EP 397 – New Year = New Plan

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 Nook Closer Show. Happy New Year 2019 to everybody out there. Hook of horns. Gotta love when the year starts off with your football team winning the Sugar Ball, which is awesome. Hopefully everybody had a very safe and fun New Year's Eve and New Year's Day to recover. It is the first episode of the podcast for 2019. We are excited to be here and wanted to title this episode New Year New Plan. Not really a new plan for us, per se. We were always constantly tweaking things and trying to build momentum with different trainings or different focus, different attack mode, I guess you could say, especially attack mode when we're looking at finding and buying new assets. But what's funny is the whole New Year new plan. I think a lot of people have to focus on tweaking their focus in the new year. Many people are trying to do business as normal, maybe as it was two years ago or it was the beginning of last year, and that's not the case. And that's one of the big things, if I can push towards you guys to identify that, hey, it's not the same as it was a year ago in any form or facet of any type of business, whether you're wholesaling. Like my buddy Joe McCall is there this morning. Good morning, Joe. Good to see you, buddy. You've got to change what your focus is. You have to change what you're doing. It's one of the things that we are always constantly tweaking with our workshops is like, listen, it's different. I can't teach you the same, exact same things I did a year ago or five years ago or 10 years ago because the market has changed. Those things are no longer working. The market has passed those specific things by. So one of the things that I want you to really focus on and what this episode is all about is, is having kind of a new plan, a new focus. And where your year is going is you really need to start off with day one. Hopefully you've put some goals together, what you want to accomplish for this year as far as financially, where you want, how many deals you want to close or how much money you're wanting to make, that's really a big thing to keep in mind. But just throwing a number out there, whether you're pulling out $100,000 bill, whether you pull out, you want to make out six figures in your new year, you've got to have a plan of action to help you get there. I posted a question in the WCN Crew Facebook page about what's your biggest goal for 2019? And only a few people answered. It was, I was kind of disappointed in because if you don't know where you're going, what your biggest goal is, you're really going to flounder, you're really going to hurt yourself long term if you don't have some sort of focus, you don't have some sort of big goals, I guess you could say. And goals doesn't have to be necessarily a big thing. It could be, hey, I want to close three assets a month on average. That's great. 36 for a year, great deal. I want to make five grand in cash flow. I want to make ten grand in cash flow. A goal is not good if it's not specific and it doesn't have a date by January 31st. I want to close my first three deals each month I want to close on three deals. That's a specific number. I want to make exactly five grand. Say, oh, I want to have a just as much money to do that. Well, what's that number look like? What's that number? If you want to retire your parents, if you want to have your spouse leave their job to retire them, to come home and be a full time mom or full time dad, what does that number look like? And taking the time to sit down and go through that number will help you identify the opportunities as they come across your plate. Because in the no business. Donna Bauer and I've joked about this before. If you're a true note investor, you're focused on a couple variety of different tactics. Yes, non performing, because you need to know what happens when the. It's the fan. Okay, what to do with a note. Do you start foreclosure? Do you work out loan modifications? What do you do? And our biggest goal is always to get to where we have performing notes. So it's kind of a dance between performing and non performing. We may start off more than non performing to get to performing. And then there's always investors that are looking for performing notes that when they go south, oh, what do I need to do? So it's a good balance to that, that's not saying. Everybody's also just buying institutional paper, which we buy primarily. We'll look at a little bit of owner finance paper as well, our newly originated paper. But we're going to take a big discount and people don't usually like our prices, which is quite all right. It's fine. We'll stick to organs, you stick to your guns. But what I'm trying to get at here, new plan for the new year for you guys. New year, new plan. So let's talk about some of those things. Here's the one basic thing that everybody can do that's extremely easy for everybody to focus on. And I say this and some people are like, ah, is putting together a one page executive summary. A one page executive summary is one of the easiest things that everybody can do and it's not that difficult to do. All right, now what goes into a one page executive summary? Well, well, a one page executive summary is really just a short three to four paragraph. And I put it on a one page flyer that's nice and shiny. It's something that I can hand out to investors when I go out to local rea clubs or if I'm not speaking or I have a booth trade show or something like that. We have executive summaries that talk about what we do as a business. Some people will create handouts, whatever. It's just a one page thing and basically talks about what your company is. What's your focus? Inverse Asset Fund, or we close Notes, is a parent company of Inverse Asset Fund or Inverse Ventures, which is a Texas based real estate investing company that's buying distressed debt in most of the major markets across the country. Our biggest focus is to buy this distressed debt at a substantial discount. It gives us plenty of room to reach out to the homeowners and try to work some sort of win win loan modification agreement with the homeowners. In case that doesn't work, then we want to make sure we have enough room where we can foreclose on a property and then sell the asset at a substantial profit. That's a basic paragraph about what we do. Maybe we may want to talk about your major markets. You may want to talk about exact assets that you're looking for. Doesn't have to be long, but Executive Summary is going to give you a bit of a guide and it's going to tell everybody else. What are you focused on now? You want your guys? Look, we buy notes and we also focus on building a rental portfolio. Great. We're buying apartments and we use Debt to help us find apartments, whatever that is. It's Great. You know, McCall Assets is focused on wholesaling properties in other parts of the country and keeping assets for our own portfolio in Missouri and Kansas. Whatever. A one page executive summary. It has your logo across the top. A little bit about your company. You want to have a little bit about your past. I've been an active real estate investor since 2002. Being a full time investor since 2005. We've bought sold over half a billion dollars in distressed debt. Something about what you're. I've been focused on distressed assets or short sales. I've been an active realtor mortgage broker since blah blah blah blah. Now a lot of people are like, okay, well Scott, I've been an active programmer in I T or other things. What do I say since I started investing? Well, most people, their biggest investment is going to be their house. So put down when you bought your first house. Okay, if you're a realtor and you don't have a lot of experience in investments, but you sold investment property or negotiated short sales where you worked with other investors, put that down. Hey, I've been working with other investors since 2005 or 2009. Put that down. And then you may put a little bit of paragraph about yourself besides, hey, I've been an active realtor since 2002. Austin, Texas is a home. I'm a graduate of Texas State University with a major in business and finance. One of the things I enjoy doing is long walks on the beach with pina coladas and a good cigar. I don't know, you put something interesting down, you want to make sure you put a good headshot, a good photo, not something that's a selfie. You may want to have a professional photo or get a really good camera to take a picture of you somewhere. Heck, iPhones and Samsung phones are. I mean these are really easy out there to get things done. But this is one of the most important things I can tell you to do because every year I already did this. Already kind of worked on my new executive summary for 2019. But taking the time to have a good photo and look, I get it, some of us may not be the most photogenic. Have somebody set you up. This reminds me, I had a guy one time who posted a photo. His photo in his email looked like he was 18 years old from his high school prom in a tux and he looked good. I'm like, dude, that's not how you look exactly this day. So you sending an email out with that photo. You put anything in that photo, people are going to recognize you when they see you and meet you in person. And so he went, took a photo standing outside his house. Well, once he got behind him, he's got the garbage truck driving by him. It's garbage, dude. Take it against a white wall. Take a photo. Didn't have to have a tuxedo on, jacket or a nice shirt, whatever. Just something so people get it out there. It's important so that you can kind of start bringing on that same photo. I recommend that you put it on your executive summary. You're putting that in your LinkedIn profile. Maybe it's the photo that you use in Facebook as well. Why? Because that brands you so people can find you. People can see what you're doing. It's amazing. I've been cleaning out Facebook, people on Facebook that are connected on my personal page. I'm like, I don't know who this person is. I don't know how he got connected. But I've been going through and scrubbing my list and I'm just amazed at the photos I see. I'm like, oh, oh, that's horrible. Not professional. All a lot of people. And I get it, Facebook is more of a personal thing for a lot of things. But if you use it for business, you're using it to build your brand or using it to get out to your tribe what you want to focus on, you gotta look a little professional. Doesn't mean you can't swap it up every once in a while. I get that. But put something that's going to be really good. So New Year, like I say, the one page executive summary is not difficult. Now, one of the biggest mistakes that I see of real estate investors doing as they're planning their marketing is that they don't use the backside of the page. They don't use the backside of their marketing piece. They print off one page and they don't use the backside. Now, I get if you're in a bit of a hurry, I get it. But literally taking the time, plan ahead will come in so handy. Maybe you want to put some of the things that people put in the backside of an executive summary. What I like to do is I'll put two photos for my note, mastermind groups in the backside. So people see that we've got a big group that follows us, that we work with on buying and selling assets. People like that. People want to belong to a tribe. People want to belong to a group. They want to know that you're Not a one man band. Okay. They want to know that you're not a one man band. So definitely use the backside of the page. Other things you could put on the backside of your executive summary, you could put assets you bought in the last 12 months. Okay. Or some fix and flips or some before afters or some deals that you're working on currently. That's not too difficult to do. You would literally go into canva, canva.com I think it's like they've changed up their pricing structure, I think on older pricing. But literally if you go to canva.com it's like 12 bucks a month or something like that for you to use unlimited. You can literally create a professional looking one page flyer where you basically bring in 1, 2, 312 pictures of assets that you worked on and literally put that in there. And now you've got a really nice looking marketing piece. Now one of the big things you always want to do is at the bottom you want to make sure and put your contact information too. Your name, your email, your phone number. You want to have your logo on both sides. All right? That's why it's important to have a logo that really goes nice and horizontally, not a square, bulky one is to take up a lot of information. Leaves a lot of dead space. So starting off with a one page executive summary is one of the most. I'm sorry, not a one page, one full page, front and back is what I'm trying to say to help you kind of get the word out what you're doing. It's going to be a great piece if you're out networking because let's face it, if you're part of a real estate investing club, the most amount of attendees that that club is probably going to see is this month and next month. So one of the things you can do as well to use your executive summary effectively is to go and search the local rea clubs. And what I might mean by local rea clubs, just go to meetup.com and type in real estate within 25 miles of your location. Maybe you've got to put 50 miles of your location. All right? But real estate investment clubs go to meet up. Type in the city you're in and the little box type in real estate and it'll pop up a bunch of the clubs around there and then look at the calendar, see when they're meeting. This is something we're actually doing this year here too because there's a lot of real estate clubs that have popped up here in Austin, Texas. So we'll be attending a few of them this month and next month, provided that I'm not out of town. So that's one thing you could do. Everybody's gonna be out. You want to go prepared. You want to go looking like you know what the heck you're talking about. Because let's face it, most people that are brand new to real estate investing, they may have money, but they don't know where to put it. They'd be making 0% on their certificate of disappointment, or their 401ks took a big hit over the last couple months, or their government employee that are worried about the shutdowns. There's a whole variety of reasons that people are stressed. They're looking for options. Okay, what you want to do is have something that you can go in and say, hey, I'm experienced. I've got some things even if you're not. Here's what I do, here's what I focus on. Because this blows people away. Like, oh my gosh, this is nice. And you want to stand out from the crowd versus just the regular Joes that show up with nothing. They don't even have a business card. That reminds me, take some business cards. Make sure your business card has your photo on it. The reason, because people I don't really care to be like, oh, no, you won't put your face on it. No, you need to have your freaking face and your business card. People get so many business cards and the face identifies with who the person is. That's basic marketing. One on one. Don't care what your logo is. All these realtors or all these mortgage brokers just want to have their company name on it. Well, it doesn't help market yourself. You're out to market yourself in 2019, not other people. It's time that you got the traffic that you so deservingly deserve. So make sure you go take the same face, same picture that you're probably gonna use on LinkedIn and make sure you can create that on a business card. Put it on the image on there and make it look decent. And you know what, if you're one of these people, it's a jack of all trades. It's got 12 different things that you're doing. Just focus on one. Let's kill this. I'm a house cleaner and rehabber and wholesaler, and I'll pay you $5. Let's quit that. This is the 21st century. Put one or two of your social media handles on there. Your cell phone, your email and that's about it. That's about all you need. You don't need anything fancy. All right? This is pretty simple, straightforward. Don't have diarrhea of the mouth and throw up on people. This is why you want to keep your executive summary. I can say to three to four, maybe five paragraphs on one page. You don't want to be too long. You want to be in decent font. For the love of God, let's be professional in 2019. Let's take things to the next level. Maybe you can put a captcha code on the back of things where people can scan it, and it takes them straight to your Facebook page. Facebook creates that for you. Or you want to add them text into a number, or you create a little bit link where, hey, if you're an investor, you can go straight to this link, and it'll take you to my mailchimp account or my infusionsoft account. You can register there. Look, let's be smart. Let's not do the same stupid things that you were doing last year and not having success with. Let's do the things that make sense, because these things will come in handy. You can use the executive summaries. If you're out talking to other investors, you're off at different trade shows or Mortgage Banking association, whatever you want to look like you know what the hell you're doing. If you're going for meetings with investors, you're going for meetings with the local bankers or things like that. Have that executive summary available. Make it look uniform. People are like, oh, this guy or gal knows how to brand themselves. Okay? It's so important for you to act this way in 2019. And I don't care if you've got a great logo. It's still your kisser that people are going to identify with. All right? But the thing is, some of the things that we're focused on here a little bit differently, it's always been going directly to the banks. It's always been one of our biggest things. It's amazing. I got to give a big shout out to everybody. Chad Herbshot, New Year's Eve. I guess he got off the phone with an asset manager at a hedge fund who's trying to sell assets at a price that doesn't make sense. It's not at a bank. And he's like, I'm gonna have to refocus my effort on banks this year, because these other guys just don't make sense. They're smoking a lot of the wacky tobacco, as I like to Say they need to pass the crack pipe because that's all they're smoking on is crack. You know what I'm trying to get at is as you're out and start calling banks and things like that, a lot of them like, do you have like an info packet and an info packet people like, what's an info packet? It's just your executive summary. Tell them a little about what you're doing. But by the way, the projects you're working on, it's not that difficult to do. Like I say, new plan for the new year. Share what you're focused on. If you close some deals, great. Have some case studies. Take the time to put the case studies together too. It's a great little packet you have. We talk about a pitch deck before, like one of our top 10 episodes of 2018 with Sal Buscemi talking about having a pitch deck. Put your pitch deck together. It's a little bit about you, about your history, your focus. I guess it's basically executive summary. Have some of your experiences, have talk about some of the deals that you're working on and what you're looking for. Don't be afraid to ask. If you're out talking to local investors at local meetup groups, don't be afraid to ask, hey, what are you looking for? You're brand new. How long you been investing? What are you looking for? It's an important thing to ask because you never ask. You'll never get. Hook em horns everybody. Hook em horns. It is a nasty cold ass day here in Austin, Texas. I if you can hear the sirens, I guess there was a wreck or something down the road or a fire. It's just nasty here. Cold. A lot of people. I walked in the office this morning. It's basically a ghost town still. It's kind of fun. I was up here yesterday morning New Year's day, get my workout in with my trainer and just trying to stay consistent. I got to see him in an hour and a half as well to go some things guys. And G, I can tell you this right now. If you look to make January a great month, kick butt, start doing things now. Next year has arrived now. Okay? And you can take advantage of what's going on in the markets by using that marketing out to your database, marketing out to IRA investors. This your executive summary we talked about. It's a great insert to have to send out to database. It's one of the things that we're doing. I'm actually literally dropping a cop of my book in the mail along with executive summary and a little a letter out to about 500 investors in the next two weeks here. Locally, we'll be dropping off another 500 more basically every month. Dropping off to investors here, a couple of other major markets up in Ohio and Michigan as well. Literally. Just, hey, just wanted to drop my book. Came across information on public records. Love to visit with you some more. Here's a book on what we do a little bit and who we are. Oh, and make sure to check out the Nutcloses show podcast, a little podcast that we have. I know this is not overwhelming, like, oh my God. Here's the latest and greatest trick. Here's the latest and greatest trick for you to find real estate deals without you having to do any work or using all your money just sitting on your ass getting rich. I'm sorry, this is a no business. You have to take action. You got to put the work in to get things to happen for you. Got to put the work in to make things happen for you. And if you want your new year to be phenomenal, know where you want to go and start working those numbers backwards. We talked about planning in October of last year already. Hey, how to work towards many people didn't know where to go, didn't know what to focus on. Get things rocking with putting things together, start planning things out. We're excited. We've got a fast track. Not this coming weekend, but the following weekend. And we've got a couple coming in. And he knows he's going to be laid off in a year. He knows that 2019 will be his last year at his job because they're closing down or he's getting laid off. He's already been told that he's got basically 12 months left at his job and then he's being laid off. So him and his wife are using this year to really propel themselves so that it's not a big thing for them to walk away from that income there. It's not a big thing for them because that they can have replaced what they were making that way with what they've got coming in from the note space. And look, it's. They're not going to replace that in one month. They're not going to replace that in two months. They might if they get lucky with some different things. But they're coming in to put the work in to start putting those little pieces in place. Reaching out to asset managers, reaching out to IRA investors, reaching out to their local tribe to share what their focus is. And that's one of the biggest things that I would challenge all of you is don't be afraid to talk to your tribe. One of the big things I see a lot of people struggle with at local real clubs, especially in the New Year's, they don't know what their focus is and they always have a haves and wants. Most really good investment clubs will have a time where they allow the audience to either stand up and say what they're working on or they have something they're focused on. Take this time to stand up, go to the front of the room, say, hey, my name's Scott Carson. My name is Don Lucia. My name is Laura Blanc. If you don't know me, I'm a local real estate investor who focuses on buying distressed notes. If you come across any distressed debt, mortgages, people behind their mortgage, I'd love to visit with you. We also have a lot of phenomenal investment opportunities. If you'd love to talk with me more, my phone number is blank or you can reach me@scottclosenotes.com for us to help you get rocking and rolling. Those are some simple things that you can do. Your executive summary. Not be afraid to go to your meetup groups and network with those. Don't be afraid to talk to your tribe. Just be awesome. Because I know all of you are capable of doing amazing things in the new year. You've all got many opportunities available to you. Just take advantage of opportunities. Do a little bit more than what you did the day before. Just give yourself a little bit of extra, little 5% extra. That's literally three extra minutes an hour. It's an extra 72 minutes in the day. It's a whole lot of time when you add all that numbers up over a year. So just do a little bit extra and you'll go a whole lot further this year in 2019. So once again, everybody, happy new Year to all of you. Unless there's any questions or comments from our online Facebook tribe out there. Love to have you. Thank you for always listening. Make sure that you always do me a favor as well. If you're listening to this on itunes, make sure you go ahead and subscribe. Click on the button, subscribe the episode so you're alert of the newest episodes and then always you're watching this, make sure to feel free to share. If you found value in what we do, please do me a huge favor. Please feel free to hit the share button and share it to your tribe as well. Especially if you got investors, real estate investors in your community, in your tribe Feel free to share this. Hopefully this finds value across the board. It's our biggest goal of the podcast this year is to keep delivering content is actionable and easy enough for everybody to be able to follow for you. Don't get me wrong, there'll be some things we discuss that are complex from time to time, but we want to help you make 2019 the best year yet. 2018 was great. We look forward to what 2019 has to offer for all of us. So till that is, go out, make something happen. Everybody, thank you for listening, thank you for watching, and we'll see you all at the top. Everybody. Bye. SA.