How We Built a Referral-Based Business | Inside the Limitless Garage

Mr. Evedv Valentine, you have a new way of business that is now kind of a full time way of business that you're doing. It's all referral based, but you're building a network you're calling Limitless Garage.

Yep.

So my goal is to unpack that.

Right.

So that I have clear understanding, so that everybody else knows what you're doing, how you're doing it, why you're doing it, maybe why they should do it too.

Absolutely. What is the biggest service?

Yeah. What is the Limitless Garage?

So if you, if you unpack the Limitless Garage is a place for real estate agents, especially solo agents that want a place to come and be their own person. They're not paying massive splits, but they have some guidance and some mentorship and some collaboration inside a community that doesn't necessarily care who they are, but who they are.

So they're solo agents. This is not a team.

This is not a team.

What's the difference between what you're doing in a team?

Well, because a team, you have splits and everybody is together, supposedly operating like a team. They really don't. I think that's part of some of this. Right. Is the teams don't actually operate as teams. They're competition, some collaboration. I designed this specifically because of all the animosity that comes with teams and the ebb and flow of agents. Once they learn enough, they go on their own. And it just creates this tension all the way around. You have some great teams out there that have kept together for a really long time, but there's a lot of agents that are there for a year and then they're moving on. The grass is greener somewhere else. Part of that is they're never truly taught how to hunt and kill and what else is possible inside real estate. So to give this space for people to come, and why we called it the garage was part of my journey. And I realized that when I was going through some of my struggles, I didn't have a true place that was both personally and professionally to belong to. It was always one thing. And when you go into all the real estate classes and courses and coaching, it's all more success, more transactions, more gci. And I wanted to change that. Sure. And so.

So you changed it.

So I changed it.

Right now it's. This is not just a zoom call. This is not a Facebook group. What, like, where does the garage meet? Like, what's.

So there's. There's levels to the garage. And the reason that there's levels is that you Know, I want to be broker agnostic, which means that come one, come all. When we do our monthly trainings and they're kind of giveaway, sometimes they're personal development, sometimes their business development. It just depends on the month. And to be honest with you, what I'm feeling right, yeah. And then on the more elite side of it is if you belong at Real, then I give you my time on Friday mornings and that is two hours a week that we go through and the community gets together. There's about 35 of us right now. The goal is to get that to 200 agents and it's giving them a space to come together on Fridays. It's not a big sales meeting. We're not going over marketing stats. You can do all that stuff on your own. We're really getting into the nitty gritty and the tools that you can find in the garage. Like, hey, how does a sub to work? And how do I invest in real estate and what should I be doing with my financing? And oh, by the way, how are your relationships? And did you know you can raise capital through your database? It's different mind shift inside the space rather than what the space has taught us. The industry has just been on the same messaging, little tweaked here and there, but it's still the same. Yeah.

It seems like one of the biggest benefits for being on a team. Right. Is that there's almost an insight or like, yeah, an oversight that comes in to make sure that you don't drop any balls. But the biggest thing that comes from this is the development. Like I feel like on the team side you see team meetings and things like that. But I don't know if I see as much focus and on personal growth and development that to make you a better you, to make you better at your business, to be a better agent, better at relationships, but also like such real estate, knowledge of structuring deals, like in the most creative way, like you, you. That's something I feel like a lot of people don't realize is that you spend a lot of time with these agents helping them get creative. And I feel like being like, I don't know if the real estate has a creative space, but if they do, I feel like it's the garage.

There's. There's lots of spaces. But let's. Let's just call it what it is is that there's different communities in the space. Like Pace Morby has an awesome community called Sub2. It's all about creative financing. It's all about Investors, all the things. He's done a great job building that community. And it's not real estate agent centric. Right. So you have to be able to talk the same lingo when you get into the creative side, on the real estate side, and nobody's doing it that way. Well, on the community of, yes, you can be a traditional real estate agent, and here are the other tools you're going to find in the garage that can enhance your wealth, enhance your finance, enhance your personal growth in order to get there. And I think that that's where the garage for me was so important, is that I'm more concerned about the person you're becoming than the success you're achieving. Hmm. And the reason being is that in this industry, that is all that is taught and that's all your value is in what you do. And what you do is how many transactions you sold. Yeah. And where your names are in light in the meantime, your life's all fucked up. Right. And so I know I can say that because I was there, right. Great success. But in the back end, there's things that were screwed up that I didn't know where to go or where to communicate that to. And the fascinating part about it is the garage came from a need to serve my. I hate the word downline. It's another word I'm trying to freaking change. Right. So at real, you know, the agents that have invested in me as their sponsor, I'm investing back in them on Fridays. And that's where my goal. And here's. Here's the crazy part. I think this is where my mindset is around the garage, is that the industry has trained us to go train another agent so that you can expand your business, do more, make more money, all the things. And in the meantime, what happens is that becomes a treadmill. The agent gets on. They're doing good, and then that's just what they're supposed to do. Yeah. And the only way for increases to do more transactions or raise your purchase price, but nobody's saying, hey, if you keep running that hard on the treadmill, you're going to burn yourself out and something's going to happen. There's other ways to create the same amount of income with less work and still be a healthy human being rather than having to swing the pendulum from one side to the next. And I can say that personally watching my dad, my dad swung the pendulum all the way to the successful piece. Right. Which is if anybody wanted to take an agent and go, my God, the guy sold, you know, 500 plus homes a year, had number two top team in realty executives and was freaking broke and unhealthy and all the other things that went with it. And then, oh, by the way, he spends all that time, which if somebody would have gotten a hold of him just before the crash, his life, he'd probably still be here because I believe that he was so behind the eight ball from the things he created that the pendulum swung so far over that he worked 20 hours a day, it made him unhealthy. Eventually he developed cancer in the lungs which went everywhere and killed him in nine months. And I believe that a lot of our industry is tracking that way, unhealthy habits all over the place. And so the garage is also a place where you are invited. You can also be uninvited and there's no ego there. Right. Because I want to save space for you to be able to define your success. You see, you're just as important if you're a four home salesperson as you are 100 home salesperson.

Yeah. See, this is something I like about the garage is there's not this like requirement to be a top performer to be there. Also, the only overhead it seems like you carry for the garage is the rental fee you pay to rent a bigger space because you can't fit everyone in your conference room. Now, other than that, to me that's a huge win versus like a team where you carry all this overhead for all these agents, which then seems like there's a pressure to either provide, I'm either paying for listings, but if I'm paying more for all these things, I have to require more out of you. So that's a whole other team structure.

It seems like that you bring up the good point. Right. So the garage is typically agents that have been in this business, you know, two plus years. There's a few of them that have been in there a little less and they're being mentored by certain people. But a lot of people go into the team space because it's the easiest place to start with the least amount of money. Right. Because I can go in and work even though I'm not being paid, but I'm working towards a paycheck. But I have all the tools and systems and people around me to utilize.

A list of farms.

Right. And a list of farm. And here's the leads and. And that's where people are looking for that jump start. Then they get comfortable. Right. The exercise that I did with Sean, he was on another team and I said Look, I need you to go through your transaction count and tell me how many transactions were leads from the team and how many transactions were from your sphere. See, a lot of us go through them, like, oh, well, you know, I'm getting these leads and these things and all the stuff. And then they realized, like, Sean did 23 transactions later, he's paid his team over $100,000, but not one of those leads came to him. They were all his. So he paid $100,000. Let's break that down a little bit further. You invested $100,000 into what? Did you get a great CRM? Did they pay for your marketing? Did you get paid for coaching? Like, what could you have done with that hundred thousand dollars had you known how to break that down? It's really simple. If you're on a team or brokerage, you look at, well, what did they provide me and what did I provide myself? And start figuring out, well, maybe I'm better off on my own. Now, the reverse of that, if you're on a team and you're doing 80% from their lead gen, you're not ready to make that move, right? You're, you're reliant on the team. And until you go head up and go, how do I not rely on team leads and start relying on my own business? And that's a goal. You, you're always going to rely on somebody else's leads, which means that you're always jumping to the next person that offers the most amount of leads or the better split.

Now, that jump, I feel like, scares a lot of people.

Oh, yeah.

But I feel like you have some strong kids in the garage that are younger, but they're not afraid to make calls. They're not afraid of door knock, they're not afraid to get out there and build their own list. And so talking, what kind of drive does it take to leave your team and decide to go?

Well, it's, it's the alternative, right? It's, I can stay here and only have this, right? This is my piece of pie. This is all it ever will be. If you want to make more money, you have to do more transactions, right? Or you have to go outside the team and figure out where am I doing other things. Maybe you want to get into the alternative side of real estate. You want to know how to invest, how do I buy houses, how do I flip houses, how do I own rentals? And that's not part of a lot of traditional teams. The reason being is that you end up, you end up taking Your sales team and turning into a bunch of squirrels. Right. When you're like, you can make more money doing this, but they don't know how. And you know that it's a long shot. They don't want to teach that. It's up to them if they want to learn it. But they also stay stagnant that this is the only way to do it. Right. Which is where I get a lot of calls from a lot of other agents on a lot of other teams like, hey, I don't know what to do with this. This is weird. It's outside the box. Let me funnel through that with you. And you know, it's kind of cool. It's a different way of coaching with agents is, you know, I get to do a referral piece with them. So they pay a referral agreement to me and then I help them walk through and we get that. That transaction across the finish line. All right, good.

So going to that little bit more for me because I feel like that actually is a huge benefit for anybody in the garage because anybody can tap anybody in.

Right.

So a lot of these people are working different areas of the valley or have different specialties. You know, you got one kid that drives down from Prescott for Fridays and all that stuff. So what does it look like if you are a part of something like this to build a referral based network?

Well, it's encouragement of same reason. Do you want to burn yourself out driving from freaking Tonopah to Apache junction? Or can you work with two buyers out in Buckeye and refer the Apache junction buyer to somebody else in the community? And here's the difference is that in the garage, in the community, there's 35 agents and we all work different parts of the state from Tucson to freaking Williams. Pick your poison, right? There's people in there. The cool part of that is that when we're going through in the community, we're talking about properties. You get people from other parts of the state that are like, hey, like, we've seen that property. We've done this. Probably not a good idea. Right. You get this influx of exposure of information and education from people that are like, hey, you're new, let's do it this way. Right. It was kind of like when we watched, you know, Caitlin a couple weeks ago. She was going down the road of learning how to do the numbers on investment property. It scared her, Right. But once she got to it and she shared it, then everybody else got to help her see it a little bit further. Yeah. And now when you Ask her. She's like, I can definitely go through this now because I've got confidence in doing it. She didn't have to pay 12,000 bucks to break it down. She didn't have to do anything. Now, on the other side of that is every one of these people in the referral network is, hey, you can do more and go further with more people. Which means Isaac's a great example. You asked, like, what does it look like to leave a team? Isaac left a big team, had leads for six years. Then when I broke it down for him, like, you can do 30 transactions on your team, which he averaged about three grand a transaction, so still less than a hundred thousand dollars. He's still driving his own car, putting his own fuel, paying all his own stuff, which means at the end of the year, even after splits and team and everything else, he probably made 40 grand, like, if you net it out. Instead, now he is knocking on doors. He doesn't know what to do with it, but I do. Yeah. So Isaac really enjoys that part of the business. He does not enjoy running around showing buyers houses. He likes the problem and the conversation. So he's a dog with a bone. And I gave him permission to go do that. He didn't have permission because nobody else could follow through with the crazy. Yeah. And now Isaac is out there with a shovel, like, sling an elephant dung all over the place. Like, here you go. Yeah. I'm like, okay, now what do we do? This.

So someone who's as capable as you, who's maybe watching this, going, I should look at building more of a network like this as well. Right? Because I keep saying, because I think it's funny, but also kind of true. It's not just clickbait that I think after watching this or realizing the potential and the possibilities that people that are on team might be exiting their team in 2025.

Right.

So it's not just clickbait, but I think it's a real thing. And I think someone who's capable or has a bunch of people that maybe they're a team lead or running their own office kind of thing to get more to that spot. There's a benefit, Right. When you're the problem solver, you tend to get attached. More people are willing and wanting to attach you to their problem.

Right.

And so it is a strong benefit that way. But also, just being in the network is a massive idea machine.

Right.

The amount of. The amount of group texts that get carried away, but people will have a question go, hey, have a seller this is the problem. And people will just start throwing out ideas of creative solutions, and they might still not know how to structure that. But it's. It's just a very positive thing where there's no one. There's no feeling of like, someone trying to undercut you or take your legs out from underneath you or beat you in this transaction.

Right. It's. I mean, the. The goal as well, which is. Is really fascinating, too. We'll finish this with the version of my tattoo is that, you know, it's a ladder community. Right. And. And the goal when I tell anybody that comes in that's invited in is like, you have to be willing to reach out and help somebody else. With nothing in return. Right. With not looking for anything in return. Now, there's. There's times. And that's the. The great part about the team aspect, too, is that at some point in time, when you want to move from intrapreneur salesperson to entrepreneur, CEO of your own business, that's when you have to take that leap. But that leap comes in when you start looking at everything from a business standpoint, not from a income standpoint. Right. So too many people are focused on all the regular, regular trajectories in real estate, which is, I want to make 100 grand and I want to sell 12 homes. And then you got some people like, I want to do 100 homes, and I'm like, cool, that looks like fun. Let me know how that turns out. But this is. This is all there is. This is all they know. Because that's what's on social. That's what's on everything else. And then you get all the people like, well, you know, I, you know, they're Lambo and a million dollars a year, and here's all the leads and here's how they sell. And the reality is, like, that's not going to get them there. It's not. It's through experiences. And you learn experiences through the experience, not from the coaching. And that was one of the reasons I had to stop coaching, because my stuff isn't practical, tactical. It's situational awareness. So basically, you're being paid for me to tell you stories and how I solve them and how much money I make. It sounds great, but until you're in the situation, especially with people in houses, there are too many unknown variables to solve for in that place. Yeah. So now in the coaching piece of things, people in the garages, they're not paying splits to me. They're not going through all that process. But if they need me or they need somebody else in the community. They all know, like, well, I'm just going to do a referral fee on unearned income, and we're going to go kill that together. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's a huge. A huge play. And I think you're right, too, because a lot of people are looking for an easy formula to implement. A plus B equals C. If I can. If I can do that for every seller carry. If I can do that for every wrap, I just insert this formula. The problem is, like you said, the variables change with every seller, every buyer, every individual is an individual case scenario. So, no, I think that's awesome. I feel like that's been part of your dream, is to duplicate problem solvers that surround you, and it's trying to help grow people into that.

And the only way you can do that is by living in living. You're right. The only way you can do it is by living in the trenches. And I think that's one of the differences when you look at the garage versus teams is that the whole goal in a team is to eventually remove yourself from the business. And my goal is like, how do I stay in it? Yeah, right. Because that is where my joy is. Some of these guys, they want to get out. I want to stay in down here because that is truly where my strength is. Is give me all the crazy, and then let's funnel through it and see if I can figure it out. I mean, even this week, I got two new problems from Isaac that I'm like, great, these are awesome. Let's figure these out. Right now. For me, that excites me because it's the next thing. It's like, cool. Now that we've done that, I get to share with the group. You know, like, as crazy as it sounds, like how we're partnering with a home buyer that has an FHA loan and doing a partnership with them rather than buying it. Like, okay, so now we're documenting that process and with the attorney with the things. Who's going to get that information? Everybody in the garage. Because it's something that I just did and now is a tool. So they know, oh, if it's an fha, it's foreclosure. Like, there's an alternative to this. And now at least the idea. And light bulb is on. Yeah.

All right. If people want to know more about either joining your garage or potentially how to do what you're doing, but in their own way, how do. How would they reach out for you or learn more about this or figure out how that looks like.

I mean, joining the garage is simple. Shoot me a DM with the word garage, and then we'll get you set up in the garage from there, have that conversation. I like to have conversations with people before inviting them in and see what they're looking for. And then, you know, the other alternative there, too, with the garage is to join me at real as well, which is a whole nother conversation. And that's where we really get into the nitty gritty of the investing and what that looks like and what the future is there and the community wise. Just DM me, right? We'll talk about community. One of my big goals on the garage is to figure out how to expand this nationwide over time. And we're doing it a little bit of time here and there, but it's just a great alternative to what the norm was. Right. It's not a. It's not a paid community. It's not all these other things. They're certainly going to be paid portions of it, but it's a place where people can come and be who they are and figure out the real estate space from their version and what they want to be successful.

Awesome.

Awesome.

All right, DM you @ Steve D. Valentine.

Steve D. Valentine. Let's go.