Quote from @Aaron Lietz:
Originally posted by @JD Martin:
Quote from @Joe Splitrock:
@Aaron Lietz I would argue in your example that a guru isn't a rock star. They are more like a music teacher who never became a rock star. Most wholesaling guru were moderately successful at best. They pivot to being a mentor, because it is more profitable (for them). A successful wholesaler is too busy doing deals to mentor people. This is the "guru fallacy" that dates back to television infomercials from people like Carlton Sheets. It is has not moved to social media and the internet.
I wouldn't even just pick on wholesalers. This low success ratio is true in much of real estate. Most "investors" never buy more than one property. Most realtors do very few deals. That is because there are skills that cannot be easily learned. Being a self starter and good at sales are not a textbook skill. Business has many functions, each with risk if you do them wrong. Legal, marketing, accounting, taxes, etc. are all part of business. Sometimes the person who is good at one thing, isn't good at the other things. You need to do it all, or be good at hiring things done.
@JD Martin is a rock star and investor, so curious to hear his thoughts on this.
LOL. I've had my 15 minutes of fame but mostly I'm a rock star in my own mind 🤣🤣
My thoughts on the analogy
1. I've been in a lot of music stores in my life and I've never heard or had that conversation. That would be a pretty weird conversation to have, because outside of some really young guys, most people who show up in music stores with no experience and no equipment are usually just looking to get started for fun as a hobby. Virtually no one past the age of 20 shows up at a music store to buy the lessons and equipment they think will make them the next John Mayer.
2. The low barrier to entry analogy: not even close. Anyone can buy a guitar and even start a band. Beyond that, you are talking about a lot of work and a level of commitment few people can maintain. Our self-produced album - meaning we had no record company to answer to, so total artistic freedom - took almost two years to complete. To even get to that point, the band had to be competent enough to play music that could be recorded, overdubbed, mixed and edited. I had to fire a musician halfway through the project. Getting multiple people to practice on a regular - and productive - basis is way, way harder than it sounds.
3. I agree that "not making it" can be separated from hard work, skill and effort. It depends on your definition of "making it", but I've known plenty of excellent musicians that were hard workers that just made a living, and some barely that. "Making it" in the music business depends on skill & talent for sure, but also a level of work and commitment that is more or less an obsession. You have to sacrifice *a lot* of your life to "make it" in the music business. Just maintaining enough work as a professional requires a ton of sacrifice. I can't count how many times I played gigs on a Thursday that were a 1-2 hour commute, you start at 10 PM, get done at 2-2:30, load up, commute home, in bed by 5 AM and get up for work at 6:30 in the morning. The guys (gender neutral) that "make it" do this for years.
4. Selling the "tools" for success - yes, to some extent a good analogy. Except the vast majority of people that start playing music have no delusions of grandeur. Virtually everyone who wants to start wholesaling has visions of drinking Appletinis on a beach all day and giving the big middle finger to the working world.
5. Getting lucky - no such thing in the music business. Yes, you have to be the right product at the right place at the right time with the right people, and that's a situation out of your hands, but you have to have every bit of the groundwork in place the moment that opportunity presents itself. Luck is where hard work & opportunity intersect. I think the same is mostly true with wholesaling.
6. Overhyping self-employment: I don't argue this point. I probably work more hours when I'm working for myself than working for someone else. Just not working for someone else can't be the only goal.
@JD Martin
Thank you for taking the time to reply. Very respectfully, nearly everything you mentioned above applies to wholesaling.
- • Music salesman/teacher/guru - there are lots of music teachers (who also sell music gear and work on commission) that will tell you that if you "just work hard enough" you will be a success (just like wholesaler gurus selling mentors/programs and imply that it just has to work if you work hard enough). They may not tell me what kind of success I'm going to have, but they are still selling a dream that is not achievable for the overwhelming majority of people (even for those who don't give up and "grind really hard"), same with wholesaling.
- • Low barrier to entry - Any beginner wholesaler (or musician) can easily get into the game with little to no money (or even tons of training). I can skip trace a list and start calling it (i.e. - buy a used guitar/computer, start a band, practice songs/covers, and start playing gigs), all while using YouTube University. In wholesaling, I can download an app and start knocking doors. I can drive for dollars (and on and on, just like getting into music). It would be hard to count how many pop/hip-hop/dubstep lovers started with a laptop, a mic, and a set of headphones.
• Hard work, skill, effort, and sacrifice - We agree! This is the same thing as wholesaling. In a similar fashion to the music business, I can work hard, have the skill, put in tons of effort, and sacrifice a ton, and yet my chances of replacing my good-paying corporate sales job (which pays 6 figures) are slim (and this is even if I put tons of money into advertising).
• Believing you can make it in the music business is part of the picture. Yes, not everyone who buys a guitar thinks they can possibly be a rockstar, but nearly everyone who is trying to make it big, believes they can (kind of like the lottery), when in fact they can't due to how unlikely it is. I think this makes wholesaling look even worse than the music business (yet still similar) - because at least playing music is fun whereas the process that most beginner wholesalers do (cold calling, door knocking, texting, D4D, mailers, bandit signs, etc), is not. The overall point of my post though is about likelihood. In other words, for me it seems like any given person is just as unlikely to be a big success in wholesaling as they are in the music business. But then again, maybe it has more to do with how I go about wholesaling?
• "Getting lucky - no such thing in the music business. Yes, you have to be the right product at the right place at the right time with the right people, and that's a situation out of your hands..."
Being in the right place at the right time...That is called luck my dude :). I go to a casino on Monday and roll the dice with no success. I go to that same casino 5 years later, roll the dice at the same table, and hit it big (i.e. - right place, right time - all with little to no effort or skill). The point is, I think, I have to work hard in the right area.
"...but you have to have every bit of the groundwork in place the moment that opportunity presents itself. Luck is where hard work & opportunity intersect. I think the same is mostly true with wholesaling."
There are more musicians who believed this than not, and yet the overwhelming majority of them did not make big success in the music business (like the gurus implied they would). In fact, the overwhelming number of musicians who get signed and tour don't wind up having big success. They wind up in debt, sell very few tickets/albums, and get shelved or dropped by the label. This is the same in wholesaling. Sure this person might do a few deals, but how much money did they have to sink just to get to those deals?
I guess we are going to have to mostly disagree here - your profile doesn't say anything about being a professional musician, so unless you tell me otherwise (and provide some street cred to back it up :) ) I'm going to have to just shoot down a lot of your points again - maybe more effectively this time:
1. The word "lots", "a bunch" and similar is just a way of making a point without any facts to back it up. I've never done a study on how many music salespeople are trying to sell a dream of success to would-be musicians, but I've known literally thousands of musicians in my life and hardly any of them had any delusions of "making it" in the music business. Most of them just wanted to be able to play some music and have a good time doing it, and that was their definition of success. The two fields you are trying to connect have virtually nothing in common. Music is an artistic pursuit that *some* people end up making money at, a very few make a lot and become famous, and most people just enjoy it for the sake of doing it without any expectation of remuneration whatsoever. I expect the vast majority of people who get into wholesaling do so with the hope/expectation of making a lot of money.
2. Low barrier to entry - you're still trying to conflate the ability to obtain tools with the effort involved in using those tools to accomplish anything. The only similarity of music to wholesaling here is what you do with those tools. Downloading an app is a low barrier to entry. Knocking on doors is not - that requires time, work, effort, and a pretty strong backbone. Buying a laptop, a mic and a set of headphones (not what I would consider a "musician" anyway, but I digress) is a low barrier to entry; spending many hours writing, mixing, getting gigs, performing, etc is not - that requires a lot of work.
3. Believing you can "make it" in music - you vastly overestimate the number of people who play music who you think is trying to "make it". As someone who's been a professional musician almost my entire life, and has played a lot of places and on bills with some fairly famous people (Darrell Scott, Carrie Rodriguez, Avett Brothers, etc), professional musicians can largely be sorted into 2 camps: those who enjoy playing music and aim to make a reasonable living doing it (think studio musicians, professional cover bands, etc) and those who have a manic dedication to their artistic vision and couldn't care less if they "make it" or not, and some of them happen to (think Bruce Springsteen or Darrell Scott). Virtually no one is "trying" to make it big - that's just popular culture talking.
4. Casino example is incorrect. If you're walking through the casino and you bump into Paul McCartney and he asks you to play on his next album, it's not luck or anything else if you don't know how to play an instrument and play it well.
5. Finally, and this is the old days as it doesn't really apply any more, but a decent number of acts that are signed by labels & tour did reasonably well because labels weren't in the business of spending money making albums and promoting artists they didn't believe would provide a return. Getting signed in the first place was the difficult part. Yes, many musicians didn't have staying power, but that's less a factor of their talent, work or anything else than an indictment of the process in the first place.
In any case, I go back to my original premise. Your post sounds good to a layperson that doesn't know anything about music or the music business, but you're comparing apples to oranges. Wholesaling is almost exclusively about making money. People want to wholesale because they believe it's a cheap & easy way to get into real estate to make a lot of money. In all the years I've been here I've never saw someone post about wanting to get into wholesaling because it seems like a fun hobby or a good way to get together with friends outside of work.
However, don't conflate my disavowing of your analogy with the idea that I disagree with your premise about wholesaling - I think your thoughts on wholesaling are largely correct :) . I think a closer analogy to wholesaling might be about losing weight than anything like playing music.
