Getting Into Flipping (Gettng Frustrated)

[Davis Sessums]

So I'm definitely a newbie to RE Investment.  My goal is to make money flipping that I can then put into long term buy and holds.  Seems simple right?  Well I have no money to invest on my own.  I'm cutting every single cost I can to save some up, but on a local government salary supporting a family it's hard.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, I'm actually doing pretty good, but it will take me a long time to save up even a modest down payment to combine with OPM or a hard money loan.  

I've tried wholesaling and sent out dozens of letters with no results.  I have started going to my local investor meetings and I've met a lot of awesome people and one of the lessons that gets repeated is they tell us "If the deal is good, the money will find you."  Well I've found some awesome deals through local wholesalers.  I know these are good deals simply because the numbers work.  I've read J. Scott's books, I've studied the formulas, I've practiced them on every "deal" I can find, I lean toward the conservative side of estimating, so I know the numbers work.  Back to the money issue though, I don't have any of my own to throw at the deal and from reading posts on here, investors want you to put some of your money in the deal so you have some skin in the game too.  

My thought process is to approach some investors with these deals, with all the numbers laid out and say hey I'm eager, I want to learn, I want to help you make money.  In return for finding and bringing you the deal (even though I found it through a wholesaler) is a small fee (6 to 10%) of your profits and the opportunity to shadow you on the deal so I can learn from it.  I'm a big believer in respecting the "money" so to speak so I'm not asking for insanely high profit shares like 50%, especially when the only thing I'm really bringing to the table is proof that the deal I've laid out is a good one.  Hell I'm even willing to offer up this deal for free the first time just get some street cred so to speak and prove to them that I can do future deals with the above nominal profit sharing.  

So my question is, am I on the right train of thought with how to approach investors to partner up with, or I'm I going to get laughed right out of door?

TLDR: Can I act as a middleman between a wholesaler with an awesome deal and a seasoned investor in return for a small share of the profits and the opportunity to learn from the investor?

[Andrew Johnson]

@Davis Sessums I'm not saying your strategy *won't* work but just reading your post there are a few things that you may way to consider:

1.) "Dozens" means nothing when it comes to sending out letters.  Try hundreds of them and then keep doing follow-up mailers to hope you catch someone at the right time.  It's the same thing with cold-calling, you get a higher response rate with your 6th call than with your 3rd.  Don't ask me why but that's how it sometimes bears out.  If you stopped at "dozens" you didn't even give yourself a chance to be successful.

2.) If you're just recycling over wholesalers deals you have to ask yourself what value you're adding. It doesn't take much (any) efforts to get on a distribution list. Presumably the wholesaler has put together their theoretical rehab cost and ARV. So if I'm an investor I have to ask myself what the additive value of Davis is. Are your better at estimating rehab costs than Wholesaler 1? Are you more accurate with ARV than Wholesaler 2? Are you going to vet 100 wholesale deals and bring them the top 1%? There has to be something there.

3.) And, not to nitpick, but I'd hesitate to use "proof" in any discussion when you haven't done a bunch of deals. Now maybe if you have a message around risk-adjusting out 90% of the wholesale deals you have a value proposition. But if I'm an investor with capital I'm going to want to know what you did to arrive at your conclusion. Anyone can mess around a little bit with assumptions (conservative or not) and make a spreadsheet pop out a nice ROI.

It sounds to me that what you need is an investor with money but no time to vet the wholesale deals.  What the next-level of analysis is worth to that person is something that I'm not sure of.  My assumption is that most active cash-buyers are already on the wholesaler distribution lists.  Maybe I'm wrong.