How to Attract HNW Investors on Auto-Pilot with Special Guest Yakov Smart

I'm just processing right now. There we are on YouTube. Excellent. Okay, I'm gonna restart again. Welcome to Syndication Attorneys' free monthly podcast, where we talk about topics of interest to real estate syndicators with the opportunity to ask live questions and get answers at the end of the call. I am an attorney, Kim Lisa Taylor. Before we get started, please note that all of our podcasts will be recorded and may be used for future promotion, posted on our website, broadcast in a podcast or posted on social media, and we are live streaming on YouTube. So if you don't wish to have your voice recorded, you can either just ask your question in the chat, ask your question in the Q&A. If you want to have your voice recorded, you can raise your hand. Information discussed during this free podcast is of a general educational nature and should not be construed as legal advice. So today we are talking about how to attract high net worth investors, right, on autopilot with Yakov Smart. And Yakov, I met just recently at RE Mentors Ultimate Partnering event in Phoenix, right? A couple of months ago. And I was impressed with his services and what he had to offer. So we kind of connected and said, let's share this with our audience. So that's why he's here. So Yakov, Tell us about yourself and your business and who you are and what you do.

Yeah, definitely. So I'll give you the real Cliff Notes version here. And first of all, thank you for having me, Kim, and it's going to be good stuff. I know we have a very relevant audience, real estate syndicators, and it's all about raising capital, finding investors, doing more syndications, doing bigger deals, right? So my business is called Investor Attraction Academy. We work with people who want to scale their capital raising. We show them innovative ways of using the internet to build relationships legally and in a natural, authentic way with high net worth investors who can invest in their deals. Been doing this a while, wrote a book on LinkedIn marketing several years ago, and then in 2020 started working pretty much mutually exclusively with real estate syndicators, entrepreneurs raising capital. At this point, we've had, I don't know what the exact number is, but I know it's in the tens of millions of private capital raised as a result of some of these strategies and systems. that we're going to be talking about today. And one of the biggest things that we do when we work with people is we actually set up some of these key systems that we'll be talking about for them, give them the strategic guidance so they can go out there, build those relationships, and ultimately raise more capital as a result.

Excellent. That definitely sounds like something that our clients and all of you potential syndicators out there who haven't done a deal yet need to know about. In fact, I'm interested in learning this. Half the reason I interview people is because I want to learn about their services because I'm on my might want to use it for our business. And, uh, so we, we do a little bit of stuff on LinkedIn, but I'm absolutely certain that we are not maximizing our returns that we could be getting off from LinkedIn. So I'm super excited that you've joined, and maybe we're going to be able to do some business together that way too. Um, all right, so where are the best places to find investors online? I mean, I know, you know, some people find them on Facebook, some people LinkedIn, some, you know, people are You know, claiming TikTok is the next greatest thing. What do you, what are you seeing?

Well, there's so many options, right? I mean, in, in theory, you can find investors anywhere— Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. You could have a podcast, you could be a guest on podcasts, you could guest blog, you could have SEO, you could do pay-per-click, you could do YouTube ads, you could do Facebook ads, do LinkedIn ads, you could do organic outreach, you could post content. Just the— even that list alone is like a big buffet and it's overwhelming.

I'm like overwhelmed just hearing that.

Yeah, I saw it makes you want to do nothing, which is what some people do when they hear that, right? So the best places are, you know, you have to think about, okay, who your ideal investor is, right? You know, for most people starting out that we work with, we talk about having an inbound and an outbound strategy. Okay. So as far as outbound goes, LinkedIn right now, great place to get hyper-focused in who you're building those relationships with, who you're getting in front of and doing it in an intentional way. Facebook can be as well. I think most people where they're at in their investor attraction journey, I think starting on those 2 platforms and building from there is going to be the name of the game.

So Facebook and LinkedIn. So I know for us, for finding legal clients, Facebook has not been good. But for us, Google has been good and also LinkedIn has been good. But I know that for a lot of my clients, that Facebook has been really great for them. So, okay, well, good. So Facebook, what do you think about the other platforms like Instagram, TikTok? I mean, are those as useful or maybe not as good for this?

I think they can be. I think a lot of times people overextend themselves, right, and try to be everywhere. And unless you've got a huge budget, huge team, a lot of resources already, I think that's a major mistake. So I'll share a concept that we talk about in our programs called the levels of investor attraction, right? So most people, when they start out, they're starting with what? Friends and family, right? And when they start to go beyond that current network, they know online's the way to do it. And they start doing things like starting a podcast, YouTube channel, maybe they want to run Facebook ads. And we call that a level 3 activity, right? And my contention is you want to start where you're at. You want to start at level 1. So the real foundation is having outbound messages that build relationships and book calls with potential investors, not that go out there and solicit people, but that get curiosity and start that intro call, just like you would when you meet someone at a conference, right? You know, having that initial intro conversation. So that's level 1. A lot of people start at level 2, which is posting, content creation, all those different things that can get overwhelming and take up a lot of resources. What's great about level 1 is you can automate a lot of the process. You can really streamline things through templates, automations, some of these different things that we're going to be talking about. And I think a lot of syndicators, if they just start at level 1 and then branch out into posting content, then branch out into writing books, you know, ads, all these different things. If you want to do them, great. You might not even need to, but understand the level 1 activities, they're going to get you those quick wins. And a lot of the time, that's the core foundation that you'll need. So I think any platform can be useful, but until you have the strategy and the messaging dialed in and the funnel as well to drive people to, um, you're not gonna be able to really maximize the platform that you're using.

So, so level 1 is the building relationships and instigating calls. And that's where you're dealing with your message and your automation, right?

Direct messaging. Yep.

And then the content creation would be kind of level 2. Once you've got that up and running, you can start thinking about posting a lot of content. I mean, that's what we've done. It's taken us years to get the content that we have. Here's one of the things I do. Just a little tip for the people that are on the call. If I find myself answering a long question in an email, I just go ahead and cut and paste that and kind of edit it to make it an FAQ. And I recast the question. So, you know, I'm not stealing that person's exact words, but I'm saying, okay, here's the question that I'm answering. And, and I've written 3 this week just based on doing that. Another place, if you want to do— get some great questions and answers that you can use as FAQs, get on BiggerPockets. Right? Because you can get into the forums and you can hear people's questions and whatever they're asking. A lot of other people are thinking. But, but you're kind of trying to think of it as a syndicator. You're thinking, what are the questions my investors are asking? You always want to cast it in their— from their viewpoint. What are, what are they asking? I mean, for me it's easier because it's like, what are my syndication clients or potential clients asking? Well, they're emailing me that stuff every day. But, but that's how I do it is just if you see you're writing yourself a 2 or 3 paragraph email in response to somebody's question, turn it into an FAQ. Now you've got some content posted on your website. You know, keep doing that. And if you know, and then I write articles when I find myself writing more than just a 2 or 3 page paragraph, or it's something like, oh, I could write a 1 or 2 page article about this. I'll, I'll go ahead and write that, and then I send it to my editor. She edits it and posts it. So that's how you get content. And then eventually, when I had enough content, and then, you know, FAQs and all these other things, I turned it into a book. So, you know, that's for me been my journey in creating content. But I will tell you, it's not without time, effort, pain. It takes a long time. So I, I like your idea of kind of starting with level 1, which is, I think, where you guys come in, right? And helping people get that part of it set up, which can be pretty overwhelming by itself.

Yeah, and it's really important too because with level 1, you know, that's where you can see a lot more of the quick wins and then still doing the level 2 things. For example, being a guest on podcasts, right? You know, that's a level 2 activity. You can still do them in harmony, but it's more of— I look at it 80/20, right? So as you're starting out building your investor list, going beyond your current network, 80% of that foundation is level 1, having conversations and booking calls with potential investors. educating people, right? And then level 2 is that content. And then like you were talking about in your story, it stacks up, right? It really starts to compound. So, but that's not going to happen overnight in a project like writing a book, right? We talked about, you know, you're re-releasing your book. That's a big project. It takes resources, it takes bandwidth, and there's a huge long-term return on that. But it's not, if someone's just starting out trying to find more investors beyond their current network, or, you know, even with their capital raising journey and they just want to write a book out of the gate. Well, I mean, it's, it's usually not the best play, you know, because it's something if you're like, okay, I want to add more investors in the next 6 months, well, you might not even publish the book for the next 6 months, right? So it's one of those things. It's really important to have— we call it a strategic plan when we work with people, just like a roadmap for, okay, you know, how do you get from where you are right now to having X amount of investors or access to X amount of capital for future syndications?

Yeah, well, My first book took me 9 years to write. I don't recommend anybody do that. Maybe you can get a little more focused than I did. I finally asked Dave Lindahl, who's written a whole bunch of books, saying, how do you get them all done, Dave? And he said, I just get up an hour earlier. So, I started doing that too. And I find I get my best writing done in the morning, like before coffee, before dealing with animals or, you know, right in the morning. Yeah. And then, you know, updating the book, that's a chore in itself. That's the thing that keeps me up at night. So— Yeah, you can do these things, but it's not easy. So, okay, what are some of the biggest social media mistakes you see syndicators and capital raisers making?

We could do an hour-long seminar on this topic alone. There's, first of all, doing nothing. I mean, that's the biggest mistake. Like, you know, having— you've got a resource available on social media, literally millions of high net worth individuals are there, right? Millions of people. It's free to use, you can advertise, but there's a lot of things you can do that are free to use, right, that cost almost nothing, and reaching those people and building relationships. So people overthink it. They think that communication and psychology, for some reason, they get online and get on social media, they just, all the common sense just goes out the window. They're like, okay, if I message someone, I'm going to send them 5 paragraphs. They don't know who I am, but here we go, right? If I post something, I'm going to write it super formally and just, you know, not capture people's attention, right? So forgetting human nature is a big one. Another one, a more tactical one, is they don't have their profiles updated, right? So here's what I mean. For example, on LinkedIn, if you don't have those sections filled in, your reach is going to be limited. Just having the sections filled in is going to suggest you as a contact to people, right? If you're, if you're posting something or messaging, it's going to give you more reach. Same thing on Facebook, right? Your personal Facebook. And, you know, some people talk about business pages. Business pages on Facebook, unless you're paying to play, you're not going to get much reach. And a lot of people think that they just need to post on their business page. Well, no one, no one sees this stuff, right? So that's another mistake. They think that if they have X amount of friends or connections, let's say you have 4,000 friends on Facebook or 4,000 connections on LinkedIn, and you post something that all 4,000 or the majority are going to see them. Uh-uh. There's a whole algorithm. You could have 4,000 connections and have 40 people see what you posted. Right. So that's a really important thing not to overstate. Right.

Right.

Another mistake is they don't sound credible with their profile. It doesn't look professional and it doesn't grab attention. Right. It's very much all about them. It doesn't talk about— I love what you said earlier about the FAQs. It doesn't meet the investors where they're at, right? It doesn't have people feel seen and heard and understood, right? It's all about, hey, I've got great deals. We've got the best returns. Hit me up, right? That kind of thing. Another mistake, and this as an attorney, is people will post their deals and it's illegal to do that. They've got a 506 and they're blasting the deal because they're desperate to raise money, right? So it comes down to building the relationships before you need to ask someone for money, right? Just like you would offline, the same thing applies to online, right? And the other thing is not streamlining things, not being systematic, not having automation in place, right? Because, you know, if you're, if you're asking yourself to do that grunt work every day and you don't like being on social media, you don't really know how to do it, your time is better spent building relationships, finding deals, and building the business, right? So there's a lot that you can streamline, like you can automate and systematize whether it's human automation, having a virtual assistant, having an admin person who does some of these tasks, or better yet, automation that starts the conversations, responds to some of the posting that makes your life easier. And then the other thing is, you know, people don't do enough to build trust one-to-many, right? If you're having to repeat the same questions again and again, when you talk to a potential investor, I don't know about you, but I hate that stuff, right? It's like, I don't like repeating it. It doesn't, doesn't excite me, right? So we're big on, and we'll talk about this on next week's workshop as well, having a prerecorded webinar, right? Call them an investor attraction webinar. It's not a solicitation. It's for entertainment purposes only, as we say, right? But it shows people a little bit about who you are, track record, how you look at investing strategy, that type of thing. And it starts to do that just like you would share that with them one-on-one. It does it one-to-many so that ideally if you're generating inbound leads, they're coming, they're watching that first before they talk to you, right? So a lot of the legwork you can have the automation do for you.

That all sounds amazing, and it all sounds like stuff that I would never be able to do on my own, and I would absolutely hire an expert to do that for me. Um, yeah, I can't say enough how it is thinking about doing that by myself is just like, yeah, no, it's never gonna get done. Um, all right. So why is it— I guess maybe we've already kind of covered this, but if you want to expand on it, uh, why is it so important that your LinkedIn profile stands out? Yeah.

And it's a really big thing. A lot of people don't know this, but when someone goes to Google your name, even if you haven't logged into your profile in years, that profile is going to come up on the first page most of the time. Sometimes it'll even be the very first thing just because LinkedIn, for whatever reason, has really strong SEO, right? So, you know, as an investor, if they— most of the time, today's day and age, they're going to Google you before investing money with you. I'd hope so anyway, right? They're going to at least Google you, see if there's any red flags, and that LinkedIn profile comes up. And if that LinkedIn profile is incongruent to what you're saying, right? If you're saying hey, I'm the president of XYZ Capital and this is what we do, and your profile positions you differently or it just looks scattered or sloppy or like you've got 10 different businesses and it's all over the place, it's a red flag. So it's something that it's not necessarily going to get someone to wire you money right away, obviously, but it can get someone deterred from investing with you. So it's important to have that cleaned up. It's important to establish credibility. And it also gives you that added visibility piece. And so A lot of the time, you know, people really focus on their websites, and websites are really important, but, you know, other assets like a LinkedIn profile that's optimized or a funnel where you have an automated way of following up with people, capturing leads, those assets online are of equal, if not greater importance, right? And it's just like having real estate assets. Those are things that you can pull on again and again for cash flow. Online, you have those assets in place. You can lean on them for credibility. You can lean on them for you know, establishing trust with investors and making your life that much easier.

Wow, I never even thought about that. And I can't tell you when the last time I updated my LinkedIn profile. There's probably been more than a year, right? So how often should somebody be updating it?

Well, ideally, if they're doing the same thing, it's set it and forget it, right? You know, every once in a while, maybe you added experience, you want to brush up on something. But that's another mistake that people make, you know, they're putting their focus on updating the profile and the funnel, when in reality that needs to be set it and forget it, and their focus needs to be on generating what's called traffic, right? So eyeballs, reaching more people, getting more people in the front door instead of constantly having to repaint, rearrange the front door, right? So you build the front door systems once, set and forget them. That's where the automation comes in. And then the focus of your marketing is getting more of the right people in those front doors.

Okay.

All right.

Well, that sounds like advice I need to take. What are the— so what are some of the best ways that people can stand out to investors online? I mean, there's so many people looking for investors. How do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?

Well, we talk about something when we work with people called streams of commonality, right? So if you can identify, and this is where, you know, a lot of people go too broad when they're looking for investors, say, oh, doctors, lawyers, people have money. I don't care if they have a pulse and they have money, I'm good. Like they can invest in my deals. And in reality, you have to look at, okay, what do you have in common with people, right? So for example, you know, one of our clients, he comes from a corporate background, Fortune 500 company. So his entire strategy, especially on LinkedIn, is to talk to people at that company, right? Because that commonality, you can't fake that. No one can knock him off. Like, literally no one can compete on that commonality. So it's unique and there's that instant rapport, right? So that's one way to do it. Another way is to address some of their questions, concerns, in your marketing in advance. Very few syndicators are doing that, right? A lot of syndicators are talking about deals and cap rates and all these different things that are nice. But you want to create what's called a paradigm shift, right? And I talked about this on one of my podcast episodes as well, where if you can change someone's way of thinking or someone's perspective, that's the most powerful way you can educate someone, not just throwing data and facts at them.

So I love the find your niche, find commonality, because that is something that I've been teaching people for a long time. And someone will come to me and they're in the military. Well, your target market is other people in the military, maybe other people in your branch of the military, right? And, you know, doctors mostly. I get a lot of people that come from the medical profession. So it's like, hey, you already know how to talk the lingo of the people in your profession. Those are the people that you should be trying to approach for investing with you. And they're all interested in one learning, right? I think a lot of people would really like to invest in real estate as part of a group if they knew there was a possibility or a way to even do that. And so for a lot of investors, they've never even heard of the concept. So your job is to train them and show them that this is something that you can do. So I love that your system seems to be able to bridge that gap. All right. So what's the difference between posting content and direct messaging for finding investors?

So there's a big difference. Posting content is your— it's a little less intentional. It can be very effective. Just got to be consistent with it. And the big thing is, you know, when you post, you never know who's going to see it, right? You know, you could have someone randomly reach out, you could not, you know, and a lot of people in the syndication space, their networks on LinkedIn and Facebook It's other syndicators, right? So, you know, you might get a pat on the back, you might get a like, you might get a comment, but is that going to translate into dollars raised? Probably not, right? So with direct messages, and ideally, you know, once someone is really up and going, they're doing a combination of both. But initially we talked about building that foundation. Direct messages, you can very intentionally target who's getting your message, okay? What they're seeing, when they're seeing it, you can grab their attention. It's one-to-one and you can streamline and automate a lot of it, right? So It's more intentional. You can build value faster. You can get someone to raise their hand and say, yeah, I'm interested faster. And it just, it expedites things and it takes a lot less. Once it's up and it takes some bandwidth to build the systems, right? But once it's up and running, it takes less bandwidth. It's very much managing the system instead of having to constantly, you know, update the direct messages or having to constantly, you know, switch up the campaign. Because once you've got one that's working, it's continuing to dial that in, rinse and repeat with posting. You know, you're, you're posting, if you're doing it right, at least 3 times a week, right? So there's a level of consistency there. What I like about direct messaging, again, just kind of meeting what I found in my years working with syndicators and capital raisers, is a lot of people, they need that foundation. How can they book their first, you know, few calls a week with potential investors, right? And that starts with direct relationship building, right? It's the closest thing to being in a room with people. And meeting those high net worth individuals in person.

Yeah, they definitely need to see your name more than once and see you out there and, you know, making yourself a thought leader, right? Yep. That's kind of the whole concept is once you're a thought leader and they look at you as, hey, this guy knows what he's doing, or this, this gal really seems to get this, then they start trusting you. And next thing you know, they want to do business with you. So when do you think is the right time to start building a personal brand?

I think it's yesterday, right? I think for, for people who haven't started, and I want to unpack what personal brand really means, my definition is a little bit different. I don't think you need, I don't think it's about having a fancy looking website or a bunch of fancy looking marketing materials necessarily. It's about being clear on what you stand for, right? It's about being clear on your messaging. Because to me, messaging defines a personal brand. So if your brand is XYZ Capital, cool. You're the— maybe you're the president, founder of XYZ Capital. That's how you're positioning your personal brand. Nothing wrong with that. You don't need to be a speaker and, you know, do all that necessarily. But at the same time, you know, when someone goes to your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook, you know, go to your website, they need to be able to see a picture of you and say, okay, here's that person, here's some of their core values, here's a little bit about their story, right? To at least humanize you. So we talk about humanizing in marketing as a really important thing, and it's something that I think is going to continue to be a bigger trend. I think a lot of people, and I'm not knocking it because I've done this before too, they'll read a marketing book or two and they'll go out and their messaging sounds very— I want to use the word salesy, but almost like kind of sleazy or inauthentic or very like, hey, I'm gonna— here's the 5 bullet point statements. And yeah, like I should check the box, right? But if you tell that human story, so for example, when we work with people in their investor attraction webinars and we want to identify, okay, what's the story? What are the commonalities to weave in? Because if someone's saying, hey, that person's like me, it's a lot easier to build trust, right? So that personal brand does that. And that thought leadership also, it happens over time, right? That compounds, right? So that's something that doesn't happen overnight, but the conversations can happen much more quickly. And then also once someone's on your investor list, and a lot of syndicators mess this up, right, is someone's on the list. The only time they hear from the syndicators when the syndicator has a deal to pitch, right? Well, there's, you know, there's a lot of opportunities to have multiple touchpoints, establish that thought leadership, be consistent. be relevant and be frequent with that person, right? And that personal brand piece, yes, it's a perception. Yes, it could be, you know, how the branding looks and the images, but it's also the feeling that you create with people and how they resonate and what they find, what they see in themselves that they see in you.

You said 3 words that I thought were really important: consistent, relevant, and what was the third?

Frequent.

Frequent.

Frequency, right? So frequency and consistency, they're similar.

Right.

Frequency is just how often you're going to be consistent. You know, what's the— what's the— how intentionally are you going to communicate once a week, a couple times a month, once a month, right?

Definitely consistent. You know, we started these podcasts in 2016. And, you know, it's just amazing how quickly time goes by. And there's more than 60 podcast episodes out there. And now I'm getting to a point where we might have to do them twice a month because I'm backing up on speakers that I really want to interview. And I think probably bump up our frequency. And of course, everybody has told me you need to do it once a week, but, you know, I also have to live my life.

Yeah, that's important too.

That's something I have to constantly remind myself of, and all of you need to remember that too. Don't forget to live your life. Don't forget, live your life. That is hugely important. Um, okay, cool. So, so not only do you get marketing lessons here, you get life lessons. What are a few of the most important tech tools for people to have if they want to implement their system and implement your system?

Yeah, there's quite a few. I'll say obviously, you know, having things like a funnel where you can actually capture leads, not just the website, that's really important.

Is that like your CRM? Is that, you know, ActiveCampaign?

So it's, I mean, to get really tactical, it's having a landing page, right? So a page where people go, they can opt in, name, email, Ideally, whether or not they're an accredited investor, right? A thank you page after they've opted in, right? You know, having automated emails. When we work with people and we design these things, usually 7 to 10 posts, we call them the post-webinar emails, right? Inviting people to book a call, find out more, re-emphasizing some of those key content points from the webinar. Also having, yeah, a CRM autoresponder where you can tag people, right? So we Share with people, okay, you want to tag people 3 different ways once they've opted in. You've got your active investors. These are people who've already invested in your deals, right? You've got your deal-ready investors. You've talked to them, you've established a relationship, you know how much capital they're bringing to the table. There's a good chance when you're doing your next syndication, they're in, right? And then you've got that final group who've opted in. Maybe they requested something for free. Maybe they were in your friends and family. You guys talked 3 years ago. But they haven't just yet, um, you know, committed to saying, okay, I'm ready for that next deal, right? So you want to be able to segment that list. Um, there's, I mean, there's page builder tools out there. There's, there's a lot of different ones that people can use. Um, also CRMs. I mean, there's some different ones. I'll be talking about this on next week's workshop as well. But the biggest thing is making sure— the other thing too, and I want to say this with the tech tools, right? It's easy to creatively procrastinate and do a bunch of research on the tech tools and not get a whole lot done, right? So a lot of the tech tools, they do the same thing. And once you get them set up, you know, again, spend your time, energy, focus on actually building relationships with investors, not upgrading the tech tools, because a lot of them, the CRMs, they do pretty much the same thing, right, that the good ones do.

Well, my advice to people that are exploring tech tools is do not opt in for the annual plan because it's cheaper. Do the monthly, pay the extra monthly, use it for 6 months, make sure you're going to keep using it before you decide to go with the annual plan. Because I have been locked into, you know, 1, 2, 3-year-long contracts on things that I didn't like after the first 6 months. And I'm still in one of those now. So just be cautious about that. You know, don't let that happen to you. But, and we've gone through multiple CRMs. We started with Insightly for our law firm. That's a Google app. And then we graduated up to ActiveCampaign, and then we went beyond ActiveCampaign and now use HubSpot. And of course, each of those have increasing expense levels associated with them, but they all have increased capabilities. So I would imagine there's some that you like. Would you be willing to share some of those with us?

Yeah. So for clients, we recommend ActiveCampaign majority of the time, right? Some people are using Infusionsoft Keep. Um, I wouldn't recommend that.

It was a nightmare.

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend starting with that. It's, it's complicated.

Well, and that was the problem that we had with some of them is that they were so complicated, we never figured it out. And so we're just like, forget it. It's too much.

Yeah. And it's, it's an energy suck, right? So when in doubt, ActiveCampaign is what I'll say for CRMs. We use Kartra. It's a little more advanced. We pay a little more too, but we do some pretty nifty things with segmentation and all those different things. But again, like when in doubt with CRMs, ActiveCampaign. And I know there's a few different softwares for investor portals as well. And maybe there's some that you recommend, but there's a few that I usually recommend to people. And then on the technology side too, I mean, there's different tools for text message automation. There's different tools for page builders too. Sometimes that's separate from a CRM. I think what else we— I mean, if people are starting to podcast, there's different tools. So one of the things for, you know, next week, and I know we'll talk about this in a second, we actually give people a document that's like, okay, here's the tech tools that we recommend, right? You can also automate a lot of the LinkedIn messages. There's tech tools for that. There's tools to automate posting. So a lot of people are surprised at how much can be really streamlined and automated, right? I'm big on systematizing. things, right? So if we can have it to where it's systematized or automated, let's do that, as long as we're not losing the relationship-building element.

Excellent. All right, so I'm just going to remind everybody, if you have questions, this is a great time to start putting them in the chat or putting them in the Q&A, uh, because we're going to, uh, we're down to our last couple of questions and then we're gonna go live. Uh, you can ask questions of Yakov, you can ask questions of me. We're happy to answer anything that we can't get through during this hour call. All right, so what do you think are some of the biggest opportunities for finding investors in 2023?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think right now with what's happened in the stock market, right, I think there is a whole pool of people who are working corporate whose portfolios took a dump this year. I mean, let's just call it what it is, right? And In the past, I think finding investors, having the conversation where you were talking about things like cash flow, tax benefits, all still very important things. But I think now it's much more directly, hey, you've got this big problem. I've got a great solution. It's safer. You're actually going to get cash flow, monthly passive income, or quarterly, however you do your payouts. And so it's a real solution to a problem. So marrying the two, without doing it in a way that doesn't meet people where they're at. Because a lot of people don't know what a syndication is. I know it's crazy for people on this call. A lot of people have no idea what a syndication is, and they're legitimately high net worth individuals. You have access to a decent amount of money. So I think the opportunity with the money sitting in retirement accounts is something like $4 trillion that's sitting there that could potentially be accessed through self-directed IRAs. I think that's a big opportunity. Opportunity. I think people are craving connection more than they ever have. I think especially a humanness in our marketing, right, you know, telling stories, establishing that commonality, that's going to be more important. I think paid advertising online, if any of you have done it, I would advise against it right now unless you already have a— I always tell people, unless you have $10,000 a month that you're just willing to spend for 6 months and get no results on the paid ad side, I would say don't do it. Right? Because it, it can be, be a money drain. And paid advertising has really changed a lot with iOS. And like, there's some different things, but I think niche-specific advertising could be really powerful, right? You know, specific journals, magazines, websites, blogs, much better ROI, right? And I think it's also important to build that trust in advance. I think a lot of people are familiar with like, you know, there's crowdsourced platforms for investing. A lot of people know what a REIT is, right? So it's really important to educate people and build that trust in advance and take care of that as much as you can before they have an opportunity to invest. Because if you give someone an opportunity to invest and they've got those unspoken objections and you're not anticipating those, it's going to take a lot longer for them to invest. So I think, um, the other thing with social media, I think the opportunity for reach is still out there, you know, even on the organic side, even with posting, direct messaging, reaching people, building those relationships. So I think that's a big thing. And I think the world of alternative investing is still very much a golden age. I think over the next 12, 18 months, there's going to be access to some great deals out there. So even if the media is screaming, hey, recession, or whatever the case may be, I think the people who are the most aggressive in their marketing and building that list bigger, better, faster, they're going to really be able to have a lot more assets under management and raise a lot of money. Because I think people are looking for a legitimate solution to what's a very big problem right now.

Well, this is really good advice, and I'm sure there's a lot of people— I'm taking a lot of notes. I hope some of you are in the audience as well. And I just want to know, all right, so all this sounds really great. It sounds like you've got it down. How in the world would somebody like me that wants your services work with you? And, you know, what do you have to offer?

Yeah, so our core program, that's, you know, it's called Investor Attraction Academy, and we basically build out a lot of the tech stuff, the systems for you, right? So literally we'll customize it towards what you need, and then we give you a strategic plan, messaging templates for how to execute the system. Best way for people to learn more, next week on the 29th, we're having a live workshop. It's gonna be a 2-hour workshop where we go in depth on some of these strategies, systems, tools, It's a great introduction to some of this stuff. It's a great way to kind of understand, okay, where I'm at, where I'm going, and whether or not you'd be a fit to work with us. So that's something we're making available. So my recommendation for people who are interested, curious, the workshop, we're making it available at a ridiculously low price because I want to be able to share this with a live audience. And I want to make sure that before we talk to people, that they're educated, they're informed, and they understand that it's a fit, right? They understand there's some alignment. Right. So we're going to drop— if you have a link, Kim, or we can drop that in the chat.

And if not, you can put it into the chat. Can you do that?

Yeah, I need to. I just— I want to— I don't have it in front of me, but we can definitely, um, find it here in a second, um, or at the very least follow up with it. So that's called the Attracting Investors in 2023 Workshop. I know Kim's got a special code so you can get in for $23. I know, I know it sounds crazy, 2023, $23. But again, it's a great introduction. It's actually going to be real content, real strategies. At the very least, you'll leave with 1 or 2 ideas of things you can do to grow your investor list. And if, you know, at that point you're like, okay, I want to work with these guys, really get the style, then get the fastest results possible, we'll share how to do that on the workshop as well. And I'm going to go— as we start taking questions, I'm going to see if I can find—

Okay, so I've got some of these, uh, links right now. See, what do I do? Trackable registration link for the workshop, right? That's the one. Yeah, I'm gonna put that one in right now. So if anybody wants to join the workshop there, go ahead and do that. And it looks like you might have a couple other offers. There's a guide.

Yeah, there is. So there's a coupon code. So if people, people click on that link and then use the coupon code KIM at checkout, you'll get in for 20% off. $23. So that's, that's what I recommend. We'll share the guide with people who attend the workshop as well, but it's going to be on the 29th.

Is the coupon code for the, for the workshop or for the guide?

For the workshop. Yeah, the coupon code is for the workshop, um, so that if they go to the page, they enter that at checkout, they can get in for $23 because it's 2023.

All right, cool. Okay, I'm gonna put that in the chat also. Okay, and, um, let's see what else. So anything else that we haven't covered that you think we should talk about, Yakov, that's important for our audience?

Yeah, so we've got some questions. We can, we can go to those. I just, I think it's really important for people to think about capital raising and investor attraction systematically. I can't stress that enough. I think, and I, I don't know, you probably are the same way, Kim, I get messages literally Every week someone's like, hey, I need to raise $250K in the next 7 days. Okay, do you have anyone I can talk to? I'm like, should have, you know, built those relationships beforehand, right? Because one of the work— and it's also not legal. Like, if you're— if you need an extra $250K, you're just blasting it out and it's a 506, you know, it's also not legal and it's not the smartest approach. So this is all about building those relationships in advance, having that list. So you can turn to people when you have that deal and you're doing the next syndication and have that confidence that you can go out there and raise the money, right? It's a huge leverage point.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's what we're all about too. We have a program also that can help you and can go hand in hand with what you're doing with Yakov. And what we call ours is a pre-syndication retainer. And that's for people who are in between deals. They don't have a deal right now, but they want to to kind of work on their investor marketing program. And that's exactly what Yakov's talking about. So, uh, you know, for me, I— the— what we teach is you've got to have a combination of your online presence and your physical presence, right? You can go to meetings in your local communities. You've got to learn what to say when you meet new people and they ask you what you're doing. So you have to get polished with, uh, your response to that question. You know, some people call it an elevator pitch, but it has to come off organic. So, you know, we We have with our pre-syndication retainer program, we'll give you an investor marketing plan template where you can write down, this is what I'm going to do to find investors, this is what I'm going to build out this year. And number one on the list should be, I'm going to have Yakov help me with my online presence. And then number 2 is, these are the kind of meetings I'm going to go to, and I'm going to go 2 or 3 times a month. And they could be meetups, they could be real estate investment association meetings or anything like that. Um, and then you've got to figure out how you're going to follow up. So that again goes back to Yakov's system of what are you going to do, and then what are you going to have in place that you can use when you, um, meet people in person, right? Would you hand something— hand them that they can take back to their family or their friends? Or can you create an educational webinar or something like that that's going to educate them on the process? So I think, uh, you know, that you can get a lot of that content and that guidance, you know, from both Yakov and us. So I highly encourage you to do that. We do weekly masterminds on Wednesdays at 9 AM Pacific time, noon Eastern time. So there we go. And let's go to questions.

Yeah, so before we do, I just want to make sure— says the chat is disabled. So I want to make sure people can see the link, because that might have just gone to you and So let's—

yeah, and I sent it out. If you guys can't see it, let us know. I sent it out to me and everybody. I'm not sure why it's disabled for you. Um, so I did try to send that out.

Yeah, we have, we have one person, Marie, saying she, you know, they can see the link.

Oh, they can? Okay.

Yeah, one person says, guys, just confirm, or someone in the chat or the Q&A, that you can in fact see the link and the coupon code. Okay, it says chat disabled, but we can see the link. Okay, cool. So, okay, so we're good on that.

Yeah, and I just clicked the link and it went right to your page. Perfect. Um, okay, so, uh, Satish says, uh, so level 1 strategy is to direct messaging folks in your social media network and set up a call with them. So she just wanted to confirm, what is that level 1 strategy?

It might not be directly setting up a call. It's more of, you know, building the relationship, gauging interest, establishing commonality, curiosity, all those different things before setting up a call. If you've known them for a while, I mean, you, you could be a little more direct there too, but there's some different strategies. We'll talk about that next week too. So level 1 is, yeah, having a way to directly build relationships from anywhere, right? You know, meeting people in person is great, and it's also great to be able to sit on your laptop, you know, at home or wherever, wherever you want to be. And each and every day you're building conversations, you're starting dialogues with people who potentially become investors, right? It's, it's really powerful to be able to do that. So that's, that's level 1.

Okay, great. Um, Stephen asks, uh, Yakov seems to really know his stuff. How do we draw people to our front door once we build the front door?

Great question. So that's where all these different marketing platforms come in. Everyone's a little bit different. That's where LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever you, um, wherever you're gonna strategically be online, right? That's, that's what you're using, right? So on the inbound side, you know, there's a number of different strategies. So for example, let's say you're a guest— I'll give you just one like kind of easy-to-digest example, right? So let's say you're a guest on a podcast, right? And someone at the end of the podcast will usually say, okay, so where can people go to find out more? If you just drive people to your website, that's cool. You'll get some people potentially, but you haven't captured the lead, right? So unless they're hot to trot, ready to go, ready to have a call, you miss out on the lead, right? Versus if you say, okay, go to this link, you can access a free training that I recorded, right? You know, talking about passive, passive income strategies in any economy. I'm just like shooting from the hip on titles, right? Because titles are very important. You'd say, go to this URL. I go to the page, I listen to you on a podcast, I put in my name and my email. Now our relationship starts and it starts one-to-many. Now I'm getting emails from you. Now I can watch a presentation. Now I'm well informed. Now I trust you before we talk versus it kind of being ice cold, right? So that's just, that's one of the strategies. It's really having multiple, just like you want multiple deals, multiple streams of income, multiple ways of getting people in that front door on your calendar.

Well, and make sure you're following up with those people, cuz I can't tell you the number of times I've put my name in on somebody's Website, never heard from them again.

Well, that's that's that's where the the automation comes in and the CRM and all the all the tech stuff, right? Because you know, to manually remember to do that can be tough.

Yes. All right. Richard asks Amen to that on tech tools. Thanks, Richard. And then he says Thoughts about syndication model to acquire businesses or best for real estate? You can use these syndication the the the rules for raising private money from private individuals. individuals. So high net worth investors, friends and family, acquaintances, people you meet on the internet, individuals, the SEC calls them all retail investors. People you can— the rules of raising money are the same for all retail investors. So it doesn't matter what you're raising money for. You could buy— be buying a plane, yachts, land in another country. of multifamily properties here, any kind of asset class you can imagine for real estate or businesses. There are some differences, some additional hurdles that you will have to jump through if you're buying securities in other people's offerings versus buying something directly that you're going to own and control, and specifically real estate. So if you're going to own and control real estate, then you just have to follow the Securities Act of 1933. If you're going to do a fund of funds and you're going to start raising a pool of people who are going to invest in other people's deals, then you're going to have to follow some additional rules that can be quite burdensome. So if you're going to be buying and just owning businesses directly, then yes, there may be some additional rules that apply, but it's probably not going to be all that onerous. So absolutely, and we do have an attorney in our team that specifically deals with non-real estate offerings, uh, and he's taken a lot of companies public and, you know, can help with all aspects of those types of offerings. So yes. Um, uh, Richard asks again, in using short videos on LinkedIn, maybe more effective than blog article or written, uh, posts, or is it better to post on YouTube or directed emails?

Um, so the short videos on LinkedIn right now, they're not doing as well LinkedIn long form is working well, especially for this type of audience. And then as far as the short videos, it's just one of those things you can repurpose a video a lot of different ways and get it transcribed. You can make that a blog. The biggest thing though that I'd say when it comes to the short videos, and I want to reread the question here, I saw something. Okay. So I wouldn't use short videos on LinkedIn. Posting on YouTube, it's one of those things. It's more of, again, a level 2 or even level 3 strategy.

It's very long-term.

Love email marketing, especially people who've already opted in. That's great. So if you're sending in a short video in an email, for example, say, hey, click the link, watch the short video, right? So that, that's the big thing. But I wouldn't go— if you're doing Instagram, that type of thing, yeah, those short videos, reel-style things, they're effective. Here's the problem, and here's what people don't understand about investor attraction. A lot of these high-net-worth individuals are going to be a little bit older. They're going to be usually 40 plus, not always, but typically 40 plus, if they're actually serious, legit investors and they're talking about investing their money, okay, they're going to want to do their due diligence. They're open to being educated, right? They don't need the video to be 30 seconds or less, right? They really don't. They're going to sit and watch. Like, you guys are here, you know, we've been here almost an hour. We didn't need to make a 30-second reel talking about this stuff. You would've just been like, okay, cool, and brushed it off, right? So So don't be afraid of doing long-form content. Be open to having depth, right? Because that depth creates trust. It creates the sense that you know your stuff, right? So that's a really key thing. Um, the other thing that I'll say that I'm just on the short video side is don't— just make sure you're very intentional if you're going to be doing that, because a lot of people are just doing that to create content. It's a lot of work. You might even have an editing team, and it's like, does it really create the outcome that you're looking for? Does it put you in front of investors? Does it get you calls? And does it, you know, raise capital for you at the end of the day? And if it does not, if you're just like, if you were playing the popularity contest on social media, how many views and likes and comments, that stuff's cool, but where's the real ROI on that? So just be mindful of that with the videos.

So, um, hey, Hector said that the code coupon code doesn't work.

Yeah, so that, that's my bad. It's KLT. So capital K as in Kim, L as in Lisa, T as in Taylor. So it's KLT. Yeah, forgive me, guys. We've had a lot of moving parts on the automation side, right? So yeah, coupon code is KLT. That should do the trick. I just verified that.

Okay, I'm gonna just put that in the chat. Okay, great. All right, so that's done. See, I'll have a question. Okay, um, all right, they've got KLT, it's now working. All right, so we've gotten through those. Uh, I think we've gotten through all of those. Did anybody raise their hand? Nobody's brave enough to be live.

There's, there's someone.

Is there someone live there?

There, I, I see Hugo and I see Bud.

Okay, go ahead. I'm not seeing you. I'm not seeing them. Go ahead. You want to add— can you see their question? I guess I have to— you might be able to make them—

So Hugo just kind of reappeared, disappeared. I'm going to see, I'm going to click on it. Yeah, so I'm clicking on him and he is not. So Bud has his hand raised, so I think the way to, to do this is going to be— Bud, if you've got a question, you can probably put it in the Q&A box. Let's see if we can call— okay, we got it down, we're on a roll.

That is, you know, chat is disabled. Yeah.

Hey, there you go.

But how are you doing? Doing very well.

I wanted to know if there's gonna be a replay.

Uh, we're live streaming on, uh, YouTube right now, so you can go to YouTube right after this and listen to this again if you want. Great. Thank you very much. Yeah. And then we will be posting this on our podcast. So our podcast is, uh, Raise Private Money Legally. It's on 20 different podcast platforms. I encourage all of you to sign up and subscribe to that. There's over 60 different episodes, so you can learn, you know, listen to it while you're in the car or wherever you want to be. Let's see, here is our link to the podcast. I'm going to stick that in the chat also. And then if you have been listening to the podcast, And you want to give us a review, we would love that. There's a link for that too. It's like there's an app for that. There's an app for everything. And then, you know, we love reviews. So if you guys want to give us a Google review, we're going to go ahead and put that in the chat also. And if you want to save the chat from this entire program, you can do so. If you go down to where you would type a message, Uh, there's 3 little dots to the right of that. If you click those dots, then you're going to get a pop-up, and one of the options is to save the chat. So you can just save this chat and get all these links, keep them on your computer, and then use them when you're ready. Um, all right, well, we are— anybody have any questions for me? I'm happy to answer those as well.

Um, but, uh, looks like we've got one more here. What's your take on pitch decks?

Go for it.

I mean, well, I'll have you answer that first and then I'll give a little bit of a unique perspective.

So you need a pitch deck. You know, if you're gonna— you can do a webinar, right, where you're gonna be talking to a group of people and you wanna educate a group of people, you can use a pitch deck for that. Or you can do some kind of educational content where you're just explaining what is syndication, how it works. If you don't have a deal, your pitch deck is gonna be a lot like that anyway. Kind of, you know, here's what our business does. We, we do these kinds of real estate deals. We put small groups of people together. Here's how you can participate. Here's the kind of returns that we look for, et cetera. So it's very generic about what in general your, your team does. If you're doing an offering, if you have a pre-vetted group of investors, then you can do a deal-specific pitch deck. and you can invite those pre-vetted investors because those are the people that you have established the right substantive relationship with. So once you have that relationship, you're able to pitch deals to them in a group as long as you're not including outsiders that aren't pre-vetted in that pitch. But then you could, you know, and I always recommend 15, 20 slides. This should only take 15 or 20 minutes. If you're doing an hour and a half presentation, you've just made everybody go to sleep and everybody forgot what you were talking about, right? So, um, 15, 20 slides max, and not a lot of words on a page. Uh, you're, you're— it's bullet points that are reminding you what you want to talk about. You're not letting people read whole sentences on your pages, or that's going to be a very boring presentation as well. Um, if you are doing a 506 offering, and that is you are allowed to advertise, then you would be able to, uh, you know, pitch your deal to an entire group of people. You don't have to know that they're all accredited. You just have to make sure that before they actually make an investment that they are accredited. So, you know, there's lots of different ways to use pitch decks. So you've got your generic one before you have deals, you've got your deal-specific one for a 506 offering only to pre-vetted investors, and you've got your 506 that you could do to more, uh, the general public. You just have to make sure that the messaging is correct. Yakov, go ahead and contradict me if you want.

That's exactly what I was going to say. And so a lot of people, when I say do a webinar, we're not talking about having a pitch deck and pitching a deal on a webinar. You can, but once you've got the relationship, the investor attraction webinar, just what you mentioned, introductory webinar, telling a little bit about your story, explaining what a syndication is, explaining what passive investing really means, That type of stuff, educating people, right? So I think people skip that step too often. I think, you know, the first time they talk— so even if your friends and family, or if you're going in for the kill on the pitch deck on the deal and that educational foundation isn't there, it's very hard to convert someone and get them to actually wire you money, right?

Well, and I would argue that your first deal, your first conversation is not a pitch. Your first conversation is, hey, this is what we do in general. We're just talking to people to see who might be interested.

Exactly.

Then if they say, well, yeah, that sounds kind of interesting, then you say, we've, you know, the SEC and legally we're required to ask you some specific questions to know if this is going to be a good fit for you before we can talk to you about specific offerings. So if they get their permission to ask the questions and then you ask them, are you accredited? You give them the definition. If they say no, then you say, Are you sophisticated? And you said something earlier, Yakov, and I think a lot of people miss out on this and maybe it's going to change the way you do things. But if the only question you're asking investors is, are you accredited? And they say no, they have just ruled themselves out as even being eligible to invest. And that is absolutely not true because all it requires is that if they're not accredited, are they sophisticated? And then you develop a relationship with them and now you can offer them Rule 506 offerings that allow you to include up to 35 non-accredited but sophisticated investors. So I really think you always have to ask, are you accredited? And if no, are you sophisticated? Or not really even if no, because even your accredited investors are supposed to be sophisticated. So I think you've got to ask that second question though, and that requires giving them the definition of what does the SEC say that means, and then letting them explain in their own words Why they think they qualify.

Yeah. And a lot of people who don't even know they're accredited, that, that's why, you know, some of our clients, they'll, they'll talk to somebody accredited. Well, and they're like, yeah, you're definitely accredited, dude. Your net worth is this.

You're—

they, they don't really know what that means, which is—

That's right. So you give 'em the definitions. They do, you know, do you check this box? Right? Oh yeah, I meet that. And, and you don't have to get verifications from anybody until you're doing a 506 offering and it's at the time they make the investment. So at that point, then you have to go through the verification process. Until then, you're just asking questions and you're taking note of what the answers are and putting it into your database so that you've now tagged them as accredited or not accredited but sophisticated. So, you know, when Yakov was saying you have to assign tags to people, you definitely want to have, you know, your pre-vetted, and then you want to ask, you want to know if they're accredited because then you're not going to be offering You could offer them either 506 or 506 offerings. But if you're not accredited, you're not going to be email blasting them about 506 offerings that they're not eligible to participate in. So, Yakov, we do have one more important question. We're running a little bit over, but what is your email and contact information? How can people get a hold of you?

Yeah, best way, we can put the email in the— or I guess not the chat box. Let's see. Let's see if I can do it. Um, so my email is jakob@linkleads.us. Obviously I'm on LinkedIn. Our website is findmoreinvestors.com. Best thing to do though, guys, if you're around next week on the 29th, that workshop, it's gonna end. And we see a few more questions I know we don't have time for, can answer those for you on that workshop. So it's the best way to learn. It's the best way to get in touch and kind of really get to go deeper on this stuff and get a feel for, first of all, what you need to do, how it applies to you, and just really the best way to leverage what's available in terms of systems, strategies for growing your investor list and finding more investors in 2023.

Excellent. All right. Uh, one more time, your email, yakov@linkedleads.us.

Yep.

US. Okay. It's in the chat. I'm going to give you guys a couple minutes to grab that chat. Make sure you do. And this has been really great. I appreciate this very much. I've learned a lot. I think I need to be on your call. Probably need to actually just have a private conversation and say, all right, what do I have to do to get started? But anyway, thanks so much. We appreciate everybody taking your time to be with us today, and we look forward to talking to you as you know, having you as clients or potential clients. If you want to schedule an appointment with us, go to syndicationattorneys.com and there's a schedule an appointment button. You can go through a little, you know, question of what you're looking for and we'll get you to the right person so that you can engage with us and we'd be happy to have you. We are also offering a holiday fund sale. We do it annually. We have 20% off all blind pool funds right now, 15% off all syndications, and $200 off our our pre-syndication retainers if they're prepaid by the end of, uh, December. So you've got 9 more days to take advantage of that, and, uh, we look forward to talking to all of you.