How to Build a $100K/Month Real Estate Wholesaling Business

J:
Welcome to Mr. Max Maxwell. How ‘ya doing, Max?

Max:
I’m doing well, sir. How you doing?

J:
I am doing great. We are thrilled to have you here.

Carol:
Hi, Max. Thanks so much for coming on with us today.

Max:
I appreciate being here. This is awesome.

Carol:
Honey, how excited are you to have Max Maxwell?

J:
This is awesome. I have listened to a lot of your podcasts. I’ve listened to some interviews you’ve done, and you’ve really figured out, and we’re going to talk about this in the episode, but you’ve really figured out the systems, the processes, the scaling of your business. I know there are a lot of people who are listening to this who are looking to do the same thing, so I’m really excited about this episode.

Max:
Me too, man.

Carol:
Can I tell you what else I’m excited about? Honey, have you seen Max Maxwell’s signature? It is the coolest signature. It could totally be this free-standing brand. I just want it splashed across shirts and everywhere. Have you seen this? It’s amazing.

J:
I have not seen this. We will make sure that goes in the show notes.

Carol:
Thank you.

Max:
Awesome.

Carol:
My signature’s really cool too.

J:
Yes. You have a great signature.

Carol:
Your signature is ridiculous.

J:
My signature certainly needs some work.

Carol:
You get an X. Totally lame. Max rocks the signature situation.

J:
Okay.

Max:
Funny story about that though, but we’ll talk about it later.

J:
Okay, perfect. I want to start out with, so we have a really diverse audience. We have a whole lot of real estate investors in our audience, but we also have a lot of people who aren’t real estate investors. They’re more generic business people or they’re getting ready to start businesses outside of real estate.

J:
You are one of our hardcore real estate business owners and guests. Before we jump into your backstory and our business discussion, can you give us a little bit of information about your specific business niche? You’re a real estate wholesaler, and I know there are going to be some people who are listening to this that don’t know what wholesaling is. Can you tell us a little bit about what wholesaling is, what exactly that means?

Max:
Yeah, I mean, it’s really no different than wholesaling groceries or wholesaling cars or anything like that. We just decided to use real estate because the margins are a lot better and everybody needs a house. Particularly, we get something, a house under contract at a certain price and we either try to sell that contract or purchase it and sell it pretty much quickly, right after we purchase it. Basically, buying something low and selling it higher, and we don’t even deal with the retail side much. It’s more of end-to-end, business-to-business, where we’re selling directly to guys that are flipping properties or guys that are holding properties for personal investment purposes.

J:
You’re basically playing the middleman. You’re buying low, selling high and just kind of doing an arbitrage play, where you’re making some money for the services you bring to both the seller and the buyer.

Max:
I mean, in any business, and I think the way the world is going right now, the middleman is the guy that actually makes the most money.

J:
Yeah. Awesome, okay. Thank you for that.

Carol:
Great, so am I understanding correctly, that you have managed to systematize your business to the point where you’re making something like, you’re bringing in $100,000 each and every month wholesaling?

Max:
At least, yeah.

Carol:
That’s fantastic. I’m sure, I’m guessing that didn’t happen overnight. Before we go into how you got there, I think this is really important that we hear your backstory. I’m guessing you had a first job at some point in your life.

Max:
Yeah.

Carol:
Maybe it was wholesaling, I have a feeling it’s not. Give us a little bit of backstory. Where, show us where the entrepreneurialism came from, Max.

Max:
Well, I don’t know where it was born from, but I know my uncle used to own real estate, and he would show me around, and I never understood how he owned so many houses. Ever since I was just young, like it was a way of making your own money was going out a young age. I have immigrant parents, so I come from a very hardworking background of, thread of parents, and it just kind of was in me.

Max:
My first real job on the books, outside from when I was younger, so when I was younger, before I had my first official job, I worked at a tree farm. I did concrete, hard labor. It was fun though. My next door neighbor owned a concrete company, and I was able to work with him in the summers so I could buy my jet skis or whatever I wanted-

Carol:
Nice.

Max:
… to play with on the lake. My first job, job where I actually collected money and W-2 was the United States Air Force, at 17 years old.

J:
Awesome. Do you fly planes?

Max:
I actually do fly planes now, but I was not a pilot in the Air Force. I actually learned how to fly, maybe three years ago now.

J:
Oh, awesome.

Carol:
You do it recreationally, as a hobby?

Max:
Yeah. Just small towns, four-seater planes. Just fly whenever I can.

Carol:
This dude’s got jet skis, he’s got airplanes. You’ve got the life, man. You’ve got this figured out.

J:
Notice he, notice, tell us a little bit about that booth you’re standing in now. You were just telling us before the show started.

Max:
Yeah. Last year, when I decided that content was a very important part inside of being a media, of being an entrepreneur, I decided to invest into a 5,000 square foot warehouse. It was actually 13,000, but we took 5,000 of it and made it into a, like a studio. We have a 20 by 20 cyc wall, two podcast rooms, a set design area, an edit bay. Pretty much I could do, I could run a news broadcasting center out of here, only because I understand that each company that I own and participate in has to be a media outlet themself, so I just invested that myself.

J:
That’s awesome. I’m going to get back to that. Okay, so let’s go back to your story. You’re in the Air Force. What’s next?

Max:
I was in the Air Force. I did my first four years and decided this wasn’t for me. Getting shot at for 20 grand wasn’t really that fun.

Carol:
I can’t imagine it would be. Not for living the dream.

Max:
Yeah. I met some good people, some people that are friends now still with me, but I wanted to do something different. I got out and, actually, I went right into real estate. This was around 2004, 2005. I got a real estate license as a broker and decided that was fun for the first year and a half. Then I decided that wasn’t cool either.

Carol:
What about it wasn’t cool?

Max:
I didn’t like driving people around on Saturdays and Sundays to buy a house that they never were intending to buy.

Carol:
Right. I hear you.

J:
It was a tedious job.

Max:
It was a terrible job. I enjoyed it, I loved what I learned. I think that’s the lesson. Everything that I did, I learned something that got me where I am today. I loved that real estate side, and then I opened up a property management investment company. I enjoyed that better. I enjoyed the numbers. I enjoyed finding something that was less value, turning it into something that was worth more and then making it an investment property for somebody.

J:
So, flipping houses.

Max:
Well, really, I was doing the management side of it, but then I found one big guy that wanted me to actually assist him with flipping some of his properties. I was kind of wholesaling and not really knowing what wholesaling was. I was finding houses that were broken, fixing them and then giving it to him as an investment portfolio property.

J:
Got it. You started in real estate, 2004, 2005 and that’s kind of been your main business focus for the last 14 years?

Max:
No.

Carol:
Oh, there’s more to the story.

Max:
No.

J:
There’s more.

Max:
Yeah. 2008 happened and I thought real estate was dead. I left. I got out of the game, and I didn’t come back. I left in about 2008, when I moved to California, and I didn’t pick up real estate again until 2015, ’16.

Carol:
Wow. I want to go back to that. Obviously, we know, we all know what happened back in 2008 on a mass level. I love hearing those nitty-gritty stories. Was there a single incident or a single week or a single month or a single something that was just so bad for you personally, so bad for you in real estate, so bad for you in your business, where that was like, “I am so out of here”? What was the straw that broke that camel’s back?

Max:
Yeah. Big mistake. About 90% of my business was from one guy. It was a $13.5 million portfolio, all North Carolina properties. We’re not in California, so $13.5 million in property is a lot of property out here.

Carol:
A lot of property.

Max:
I managed his entire portfolio. He was 90-plus percent of my business and he’d seen the ball coming down the hill, and he started selling. I remember the day that he wanted to start dumping his portfolio. That was the day I had to start laying people off that were onsite managers at the apartment complexes and stuff like that. It was just like, “Wow. We’re going downhill.”

Carol:
No fun. Some really hard lessons learned there, right?

J:
Yeah. A lot of people don’t realize. I mean, you could have the best customer in the world generating a ton of money for you, but when you’re relying on one customer, that customer has control over your business. You no longer have control over your business.

Max:
I didn’t realize it at the time, but like I said, these lessons built who I am today.

J:
That’s awesome. Okay-

Carol:
Well said.

J:
Go ahead.

Carol:
I was just going to say, lessons built who you are today, and that said, we always like to, we love to talk about our failures. Even if it’s nothing that we personally did, intentionally. Obviously, that was a failure. There are failures, I think, every single day, we have a mini-failure, we have bigger macro-failures. I want to get more into some of those later as we’re talking more, but I think they’re so crucial to building your business, and not being afraid to try new things and just fail the heck out of all kinds of situations, so you get new ones going on.

Max:
Absolutely. I’m with that.

J:
2008, your one big customer kind of goes away and you realize, “I have to move out of real estate.” What was your next move?

Max:
I didn’t know. I went from riding a high horse, at least what I thought was a high horse at that time, to pretty much broke because I was living above my means. I didn’t see the end of the real estate coming, so at that age, at 21, 22, owning a company and doing well, I had everything I thought I needed. When that collapsed, so did everything. I went from having everything, to where my car was in repossession.

Carol:
What was everything, Max? Tell us, what was that lifestyle? What was, what kind of lifestyle were you living at 21?

Max:
I could travel. I could take one-way flights to New York and go shopping and not worry about the day I was coming back. I had multiple cars, all on payments, which is stupid. I had more fun than I worked, and it caught up to me.

Carol:
It was all at once. It was, “Boom, game over,” right?

Max:
Yeah. Game over.

Carol:
What did you do? Where did you go?

Max:
I packed up and moved to California. Went to go sleep on my cousin’s couch. He played professional soccer in LA, and I Just was like, “I need a new beginning,” so I went over there, and lived for a little while, and then I started working in the marketing world. That’s kind of where I started to really find what I really loved was marketing.

Carol:
Okay.

Max:
At the end of the day, most of our businesses, you have to market and sell in order to survive. I started doing what we call experiential marketing, activations and setups for big companies like Verizon, Char Broil, Hershey’s, Legos. Started doing their activations, and setting up their stuff, and organizing their marketing for their experiential side of the things.

Carol:
What is the experiential side of things? What are we … Give me an example from one of those companies you’re talking about.

Max:
Yeah, so it’s like a couple things. You can go as large as, for Verizon what we did was they had a sponsorship with college football, and we did their activations at the games. We would have, we would organize, “Okay. There’s x amount of games this year. We’re going to deploy x amount of people with tents and new vehicles, and show off your branding, show off new products.” All that type of stuff. That, all the way to state fairs, to conventions and conferences, the large ones. All these guys had sponsorships, so we would be their experiential side, their experience side with their customer.

Carol:
Great. It sounds like you were getting in front of a lot of people, building relationships with a lot of people, building rapport with a lot of people to ultimately activate those customers. Does that sound about right?

Max:
Absolutely.

Carol:
I’m capturing that correctly?

Max:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Carol:
How did you take that and translate it into your next move?

Max:
My next move was I realized a big funnel in this world. We would deploy, we would have a $14 million budget from Verizon, and we would go from state fair to college football games, and we needed what the called brand ambassadors to work that weekend event. We were hiring them from Craigslist-

Carol:
No kidding?

Max:
… and Facebook groups, so it was, you had this $14 million budget, and then you’re hiring people from Craigslist to represent a billion dollar brand. That was a bottleneck, so I created a company called Fastba, which means fast brand ambassador, and it was an app, where it was a marketplace app. Where, essentially, where we would go signup all the brand ambassadors in the world, and we would go get all the marketing companies that needed on-demand staffing and we would merge them and make the price in the middle. Once again, try to be in the middle.

Max:
We would earn between two and four dollars an hour over thousands of employees, every single weekend. We got the app about 95% built, was in beta testing, and we couldn’t get funding in North Carolina, so all of my money, all of my credit cards, I’m all out now, again.

Carol:
How much did you have invested in that project?

Max:
I think, personally, I had around $30,000-

Carol:
Oh!

Max:
… Which was a lot of money to me. Then, I had another 60,000 in investments from outside investors, so we were out $90,000, which wasn’t, nowhere, not the right amount of money to build an app. Then we failed and I hit rock bottom again.

J:
You’re in your mid-20s at this point, right?

Max:
I am pushing 30.

J:
You’re pushing 30.

Carol:
Pushing 30. You’re getting really old.

Max:
Yeah.

Carol:
You’re getting like, you’re getting ancient.

Max:
Social security’s about to kick-in.

Carol:
Like your clock is ticking. All of it, all of it. Two mega failures. You’re almost 30. “Oh, no. End of the world.”

Max:
I thought it was.

Carol:
How are you feeling that time around? You’re like, “Oh my gosh.”

Max:
It felt like it. I was at a point where, once again, I didn’t even have a car that had a payment on it, thank god. I had a 2004 Volkswagen with a bad starter. At 30 years old, I had to move back at home with my mom.

Carol:
Okay, so you went from living on your cousin’s couch, to being on your mom’s couch. How did your mom like that? How’s your mom feeling about the whole situation? The mom in me’s got to ask. How do you cope with that?

Max:
Well, my mom was happy to see me, because I’d been gone for so long-

Carol:
“Come on home, honey. I’ll cook for you.”

Max:
Yeah. I really left home at 17.

Carol:
“I’ll make you cookies.”

Max:
There you go. She’s a Jamaican mother, so she loves to cook food, but there was a point where I lived in my … I went rock bottom. I went to go live on my cousin’s couch in LA. I built myself back up, riding back a high horse. Quit a nice paying W-2 job, just to create a company. Create that company, I hit rock bottom again, and now I have to go back to a couch. Well, not a couch, but my mother’s house, so there I’m at bottom again.

Max:
I don’t know. It’s something in me. I think that’s a question that a lot of people can’t … I’m just unemployable. I don’t fit the mold of what, where I should be. I didn’t go to college. I barely graduated high school, so if you look at my resume, I don’t fit in where I’m actually capable of doing. Like I can turn companies around, but my resume doesn’t say so.

J:
I want to touch on something, and I saw it in your backstory, doing some research. You had mentioned that you’re dyslexic.

Max:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), big time.

J:
I imagine that that’s caused struggles throughout your life as well and made things difficult. One of the things I’ve found is that people who have these struggles that are thrust upon them, whether it’s a learning disability or it’s a, something in their childhood, whatever it is, they’re forced to take a path where they’re not following the rules, and they get accustomed to not following the rules. Essentially, we as entrepreneurs, that’s what we are. We’re people who don’t want to follow the rules.

Max:
What rules?

J:
Exactly.

Carol:
Rules?

J:
Exactly.

Carol:
I think I’ve hard of that word.

J:
The reason I bring up the dyslexia thing is I have a good friend, one of the best entrepreneurs I know, and he’s dyslexic. He once said to me that if he hadn’t have had dyslexia, had he gone, done well in high school, gone to college, zero chance he would have been an entrepreneur. He’d be sitting in an office right now, behind a desk, working a 9:00 to 5:00 job. I think what a lot of people don’t realize is these struggles that we face oftentimes give us opportunities that “normal people” don’t get, or they don’t take advantage of, so they’re really a blessing in disguise.

Max:
I agree 100%. It gave me, I had a weakness on one side, but it gave me a strength on the other side.

J:
Yup.

Max:
Dyslexic, for most people who don’t know, is I see numbers and letter backwards. You can clearly tell me, I can literally read something on a screen and when I say it, I say it backwards. One thing I do, I picked up when I was younger. I found out I was dyslexic in high school. One thing I picked up is I actually read people’s lips.

Max:
Whenever you’re talking to me, and if you’re face-to-face, you’ll notice that I’m staring at your mouth. I can literally see the words coming out of your mouth, like literally, in physical form. I can see them come out of your mouth. It helps me like get the conversation straight because if not, I will hear things that you didn’t say in sense of like, in order.

J:
You know what I love? I love the fact that a lot of people like we could be talking to right now would be, they would have started their story with, “I was dyslexic, and that’s an excuse for this, an excuse for that.” You don’t even mention it.

Carol:
No. Not even a thing.

J:
You have this-

Carol:
It doesn’t define you.

J:
Yeah, something that would stop a lot of us from even trying to achieve business success, and you don’t even mention it, like it’s not a big deal. I love that.

Max:
Yeah. I don’t mention it, because I don’t think about it. It’s something I bring up and I told people because I know there’s other people out there that struggle with it that really don’t like to … I didn’t read my first book until I was 30. Dyslexia stopped that. It made me, I did not read a book from cover to cover until I was 30 years old. That was four years ago. That, I think that’s good and bad. I love it though. I think it’s great that I didn’t ready my first book ’til 30 because when I read it, I was ready to receive the information that was in it, and that book changed my life.

Carol:
That is awesome. What was the book? We’ve got to know.

Max:
It’s cliché, but it’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad. [crosstalk 00:20:08] That story in the book gave me the idea that I … It gave me the thought that I was thinking about everything the wrong way.

Carol:
Okay, so you shifted your mindset because of that book.

Max:
Yeah. It was just like, “Hey. Look at it different, look at things different.” When I did, it made me click, so with all my past failures and experiences, and then reading that book, it started to have me piece things together and stop looking at the failures as failures, and as lessons.

Carol:
Sure, so it almost gave you permission to like take those experiences, those, quote, unquote, failures you had before, look at them in a different way and be like, “Wait a minute here. I’m just going to take that, shift my mindset about how this is happening, and rock out a new thing.”

Max:
There you go.

Carol:
What was the new thing?

Max:
Real estate.

Carol:
Yes!

Max:
I was broke. I didn’t have any money, so a friend of mine, his dad is in real estate. I went to his house. We were having a conversation. He was talking about how he became financially independent through real estate. For me it was, still didn’t click because I’m like, “How can I get there? I’m not bankable. I’m not financable. How does this happen?” He mentioned the word “wholesale” and how you can pretty much sell things without actually owning the object, but controlling it without any money, and I was like …

Max:
I went home and three weeks, I went to YouTube University. I call it YouTube University, it’s just like you become obsessed with something. You could use YouTube for two things. You could go down a dark hole of weakness with cat videos, or you can use it to literally get a quick lesson from Harvard that quick.

Carol:
Absolutely.

Max:
I mean, there’s actually Harvard videos on there. Classroom videos on YouTube.

Carol:
There are. There’s everything. I tell, I’m going to interrupt you, but I tell so many … I hate to date myself, but I tell so many like younger people and stuff now, I’m like, “You are all born into this amazing, amazing, amazing time.” Like I listen to Jay’s 94-year-old grandmother tell me all the time, she’s like, “You have no idea, I can’t comprehend any of this.” I’m like, “Well, you know what? I can’t comprehend everything that’s happened, even in the past 10 years.” There are just so many incredible tools and resources available now, so it’s awesome that you were able to dive in there, and graduate from YouTube University, and really get educated on this new venture.

J:
There’s really no excuse not to be able to get started in anything you want to get started in. I think that’s the lesson here. That there is enough free information out there, that people don’t need to go to business school. People don’t need to have a business mentor. People don’t need to spend a ton of money on coaches.

Max:
Yeah.

J:
Just go and get started. Go do it.

Max:
I think that’s the main thing, because so why I tell people that, “You don’t need a mentor.” I don’t mean you don’t ever need a mentor, because I have mentors.

J:
Of course, of course.

Max:
I mean, you don’t need a mentor to get started. Because people use that barrier of, “Oh, I need a coach, I need a mentor,” to not do anything. When reality is, you just need to know the first step. Don’t worry about step 10. Get going. I learned how to drive for dollars, which is simply riding around, and looking for abandoned properties, and finding the owner, and calling them and see if they want to sell it.

J:
Absolutely.

Max:
That costs nothing, except for a tank of gas.

J:
Absolutely.

Carol:
That’s how you started your wholesaling business, yes?

Max:
That’s how I started. I went to old neighborhoods.

Carol:
Just started, got in your car, started driving for dollars.

J:
Okay, so now a lot of people in this business, in the wholesaling business, I meet a lot of wholesalers, and they get to the point where they’re doing a deal a month, or two deals a month, or even three or four deals a month and they are ecstatic. They feel like they’ve made it. They’re maxed out. They’re maybe working 20, 30, 40, 60 hours a week. They’re just like, “I made it. I’m going to keep doing this. I’m going to keep making money,” and that’s what they do forever.

J:
At some point, you decided, “This isn’t enough. I need to grow this business. I need to turn it … I need to take it from a hobby or kind of this investing thing I’m doing, and turn it into a real business, to scale it.” What was it in you that kind of led you down that path to, “I want to turn this into a real business”? What did you start doing to achieve that?

Max:
One of my mentors, the one that actually introduced me or just said the word “wholesaling,” he told me to have a goal. Because what I, the picture I first seen is that he owns over 200 doors, and he doesn’t have to be, he doesn’t need anything. He could be done and just relax for the rest of his life. He gave me a statistic how if 100 people start working at the age of 25, by the time they turn 65, only 1% are considered wealthy, which is like $5.7 million in net worth.

J:
Yep.

Max:
4% can take care of themself. That means they don’t need social security, they don’t need any government assistance.

J:
Yep.

Max:
The other 95%, either dead or depend on friends, family or government assistance to live.

J:
Yeah. It’s horrible.

Carol:
Staggering.

Max:
That statistic tells you that I need to build wealth. Yes, wholesaling is an ATM machine. It’s just a job. Wholesaling, yes, I have a business, but it starts over every month at zero. Right?

Carol:
Yes.

Max:
I needed to learn how to build wealth, so he told me, “Look. You need to put goals in. You’re doing a lot of volume. You need to start buying properties and getting the tax benefit of that. Then start creating that passive income. Right now, you have a very active income.”

Carol:
Yes.

Max:
That’s when he said, “Come up with a goal. For every seven houses you wholesale, buy one.” That’s how we started last year. It’s just become a rippling effect.

J:
Basically, your wholesaling business is the feeder to your wealth building business, which is your rental properties.

Max:
My wholesaling business is a very high paying W-2 job, that I don’t know how long it will last, but if I’m smart with it, and with the money that it brings, then I can create passive wealth for a long time.

J:
You’re trading your time for dollars, and as soon as you stop putting in your time, you stop getting the dollars.

Max:
There you go.

J:
That’s where the rental properties come in. You put in the time, the effort once, and the dollars just pay an annuity forever and ever.

Max:
Correct.

Carol:
I would like to know, Max, back when you were, when you were really doing this by yourself, take us through a typical deal. Take us through what that process looked like. Maybe even what some of those numbers look like in that, so start with that. Then build up to how you shifted things, how things changed and systematized so you could begin growing. Go back to that, when you were doing it by yourself, what that, what do those deals look like? How that worked.

Max:
Yeah, so typically, so I’ll go back to my first deal. We bought a house, I put a house under contract, let me say that. I put a house under contract with the intention to buy, and then sold my equitable interest for $14,000. That was my proof that this is real. I started doing that by myself on a regular. What that looked like on a day-to-day is I would make 200 phone calls every single day. 100 in the morning, and 100 in the afternoon and the evening.

Carol:
You. You yourself would make 200 phone calls in a day.

Max:
On my cellphone.

Carol:
Ah, that makes my head hurt thinking about that. How many hours a day were you realistically working, making those 200 phone calls?

Max:
In the morning time, I would start like 7:30, 8:00 in the morning, start making phone calls, because I want to catch certain people before they get to work.

Carol:
Certainly.

Max:
Then, so I did that all the way ’til like 11:00 because I want to catch people when they’re watching Price is Right and all that stuff as well. Then between like 12:00 and 2:00, I would do my research. That’s when I would spend my time at the courthouse, in the probate, in the taxes. I was really educating myself and really putting the pieces of the puzzle, of problems. Because we’re in a problem solving business, so I needed to find out where the problems were. I was in the divorce room, in the probates room, in the bankruptcy rooms, trying to figure out, “What problems can I solve?” That’s when I started collecting data, between the time of like 12:00 and 2:00.

Max:
Then after 2:00, I would come home, compress this data, put it on Excel sheets to be skipped out at night when I was sleeping, and started at around 5:00, I would call from like 5:00 p.m. to 8:30 at night. That’s where I would do my 100 there, 100 there. Now, do I talk to 200 people a day? No. I would probably reach around 40 people a day, 30 or 40 people a day. Whether they told me to, “Go kick rocks,” or “Yes, I’m interested in selling the house.” As long as I got 40 people that owned the property, on the phone, that said, “No,” “Yes” or “No,” I was happy because I started to build up this pipeline.

Max:
As I consistently did that, I started to realize I was building this pipeline. Then I would get call-backs, and the follow-ups came, where I would call somebody that I talked to three weeks ago that said maybe or that they would think about it, I would call them now and they would be more inclined. Then another conversation in two days, and then the next day. Then, “Oh, an appointment.” Then, “Oh, I got this house.” I would work like that in succession. I was working, when I first got my first check and I started working like crazy, I actually had to wear a night guard in my mouth, because I did not want to go to sleep. It was, I was dreaming and gritting my teeth at night. I wanted 7:30 to hit so fast, so I can start making phone calls again for the next day, because I knew that one “yes” was like 10 grand. I was getting shot at for $20,000 a couple years ago. You got to understand, the difference is that I can make a phone call for 10 or get shot at for 20.

Carol:
Kind of a no brainer.

Max:
Yeah.

J:
This is a common theme among the guests that we’re talking to, it really is. It’s about consistency. There’s a saying in business and entrepreneurship, “90% of success is just showing up.” It’s amazing how doing the same thing day-in and day-out, the first day, no results. Second day, no results. Third day, no results. I often tell people, I meet two types of people in the real estate business. I meet 95% of people who they’ve never done a deal, and they’ll never do a deal. I mean zero deals, that’s their reality in real estate.

J:
The other 5% are going to do 10, 20, 50, 100, 1,000 deals. I never meet anybody in this business that does one deal. Because if you have the motivation, if you have the work ethic, if you have the commitment to do one deal, that deal’s going to take you a while, but as soon as you do that first deal, you’re going to get to the second much quicker. You’re going to get to the third, to the fifth, to the fiftieth or the hundredth that much quicker. I think, you said this a lot more concisely than I did, but it’s really, it’s just showing up, doing the work day-in and day out, and letting the snowball form, and not giving up before it does.

Max:
Correct. That’s why I say, “You’re one deal away.” I use that term a lot.

J:
Love that.

Max:
It means that, not going to gain financial freedom from that first deal, but you’re going to prove to yourself, and maybe others that have been doubting you, that this is real, and you are now going to try to do this over and over again, make it repeatable. Now, you changed everything you knew about time and money for the rest of your life.

J:
That’s great.

Carol:
Yes. That’s really good.

J:
You’re doing deals now, and you’ve realized, “I can make $10,000 a deal. I can make $14,000 a deal,” like you did on your first deal. At some point you decide, “That’s not enough. I don’t want to make 200 calls a day, even though I might be making 10 or 20 or $30,000 a month, that’s not enough for me. I need to do something different. I want to do more. I want to do bigger.” What did that look like to you? When did that kind of, that mindset set in that, “I can scale this thing”?

Max:
Yeah, so that’s when I kind of started my YouTube channel. I wanted to hold myself accountable. The first thing, after reading books and listening to podcasts, because during this whole time, I’m still educating myself. Because I don’t know anything. I really don’t know anything. I just know enough to where I made some few dollars. I started educating myself, and I heard somebody say, I don’t know who it is, I don’t know who to give credit but they said, “Fire yourself from something that you don’t like to do or you’re not that great at.”

Max:
I fired myself from collecting the data and doing the Excel sheet and all that stuff. The first hire I had, it was a remote employee from the Philippines, which I lucked up on. She’s still with me today. She did all my Excel, all my data collection from online and everything, and did it while I was sleeping, so that when I’d wake up in the morning, I no longer had to do that before I got started making the phone calls. When I wake up, I can now start dialing.

Carol:
Great. I think that’s, I want to touch on that a little bit more for all, people in any type of business. I think it’s, you said something that your coach or your mentor told you, that you said was, “Fire yourself from something you’re not good at.” Would you agree, and honey, I know you and I still, still to this day, even with all of our businesses, everything that we’ve done, we still struggle with this. Is people, it’s sometimes just hard to identify and admit, “There are some things I am just not good at.” You even remember, back in the day, when we started-

J:
You tell me all the stuff I’m not good at all the time.

Carol:
Oh, I’m so good at telling you all the stuff you’re not good at. I’ll tell you that all day long. You remember, back in the day, when we started our businesses. Like you remember when we would just, I would do something, and then you would decide you were just as good at that, so you would re-do it? Then I’d go and then I would re-do what you just re-did, and back and forth.

J:
It turns out, neither of us were good at it.

Carol:
Neither of us were good at what we weren’t good at, but we just had a hard time realizing that was the case.

Max:
Yeah.

Carol:
I think it’s, I just think it’s super important, no matter what type of business that you’re in, realizing there are things that you just are not a pro at, and figuring out a way to supplement that. It sounds like you supplemented that with your assistant in the Philippines who crunches your data.

Max:
Yeah. One thing I would say, is before you completely outsource it, at least understand it. Understand it enough to where you can teach it because if not, you’re just passing through chaos. Just because you hire somebody that is supposed to crunch your data, doesn’t mean they know how to do it exactly the way you want it or were doing it prior.

Carol:
Sure.

Max:
Learn it. Don’t got to be good at it, but learn it.

Carol:
Know what it’s about. Where did you find your person? Where do people find these people once they do learn what needs to be happening? Where do they find people to do it?

Max:
I found my virtual assistant on Upwork.

Carol:
Upwork. Okay.

Max:
She turned out to be a rockstar.

Carol:
Yeah?

Max:
She’s actually like the hiring manager at a large call center in the Philippines. Then from that day forward, anytime I needed a new person on the team, she would go out and hire them.

Carol:
That’s a great process within a process right there. While you’re building out your systems and processes, you are systematizing your processes around hiring more people through your virtual assistant that you got through Upwork.

Max:
Yeah.

Carol:
At this point, you’re really realizing the value in systemizing everything to scale.

Max:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I, at this point now, I’ve fired myself from collecting the data, and now I could focus on doing things in those three hours in a day where I was going to collect data, three to four hours. I am now doing more marketing, whether that’s on Craigslist, on Facebook. We started putting out Bandit Signs. The Bandit Signs started an in-call volume, so now I’m getting calls that I can’t even answer. I’m starting to like filter my customers through listening to their voicemail, if they’re motivated or not.

Max:
I said, “I’m blowing a lot of money here. I need a full-time person that answers the phone.” I call Alexis, which is my first virtual assistant, and I said, “I need somebody that answers the phones, and I’m going to train them.” She got the person, her name is [Lyka 00:36:55], she’s still with me today.

Carol:
Great.

Max:
All my inbound calls come through Lyka. She is so trained now, she probably does it better than I do. She answers the data through Podio, and then she passes it to my U.S. based team, that then picks up the ball and moves from there. At that point, I now freed myself from answering the phones and we now had a process where we can now collect the data in a CRM so that we could follow up, more importantly, because the money’s in the follow up in any business.

Carol:
That’s right.

Max:
Now we’re rocking and rolling even better.

J:
Now, the beautiful part here is, you’ve trained somebody to deal with your data. You’ve trained somebody to take your leads, so you might be able to take 200 calls in a day, if you wanted to. I’m not saying you want to, but maybe you could take 200 calls in a day. Or you could hire somebody to take 200 calls in a day. Or you hire three people and take 600 calls in a day. Or you hire 100 people and take 10,000 calls in a day, whatever it is.

Max:
Exactly. It becomes a numbers game. Guess what the next place I fired myself from? I no longer wanted to make these calls every day. I just wanted to go to the appointments, so now I hired, Alexis hired Paul, which is still with me today. He now makes 600 calls a day-

Carol:
Wow.

Max:
… because we use technology-

Carol:
Fantastic.

Max:
… and use a triple line dialer and all that stuff like that. Now, his sole purpose, sole focus, nine hours a day, is to do outbound calls, that sometimes turn into inbound calls, which Lyka answers.

Carol:
Great.

Max:
Now, all I’m seeing is qualified leads, where I need to have that initial pre-appointment call with them.

Carol:
You are the one, you Max, are the one who takes that pre-appointment call. All those other things happen, and then you are the one who personally takes that pre-appointment call.

Max:
Yeah.

Carol:
Why are you that, why are you doing that? I’m not trying to … I’m just going to say what I think. I could just even tell from your podcast, the way you work, the different things you’ve done, that just building that relationship is so absolutely crucial. I’m just going to answer the question for you, because it is so evident from your personality, so evident from just the way you come across on your YouTube channels and everything else, that establishing that you, as that first point of contact, and building that trust, building that rapport, building that information, gathering together and building that trust, I really think that serves you incredibly well in your business.

Max:
I appreciate it, and that’s it. It’s two-fold. One, I want to introduce myself to the customer and really get real boiled down and see if I can really solve a problem before I waste my time and their time going to their house. Then I also establish that rapport with them, and now we’re going. I say, “Hey, you’ve talked to my associates. They got you here. I’m the guy that’s going to come to your house. Let’s just have a quick conversation and now, okay, great. The appointment’s tomorrow at 2:00. I’ll see you tomorrow at 2:00.” I was still that bottleneck.

Carol:
Yep.

Max:
I will still that bottleneck, but I didn’t have to do all these other things. Now, my time is spent real carefully on revenue generated activities.

J:
Yep.

Max:
I am now, I only do the things that generate revenue, which is now going on these appointments and getting these contracts.

J:
Okay, so now-

Max:
And-

J:
… You have four people in your business. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt there.

Max:
No, go ahead.

J:
You’ve got four people in your business. You’ve got somebody that’s dealing with the data while you’re sleeping. You have somebody who is making outbound calls for you, basically generating leads.

Max:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

J:
Somebody who is taking inbound calls, so somebody who is doing the lead follow up, and you. You’re taking appointments and actually negotiating deals, so we got four people in your business right now. You’re doing, it sounds like, a whole lot more transactions, touches, lead generation tasks, with a whole lot less of your time.

Max:
Correct, so-

J:
You’re heading in the right direction here.

Max:
Yeah. I’m utilizing, I’m taking advantage of U.S. currency, with the great workers and great work ethic that people have in the Philippines, and I am now maximizing my dollar and finding great employees at the same time, so-

J:
How much are you paying them?

Max:
Each one is a base salary of around 2 to 220 a week.

J:
Okay.

Max:
Which is double the salary of an average person that works in a Philippines call center for an American company.

J:
That’s awesome. Win-win.

Max:
We pay great, and we do bonuses as well. Now, I’m consistently doing 20 or $30,000 a month, and I have team, but I also have some freedom at this time now.

Carol:
That’s nice.

Max:
Now, I have to do CEO, 30,000 foot level stuff. I need to figure out, how can I go out, spend time in the evenings between 5:00 and 7:00 and meet new buyers? What networking events can I go to? Versus crunching data at night, what networking events can I go to, and meet new buyers and find out what they like, and find out what they don’t like? That’s what I was doing.

Carol:
Excellent.

Max:
Generate more and more and more.

Carol:
What other networking things are you doing in addition to physically going out? For example, I know we talked a little bit about your YouTube channel. You talked a little bit about your vlog, which I still have the hardest time saying that, vlog, vlog.

Max:
Me too.

Carol:
Right? Who came up with “vlog”?

Max:
“Is that a real word?”

Carol:
Vlog. You “get the merch” and you “smash the like button,” and all that. It’s just fascinating to me. This whole new crazy world, I love it. Well, what are some of those other things that you’re doing from, to really build that brand even more? To take on that 30,000, high level view? To really be the CEO, to really grow your business? What are those things that you’re spending your time on now instead of answering the calls, and crunching the data, and all the stuff that you did back in the day when you were first growing?

Max:
That’s a great question. One of the, a person that I look up to and have for four years now is Gary Vaynerchuk. I actually just had him speak at my event, which is like crazy that- [crosstalk 00:42:52]

Carol:
Awesome.

Max:
… a very short amount of time. Gary talks about building a brand for yourself. I actually brand me more than I brand my company, so that whatever I decide to do, I am the brand. Whether I want to sell peanut butter and jelly sandwiches tomorrow or I want to keep doing real estate, the brand follows me.

Carol:
I would totally eat a Max Maxwell peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just for the record, I could sell the crap out of those things.

Max:
I probably should start making them in the morning now.

Carol:
That’d be amazing.

J:
No words.

Max:
Doing-

Carol:
My god, I so didn’t mean it like that. People, gentlemen, come on. This is a family show.

Max:
This is a family show.

Carol:
What’s happening here?

Max:
Just building your personal brand and becoming that authority figure is important to going out and finding … It’s actually helped me find a lot of cash buyers. People that trust me and see my work ethic visually and hear it. They know that I’m trustworthy by listening to me and following me. It’s helped me get some of the best employees that I can, because they trust in my brand, they believe in me.

Max:
Building that personal brand is a big side, a big uptick of growing your actual business. I started hosting free meet-ups. I started telling people, locally in my community, how to do the same thing I was doing. A lot of guys were like, “You’re creating competition.” “No. You’re seeing it wrong. Look at the big, big picture.” I’m creating an army of people that are willing to learn, and may even come to me and bring me deals.

J:
Absolutely.

Carol:
That’s right.

Max:
That’s how you look at. We’ve done deals. I’m doing a deal tomorrow making like 25,000 with somebody that is locally in my market.

Carol:
Isn’t that great? You’re out there and it’s just all self-perpetuating, right?

Max:
Yeah.

Carol:
You’re keeping yourself out in front of people. You’re helping people learn how to do this on their own. You’re changing lives, and in return, and it’s a byproduct, but it all just works very organically. It’s just people are, people continue feeding you deals. It’s like you’re putting good stuff out there, good stuff’s coming back to you, and it just keeps growing and snowballing and becoming bigger and better. Tell us more about your conference that you just had.

Max:
I set a goal this year to put on a conference, the largest wholesaling conference. There’s so many conferences about like apartment buying, single family rentals. I wanted to do something big. I wanted to put on the largest wholesaling conference. Not just because of, just to say I did the largest, but what would it feel like if we had 1,200 wholesalers, like-minded individuals, in a hotel for three days?

Max:
Just the atmosphere it created, we created new family members, we created all types of things where, I mean, we now, you could now go back to your prospective area where you live, where you now have a family of 1,200 individuals across the country that are in the same thing as you. We did that event, it was two and a half, three days. We had Gary V as the keynote speaker, which was awesome. We just met people, and changed some lives, and showed people how this works, and really helped scale their current business as well too.

Carol:
So fun, congratulations. Sounds like a huge success.

Max:
Yeah.

J:
Awesome. You now have a business, if I recall. I know your goal was $100,000 per month, and you’re doing that. You have, again, your data person. You have inbound person, outbound person. You now have somebody who handles your acquisitions and your dispositions, so actually working with buyers and sellers. How do you decide where to spend your time in the business? How do you decide what the highest and best use of your time is?

Max:
The highest and best time for what I do, I recently hired my older brother as my COO, so I could spend more time on the road and out doing things and generating and meeting people. My goal is not to be the biggest wholesaler in this state or this country, it’s not. It’s just not, that doesn’t make sense to me. I want to grow a billion dollar company, and the only way I can do that is going out and meeting other people. Now, it’s going to be in the real estate field, of course, I need to go out as a CEO and be able to generate more things, learn. I go to conferences to learn so I can bring that back to my team, so we can grow what we have, just, it’s just a snowball.

Max:
My job is make sure I get all the outside influence and bring it into my company and grow something. Finding new partnerships. Finding people that I can partner with to create things. Being in this business for a short time, not even three years, I see a lot of technology that needs to be developed, and I’ve linked with developers to where we created a business, to where we’re creating softwares and we’re creating tools that help real estate investors across the world. That’s, so out of wholesaling, the ATM machine, I’ve been able to create passive income. I’ve been able to actively go out and start new businesses. It’s my vehicle to being an entrepreneur, where I really have four businesses now, just from learning how to wholesale.

Carol:
That is fantastic. I want to touch on one more thing that I feel is … I was talking a little bit about just you’re building rapport and your relationship building and so on and so forth, that has been so successful in your business. I think another one of those, when we’re asking about the things in which you spend your time, it’s just your whole art of negotiation. Of course, that’s a little bit near and dear to our hearts, because we just recently released our book on negotiating real estate.

Max:
Awesome. I got to read it.

J:
I sent it to you.

Max:
Okay. Perfect, perfect.

Carol:
You could write the book. Oh my gosh. Are you kidding me? We were, as we were watching some of your videos and so on, actually, which I want you to talk near the end of this. I want you to tell people where they can go to watch them. It is absolutely awesome how you document yourself on YouTube doing full-on negotiations so that you can see, so that people can see how that really works, and really the art of negotiation and the skill behind it.

Carol:
Where, I want to know, where did that come from? How did you become such a good negotiator? Did it grow organically, did you have a specific experience that led you to become a good negotiator? Is it trial and error? Or what is it? What tips? Whatever. Tell these listeners something about negotiation, why it’s important in your business. A tip, whatever, because you are a stellar rockstar at it.

Max:
I appreciate that.

Carol:
I’m done now.

Max:
It did not come overnight. It’s something that is really trial and error. You learn some, so sales is pretty much the same across any industry. There’s some very principle, key foundations like listening more than you speak. Really trying to hear the customer, try to solve a problem. Those are some key foundations of what it is. Then you also got to have a hard line. Never be desperate when you’re selling or you’re buying anything. When you are desperate, it shows, it smells and people, it makes you very vulnerable.

Max:
Be honest. If the numbers just don’t work, it don’t work. People can appreciate that. That, “Hey, look. It’s a great house, just way too much for me.” “I mean, I can do this, but there’s no way I can do this, and I respect that.” Negotiation takes time. I say, put yourself and learn some key principles and it can be, you can learn how to sell cars or you learn how to go door-to-door for AT&T or whatever companies you want. Learning some key principles, and then really being a people person. It’s the difference of winning the deal is literally trying to understand what this person’s objective is. What are they really trying to get out of this negotiation?

J:
You’re solving a problem.

Max:
That’s it. “What is the problem? Can I meet you somewhere? Can we, let’s solve the problem that you actually want.” A lot of people say, “Hey, look. I want $100,000 for my house.” “Why? What are you going to do with it?” Then you start to break down the problem, and then you get to the underlying thing is, “Well, I need a new car, and I want to get a boat.” “Okay. What type of car? What type of boat?” These, and then you start to realize, “Well, you don’t need 100, you need 50.”

Carol:
“That’s all you really need. Let’s get you what you want, let’s get you what you want and I got a guy who’ll get it for you?

J:
You’re making the negotiation about them. It’s not about you. Too many people go into negotiations with this attitude, “I want, I need, I’m going to get.” It’s not about you.

Max:
No.

J:
If you give the other side what they want, what they need, what they’re going to get, it’ll come back to you. You’ll get what you want, but you need to focus on them. People like things to be about them, and if you go in with that attitude, “Give me what I want,” that’s going to come through, so you go in with the attitude, “I want to give you what you want,” and that’ll be paid off in reciprocation.

Max:
Never be afraid to walk away.

J:
Absolutely.

Carol:
Always walk away.

Max:
That’s it. Walk away.

Carol:
Just walk, and they always come back. Funny how that happens, right?

Max:
Exactly. That’s what I say it.

Carol:
It really does, it really does. What do you think, Jay? Is it time to do four more?

J:
I think we’re going to do the four more. Max Maxwell, we have four more questions for you. You ready?

Max:
I’m ready.

J:
What was the worst job you ever had, and what lessons did you learn from that job?

Max:
Ah, man. The worst job I ever had. It was a combination. This is going to be, sound a little cliché. I think the worst job I ever had was the United States Air Force.

J:
Really? Thank you for your service, by the way.

Carol:
Wow. Thank you.

Max:
But I enjoyed it. Did that make sense? That’s what I’m saying, it’s-

Carol:
It does. It’s the double-edge dichotomy thing going on.

Max:
Yup.

Carol:
Okay.

Max:
I enjoyed the travel, I loved the people I met, I loved the lessons it learned me but man, was it a terrible job. Jumping out of things, getting shot at, shooting things. It ain’t really that great of a job.

Carol:
When you look at it that way.

Max:
But it was fun.

Carol:
Excellent.

J:
You did that one for everybody else, not for yourself.

Max:
Correct.

Carol:
There you go.

J:
We thank you for that.

Carol:
My question is, what is the defining moment where you realized that you really had an entrepreneurial itch?

Max:
I think when I started, when I got jobs that I thought I wanted when I got out of the military. I was turning down offers from other companies because I had a top-secret security clearance. I was leaving like a 24, $25,000 a year job and turning down 60, $65,000 jobs to try something. I think that’s when I realized that, “Okay. I left this military for a reason. Let me fail my way to success.”

Max:
Really being on the job and seeing the problems. If you ever worked in corporate, you see problems that you just want to solve, and you can’t be quiet about it. When you go to your managers and the upper level and they’re like, “Shut up,” and you can’t, so it’s frustrating and you have to leave because you can’t sit and watch the problem just manifest in front of you.

J:
Okay. Max, there’s a lot of bad advice that I hear in the real estate world and the business world. Can you give me an example of some of the worst advice you’ve been given or that you’ve heard from other people with your real estate business or your business in general, and how you would correct that advice?

Max:
There’s a few. There’s a lot of, I think people misinterpret the, “Fake it ’til you make it” model.

J:
Love that. Yes.

Max:
If people take it as into, literally fake your presence, or what people think of you, that’s not what it means. It doesn’t mean, “Look like success before you are a success.” It means, “Believe you are successful, before you are successful. Do the things that successful people do, prior to you getting there.” Faking it and believing that you are there already, so when you have a conversation with somebody, you show that confidence of that you believe you’re there.

Max:
This, “Faking it ’til you’re making it,” it’s not saying, “Go buy a Mercedes because that’s what the top realtors drive.” Or it’s not, “Would top sales guys drive that?” It’s more of believing in yourself. Faking it, like understanding, say, “Yes.” Say, “Yes,” more than you say, “No,” is believing and faking it ’til you make it.

J:
I love that. I love that.

Carol:
That was a really good one, really good one. I have the fourth question. What is something, Max, that you’ve splurged on, but it was totally worth it?

Max:
A Lamborghini.

J:
Really?

Carol:
What?

Max:
Yeah.

J:
What kind of Lamborghini?

Max:
A Huracán.

J:
Ah.

Carol:
Nice.

J:
My nine-year-old’s going to be very, very jealous.

Carol:
What color is it?

Max:
Black.

Carol:
Sweet.

Max:
I don’t even talk about it.

J:
That’s awesome.

Carol:
Even better.

Max:
It was something that was on my wall as a kid, and it was something where I wanted to get it. It was nothing to do with, “I want to get it to show it off.” Because you don’t, nobody sees it. It’s not on Instagram, it’s not anywhere. It’s just there because I always wanted it. I don’t care if nobody ever knows I own it. I just wanted that.

J:
That’s great. We all need those signs or those reminders to ourselves that we’ve worked hard, we’ve earned it. It’s a good reminder that you need to get up tomorrow, and you have to keep going.

Max:
Yeah.

J:
Because the day you stop doing that, until you’ve generated that cash-flowing machine that’s passive income, until that day, that car can go away, or the next car’s not going to come, so it’s-

Max:
It’s a very dumb purchase. I mean, I could have bought a performing asset, but it was, I don’t know, I had to get rid of that itch.

Carol:
Something you wanted to do for you.

Max:
I got rid of the itch.

Carol:
Good for you. Okay, so that was the four, so here’s the more question. Where can people find out more about you?

Max:
I am, I’m all over the place. I’m very active on YouTube. I just hit 100,000 subscribers. I’m on Instagram. Just search Max Maxwell. There’s a few of us out there, but I pop up first on YouTube, on Instagram, on all those other places. Go follow me, please. Tell me that you followed me from this podcast we’re doing here. I like to respond to everybody when I’m on flights, but I just like to give, because the information that we have to us now, yes, it’s readily available, but a lot of people still don’t know that.

Max:
I’m trying to help other people change their family tree, like how I’ve changed mine. You don’t have to be in love with real estate or an entrepreneur, but get, do it so you can get what you actually want to do. You might get into real estate just so you can start your nonprofit. Whatever it is, but go out and change your family tree, because it’s up to us to do that, and nobody else.

Carol:
That’s phenomenal. Max, thank you so much for being here with us today. It’s been absolutely awesome talking with you.

Max:
I’m glad to be here, glad to be here. Thank you so much.

J:
Thanks, Max. We really appreciate it. Talk to you soon.

Max:
All right. Bye, bye.