In this solo YouTube presentation, the speaker recounts his rapid rise from a complete real‑estate novice with only $212 after losing his stock‑market savings to building a wholesale/novation business that now generates $80‑$120K in monthly revenue. He details the gritty early tactics—four months of relentless cold‑calling, driving for dollars, and free skip‑tracing—to acquire leads, and explains how learning to speak to sellers (offering cash, subject‑to, and seller‑finance options) transformed a 1‑in‑60 contract rate into consistent weekly closings. The narrative then follows his struggle with disposition, the costly mistake of lacking a cash‑buyer pipeline, and the pivotal decision to join a $5,000 mastermind that taught him how to attract investors. He describes scaling the operation by hiring acquisition and disposition specialists, moving to virtual wholesaling, launching nationwide FSBO campaigns, and adopting novation deals that lifted average deal size to nearly $30K. Financial discipline lessons emerge as he recounts over‑spending on marketing and depleting reserves, prompting a strategic retreat to familiar local markets and a focus on lean, high‑ROI marketing. Throughout, he emphasizes tracking key performance indicators (cost per lead, contracts per call, talk time, etc.) to identify bottlenecks and systematize the business. The talk concludes with an offer of a free training course to help viewers replicate the path from zero deals to a six‑figure wholesale business.
Chapters
Guys, just two and a half years ago, I was a complete beginner in real estate. I absolutely knew nothing about it. And last month, my company generated $83,000 in revenue. And today I'm going to tell you the exact roadmap that I took to get where I am today. So it all started off with losing all of my money in the stock market. We're not going to get super deep into that, but I lost all the money in the stock market. And I had to figure out a way to, to invest in something that I could actually go out and grab. And that happened to be real estate, except my capital was negligible. I literally had $212 left. Like I said, I lost all my money in the stock market. So, like, what can I do to start investing in real estate? And I was like, I've heard of wholesale. I've heard of being a real estate agent. So I'm just going to start doing that, right? So I started calling off market properties, and I cold called for four hours. That's a lie. Four months, eight hours a day. So I would start at 8am and I would usually go to about 5 to 8pm so however long that is, I would cold call all day long, of course, with like lunch breaks and I would eat and stuff like that for four months, every single day, weekdays, weekends, every single day, holidays. I did not care. In my first four months, I literally made $0. Yeah, you're probably like, oh my gosh, I was going to get rich off four months. No, I literally made zero dollars. And the reason was because I did not know what I was doing right. And from month five through month ten, I made $120,000. So one vital switch took me from literally making $0 with 50 times the work to making $120,000 with 1 50th of the work. And that simple switch was learning what sellers actually want to hear. And what sellers actually want to hear is completely different than probably what you've heard. So what I did was I went out and I started looking for properties. And the best way I did it was just driving for dollars. I had no one really to mentor me at the time, but I did meet a guy named Jason McDaniel. And he was like, JT, the best way that I found deals all my life was just to go out and driving for dollars. If you don't know what driving for dollars is, it's literally riding around town looking for distressed properties, like, properties with no pride of ownership, you know, like gutters falling off Roof obviously not new. Like really bad landscaping, deteriorating siding. Just properties that look like they need a rehab. Right. When they have no pride of ownership, that probably means they have no emotional attachment to the property or less emotion, less of emotional attachment to the property, and it'll probably be easier for them to sell. So I started driving for dollars. I would drive every single weekend with my girlfriend at the time or a friend of mine, and we would go out and we would drive through neighborhoods, and we would just take screenshots of addresses. And I would put about 300 down a weekend. It would take me about three to four hours. I do about 300 a weekend, and I come in on Monday. And I would skip trace them all through truepeople search.com. so I'd come in, search the owner name with the address, and I would just find all the phone numbers. For true people search, I would say we had about a 40% hit rate. So about 40% of the contacts were right. I ended up getting a software that had about a 75% hit rate. But when I first began, I didn't have any money, so I had to use the true people search, which was free. So say we got 300 leads. Let's just make it really simple. Or 300 addresses. We would probably get about 150 actual leads out of that. Now I really was blessed with some closing skills at this point. So we were closing about one in every 60 of those, which was pretty awesome. Putting a contract on one in every 60. We'll get into how my disparate process was not dialed in at the time. And so I was doing about one in every 60, though. So I was doing actually about two to three per week at the time. Just cold call driving for dollars. And it was really, really awesome. And it really, really crafted me to the salesman I am today. I learned to listen to the seller and figure out really what they wanted instead of just trying to convince them to take a lower offer. I literally listened to the seller and provided options, right? I provided wholesale options like super quick cash. I provided subject to offers. I provided seller finance offers. Basically anything I to get them to be confident in the offer that they received and see that it actually solved their problem and know that I was listening to them. So I was. I was blessed by God to be able to close a good amount of those deals. I got screwed out of a few because I was. I was a pushover. If the seller wanted to back out, I would let the seller back out. I think I lost $300,000 doing that and I also lost probably about $150,000 in the process of doing, not having a dispo process. So I was very good at sales on the acquisition side, but I didn't really know how to sell the deal. And so I would just basically post it on Facebook groups, or I would send it to one or two people, and if they didn't want it, I really didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to find new cash buyers. I really didn't know how to, you know, get this marketed properly or jv. I didn't really know about any of that stuff. So what I did to fix that was I ended up joining a mastermind group, which cost me about $5,000 at the time, where I started finding more cash buyers. I started learning the principles of real estate and like, what people look foreign properties and how I could underwrite those deals for them specifically, how I could find deals for them specifically. And then it just became like a repeating. How do I put it? Like a. It just became like a repeating system. So I was in my city, I was doing about one to two deals a week. Our fallout rate was a little bit higher than I'd like, about 30%. But we doing about one or two deals a week. I was living fine. I think I was making. My average deal in Knox was about 10 to 15,000. So my city is Knoxville. I was averaging about 10 to $15,000 per deal. So I then this was all in person too. So I was going to Properties. I was locking. I was still sitting virtual contracts, but I was actually driving to Properties, locking the contract up. I then heard of virtual wholesaling, where you can run your complete operation online. So I was like, well, that's what I want to try. I ended up getting to like 15. I ended up getting like $30,000 a month in person. And I was like, JT, it's time that you build a team. It's time you do this virtual wholesale thing. So I ended up learning how to virtually wholesale and sell without going to the properties. So we ended up doing for sale by owner campaigns all across the country, meaning I hired two acquisitions guys and they would call all the for sale by owners. The pros of working with me was I had the systems in place and I had pretty solid training and sales when I was in office. So I actually got us in office. The guys came into office and we started to focus on for sale by owner while doing a nationwide campaign. And for sale by owner, we were doing about 15 deals. A month. And the deal spread was still pretty low, about 10 to 15. But. But the crazy part about these deals was the, the marketing cost was zero. The bad part of them is the fallout rate was super high because we didn't have a market specified. Instead we were just going nationwide and we were locking up everything that penciled. But instead we didn't ever have buyers. So we came across a strategy called Novation. At the time our fee, average fee I literally think was like 11,000, like $300. And we came across Novation. My one of my old business partners, his name was Gunnar Morgan, he really taught me about this Novation thing. He helped me get my innovation team up and running. So we started doing ovations. I think we were doing about three to four of those a month and we took our average deal size to $28,800. So the principles I learned was during this time while scaling up from $30,000 was do not spend in useless places. So really know where your money's going, try to run as lean as possible for as long as possible and only do the thing that generates the most revenue. Right. So when I first started I was like spending money on investor lift. I was spending money on marketing. I spent like $157,000 before I actually made a single dollar in profit in this company. And I remember thinking like jt, like what are you doing? You bought all the stuff, you did all of that. But I didn't know how to build a team. I didn't know the follow up systems. I didn't know the, the true in depth process of closing the nurture, closing the long term wholesale deal, not just the one called close. Right. So we had a lot of leads slipped through the pipeline. We had way too many leads. We over flooded our CRM. We didn't really know what we were doing at the time. We were just hustling. And that's all I ever knew was hustle, hustle and convince other people to hustle with me. So I did that. We ended up getting about 30 and then we went to 50k a month. And then we started really getting our systems dialed in. We moved one of our axe guys to dispo. He was incredible talking to investors. So he started focusing solely on dispo, on dispositions. Then I had my other guys started focusing on acquisitions and I just managed them and gave him sales training where need be. So we did this for about two months. We're doing about 50 to 60k a month. We had a month where we literally did zero dollars. Then we had a month, we already did 10,000. Then we started pushing 50 again. And then we started, then we had our first 100k month. So we went from 60k and we had 100k month. Then we had 100k month again. Then we had 80k a month, right? So that was last month. So we started really, really pushing. It was really, it was awesome. And I saw a repeatable process come. And once you do a good amount of deals, you start to see what your, your niche is like, what is working best for you. You have the data. Once you track, you'll start tracking KPIs the farther you get into your business. I suggest starting with it so it becomes a habit. But tracking KPIs, like cost per lead, how many leads to get a contract, cost per contract, how many hours of talk time it takes to get a contract, how many, how many average times do you have to talk to the seller to get a contract, right? How many, what, what's the percentage of one call closes? There's so many different metrics that you can track, of course. And by doing that, I was able to identify bottlenecks in the business and I was able to, I was able to create a repeatable process. Sorry, somebody's calling me. I was able to create a repeatable process that I could look at and say, hey, I know what we're doing is working and I just have to keep pumping money into that. Right? So we were doing a nationwide thing until last month, right? We bought a bunch. We actually ended up buying a bunch of deals. Wholetailing, which if you don't know what wholesaling is, we'd buy the property, do minimal repairs, and they would sell it. And then we were doing that all across the country. We bought a bunch of deals and we, we liquidated our entire amount of reserve, which is, which is failure number one. This is, this is a good, a good teaching point. So we liquidated a large amount of our reserves to purchase these wholesale deals. But then we were left with almost like minimal cash. So we couldn't buy new deals, right? So we took our focus away from the principles of the business, which was whole wholesale, fast cash innovations, which is a, which is a low look, which is a low capital requirement business. And we turned it into something that was capital intensive to actually go out and flip these properties. So what we did was we had to take that away, right? We took the nationwide hotel away. We focused on wholesaling back in our home markets and markets that we know extremely well. Only to make our cash conversion cycle quicker with those deals. And then if we want to do wholesale nationwide, we can do that, but we have to do it off of jv. So JV is something that we decided we will do because we have access to the cash buyers, we have access to the connections. But we don't want to spend marketing in markets. We don't spend money on marketing or invest money in marketing and markets where we're not super professional at. So we focus on the ones we are professional at, which is mostly where we're from, where our team, where our team lives at, and where we have like really good connections at. So we can get our cash conversion sale, our cash conversion cycle down farther with those wholesale deals. But when it comes to our actual marketing efforts, we stay in markets that we know. So if we're going to be paying money for marketing, we want to be able to know that we can get the most for the marketing out of that deal. So a lot of people are seeing like 5, 6 x Roazes, but we're pushing for 15 plus x Roas's meaning let's just say 10 for easy example, meaning marketing is only 10% of our whole entire, which is only 10% of our profitability. While other companies may be seeing 20 or 25% being there, 20, 20 to 25% being a portion of their profitability. So the lower we can keep marketing down, the higher we can pay our sales reps, the higher we can pay other members of the company and, and the more money we can spend on data and research to be able to come more profitable and drive revenue in. But all of that comes down to what we were talking about earlier, which is KPIs. Guys, I did not know, I did not track KPIs at all at first. Like I said, we're doing about 10 to 15 deals a month, all for sale by owner. Just complete hustle. Did not know what was going on, but we were still doing, we were doing okay income. But what, what it really took was that catalyst to say, hey, I have to run this like a business. I have to systematize this and be able to run it like a business in order to get to the 80 and 120k months that we've had so far, which is really a blessing. But guys, it might be all confusing what we talked about here. I have a complete basic course to help you. Just go from your zero your without any deals at all to your first one, two, maybe three deals. Just go ahead and get your foot in the door, make a quick $30,000, and then be able to scale from there. Guys, I'm not going to charge for it either. I'm going to teach you for free. So for one, thank you for tuning into this. Listening to my story of how I went from losing all my money in the stock market to doing $120,000 a month. A month. I mean, we do about 80 to $120,000 right now. Thank you for tuning into that story. And if you want to learn how to do this without paying anybody to teach you how to do it, I'll teach you for free. And I'll put that in the link in the bio. It'll be the free live training class below. Anyways, blessings and thanks for attending.
