From Corporate Puppet To Real Estate Success

Hey, it's Mark Podolski the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest is a little bit different. I'm very excited to talk with him. However, before we talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host. You know him, you love him. The professor, the brain. You're a flight school sherpa. Scott Todd from Scott todd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, if not automating your craigslist and your Facebook postings, posting domination.com thelandgeek Scott Todd. How are you, Mark?

I'm great. How are you?

Pulse is still normal. Respiration's fine. Still trying to stay on that peloton, man. 50 rides now. I hit 50.

50.

Wow.

I know you're way above that.

I'm almost to the century. I'm almost there. And I had. I've hit a little. I hit a little roadblock here along the way, so might be delayed a little bit.

Well, that's good. That'll give me time to catch up.

There you go.

So I want to talk about our guest, Cliff Hayden. If you don't know about Cliff Hayden, he's a real estate investor and founder of ShowMe the Rental.com an online software that automates the most difficult part of property management. Finding and screening qualified leads. After quitting his day job real estate investing as a career, Cliff grew tired of taking hundreds of calls and and emails from unqualified leads justifying that one good runner. He was tired of managing showings and following up with people. He was struggling to find time for his family. He decided he needed a better way. And when he couldn't find a better way, he built it. Since developing showmeterental.com Cliff is able to focus on his business and let the website manage the leads so that he can spend more quality time with the people he loves. Cliff Hayden, welcome. How are you?

I'm great, Mark. I appreciate you having me. How are you today?

I'm great. I'm great. You know this. Your story sounds a lot like my own story with my own software. GeekPay IO we should talk about the synergies with this. But I digress. So show me the rental. So let's just kind of rewind the tape. What were you doing before you got into real estate?

I was actually in the corporate world like you. I looked at your bio. Same thing. I worked for AT&T and back then. I want to say the late 90s and my goal was to go up the corporate ladder. That was kind of my, my deal. Go to school, you know, get the job, get a degree, work for a big company and work the ladder. I found out that corporate America was not for me. So I did that for about 10 years. And I was a fancy, I was an outside plant technician, which is a fancy word for construction worker. So I worked in the bucket trucks and put up telephone lines and traveled around the country when there were storm damage and we made really good money. So I was a 20 something year old kid making almost 100 grand a year, which was a lot back then, so doing very well. And then some things happened where company kind of, I'd say screwed me over. They thought we were more of a team. And I learned that, I learned a hard way that I was basically a puppet on a string. So they were pulling my strings and I was going along with it and I realized there had to be something else. And so long story short, my sister and brother in law came back from Iraq and I want to say in 1999 or 2000, somewhere in that range and brought a game called Cash Flow Rich dad, Poor Dad. And we started playing that game. And whatever happened, my brother in law said that he could see the hamster turning in my brain. I've run on that wheel. And so I was just really intrigued by real estate. So that's when I kind of got my first dose of it. And from there I had a bunch of money saved up from working overtime and I just went out and bought a duplex, which was a horrible idea and a horrible deal. From there I learned about a local real estate club we have. And I went, started going to those meetings and I found my first mentor, a guy named Mike Butler, who took me under his wing. And from there I started buying rental houses. I bought the wrong rental houses for a long time and just got overwhelmed with this amount of stuff I was doing. I was buying houses, fixing up written houses, all while all doing this. I work in a full time job. I then began to hate my job and realized that I wanted to quit, but I could not walk away from that. I'm a lower middle class guy, so I could not walk away from that kind of money. So kind of a funny story, I got suspended on purpose. So I actually do hold the record for the longest suspension in AT&T history, which I'm kind of proud of. And so how that happened was when you drive a bucket truck, you have to have a CDL license. And when you do cdl, you have to have random drug tests. So my boss came in one day, and it couldn't have been better timing because I wanted to take a break, but I didn't want to quit. So they said I had a random drug test and I refused to take it. And so when you refuse to take it, you. It's the same as a fail. And so just coincidental stuff happens. So then I go to the drug counselor and I started talking to him. And lo and behold, he was actually my aunt and uncle's next door neighbor. So we had a rapport right away. And I started talking to him about what I was trying to do. And I just told him, I said, I just need time so I don't have a drug problem. I just need time to figure out if I can do this real estate all full time or if I need to stick to my day job. And so he gave me. And I'll never forget him looking at me and he goes, I tell you what, he goes, I don't agree with what you're doing, but I'll tell you what I'll do for you. You have. I forget how many hours I had. 10 or 12 hour, eight hours, whatever, of rehab. So he said, you can take this as fast or as slow as you want to take it. And I looked at him, I said, I don't. I don't know what that means, man. I'm slow. I don't understand. And so he goes, you can take it as fast or as slow as you want to. And I still didn't get it. He goes, hey, you can come 15 minutes a week or you come 10 minutes a week, or you can do it all in one day, all the classes. And so eight hours of rehab took me four and a half months to complete. And so in that four and a half months, I did. And I mean, I blew the. I did real estate, you know, 15 hours a day. I worked my butt off. And I actually made my salary the first month that I quit, that I was on suspension. And so from there I decided I could do it. And my bout. My boss finally called me and said, you come back here or you're fired. And I said, well, I guess I'm gonna quit. And so it couldn't have worked out better. The problem I had from there was, you know, when you're on your own, the freedom. I was working and working and building every aspect of real estate, real estate you could think of had a. I was buying a lot of rental houses. I was fixing up Houses. In this timeframe, I got hooked up with some big foreclosure agents. This was probably in oh,708, which everybody knows what happened then. And I worked with some big foreclosure agents around town and ran a general contracting company company fixing up bank foreclosures. So we ran a whole company doing that for several years and just busy, busy, busy. And the whole goal at that time was which my old pro priorities were, I made money. The goal. Now when I did that, it caused a lot of problems at home. I am now happily married. I have five beautiful children. But through this growing pains, I was not around a lot. I was working. I thought that's what a dad needed to do was to provide, have a nice house, nice schools, nice toys. But I didn't realize I was causing a lot of problems at home. So when I was home, I wasn't present. And I know if everybody's on real estate long enough and you've been busy, you just, you got 20 things going on at all times. So when I was at home, I can still remember sitting down and we might have three or four empty rental houses where we were taking all the phone calls. So when a tenant called about a house, email, text, I'd be sitting at dinner table and my wife, I don't know if you remember Superman, when he got mad, his eyes would turn red and he'd shoot lasers out of his eyes. I got that look a lot from my wife. And so we were just. The money was great, but I just did not have a good home life and I had to do something different. So what I found out is by answering all these emails and phone calls. And I actually had a guy in our office, we have two guys in our office, and we just couldn't keep up. We couldn't screen people fast enough. We couldn't get everything done. And so I went out and tried to find a screening service that could just automate this whole process because we found we were asking these people the same questions. How long you been in your current job? How much money you have in your bank account? Will you sign a 5 year, 3 to 5 year lease? Can you do small, can you complete small jobs? Yada yada, yada, same questions. So we try to find a system that could do this for us and we could not. And so then show me the rental got created. One, to keep my sanity and two, to, you know, be a better father, be at home more with my kids and be present when I was home.

Scott, Todd, I'm just gonna Jump in here. Does this story sound familiar to you?

A little bit. I, you know, I didn't get suspended and, like, or something. But look, you know, here's the thing, Mark. The cool thing about Cliff's story and the thing I'm taking away here is Cliff has something that you can't replicate. Okay. And Cliff, I could. If you didn't tell me anything else, I'd tell you that Cliff was gonna be successful. And it's because of this one thing he has. And it's the passion. It's the burning desire to get the heck out of Dodge. And honestly, you know, what happens is we become. I was there, too, and I know you were there, too. We become comfortable with that corporate gig. We become. Yeah, it's like a blanket. It's a nice little warm blanket that gets wrapped around you every two weeks. Oh, don't worry, you know, you have a job here until you don't.

Okay.

Like, hey, let's. Let's go team. There's no team. The team is you're on the team until you're off the team. And, you know what happens is we. We get sucked into this comfort level of, okay, I'm just going to be here, and I hate it, but I'm going to be here. But Cliff. Cliff had a passion to get the heck out. He had a burning desire to go on a different path. And he was scared. Right. Like, I was scared.

Terrified.

Okay.

And the thing is, is that if you have that burning desire and you do it a smart way to where you just kind of think of like an interstate exit, like, you slowly get off the interstate. It's not like you.

It's not like.

It's like you just drive off the interstate. You take the exit. Right. Like, you take an exit.

Yep.

And guess what? There's a whole nother world down there off the interstate.

That's.

That's there. But it all comes back to that. That passion, that burning desire to make a change.

Yeah.

You know what I think is interesting, Cliff, is the. Is the crossroads of the sort of existential crisis which I think, you know, once you make that leap, like Scott was saying, like, okay, here I'm creating this better life for myself, but in exchange of doing that, I'm sacrificing a lot of, you know, what would be, like, the big priority, which is, you know, making myself, my family happy.

Right. Because that's why we're doing it. That's why I'm doing it. Anyway, that's what most people do it. We want to Have a better life. And we think. In my mind, we were talking about this at breakfast the other day. I hate to interrupt you, but we were talking about. So I have five kids, like I said previously. And how do you teach that drive? How do you get them to be driven? And one of. We have a group, we meet every Wednesday, and we kind of go over deals in life and what we're doing. And one of the older guys said, you know, he goes, kids watch you when you don't think they're watching you. So when they see you working hard, when they see you doing stuff, when they see you moving, they're learning that whether you're talking to them or not, which was just pretty neat. So, you know, out of five kids, they're all different personalities. And this is where all my focus is now, by the way, is my kids. And we're traveling now and doing fun stuff and kind of. I got a mobile company pretty much that I can run from anywhere. And so we travel all summer. And my goal is to get them to find something they're passionate about and have that drive. So for me, it was real estate. For me, it was getting out of that corporate world, stop being a puppet on a string, and do things that I enjoy doing, which I love. Putting deals together and talking to people, and I love fixing up houses. It's very fun to watch the whole process through. So back to what you were saying. Yeah, that drive is huge. And how do you get that?

Yeah, go ahead. I mean, I think for you, it was just the pain of not, you know, it starts with pain. And I think for a lot of people, that's really where it needs to be. It's this feeling, this not having this locus of control, not having freedom or flexibility, Just this sort of underlying feeling where it could all go away at any moment with, you know, nothing that you did. So I think that's. That's really important. What's. What I think is interesting, though, is how you made the transition from, you know, working all the time to creating automation systems. Delegation, especially the automation with showmeterental.com. so how did you go ahead and develop that? I mean, basically, you stretch your own itch.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'm definitely not the brains behind the operation. It was my idea. I knew there was a niche out there, and I knew there was a lot of investors out there like me, who wanted time. The whole point of whatever that facade is, is, you know, once you get a money, then everything will work out great. You'll Be happy. Well, it's not true. I've got. Not a lot, but I got more money than I can spend and I'm not, I wasn't any. I was actually more miserable because I could not enjoy it because I was so busy. So I spent the last five and six years putting systems in place and Show Me the rental was the one that freed up more time than any of them. Because if anybody I know you do land. But I know if you're in the rental business, the biggest time consumption is picking up the phone and talking to somebody about your three bedroom, two bath with a basement and give them the spiel only to find out they're not qualified. So you literally waste hours out of your day of unqualified people that you don't need to talk to. Anyway, so show me the rentals. It's kind of like a funnel and we built a funnel and we're getting all the riff raff out of the way and just getting everybody through the funnel that it's qualified that you're not going to waste your time on, which is such a huge time saver. So that's how it got developed. And I partnered with a guy who does the development and kind of runs that back door stuff because I don't understand anything about coding websites or any of that. I just have the idea and we kind of, you know, made it come to life.

Fantastic. So who is your target market then for Show Me the Rental?

So our target market is anybody with rental houses. So whether you're the new guy, intermediate or advanced guy, it is for anybody that wants to save time on the rental properties. So what it does, which is really neat, is we automate the whole process. So we basically create an online system that will advertise for you on all the major websites. It'll generate leads, it'll actually pre screen those leads automatically and set up showings automatically and basically turn those leads and applications while you sit back and watch. And then you, we have an online application. If you have your own, you can use yours if you want to, but you literally just wait till you get applications and then from there whatever particular screening process you use, you put that into place.

So, so, so you, you're, you're limiting like a property management company essentially.

Well, not, not all the way because we're doing that, we're doing the crap of the property management side of it. So you'll see no need a property management company to handle work orders, collect rent. All we do is a screening process which to me is the Most time consuming process. And if you screen your tenants correctly and get the right customer in there, you're looking for, you know, your life becomes a lot easier. It's when you get those bad people in there, which I did for a while because I got so many phone calls. I would literally just get the first person who could breathe almost or turn something in and had money in their bank account. I would rent to them. And then a year later it would cost me so much money because I had to turn it over because they weren't my right customer because I did not spend the right time qualifying them. And I missed lead after lead because I could not collect all the information. I was just trying to put out fires. So that's what this system does. And it also does it for a price that's really cheap. So so basically it's $49 until your properties rented. So you put them on our. Put it on our system. It's 49 bucks till it's rented and then you literally turn it off and it shuts everything off.

Wow, that's a. That's a good deal, Scott Todd.

It is.

It is a good deal.

So, yeah, it's very cheap. We did it basically because I would love to. I know there's a lot of people in my shoes where you're at home and you're not really present and you're just got so much going on and overwhelmed that if it can help those people out, they would make me feel better because I don't. I do have some regrets and one of them was not being around for my two older kids like I should have been because I was working all the time. So I'm trying to make up for that now. And with this system and with the other systems we use, I have time to do whatever I want, which is a great. It's a new feeling, but it's a great feeling to have freedom in your day to not just be putting out fires all day.

Absolutely. And that's, you know, you're really preaching to the choir here because we always talk about you can always make more money, but you can't get more time. And that leads me to. Today's podcast is sponsored by Flight School and Flight School Live. And so if you really want to be like Cliff and have money and time, let Scott Todd be your Sherpa up the land investing mountain. And in three days or 16 weeks, depending on which program you go into, he's going to teach you step by step how to create a fully functional land business where it's 90% automated right out of the gate and start building your passive income without renters, without rehabs, without renovations, without rodents. Learn more. Just go to landgeek.com training and schedule a call. So, Cliff, I think your story has been really inspiring. Love the fact that, you know, you've really got your head on straight when it comes to your priorities and how you implement that into your own business and life. But now we're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website resource, a book, something actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

I'll tell you, I said something to you earlier, Mark. I just found an app called Blinkist. I don't know if your listeners have heard about it, but I've been reading a book called Traction, and I'm not a good reader. I can read for about 15 or 20 minutes and in my brain just, I just, I can't focus. And so Blinkist, what it does is it takes a book and it's basically Cliff Notes. It takes it down to a summary and to all the major points in the book. You can do it. You can either read it, which takes about 15 or 20 minutes to get through the book, or they have an audio version where you can just listen to the audio version of the book. I started doing that, I found out about a couple weeks ago, and I've been added to my morning routine where I get up and I start listening to a book or reading part of the reading part of it. And it's changed my life a lot. It's got every aspect of life in it and real estate and whatever you're interested in, they have it. And I recommend that because it's a really good tool to, you know, keep your mind sharp.

Yeah, it's so true. Like, especially business books. Like, you know, the typical business book, all the meat is in like the first, you know, 20 pages. And then it's just anecdotes and more, you know, more examples. Yeah. Of what they're trying to come across that. So, Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

So I got a book that could help our listeners because one of the things that we hear a lot is like sales, like how I'm. People struggle with sales. And so check this book out. It's called Questions that Sell, the powerful process for discovering what your client or customer really wants. And you know, as, as our friend, the sales whisper says ask a lot of questions.

I agree.

How'd you find this. Who's Paul Cherry?

I don't know, man. He's an author. He's a good.

He's.

It's a good book.

We should get this guy on the podcast.

We should have more podcast.

That's right.

All right. Fantastic. Questions that sell. Well, my tip of the week is going to be save some time. Go to showmeetherntal.com it's an amazing value. 49 bucks until your house rents. And I know a lot of you out there do both houses and land, so this could be a really, really nice tool. And, Cliff, I think you should integrate GeekPay IO into Show Me the Rental so you can start collecting on an automated basis. Rental payments. Let's talk about that. Anyway, Cliff Hayden, are we good?

Yep. Mark and Scott, I really appreciate your time, and thank you for having me on.

My pleasure, Scott. Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

All right, well, I want to thank all the listeners, and I just want to remind you the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like a Cliff Hayden from showmeterental.com is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got a rate, you got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review to supportlandgeek.com we're going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit course. So please do that, and it really, really helps. All right, Scott, you ready to do this? Let's do it, Mark.

One, two, three. Let freedom ring.

All right, thanks, everybody.