I Quit My 6 Figure Job Then Made $1M in Real Estate

I'm Nathan Payne, and at 27 years old, I decided to quit my 6-figure door-to-door sales job to go all in on wholesaling real estate. I had no plan, no experience, and I did not have any deals to work on. But within 3 short years, I was able to make my first million. And now at 34 years old, I've done hundreds of deals, made millions in wholesale profit, and I've helped hundreds of other wholesalers start and grow their wholesaling businesses as well. In this video, I'm going to be breaking down exactly how I got started, what what I did right, what I did absolutely wrong, and what I would do differently if I had to start all over again today. So let's dive right in. So let's rewind real quick back to the beginning of when I first heard of wholesaling and I decided to risk it all in wholesaling real estate. Like I told you guys, I started at 27 years old and I was doing well in my job. I was doing good. I was making 6 figures plus every year doing door-to-door sales, and I was only working a couple months out of the year, and it was a good job. But the thing is, I didn't see myself building that career and knocking doors for the rest of my life as an old man with gray hair. I didn't see myself knocking doors or even running teams and managing teams that went knock door to door. So I was like, man, I got to try something different. And that's when I remembered my roommate in college. His name was Corey Roysom. His dad was wholesaling at the time when we were in college, and Corey was trying to wholesale real estate while I was doing door-to-door sales. And we would always try and convince each other to work for each other. I'd be like, hey, Corey, come do some door-to-door sales with me. You're going to make good money. And he'd say, hey, man, just do some real estate. But what ended up happening is we ended up graduating. I still did door-to-door after graduating college, and he decided to go into tech sales. So I called him one day and I said, hey, Corey, I'm still doing the door-to-door thing and I really don't want to do it. And I don't see it being a long-term play. What are you doing right now? He's like, oh, I'm doing tech sales right now. It's okay. I was like, why don't we just go all in on this real estate thing? We can do a little bit of door-to-door. I know we can hire some people that can go sell, and while they're working, we can go out and wholesale, right? So my plan was to run a door-to-door sales team and then at the same time run a wholesale team. That was the goal, right? That was what I thought would be plausible and what was a good idea. But I soon came to find out that it is not something that you can do very successfully in the beginning is run a wholesaling business as a part-time gig. It's too difficult in my opinion to do it efficiently and effectively if you're not all in on it. So we tried to do that and we had a couple employees that were knocking and selling Sprint and Dish Network door-to-door while we were trying to sell as well door-to-door and we were running the wholesaling business. But after a couple months it just didn't work out. Our attention was split and that's one thing you're going to learn if you're going to do this business well, you need to go all in on it. So that's what me and Corey eventually did. We told those guys, hey, let's just call it. We dissolved the company or the sales team, the portion that I was managing. And I said, let's just go all in. So once we decided to go all in, me and Corey started calling for sale by owners and we really didn't know what we were doing. But eventually what we decided to do is we said, we need to get ahold of somebody that knows the industry and knows this area. 'Cause we were in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Corey was wholesaling real estate in Rexburg, Idaho when we were doing it. And he wasn't even technically wholesaling, he was doing lease options. But what ended up happening is we said, hey, we need to just get around somebody that has more knowledge than we do. So we made a Facebook post, and on the Facebook post we just said, hey, we're trying to network with any real estate agents, any brokers, anyone that knows how to wholesale real estate. And Corey got a response to his Facebook post that he put out there, and it was someone that said, hey, my broker is interested in wholesaling, you should come meet with him. So we ended up going to the office of a broker in the area, and he said, hey, I recently had a dream about wholesaling in Missouri, and I want to get into wholesale. And I got some cubicles that you guys can use. I have a dialer. You guys just hop on the dialer. I have lists that you can call. Any wholesale deals that you get, they're yours. But any listings that you get that they— where they don't want a wholesale offer, give them to me and I'll list them. So we're like, yeah, it sounds good. We didn't— we were working in my basement before, so I was like, yeah, let's work at an office. We didn't have to pay, so it was a good fit. And the thing is, Corey was from Missouri, so we were like, well, maybe this signed. So we ended up working 3 months with that broker. It took 3 months at that office to get our first deal. We were just hammering and cold calling, and I was getting rejected, and it was really hard. And I was like, man, this sucks, because we were calling pretty much the phone book. We were calling lists like expired listings and just giant lists of just neighborhoods, and we were just not really targeted like I know how to do now, where you want to just target specific stack lists. We were just calling, like I said, pretty much anyone and everybody in the area, right? What ended up happening is we met with a guy named Donald who was in pre-foreclosure. He had previously listed his house and he came from the expired listings list, listed his house. He didn't get anyone to want to buy his house for a price that he was willing to sell for. So he just took his house off the MLS and he was willing to let it go. We ended up working with Donald and we— this was a crazy deal. I'm not going to get super into it. I have more on the story with Donald, but we ended up making $5,000 on that deal. And that deal is what taught me that this was real. Now, $5,000 is not a lot of money, especially when we had to break it and cut it and split it because we're business partners. But again, it taught me that this business is real and it got me excited that there was a lot more to come. And what ended up happening is the next couple of months we were able to do several deals and we ended up actually making $96,000 in our first 6 months because we had the momentum of building up the pipeline. So if you want to do well in this business and you're— well, you have the time and you're willing to hustle, You can do deals just from calling. You can do deals from knocking. You can do deals from text blasting. You can do deals from just straight hustle, okay? Now, if I had to start over, I would not go that route. I don't have the time or have the desire to just call a bunch of people and get, you know, chewed out at. There's better ways now, which I go over in my other videos, but I'm just letting you guys know that that was my experience. I hustled and grind and I knocked doors, got deals from doing crazy stuff that I'm not willing to do anymore. I moved a hoarder. Myself. I got 2 giant trucks and filled these 2 26-foot U-Haul trucks myself with my team, my cold callers that I had at the time. We personally moved her. And crazy experiences. Again, like I was in the trenches and I was willing to do anything to get a deal that right now I would probably just say like, hey, if I have to do that much, it's not even worth it. But it was a crazy experience. But that's how I got my start. Now, if you're just getting started like I was and you want help closing deals and someone to walk you through so you don't have to go through the pain that I had to go through to get my first deal in months of cold calling, Click on the link below that talks about my painless flipping apprenticeship where we work with you hands-on to help you close deals. Now let's talk about what happened after I went all in and what enabled me to make millions in wholesaling real estate. So what ended up helping me make tons of money and do more deals was I got more leads, got better at the sales process, and I got a team. If you want to make a lot of money in this business and if you want to do— and when I say a lot of money, I mean you want to bring in a lot of revenue you need to hire a team. And that's what I tried to do in the very beginning. I was just, I wasn't really concerned with the profit margin necessarily. I was just wanting to do more deals. But what you end up finding out is if you scale too soon and you try to grow a team too fast, you're not going to be extremely profitable because this business can eat you up alive if you spend too much money on marketing, then you have overhead, then you got leads and you got CRMs, you got services and softwares, and then you have employees. So although I was able to make my first million within 3 years, I wasn't very profitable. I'm just going to be straight up with you guys. Anyone that just says like, oh, I made a million, I'm super rich. Like, no, it's a business. You need to be able to pay out people and you need to be able to make money, but you need to be able to be profitable for it to be a good business. Now, it wasn't that I didn't make any money. It just wasn't as much as you thought it would be after making $1 million. So in this business, I learned that it is more important to be profitable and have a higher profit margin than just to bring in tons of revenue, do tons of deals. It was almost like a vanity metric where you just want to do tons of deals and say you made a lot of money. But the bottom line is you didn't really make that much after all the expenses. So what I learned in this business is the most important thing is to keep the money right. You want to stay profitable and you want to make money. So that's one of the biggest lessons I've learned. But in order to get up to that point, I had to master a sales process and I had to get good at knowing all the different extra strategies that you can do and work with sellers. Not only that, but I knew I needed to generate tons of leads. So this business is a sales and marketing business primarily. You need to get good at sales and get good at marketing if you want to hit millions of dollars in this business and stay profitable. Doesn't matter how much money you can make if you don't get to keep it all. Okay, so that's my advice to you guys. So what would I do differently if I had to start all over from scratch? Well, first of all, I would generate leads. I would only do pay-per-lead or pay-per-click if I were to get started now because I have a marketing budget and I would be able to— if I didn't have any money, I would go get a 0% interest credit card. I put all the money on that card and then I would bet on myself to close those deals. Because if I went cold calling or text blasting or RVM or mail, those aren't, I'm not that sure that those are gonna return the investment, I'm gonna get an ROI on those as if I did pay-per-click or pay-per-lead. So that's what I would do if I started over again. I would really focus in on my sales process, on how to talk with sellers, how to gain trust. Not only that, but I would work on all the extra strategies that you can do when you're working with a seller of novation, wholesale, BRRRR, creative financing. I would get really good at those. So that's what I would focus on if I were you guys and I had to start all over, is 0% interest credit card, go pay-per-lead, pay-per-click, connect yourself with a real estate investor in your area that can help you do deals. If you don't have that experience, JV with some people, learn, leverage other people's experiences so you don't fail and just light all your leads on fire because you don't know how to close them. You don't have to be an expert at everything first in this business, and that's why I have the Painless Flipping Apprenticeship. I help people who want to do deals, but maybe they're not there yet and they need some help along the way. That's how I wish I would have learned, because I've had a lot of bumps and bruises from trying to figure everything out myself. But if you have someone in your corner, then you're going to do more deals faster. So check out the link below. And if you want over $2 million of wholesaling real estate advice packed into one video, check out this video on the next screen where I break it all down.