EP 624 - 10x10 Pro: Creating Massive Income, Contribution, And Fulfillment With Real Estate Investor, Bill Barnett

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This is the no Closers 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.

Hey, it's Bill Barnett. I want to invite you to join Scott and I for the next episode of Note Closer show because on this episode we're going to be talking about how you can become a 10 by 10 pro. $10,000 a month in passive income giving back to your community. If you're interested, make sure you join us on the show.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Note Closer Show. As always, Scott Carson. Excited to be here with the day. Really excited to have a friend from also in the Lone Star state, just up I35DFW market. My good buddy Bill Barnett is joining us here today on the Nucleus Show. And if you don't know who he is, you've probably heard of his book or even read his book. Are you dumb enough to be rich? If you haven't, you better go out and buy it. But he's done over seven years of his weekly radio show as well. Real estate now with Bill Barnett and he's also been on TV with over 102 episodes of the Dynamic Achievers World Network. He's been invested in real estate for more than 28 years. And of course there's a lot of note investing out there. Bill, we're honored to have you, man. It's good to catch up with you. It's been too long. How's it going?

I'm tickled to be here. It's been way too long since we've had some time together. It was great catching up so in the last few weeks and so excited to be here and part of ncs.

Yeah, good stuff. So for those few stragglers out there across the country that don't know who Bill Barnett is, obviously you got your radio, your tv, the book. I love the title of the book. It's one of the best ones out there for you out there. Great content. Why don't we share a little bit about your focus because you do some really cool stuff out there for investors out there besides just the notions. We can get that a little bit. But let's just talk about what your main focus is and dive in there first.

Okay. So I stay with trends of the market And I've been consulting for 18, 19 years for new investors and seasoned investors, getting them over the hump, getting them rocking and rolling. And that's what the books are about. That's what my business is about. Of course, do investing myself. Got four rehabs going on right now. I love flips and I love buying holds for passive income. That's where I do a lot of note. Do a lot of note business in the flips as well. On a brokerage firm. 2010, I bought a traditional brokerage firm, DFW properties.net and if you remember, back in 10, the market was a shambles and I had people that were friends of mine just going, are you crazy? Why would you buy anything in real estate right now? And I'm like, no, that's when you want to buy. And so I bought a brokerage firm. And so now playing both sides of the game, you know, working with traditional agents in a traditional business and then doing investing and of course, teaching my agents how to work with real estate investors. And I just, I love that. Never thought of myself as a consultant's really just a teacher. And I never thought of myself as a teacher. And another friend that we share, Mark, Victor Hansen. Mark is the guy that got me speaking 20 plus years ago. And I just found out that I absolutely loved it. Love seeing the impact that can have on people's lives and futures and families. And that's what we've been doing, brother.

Yeah, no good stuff there. I love that aspect of things. And I really love the fact of working to help get people over the hump. And I think a lot of people, and we've been teaching Note Investing for 10 years and seeing people. The thing that I think it invigorates us who are educators and teachers, besides the fact that we like going out and do deals, but it's really seeing people pull that trigger and get beyond themselves. Right, Bill?

Yeah, they've got to be able to. I was just talking about this with a former student guy that Kevin Mills, that he and I do a podcast together and. But I was just talking to Kevin about one of the big stumbling blocks that investors have, especially new ones, is pulling the trigger. And if you've got your money lined up, then it's easier to find properties. If you got properties lined up, easier to find money. But you got to have those two things in play. And when you've got that, it gives you the confidence to pull the trigger. If you learn from somebody like Scott or you learn from somebody like me, they're Going to teach you how to do the business the correct way and you get familiar with your numbers. When the property works, move on it, do it. Then you can't wait around a couple of days, have contractors go, look, you do that, it's going to be gone.

That's definitely the truth. In all spaces of real estate, whether it's buying, buy and holds, fixing flips, no deals, you've got to pull that trigger and get rocking and rolling because otherwise somebody else is going to see it and gobble it up there for you. But the whole waiting around for that perfect deal, that's what I see. A lot of new business. Well, I don't know. It needs to be perfect for me to do it. There is no perfect deal out there. We can always agree that some, some shit's gonna go wrong at some point along the way, right?

Absolutely. And once I get into a contract, the longer that contract goes before closing or after it's closed, the longer it goes in the rehab and things are going smooth, I start to get sweaty. I'm like, something's always gonna happen. Let's get it done quick and out of the way. But yeah, it's the nature of business. And when you're able to pull the trigger, I'll tell you something, how timely this market is. This past week I was out looking at property and I forgot my iPad. Because usually what will happen is when we find a property, we go ahead and put offer in on it while we're there at the property, because we've got everything set up already, so the real estate agents all have it. And I'm not licensed myself. I just own a brokerage firm. I still use an agent that works for me. And so I, I called my buddy Ron who works for me, and I just said, hey, Ron, I want to let this. Get an offer in on this property. Well, I had to leave him a voicemail and it was about 10 minutes before he called me back. In that amount of time, that property had a contract accepted on it. Now I'm in as backup on it, and I'm a smidge higher than what they accepted. So I think I got a shot at it because there's some unique contingencies that make it pretty doubtful that they might be able to close it, but that's how fast the market is. So if you're prepared, pull the trigger and get this thing going. Because there's nothing more fun than getting out there and look when you're looking at property. That's what I tell people all the Time, Scott, you know what? When you're out looking at property and you're in these old ratty old houses that are just trashed out, if that just gets you grinning for a minute ear to earth, this is not your business. You gotta love that stuff. If you get out there, you start making offers. The whole business in my aspect boils down to money and offers. And you're such a key component on the money side of it. But it goes hand in hand. You got the offers made and you don't have a source of funds, you don't have anything. If you got money and you got no offers to make, you don't have anything. They go hand in hand. And that's just what I always tell people. Look, money and offers, which comes first?

Yes, yeah, exactly. And I always tell people that if the deal does make sense and you market, get the word out, flapping your gums about what you're doing to your network and everything, that money will show up if the deal makes sense. You just gotta share what's going on and not be a secret agent. In real estate, I've never found somebody that wanted to be quiet and never talk, never market, ever do anything long term, you know, besides maybe using a little of their own funds. But at some point your own funds are gonna run out, right, Bill?

Yeah. I caution people about using their own money and it's a crutch. And you won't learn to do the business the right way if you get hung up and pick a number. So we got 250 in our retirement account. We're going to start using that to do deals with. It doesn't matter what the number is, you're going to run out. Now I'll tell you where I really learned this in spades. Years ago I did some work for President Trump, obviously, long before he was president, did some work consulting for his company and training some trainers for him. A lot of what I did in preparation was go through the books and there's a great book I'm going to reference and it's called Billionaire Tips for the Small Time Investor. He co wrote it with George Ross and George was his real estate attorney, may still be fabulous, fabulous guy. And it's the only one of all the Trump books I read that is specifically about deals in real estate. Most everything else is business philosophy and they're great books, but this one is about deals, tears deals apart, walks you through them top to bottom and I love that. But one of the things that really hit home in there was that he Always uses partner has the ability on a ton of these deals to just go out and do it himself. But he uses partners. And one of the reasons that he does that is the fact that you always run out of money. So it doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or if you're a thousandaire. If you're using your own funds, you're going to run out. And when you do, your business comes to a halt. So if you learn on the front end how to use opm, so you're using notes, using. Working with hard money lenders. There's a thousand different ways to fund these things, but you got to put together funding that is just crucial. And if you do that, then your business grows a lot faster. It'll grow exponentially for you.

Yeah. What's your favorite tip to raise capital? Tell us a little bit about it without giving away the secret sauce. You know what I mean?

I come from an investment banking background. I started Merrill lynch in the mid-80s and managed some money out in California for a bank out there for years. And on the course of all of that, dealt with a lot of private money. And that's what I love about the note business is I dealt with private money. So I had this ability to raise private funds. And that's just a conversation piece that you have to have with people. Just. So what I found in real estate is it works even better in real estate than it did in investment banking. And so that's really my number one fun way to raise funds for deals is private money. And you're able to give people a great rate of return better than they're going to get most anywhere else. And certainly less risky than what they're going to get in the stock market, even if they get a better return. And a lot of people prefer to have a little bit less of a rate. I do 10 to 12, and that's up to you. But you have that ability to go out and help people get a great rate of return who love real estate but aren't like you and me and want to be involved in the deal. They just want to have the money side of it and get a great rate of return.

Yeah, it's conversations, talking with people. You said two really good things there. I think a lot of people miss out on. A lot of people get into the whole nitty gritty. I want to be the jack of all trades. I want to be the person rehabbing the property and listening and doing. Exactly. Hang on, let me hit that. Pull that trigger again. Here it's mind numbing work out there. Basically the things that you're focused on is the raising capital we talked about, but also finding the deals and using your sources to locate those deals. That make sense, correct?

Yeah. And here's the thing about. And look, I was the worst when I got started in the business. I'll give you two quick stories here. One of them was my very first deal. A buddy of mine and I who played at West Point, he and I were roommates at the time. We bought this house together. And so we decided, hey, it's a house, how difficult can it be? And so we started rehabbing it. And we spent all day, every day for six days a week. And four months into this thing, it was a mammoth property. It was almost 1800ft. Four months into it, we're still not done. And we finally got to the point of, well, we're going to have to bring in some contractors here to finish this thing out. So I started interviewing contractors. Now, I didn't tell them that I had been doing the work that Brad and I had. It was just like, hey, you know, we got this house and we're going to flip it. Come in, take a look at it. So I interviewed three separate contractors. All three of them said the same thing in different ways, but they said the same thing. Well, whoever did this work doesn't know what they were doing. So we're going to have to undo all of this and redo it. So I had the pleasure of doing it and of course paying for doing it. And then I had the pleasure of seeing it undone and the pleasure of paying for someone else to do it correctly. And it really taught me a lesson about, hey, you know what? Let the people that know how to do that do that. One of my favorite consulting clients through the years, the guy was a professional painting contractor. And so when we started consulting together, he was like, well, you know, I agree with almost everything you say, but look, I'm a high end paint contractor and you're not going to find anybody that can do a better job for me. So I'm going to be doing my own painting on my properties. And I'm like, well, that's okay if you have your crew do it, but you're not, right? And he goes, yeah, when I go out with my crews, I go with them. And I'm not above doing that. I'm like, yeah, that's not the point. The point is what you make as a painter is a very different number than what you make as the investor or as A sheetrocker or as a flooring expert or any skill that you might have pales in comparison to being the investor.

Yeah, it definitely is. You end up working for minimum wage or below minimum wage when it's all said and done. Let's talk about the notes side of your business. What do you love about notes? What's your niche? What's your focus when it comes to the paper business?

When it comes to the paper side of it, I love funding deals with notes. And as I said, I got started in investment banking and after five years, well, not five at Merrill, but after I got started in five years, I was in LA and some buddies of mine from Merrill lynch called me and said, hey, we're going to strike out and we're going to start our own firm. It was what in the business is referred to as a merchant banking firm, which is. It's not really a bank. It's more venture capital, but it's not quite the size that most venture capital firms are. So we specialized in 2 to 20 million dollars raises for companies that we cleaned them up and repositioned them in the marketplace and got them to what I would call the real venture capital firms. Now those numbers would probably be like 50 million, but at the time, this was early 90s, so I left and started that. So when we were doing that, just love funding deals. And that became the nature of a lot of who I am. I love putting the deal together and funding the deal. Now those were corporate deals. So when we came along and started doing real estate, it was just an easy transition. So I like using the private note to fund the deal. Whether it's a flip, you can do it on a buy and hold. It's a little different scenario there. Flips are real easy to do. Sometimes we'll combine notes. We'll do somebody that comes in and they hold the first. Then we'll do somebody separately for the rehab funds. But here's the other thing you look at. So I have people a lot of times that'll go, well, you know, it hurts my rate of return. If I'm paying out. In my case, I teach them 10 to 12%. If I'm paying that out, it hurts my rate of return. And I'm like, really? If you're 100% financed, how much money do you have in the deal? Well, obviously I don't have any. Well, if you don't have any in the deal, you cannot calculate your rate of return. It's infallible. So get over this thing about somebody else. Is going to make some money as well. That's the beauty of help somebody else make some great funds and what you'll find. My first funder in real estate, we did a $50,000 property. Of course, years ago, we did $50,000 property. And over the next couple of weeks, I got this feeling that, wow, this must have been his last $50,000. Maybe I shouldn't have taken this because he would call me almost every day, hey, how to go to the house today? And I was like, this is crazy. Well, house was fine. We sold the property. Everything went according to plan. And so after I closed it out and he got his funds back, a couple of days go by and he calls me and goes, well, do you have any more properties? I'm like, well, yeah. He said, well, you know, I came across a little bit more money. I think I could probably do about 75. Well, over the course of the next couple of years, we ended up with about $3 million. What he was doing was vetting me, and the more we did, the less I heard from him because he got more and more comfortable. Well, when you find somebody, whether they're a whale or not doesn't matter. When you find somebody that they have confidence in you because of your performance, it puts you on that plane where you can strike. That's the way we refer to it in my consulting business is when you see a deal and the numbers work, strike. Don't mess around. Pull the trigger right then and having that funding put together. So I love the private note. Maybe we'll do the solid gold money script sometime during the course of the show today.

We'll get to that in a little bit here. Possibly you've got a great program that you're really doing because you're about more than, hey, let's just make as much profit as possible. You're also really big about being conscious and giving back. So you've got a new thing that you're launching, you've been doing for a little while called 10 by 10. You want to explain that and kind of what all goes into that?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a website and a podcast, 10 by 10 pro. And please join us on the podcast. But what 10 by 10 is all about is getting to a minimum of $10,000 a month in passive income and then a commitment. It's a. I actually have them sign a. I call it an emotional contract. It's not legally binding, but it is a contract between me and them that says, hey, they're going to give 10% of their income back to their church, charity or community. And I'm going to mention Mark Victor Hanson again. For years I've been working with Mark. I've known mark since 1978. But some years ago he wrote a small book that's so powerful and it's called the Miracle of tithing. And for anybody that spends any time in the Bible out there, you know, one of the things that the Bible teaches is that you give 10% back. And you give that the Bible says to your church, which I agree with. And it's the first 10%. So I've been trying to look at through the years, how do I incorporate that. And about seven, eight months ago, several months ago, it all came together with 10 by 10. And 10 by 10 is built on passive income. And if I can teach you how to put $10,000 a month into passive income. And Scott, you know, the way I do things, it's not just classroom, it's all experiential. We classroom part of it. Then we go out and take them by the hand and we go say yes, buy this one. Here's what we're going to need to do to it. And we've got this going in multiple markets right now. A lot of these markets have amazing values for rental, much better than what we have in Texas, which is shocking. But you can find that you get up in the Rust belt and you can get rental property, 40, 50, $60,000 for a duplex and put five $10,000 into it. It's rent ready. And so what we do is we teach people how to get a cash on cash return of a minimum of 50% per year. We'll get you making the money that you want to make. We want to get you being involved in giving back.

Well, that's a big thing. Anytime you can give back to something, it adds much more, I think, much passion to it. Because it's all about when you see what that money does as far as good out in the community and helping people, Whether it is your church or your charity, whatever it is, it adds a whole different layer to things. And a lot of people will strive and be much more motivated to help that cause versus trying to help themselves. But that number is how they fund that stuff. You know, getting things rocking and rolling on your Fill your own cup before you go out and try to fill the world. Right?

Yeah. You can't help anybody else if you can't help yourself. So we always make sure, look, let's let you help you get your financial house in order so that you can now take on this other piece of it. We've got a lot of our folks end up giving more than 10%, but it's because of the income that they're creating. 10,000 bucks a month is typically enough for most folks, especially in the south, to get along fine with. And that's a minimum. That's where we say, now you're at a minimum point. Now, that's not when you start tithing, by the way, but that's the goal. Let's get over this first plateau of 10,000amonth and then build from there.

And.

And I'll tell you about a couple that used to work with the Sacramento Kings. I had met them and consulted with them years ago, and I always want to find out what makes people tick. Why are you doing what you do? And so the couple said, look, we want to get into this business because we have a passion. We have a passion for kids, and we'll tell you about what we do. So for 15 years, they had. And they made really nice money. He was a retired player. For 15 years, they had scraped and saved every penny they could, and they built a house that was free and clear, and they filled that house with wards of the state. And so they were just like, this is our passion. This is what we really live for. And we're hoping that you can teach us how to do that faster, better, quicker, so that we can build more houses. Because if it's going to take us 15 years to do it again, we're only going to have one or two more houses in us, and that's it. So came into the consulting program about two years after that, I bump into him and speak it out at a big real estate convention at the MGM grand in Vegas. And I had just come off stage, and we had gone to a break, and I hear somebody calling my name, and I look and she was over six foot. He was like six nine, she was like six one. So they were pretty easy to spot. And came up and big hugs, and we start yaging like, tell me what's going on? And as soon as I said that, she just. The waterfall came on. She just started crying. And in the two years since we had done our consulting, they had built five houses. And so if you have a passion in life, this is the most wonderful thing about real estate. If you have something that you love. And look, doing it for the money, we all get in it for the money initially, but that's not going to keep you moving forward. You got to have something in you that's bigger than you that you're looking at. How does this world become a better place? Because I was here and because I had a real estate business. And when you find that, it just explodes. My amount of fun you're going to have, it'll explode. The amount of success that you're going to have because you're going to be infinitely more diligent. So I love their story and I need to touch base and find out where they are now. At that time, they had gotten to a total of six and were continuing to rock and roll.

Wow, that's awesome. That's a great story. Being able to help out. And that's the beauty of it, because it comes back tenfold. What you give in 10% definitely comes back tenfold for you in goodwill and karma in a lot of cases.

Karma, Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. One of my youngest sons said, well, dad, you're a Christian, aren't you? I went, yeah. He goes, well, why do you use the word karma? That's not absolutely. It is. The Bible says what you sow is what you reap. That's about as karma as you can get. But he's like, oh, never thought of it that way. Yeah, you absolutely is a ton of karma out there. And business karma, it's no different than personal karma. You're out there doing good things in the Marketplace. So what 10 by 10 is all built around is you being able to make a great living for you and being able to help other people in the process, help them into getting into properties. And we do a lot of buy and hold properties there. And so getting into properties that they might need some help getting into and providing them a great opportunity to have a good home. And if you're doing that and then you're also giving back to your church, charity or community, it just opens up the heart. And it's just a great, great place to be. It's a great philosophy and pattern of business life. I learned a lot of this stuff from Zig Ziglar. Who. Zig was my second father for about seven years. You mentioned the TV show earlier that existed. I created it, but Zig gave all the credibility to it. That got it up and running and just missing dearly. And if you're one of those few people out there that haven't experienced Zig, he's got a ton of great books, course, see at the top, the original. Get you a copy of that. Great, great audio recordings, a lot of stuff on YouTube. And Tom, his son, runs the company now. And just a Great guy. But there's some terrific, terrific information out there for you on how to get things going so that you're helping others while you're helping yourself.

Amen to that. I think we need that more now so than ever, with everything going on in the market these days, I love to get your kind of your feedback opinion on what's going to solve a lot of this stuff, because it's. I think a lot of investors are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. They've got their mortgage that they've got to pay a lot of. And then people that, luckily a big chunk of borrowers or tenants are paying on time, but you still got those that aren't paying, that have been furloughed, laid off. And really, it's kind of, like I said, rock in a hard place that a lot of investors are at.

Yeah, we do some Section 8 stuff and we do a lot of it. And the program's changed through the years. A lot of investors shriek in horror, oh, no, I don't want to be involved. You missing the boat. And so we teach you how to do that correctly within 10 by 10 and so how to do it correctly. But here's the thing. When all of this stuff happened, guess how many rent payments got cut back or were late? Uncle Sam doesn't pay late. If you're going to have a tenant, the best tenant on the planet to have is the guy with the deepest pockets. Well, that happens to be Uncle Sam. And I'll tell you, there's a mental shift that happens in years ago. And while I was doing real estate, in fact, I got to do this because of real estate. I used to travel around working on the weekends with country music acts all over the country. A lot of Toby Keith and Kenny Chesney, Tracy Lawrence, guys like that, and Merle Haggard back when he was still alive. Willie actually been on the Willie bus and came off going, wow, all those stories are true. So this was all funded by Coors. And there's a law that says that a beverage company, whether it be alcohol, whether it be liquor or whether it be beer, cannot sponsor an event directly. Well, as you know, if you've not been living in a cave, they sponsor everything. And so what they do is to work around that law is they hire a third party contractor. And that's who I worked with, a guy named Roger Huskey at Hollywood Productions. And one of the things that I learned was I always thought that these companies like Coors, that their client was, if I walked into Seven Eleven and bought a six pack of original or Coors Light. Well, that. I'm their customer. I'm like, oh, so Seven Eleven is your customer? Then they're like, no, our customer is the distributor. And what the distributor does with it is their business. But that's who we work with. So how that fits into this real estate game, and especially in the section 8 is. I understand who my customer is. My customer is Uncle Sam. My client is Uncle Sam. What Uncle Sam decides to do with that now, do we have some input on that? Absolutely, we do. But what they decide to do is really what makes this thing work so good. And look, if you think that this market guy is going to change, you're absolutely spot on. It doesn't matter who wins the election. It might matter the severity of the change. But real estate's a cycle. And we are in the tail end of an up cycle that has been going on since the end of 2012. And we're due for a correction. And that's nothing to get panicky about. It just is the nature of the business. If you understand the cycle, it takes the fear out of it and it allows you to get prepared for the change in the market which is coming. And I can't think of a better time to be involved in passive income. And there's not a single city in the country that I've seen, and I've seen most of them that has enough section 8 housing. We teach some real tricks of the trade on how to get the absolute best tenants in there for that, for the people that are actually in. We don't manage those. We use outside management firms for all of that. It's a great, great business mailbox, buddy. You gotta love it.

Yeah, any type of passivity. And that's the thing, I agree with you there 100% that almost every city in the country needs more affordable housing. You hear it all across the news. Affordable housing need, affordable housing needed. And we're gonna see a lot more need of that, especially with the defaults are going on. And we're at a, a high 8.22% across the country when it comes to people being in default on their mortgages. Those people are going to be moving out or looking for places to live. FHA loans are at almost 16% default rate across the country too. That's your first time home buyers. We did a big push on looking at the 40 biggest markets out there the last couple months. And religiously across the board, your biggest default numbers are in that $200,000 or below market. And that's where we're going to see a lot of the inventory hitting the market here. Right.

And a ton of those people are going to look at rental properties to tide them over for a few years until they get back up on their feet again. And absolutely, here's. You know, one of the things that I love about the note business is that you look at what's going on on the money side of the real estate game. And I tell people all the time and I talk about this on the show and in the podcast about how to dissect the market from a standpoint of future predicting, if you will. Just seeing the trend in the market. You know, this is not the stock market. It doesn't change in a news flash. Somebody does a press release and the market goes crazy. That doesn't happen. This is a battleship. It changes very slowly. And so we start looking at what are the underlying factors that predict where the market's going to. And so we start to see defaults go up. And it'll go on a long time. It'll go on many quarters before it becomes really big. Public knowledge. And guys like Scott and I that look at the underpinnings of the market, study those things to see where the market's going. And that's where we're going. We're seeing more new foreclosures than we are existing foreclosures being sold. That means foreclosure markets growing. And it may not have hit in your particular buying sphere just yet. That didn't mean it's not happening. We're seeing prices are cooling off. They're not really dropping yet, but they're staying pretty flat right now. We'll see that continue before they start going down. We're seeing days on market get longer. All of those are trends that are telling you the market is changing. It'll get way down the road before the public goes, oh, wait a minute, the real estate market changed. So if you're learning how to react to where the market is going, it's going to be a great, great time for you. And it's just a shift you don't get stuck in. This is the only way I can do my real estate business. If you do, you're going to have a short career. You look at all the different aspects. So right now we're still doing a lot of fix and flips, but we're shifting more and more into the buy and hold because that's where the market is going. And then what you do with those Buy and holds. I love passive income. People that buy notes that fund our deals, they're looking at the same thing. They want the passive income. They're one step removed or arm links removed from the transaction. They don't necessarily want to do the real estate. They just want to get the great rate. And if you know that this is a fabulous time to be in the business.

Yeah, exactly. You got plenty of investors out there that, like you said, that they focus on one aspect, like your short term rentals, Airbnb market, you got a lot of people that are running for that because nobody's traveling and hanging out in their house on the beach these days.

For the most part.

But you got to be flexible and figure out what, like you said, what the trends are, where to act and if you've been in that area looking to do something. We've loved buying distress notes for the last 12 years and then working those out. I was just looking at a deal in Maple Heights, Ohio this morning. A borrower's paying me $450 a month, principal and interest. Okay. On a $21,000 balance that I paid like five grand for. All right. And I was like, I reached out to my estimates, like, wait a second. So how long did we modify this for? Oh, it's for five years. I was like, oh, bless us. Bless us in a year. Well, what I paid for the note, we've got back our principal and it's all basically just rock and rolling borrowers, houses worth 60. So if they don't fall through, we go through and take the property back if we need to or foreclose or get paid off in full if they do refinance it out. So I love the note business. And there's gonna be a lot more of it on the market here, right?

Yeah. And so a couple things. One, back in my investment banking days, it introduced me to several different pieces of the real estate market. At one point, for about four years, we ran a $10 million fund that did nothing but tax liens, deeds and certificates all over the country. But also what really got us started is way back when Countrywide was still around and we got into, kind of stumbled into a piece of the market where on mortgage notes had quality control checks on. So FHA would come in and they would look at the underwriting. So they've got mortgage companies and banks out there making all these loans, and through the course of a year, they'd pull about 8% to 10% of the underwritings and they would re underwrite it themselves. Just to make sure that everybody was following the rules. Well, what they found out was that about 10% of that number ended up being fraudulent mortgages. Maybe the homeowner had said they made a lot more money than they did. Now, these are not defaulted. These are notes that are just rocking along and they just are doing quality control check on the underwriting. Well, once they found out that the underwriting guidelines had not been adhered to properly, now it became a taine note and they sold those off. And so we would go in and buy those and go back to the homeowner and say, hey, we got to get this worked out. We're not in here to foreclose on your house. That's not what we're about. But you did do some things that weren't kosher when you were getting your mortgage. Doesn't matter that you've been on time every time. We got to get this note rewritten so that it is underwritten correctly. Likely going to be an increase in your interest rate. But if you we do this, get you out of any legal exposure and then after a couple of years, you can go back and refi and probably get a better rate than you had to begin with. And we did that for several years and Countrywide took notice of what we were doing and started going into our big suppliers and just doing contracts with them saying, you know, everything you find. Because what would happen is once FHA found out that something was not adhered to properly, they would go back to the originator and say, you've got to make this good for us. You've got 30 days to refund us the money that we put in this. Or you get your funding cut off, they lose their warehouse line, which would basically put them out of business. And so they would sell those off and take the loss and we moved in it for there. So we have a lot in common, bro.

Exactly. And there was enough of that stuff there. Not just on the borrower side, but even you think back to like what Ameriquest and some of the other companies out there were doing, creating W2s, creating pay stubs in some cases, not every. It was a very small amount of bad apples out there doing it. But still though, it led to some opportunity now to tap into that stuff and then make lemonade out of lemons for some things. Right.

I really hope as we go through this next cycle that there's more public information. I'm certainly going to do my part, as I know you will, about letting the public know. Look, don't freak out about this because the Obama administration during all of that, painted this as, oh, this is all the mortgage companies fault. And yes, there's bad apples in everything. When you have a big number of people doing anything, there's going to be some of them that are bad apples in there. But the overwhelming majority of the banks and the mortgage companies making those loans, we're making those loans in good faith and expecting people to pay them back. And so if we understand the process, if we understand the cycle, we're going to understand that when this thing starts to happen. And right now, you look at money's pretty easy to get a hold of. That is a natural tendency of an extended up market. Money frees up, makes it easier to qualify for because all the banks and the mortgage companies had started over the years. They ease up on their credit requirements, and they do that to encourage refinancing. And that's their business model. They don't make any money if they're not loaning money. So they start easing up on the credit. And there comes a time that the market starts to shift. And when it does, some of those loans are not going to survive. It's just the nature of the beast. And if we know that, we can react to it, participate in it. And look, think about it this way. There's 330 million Americans in our country, and there's only minute, microscopic percentage of them that live under bridges. The rest of them live in houses and apartments and condos. So they got to live somewhere. This is how big the real estate world is. Every roughly five years, the average American is living in a new home or living in a different home. So you take this massive number of properties across our country, and it's like a deck of cards. It gets reshuffled and people are living elsewhere, but they're living somewhere. And that's the market you want to be involved in. It's so huge, as long as there is an America, that there will be a housing market. If the housing market ever goes away, there won't be in America. So it is the single largest part of our economy. It's much, much bigger than stock market. It also affects more industries. So when you look at how big it is and how much it turns over on a regular basis, you just want to get in the flow of the money. This is the place to do it. Real estate.

Amen to that. Amen to that. And you've done a great job over your 28 years of experience of really not only understanding a lot of stuff, but making A lot of deals happen and more importantly, helping others to pull that trigger to get rock and rollin'. What's for somebody who's listening to the show and thinking about getting rock and rollin and like your approach, what's the best way for them to find out more information on your 10 by 10 program?

Bill the website's pretty easy. It's 10 by 10 Pro P R O P. Because what we're going to teach is how to become a 10 by 10 pro. And so just jump over the website. It's a limited program. It's not a come one come all kind of thing because of the intimacy involved in the consulting. So we have an application process jump over there. It's short, but it gives me some insight into what you're doing. And then once we go through the application process, I or somebody from the team will give you a call. We'll do an interview process at some point in there I'll be speaking with you personally and we decide if this is a good fit for both of us. And if it is, we move forward.

Yeah. Are you looking for people of all types of experience, brand new or seasoned?

Absolutely. Because we find that a lot of seasoned investors, they get to a certain point in their business and they stagnate. And it's been around long enough that a lot of times a fresh pair of eyes on the way they do their business is easy to see the spots that's holding them up. And so we work with a lot of people that are already in the business. But I love working with Greener than Green than Green because it's just so much fun to see the light bulbs come on, the changes that happen in people's lives to get them up and running and get them on the right foot to begin with.

Yeah, it definitely is. When somebody's, I don't want to say like a puppy, but they're excited, they're motivated, they're coachable. They maybe haven't built some bad habits along the way or gotten, like you said, stagnant in their activities.

And boy, you said something right there. That is a mouthful. You said they're coachable. You and I both played college ball not recently, but back in the days and the greatest compliment I ever had, and I didn't find out until I was about 10 years out of Alabama. And the guy who was my offensive corner coordinator later on in his life went on to be the AD for many, many years there. Mal passed away a few years ago, but through relationships there with your coaches, you know how to get. You hang with them forever. Basically. I learned several years after I had spent my time there that one of the things that they had talked to my high school coach, my high school coach said, hey, not the biggest guy, not the fastest guy, but maybe the most coachable guy I've ever had. And that went a long way with me being accepted at Alabama. And so I look at that with people all the time. I've done a ton of coaching, youth baseball, which I just absolutely have a passion for. I've had several years. I've coached as many as four teams in a year, and I love it. The thing I look for with these kids and I talk to them about all the time is coachability, is, look, you're never going to play for a guy that wants success for you more than you do. You're always going to. It's got to come from you. But a coach is always wanting to give you the tools for you to be your best. And that's really how we do our business, consulting with real estate is we look for people that are coachable. For years, I would have people ask me when I was speaking and Scott, you know, I spent eight years as one of the lead trainers for Robert Allen going. I was on the road 42 weeks a year, teaching weekends, every weekend. And I would always have people ask, is this perfect for anybody? Can anybody do this? And the answer is, yes, anybody can do it. But I'm going to tell you, I have also come to realize there are certain aspects of the population that do better in our business. And I. I look at people that have military, police, or medical background, they tend to do extremely well. Former athletes tend to do really, really well. And it's that coachability thing. Now, for the law enforcement, the medical and for the military people, they are used to being told what to do and then going and doing it and not going well. Let me see. I think I know how to do that better. I still run across that and I crack up. My comeback line is always, so now, how many deals have you done so far? And typically the answer is none. Why don't you do it my way for six months and let's see where you are and see if you still feel that way. But the thing I look for, there is a common thread in people, is coachability.

Yeah, it's one of the most important things. And I think a lot of people, especially as an athlete, we always worried about when the coaches stopped chewing on our butts. That was when they. That's not a good Sign. As long as they're chewing on your butt and throwing their hat down, you know, they can't.

Yeah, my young. And a long time to accept that, you know, he'd come in, oh, man. Or when I'd get on him, when he played a lot of baseball for me, me after a game or something. Why did you yell at me during the game? I'm like, well, first of all, when we're at practice and we're a game, you're part of the team. You're not my kid, you're part of my team. And so I'm not gonna treat you any different. I might treat you a little harder, but I'm not gonna go any easier on you at all. But know that anytime a coach is ragging on you, they're doing that because they want you to be better, and they have spotted something that can allow you to be better. And most of us that are have ever done any coaching at all, no matter what level it's at. We're pretty gregarious, and we get kind of loud sometimes, and it's one of those things like, hey, they're telling you, they're yelling, they're getting in your face because you're doing it wrong, but it's because they care and they want you to be better. So it's the same thing in business, people that say stuff to me all the time, because I have a lot of mentors that I still work with, that I have coaches that work with me, and sometimes they say things that I don't want to hear, but I know it's coming from a place of love. And when I know that they can be as rough as they feel like they need to be, as long as I know what the intent is. And that's the same thing consulting clients all the time is, look, I try to handle everybody a little bit differently because I try to adapt a little bit to what works best for you. But there's going to be some times you're going to need a kick in the butt, and I'm going to give it to you. But you got to know that I'm not doing it to be mean, rude, make you feel bad. I'm doing it to help you be better at what you're doing. So that's the philosophy there, brother. Coachability is hugely important for me.

Well, but that also, when it applies in real estate, it's because we as investors, as educators, as coaches, we're not telling people to do something that we haven't done ourselves or experienced ourselves. Have gone through that. And that's why I saw people seek counsel, not advice. Counsel. You're going to get that from your mentors and your coaches and stuff like that. Advice is like, assholes. Everybody has one. Doesn't mean they're good, right?

Yeah. And look, when you're taking advice from somebody, and this is how I coach it in my own life, that's why I still use coaches and mentors in my own life, is look at somebody. This is the level that your business is at. I want somebody that's at this upper level. And so how do I get here? Well, I'm not going to find somebody that has a lower level than that telling me how to get there. I want to go. Somebody that's there saying, this is how I got here. This is what I see you doing that you could do better at, or maybe you're not doing this at all. And if you'll do this, this gets you to this level. And guess what? There's always somebody at a higher level. And that's what I'm looking for. That's why I always tell all my athletes that, hey, you know what? There's always somebody bigger, stronger, faster. What you can do is be the kid that nobody can outwork. And if that happens, there's always a place for you, and coaches will find a place for you. Business is no different. The business will find a place for you if you're willing to work. Look, there's a lot of, oh, this business is so easy. It is very simple. It is very straightforward. I'm not the guy to tell you it's easy. It's work. But if you'll work at it, the rewards that we get out of this business are typically exponentially larger than anything else you might have worked at. And likely, when you compare it to a traditional job that you've had at some point in your life, you'll go, wow, it really was easy. But it's because of the disparity of the reward.

Yeah. Well, one of the things I love about you, Bill, is many different experiences out there, from playing for Alabama to being NASCAR part of a pit crew for a couple years.

IndyCar.

Yeah, but you're also, like you said, you've got mentors. You've mentioned a few of them. I know that you're going through something similar, like us working on our marketing with Russell Brunson and going through some things, like constantly working to better ourselves on a variety of things. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of People forget about. They think, oh, I'll be a real estate entrepreneur. I'm just going to chill. I'm going to live that 10 to 3 lifestyle and not have to put any hours in. That's not the case. It's not the case at all, is it?

Yep. Nope, nope, nope, nope. If you want to make sure that your day is full, go to work for yourself. You'll either starve or you'll have a really busy day. I love Russell. I love what he stands for. And that's another one of those things that we have to come to grips with at times in our life is that, wow, I'm going to have some mentors that are younger than me now. At my age, that's pretty easy. But when you're in your 30s, a lot of times that's a hard pill to swallow. But again, it's back. What's the level of achievement? If they're where I want to be, I don't. They could be 19. If they're where I want to be, I want to hear from them how they got there, what they're doing, what's different about what they do than what I do, how they spend their day, what makes them tick. Those kind of things open up the door for us so that we can change. The business part really becomes pretty simple. It's the internal part. It's who you are, what your makeup is that really dictates where your business is going to go and where you're going to go.

Yeah, that's the truth. Bill, you and I could sit here and talk all day.

I love it.

I know we'd have a great time. We're coming at the end of the hour here. Best way for people to get ahold of you, to find out more about everything you got going on.

Absolutely. The best way is to jump over to 10 by 10 Pro. 10x10 Pro. Join the podcast. If you think this is something that has interest to you, there's an application there. You can fill that out. You can learn more about what 10 by 10 Pro is by going to the website and love to have you listen to the podcast, pick up some of the books I've got. You know, we were talking about over the Hump earlier. I have a new book coming out and it's 10 by 10 how to become a 10 by 10 pro. But originally I thought about calling that over the hump because of what it does. But the whole concept behind getting better, being better, and it not being just about me and it not being just about the money. That's what 10x10 is. It does teach you how to take care of yourself first and then how to share that with others.

Amen to that. It's a great way to go out there and feed the world with the overflow from your cup. So, Bill, as always, great man having you on here. We'll catch up in sometime soon, maybe catch some baseball at some point.

Yeah, let's do that. Now that things are they're playing again. The Rangers were kind of semi playing, but now the MLB's back on, so. Yeah, you know, I love baseball. Last weekend it was on tv, but I got to watch some live high school football, which I was like, oh, yeah, this is great.

Exactly. And then of course, we got the college football kicking off you. And then of course, Roll Tide rolling out here as well for you.

Very good, brother. Hey, enjoyed it. Let's do this again, Roll Tide, and we'll see you next time.

Sounds good. All right, guys, check out the website there. Check out his podcast as well. We'll have the links to that in the show notes or in the description below. But as Bill said, go out, take some action, pull that trigger, and you'll be one step closer to being at the top. Everybody, we'll see you out there. Be safe, everybody, and we'll see you on the next episode.