Cody shares the mindset shift that helped him raise hundreds of thousands for real estate deals: reframe debt as allocating someone else's money, then know your deal's numbers cold. Investors need to see more value than they'd get alone. He rehearsed his pitch constantly, in mirrors and cars, and recommends finding a mentor who's raised capital before.
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Hey guys, what's going on? This is Cody, and I'm creating today's short video to go over the one thing that I learned over the past year and a half that allowed me to change my mindset about raising money, and a few of the key understandings that I needed to learn over this past year and a half that have allowed me to raise a couple hundred thousand dollars for my first few deals. Before I jump into that, I wanted to share a book that doesn't quite fit the topic of this video, but Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover I want to talk about this because this is the only book that works 100% of the time for getting your personal finances right. It's the only strategy where you can start to finish that works 100% of the time. He is a debt-free strategy type of person. I use debt to buy income-producing real estate. I don't use it for fix and flips. However, I am using it for assets that pay me every single month, and so that's where I defer from him.. But if you need to get your personal finances right, check out Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. It will get you in the right position to start making these types of investments. So with that said, I'd like to kick it off. The number one understanding piece that I had to gain over this past year and a half is that debt is solely the allocation of someone else's money. When I'm looking at a real estate deal and I don't have the down payment, I have to raise that money from someone else. I have to provide more value to them than I am taking. At the end of the day, everyone is looking for a safe place to put their money, regardless of whether they're worth $10 or $10 million. Folks are looking for a place to get a solid investment where they don't have to worry about their principal. And so I have to be able to go to them and show them how to spend their money better than they could spend on their own. I have to allocate their money for them. When I learned this, I understood, okay, I got to get really comfortable with my numbers. I gotta make an airtight logical case on why this deal that I'm presenting to them is the one deal they want in their life. And when I figured that piece out, I started looking to the questions that I had to ask to pitch investors on my deals. I had to know about, okay, what's the income? What are the expenses? What's the area like? Who are going to be my typical tenants? That's a big one. That's a question that I always ask now to myself. I ask to people in the area, 'Cause if I don't know who I'm renting to, it'll be impossible to predict how my vacancies are gonna be, how my turnovers are gonna be. And so it's something huge that I've started implementing into my real estate business. For actually raising the money, when you're in the meeting, something that I've learned, you gotta be super comfortable in your own skin. You've gotta present this to the mirror a lot. My first few times that I had to talk with folks about raising money, I had a very difficult time. I was very nervous, very uncomfortable. I wasn't really comfortable talking about money itself, and so I had to address that. I had to get into a lot of conversations with folks, with myself, practicing by myself, going through over and over in the car exactly how my pitch would be. And then when I got into the room, no matter how much I practiced, it would still get rushed. My speech would speed up, I'd get super nervous, and I would forget my lines. I'd forget what I have to say, what I came to the meeting for. And it was a learning experience. So for those of you who are looking at raising money for the first time, number one, find someone who's done it before. But two, get really, really comfortable with the deal so that it's second nature. You don't need to actually think about the deal, it just comes off the tip of your tongue. And once you do that, it gets a lot easier to get in front of folks and start pitching ideas. And just make sure that you can add more value than you take, and you're going to do awesome at this. That being said, hope you guys have a great night. If you're raising money, borrowing money, only do it for income-producing real estate. And if you need to get your personal finances right, check out Dave Ramsey. But, uh, that being said, I'll see you guys next week. If you like the content, please do like, subscribe, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks.
