DAY 28: Progress Report - turning DOWN opportunities.. WTF?

I'm mainly writing this to make sure I don't forget what I should be focusing on right now. I'm just overwhelmed with how much stuff is going on and what there is to do.

-[ 11/16/2014 Sunday 4:00 PM ]- marks the time that I decided to begin seriously hacking away at this real estate thing instead of just consuming educational media on the subject. I joined BiggerPockets 6 days later on 11/22 to help keep my head in the game during a rough bodily health transition.

There are two things I can say for damn sure:

1. I'm damn lucky

2. BiggerPockets rules

Table of Contents (YOU DIDN'T THINK I WOULD STOP THE TLDR TRAIN DID YOU?? CHOOO CHOOOOOOOOO)

- Desperate situation developed recently

- Found a mentor

- Opportunities come a knockin' when it rains it pours, more than I know what to do with

- My two biggest hurdles and weaknesses in the real estate business now

- The bottom line

Desperate Situation

Unfortunately I don't wish to reveal exactly what happened a week ago because it could cause problems if certain people related to me find out, but let's just say that one week ago, just when I thought things were going really well and my living situation was stable (check my intro thread, link in my profile) ALL HELL HAD TO BREAK LOOSE.

Essentially there was a huge uproar and I almost got kicked out of my mom's place which means I would have been homeless. Here's the punchline: This uproar had nothing to do with me or my mom doing something. It was triggered by a completely unexpected and unforeseen event that was seemingly innocuous but ended up raising all sorts of hell and drama.

The bottom line is, I had to pull a trump card to negotiate me continuing to live here, and I placed a hard deadline on when I'll be moving out, which will be June. This gives me about 6.5 months to pump enough profits to move the F out!! Technically speaking that's plenty of time, but I'm well acquainted with Mr. Murphy and I know he'll be visiting me again and again, so if I work my ass off, it might turn out that 6.5 months is just barely enough.

In a way this is a good thing though, because it gives me that much more motivation to slog through this shit. Plus, if I beat the deadline, that means I've turned my life situation around very quickly!!

All I can say is, if my computer dies, I'm gonna shit a brick!!!

Found a Mentor

I stated right out the gate that I didn't expect to find a mentor, but at the same time my policy was that if there was a mentor lead I would pounce on it, because I know from my own experience in other fields becoming an expert on my own, and teaching others, that a teacher can take a 5 year learning curve and turn it into a weekly or monthly learning curve if the student keeps at it.

In my opinion if there's a chance to cut the learning curve by getting some help from an expert, it's absolutely retarded not to take it!!

Thanks to the help of a couple people on BiggerPockets (including @Raj Gandhi who hired me for a small writing gig which put a bit of cash in my pocket which is paying for my skype #/call service among other things, and an anonymous party who did something similar) to whom I will be eternally grateful (including financially down the road) I was able to begin mentorship with an old grizzled veteran of the creative/traditional real estate biz who's particular favorite area of mastery is lease options. This guy is amazing, and he's one of those people that's not about problems, only solutions and getting the job done. I knew this beyond any shadow of a doubt when we spoke on the phone for the better part of an hour and I explained to him that I'm dead broke.

Before I called him a couple days ago I was convinced that I'd probably have to go look for a job before things could move forward, but that could add months to my poverty timetable so I decided to try pressing forward anyway. I was so sure he would have a problem with me having zero money/income whatsoever, that I spent a couple hours drafting a written proposal script for me to trade my labor/marketing to him or another one of his students in return for a bird dog fee once I got them a deal, or even being a temporary VA for them, so that I could pay the necessary starting expenses that might be incurred. Turns out I never needed it, because he was the one convincing me this wouldn't be a problem. I brought up many potential problems that would require me having funds to move forward, and he just mowed them down like he was about to get fined for municipal code violations. This guy's a problem solver not a problem maker.

One of the items on this call's itinerary was talking about the student's goals. He didn't even want to hear them yet, because after hearing my situation (including my living situation, I showed him my BiggerPockets intro thread) it was obvious the only thing that mattered was closing my first deal as soon as possible. It just so happens that was my written immediate goal. None of this "get a job" shit or "you think you can just waltz into this business without a dime and start doing deals?" Just let's get this shit done!! Looks like we think alike on that. He told me exactly what to do to get this done as soon as possible without having to spend a dime.

Funny How Opportunities Always Come At The Strangest Times

#1 - immediate work opportunity

A few weeks ago I was considering the fact that I would probably have to go get a job, maybe even multiple jobs. Read my intro thread (link in my profile) to understand why this prospect would likely be a very long and painful one to get through with.

Well just yesterday an employment opportunity FELL RIGHT INTO MY LAP. I was walking around during the cold foggy morning and came across a bandit sign RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM WHERE I LIVE.

"HELP WANTED" it said, people for landscaping and snow removal. PERFECT because its an unskilled (mostly) position that would have been just right for me. It was probably only temporary/seasonal but that's all I needed anyway. TOO BAD I DIDN'T NEED A JOB ANYMORE!!!! In fact to take a job now would be the dumbest thing I could possibly do, because every second I'm not spending working on my marketing operations could be hundreds, thousands of dollars down the drain. Funny how that shit works out. The opportunities only come when you don't need them anymore. I've seen this in many areas of my life. When it rains it pours. The rich get richer, etc. It's precisely when you most need something that you won't find it. Just a few weeks ago, taking a seasonal snow/landscaping job would have been the best possible thing that could have happened to me.

If you thought that was funny, check this out:

#2 - millionaire investor joint venture opportunity

Very soon after getting on board with my mentor I was approached by a creative real estate millionaire on BiggerPockets who has a thing or two in common with me, and was considering having me work for him to help increase his profitability. He does over 100 deals a year and was willing to split the extra profits with me that I helped generate. I was completely flabbergasted and thought "this is awesome, now I have two things I can do in this business, the lease option mentorship AND systematically low-balling on defaulted homes for wholesale/flip purposes!

HOWEVER, in the back of my mind I knew that being able to do both of these things at once, as a broke newbie, would probably be too much for me to handle. As you'll see in a bit, just doing one feels like more than I can chew. Isn't it weird that two amazing opportunities fell in my lap at once, when 1 month ago I was expecting to spend upwards of 1 year working for minimum wage just to hopefully get started, and that's if I could even get a damn job (I think by now you can see I'm practically unemployable)!!! ;)

Anyway, the millionaire BiggerPockets guy's offer was nice, but the problem was, it could take many months or even years to see my efforts on his behalf pay off, due to the nature of the mechanics of how my work would increase his profitability. Essentially there would be no results for quite a while, and then over time there would be a potential for a floodgate of increased profitability (IF successful, things could change at any time rendering progress obsolete).

With the advent of almost becoming homeless and spending nearly a full week in living-situation-limbo, I sent this guy a message about my situation, explaining that my top priority was the lease option mentorship, because it would be my quickest and most reliable route to cash, and living in my own place. Hell even for a six figure income. However, I said, if being able to do his task for him only required perhaps a maximum of a few hours per day or less (less is better) then I would be happy to get started, since I still saw it as a great way to learn the business.

I intentionally let myself make the message very long and ranty since I figured he would get a kick out of it. Well, apparently he didn't, because since then I never heard from him. I guess he concluded I wasn't interested or committed enough to the project to be of any use.

So even though I didn't technically turn down this offer, in effect I kind of did. In fact to be honest I was almost hoping he wouldn't get back to me, because I doubted my ability to juggle both of these avenues at once. Isn't that funny, one month ago I would have eaten my own shit for a minimum wage job (while never being able to get one), now I'm actually turning down joint venture offers from millionaire investors.

Does life get any more bizarre? But then again, it's completely predictable. This is how things usually happen, as fucked up as it is.

My Two Biggest Weaknesses & Hurdles In The Real Estate Biz Right Now

#1 - social anxiety

As wonderful as things are going for me right now it's not easy street. As I've learned the real estate business is just a misnomer. It's actually the marketing and people business. What a coincidence! It just so happens that the two things I suck the most at are marketing and people!

My mentor stresses again and again that without marketing and persistence you could be the most brilliant real estate guy ever and you'd be dead in the water. You need leads, you may have to contact hundreds or even thousands of people in some way to get a lead or two with some marketing strategies, and most will turn out to be suspects not prospects. And most prospects will not turn into deals. It might take 100 no's to get 1 yes, or worse. And yet all it takes is a few yes's and next thing you know you're pumping 5 figures or more a month. The one thing he won't do is do your marketing for you. He has tons of info and insight and advice to give about the marketing, but it's up to the student to actually execute the marketing.

This in and of itself is neither a surprise to me nor a problem. Except for the fact that for the past nearly 10 years I've basically shut myself off completely from the "real world." As I started poking around craigslist, setting up my skype phone # and voicemail, and actually e-mailing house rental landlords, I began to realize the thought of actually receiving calls from these people or calling them filled me with an unbearable level of anxiety.

E-mailing? Chatting online? No problem. But just the thought of getting on the phone with a random landlord or house seller fucked with me on a serious level. You gotta remember, I'm not normal. By societal standards I'm not even a person. I cannot identify with 99% of you motherfuckers with jobs, families, responsibilities, social conventions, and whatnot. I suck at life. I'm a nub. And now I have to actually get on the phone with real people who's entire worldviews and experience are completely alien to me, and try to get them to sell me their house!! Wow! From mom's basement to buying people's basements.

There's absolutely nothing anyone can say or do to ease or allay my fears related to this. I've heard it all and understand it rationally and even from previous experience in times long since past, lessons long since forgotten on a body level. All I can do is force myself to make and take the calls. I know from experience that just being merciless with myself and doing it anyway cures all problems once I do it enough.

#2 - no scripts/systems/procedures/organization

My second problem is that I'm disorganized and have no systems in place. For some reason what I feared most was actually getting responses to my marketing and handling them. Everything's fine as long as I'm just fishing for responses, but as soon as I actually got any type of response or info that involved either taking or receiving a call, and filling out a property information sheet, I just shut down completely. It wasn't just fear of the phone. There was another problem.

In order to meet my quick deal and large amount of deal goals I'm going to have to do A LOT of marketing, and that means making and taking probably hundreds of calls, maybe even thousands. E-mailing thousands of people. Getting in touch with thousands of people. Managing hundreds of relationships. Posting ads every day. Keeping track of my marketing numbers and giving my mentor my daily marketing minimums so he can slave-drive me if I'm not keeping my numbers consistent. Receiving hundreds of e-mails and calls. Keeping track of dozens or hundreds of property information sheets, as well as filling them out.

SUCH A WHIRLWIND OF CHAOS!!! My brain was completely overwhelmed. How the FUCK would I actually organize all this stuff? How could I possibly run a persistent marketing campaign, where I keep track of who to get back to, and who to let disappear in the wind, and when to call them again, or e-mail them. How do I keep track of my bird dogs? How do I remember who gave me what lead? What exactly do I say or do when I call people, or e-mail them, or hit their voicemail, or answer the phone? How do I manage all these relationships? How do I maintain threads of communication with possibly hundreds of people at a time or more, over months of time, without wanting to put a bullet in my head from overload? How do I remember and keep track of all this crap?

What's even worse is that after sending only 16 e-mails with craigslist my gmail account I used for that purpose was "permanently" disabled from sending outgoing mail (I managed to send a reply to myself with it today though).

This problem really took the wind out of my sails. Craigslist is just ONE of the avenues of marketing I'll be doing, but still an important one. Now I might be spending many hours or days trying to figure it out before I start the other marketing strategies. My brain does not have enough capacity for me to concentrate on more than 1 thing at a time. I can't do multiple marketing avenues per day until I figure out how to do them properly first, and it appears this stuff isn't necessarily as easy as it looks.

It would appear that Craigslist marketing is a lot more of a sophisticated maneuver than I thought it would be, requiring many e-mail addresses from different free e-mail providers, and cycling between each one for each e-mail, and only sending maybe 3-5 e-mails per day in response to craigslist ads. Alternatively I could use special software and massive amounts of e-mail addresses to automate the process and e-mail huge amounts of people on craigslist per day, but that is even more sophisticated to set up, and there's no point in trying to automate something that I haven't even learned to do manually yet first. Plus I want to focus on actually making tons of calls too, to start with, to get rid of my phone anxiety so I can handle the calls better once my marketing starts generating results. Even if the calls are lower efficiency.

I discussed the problem and got some excellent advice on the subject here:

http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/80/topics/1624...

Implementing multi-email craigslist cycling and being more picky about who I contact and how, and trying to avoid redundant communications (especially with e-mail) means a great increase in complexity, which compounds the problem of having too much shit to juggle. Remember, I can't afford to hire a VA yet, and even if I could, how can I train them to do something I don't know how to do yet? ;)

It's obvious my second weakness is that I'm disorganized. I don't have any systems in place, and my various documents aren't organized. I also didn't flesh out my standard scripts and procedures for every single repetitive marketing task that I'd do 10,000 times. In other words I had no scripts and procedures.

You might say, hey buddy, Max buddy, you're just getting started. Just pick up the phone, make some calls, send some e-mails. You can adjust as you go along.

That may be true but remember that I'm going at this whole hog. I want to be pumping 5 figures a month very quickly, and even pumping 1 or 2 deals to start can be a slow start for the newbie. At first, it can take a shitload of marketing to gain traction. I have to get organized right now, because I'm diving in all the way. The amount of dealing with people I'll have to do per each closed deal is extreme, and if I'm trying to do it in a short time frame, that means BIG NUMBERS, and without any organization, big numbers = BIG CHAOS.

I'm super organized and HIGHLY systemized in World of Warcraft. Without my systems which I spent years honing I wouldn't be able to do what 99.9999% of players can't on the WoW auction house, which is handle a 9k-22k item inventory on as little as 3-4 hours a month and never think about it, just collect absurd profits that other people take 10-150 times longer to build up. And while they worry about market conditions, my method works in all market conditions. And while many of the richest people in WoW are only that way because they have a 400 member super-power guild behind them and they're high rank, and they have to farm 25-man raid instances with a powerful team to have any hope of a big payday (which they still need luck for), my method is solo and has a pretty consistent minimum payday with occasional huge windfalls. Don't be fooled. I can start with zero inventory and zero gold on a WoW server with a level 1 character. I made my first million gold on my current realm the first week I played there, starting with a level 1 character. That's a lot of gold in WoW, even on the server I play, where gold is inflated quite a bit. But starting out from zero it takes approximately 20-30 times more work to get nice paydays, and you often don't get any sales for periods of time unless you sell for shitty margins. Hmm, sounds a bit like real estate ;)

I spent my entire day today investigating different CRMs and the idea of setting up my own custom database with MS Access or a free alternative like LibreOffice Base. I checked out Podio as well. My conclusion was that while in the long term these or other similar tools would be awesome, they would require wayyyyyyyy too much setup and development from me to be worth using right now. I'm talking weeks even months of development to really bang out a good system for my needs. And Podio is ugly as hell and slow and clunky. It makes my eyes bleed and my head hurt. Right now I can only afford to take a few days to bang out a system, at most. Trying to come up with an awesome CRM system is a luxury problem I can worry about once I'm sitting in my own home-office and have $100,000+ so I can start breathing again.

Fortunately I think I'll be decently well covered. I started brainstorming some relatively primitive systems for the following:

1. Handling leads

2. Handling property information sheets

3. Wholesaler list

4. Bird dog list

5. Retail buyer list

6. Colleague list

7. People who helped me out

8. Keeping track of who I've marketed to already and what stage I'm at with them

9. Standard procedures and basic scripts for the most repetitive steps of all my marketing methods

So far I've come up with some solid ideas for a nice ghetto bare-bones system that I think will work pretty well. Some of it involves storing certain files in a certain tree structure of folders with a standard file naming system. Most of it involves excel spreadsheets. All the files will be kept on a dropbox folder. This woman's article is amazing:

http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/04/10...

I'm reading all her articles about excel. That tables thing is awesome.

I should be able to bang out most of the systems in a few days.

Funny thing is I already have a nice system in place for keeping track of things to do and appointments and such. I'm using the "secret weapon" technique in Evernote, which implements the GTD (getting things done, dave allen) system into Evernote in an ingeneously clever way that involves using a system of specially named/structured tags and a couple other things to make it ridiculously easy to set up literally thousands of tasks, action steps, projects, etc. and never have to worry about losing track of anything including appointments. It's super easy to always know at any given time, what's coming next and when, what your immediate tasks are, what your next tasks are, soon tasks, later, some day, waiting for, etc. and you can sort/filter by all kinds of things. It's so quick and easy to use and powerful.

But this system is only good for tracking stuff I need to remember to do, but don't want to actually pay attention to except when its time to do them. I actually hardly use it, maybe up to 5 minutes per day if at all, but as time goes on in this business I'll probably need it more to keep track of all my engagements.

I've been trying to use evernote for other things, like storing structured libraries of information, but I find it too clunky for such purposes. I think I'd rather just store things in folders in a dropbox folder or something like that. Aside from the "secret weapon" system I'm finding evernote seems to only be good for capturing stuff and having a secure place to house it until its processed. MAYBE it can serve as a central information/project hub for a very limited set of stuff. Also there's a program called TuskTools which integrates with evernote to create a graphical calendar system accessible anywhere (it even syncronizes with google calendar as well), so there is that too. But my free trial ran out so I'm screwed ;)

The Bottom Line

Bottom line is I gotta set up my ghettofabulous systems and once I do that I'm gonna tackle this here Craigslist the right way and make a bunch of calls. Once that's relatively smoothed out to a minimum of 50-100 communications per day + 2 or more ads, which should take 1 or 2 days, I'll begin focusing on the other free marketing methods and systemizing/smoothing/scripting those one by one, while continuing to maintain a minimum consistent daily Craigslist activity at the start of each day.

Hopefully after 2 weeks or less I will have three or more distinct and powerful free marketing methods being applied consistently and efficiently at the start of each day, leaving me tons of time afterward (and preparation thanks to my scripts and systems, but nothing can prepare me for popping my phone cherry) to handle the leads that come in. And if there's any downtime from handling leads (if, funny) then I can start working on scaling up the marketing to hit bigger numbers daily with high efficiency, including making more calls to get that phone practice in.

Ideally within 1 month I should be using 3-4 marketing methods at a relatively high scale for 1 person doing it manually, which I predict should be able to turn into at least 2-4 deals per month if I actually do things right.

One of my mentor's students got her first deal in only 9 days and she's really sloppin' it up. His call calendar is just filled up with timeslots for her 3 way seller phone calls.

In 30-45 days I'm hoping to hire my first VA (as soon as the first deal closes, hopefully it does not take that long) and start learning about paid marketing methods. But before any of those pipedreamz let's get that first deal done!!!!!!!!!

Let's see if Mr. Murphy pushes back the timetable on this one too ;)