You’ll Never Build a Real Business Until You Master This (My $200K/Month Turnaround)

Most people only show you the highlight reels, the wins, the big figure checks, the record-breaking months, but no one really talks about the mistakes that they make or when your real estate business almost crashes. I went from making over 7 figures in revenue to losing over $600,000 in a single year and almost wanting to quit my business. Look, the business I had built, I resented it, and in this video I kind of show you all the mistakes that I've made and give you the frameworks on how I turned it back and to how now we make over $150,000 per month consistently by focusing on profit instead of revenue. And you're just starting out, or maybe you've been wholesaling for a couple years. I'm sure you can relate to some of the things that I'm gonna talk to you about. So with that being said, let's get started with the video. How I went from making 7 figures a year to almost going bankrupt and to now rebuilding the business where we make $150K per month. With over 75% profit margins. Now, before we talk about that, I want to talk to you about how I got started. So it all started in 2022, hired my first mentor to teach me how to flip houses, bought my first 2 deals, and then something interesting happened in 2022. The rates increased from 2% to 7%, and those couple houses that I bought ended up losing money, and The good thing is that I still got some deals where we made over $120K in revenue that year. And that money that I made, I was like, well, I don't think flipping is a good idea right now, so I need to figure out how to wholesale. So fast forward to 2023, hired some mentors that taught me how to wholesale, and I started having success pretty quick. My first full year wholesaling 2023, we did $750K in revenue with around 50% profit margins. $32,000 deals, $23,500 average deal size per deal. 2024, we increased revenue, but we lost on the profit margins. Why? I'll talk to you about right now. With the 38 deals, and our average deal size was $27,000, and we also closed on our biggest deal. Now, although we had good results, I was building a house of cards. I was not tracking my KPIs. I was throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping that something would stick. So I was operating based on feelings and not data. I thought I had a business, but in reality, I had a job. I bought deals that I shouldn't have because I kept on losing money on flips, and I was not training my team properly, and I wasn't being a good leader. And it was all my fault. So this is a KPI, um, sheet. It took me 2.5 years to fill this out, but I want you to focus on 2 things. One, we invested on PPC in 2024, $96,000, and we made $462,000 from this specific channel. And the rest we made from other deals that we were working in 2023 that pushed on to 2024. So we made the majority of our money the first half of 2024. But as you can see, I invested money in all of these marketing channels that didn't even perform or gave us like a good ROI. So in total, it was around $130,000 that I could have put in my PPC campaign and made an additional $600,000. So I lost $130 grand and I missed out on over $600,000 that I could have made money on by just tracking my KPIs. If you're someone that's not tracking them, you need to do this. So what was the turning point? When I was filling out that calculator last year around December and January, everything came crashing down. So that house of cards that I built, that's when the spotlight really reflected what I was building and what I was not doing correctly. So in quarter— quarter— in, in 2024, the last quarter, we had 15 houses listed and nothing was selling. You know, the elections, you know, December, Christmas, all that, it came kind of crashing down. I didn't manage my cash properly, and this is what my bank account looked like around January, like from making $100,000 to not having anything, I was like, what the hell am I doing? Something's got to change. My team was bloated. I wasted all that money that I was selling you because I wasn't tracking. And I started to resent the business that I had built. And I started looking for some new opportunities. I even started applying to jobs because I wanted to quit this. But what happened was I got tired of the day-to-day grind and I knew that I had to kill previous self. Why? Because that was not serving me. I needed to build a business that would serve me, and me, I needed to become a better leader and a better business owner to turn it around. So let's talk about the comeback. After kind of going through all those things, there were 3 books that really changed my business. The first one is The Motive. Now, if you guys hate meetings, you need to read this book. Basically talks about two CEOs, one crushes and one doesn't. And it basically talks about the differences between a good CEO and a bad CEO. But basically you need to care for your team because your team is everything. So I'm not going to spoil it to you guys. You guys need to read it. The second book is Outwitting the Devil. So this was written by Napoleon Hill in 1910, 1912. But it was published 100 years later. It was only published in 2011. And in the book, he talks about things that are going on right now. And the whole premise of the book is how the devil takes control of us with our thoughts, with fear, by not having direction. And I really recommend you guys read it with the audiobook because you'll be able to identify how you self-sabotage yourself and how you can point it out and how just have most conviction when it comes to doing the actions necessary in order to be, to be a better leader. So I recommend you reading these two books. The third one, the $100 Million Leads book by Alex Ramosi. So with that, I was able to learn how to run Facebook ads, which was the biggest game changer in my business because now we crush and our cost per contract is super low and we make all this money with very little ads spend, which it kind of just all that turns into profit. But I had invested over $200,000 in coaching. So with the comeback, all the lessons that I had learned, I was able to finally apply them. And I started to build something that I was proud of. Another thing that I changed was I started to build for profit instead of just chasing revenue by knowing, okay, how much money do I need to make? What are my expenses? What marketing spend do I need in order to get those results? And identifying the channels that would give me those opportunities. And anything that was not making me money, I cut it out. So I recommend you guys take a look into your business and see what it is that you can cut out. The other thing that I did was I simplified my revenue. I built a business to serve me, not the other way around. A lot of the times we overcomplicate things and we just need to simplify. I cut down the noise and I got to work. Now, simplifying your business, what does this mean? As wholesalers or investors, there's only two things that we do: we market, we sell deals, and that's it. And that's how we make money. And there's three things that we can control: one, CAC, which is your cost per contract; number two, your LTV, which means how much money you make on average per deal. And number 3, your cash conversion cycle. How quick can you make the money with the deals that you're putting under contract? Now, the lower that your CAC is and then the higher your LTV is, the more money that you make. So I thought, okay, how can I decrease my cost of acquisition and increase my LTV, which I'll go into a second. But if you don't know what your KPIs are and what you're building for, you're toast. You gotta go from hustler to CEO, and being able to pinpoint your KPIs is going to be the biggest lever that you can pull from. So going back to how can we decrease our cost of contract? Well, I told you guys that I learned how to run my Facebook ads in-house, and now our cost per lead is around $30, and it takes us 20 to 25 leads to get one deal. And if you do the math, it's around $800 to $1,000 to get a contract. So we're spending less than $15,000 and we're getting 10 deals per month. And basically, if you guys want to know what our Facebook ads— like, once we know what works, I like to do campaign budget optimization where we put the budget on the campaign level, and I like to do the dynamic ads, and we put like 4 ads per ad set. I put one winning ad copy that I know works and what headline, and I do two ad sets. One is with videos and one is with images. So I have four ads in each ad set, and then we take them to a lead form. I know people say that you can't get good leads with lead forms, but that's what we do. And that's what I do with my clients and they crush. But basically we put the ads out there, we market it. People fill in their information on the lead form, they get an instant callback, and then it gets pushed into the CRM. And if I could pinpoint one of the main, the biggest thing, the biggest change that I made was learning how to do this. Because now if you know how to get leads, you'll never go out of business. And especially if you can get leads cheaply like this. Now, some people may ask me, hey, what ads should I run? Well, you can do standard image ads like this where you stand in front of the house and you say something like, "Hey, sell your house fast for cash." Or maybe a photo of a property you've bought and you put some text like this, like, "Sell assets for full price." I have a video like this where just me just having a conversation with a camera. It doesn't sound like a pitch or anything. It just says like, "Hey, my name is Fidel. I just bought this house and if you want us to help you, Fill the link down below. And then this is like an ad copy where you can call out the specific market that you're in, tell them what you're offering and all the benefits and what they need to do next. Now, a good exercise I like to use when recording video ads is having 6 different hooks, and then you do it by segments. So each hook should be anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds. And what I would do is I would record 6 different ones and have 2 core offer Basically the core offer is like, okay, what you do, buy houses fast for cash, no repairs, in your timeline, all those things and the benefits. And what the close is, it just means the call to action where you tell 'em what they need to do next. For us, it's something like, hey, fill out, click on the link down below to receive your no obligation cash offer. So if you pair them together, you'll have a bunch of different creatives that you can test to find your winning ad. And the better that your ads are, the lower your cost per lead is going to be and the lower your cost per contract. And if you keep the same amount that you're making per deal, but you can decrease your CAC, the extra bottom line, you can put it in more marketing or it's just going to go into your pocket. So that's why I always preach about Facebook and I have a video kind of going over how we do it. But this was the main lever that I was able to fix that transformed my business. So I definitely recommend you guys look into that. I know that we can help you. Uh, I made some videos on this, but the second thing is having a replicable sales process. So what we do is we follow a 3-step sales process where the lead comes in, the lead manager qualifies the lead, and if it's qualified, meaning if they are motivated and they have urgency, they set an appointment with my closer, and then my closer will do a reprocess script. To build trust. I made another video on our sales process that you can find here on the channel, but this is super important. Once the, the closer builds the trust, he sets up the offer call. And on the offer call, we kind of go over our options, the MLS, the innovation strategy that allows us to get a deal every 4 offers, and then we schedule the contract call. Now, a lot of the things that I see is people blame the marketing instead of doing more sales. So I say that wholesaling is 50% marketing, 50% sales. If you can get the people in the door but you can't convert them, that's more on you. So your marketing and your sales has to be on point. Now, the sales is something that I did to basically increase our conversions, and it was one of the biggest things that, um, changed in me. Now I went from being an operator to a CEO and just giving my team more training and resources to become better at sales that paid for itself tenfold. So now before I kind of talk to you about the results that we've been having by making the changes, I want to talk to you, talk to you about what changed in me in order to be able to achieve that. So I went from operator to CEO, where now I lead my team like a sports team. I track my numbers daily. I hold my team accountable. I make decisions based on data. So that KPI sheet that I told you took me 2 and a half years to fill out, now it's like all that I look at and I see, okay, what's the return? What's working? What's not working? And what we need to fix now. I hire A-players. And remember, A players only want to work with other A players. So you yourself need to be an A player and you need to become more skillful in order for people to want to work with you. And now I spend my time being proactive, not reactive. Now, what are the results? So in June, we made $226,000. With 75% profit margins. And as of July, we already closed $108,000. We have around $60,000 pending. And like I said, our margins are now very, very low because— I'm sorry, our margins are very high, but our cost per deals is very low. And it all happened because of the changes that I told you about. Being better at the marketing, the sales, and leading the team more efficiently. And me myself being, um, making decision based on data instead of feeling. So continued, my team now is stronger than ever. We run a lean and mean 5-person team. Our cost per lead is around $35,000, takes us 25 leads to a contract, and our on average our cost per contract is around $1,000. Our average deal size is $22,000. So we have a lot of margin between the cost per contract and the profit per deal. Our monthly overhead is around $30,000 per month. So anything after that is just like profit. We have high profit margins. I love having meetings with my team because before I would hate them. And now I can go to events and my team crushes. So I did the same presentation to a group of 40 investors. In Miami and I taught them how to simplify their business and building a business that actually serves them instead of just chasing revenue. So this was the day that I presented, which was last week. We got a deal while I was there at the presentation and then my team was crushing. So they set all these appointments, not even 10:00 AM, 4 leads already. And that's 'cause our marketing system works very, very well. So what are the main takeaways of everything that I'm telling you? Number 1, most of you already know what you need to do in order to get better. You just need to do it. Just have the discipline and have the honest conversation with yourself and pinpoint what it is that you need to change. Number 2 is you need to pull the right levers. Business is a game of levers where A small tweak in increasing the conversion of something can have a huge output. So you need to figure out what is the main focus that you need to focus on in order to have the most change. Number 3 is you are smarter than you think. Now, a lot of the times, I know you guys can have some negative beliefs that don't serve you. So you got to be able to kill all those negative beliefs in order to become a better person. But I promise you guys, every single one of you that is watching this video, I don't know who you are, But if you are struggling or going through a down period, I know you can get through it because I did. And many people have gone through this. Like anyone who's successful has had to go through those down lows, but you gotta have confidence in yourself. And I'm telling you, you are smarter than you think. You can take on more. And I'm here cheering for you. I know you can do it. Number 5, you need to bring your marketing in-house. You know that we guys can help you. If you are interested in seeing what we can do, send me a message on Instagram and see if you qualify. But you need to have an inbound channel that's giving you more than a 6 to 7x in order for your business to be profitable as ever. And you also need to build a replicable sales process that your team can follow so that they know what to do at all times. They are the two main important levers that you can pull from in order to make more money. And the last one is you yourself have to become a better leader. You may be one hire away from building the business that you want to build. And just kind of want to show you my team. So here's the 4 of us, we're missing one, Brian, but we can go out for lunches and I love hanging with each and every one of them. I trust them. They're all killers, but they wouldn't work for me if I wasn't like a good founder and a good leader. So you guys can do it as well. So I hope that this was valuable for you guys. You can follow me on Instagram if you want to see how we can help you. Um, and with that being said, I want you to watch this video next because I think it can help you, and I'll catch you on the next one. Remember, I'm rooting for you, and I know you can crush. Thanks.