EP 335 – Connect And Reach Out With Technology And Smartphones

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This is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Note Close show. As always, I'm Scott Carson. Excited to be here today. What a busy week. Not only do we have two back to back events we're rocking, we've got a portfolio we're working through. But we were originally scheduled to have a Kwambal on today but unfortunately there's some technical issues. We're going to reschedule with him which is completely fine. It's not a big deal. We reschedule people quite often just because of technology and we want to make sure that our signals are clear, they can hear, we can see them, all that great stuff. So for those are looking for, for Quambolo on Thursday, I'm sorry, he's not available right now. We'll have to call back at another time. But anyway, so we run audibles. All right. One of the things that we're excited about, we have been working on for quite some time is we are always, always, always diving into technology. And the thing you have to keep in mind, we talked about this this weekend with everybody at the Quest Expo when I mentioned on stage that everybody, this is your new media outlet. This is your new phone, this is your smartphone, is your media outlet. This is where everything's at right now for the most part. And you have to expect it just missed a phone call and another phone call as well. But anyway, excited, we have some great stuff going on here with our phones, our technology, first world problems punt. I don't know what that means, but anyway. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. But one of the things that we are using and be using our phones for is really kind of a cool thing is as we get some product in, as we get some stuff and we're looking to move assets, we'll be literally using our smartphones. This is the technology we're using to literally get the word out to you guys, to our investors, our buyers, we have classes, new podcasts available. Gives you an opportunity to stay connected at the touch of your phone. And I know a lot of people spend time on text message marketing. We're using something like that service called Mobit M O B I T is who we're using really cool thing, actually. If you're watching this, you'll see down here below where it says text notes to send 2000. Learn more about note investing. That's a mobit technology where if you text notes in boom, you're sent a link to your smartphone. You click on ask for your first name, your email address, and then it provides you with links. If you have not done that already, please do so. If you're listening itunes Stitcher, if you're watching this, take the second. If you've already done it, don't worry about. You don't have to worry about doing it. But if you have not, then I want you to pull out your smartphone. For you guys that are listening to this while you're driving or walking or doing something as well, pull over the side of the road, pull out your smartphone, go to your text messaging service, type in the number sunny 2000 and then I want you to send the word notes N O T S that will initiate text messaging. They'll be in our service, our system, and that way I can send you alerts on a regular basis. I'm not going to bombard you every day with something, but as we have podcast episodes that become available, or as we have deals, because specifically type in notes, I'm going to send back a link to you. Roughly, we'll be sending that out here in the next day or two for you to update the top three states that you like to buy in your top three markets. And then what we'll do with that is as we have assets available, as we have assets, we're moving off our plate because we've got something we're getting ready to sell. You will be notified. Hey, here's an asset in your area or here's a link to an asset page for you to take a look at. And if you want to make an offer, great. If you want to dive into it, get more information, you'll be able to do that. So that's the beauty of technology, is everything is coming to your smartphone, video replays, webinar reminders, assets. It's one of the cool things that we are doing. We've been working hard over the last couple years working to kind of create some stuff and that makes sense to stay ahead of everybody, technology wise. And so I'm going to ask you, we sent an email out last night to our database. Hey, please text. If you've not done this, go ahead and do this. Trust me, you'll be excited about what we have to offer. We're not going to be one of those bombard you with buy every wrap or buy every note we have. No we want to make it and target it and be specific and niche down to what you want. We don't want to send you things that you don't want to see. Okay that's not what we're trying to do. But it's also kind of cool things that we can send you over lists if we've got a tape of assets available. Hey, here's a list of preview Here's a list obviously to take a look at make offers off this stuff. We've used this before obviously with some of our workshops. I use this when I speak. If you will text the word notes to sending 2000 you'll get my slides use it before we've used night. If you text the word night N I G H T you'll get registered for it'll allow you to get registered for our note night in Americas. Those are just two things. We've also if you text the word deals D E A L E S deals D E A L S not es D E A L s the five letter word to 72,000. It'll also send you the preview of the note if you send the notes. But it'll allow for you me to be able to see who actually sent the word in for deals. So this guy send it in either notes or deals or night. We'll get you in the system and be able to send you out direct information to your smartphone. All right. To your smart we're pretty stoked about that. Also some of the cool things is we've got just some really cool we got a new app that we're working through right now that'll be tied into Facebook like a chatbot and app to your smartphone. Whereas your if you're brand new or asking questions, you be able to go and connect there and be able to ask questions and we'll be able to answer them almost instantaneously. Pretty excited about that because the fact is that we've got a company and our buddy Peter Latowski is literally taking videos and hours of webinars and uploading them to an artificial intelligence system that we're developing for the note business. So if you have questions we'll ask and it'll literally be able to prompt you questions, answers, videos, a podcast, episodes directly in your inbox or via your Facebook messenger. So you'll be able to communicate with us and I won't need to be live 24 hours a day. It would Be basically almost an instant gratification for you guys. I know, I know. I'm really pulling out some big guns for you guys. So that's in development. We hopefully have the first part of it rolled out here by the end of the year. It's been a long time coming and we're constantly tweaking, constantly adding some things to really make it a smart thing. We're really trying to revolutionize the note industry with a kind of coming in the new guard versus the old guard. Nothing. That's the old guard. Although the old guard often has a very like, I don't want to share anything. I don't, I don't want to share anything with you guys. And the new guard is very like open. Hey, let's share some stuff. Here's some great things are going on, stuff like that. So yes, we are quantifying and maximizing our marketing. I know some people are not a big fan of marketing. Some people would rather just stay at home and watch TV all day, which is fine. Some people just would rather talk to people versus the mass marketing of emails or social media. I get that. Totally understand that sometimes it's not the easiest for people. But you know what? Welcome to the 21st century. And Scotty is working his ass off to beam me up. And I'm giving her all she's got, Captain. All right. To help you find deals, help you with education, help you with racy capital. Just a lot of great stuff out there. So it's not bad. We mix hot chocolate with coffee by accident in the coffee maker this morning. What else is going on here? We got just technology. Good. We have a big announcement. We've hired Hazel Rivera to work with us on a full time basis as a new asset manager for us on our portfolio. Hazel comes to us from Madison Management where she worked there for a couple years. Excited to have her in order to manage our portfolio and then probably, probably be rolling out some other things for our mastermind group as maybe a private asset manager to help out with other people's files as well. If they're curious, they need help with somebody following up and things like that. So pretty stoked about that. We're looking to also be providing updates via text messaging out to our clients as well on the text message service. So then get updates, payments come in on our files or as we have updates. We're pretty stoked about that aspect of things as well out there. But technology, guys, is this something you should shy away from? It's something you should embrace. Literally. It can save you. It can help you save you time, save you money, make you money if you use it properly to make sure you're communicating on a regular. Because that's what really what it all comes down to. If you think about the book Tries by Seth Godin, one of the great books out there, you have not read it. Go ahead and read it. It's all about connecting people. It's all about networking. It's all about really taking your business to the next level to literally you can use less and less people to make things happen. I mean obviously you've heard of robots in the in McDonald's or in assembly lines now that we have a robot. But we are using chatbots with our new technology. We're rolling that out to stuff like that. We're using some of these easy features to be able to communicate with you guys on a much faster basis. There'll be some part of the the podcast website brought into that as well with the episodes where you can watch directly from your phone as well without having to go out to itunes or Stitch or anything like that too. Although we like it when you go there because it tracks it a little bit easier. But some of the things that you can use that are really simple you can use voice blasts are relatively easy for your emailing out. I'm sorry you're wanting to leave a voicemail with a lot of people. There is like I said, Mobit's a great text messaging service. There's a variety of them. Fix your funnel is another one that you can use for text message marketing out to your database to help you kind of drive things in. The idea is everybody is that with the way that technology works, the way podcasts work, the way that Facebook works, the way that YouTube works or Instagram works, everything is all about literally being on the phone. And you have to start embracing that. That's why you want your emails to be weapon able to where it looks nice when you send an email out. It's why it's important to use like an infusionsoft or a mailchimp something that you can use that integrates a lot of these features into your phone or into your CRM so it's easy to communicate. We're even toying with the idea of using text message marketing in with our borrowers to be able to alert them hey, your payment is due or hey, thanks, we've received your payment. You know we've. I know some people are using some of the voice blast to send an email. Hey, this is such and Such we just want to remind you that your payment is due, your mortgage payment is due this month, which is I think a little bit, almost cross the line a little bit. But I think there's some feasibility to it and there's some great uses of that stuff in your note business, only for raising capital and moving deals. But also on the workout side, you get a cell phone number of a borrower and then you're sending a text message to them. Just normal, not anytime, crazy after hours. You always want to be compliant with the fair debt collection practices. That's important thing. But think about this. If you can literally be communicating with people directly to their cell phones, you're literally in their pocket. You're literally on their phone. Because people are spending more and more time answering their text message. And text messaging have a much higher open rate than emails. Like I purposely, a lot of times don't, I don't get my we closed notes email on my cell phone because I don't want that constant thing at home after 7 o' clock to be checking my emails. I don't want that. I want to be able to unwind, to be able to untap myself, unplug a little bit. I want to be able to have a life away from the phone. I know a lot of people spend time on social media looking at Instagram and Facebook at night. I get that, trust me, I do that too. But I like to do a little bit unplug from the work side. I don't want to read every email I can. Stuff can wait till I get to the office in the morning. And that's, I think it's important thing is from 7 to 7 you pretty much do your thing unless it's emergency. And that's, I think, as I always say to people out there that are listening out there too, hey, if you can't get a hold of me via email and I don't respond within 24 to 40 hours, it's okay to send me a text message straight to my cell phone. That's why I give my phone out. 512-585-3810. Okay. 512-585-3810. That's my direct cell phone number. You can reach me on there. Shoot me a text message. Use the fastest way. Because I literally will put my phone on silent and sit it down and not look at it for two hours. Because the fact that I'm diving into a project or I'm working on something, I don't look at email and I look at text messages for hours on end. Because the fact is I want to be focused. I want to be getting. Knocking stuff out. And I think a lot of people allow the distractions to come in and keep them from being as successful. And that's fine if you've got little kids or stuff like that. I get that you gotta have be able if something happens, but what did we do before cell phones? What do we do before cell phones? You had a landline, right? So we call and leave a message. Voicemail, okay? Like I've had three people call me since I started this episode and I already know what they've sent me because the transcription of voicemail, which is great. It's fine. That's perfect. It's all I need. I don't need to be a helicopter person, okay? And I see that a lot of times. Oh my God, Johnny farted. I gotta run and wipe his butt. No, you don't. Or little Susie sneeze. Oh my God. I gotta take her to the doctor. Just chill. It's okay. It's quite all right. And if you're looking at marketing, I'll tell you this here. If you're looking at using your phone, there's a couple things that are easy to do. Just take it one step at a time, One step at a time. I have always been a big advocate of getting people's first name, last name emails and cell phone numbers because that what allows for you be able to communicate with them in an effective manner. First name, last name, obviously, duh. Email is important things in an email blast out. But the cell phone, I think a lot of people forget about that because the fact they're not used to it or they have a firm that they're. They've had one way of doing it for years. They're not adding information now. They may have the person's cell phone number online, they may have an account, but it's not as effective as collecting it at the time of login. Especially if you're doing an event where you're providing that list to other people. That's one thing that we love to do religiously is when we have an event, try to give people's information out so that you can network with people. That's a really important and handy habit or handy thing to have questions, comments, concerns for everybody. I would love to ask those that are watching what's been one big marketing thing or one big technology thing that you've added in the last 12 months to your business or to your life. I will tell you one thing that I am not a fan of is the in home. Like Echo or the in home, Amazon, whatever they call those things. Little boxes where you can say something, it'll order for you. I'm not a no, you won't see me adding one of those. Now, I probably need to work a little bit on some things so that when people want to order or listen to podcasts, they can make it a little bit more easier for people to do that. But I won't add one of those Amazon dots or the Amazon echoes or whatever the heck they call into my home. Just. I just won't do that. I see the feasibility and the smartness of it. If you're especially your elderly, hey, call the doctor, call 91 1. I get that. Or order this. Order that. Last thing you need is though, there'll be a mic on in your office the entire time because we already know the NSA Uncle Sam can tap in and turn on us. Yeah, all you gotta turn on a smartphone or can turn on your phone if they need to to listen in. Which is crazy. I know that conspiracy theorists out there are getting excited right now, but anyway, I think I tell you this, that's why it's important to turn things off. It's why it's important to literally kind of limit some stuff. One of the things I do think is pretty cool is the new ring ring security systems where you have the cameras on the outside and somebody rings, it rings to your cell phone or you've got the motion detectors in your house where if your dog's running around, you can see if your dog goes to the bathroom of your cat takes a crap kitty layer. Some people want to have those updates on a minute by minute basis. Oh, that's awesome. My kitty took a poopy. Amazon, can you order more kitty pads or more. That's what's gonna eventually happen. It already is. I know. Oh, you're out of milk. Let's let the refrigerator order more milk for you. It's just, it's coming to be an automated thing in our lives out there. And I think a lot of people in real estate have bucked the trend of doing that where we are kind of embracing part of it and identifying opportunities to be able to help people out there with their real estate, their education, or their other things out there that can dive in. Buying assets, funding assets, get somebody to work, you know, opening an IRA account. I mean, that's one of the great things about what we do is we are a big referrer of new accounts To Quest, Ira to Lawful and Associates, to Madison Management. Each and every year, we send a lot of business across the board to our vendors that we love. Singer Law Group, Polaris, Ross, Diversified. I can think of a lot of people that we've sent a lot of business two over the years. And the thing is, we love doing that. That's what we have great vendors we work with. We love referring business to them because it's a help becomes a win. Win across the board guy. Yes, exactly. Christina. Christine says, I know someone we both love would love to check on our cats throughout the day. I totally agree. I totally agree. Yeah, that would be a great thing. And I'm sure a lot of people redo that check on their cats or their dogs. I would love it too. Checking on my dog throughout the day. There's actually a box that stuff and I bought, actually that we were doing when we were traveling, when Princess was getting kind of sick, that we were looking at getting hooked up. So we can see what's going on with the animals in the thing or their pet sitter. But we've got an amazing pet sitter, pet nanny that comes in, just does a great job, takes photos and loves our animals just as much as. Well, not quite as much, but pretty close to it. Jamie does a great job with pets or pet sitter, does a great job there with our animals. Sends photos, sends updates on a daily basis as she's out here, you know, she comes by two or three times a day and we're gone. Because our animals need that extra love. They need that extra bit of love. But that's the thing is getting phones, getting to think about that, getting text messages, getting videos to your phone. This is the wave of the future. And you have to start realizing this is how business can be done. This is how webinars. This is how you're communicating. Conference calls, assets. You know, you look at driving by houses. We use this to take a lot of photos of properties, property inspections. I mean, I walked through two assets in Ohio. Boom. Taking videos of the property. Lots of great things that we did, we do on a regular basis. Comes from our smartphone. Reminds me, I gotta upgrade my phone. I go to the larger one. But that's the thing is I don't think you're ever gonna go wrong. I think you heard Christy White. Sue was on here for our marketing Monday two weeks ago. Two, almost three weeks ago. Talk about some of the things that they're doing. I mean, they have a service with Apple. You know, they basically rent phones every Week. Every month. Not every week. Every month. But they always get the most upgrades and things. Okay. And that's some smart to do versus dropping 700 bucks at a time. Laura Blunk says, I think I decided after last week, I need a spreadsheet of all my vendors and their favorite alcohol. That is a great idea. What's their favorite drink? Laura Blanc. What's her favorite wine? That's the bartender in me. That's not a bad idea. That's not a bad idea. Like, I know quite a few people what their favorite drinks are, and it helps out tremendously. They walk into a bar and there's a drink sitting there waiting for them. Okay. Take care of your bartender staff, because your bartender staff can make it really look nice. It's nice. Especially this weekend. Walk into one of the bars there at the Galleria, and the bartender would literally slide down a crown and Sprite with lime. To me, I'm like, thanks, I appreciate it. I'm not drinking half the time, but, yeah, that's a good idea, Laura. Just getting to know what people like, whether it's like, I'll give our good buddy Bill Greasemar likes fruity drinks. He just doesn't like the taste of alcohol by itself. So he likes something fruity. There's nothing wrong with that. I know that people like green tea or black tea or that, like, I'll give you this. Tom Hazard loves tequila or Dan Zatofsky loves a good bourbon Manhattan or an old Fashioned. Am I sorry. Shantae Duffy loves vodka drinks. Okay. Daniel Singer is a bourbon guy. All right. So, yeah, I can tell you a lot of these things. I know that Jack Croopy likes vodka Red Bull. I know that Peter Slagovitz is a. Likes red wine, like a Pinot Noir, basically. So those are all important things to keep in mind. Yeah. You could literally tag that in your smartphone and send them wine and stuff as well. But we're getting off the track here. Okay. I like. Casey likes. I like free drinks. Yes. All right. Who does not like free drinks? Casey Lang. Exactly. But that's the. That's the beauty thing. There is apps out here. This is one of the great things, too. This is. There's an app I love using called Vimeo. Apps are pretty cool. If you've got a good one, Vimeo that allows you to click on it. You can actually take a picture of the wine bottle and tell you what the average price is, the ratings. You can rate it. You can add it to your thing. It's one thing that I love doing. I travel a good bottle of wine. I'll take a picture of the label and keep it. But we also do it for ourselves because we've got a pretty decent little wine collection going from all the Napa and Sonomas and places that we've been to, we keep track of on our phone. But that's the thing. One thing that we're looking at doing with that aspect of this thing is literally, hey, if you got a deal, you got an asset you're buying, why not be able to share? Hey, I got a deal here. And a text message goes out to your investors, okay, boom. Photo of the property. I send it to my investor list. Here's a deal that I'm working through. It's worth 100. Pick it up for 50. Who wants to jump into it? Instant gratifications. We're looking for instant access to things. Everybody pretty cool with that aspect? I would say, you know, technology is great. Everybody, I know it's can be overwhelming, marketing can be crazy, can be scary. But if you take it one bite at a time, one little thing at a time, and learn it, learn how to use it, learn how to implement it, you'll be a lot happier off because it'll actually save you a lot of time and maximize your hour. If you want to take your hourly rate of what you're making up a notch, learn to market more. Most entrepreneurs, they struggle because they get so busy doing one thing and they forget to market. And then they go through their funnel or their lead gen, they did for a while, and they come to an end point where now they got to start marketing again to build, fill up that funnel again. And especially, I'll give you a great example, Realtors, mortgage brokers, title reps, are very, very known for this. They're always pushing towards closing at the end of close by the end of month to hit this month's goals these months. It allows them to stay competitive. I will tell you that if they're a competitive person, if you're not competitive, I would not be in that nature. Because everybody, the good mortgage brokers, the good realtors, are really focused on getting things closed by the end of the month. And that's one thing you have to look at too, especially in the note business. As we come to the end of the fourth quarter, a lot of the sellers have stuff, especially some of the hedge funds and stuff. They're trying to move off their books by the end of the month, by the end of the quarter, by the end of the year. And we're coming to a busy time frame for them to get stuff off their books. And so the ease of being able to market is important. If you can put some things in place and not donate to companies for a while, like I donated to infusionsoft, probably for two years before we actually started using it on an effective basis to get our money back. Start doing things, simple things. Marketing, creating a text message list, creating a voice blast system. Those are all little things that you can do to help drive people to you, to help drive people to your tribe. And it doesn't. You don't need to have a thousand people. Heck, 100 people could be very effective on the list, 50 people depending on that list. If it's investors, great. Just keep that in mind. That little things can help you really, really save the day. Technology is important. Technology is not going to go away. So the sooner you learn to embrace things versus fighting it, the happier you'll be, the more effective you'll be and the more fun you'll actually have. But most importantly, you gotta make sure you take care of your nuts and bolts and the base stuff of assets or raising capital or making offers. That's what it comes down to. But the smarter you can be on your phone or using some of the technology available out there, communicate with your database, communicate with your investors, communicate with your staff or other people out there, your tribe, your fellow investors. Trust me, the happier you're going to be, okay, more you can communicate. The more you can link in that stuff into your, your messaging, your marketing, the happier you are going to be. Trust me. All right. If I could recommend anything out there, using voiceblast.com is a great thing to be able to drop an email blast out or not email, but a voicemail blast out to your audience. It goes straight into their cell phone. If you get their cell phone, go straight in their voicemail. If not, it shows up as a missed phone call. They can call you back, but it leaves a voicemail in there. Hey, Scott Carson, you just want to say thank you for being a part of things or whatever things we're going to the class or hey, I've got a new deal available for you. If you want to check it out, check your inbox or check your text messaging and those are really some cool things that you can use. So we use Mobit. You can also use fix your funnel if you're an infusion soft user. It's a great way to do that. We use different things like repurpose IO for video stuff. It Allows us to automatically film one place. If we live stream to Facebook, it automatically after we're finishing the video, allow us to repurpose it re post it straight to YouTube as well with a click of a button or two. So pretty relatively easy. Saves us a lot of time. A lot of people ask me, scott, how do you do all this stuff? I'm like, literally, because we have systems in place, really easy tools that make it look like a million bucks that don't take that much to do. Whereas for a lot of people, they would have to hire somebody full time to do a lot of those things. And we're pretty lucky. We run a a pretty small staff for the most part, but we get a lot done. When we need a big staff or special projects, we can bring on virtual assistants for other things to get things done. So that's all I've got for you guys today. Please, once again, do me a favor. Huge favor. Whether you're watching this on Facebook Live or you're listening to this on Stitcher or watching this at a later date on itunes or Google podcasts or Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening to, text the word notes to 72,000. That's the phone number 72072 triple zero in your smartphone, that's the phone number and the word you got to say. The one word can be notes. Doesn't mean if it's capitalized or lowercase, it's not case sensitive. But text the word if you've already done that, great. You don't have to do it again. But if you have it, do yourself a favor, get on board. Get updates. Get webinars, notices, get deal updates. I opportunities available to you straight to your inbox on your text messaging. So that'll help us help you. And that's what we're looking for to help make you better. Because we're, like I said before, we're giving her all you got. All right? We're giving all we've got to help you take your business to the next level. So hopefully it's helpful. Everybody, once again, thank you for all of you out there for listening and we look forward to continue to deliver great content and information to you. But other than that, have a great day, everybody, and we'll see you all at the top. Everybody. Bye.