EP 531 – Where Is The Work Ethic In The Note Investing Industry These Days?

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. My name is Scott Carson. As always, I'm excited to be here with you today. Note Closer show podcast. I want to give a big shout out to all of our listeners, not only those that listen to the show anywhere that podcasts are at, but our online video listeners on YouTube, Facebook, and our growing, growing list of listeners on our different AM FM radio stations across the country. Note Nation, thank you so much for listening. Thank you to our international listeners as well. We are honored as always to provide quality content and information to help you on your journey as a real estate and note investor. Well, today's episode is kind of garnered towards where's the work ethic these days? I'm sure many of you will agree with me on this that good people are hard to find. Now, I'm not talking about assistance because you can often find assistance on bas and things line up. I'm literally talking down to entrepreneurs, or talking about entrepreneurs, I should say, who sign up for something. We see this in the real estate industry, especially when you're an educator like me. I mean, I have two fast my business, I have the note business and we have the real estate stuff that runs that way. Then separately we have our education business, obviously. I guess I would kind of throw the podcast under the education business side of our business as well, although it's kind of a separate entity. But still, it's funny. It's not really funny. It's downright depressing sometimes that as an educator, I talk with a lot of my peers on a regular basis. I go to different masterminds and there's different marketing things that I go to to help us increase our conversion ratios on emails and getting people into our funnels and getting people taught because I really do value and enjoy teaching people on the no business because nobody's teaching the things that we do on a regular basis. Nobody's teaching how to from A to Z. Your nuts and bolts kind of basic training when it comes to bonds and investing in distressed debt. And what it is, and we've seen this is if you. Here's just the numbers. Let me just throw some numbers out there. So if you go speak in front of an audience somewhere, usually a paid audience, I'm talking by paid. If you go to speak in front of a group like a meetup group or a real estate investment club meeting or something like that, or conference, that's a paid attendee, people are paying to be there. And I don't care if it's 20 bucks to go to a rea club meeting on a Monday night where they're paying a couple hundred bucks or a thousand bucks to go to conference. Those that pay to attend are much higher responsive audience than those that are free. Because free is no value. Free, as I always like to say, you get the prize picks that show up to a free event. People that aren't going to have no investment, they're there for the prizes. Very few of them are there going to pull the trigger because they themselves have no investment. So it makes it really for really a bad event for somebody like me or the people that are speaking who are flying across country or showing up, taking time from our weekend to be an event or being a vendor at an event that cost us thousands of dollars either we want to deal with a with high target audience. Well, give you some numbers. So if I go to a rea club meeting, speak in front of a rea club meeting or a media group or something like that, I expect to sell somewhere between 30 to 40% of the room as far as principles. Now if you take a hundred people, but that's made up of entirely of husbands and wives, well that's 50 principals. So 30% of that be roughly 16 sales. Okay. Which is great. Hey, it's not a bad hour or two hours. Especially if you fly out or somewhere close. It's kind of a good thing. Now then you keep mine is out of that bunch. You go to a workshop, you probably have only, you know, you'd love to say 20% of people that would do something. But what it comes down to, a lot of people sign up for stuff. They never take action. And we're all guilty of this. Whether it's sign up for software or using an app, or sign up for the gym membership or sign up for dance lessons or whatever. A lot of us never complete things that we sign up for. And some people, especially in the real estate niche, a lot of people will sign up for stuff that they never accomplish or never, you know, when they sign up for back to back to back events or trainings, they often will never complete it or give seeds or the things they learn. Time enough to Germinate to show real results. And we're seeing that on a regular basis. Look, note investing is not the easiest thing. I'll be the first one to tell you. It's not the easiest niche to dive into. I mean, you could wholesale, you could put out bandit signs, you could send the yellow letters out, you try to track down foreclosure lists, you could try to track down the zoning departments or the code enforcement offices and reach out for deals in your local area. Note investing is not a really, not a local event, especially not for me here in Austin, Texas. It's an event that's outside of Texas for the most part. And that's why I tell people all the time, listen, if you're looking for deals and the notebooks business for cash flow, you really need to look outside of Texas for the most part and go that route just because of the faster foreclosure timeframes. Here especially you look at other states like California and Nevada, or if you're looking for deals in those states, you need to be looking somewhere else. And the opposite goes for New York. If you're looking for stuff in New York, you've got to be almost kind of crazy because the fact it can take you a year or two years to foreclose there, especially longer than a year, 18 to 24, sometimes 36 months. So that's one thing. And it's not a, hey, I'm going to buy this property and instantly turn around and sell it in 90 days for a profit. This is not a get rich quick type of investment thing. This is not where, hey, I'm going to wholesale something to make five grand. Now, yes, you can wholesale notes like in real estate property, but it's a different type of animal because you have a lot of different moving factors in this deal. You have a lot of moving numbers. You have different things you've got to look at in your due diligence that aren't just, hey, let's go look at the property, pull comps and see what kind of repairs it needs. You have a whole, I guess you could say wild card to it when you've got borrowers involved. But anyway, getting back to my main point, only about 10% of people will actually take action and do anything. And what does that mean? Well, in some places, 10% of people will actually put what they learn to work. That's the first thing. If they learn something, how many will put it to work in the first 24 to 48 hours? Let's just give them the first week to start implementing their plan. And then when I was a real estate coach back over a decade ago now, I used to travel out and spend four days with people Monday through Thursday or sometimes Tuesday through Friday and spend four days with them kicking their butt, getting them ready and getting them to start making offers or to send out things. And there was always homework involved along the way for people. Now, what I mean by homework. Well, the homework involved was something that was simple as like, hey, get your lists together. What are you marketing to? You know, if you're gonna be sending out to a foreclosure list, let's get your letters out or your marketing out or postcards out the week before I arrive, especially by the Thursday before I come in. That way phone calls start coming in when I'm there. When I get the biggest bang out of my four days with you now, I'd show up. A lot of times people have not done any of their homework. So we spent the first day or two getting their marketing out. And it was just a waste because nobody would call by the time I was leaving on Thursday. So we had to improvise and give them do things, go door knocking or to pull other lists or start dialing for dollars. And you have me there kicking your butt for four days. You better watch out. It's intense four days, as somebody will tell you, when I used to go out and do that many times, like Thursday afternoon, they're like, hey, you got to leave, you got to go. I can't handle you on my butt for four days. Keep me going. And I'm like, well, you've got to set these things up to be effective. You've got to actually put the work in. You've got to put the work ethic in. What did you do this last week? Oh, I just kind of took it easy. Okay, well, did you work? Yeah, I worked. What'd you do between 7pm and midnight? There's plenty of time to put work into this. And look, I'll be the first one to say, hey, we all drift. As our good friend Sharon Leichter is notorious for saying, people drift out there. And we all do. Everybody does. I do. But the thing is to know when you are drifting so that you can correct it and come on back in and try to fix it as best you can. Not the easiest thing to do. But the thing comes down to this too, that if you're going to invest in something, I always tell people, if they're going to sign up for our no blind buying blueprint, please have A work ethic. Please understand that you have to go A, B, C, D before you get to Z. And a lot of people just want to go to Z. And I'm like, it doesn't work that way. You mess up because you don't know the A, B, C, D. All right? You don't even know what the Z is because you're just going to think of it and try to apply what you've learned as a real estate investor or learn from somebody else's class and try to apply it to the note business. That's not the case. It doesn't work. Now the thing that really frustrates me more than anything else is in this industry. And I say this, really, actually I'm gonna say this, not in just this industry, but as real estate investing as a whole is the amount of people that never take action, that really drives me bonkers. That really just irritates the crap out of me. Or people that sign up for something and they're like, oh, it didn't work for me. Or it doesn't work. Didn't work for you because you didn't take action. And with, especially right now, if you're listening to this, it's the first part of November. As we record this, it's a prime time to start looking into your marketing. I mean, you gotta be more, I mean, reason of. How do you find notes? You market all. I'm not joking. From the marketing I've done from when I taught my workshop the first week of September, I've made six new sources, six SEIs. All right, uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, ses SEIs. Six new leads that have turned into four tapes. I got one this morning actually sent from a source that I've been going back and forth on LinkedIn for over two months now. Yes, since September and through October. Two months. She sent it less than two months, right at the two month mark for when I originally contacted her on LinkedIn. And that's the thing that gets me is that most people, two months, people would give up on that. Awesome. Well, I followed up with her, just gently followed up with her, followed up with an email. I know I touched base with her at least five times. Intro email intro message on LinkedIn connected with her. Send a follow up message on LinkedIn because she said she was just starting as a special asset manager to give her a week. So I followed back that week and then sent her an email and then I followed up with another email to her and she sent me a list last week and that's, I mean last Friday I didn't see it till this morning when I walked in the office. But anyway, it's got performing notes. It also has non performing notes on it and there's color. And we've exchanged emails back and forth this morning about this to get a little bit of idea on the discount and pricing and what they're looking for, that back and forth aspect. But that's two months of at least six contacts and 80% of sales are made after the fifth contact. If you're listening to this and you've never heard me say that before, you must be new because 80% of sales are made of a fifth contact. And that's the biggest thing is that you can sit here and tell people, hey, it's going to take you to make this many phone calls. It's going to take you to make this many reach outs is making this many contacts to have that have your marketing work effectively for you. It's sad is then people like they don't want to do their work, they just want to be given the lead. You know what's funny is we've done that too as people come into our mastermind or come in for the one on one coaching or fast track training. Hey, here's a list of asset managers. Here's 5,000 asset managers for you. Here's 3,000 asset managers and mortgage bankers from the Texas savings and mortgage lending department. So here's 286 servicers for you to reach out to. Okay. That have plenty of clients that are looking to get rid of assets. Oh, hey, here's a list of entities. Over 9,000 entities that bought or sold notes in their last year in one of the hottest counties in America. You think you could reach out and find some sources from that, but most people don't have the work ethic. Most people, I think we have to blame a lot on the phones these days. People are a little hesitant to pick up the phone and dial for dollars. People are hesitant to reach out and call somebody and leave a one on one message. I mean it was one of the funnest things when we were, we just did our virtual mastermind in October and that's what I did on a Saturday. I made a bunch of phone calls to entities in front of everybody, recorded live and showed them. Saturday is not the best time to be phone call but still made contact with people, still was able to get ahold of people, still was able to really communicate with people that had bought notes and sold notes and got several lists from it. But people, especially, though most people think this is an easy overnight success. And those that are successful in this industry will tell you it's not an overnight success by any means of the imagination. Now, it may seem like it's easy because I will show people easily how to pull information, how to jump on LinkedIn, how to use LeadFuse, how to use Octopus, how to use some of these other services. You know, how to use mailchimp to send email blast out. And you have to realize it takes follow up, follow up sending just an email. It's not like, just send it and forget it. I was reading emails from somebody today. You said they're going in a different direction. And I'm like, you've barely been a student for like 90 days. Why are you going in a different direction? Why? I asked them to go. I want to go this route. I'm like, why are you on the most difficult aspect of things when you've never taken a class on that aspect, on that niche? Why are you doing that to yourself? You're bouncing from one thing to another to another to another. And what happens is we see a repeat, a repeat bounce kind of thing. You know what I mean by that? Not a bad email bounce. And I want you to think about this, because I think everybody bounces around. We've drifted from one thing subject to another. And, you know, when I used to coach, there were people that were going and signing up for this master's in real estate investing education, and they would go from workshop to workshop to workshop, and then they would, as I say, bounce from one workshop to workshop. But they would never have time to implement anything before they went to a new workshop to try to go to another one. Or they would send out leads or marketing, but they would never have time to go back and work those leads that came in from that. Oh, I can't call it because I got to go to the next workshop this weekend. I gotta get my master's in real estate education investing. And I'm like, what the heck is that? Look, those classes will be there. If you're gonna be focused on something, try to do yourself a favor. Do yourself a favor. Do your checkbook, your credit card a favor. What I mean by that? Well, actually use what you've paid for and attended. Take some time before sign up for something else to actually implement and do the things that need to be done. Now, what I always laugh about is when people come through a training like, oh, I don't think it's for me. Okay, you don't think that the marketing that we talk about doing on a daily basis, weekly basis is gonna benefit you in any way. And it does. I'm not talking about me sending any email blast out daily to people. I'm talking about is people learning how to market effectively in the 21st century. Okay, yes, Scotty's here to beam you up. I'm giving her all she's got, Captain. What people don't do is they will not take the time to put things in place and realize that there is specific things that need to do on a regular basis and go from there. So let's throw these numbers out. Alright, so if you are, let's just say you want to have 100 asset managers in a 12 month period. This is the first goal that I ever set for myself is I want to have 100 asset managers that I would reach out to in a year. And I thought that would be a big number back over a decade ago. Now that's a very easy number now. But how do you get about doing it? Well, you do by a couple of things. One, you can a go to the Texas Savings and Mortgage Lending Department online and download the list of licensed mortgage bankers and loan servicers. That's the list or mortgage companies. That's about 23, maybe 3200 names. Maybe not names, but company names, emails, phone numbers and dollar for dollar. Oh my gosh, you mean I have to actually work. There's not an app that'll do that for me. And I'm like, unfortunately not. I mean you can download the app and send an email blast out to them, but your most effective thing is gonna be following up and following because you're only gonna have roughly about a 20% and that's gonna be a really good one. With asset managers, usually it's somewhere between 15, 9 and 15% depending on the time of year. Now anytime around major holidays, major holidays being like New Year's, Thanksgiving, Christmas, you've got to be very deliberate in your email blast. And when you send them out, I mean I'm in the big habit of you might as well just turn into a year round email blast that goes out every first Tuesday of the month. Everybody doesn't fall on a major holiday and just follow up with those people. Those that open the email, great. Those that didn't open the email, send a follow up email. You really only have to write about 12. Actually let me take that back. 24 emails. And what I mean by 24 emails? Well, you write 24 emails first email goes out, boom. You're gonna get 9 to 15% of people to open that email from your list. Okay, you send the same email out a couple days later, same exact email to those that didn't open the first email. Why do you send the exact same email? Because they didn't read the first time. And you only will see about a 3 to 6% open rate the second time around. You send it, but you send it at opposite time of the day. If you send it in the morning on the Tuesday, you send it in the afternoon on a Thursday or vice versa. You say afternoon on a Tuesday, you send it in the morning on a Thursday. But that's half your meals one a month. The second set of 12 emails is going to go out to those that open your email and send it the following week. Hey, thanks for opening my email last week. I'd love to set up a phone call with you to see what you have on your books. Very, very simple thing. And you know the beautiful thing, if you use like mailchimp infusionsaucer sort of CRM tool, you can basically pre write those emails, pre set up your systems so that it's done almost on an automatic basis. And then all you've got to do is the real four letter word. The real four letter word and most people are very scared of is work. What do I mean by work? Well, that means dialing for dollars. That means picking up the phone and call them means picking up the phone and just leaving a message. You know, I used to make 50 phone calls in a day. I got to 100 phone calls in a day. On a really good day I could still knock those out. But that's the magic word. That's the doing the extra 5% that most people won't do. Most people just want to send an email blast out. Oh, it's not. I don't have time to make phone calls. I'm too busy being something else. And that's fine. If you don't have time to make phone calls during the day because you are working at a job, that's fine. There's other ways to do it. What do you mean Scott Carson? What do you mean there are other ways to do it? Well, you can a do a voice blast where it gets delivered to their inbox. That's an easy thing to do. But if you don't have the time to make phone calls or leaves a voicemail. Oh, Scott. Well that goes to a lot of if only if I have their cell phone it will work. What if they have a Landline. Well, then do this. If you see that they open their email, then just send a follow up email to them and say, hey, thanks for reaching out. Let's pick up a time to call next week. And you pick one afternoon or pick one couple hours and you set up 15 minutes time slots to talk with those people. You do it after hours or before hours. I mean, you look at what your time is at and what time zone they're in and just start plotting the signs. Maybe take your lunch break each day to do that. Monday through Thursday, are you doing the afternoons? You know what I would do then? I would jump on LinkedIn and find those people. If they communicated and contacted you back and you saw the open, then go to LinkedIn and reach out to them directly. Or you know what, do yourself a favor and send them a little short video, a one minute video if you get their phone number. Okay. Or a short record, a one minute video or two minute video talking about what you're looking for. Upload it to YouTube and then send email blast out to those people that opened your email. Say, hey, thanks for opening my email. Just wanted to follow up with you. This is me. This is what I'm looking forward. Love to talk with you. See if you have anything in your books that you're looking to get rid of. Now that's the hardest thing. Most people will set up the systems. Oh, I got an email list. I don't do any work. I'm doing phone calls. Business is still based on talking to people. A lot of people want to get away with doing it virtually. And this lady that sent me a list, yeah, I haven't had to talk to her personally. I think I left a voicemail originally. But you still going to get more, more honey, okay. You'll catch more flies the more honey you put out. Now if you don't put any honey out or you only do one thing and you expect it to rain, okay, if, you know, you do one email blast out and you expect, oh, I'm gonna have millions of people send me a list and the first time I send it out, that's not the case at all. That's not the case at all. You have to realize that work is doing more than what everybody else is doing. Everybody else is sitting back, they might send an email blast out to the market list, they might do that stuff and great, good for them. But what most people won't do is that little extra bit. Well, let me reach out to this person on LinkedIn or let me see if they're on LinkedIn or send them a phone call or leave a voice message or send a video. These little things that we talk about will separate you from the crowd. Or creating, you know, here's another thing, creating a calendar link where they can schedule time on their own. I mean, maybe you want to have them call you during the day. So maybe you open your calendar links because you have a job that you can step away from for 15 or 20 minutes while you're talking to asset managers at your job, or you're taking breaks or you work from home. Okay, that's a smart thing to do, is set these systems up. But most people, we have shiny object syndrome, Squirrel syndrome. What? You know what I mean. We want to chase the shiny object syndrome. And I saw this happen after note camp. Our note can't commercial we did back in July. People were excited about it. Commercial notes, yay. And they started chasing things and they start. People started calling me, hey, I want to chase self storage. That's great. What are you doing to track lists? Are you reaching out to asset managers? Are you going to take a class from like Scott Myers or Investors in Action? My friends Terry, Terry Garner and Aaliyah Ott Carter. Can you take one of them so that you're actually learning to do what you're doing? No, I'm not going to do that. What the hell? Oh, I've been a realtor for two years or I fixed it and flipped a couple homes. It's got to be the same thing. And it's the biggest thing that just is downright depressing everybody. I mean sometimes it feels like you're just shooting blanks at people. They don't seem to get it and they're running around with a chicken head cut off trying to find something that's ease. And people are inherently lazy. As I would just say, if it was easy, everybody would do this. And that's one of the biggest things is I've always tried to say this to people and I believe I've always said, hey, this is not the easiest thing. If it was everybody be doing it. It's not the easiest thing. You're going to have delays, you're going to have deals get delayed in funding. You're going to have people walk, you're going to have tapes pulled. You're going to have assets that you do some due diligence on that turn out to be crap. Welcome to the club. Work is a four letter word for many people. Most people don't have a work ethic. They don't understand that what it takes that they've got to put in extra hours, even if they're working a full time job, they got to come home, spend some hours doing it. They've got to put some things aside. And a lot of people have a tough time this time of year putting football aside. Like football, whether it's college or pro or Monday Night Football, putting things aside that they, you know, that would then taking that time to put the work. Now, I was driving recently down to San Antonio a couple weeks ago for an evening thing and drove back the same night. I drove past Cibolo, Cibolo south part of San Marcos, north part of San Antonio, actually Cibolo shirts area. And I worked down this area when I was growing up, or I should say going to college because I went to school at Southwest Texas State University. Go Bobcats. They're now Texas State University in San Marcos. And I worked at a place called the Grist Mill. And as I was working through not only my undergrad, but also actually, this is more for my master's. I was going back for my master's. I would make the drive from Austin to San Marcos two, three nights a week for my mba. And one of the classes we took was on. We had to put a plan together. And this guy put this plan together for the strip mall. It was like four unit strip mall in a really nice desirable area off of I35. IH35 is a highway. It runs basically from Laredo all the way through Texas, splits Austin, you know, right down the middle here. And he was talking about this great plan. I was like, that's a really good business model. If you've got this, this and this, that's a great business model. And the actual professor knew that I was in real estate and asked me, he actually said, hey, Scott, do you want to take a look at this? Would you like to comment on it? Because you have more experience than all of us, myself included and others in the class. I said, yeah. So I commented the guy and said, hey, this guy worked for administrator or not an executive, but in management of malls. Simon Malls, if I remember correctly. And I mentioned to him, said, hey, if you really like this, I can put you in touch with some of the people that I'm my network who can help make this happen, who can really do this, because this is a great plan. And you know what the guy said? He goes, thanks, but no thanks. I'm like, what do you mean, no thanks? He goes, I'm happy living my life, being able to Play with my kids every day and coach their little league and do those things. Now, I'm not saying being an active dad is a bad thing, I'm not. But this guy was making like 45, 50 grand a year and he was settling, he was settling early on. Now this is going back. If I look at this, this is when I was in my golly, I wasn't divorced yet, so I was like 28, I think. Yes, 27, 28. And this guy's maybe in his early 30s and he's like, yeah, I just want to get my mba because then I can move up to an executive management level my company and then I'll be good, I'll be happy with their lifestyle. I was like, wow, wow. I mean, I said this wouldn't take a lot of work on your part. There are people that would be gladly to come in and give you a piece of the deal or stuff. And he's like, no, I'm not interested. I honestly don't want to do that. I want to settle. Those are the exact words. And that's a sad thing is now if you're in a spot, you're happy, you're content, settling okay may not be a bad thing. And I tell people that all the time. If you're happy doing what you're doing, kudos to you, good stuff. But I know many people want more in life and more is also a four letter word because if you want to get more out of life, the two, there's two letters in more and work that they share in common. It's all about the ors or and what is or you're making a decision, I'm going to do some extra work or I'm going to settle. I want to get more out of life or I just want to settle. Or is a word that most people don't want to deal with. They would rather have it just be spoon fed to them. They want to give it to them. They don't want to spend the extra time, they don't want to take away from their nights of playing in the bowling league. I had a buddy who didn't pay his bills on time, but he's always in a bowling league. And I was like, you're going there and spending money on bowling and other things and you can't pay your bills, can't pay your rent. Something is wrong. You have to make a choice. It's either got to be once you get a job or quit your bowling thing and you didn't want to deal with it. So if you're out there and you're listening to this right now, I'm going to tell you right now, note investing is not the easiest thing. Note investing can be very profitable. Note investing can change your life if you do it right. I mean, we have helped so many people change their lives in so many great ways out there and helped really change America. As I say, one distress, one stress borrower at a time. Because we teach you how to do the things that you need to do. We teach you the systems, we teach you what you need to put in place. We need to teach you that a actually you have to market. Just because you have a list of asset managers, just because you know what goes on in the states and foreclosure time frame and just because you're educated does not mean anything these days. You could be the most talented, educated person. You could be a brain surgeon, take all the classes, be the brain surgeon. But if you've never picked up a scalpel and went to work, that education is worthless. That time spent is worthless. Going to classes and going all that stuff, spending all that money. You know, there's so many people that I talk to that, oh, I got a degree and it's worthless because I just, I wasn't serious about what I was going to school. I almost discovered that, especially my junior year of school. I transferred schools. I quit playing football after taking a year off and I almost failed out of college and transferred into a new university. I almost failed off. I didn't take it serious. I was like, whoa, this is my money. I need to take things seriously. And ultimately we. Everybody is responsible for their own path in life. It's not up to me. It's not up to you or anybody else out there. You are responsible for where you're at. I am responsible for the actions and decisions that I've made have led up to where I'm at currently. And I'm responsible for things, the good, the bad and the ugly. You have to start taking being accountable to yourself that you're not putting in the things. If I want to close more deals, you know what I have to do? I got to work more, I have to market more, I have to send more emails out. I have to spend time at night, connect with LinkedIn asset managers. I need to do more. There's that or think about it. People, most people won't do the extra. Most people won't do that little bit extra. They want to do what everybody else is doing. That drives me bonkers. That drives me crazy out There. When I see people do that, then they turn around and want to blame others. Oh, I know. It was not what I thought it was going to be. What do you think it was going to be? Sitting around and eating bonbons on your ass all day. You're going to be like Paige Bundy sitting on there in stretchy pants just from the couch watching Oprah. Look, the no business takes work. It takes work to market. It takes work to reach out to people. Takes work to do your due diligence. Takes work to hire servicing company and attorneys to handle all that stuff. It takes work filing collateral files. It takes work. It takes systems. It takes time. It takes time and you've got to put the work in to see the results. I mean, if we had to rely on most people these days to replace our farmers for food, all of us would starve to death. Okay. Or if we had to learn how to walk again as an adult, most people would just give up. Most people give up. They would be paraplegics sitting around in a wheelchair. Oh, well, it's hard. I don't want to hurt. I might break a sweat. Might fall down and hurt my knee. Oh, I might scab myself. Oh, I might get a bruise. Oh, I might get my finger. Might hit my finger with a hammer. I can't do that. You can't ever get anything done. Whether you can or you can't, it's up to you. Everybody out there. And so that's the thing, you know, this episode, that's the thing I really want you guys to look at is look at what are you doing on a daily basis. That little bit extra, that 5% more. What's that 5% more that you're doing or are you doing something else? Think about it. Work means more or not work, chill or work. If your dreams are big and your comfort zone starts to really come out. That's the thing. People will not move outside of their comfort zone unless they're forced to do something by force. Means either death, starvation or some other stress comes. Most people won't do things. I know one investor right now in Houston who just rolled over and basically gave it up. I'm lazy. I referred about the tale of two note investors a while back. The guy just gave up. He just literally gave up. I don't want to do the work anymore. I don't want to follow up. I don't want to attend the re club meetings anymore. I really just want somebody to gave me a flat hourly wage and I'll do what they Tell me to do. I don't want to be accountable to myself. I don't want to be accountable to my girlfriend or my fiance. I don't remember. I doubt, hopefully they're not engaged because if that's the case, she's in for a world of trouble later on life. And she's the bread earner. And he's not really going to do anything. He's not going to step up to the podium to help out, step up to his opportunity to do something different with his life. He's just going to be a lazy ass. And you tell a lot of people, tell a lot about people by what they do. What do they do in their spare time? What do they do in their lives outside of the 9 to 5, you know, if they've got a family, great. Accomplishing the things they want to do, are they working towards their goals? If you're not, okay, it's still the best country in the world to do something. It's still a great place for you to go out and do something. I mean, all you've got to do is travel abroad at some point and realize how lucky we are here in the United States or go someplace where the people aren't as lucky as us. I mean, you look at the borders, people are dying to get in the United States, from El Salvador, Europe and things like that. People are looking from Mexico, are looking to get here. We are such a wealthy country of so many opportunities. I mean, you can go to the Khan Academy online, you'll learn things. You can go to lynda.com to download trading programs. All the hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there. It takes work. It takes work. I see a lot of this happening in podcasting where you have a lot of podfate where 80% of people haven't produced something new on their episodes in the last six months. It takes work. It takes you showing up. And that's what note investing is all about. You've got to show up. You got to keep following up with this deals. Look, I didn't close on my first note deal. It took me over six months to close my first note deal from when I got started. And I was really half assing it at that point. I was still doing other things. I was like, oh, I'll do this. When I got serious about it. Oh wait, there's the or. You have to do the things you want to do. The or. Serious, okay. I think there's an or in that ous maybe is you have to realize everybody there's no. Or in serious. But you get what I'm talking about, is that it takes time. It takes you showing up, it takes you being dedicated. It takes you doing the mundane things on a regular basis. And a lot of times, I'm a Daniel. You can set up systems so they take care of that for you. You can follow up on things like that. Look, you can't sit around here and just send email, blast out once a month, and then take a nap every day. Doesn't work that way. And there's people out there that are like, I want to be the laziest note investor out there. Well, it doesn't work that way. Note investments is this constant mutating kind of rubber ball. Okay? Tar baby ball, I guess you could say. There's things that you can get stuck doing that you don't want to do, but there's other things you can have other people do. And that's why we tell people all the time, like, listen, if you're gonna buy your first couple notes. Yeah. You put your systems in place, get them going for 1, 2, or 3 notes. Don't buy a cheap note. Don't buy a skinny deal. Move on to the next one. To the next one. How do we find the next one? You do more. I had somebody come to me aggravating. She's like, I'm gonna buy this note deal from this other investor. I'm like, wait a second. Why are you buying from them? Well, I went online, this platform, I was like, okay, and what's your exit strategy going to be? Well, I'm going to try to get it modified. Like, wait a second. If that investor's had that deal for six to 12 months and they not got it modified, got reperforming, you're sure as hell not going to get reperforming. So why are you paying above 70, 75 cents of the dollar for that note? Your only exit strategy to foreclose. Look, go do some other deals. Go market somewhere else. I don't want to. Okay, don't do that deal. It's going to be a bad deal for you. You're overpaying. The only person that's going to get any money on this is the investor selling you the deal. Always gotta be a win win. There's not a win win. Don't do the deal. Well, I need you to do a deal. Well, great. How much are you marketing to these other places? I mean, making phone calls. Well, I'm not doing any of that. Ha ha. Ding, ding, ding. You understand why they're not having success. All right, Shows up just like that. If they're not willing to do those little things, I don't want to do those other things. Well, what are you doing here? Why are you showing up now? There's plenty of people note investors out there that don't want to do a lot of work. And they like the performing note side. They can buy a performing note. It's going to return cash flow to them on a regular basis. Okay, great. Totally fine. Stick to that. There are a lot of people out there. Well, I want to make big returns. Great. To do big returns. To get higher returns, you've got to do more. Okay, You've got to do more work. Oh, you've got to do more. And that decision is ultimately up to you. And if you want to have a work ethic, great. Stick to it. Set goals, set some limitations, set some things, some numbers to you. KPIs. I'll tell you right now, making 50 phone calls in a day, you'll probably get 12 to 14 people you talk to. You'll probably get one to four lists out of those 50 if you follow up with them. Or out of those 14 you talk to, you know what you do the next day. Great. The 14 you talk to, you replace those with 15 more people. You can make phone calls Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays. That's 150 phone calls. @ the end of that week, you've probably talked to 45 people. Guess what? Add another 45, 50 people and call the other hundred people. You didn't get to follow up with a second phone call to them. That's the only way you'll divide and conquer. I mean, there's so many asset managers out there, it'd be impossible for you to call every asset manager in the book. Whether it's on Lane Guide or Distress Pro or Note Pros. You there's so many ways, so many different asset managers and contacts in the lending industry right now. You can't reach everybody. Will you call and somebody else talk to? Rarely, because most people aren't going to do that extra 5% more. They're not going to do that extra aspect of dialing for dollars. They might send an email blast out once, but they're not going to dial for dial. They're not going to download Lane Guide. They're going to try to be cheap. If you want to cheapen your success, go right ahead and cheapen it. If you want to delay your success by 6 months or 12 months or by never because you're constantly Looking for the easiest and the least, least amount of work to do. That's great. Go do it somewhere else. Don't do it with me. So once again everybody, I know that you many you are out there looking for doing some things. Check out our noteblueprint training noteblueprint.com or check out our upcoming virtual note buying class is this first week of December. We'd love to have you. Other than that, check out weclosenotes.com for latest update of classes in the new year. It's up to you to define your success. So you can either do it or don't. And that's what more is all about. More is picking that, hey, I want more to take place. That means I'm going to do something other than what I'm doing right now. I'm going to do something more than what I'm doing on a daily basis. So go out there, put more in your corner to get more work done and get more done. And trust me, if you focus on that for 30, 60, 90 days, you look back and give yourself time to build those habits and be focused. Say no to other things. Say no to the shiny objects, kill those squirrels. You'll be a lot happier off in the long run by being focused. Learn to say no and say yes to getting work and more done in your daily basis. An hour extra day doesn't have to be talking about, hey, I'm going to go from one job to another job. That's the last thing we want to do. Put in an hour, put in two hours extra each day and you'll get a lot further along than those that aren't going to do anything else there as well. So once again, Scott Carson here, host of the NoClozed Show. Once again, thank you guys so much for listening as always. Go check it out. Go to weclosenotes.com to listen to watch. You can also listen to the podcast on any of the channels available. I would really love it if you guys would do me a huge favor. I don't ask this very often, but if you head over to itunes and leave a five star review or head on over to LinkedIn, connect with me on there and leave me a recommendation. I would love that as well. So give you a shout out and be glad to give you a recommendation back as well too. So once again, thank you all for listening. Thank you for all your support. Go out and have a great day and do a little bit more and we'll see you off the top everybody. Bye Sam.