortgage payment will go to a charity of her choice until the mortgage that we’ve agreed upon is satisfied. Because she owned the home free and clear – Wiley Children’s Hospital. That made us feel good as well.

Frank: Our kids are great. They think and they tell us – because we look at so many homes and we’ve been buying so many that they think every home that we buy is ours. I mean, it is in a way, but they think we’re moving into it. So immediately we’ll go look at a house – ‘This is my room’ and they split the home up, and then they’ll tell their teachers and their friends, ‘We have a hundred houses. We own ten houses’ – It’s really comical.

Frank: And still to this day, she still probably pulls 60% of the week to my 40%, or probably even greater. She’s more of a people person than I am. We take different roles with the company but I’m stepping in more and more because we’re just inundated; we’re just super busy. We’re getting from 200 to 300 calls a day now. It’s very crazy but exciting.

Frank: I’ve had to travel for so many years and missed so much and it’s great to be able to wake up in your own bed for more than one night or two nights. It’s great. Very – it keeps you energized. You get complacent I believe, being away. Joe puts it very eloquently – there’s only 3% of the population that are entrepreneurs. And nobody can really understand how you think or what you feel other than someone who thinks the same way you do. So staying in touch and being plugged in keeps you energized and keeps you centered to your own goals and it’s fun to see new people get started and to see the excitement. And the nervousness! When we first came, we were so nervous, and now it’s just like old hat. It’s just that you feel so worried about getting everything and you’re trying to absorb every word that he’s saying and you can’t keep up and just so stressed by the end of the first night. You’re exhausted and don’t want to do anything. But now, coming back (this is our third time coming back), it’s relaxing. But you still hear stuff that you missed or you thought you knew and you think, ‘Did we just hear that right? Hm.’

Frank: I think I fired a couple people up and basically if I can do it, they certainly can do it. And that is true – if I can do it, anybody can do it.

Interviewer: If the government called you back tomorrow, would you go back to work?

 
Frank: Hell no!