All Forum Posts by: Chris Gould

Update, spoke to @Andrew Postell over at Guaranteed Rate, he let me know that my strategy could work as long as I acquire the property with a mortgage and ensure the mortgage gets recorded as a lien against the property. Love BP for helping me right the right answers! Creativity people!

I'm acquiring a property at 65% of ARV using a private mortgage (secured against the property) and then want to immediately refinance the property using a conventional mortgage through a normal bank to pay off the private mortgage. Only issue is that I'm being told I can only get a refinance loan for 80% of the purchase price. Because my private mortgage is for 100% of my acquisitions cost, this means I have to leave 20% in the deal. Is there some way around this??

We're absolutely still buying right now. Numbers change but motivated sellers will need help in all market conditions. Sticking to my numbers and don't breaking my own rules to sneak one in is how we avoid picking bad deals. Not getting needy for deals is super important too!

 Thanks Joe! I could barely proof it because it was so long haha

 Hey John! Good to see you on here. Thanks for the comment and your business. We like working with you :)

 Hey Alexander, I "started" dabbling in 2016. Got more serious in 2017 and still didn't quite my job until 2019. 

Most of us get into this business to make money. I know what you're thinking...duh....but bear with me for a few more sentences. We have other motives but money is the key that unlocks everything else. And to make money in real estate you need to do deals. If you’ve gotten your mind right, you’re also very excited to do deals. The problem is, if left unchecked, your extreme desire to do deals can have a negative effect on your conversations with sellers because you can subtly become desperate. 

Especially when I started, I was willing to do anything to get out of my corporate job and make my dreams a reality. I was so disgusted with my situation that each deal felt like a glimmer of hope in my eventual freedom. I had a very, very strong purpose. Unfortunately, this resulted in me getting very desperate to do deals.

If you’re not currently dating, think back to when you were. Remember the people who seemed desperate to be in a relationship? Even if they were attractive and a good match for you on paper, if they came across as desperate, weren't you turned off?  Neediness can be very repelling. For me, it made me very suspicious. Why are you so desperate? What are you hiding? I don't trust people who seem desperate. There seems to be a hidden agenda. 

Psychological Science actually did a study on this back in 2007. They found that during a speed dating event, if a person had low standards and was open to dating basically anyone, even if that was not verbally communicated, their counterparts could sense this and rated them lower on the attractiveness scale. In short, desperation is communicated whether you explicitly say it or not. You must purge yourself of desperation AND still chase deals vigorously. 

The distinction is that you must have constraints that you operate within. Within those constraints, do whatever it takes to get the deal done. I once called a Popeye's Chicken and asked the employee to walk down the road to knock on a seller's door because the seller had went dark on me. I paid the Popeye's employee $50 and we ended up closing the deal (the seller had gotten a new phone, moved to Florida and lost my number). 

I realize my connection between desperation and repulsion may seem harsh but it's just science. Don't shoot the messenger! Conversations with sellers are the same way. If you come across as needy or desperate it’s a huge turn off to sellers. It will also make you compromise on things like price. You can take a potential good deal and once the seller sniffs your desperation, don’t be surprised when they try and get you to come up on price, eating into your profits.

We combat this by telling people up front that we are not a good fit for everyone. We have a business to run with certain protocols and procedures. We can’t just change things willy-nilly to accommodate the seller. This doesn’t mean we don’t try to accommodate them within the constraints we’ve set but we don’t completely break our process to appease them.

For example, I had a seller that wanted to sell us his house but he wasn’t truly motivated. The comps were weird so I wasn’t totally confident it would be a deal either way. He wouldn’t sign a contract unless it was 100% guaranteed it was going to close. I told him I needed to get funding approval first and the deal would be contingent upon that. He wanted me to get funding approval before he signed anything. I told him that’s not how it works but he was willing to walk away at that point. I was desperate so I agreed I would bring it to my investors without a contract in place (BIG NO-NO!). After calling around to my investors, one of them agreed to walk the property. After his inspection he told me he would take the deal. I called the seller back and said I was ready to move forward at his asking price. While I was running around to find an investor, he had talked to his son who is a realtor and had decided to just list it because he could get more that way. I had to break the news to the buyer and he was furious that I had wasted his time without having a contract in place.

Don’t break your process to appease the seller. Stick to your guns and you’ll be surprised how many folks come back around and agree to your process once you’re willing to walk away.

This is an excerpt from a book I'm writing a book called "The Wholesaling Handbook." If you wanted to get notified once it's available, sign up here. 

Happy Wholesaling!

This is the story of how I went from cold calling in a closet to owning a wholesaling business that did just under one million dollars in net revenue last year. Hopefully you can identify with some part of my story and if you’re not at my level yet, you’ll be encouraged by how I got here. This is the emotional journey I went through and the key business decisions I made along the way.

I wake up around 6am, even though I have no meetings and can sleep in until whenever I’d like. I meditate for 25 minutes, let out my dog, make my coffee and then play piano. From there, I can do whatever I want. I have one meeting per week on Monday. The meeting is 90 minutes long and is led by my “Integrator,” Julie. She prepares all the numbers for me to review and then we discuss issues within the business, create an action plan around them and wrap up. I can work from anywhere in the world. I only need to work a few hours a week. My real estate business runs without me. If I go on vacation for a month, the business keeps running. If I’m sick, the business keeps running. Nothing goes through me. Everyone is autonomous. I am free.

In 2021, my company earned just under $1,000,000 in net revenue and I personally pocketed about $325,000. When you consider that I only work about 4 hours a week, that breaks down to an hourly rate of just over $1,500 per hour. It’s taken me 5 years to get here and it was worth every second of effort, pain, fear, and risk. I’m not telling you this to brag, I’m telling you this to excite you and because it is possible for you too.

First of all, I have started and given up on more ‘ventures’ than I can count.

To name a few: lawn mowing business, marketing agency, video production company, acting career, window washing, SEO services, improv comedy, music production, painting, drawing, guitar, blogging, and photography.

Some I’ve dabbled in as hobbies, some were full blown business ventures that I attempted to grow and failed. But each one brought me closer to my current business: Virtual Wholesaling. You never know how the dots will connect when you look back. You just have to keep moving forward and trust that it will all make sense eventually.

Growing up, not a single person in my family had financial freedom, or even financial abundance for that matter. I grew up around a “grind” mentality, and my family members seemed to spend all the money they made. No one ever purchased a rental property. I never heard anyone talking about stocks or investments. You went to work, made your money, and then enjoyed your life with your family. That is fine but it left many of the family without a safety net. Financial scarcity seemed around every corner. There was an underlying sense that if a few things went wrong, we’d all be in trouble.

My parents spent every dollar they had on the four kids in our family. They sacrificed and overspent to make us happy. I am grateful for their intentions but I knew that I wanted something different when I grew up. I didn’t want my kids to feel guilty for ordering a soda at dinner because we really didn’t have the money to go out in the first place. It was very confusing. I was happy to eat out, but there was always a side dish of guilt that came along with it.

We moved into a nice house in Florida when I was a sophomore in high school. It was massive, around 5,000 sq.ft. and I remember thinking “how are we going to afford this?” And yet Mom and Dad seemed to be doing okay, although we heard whispers that there wasn’t enough money. It scared me.

I did what everyone told me to do and went off to college, thinking I would become a lawyer and make my family proud. The housing market crash of 2008 came down on us like a hammer. My parents had to stop paying the mortgage and I could feel the stress radiating through the home every time I visited. This was traumatic for me and helped shape my belief system. I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to have so much money that I’d never have to stress about it, ever.

Back in college, I half-assed every class, partied way too much and scraped by with a 3.2 GPA. After graduation, I bounced back and forth from Los Angeles to New York City, doing odd jobs. I catered events attended by Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey. I sold solar panels door-to-door. I even worked at a movie theater for one day.

I didn’t get a “real job” until I was 25 years old. I had scraped and struggled along until then and I was just exhausted from the transient nature of the “gigs” I used to support myself up until that point . The stability of corporate life felt like a breath of fresh air. I quickly rose up in my company, but there was a gnawing sensation that I was destined for more. The inefficiency of Corporate America was maddening. I’d ask my boss, “Why are we doing it this way? It would be so much more efficient if we made this small change.”

I was frequently met with “Please just do what I’m asking you” or “Can you stop asking so many questions, I don’t know why” or “Why won’t you just do it the way I’m telling you to do it?”

I quickly realized that I was not destined to work in this type of environment for very long. I received a bonus of $6,000 and I thought I was rich. I’d never had more than $2,000 in my bank account up until this point. I largely lived paycheck to paycheck, drinking away the weekends to avoid the overwhelming sensation that my life was slipping away from me. I was a ‘talker’ not a ‘do-er’ and it was driving me crazy.

I tried to look up properties that I could buy using my $6,000 bonus as a down payment but I was living in Los Angeles and couldn’t even buy a shack. Additionally, I was not making enough from my corporate job to support any kind of significant mortgage payment.

I called my Mom’s friend, a realtor named Tracy Greenfield. She told me about this thing called wholesaling. “Go check it out” she said. And I listened.

I started reading online about normal wholesaling (not virtual). I remember watching ‘gurus’ talk about how you could make $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 on a single deal. All you had to do was drive to the house, take pictures, sign a contract and then assign the contract to a buyer for a fee. It sounded easy enough but I worked a 9-5 and driving anywhere in LA was a nightmare. This model simply wouldn’t work for me.

I kept digging and found out that there was an even better version of wholesaling, Virtual Wholesaling. Now this REALLY seemed too good to be true. “Work from anywhere, even a beach in another country. Never go to a single in-person appointment and still make tens of thousands per deal.” I wanted to know more but all of my life experience up until that point had shown me that this must be a scam. I kept researching for a few days as my head spun with doubts. Here are some of the thoughts that crossed my mind during this time (and stayed around for the first year):

This is a scam

This is too good to be true

This must be illegal

I could never do this

It sounds too easy

I don’t have enough money to get started

I’m not smart enough

I need a real estate license

What if I mess up?

I’m going to get sued

I’m too lazy

I always give up on my business ideas

Everything I’ve done in the past has failed

It pains me to even write those things now because I’ve learned that they are all so totally untrue. But I had not built up my self-confidence yet. I didn’t have any true “wins” under my belt. I really doubted myself, and it makes me sad to think back on where I was mentally. The blessing was that my desire to get out of Corporate America was stronger than my lack of belief in myself.

Tony Robbins talks about decision-making and how you need the pain of staying the same to be greater than the fear of failure. I knew that my life would be slipping away from me if I didn’t take massive action towards achieving my goals, so despite my fears, I kept going.

I was watching a lot of videos by Sean Terry and he seemed like a good teacher. I went deeper into his educational material and found one of his courses, but it was $750. This was a huge investment for me at the time. Before I got to the payment screen, they prompted me to buy a secondary course on Virtual Wholesaling at a discount, another $250. I gulped down my fear and bought the second course.

I immediately became obsessed and couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up at 4:30am to continue watching the course, soaking up as much information as I could. I did all of the activities he suggested for me. I tried to not cut any corners.

What I learned is that you can hire a “boots-on-the-ground” to do a lot of the work for you and just pay them a commission once the deal is completed. This is what allows you to do deals without physically going to meet with a seller. Easier said than done…

I bought a web domain “homebuyer.cash” and built a website on Wix.com for under $10. I copied the website of another wholesaler almost word for word.

Following Sean’s instruction, I signed up for Google Ads. I set a budget for $5 per day, and set my target market for the entire US. I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing but I was taking massive action. When someone would search “need to sell my house fast” into google, sometimes my ad would pop up, they’d go to my site and fill out a form.

I put my personal cell phone on all of the Google Ads so when someone called in, my phone rang. But remember, I was working in an office from 9-5 every day. When I saw a call coming in from a number I didn’t know, I would go take a “bathroom break” and find a deserted corner of the office. I’d open a new note on my iPhone and start asking them questions about their home, which I made up on the spot. This went on for a few weeks and was exciting but very stressful.

I eventually found a seller who wanted to sell me his house...in Little Rock, Arkansas. I have never been to Arkansas and I don’t plan on ever going there. Honestly, I had to pull up a US map to even remember where the heck Arkansas is. While I was scared, I still proceeded since I had just learned the general process from my course.

I used free tools like Zillow and Redfin to come up with a home value, asked him some questions about the condition of the home, made him an offer, and he accepted it. I didn’t know about DocuSign at the time so I literally mailed him a contract with an overnight envelope inside for him to send it back once signed. I had a clause in the contract that said I could assign it to someone else If I wanted to, which I learned from my course. This is what would allow me to sell the deal to another investor once I had the property under contract. He sent me back a signed contract a few days later.

Next, I needed to find an investor to assign the deal to. I got on Facebook and started reaching out to investors on the local real estate page. After failing to find anyone even remotely interested, I posted the deal on Craigslist and found a very sweet family who wanted to buy the house. The problem was, they only had enough money for a 3.5% down payment and an FHA loan. Shouldn't be a problem, right? WRONG!

You can't wholesale a cash contract to an FHA buyer but whoops, I didn't know that. The transaction dragged on for months and months. I even offered to let the seller out of the deal, multiple times, but he wanted to press on and just get it done. I felt so bad that I told him that I would reduce my fee from $7,000 down to $3,000. I was racked with guilt that I had committed to do something and wasn't able to execute in the way I had promised. It was a terrible feeling and I considered giving up completely.

I had to jump through hoops for weeks and weeks trying to get the deal done. Ultimately, I had to get the seller and my buyer to sign a direct agreement, with the seller signing an addendum saying he’d pay me a fee for my services. It was an absolute nightmare. After 4 months, the deal finally closed and I received a wire for $3,000. Considering the amount of time and energy I had invested, I probably could’ve made more working at McDonald’s over that time period.

But now I had some money in my bank account to play with. I put out more Google Ads and eventually got another house under contract. This time, I made sure I was only working with cash buyers. I found an investor who gave me a cash offer but it was almost $30k below the price of my contract. I had miscalculated the repairs that would be needed to get the home back up to liveable condition and I had to go back to the seller to renegotiate the price. Luckily I had a good reason because there was massive flood damage in the home. She accepted the lower offer and after signing with my investor, I was set to make a $5k fee. I thought I was going to be rich!

Once I submitted everything to the title company to complete the transaction, I learned that the seller had not gone through the proper processes when she inherited the house. It was going to take months before the deal could close, and only if the seller completed many tasks on her own. Since she was not very organized, I had little faith in her following through.

My dream of being a business owner and quitting my corporate job was slipping away from me. I was bummed out and decided that this wholesaling thing wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t quite a scam but definitely too good to be true. I turned off my Google Ads and decided to focus back on my corporate job. I was working a big deal, actually the biggest sale in my department’s history, and I felt like it would yield greater returns than this real estate dream.

I gave up for about 6 months. I worked my *** off to close this huge deal at my corporate job. When it closed, I won salesperson of the year, getting a “big” bonus and a trip to Australia. I was stoked, I had made it. Or so I thought…

On pay day, when all my commission and bonus was set to hit my account, I excitedly logged onto my banking app, preparing to see my life changing check dropped in. It was $9,000 after taxes. Hold on…I worked my *** off for 6 months, did the biggest deal in company history, won the award for best salesperson and it only yielded me $9,000? I had bigger dreams than this and it was a reality check: ‘you’ll never become wealthy working at this company.’ It’s when I realized that I need to get the lion’s share of my efforts, not pass them on to managers upon managers above me.

Shortly thereafter, I got an email from the title company that was handling the closing of my second wholesale deal. By the grace of God, the seller had jumped through all the hoops necessary and my $5,000 had just been wired into my account. Holy ****! It felt like a miracle at the time.

I had spent about a month, part time, working on this wholesale deal that yielded me $5,000 and I spent 6 months grinding full time at my corporate job to yield me $9,000. The math made it very clear: if I wanted financial freedom, real estate was the route I needed to follow.

I was contacted by a real estate coaching company and they told me I’d been selected to “apply” for their coaching program. Looking back, that was just an amazing marketing technique but it piqued my interest. I would get 3 months of 1v1 coaching from an established wholesaler every week and access to their “proprietary software.” The catch was that it would cost me $7k.

This was truly the turning point for me. I had two choices: stay in my comfort zone or take a leap of faith. Life is made up of these defining moments. I remember standing in my living room in New York City at the time when I told the salesperson that I wanted to move forward with the investment.

This was my ‘crossing over’ moment, when I finally put my money where my mouth is. Putting up so much money made me feel like there was no way I could bail out on my commitment. This wasn’t a commitment to go to college, paid for by student loans that felt like monopoly money. This was my hard earned dollars that I had scraped and scrounged to accumulate.

The coaching came with an online video library in addition to the 1v1 sessions with my coach. I watched every single video and did every single exercise they suggested including writing in extreme detail about my perfect day once I’d “made it”, making an audio recording of it and then listening to it every day.

I wanted to work with one of the virtual wholesaler coaches that were featured on their site but I found out they were “unavailable” for some reason. I started feeling like I had been scammed. I decided to wait for one of the virtual coaches to be available but after weeks of waiting and none becoming available I decided to just go with one of the normal wholesaler coaches, meaning they did wholesaling but in their home market.

The first coach I had didn’t have a plan. He was just making it up as he went. I remember being 30 minutes into a call and him saying “alright well I don’t know what else we have to talk about.” I wanted every single minute of value I had paid for and I wasn’t getting it. I also didn’t have direct access to him, so if I needed immediate counsel on how to handle a situation, I had to email him and wait to get a response usually a few days later, and by then the deal was already mishandled.

At this point I was still doing nationwide Google Ads as my primary source of marketing. Every time I signed a new contract in a new city, I had to find a new person to take pictures of the home, and new local buyers to that market. Without the tools and knowledge necessary, this was a massive undertaking. My coach recommended that I pick one market. When I asked him which one to pick, he told me that it was up to me to figure out.

I found an article online of the top 100 cities in the US for flipping houses and put them all into a spreadsheet. Then I logged on to the software that came with my course and searched each city to see how many cash transactions and vacant homes were in each location. My thinking was, if there are a lot of cash transactions, there must be a lot of cash buyers. And if there are a lot of vacant homes, there must be a lot of people willing to sell, since the homes are just sitting there empty. Honestly, I just made it up. Once my research was complete, I just picked the market with the highest numbers of cash transactions and vacant homes.

I was feeling unhappy with my initial coach so I wrote to the administrator of the course and asked for a new instructor. This is when I was introduced to Jerry Green. I immediately felt a connection with him. I remember he called me “dude” a lot and I thought that was cool. He wasn’t performing for me, he was just giving me super helpful, targeted advice. He also gave me his phone number and said I could call him anytime I needed something. This was a game changer. I now had someone to give me guidance in all of these new and delicate situations I was finding myself in.

I gained as much knowledge as possible during my three month course but eventually it came to an end. While it was helpful, it didn’t feel like spending another $7,000 would be worth it, so I moved on and didn’t renew my coaching. Luckily, I still had Jerry’s number and could call him if I was in desperate need of guidance.

I had become very active on Facebook during this time because I needed people to do various tasks for me in exchange for a piece of the deal once it was completed. After trying to hire random people from Craigslist, I finally met a guy named Joe from the local Facebook group. He agreed to go to appointments for me, take pictures, get contracts, and also find buyers for the deal. This sounded amazing! I didn’t have any buyers myself and this solved so many problems for me.

Now that I had someone local I could trust, I ordered about $2,000 worth of direct mail which my coaches had told me was the best way to get leads. I had a handful of leads come in and one of them was really good. The prospect was willing to part with both houses at a discount. I looked at the comparable home sales and felt like the prices he wanted left me with enough room to make some money. These seemed really promising.

It turned out that Joe only had one “buyer” on his list, and it was the cheapest guy in town. This guy paid less than anyone else, by far. So when Joe shared the deal with him, He wanted it at a massive discount, well below the price I had it under contract for. I tried to renegotiate but the seller was spooked and I lost the deal.

A few days later, I had more leads come in and set up appointments for Joe but when I called him to confirm the times, he didn’t answer. I was confused for the first couple days. Then I was mad. This guy was messing up my process and now I had to call and apologize to my prospects and reschedule appointments. He finally called me a week later and said he had been in jail for “accidentally” stealing a woman’s purse at a bar. I needed to find a new boots-on-the-ground.

I found another local wholesaler, David, who was also new to the game but he had his real estate license and access to the MLS. He gave me access which allowed me to run comps more easily and quickly make offers. We agreed to split the profits 50/50 on every deal. I would try my best to sign-up the deal over the phone. If I couldn't get it signed, he'd go in person to meet with the seller, take pictures, and then market the deal to buyers.

I didn’t want to risk spending $2,000 again on direct mail, so I bought a subscription to a cold calling software for $79 a month and purchased some phone numbers for prospects. I had moved to New York City at the time and had a tiny closet with no windows as my office. There was a small sky light in the ceiling that was my sole source of natural light. I learned how to use the dialing software and committed myself to calling for a minimum of one hour a day, after working my normal job. I remember in the dead of summer, sweat my *** off in the little office, calling prospects and trying to get them to sell their houses to me. It was character building for sure but I knew it was unsustainable. I didn’t have the drive to cold call after a full day working my corporate gig, and I found myself skipping my mandatory one hour sessions. I needed to hire someone to put in a few hours a day.

I found a website called UpWork where you can hire freelancers to do random gigs for you. I started by hiring a woman from the Philippines but her accent scared people off so I had to let her go after a few weeks. Then I found a guy who actually lived in the market I was targeting. He had a poor rating on the site but I overlooked it and hired him anyway. He had experience in cold calling and seemed nice enough. Initially, he was producing several leads per day but it quickly fell off to where he was only sending me a few per week. I called Jerry Green and told him what was happening. He instructed me to monitor his calls which I didn’t even know was a feature on the calling software.

After reviewing some of his calls, I was shocked to find out that he was being rude to prospects and then once they hung up, he would stay on the line to make it look like he was putting in a lot of time when in reality, he wasn’t even working. I fired him immediately.

I called my sister to complain about my problem finding a good cold caller. She suggested that I hire my aunt, Marilyn. She was working at a company she hated and Lauren thought she’d be open to the idea of putting in a few hours cold calling for me. I asked Marilyn if she’d be interested and she agreed. She learned the system quickly and now I had someone reliable to generate leads for me. I no longer had to put in hours of tedious work after my corporate gig was finished.

The relationship with David worked well for a while but he eventually tired of constantly driving around the city to appointments. Over the four months we worked together, we probably made about $25,000, which we split. He decided it was not worth his time and ended our agreement. I was in need of someone ASAP.

Luckily, I had heard about a young kid, Nathan, who was only 23 years old. He had allegedly done more than 100 deals over the past year. I sent him a message on Facebook and proposed that I would bring him leads if he could help me close them and we’d split the profits 50/50. He agreed.

I sent him some leads I had been working and he quickly got them under contract, found buyers and got us paid. Within two weeks, I had $10,000 in my pocket. I felt confident that this guy was dependable and wanted to pour gas on the fire.

I increased the number of hours Marilyn was working and ordered another batch of direct mail, all at my sole cost. Leads started coming in more consistently and Nathan landed us a deal that netted us $13,000 each. I was thrilled. I ordered more mail, again at my cost. We did a few more deals, but it seemed like the money I made was gone too quickly.

I crunched the numbers and realized that because I was paying for Marilyn, all of the software we needed, and the direct mail, Nathan was actually making 50% more than me. I was shocked.

I had still been talking with Jerry Green sporadically and upon hearing about my situation, he invited me to his event in Tennessee. Several wholesalers would attend and each would present about their business and then get feedback from Jerry and the rest of the group. I agreed to go and paid him $2,000 for my ticket. When I presented, they told me I needed to have Nathan split all of my costs immediately. They told me the agreement was unfair and that I would never be able to truly grow while giving away 50% of my profits AND paying all the expenses.

I went home and called Nathan, explaining that he was making 50% more than me because I was paying all the expenses. He agreed to split Marilyn’s commissions with me and split the cost of direct mail.

We continued in this way for about a year, making steady progress, learning from our mistakes and generally improving overall. I convinced him to invest in John Martinez’s sales training course which we all completed. But the problem was that I wanted more structure and accountability and he wanted to do his own thing. We had started as equal partners but my push for accountability felt to him like being bossed around.

I wanted to grow so I hired Jerry to be my coach full time, which cost me about $1,200 a month at the time. Nathan didn’t think it was necessary so he wasn’t going to help me pay for it but he sure as hell benefitted from everything I was learning. We bickered and fought for months upon months about him not doing all of the organizational tasks I saw as necessary to move our business forward. We were making some money but not a lot.

Moving on

I was still employed at my corporate gig at this time. I had become the highest seniority level at the company and had also learned to get all of my work done in about 10 hours per week. But with each passing day, doing the song-n-dance of Corporate America started to feel like my soul was being sucked from my body. The endless pointless meetings, pretending to care about company wide announcements, having to sell products that I didn’t find valuable at all. It was becoming unbearable.

I had moved about an hour away from the company’s headquarters and was mostly working from home. My boss called me and said that I needed to start coming into the office more, that the other employees felt it was unfair that I only came in one day per week and I got paid more than anyone else. “We need you in the office, you improve the culture when you’re here.” Fair enough, but my job wasn’t to improve culture, my job was to make sales which I was doing.

I was angry with my boss and the upper management of the company but looking back, I wasn’t really mad at them, I was mad at myself for not stepping up and quitting my job. I had been encouraged by the other investors in my coaching group to quit my job and do real estate full time but I was scared. I asked my parents and they suggested that I continue with my corporate job since it was stable. “What about medical insurance?” they’d say to me.

I had a breakthrough during the weekly coaching call with Jerry. One of the guys said “if you quit your job, and totally fail at real estate, could you get your job back or find another job with similar pay?” The answer was yes to both. “Well, then what do you have to risk? The worst thing that happens is you go right back to where you are now. It doesn’t seem that risky to me.”

A lightbulb flashed on in my mind; he was right. What did I really have to lose? I made a list of the pros and cons of quitting. Here’s what the list said:

Stay at Corporate Job:

1. Consistent paycheck
2. Healthcare
3. $100,000 base pay
4. Less pressure

Quit Job, Real Estate Full Time:

1. Fulfillment
2. Unlimited earning potential
3. Make my own schedule
4. Be my own boss
5. Work from anywhere
6. Focus on building family empire

When I stepped back and looked at what I was leaving behind, it was crystal clear, I needed to leave my comfort zone. I needed to quit my job. I went into work the next day and asked to speak to the VP of Sales. I told him that I needed to do the real estate thing full time or else I’d regret it for the rest of my life. He asked “is there anything we could do to make you stay?”

“I appreciate the offer but no, I have to do this.”

I said good-bye to everyone at the company, drove home and that was the last time I went into the office which I had called home for 4 years. I was free but everything was now on my back. Either I’d fail or succeed and it was up to me. When I had the safety net of my corporate salary, a bad month of wholesaling didn’t matter that much. Now, a few bad months could put me out of business completely. I was determined to make it work at all costs.

Rehabbing

It was heading into winter and we had three deals that were not moving, Nathan couldn’t find investors to buy them from us. His proposed solution was to rehab them ourselves and make the money that we were “giving away” to our buyers. It felt like we were stuck so I agreed. Plus, he assured me that we would only have to put about $10,000 into each house. So began my rehabbing nightmare.

Nathan hired some random contractor who didn’t know what he was doing. He quoted us $13,000 to completely renovate our house and said it would only take 3 weeks. Fast forward four months later and $30,000 in renovations, and the project was still not completed. The stress of managing the rehab removed our focus from the wholesale deals and those stopped completely.

Being the geniuses we were (hint: sarcasm), not only were we stuck in one terrible rehab, we had also taken on two others at the same time. These two were the same story as the first one, we couldn’t find an investor so we bought it ourselves. Here’s a tip: if no one else in the whole city wants to buy your deal, then don’t buy it yourself!

All of the projects dragged on for months. We finally got them all listed around the same. One went in and out of contract three times before it finally closed. Meanwhile, we were paying a crazy high interest rate to our private investor who had funded the purchase of all the homes.

When they all finally closed, six months later, I calculated our profits. I made $13,000 on one, $8,000 on the other, and $132 on the last one. That’s an average of $7,000 per deal, the same as my average wholesale deal. The only difference is that the flips took SIX MONTHS while my wholesale deals took TWO WEEKS.

This is what shocked me awake into the true beauty of wholesaling. Yes, maybe you make a bit less through wholesaling, but you are in and out of the deal way more quickly. For example, if it took me six months to complete each rehab and I only netted $7,000, that’s a day rate of $38. For a two week wholesale deal that I made $7,000, I’d have a day rate of $500. That’s a 13x greater return for my efforts in wholesaling. I vowed to never do a virtual rehab ever again.

Shortly after this, I was totally burned out. I was tired of fighting with Nathan about how I wanted to grow the business. I wanted to end the relationship with him but I was afraid. I made the mistake of allowing him to keep the entire buyer’s list without sharing it with me. That meant if I broke off our relationship, I wouldn’t be able to immediately market to buyers. I’d have to build my owner buyers list. This freaked me out.

I labored over the idea of leaving him for a few months and then finally, the pain was too great. He refused to comply with where I wanted to go. I called Jerry and he told me that our problem was that we have two visionaries. It was a two headed monster. There was not clear leadership. Everything was a joint decision. And neither of us was organized enough to gain traction and really start moving the business forward. I practiced a hundred times how I was going to break off my partnership with him. I was so nervous about how he’d respond.

When the time finally came, I told him that I didn’t want to continue sending marketing with him and I was going to try and do my own thing for a while. He totally understood and seemed cool about everything. I was shocked. I had built up this moment of leaving the partnership to be this massive gut-wrenching decision. But in reality, he understood and wasn’t mad. This was my first big lesson in “letting people down.” I put myself through so much anguish leading up to the moment for fear of the response and once it arrived, it wasn’t even that big of a deal.

Going forward, my plan was to have my photographer go to houses whenever we had an interested buyer. I’d have to rebuild my team around this new process. I no longer had Nathan to run around the city whenever we needed something completed. Previously, I could rely on Nathan driving out and saving the day. Now I had to be very strategic.

I hired on my youngest sister Jennifer to work part time doing sales. I also hired a virtual assistant (VA) from the Phillipines and a cold caller from Houston who was friends with Marilyn. (Note: NEVER hire someone just because they're friends with one of your employees, it makes firing them way more complicated.) I figured, if I hire several low skill employees it would equal one high skilled employee. WRONG. Hiring one B player brings everyone down and having a team of B players actually makes you a C team.

I quickly fired the VA and the cold caller because they were not the right fit and I basically didn't even interview them. I essentially would hire anyone who would work for me during this time. What an absolute mistake. Managing bad employees is way worse than having no one on your team at all. It was an amazing lesson I learned but it had cost me big time and I was on the edge of going out of business.

With less than $20,000 left in my bank account, I had to get back involved and start putting deals together. Luckily, I put together a deal that brought in just over $20,000. We had a little breathing room but another few months like this and I would be out of business.

Marilyn had acquired a package deal of six houses around this time and I knew this was my last opportunity to make significant revenue before things got scary. I told Jerry my situation and he suggested I go to Indianapolis, hire a boots-on-the-ground, and get the business back on track. When I arrived, I had one interview lined up with a guy in his 70’s. He was the only one willing to take a risk working for a start-up struggling business. I’m grateful that he took the risk on us but again, I just hired the first person willing to work for me. I had this underlying belief that anyone could be trained into a good employee. That is absolutely not true.

During the two weeks that I was in Indianapolis, I got a call from my oldest sister Julie. She had just read ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad.’

“I get what you’re doing” she said to me, “and I want to be a part of it.”

It was a divine moment. Julie always had a knack for keeping things organized and she is a tremendous leader, which is exactly what I needed because I am not organized and I don’t like having people depend on me every single day. She was always the captain of the team or the President of the club. I’d believed in her greatness since childhood but I never thought we’d work together. This call felt like my chance to level-up but bringing on two employees at the same time felt overwhelming, beyond my capacity.

I asked what was the minimum she could take to start with me. She told me she’d be willing to take a $20k pay cut to come work for me but it was still more than I thought I could afford. I needed to make a big move if I was going to make this business a success and it felt like this was my opportunity. I remember proposing a mostly commission compensation plan, which was very safe for me. I’ll never forget what she said, “Do you want to keep hiring three low paid idiots at a time or do you want to just hire one smart person?” She was right, I needed to stop cheaping out on my biggest asset, my people.

I told her that I’d hire her at her minimum required salary and give her a small signing bonus. We drafted up an employment letter and she began the following week. This was the best decision I’ve ever made in my business. I finally hired the right person, in the right seat, and paid them well enough that they’d want to stay. This was my turning point and my biggest risk. I was learning to let go and trust the process. This is when I went Pro.

As soon as I hired Julie, I handed her a copy of “Traction” and told her we were going to implement this. Traction is a book that describes the EOS Model, or Entrepreneurial Operating System. I didn’t have the bandwidth before to implement this system but with Julie on board, I could finally start doing the organizational things I knew needed to make the business consistent. She would be my “Integrator.”

Every great business that has ever existed had a Visionary/Integrator relationship of some sort. Walt Disney, Roy Disney. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. Bill Gates, Paul Allen. Shrek, Donkey. They all had complementary skills. That’s a huge mistake I see so many entrepreneurs make. They go into business with someone who is exactly like them and they have overlapping skills.

We quickly implemented EOS and started looking at our business in a new way. We broke everything down into six categories and used those as buckets to simplify our understanding of the business. The categories are: Vision, Traction, Issues, People, Data and Process.

Now that I was not running everything, I was able to off-load the most draining tasks I was still conducting. This was when I really started coming out of the business and started working on the business. I knew that we didn’t have long to get everyone up and running. While I had a solid team, the payroll was a big cost and I couldn’t survive for many months without bringing in revenue.

At this point, I had Julie as the Integrator, Marilyn as acquisitions, Ron as dispositions and I did the coaching for everyone whenever we had an issue. I was no longer acquiring or selling deals but I was still highly involved in every aspect of the business.

One of the most beautiful things about EOS is that you implement KPI tracking and start holding people accountable to numbers. Once you do this, excuses start to sound very weak. Either you hit your numbers or you don’t. We implemented weekly minimum KPIs and started holding people to them.

It quickly became apparent that Ron wasn’t able to complete the minimum tasks necessary for his role. I was helping him make emails. I was hand-holding him constantly. Once, I handed him off to be managed by Julie, he was insubordinate and quite frankly, rude. My belief that it’s better to have a B player than no one was still present. So I delayed firing him for 3 months until finally Julie had had enough.

We needed to let him go, and I would just do Dispositions myself until we found someone new. I was going to fire him and Julie was giving me all the things I needed to say to him. I realized that this was more Julie’s firing than mine. She was now the one managing him. While I was CEO, she was his manager. This was a great opportunity for her to grow. Telling a man that could be your grandfather that he is no longer needed is very intense. But she did it, with grace and confidence. She held the line. This was a big turning point for her personal growth. She was becoming a true boss.

We hired Jennifer back onto the team and she took over Ron’s job as well as Transaction Coordination which Julie had been doing up until that point. With all of the new accountability we were implementing, it became clear that Marilyn was slowing down and we needed more from that role, so we hired another sales person, Zach. He was young, hungry, and very coachable. I was traumatized from making so many bad hires in the past that I really took my time finding him. I read a book called “WHO” by Geoff Smart and followed every single suggestion in my hiring process. I weeded out so many bad candidates and eventually Zach came on.

With Zach becoming our second Acquisitions agent, Jennifer doing Dispositions/Transaction Coordination, and Julie handling Marketing and all of the day to day operations, I was finally able to step back. Traction talks about “letting go of the vine.” It’s one of the most important things a Visionary must do to allow his or her business to grow. Many times, I was the bottleneck. I thought having a hand in everything would assure things would run smoothly but in reality, I was impeding the growth and autonomy of everyone in every department!

These days I am rarely needed. I talk with the team every so often, but it’s mostly to share wins and good news. I can do whatever I want each day. I’m not the richest man in the world but I am free, which is a big responsibility. Most people want to start a business like this to gain financial and time freedom. But what will you do with it once you get there?

I found that once I achieved true time freedom, I had to restart my journey and figure out who I am at a core level. I realized, there is no destination, but a series of stops along the way. The journey never ends, so you’ve got to learn to love to journey.

I've been virtual wholesaling for 4 years now and last year we did about 100 deals and just under $1 mil in revenue. THERE IS NO WAY I COULD HAVE ACHIEVED THIS WITHOUT MENTORSHIP. Period. 

Without a mentor, there are just too many easy mistakes to make along the way. I have hired 3 separate mentors over this time and in the interim when I was without one, I made countless mistakes and lost a bunch of deals. 

Some things to consider when selecting a mentor:

1. Do they have a business lifestyle you want to emulate? If you want to run an automated business and drink Mai Tais while doing deals in Indonesia, don't pick a mentor that grinds 100 hours a week and only has one employee. Jerry Green was amazing when I first started because he believes in getting out of your business ASAP so you can work on the business not in the business. 

2. Can you afford them? A good mentor will charge you properly for their time. Cheap mentorship usually comes with low quality results or slow response times. My most recent mentorship program with Tiffany High cost me $20,000 for 6 months but the changes I implemented from using her have easily made me an extra $100,000 over that time. 

3. How often are they available? I had a mentor early in my career from REWW that would only respond to me via email, usually several days after I reached out to him. By the time I got a response, I had usually already jacked up the deal and lost my contract. 

4. How long is the commitment? From my experience, the lower the commitment level, the lower the quality of coaching. It's important to put your money where your mouth is and commit hard to growing your business. My moment of crossing over was when I purchased 3 months of coaching from REWW for $7,000. I only had $9,000 in my bank at the time and I knew I couldn't let myself down after making a commitment like that. 

When to move on: I've noticed a trend with my mentors. When I start to resent them for not being better, more organized, dreaming a larger vision, or living up to their teachings, I know it's time to move on. Yes, this might be a personal issue but your mentor should truly inspire you. Once you are not inspired by their leadership and business anymore, I've found it to be super draining to stay engaged in the mentorship. 

Some business relationships are only meant to take you so far. My current mentor told me "The team that gets you to $1 million is not going to get you to $5 million." I think the same goes for mentors. What she meant is, as you grow, you will add more constraints and higher expectations. With this change, folks will simply not align anymore AND THAT'S OKAY. The worst thing you can do is try to hold onto old relationships that are not in alignment with your vision any longer. Trust me, save yourself the long term pain of holding onto an expired mentor relationship and take the risk to go out and find a coach that's more in alignment with your highest vision for your business. 

I've been virtual wholesaling for about 5 years in Indiana. We're on track from somewhere between $900k - $1 mil in revenue for this year. But I've been living in Denver for the past year and my team is now all based out of Denver. I've been nervous to get into the Denver market because of higher competition but I feel like it's time to jump in. 

I'd like to connect with some local Denver wholesalers and investors as we start launching marketing in the new year. 

What's your experience been wholesaling in Denver and what do you see as the trends going in the winter months?