My First Cold Calling Team Burned $5K | Wholesale Real Estate Story

Hmm. What's going on, everybody? I know why you're here today. You're here for Nathan Payne's Wholesaling Storytime, Tales from the Trenches, where I talk about my experience from starting from $0 to making— doing a lot of deals. All right. Doing over $2 million in assignments. And I'm going to explain to you guys how I did it, but not just all the good, all the cheery stuff. I want to explain the good, the bad, everything about it, because a lot of what goes out on social media in my opinion, is fake. And, you know, people just want to share all the highlights. And what I'm trying to do for you guys is share the journey so you can see what I had to do, what I had to go through to get to this point, and what I had to learn. And hopefully you can learn from my experiences so you don't make the mistakes that I made, like what I'm going to tell you in the story today— how I hired a cold calling team of college buddies, of friends, and it did not go according to plan. I did not make the money and make the investment back that I wanted to. So I'm going to tell you today in today's episode how when we started getting deals, how we ended up investing that money into a cold calling team that was comprised of college friends, right? And we ended up paying them more than you should for cold callers. But again, we didn't really know. So we're going to dive into that today. That's going to be what the story is about, is how when I started hiring after getting some deals, how I did it the wrong way, the painful way, and how you can avoid that so you don't go through the same pain that I went through, because that's why we're here on Nathan Payne's Wholesaling Storytime. So you can learn from my experiences. And what I'm going to give you if you stay to the end of the video, and you obviously, if you're subscribed to the newsletter where we send you free resources with every story that goes out, I'm going to give you the cold calling script that I use. Okay, so if you're interested in cold calling or reaching out to a list, I will tell you what's the best strategy that I recommend after going through this experience all the years that I have been doing this. I'm going to tell you the best strategy I use, and you're going to get my cold calling script just for being subscribed to the newsletter. So stay tuned. If you've been watching the previous videos on Wholesaling Storytime, at this point in my real estate journey, this is, you know, 4 or 5 deals in, I've made, you know, enough money to start hiring people to do specific jobs, to do lead gen, okay? Because that's what me and Corey were doing in the beginning was all the lead generation. We were cold calling, we were knocking doors ourselves, we were flying ourselves. So, you know, we started hiring people to cold call and we started hiring people to flyer. And I got a story about how the flying went sideways and how to definitely make sure if you're going to hire people. We'll talk about that next story time. But today we're going to be talking about cold calling and the best way to hire a team and how not to hire a team and what not to pay them, all all that. So let's dive right in. So at this time, we've done a couple deals, we've set aside some money for cold calling, okay, for, uh, investing in lead gen. So at this point, me and Corey are like, man, who are we gonna hire? What, you know, we were faced with a couple different options. You can hire virtual assistants, and, uh, or you could just hire people locally. You can hire people in the United States. We didn't know about all the different companies that exist now, but we knew we could hire some VAs, and we knew we could hire— we knew some buddies that needed jobs, okay? So I reached out to one of my college roommates, Steve, and I was like, hey man, uh, would you be open to working with us and calling some leads. And, uh, you know, obviously you team up, you see if they're interested in selling. We got a list for you, got a Mojo dialer. You call them, and then we'll go on the appointments and close them. We'll give you— I think we said we might give them a percentage and we'll pay them hourly for doing it. So Steve was down, and then Steve let me know about one of our— another homie we knew in college named Blake. He was Canadian. He needed a job. And we even put some ads out on like Facebook saying, hey, cold call, we'll pay you percentage. So we ended up paying Steve and Blake hourly for calling, and then we had some other people that would come into the office that we were working at, the broker's office, and they would call for a couple hours a day. And all we told them is just to call for 4 hours a day. That's it. They would come to the office, they get on the Mojo dialer, and I would be calling leads that were already in our system, and Corey would be calling leads that were already in our system, and they would be cold calling right next to us, just like cold calling so we could hear them. And we just did 4 hours a day for them, okay? And obviously me and Corey were working full-time, but the cold callers were 4 hours a day. And what we decided to pay them 5 years ago was $15 an hour, okay? Because we're like, okay, if you get a virtual assistant, maybe you can pay them like $3 or $4 or $5 an hour. Depends where you go in the Philippines or South America, Pakistan, wherever you want. But we were like, okay, we could pay $4 or $5 an hour, or we could pay $15 to these college graduates or our friends that we met in college that are American. They have— they don't have accents. Maybe they will do better because they, you know, they're American and they know how to carry on a conversation. So that was our philosophy around paying them more money. We're like, okay, we can do $15 an hour. So we ended up doing that. And, uh, We had another guy named Frank who would come and he would just come after his other job and he would call for us too. But again, we weren't paying him, we were just paying Steve and Blake. And so we got started cold calling and we were excited. Like our vision was like, oh, we're going to crush this. We got some really skilled people on the phones that are Americans that don't have accents. We're going to do great. And got the Mojo dialer and we're ready to go. And it didn't turn out according to plan. Okay. And one thing that we found out is Americans, no offense to Americans everywhere, but just our kind kind of lazy when it comes to cold calling, you know, like to do it consistently, repeatedly. Like we just saw from our experience with our buddies that they like started gung-ho for like 2 or 3 days and then eventually they just were depleted. They just weren't excited. All the rejection they were getting, it was really hard to keep them motivated. Obviously they were still making the calls because we could hear them, but their tonality, everything, it just— they weren't vibing. We weren't feeling the momentum anymore after a couple of days. And, um, you know, paying $15 an hour is pretty dang generous of us to pay them. It just wasn't really giving us the the results that we wanted. And, you know, I knew at that point, like, okay, it takes a lot of dials. It's— we just got to kind of see what happens with this cold calling squad that we have, our college buddies. But it just wasn't working out like we had planned. And what had happened is Blake, he was from Canada as well. So before this, we had had them for a couple months. Blake, uh, when we originally hired him, he was like, guys, I need a place to live. Like, I don't have a place to live. Like, I'm Canadian, so I can't really get a job here. And before we had, you know, the results of months and months of calling in the very beginning when we hired him, I was like so gung-ho on making this business work. I wanted it to work. And I believed that Blake had the skill set to convert and get a lot of leads. He had been a door-to-door sales guy. He was smooth. He was good at talking to people. But you know what eventually I found is he just was not that good at cold calling and staying motivated on that phone and keeping that energy up. But like I was saying, he didn't have a place to live. He was from Canada. So he's like, this is— you're going to give me a job, but I don't have a place to live. And I wanted— again, I wanted this job to work so much and selling that I went to my wife and I said, babe, Blake, he's going to cold call for us. I can hire him. So I know that he'll pay us rent, like obviously because I'm paying him. Can he live in our house? And she was not interested in letting him live in our house. She wanted that privacy. But I was like, babe, I have this dream. I have this vision. Please, like, if he can move in, he can have a place to live. He can cold call for me. We'll get deals. The business will explode and we'll take off and it'll all be worth in the long run. She didn't want to do it, but I just being persistent, I convinced her and she agreed. She's like, Okay, fine, he can live there. So Blake, my cold caller who I hired, ends up living in my house in one of our spare bedrooms that we have. And I ended up buying him his own little tiny refrigerator and I put it in the garage. And I said, all right, Blake, that's your fridge. Don't use my fridge just 'cause, you know, I don't want you to eat my food and get it mixed up. Use the tiny little fridge I bought you in the garage. And here's your bathroom. Don't use like any of my towels or whatever. Just let's just keep it separate. It was funny. It was funny 'cause I'd come home after work and 'cause I think he'd come home earlier than me, or sometimes he'd stay in because he was only working 4 hours a day. And I go to my fridge and he'd have his stuff in my fridge and I'd be like, why is your stuff in my fridge, man? I got you. I got you your own fridge. And it was just funny because it was like back at college and I had recently graduated from college and that's why I didn't think it was that big of a deal to let— it was like a roommate, right? So I was like, I didn't think it was a big deal to let him live there, but my wife wasn't down again. But he was using the fridge and I was like, dude, use your dang— your own dang fridge. He was using my towels. And Blake, if you're watching this, I love you, man. But that's just, you know, we were young and and we let it fly. But we were just going for it. But not a smooth idea and definitely not something I would do now. But that's how much I wanted this to work in the wholesaling. I wanted to succeed as a wholesaler. So I hired my buddy from college, let him live with me, living like right across the room from me in like one of the spare bedrooms. Anyway, that's a funny experience that wouldn't do now. I wouldn't recommend hiring a college buddy and then letting him live at your house and letting him cold call for you because it ended up not working in the long run. And I had to say, hey man, I love you, but you're fired. You got to move out of my house. So that ended up happening, which is kind of an interesting experience, but, you know, not really worth having the, uh, not having privacy. And it's— if you're thinking about it, it won't work out. Like, uh, if you hire a cold caller and you hope— in the hopes that they'll make you rich, it's, it's just not gonna— it's not gonna happen. But believe— you can believe— I'm not trying to shoot your dreams, but just from my experience, it's not gonna— it's not gonna work. So after months of having Blake, Frank, Steve cold call, it wasn't looking good, guys. With the 4 hours every day, paying them $15 an hour, the The money in the account was dwindling quick and we weren't getting the results we wanted. And I just— what I attributed to what I learned from is like, first of all, we weren't good at targeting lists. Like, we didn't know, we were just pretty much calling the phone book. We were calling expired listings, like all absentee owners over Utah. If I— obviously, if I do it again, we would be way more targeted on probates. We'd list stack, we would go for specific areas where we had buyers. As a better negotiator now, I'd be able to pull out more deals. But just, we weren't, we weren't that good, and it was too expensive to, to pay for those leads and for, for them to call, and it just didn't work out. But yeah, things didn't work out with the cold calling squad. And it ended up coming up to Christmas time, said, hey guys, let's take a break, let's reanalyze what's going on. And it ended up being, we just said, hey guys, it's not working out, we can't afford to continue to pay you, we're not getting the results we want. We did end up getting that one deal I told you about on the previous episode, Joe, where I had to go to court because we set up the paperwork on a contract for deed and he did not want to get out, and he ended up fighting it, and I had to take him to court to get him evicted. And anyway, that deal did come from the cold calling, but that, that definitely wasn't worth all the, the money that we were paying because that that one, you know, obviously in the, in the long run it worked out, but in the short term we weren't making enough money off of that. So let's reflect on this story, okay? Because it's, it's not that intense or that long of a story. It's just I hired college buddies to cold call for me 5 years ago. I was paying $15 an hour, so just maybe that would be like $20, $25 an hour now. At the very beginning they were gung-ho, maybe 2 days in, and then after that their tonality, they just weren't really working that hard. They were pausing the dialer a lot on the Mojo dialer. I'd have to get, be like, hey guys, keep calling, and they just weren't very persistent on the phone. It just wasn't good. So I would not hire college friends to cold call for me at $15+ an hour. I would hire virtual assistants who, you know, are managed by companies that are like, hey, you gotta call, you gotta hit these numbers, you gotta hit these KPIs. And they just have a different mindset. They make good money where they're from and they're excited to do it. So I would definitely hire Egyptians. I would hire Filipinos, people in South America. It's less expensive than it is here and they're just have a different mindset and they have a different mentality. They might have accents, but I think it's more important to get in front of people, more people when you're cold calling than like having like really skilled people because more skilled people are going to be more expensive. And it just didn't work out that well for us when we did it. So that's the lesson I learned from that is cold calling is a numbers game. You got to just hammer that and you got to be way more targeted and go after better lists. And for us, we were new, so we were just dialing, like I said, the phone book. We were just trying to ask everyone if they wanted to sell. Wasn't a smooth process. We weren't that good at it. Again, be better at lists. It's volume. It's a volume game. Okay. You got to find the person that wants to sell. You can't convince everybody to take a low wholesale offer. Plus, all I knew at that time was wholesale, like making wholesale offers that were like low cash offers. Now I know how to do novations. I know how to do wholesale, subject to, creative finance, all those. There's a bunch of different options. So listing it, if someone says, I don't want your low cash offer, we're like, that's fine. There's a couple of different options. If you are selling, we can work with you. But anyway, Anyway, that's a problem too that I learned from now is like if you only got one option, you're not going to be able to get a lot of opportunities. And this is another lesson is even though we ended up paying our buddies a lot of money at that time and it not working out, we had to end up firing them. I had to kick Blake out of my house because I fired him and he needed to go live somewhere else. Everything, every lesson that I learned helped me to further know how to hire people, how to handle situations, not to hire friends and let them move in. So these are lessons that I learned from this experience. Experience, and I want you to learn the same thing so you don't have to hire people and let them live with you and have that kind of awkward conversation or them using their— your fridge or them drying themselves with your own towel and you're like, hey, use your own towel. You're gonna have, uh, yeah, you definitely don't have to go through that experience if you just learn from my experience. Okay, so as you get started as a brand new investor, as like I was in this story, when you do hire out leads, you have to be tactful about it. You can't just throw money at the wall and hope it sticks, or like throw money at leads and hope you get stuff. You have to be tactful about how you do it. Now, if I were to go back again, I would hire a skilled team that was managed by someone else. I wouldn't manage the cold calling team myself. I would pay someone to do it. Lead Mining Pros is good. Shout out to Nicholas Nick. He's good to work with if you're trying to do cold calling. I would target specific lists that are very targeted. Probates, notice of default, pre-foreclosures. I would stack. I would go to specific areas where I have buyers and I would call consistently and understand that it's a numbers game and not so much like worried about that person being able to negotiate or being that skilled on that initial call, because I just need to talk to someone that needs to sell, and then I'll be able to negotiate and take it from there. So take my advice if it's helpful. I think it is. Don't, don't blow your money like I did, okay? And learn from my lessons. So basically, if any of you are interested in getting the cold calling script that I use, I give it— I'm giving it away for free. All you have to do is go to painlessflipping.com. If you subscribe, every week we send you resources from the stories I'm telling and additional resources as well outside of the stories. I'm just giving away everything in my Drive, and I'm making stories about it so it's entertaining. And instead of just giving it out, I'm tying it to stories that can help you guys learn as well. So, so far we've given out the flyer template that I've used, the flyer, my calculator, my planner scripts, uh, you name it. I'm just giving away so many resources that will save you guys thousands because I spent thousands on them. But now I don't want you to spend thousands. I want to give them to you for free, and all you got to do is subscribe to the email, a weekly newsletter, and listen to the stories. Don't even listen to stories, you get the, you get the resources anyway. Anyway, hope this was helpful, everybody. I would to hear your feedback about this story. If you've experienced any pain like I have of hiring friends, letting people stay with you, having to fire people and it'd be awkward, or, or anything. I, as I tell my experience, I want to hear your experiences too. So let me know if you're going through this right now and you're like, hey, thanks, you just saved me a ton of money saying, hey, it's not about paying more money to cold callers. Maybe if that cold caller is like really diligent and can stay positive and tonality, they can be happy all the time and they can do volume, that's good. Good luck finding that person. But, uh, what I found is the people in in different countries, they have a different mindset than what we do in America. Like, if I call for 4 hours right now, I'm freaking done. I'm tired and I probably wouldn't do it, but unless I had to. But like, in other countries, that's the mindset they have and they're happy to do it, I'm assuming, or they're willing to do it like and stay focused. That's what my take— that's my story for today. So again, share your experiences with me. And if you want to give me one more favor, hit a like on the video wherever you're watching on. Give it a like, because that means that the algorithm will see that and be like, oh, these people like this video, let's get in front of more people. And this will help this grow. Everybody have a great weekend. It's Friday. Enjoy yourselves. Love your family. Be around people that lift you up and serve, love, give back. And, uh, we'll see you on next week's, uh, Nathan Payne's Wholesaling Storytime Tales from the Trenches, because I'm in the trenches with you guys, and I like being in the trenches. That's where you learn. The trenches is where you learn. So let's learn together. See you next week. Hey everybody, what's up? It's Nathan Payne, and for the first time ever, we just released this insane training bundle that has literally everything that I've learned from doing a combined 4,000 deals in real estate, all from starting with absolutely no previous business background experience or any real estate experience. Plus, there's over $19,000 worth of free gifts that we're throwing in, all for an insanely low, low price. If you want to get your hands on this, be sure to click the first link on the description below right now.