EP 407 – Cutting Out The Noise

Foreign 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 Closer Show. As always, Scott Carson, your host here. Excited to be with you today. And today's topic is a little bit different. I know a lot of people are excited about the new year. They're new to the note business. They've been around for a while doing a variety of things. And I discussed this with a couple of investors yesterday. I also discussed this topic with some people when I was down in the Bahamas at the Mr. Landlord event that I talked about yesterday. And it's important to keep this in mind. It's specifically important if you're trying to have any type of success in whatever you're focused on. Most people know that one of my favorite books is Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill and Sharon Lechter, who co wrote it after being hidden in a cabinet for 70 plus years, where it talks about how the devil distracts us as entrepreneurs and people and that's what makes him successful. But it's also what keeps us from finding success because we're constantly drifting, right? Everybody, we're drifting, we're getting distracted. We're not focused on things. And everybody struggles with this, everybody, including me. We all drift. And what you have to realize is the best way for you to really find some clarity, some focus, direction, a compass in your no business is to figure out what are you really focused on. And that's really across the board. It could be a variety of things that you're trying to focus on, but you're going to get frustrated, you're going to get discouraged because you're not going to see a lot of activity or not a lot of success as you move forward in the right direction. You're going to be doing a lot of left steps or side steps or moving from one direction for a little bit and then moving back to a different direction. And I like to call that noise because there's a lot of noise out in the market that can confuse us, that can distract us. The best thing that you can do is to do away with that noise in a couple of reasons. And first, what we're going to talk about is the noise that we See out there. We'll talk a little about this. It's literally, I think I see so much freaking noise on Facebook. I literally was on this morning just before jumping on the call here today with you guys and I see so much noise and I see the same people looking at different things and I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion, that the people that are promoting. I'll give an example. Like, I saw my buddy Adam AAA Adams doing a live stream on his podcast interview this morning, which is great. Good stuff. Welcome to the 21st century, Adam 2019 to live streaming. He does a great job with what Adam does. The thing you have to keep in mind though is I'm seeing people that are on his event. I'm seeing people that were on a quest IRA event the other day, which is kind of in thing. I see people with the same people on my thing. They're also on propelio, they're also over on other things. You can't find success by literally Facebook surfing everybody's livestream. I'm sorry, if it was all notes, I would say one thing. But when it's commercial or your IRA or it's fix and flips or turnkeys and then investing or software, sorry, you're not gonna find the type of success that you want to find. The only way to really capitalize on what's going on in the market right now and to help you get to where you want to be later on is if you just cut out the noise and start focusing on one thing. I've had to do that. And I did this a while back. I did this a couple years ago. I was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk and I would listen to his AskGaryVee podcast or YouTube series. Every morning I come in, oh, I gotta be in the office by for sure and ready to roll by 10 to 11 so I could watch Gary Vee. And I would start realizing, like, I'm hearing a lot of the same things over and over again. There's nothing original and I'm wasting an hour now of my time out of my day by just listening to him, which it had no bearing on where I wanted to be because I found myself doing the things that I need to get done, which is great. But it was the same stuff that he was sharing on a regular basis. It was very broad, very big strokes. Not thin pencil extra, but very roller stroll. It would hit a lot of people. Well, this isn't working for me. This isn't as effective as I thought. It would be. I know a lot of us get excited about Gary Vaynerchuk. Who doesn't? Who wants to want to hang out with Gary Vee. But the thing we have to keep in mind, it's good to get some motivation, it's good to recharge the batteries. It's going to be gung ho. But you have to realize how does Gary Vee affecting your bottom line? Is he helping it? Is he giving you nuggets that you're implementing in your business or is he taking roughly about 5% of your day away? Is he taking an hour out of your time? Is he helping you be focused on things? And that's the thing you look at. Where is your attention? How much are you spending your time on other things? If you talk about watching TV at 9 or going to a movie, okay, great. If that's a way to recharge. Like we went and saw the movie Glass last night. We went and saw the 9:30 thing. I could have gone an earlier one but what I decided to do last night is I ended up heading down to Quest Ira or Quest, trust me, catching a trillion dollar mixer, listen to Mitch Stephens speak and networking with other investors down the neck of the woods. It was a good two hour thing. I got out there about 8:30, got home, went to the movie, back by midnight. It was a great spin with stuff. What we have to realize though is are we doing a lot of that stuff? Nothing wrong with going out networking, networking, networking. You have to get to the point though, are you closing business? Are you doing the basic things that you need to do? Because otherwise we can network ourselves to death and not have anything on the bottom line. That's kind of the first thing is try to eliminate the distractions. Sometimes you have just to turn off things for a while. Maybe it's turn off your social media, turning off your phone so you can be focused, turning off your email. Don't look at your email for two hours while you're making phone calls. Turn off the distractions and eliminate the distractions. You know, that's part of the reason I have an office which is much more effective here in the office in eight hours than I do at home. If I was working for 16 hours there'd be distractions and all sorts of other things. Very easy to do that. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs that struggle with the distractions. They want to sit down and watch Oprah. They want to sit down and watch the View or Ellen or whatever it might be. Good Morning America. Nothing wrong with Taking that in a little bit. But you have to learn to remove the distractions, as I say, remove the noise. Now let's talk about the noise in your note business as well. For you, there's also a lot of people, especially this time of year. You see all sorts of different things popping up out there. Everybody's marketing for their workshop or everybody's trying to be an educator. Now this is the thing that kind of boggles my mind. I can't buy any notes, but I'm going to be an educator. And I kind of chuckle that way because that's the sign that the market is oversaturated for a little bit. I won't say oversaturated investors because there's still plenty of deals out there. I got a text message from Logan, one of my mastermind students who just missed out on buying or finding a 60 asset portfolio of Texas properties from a Dallas bank. It's working out. I see Joe Tomko making offers on like 60 plus assets for a million plus in dollars. I've got a couple conference calls later today, tomorrow with some big sellers of some stuff that may revolutionize some of the things that we're focused on. I mean, now we're talking one of the bigger players in the industry looking to sell some assets off. Not a top five or ten bank, but still big enough institution that they're looking to move some stuff. So we're pretty excited about that. The thing you have to keep in mind is that there is a lot of distractions out there. A lot of distractions. Oh, I want to go to Noteworthy Investment Summit or I want to go to the Distressed Mortgage Expo. I want to go to the workshop that Eric Hyde is hosting in South Bay. Look, there's nothing wrong with going to any of those. Any of those events are going to be fine. Fantastic. Coming to the Virtual Workshop. Great. We host Valentine's Weekend. Awesome. Nothing wrong, but what you have to do is kind of reel back in. Do I need to go all three of them or do you need to go to one of them or do I need to go to none of them? What's the focus? Who's speaking there? Are the speakers going to add value or add some sort of nugget, you know, nuggets to my bottom line? Are you going to show me how to raise capital? Are they going to show me how to find more deals or is it just going to be running around shaking hands and having drinks? A glorified social hour. That's the thing I always work at when I Look at an event like. Because I've been asked to speak at quite a few events year and I've turned a lot down because they were not the focus of where we wanted to go. Yes, it had been great to go out to San Diego and hang out to the Noteworthy Investors Summit. You know, when Aaron Holderman emailed me and asked me to be speaker there, I was like, thank you very much, but I'm going to respectfully decline. Kevin Cordell, who I guess is helping out with that, reached out. Not Kevin Cordell. Kevin Shortle reached out to him. Well, I said, thank you. I'm going to respectfully decline. I hear Allen stressed Mortgage Expo, reached out to me and said, hey, we'd love to have you come speak. And I'm like, thank you very much, but I'm gonna respectfully decline. Why am I declining speaking events? Two reasons. One, I have to maximize my time. That's the first thing. I have to maximize my time. I value my time really valuable, all right? I put mine at a thousand bucks an hour. That's how I value my time, at a thousand bucks an hour. All right? That's one of the most important things that you all can do is to value your time value. Figure out what you're worth an hour. Figure out what it's worth for you and for me to fly out to an event to speak for an hour to people that most everybody already knows me there. And this is not bashing any of either one of those events. I was very honored to be invited to speak at both of those. It's just that people aren't showing up. It's not a good lead generating place for me, for investors, for deals, for students. It's not a good lead generating event for me, either of those. And it's not bashing. Hey, if you're brand new and you're in the area, if it's in your backyard, go to it. Seriously, if it's in your backyard, go to it. But if it's gonna take time away, like, you know, go to one day out of it. You probably knock everything you need in one day. The thing you want to look at is to make sure though, you want to maximize your time at those events, look at the speakers you're speaking and if they're speaking or something you want to hear, speak like Jillian Sadati and raising Capital or something like that, you want to make sure that you carve out that time and maximize that event, maximize that hour that she's speaking, that you're in there learning nuggets or if it's Yaron Young or anybody, make sure you're learning and then you're out doing what you need to do. Make it run by all the vendors, grab business cards, grab contacts, Meet as many people as you can. Don't eat alone. Show up early, stay late. Those are some of the things that you want to do to maximize your going. For me, it's not worth me flying out there, spending three, four days out of my business event and then come back and not really have any leads that aren't already in our database. Because, hey, we market, I think, better than anybody else does in the note industry. I mean, we've been very honored to have some of our peers reach out to us to help them market. We said yes to some and no to others. The thing you have to keep in mind is what's going to be a true win win for you? Is it the event going to be a win for you and for the event that's hosting for you to show up, or is it just an event, a win for them for you to show up, but not a lot of good content. You have to evaluate that for yourself. And so that's why I look at, like, my calendar over the next couple weeks. Like, we are literally, you know, we're going to a couple things. After our workshop in February, 15th, 16th and 17th is the next virtual note buying workshop. We then head out to Tampa. And it's worth me spending a night in Tampa and hosting a meetup group with the Tampa Note Closures Group on that Wednesday night, the 20th in Tampa Bay. And I'm going to be at the New Media Summit, which is a podcasting summit for me. I'm one of the icons there. It's worth me being there to get booked on things. If I get booked on, let's just say, three other podcasts in the real estate industry, and I'm able to be on their shows for 35, 40 minutes and it goes out to all of their guests, all of their listeners. That's a thousand people. Just say 500. Well, for three by 1500 people that I get the word out what I'm doing, that's worth it to me. That's a valuable ad to go out there, spend some time, market my business and get on somebody else's podcast, Market theirs and make it a true win win across the board. That's where I really see that's where our focus is really going to be in 2019. We're still going to have the virtual workshops. We're still going to have our Note camps, we're still going to have our mastermind and our fast track trains. But our focus is taken away from going out and speaking at expos, to being focused on where we need to do to go out and find people that don't know who we are to go face that final frontier. So that's some of the way that we're literally eliminating just about everything. I'm speaking at the Quest Expo, I'm speaking a couple podcasting events. Laughlin associates with Aaron Young for the most part, but literally that's about it. I'm not really speaking at a lot of Note specific expos. I'll speak in a few meetup groups across the country, probably 12 to 14 of those this year. What we found the bigger bang for the buck is to leverage our online relationships, our online savviness and really focus on that. And it eliminated a lot of the noise. Eliminate a lot of the noise. So that's kind of how we have done now, you as note investors, you as people out there in the industry, same thing. Maybe you pick two or three things to listen to. If you like Gary Vaynerchuk, you need that motivation. Hey, great, awesome. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe listen to the podcast. Maybe you're listening over to Note Inc. Serena Harris for her show, whatever it may be, listen to it. But also make sure that that time that you're listening is valuable time. Maybe you're driving, maybe you're flying, maybe you're going across the country and it's the time to listen to it. I would not be listening through the day for the most part. I've actually decided, I think I'm going to be moving most of our episodes to the later afternoons a little bit to help us accommodate some things that we're focused on here. The thing that I want you to look at too. Let's talk about the third. Really the second factor, besides who you're listening to and who you're attending to and what you're focused on. Actually, it's. That was number two. First one is basically figuring out everything, what you want to focus on. Focus on one area. If it's notes, focus on notes, but it's hard money or private money, focus on that. If it's wholesaling, just focus on that one thing. All right. Second thing is to clear up the noise of your listening. Now the third thing comes to you in your note business is for those that are specifically focused on the note business as you're getting tapes in. And I talked with Let me talk. I talked with four or five people in the last 48 hours, okay? And the thing you gotta realize is when you get a tape in and there's different tapes floating around right now, there's probably four or five, maybe six different tapes that are floating around from different people, what you have to do, some of it's good, some of it's just crap. All right? And so one of the things is when you get a tape in, especially when it's got 100 or 200 or you've got 400 different assets to look at, the most important thing that you can do is to eliminate the crap. And what I mean by the crap, well, if you're focused on five states or five markets, basically eliminate the rest of the state. So like, I do what I love to do because I get a tape in, I eliminate stuff right off the bat. I'll give you an exact idea. I don't buy New York or New Jersey, so I eliminate those. Anything in Chicago, Cook County, I'd eliminate Kentucky, I eliminate because they require a million dollar bond there. You also may want to look at getting rid of stuff that's low value or low balance. Like if the UPB is like 5 grand or really under 20 grand. Now I look at the payoff, I take it, you know, how many months behind times a P and I payment to be kind of their total payoff. But if their payoff is really under 25 grand, I kind of remove it. The value of the house falls below 25 grand, I immediately eliminate that. For the most part, it just doesn't work that way. Now I'm running online valuations. When you get a tape and you're looking at a lot of assets you buy in a lot of states like we do, you're going to rely on like Zillow, you're going to rely on note pros to help you do some due diligence. But the thing to keep in mind is eliminate what you don't want. Literally just delete it off the spreadsheet. You can always go back in your email and download that spreadsheet again. That's pretty simple to do. The thing you want to do though is to eliminate all this stuff. I was talking with somebody yesterday and we were doing a zoom call and she was kept trying to go back and find out which assets she was at. And I'm like, Liz, you got like way too much on. Why don't you just delete? Don't hide, just go ahead and delete the ones you're not looking at. Make it really clean. Make it like five lines. If you're looking at five assets, let's just look at those five assets and then let's go through and look at this column. So whether it's performing or non performing, if you're looking for just performing and you get a tape in of performing and non performing, and you just want to use your own funds and make a 12 to 15% yield, there's nothing wrong with that. That's a great rate of return on performing. So then what I would do is I would eliminate all the non performing. All right? One of the things I look at is too, if it's occupied or vacant, I'll eliminate the vacant assets. So the more that you can eliminate the assets, that's literally cutting out the noise and the distraction. Now if you cut things down, you're doing your due diligence and you realize, well, there's so many assets on here, I'm only gonna look at two. Maybe you need to expand your horizons or spread it out a little bit. Maybe your focus is way too tight. Right. Take it out a little bit, change up the market, see what's available. And that's really the easiest ways to help you, because literally start looking at every asset. And I have seen this happen to a lot of realtors and a lot of investors that come over the notes. Space is the noise that kicks in when you're looking at too many assets. There's a lot of noise that kicks in when you're confused, you're overwhelmed. And the idea is, let's underwhelm you and just focus on a few assets. Let's work through those. Let's make a few offers, especially if they've given you pricing points. Let's make a few offers. Let's work through one or two and go from there. Be trying to overdo it and make 10 to 100 offers. Trying to eat the whole elephant in one bite. Then that's where you're going to get the most confused. That's where you're going to struggle with the most. You're also going to get frustrated because you may not be as organized as you need to be initially. If you're brand new, let's focus on getting 1, 2, 3 deals close. For that means making somewhere around 5 to 10 offers. If you're only going to see about a 10% acceptance ratio, that's fine. Don't worry. Oh, my gosh, I overbid the first time. All right, so go back and fade your bid down. If their value shows 70 and you find it to be 35, that's okay, fade it down a little bit. Not going to hurt you to do that. But that's what I really want you guys to really focus on. I think it's a valuable aspect to think about is eliminating the noise in your business. You'll be a lot more focused. You'd be a lot happier. If you can find your focus and tune it down to a tighter business or tighter actions, you'll be happier. You'll also find yourself getting more stuff done because you're now not wasting 80% of your energy on things that aren't income producing. You're focused 80% of your time on income producing, only 20% on non income producing. In that way alone, that ratio is a 4 to 1. Now if you can focus. So now you're making a lot more money or a lot seeing a lot more focus take place. When you have that focus to eliminate the non performing stuff, as you say to the non opportunity items in your day, whether it's a you're running all over the place, listening to everybody, you need to narrow that focus down. Two, you really focus your schedule, your time, your commitments on where you're going. Especially if you're working full time and you've got to get time off. You really have to focus on where you want to be and look at the calendar, look what's going on. Maybe you just attend stuff in your backyard. Maybe you're going to I don't have time the next quarter, but I've got some time off starting in April. And maybe you're looking at going to the paper source convention at that point. And the beautiful thing of why we started doing our events online is we saw our tenants skyrocket because the fact that people didn't really have to take time off from work for the most part they could stay home, they could work their job on Friday, only miss a couple hours and be able to jump in and catch the replays. And so that's what you have to realize. Everybody look at your schedule, look at what you're doing, look at your day to day activities and then really focus down on what you need to get done. And if a great tool to help you out with some things is just literally time, map out your day. What did you focus on? Do it in like every 30 minute increments or if you need to every 15 throughout your day. That's one of the things that when I was a banker that they taught us to do. Okay, what did you do this 30 minutes. What did you do these 30 minutes? Where did you make phone calls? And let's look at your day because I guarantee a lot of us have big gaping Swiss cheese holes in our day that we could deal with a lot more productive items. So you need to pull out the noise canceling headphones to get stuff done do so you need to turn things off. If you need to turn off your Facebook and not watch me live, hey, if you're going to be going out making things happen, great. Need to turn off your cell phone for a while while you're working through things, that's fine. I guarantee if you do this, you'll be a lot happier and also a lot more focused and also a lot more productive. And that's the thing that we all want. We want to make more money, we want to not spend time on stuff that's not producing and we also want to close more deals and ultimately make more money along the way. So there are any comments out there for Facebook? Everybody, I'm pulling it up here. Hey, Matthew Hill. Hey Brandon Zager. Good to see you guys. Hey, John Shipley. Hey Casey Lang. Todd lapierre. It's good to see a lot of you guys out there watching me on Facebook. If you're listening to this on itunes, Stitch or any other podcast platforms, thank you. As always, make sure you go on over and hit subscribe and leave me a five star review if you would not mind. We'd really appreciate that. As always guys, you can always find out more information on some more upcoming trainings and things like that at our main website where you can always download every episode of the Note Closer show and listen to that along with every episode of the Note night in America, etc. @weclosenotes.com so if there aren't any other questions in one night noise, I'll tell you this, that you've heard the Russian proverb, he who chases two rabbits catches none. Make sure you focus on the one rabbit and you chase it. Once you've caught that, then you go and chase another rabbit. But don't get in the habit of trying to chase too many at the same time because you won't catch them and you'll end up just hungry and confused and battered at the very end. So go out, make something happen everybody. And if there's no comments or questions on Facebook Live, as always, thanks for listening. Feel free to hit share if you're watching this on Facebook Live. Thank you for watching this on YouTube. Make sure you hit like to it and leave me a comment. Love to know where you are watching this at. Otherwise, go out and make something happen, everybody, and we'll see you all at the top. Bye.