How I Survived My First Year Wholesaling (Brutal Lessons Learned)

I want to tell you about how I got started. Okay, this is going to be a quick journey. Like, I want to explain the story of how I got started, how I came from the door-to-door background. I was doing door-to-door sales and how I even started in wholesaling, which I didn't even know what wholesaling was. All right, everybody, so how did I get started in wholesaling? How did I get started in real estate? Why did I even get into that? We got to take it back. We got to take it back to college. Okay, so when I got back from my mission for my church, I served a 2-year mission for my church where I went and talked to people about Jesus. I love Jesus. I love God. And I served a mission in Portland, Oregon for 2 years. And I went out and talk to people about Jesus. And for 2 years, people were like, get the heck away from me. Obviously, some people listened. It was nice. Like, you know, people are nice. I got a lot of food. I served a lot of Spanish-speaking in a lot of Spanish-speaking areas around Portland. So got a lot of tacos when I was going door to door, but a lot of nos. So I learned quickly that like, hey, no has, you know, nothing to do with me. They're not saying no to me. They're just saying no to what I have. Okay, so I learned that. And after my mission, I enjoyed it. I love it. And I'll talk about it more if you guys want to learn more about that. But after my mission, I got— I went to college at Brigham Young University, Idaho. I didn't get into BYU in Utah. I went to the sister school. I wasn't cool enough to get into Brigham Young University. That's apparently my grades weren't good enough. But whatever, I didn't, you know, that's high school, it doesn't even matter. I would make it now if I tried. But no, BYU-Idaho is a great school. And I met some awesome friends. And that's why I think, honestly, I think college is great. I think college is good. So you can network and meet lifelong friends, business partners. And that's actually where I met my business partner where I started wholesaling with. As we were roommates in college, I was doing door-to-door sales, I was selling Dish Network and DirecTV door-to-door, we would go to rural areas every summer, or every fall, and we would knock on people's doors and say, hey, I know your TV bill's high, let me get you a lower bill. Let me take a look at that box you got, that DVR, let me see if I can get you a better one. And obviously a ton of nos, but rose up in the company pretty high, you know, had some teams, I was one of the best sales guys for Dish Network. So I enjoyed it, right? And my roommate at the time, Corey Roysom, who we eventually became business partners in wholesaling, he was doing wholesaling or lease options. His dad was wholesaling in Missouri. So he would always say, you know, Nate, come do this with me, come do real estate. And I would say, hey, Corey, come knock doors with me, you're gonna make way more money, it's more fun. We're gonna have a good time. And he was like, nah, nah, nah, I'll do this. So we try to convince each other through college to come work for each other, do what, what we were doing. But, you know, it didn't work out. I dabbled a little bit in real estate, but I didn't do a ton of it during college. So after college, obviously, I graduated and I met my wife and we got married, moved to Utah, got a house. And, you know, I was still doing door-to-door. I had some teams and I was making a transition from Dish Network selling that to Sprint Wireless where we could sell Sprint phones. And I was like, man, I honestly don't— I don't see myself being an old man knocking on people's doors trying to sell Sprint or anything door-to-door. I got to do something else. So I thought to myself, what can I do? And I was like, well, I want to make money. I was making good money at the time. What can I do? Real estate. That's what popped into my head. Did I know what wholesaling was? Absolutely not. Didn't know anything about real estate other than you can make money. That's it. That's probably why most people get into it. So what happened is I reached out to Corey because he was actually living— he had graduated too and moved to Utah at the time. And I said, hey Corey, what are you, what are you doing these days, man? And he's like, I work for a tech company. I'm like, you're not doing any real estate? It's like, nah, I'm just working for the tech company. I'd like to do real estate, but I'm not. Said, forget your job, Corey. Let's do some real estate. Let's build a business up. And I work for Sprint. It's very flexible. We can like knock doors at night and work on real estate during the day. And we can even build up a team here in Utah and have people go sell, and then we'll make overrides on their accounts and we just train them and we'll manage them. He's like, okay, let's do it. So he quit his job. And a lot of you are like, whoa, you guys just went off and started being entrepreneurs. Look, he had some money saved up. I had money saved up from what I did. It wasn't that big of a risk on our end. And we were married and our wives had jobs. So that's the background story. It's a lot A lot of people like, oh, what a risk. Well, not really, because it didn't work out. It'd be fine, right, for door-to-door. So I'm not here to flex and say, oh, you know, I made a big leap of faith. I just want to be an entrepreneur and I did it. So we started, uh, doing door-to-door and we started doing real estate during the day. And let me tell you, we had no idea what we were doing at all when we were doing real estate. We would get a for sale by owners, we would go to Zillow, look for sale by owners in Utah, and just call. Maybe we— I think our goal is like 10. We're like, let's call 10 for sale by owners. Maybe like 3 picked up. Sometimes we would just sit there and plan because we were scared to make the calls. We're like, we don't know what we're doing. So after like that day happened, like until like 5 o'clock, we would do the real estate or even act like we were doing real estate. And then we would go knock doors and we'd go sell. And we were torn between the satellite TV, Dish Network, Sprint, as we were selling and building that team to sustain us and like build the business while we did wholesaling. So we were, we were split. Our attention was divided. So we were like, well, let's keep doing it. We just kept doing it. And we, when we were knocking, we would see other guys that were knocking doors too. And we'd be like, what are you selling? We met this guy, a guy named Keegan. He was selling solar door to door. He was setting appointments. And I, I said to Keegan, I was like, hey man, you should come sell Dish Network and Sprint Wireless with us. It's way easier. It's way better. I was like, come with us. And he's like, all right. So he came and worked for us. So that was one of our recruits. And then he brought on another friend. And then we had another guy named Anwar that came in. And we started doing is we'd have a meetup, we do correlation in my basement. And I'd say, all right, let's go sell. And we'd go out with them, you know, go knock with them during the day. And then we would come back and we try to wholesale, try to do real estate again. Didn't know what we were doing at all. No training, didn't even know about YouTube, didn't know about educational platforms at And eventually we're like, hey, you know, this is really hard to juggle. Let's just send our team out to go sell Dish and DirecTV, Sprint, and we'll just stay and do real estate. But eventually what ended up happening is they were getting upset. They're like, hey, you guys don't even go out and sell. This sucks, you know, because it is hard. Door-to-door is hard. And they wanted the leaders out there. But we're like, hey, we're doing real estate. You guys go. We're providing you all the training and materials. Eventually they quit. All right. They were like, yeah, this sucks. And we're like, okay. So at that point we lost our recruits and we're like, well, let's just go all in on wholesaling. Let's go all in real estate. Let's stop paddling around. Let's, let's figure this thing out. So now instead of working, you know, half a day in real estate, we were full working. There was no excuses at this point. We weren't like, oh, well, we got this sprint going, we got some money coming out. No, we were all in. We were all in and we couldn't make excuses for not making more than like 5 calls. I know this is embarrassing, but I'm telling you guys, like when I first started, I was scared because I didn't know what to say. So this is what happened. And this is— we're going to wrap up the story. I hope it's been helpful and interesting, but this is how we got our jumpstart to the next level. No mentors, no coaching. Didn't do any of that because they didn't know about that. Had no idea that you could even do that. So this was pivotal. Corey and I both went on our Facebooks after doing this for a week or two of full time in it, and we're like, dude, this sucks. Like, we don't know what's going on. We're just calling for sale by owners. We don't know what's up. And Corey made a post on his Facebook and I made a post on my Facebook and we said, who can we network with that's in real estate? Does anyone know any agents or brokers? So I didn't get any love for my post. I didn't— I guess I didn't have any friends at the time that knew anybody. But Corey got a response to his post on Facebook and he was like, One guy responded and was like, "Hey, my broker is interested in getting into wholesaling. I work for him. You guys should come and meet him." So we're like, "Okay." You know, were we nervous to go meet the guy? Not really, but we had no idea what was going on. We sit down with the broker and he's like, "Guys, I had a dream that I would get into wholesaling." He starts telling us about his dreams. Like, "I had a dream that I started doing deals in Missouri." We're like, "Whoa, whoa, Cory's dad's from Missouri. He does deals there. This guy's had a dream. This is nuts." The broker at the time, I'm not going to talk about his name because I think the guy's great, but things didn't turn out the best as time went on. You know, we're brand new and we didn't know what we were doing. So you'll hear about that story later, how we had that bad fallout with them. But he's like, I had a dream, so this is what I can propose to you guys. I'll give you a desk in my office, I'll give you a dialer, I'll give you the Mojo dialer, and I'll give you some lists. Go ham, call them, call those lists, expired listings, you know, the phone book pretty much, neighborhoods where you could just call people. And he's like, call that. No one's really using the dialer right now, that works for me. And, uh, go ahead, you got a space. Any deals that you do, obviously you keep that you wholesale, but any deals that they don't want to cash off or give to me, and I'll We're like, oh great, now we don't have to work out of my basement or Corey's house. At the time he's living in an apartment. Now we can come here and it's legit. All right, cool. We got an office. So we came in, started hammering cold calling. And guys, again, we didn't know what the heck we were doing. We just, I think we ended up getting a Brent Daniels TTP script of like, hey, you the owner of 123 Main Street? I'd like to ask if you're interested in selling. So we were hammering those phones. And the time the broker, he also had a strategy for getting listings. Of flyering houses. And I was like, well, I never even thought about flyering, like going door to door. I have a lot of experience in door to door. So he would print off these yellow notebook pads like that would have like on marker we wrote on one and then we'd photocopy the rest so it looks like it was handwritten and we would go pass those out. So we would cold call and we would knock doors and flyer. Okay. And we did this for months, like 3 months actually, until we got our first deal. And we actually got a deal, several deals from knocking. But that's what we would do if we saw a really crappy house, we would write it down and we would knock the door. And I ended up getting a deal from a hoarder. If she sees this, I love you, but your house was, uh, had a lot of stuff in it. We're going to talk about that story there because that was my second or third deal. But guys, I just hope this story so far— this is just the beginning, okay? If this was helpful at all, let me know, okay? Because we're going to put this in the email sequence and there's more to come next, next episode. Stay tuned for, uh, you know, subscribe to the email. We're going to send you the episode next week of how we got our first deal for $5,000, the ups and the downs, how we had to renegotiate with the seller, how we set them out of the house and we would do shell showings with buyers like, hey man, you got to go to the park. We didn't know how to show the house. We actually went to the Board of Realtors. They called us in because we had email blasted our deal to every realtor in the state of Utah. But we email blasted our deal as we were like trying to wholesale to every agent in the city of Utah. And they were like, hey, let's turn these jabronis in. They don't know what they're doing. So we went to the Board of Realtors. I'm going to get into all that. But if you're interested or you thought any of that was interesting or cool, subscribe to the newsletter, leave a comment. And again, this is all for your information. And let's talk about what was the lesson learned from when I first started. Now, I didn't really know, learn this lesson until like recently, like within a year after I've been hanging out with a bunch of high-level entrepreneurs. But the problem I had was focus, and I have ADHD. I didn't think it was a problem back then that I wasn't focused. I was like, oh, I can, I can do sprint, I can do this, I can do that, I can do all this door-to-door. You know, the problem was I was not locked in, okay? I was trying to sprint, I was trying to, you know, wholesale, trying to build a team. I was not focused at all. My attention was undivided. Like undivided— not undivided, it was divided. Okay, it was not good. The lesson that you all need to learn right now from this experience as I first started is if you want to succeed, good luck if you're trying to do like 4 or 5 things at a time. I can barely do 2 things at a time and be successful. Okay, so you've got to stay focused. So I hope that helps you out to know if you want to succeed in anything in life, you got to get locked in, you got to commit, and you got to be the best at that thing and be better than everyone else. Okay, so I'll see you on the next episode. Uh, this was episode number 1. Episode number 2, which is coming out next week. Subscribe to the newsletter. It's how I got my first deal, $5K, and how bad and terrible it was doing the traditional wholesaling model, and how it probably wasn't going to be a deal unless I got lucky. And I did get lucky. And, uh, you know, Roger's the guy we did a deal with. He was the buyer. And then Donald's the guy who, um, from Croatia— hope he's doing well, hope he's in Croatia— but that's the guy that we, uh, wholesaled his house. And he knew we were wholesaling. We didn't know. Again, we didn't know what we're doing, so we just like, hey man, we're gonna sign this, we're gonna give this to our buyer. And he was like, I don't know what you guys are talking about, but whatever, just get me out of here, trying to go to Croatia. So I I talk a lot, but if you want the realness, this is the realness. This is the real deal. This is what real estate's like. If you have divided attention, if you're trying to like do all this stuff, good luck as an entrepreneur. It's going to suck. Learn that one lesson from today. Stay focused or you're going to have— you're going to have a painful journey like I did, Nathan Payne. I want you to have a painless journey. Learn that one thing today and we'll see what you learn on next week's episode.