I recently completed Michael Quarles' Gold Coaching six month coaching program.
I am sharing this post as a way to be helpful to others, especially new investors, interested in purchasing coaching programs.
What I found helpful;
1) podcasts; Michael is clearly a talented and wise REI investor and teacher. I admire him and enjoy listening to him speak.
2) Weekly classes; when these were in fact held, they were interesting, particularly the role play calls in which each of the callers read from a script in order to learn how to speak to prospective sellers via phone.
3) Information; The program offers multiple handouts, tutorials, videos to help the student.
What I found lacking;
1) Weekly classes; some were cancelled without notice, despite having signed up for them in advance. This made my time management more difficult as I had scheduled things around these calls. A phone call stating that the class was cancelled would have been helpful.
2) Coaching; my 2-3 calls in the 6 months of my membership were surface level calls. I would liked to have gone deeper into the material on these calls than was allowed. We were unable to continue our coaching calls beyond these 2-3 because (see #3) Weekly check-ins, especially for a new investor, would be helpful regardless of whether or not the exercise was completed.
3) There was an initial exercise required of members that consisted of doing a detailed analysis of up to ten zip codes. This was a 5-6 hour exercise. The coach himself, and I believe Michael as well, stated that it would take this amount of time but would be a worthwhile activity to identify areas in which there were single family homes, with X amount of equity, and be most attractive to pursue as an investor. This 5-6 hour exercise proved to be too daunting for me as I have both a business and part time job. I would start the exercise and stop several times but ultimately was never able to get through it before my membership expired. Because of this, we weren't able to discuss other aspects of this program or proceed with consistent check-ins. It may have been more helpful for us to continue our weekly calls, with the goal of helping me to complete the 5-6 hour project instead of being stuck at that impasse and not being able to proceed.
In conclusion;
I am glad I went through the program. However at $1700 dollars I believe I could have used that money towards a better use of my time.
Perhaps I could have been more diligent in terms of learning about what I was purchasing. I am a buy and hold commercial property investor and this program, while it could be a means to that end, perhaps was not ideal for my purposes and goals. I suggest that newer investors ask more questions than I did before purchasing this program.
