On Sunday we took a few hours to put every speaker and special guest up on a panel and have the audience ask questions.
This was one of my favorite parts of the event. And the caliber of the panel was top notch.
Special guests on the panel included…
Heather simply blew me away with some of her marketing ideas.
A Madison Ave consultant would have charged you $100,000 for some of the stuff she gave away. Her creative marketing tactics were VERY low cost, used other peoples money, and always ended up in a win for every party involved.
Creator of the Team Work Lead System, Andy Proper, came all the way from Hawaii for a surprise presentation on building an army of bird dogs to bring you deals. He did a live demo of the system (which has brought nearly 9,000 leads to its 200 members so far).
And then a REAL shocker…
Andy gave a surprise bonus to the crowd right from the stage; everyone attending the Pitch Free Seminar got access to the system for free! We didn’t even know he was going to do it.
Below is a picture of Andy doing a traditional Hawaii dance on stage before his presentation.
We had a very special surprise guest the Pitch Free Seminar thanks to Tim Mai. His name is Roger Salam and this guy knows how to supercharge a crowd!
For those of you who don’t know, Friday was Tim Mai’s birthday and Roger had a private party at his mansion and ALL THE PITCH FREE ATTENDEES WERE INVITED! It was so much, I really wish you could have been there to share in the networking, cake, and champagne.
Below is a picture of the birthday cake we had made for Tim Mai and presented right on the seminar floor.
Mark Jackson AKA “MJ In His PJs” did one of the most unique presentations I’ve seen in a while. He actually pulled comps live from the stage for attendees.
Mark is a genius when it comes to zeroing in on an area and finding the REAL value of the properties. If you are seeking a better way to get your comparable sales data click here (there’s a free report inside).
Here is just a little taste of his intro.
WOW! Cris Chico, the direct mail and absentee owner expert blew us away today.
Cris is the perfect example of an educator who DOES THE DEAL. He came equipped with over 100 slides of pure content, actual statistics from his campaigns, and even did some Q&A.
Below are 2 videos; one short segment from Cris’s presentation and another a video from one of his clients in the audience.
Cris goes over a lot of stuff most people dont know about making money without rehabs or chasing foreclosures. Check it here.
1. Buying rentals before ever wholesaling.
Back when I started and still today people preach the way to success in real estate investing is to buy rental properties and hold them. While I don’t disagree in the long run, not wholesaling first and/or adding wholesaling to your existing rental acquisitions program will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and years, maybe decades, of your life.
2. Attempting to Rehab Homes before wholesaling.
All of the rage today is flipping houses, witness all the television shows where people buy, fix up and resell houses. While that can be a profitable strategy for some. Neglecting wholesaling and not learning the values of these houses will again cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. If we agree that the commodity we deal in is houses then wouldn’t it make sense that the first job we need to learn or the most important job we need to learn is how to find, value (or evaluate) and secure contracts on this single family home commodity?
3. Buying houses for a rental or rehabbing without understanding how deep a discount I could really get.
Many people, Rehabbers and Landlords, could make so much more money for their efforts if they first learned through constant repetition of buying and selling houses what the real lowest value is they could get on deals.
4. Not understanding the value of homes at a deep level before I made offers.
Many people try and buy houses rehab, rental, and wholesaling without a detailed comparable sales program. There are many cheaper alternatives to a quality comparable sales program; but if you were a carpenter would you go to work without a hammer? This tool (the comparable sales program) is your right hand in wholesaling houses.
5. Not understanding marketing is the most important part of my business.
“You don’t gotta get it right, you just gotta get it goin!” Everyone’s heard the term, guerilla marketing. Anyone, at any level of finances and willingness can start this business from their spare bedroom and build up to any level of marketing budget they wish.
6. Thinking I was looking for people in financial trouble.
This is one of the biggest mistakes new people make. They search foreclosures or advertise for people in financial distress. In reality the commodity we are looking for is a property that has repair issues. We can’t purchase a property at a deep enough discount unless there are repair issues we can solve and thus increase the value and price of the home.
7. Borrowing money of any kind, hard money, family money, bank line of credit against my home, any type of money borrowing for real estate investing while I was wholesaling or before I learned to be a good wholesaler.
“Find the deal first and the money second,” is the rule you should live by. Everyone gets bogged down because they don’t personally have the money, or they don’t know where to get it, or where to find a buyer for the property. This is truly a scenario of putting the cart before the horse. “Deal first - money second!!”
8. Thinking mistakes were the end of the world.
“You fall you learn!” Learn to fail faster, if you make mistakes in rehabbing or landlording it could be years before your back in the game or back on your game. In wholesaling making a mistake means only that you learned what houses not to buy. Think of the old adage, “What would you attempt if you could not fail?” Wholesalers know that there is very little at risk, including their earnest money deposit, on well written contracts on single family homes. (In the commercial real estate world they call this a free look.)
9. Not knowing what I was looking for.
Most everyone starts their real estate career looking for houses that they might like to live in, when in reality they should be looking for the investment grade rehab and rental properties in their area. These are below the median price ranges in stable blue collar neighborhoods.
10. Wholesaling too many houses and not keeping enough for my portfolio.
Rank this as the biggest mistake I EVER made, Here I was the gateway to my clients 100, 200 and I even 400 house portfolios and I was selling them for what amounted to tips. Don’t feel too sorry for me, as I learned my lesson and started keeping rentals! I wish I had done it sooner, Just please don’t do the same and keep the best houses with the biggest equities for you and your families future.
Even after 20 years of wholesaling houses writing this blog post takes me back in time and I feel all the frustration I did when I fist got started. I want you to bypass all that frustration. Take this list, print it out, put up by your desk, and make sure you reference it frequently.
BUT…
Just because those were MY mistakes, it doesn’t mean they are the ONLY mistakes one can make.
At our Pitch Free Real Estate Seminar I am having every one of the 12 speakers create and share a list of 10 of the deadliest mistakes they wish they had avoided when they first started. You wont just learn what to do, but what to avoid too.
And YES, there’s more…
I am going to have each speaker, including myself, to a breakthrough presentation that will probably have most of the attendees getting results upon their arrival home from the seminar. I thought it would be cool, and VERY useful, if we could have each speaker give you a blueprint of EXACTLY what they would do if they were dropped in a city they never lived in with NO MONEY and had to start making money in real estate.
Can you imagine the wealth of valuable data you will get from that alone? Seriously, this is no joke, I am going to have everyone from Larry Goins to Heather Seitz tell you step by step what they would do if they were broke, alone, and woke up in a strange city and had to flip houses for their life.
Join us April 11-13 here in Tampa, FL. Come network, swipe millionaire house flipping methods, meet real mentors, chat with us, walk away with over $10,000 in bonuses. It will truly be a life changing event for everyone who will become part of it.
Woah…..
So that’s what touching a nerve on the Internet looks like.
The response (link to comments) to my mini-manifesto about the state of real estate investment education on the Internet and in seminars really got people up in arms. Excuse my French but they’re pissed!
People Really Want This Information.
AND they want to access the information that will get them results
WITHOUT being pitched. In short they want a change in the business
model of the real estate investment information business. The consuming public wants
to access this info at a reasonable price, actually the price is not really the issue
most people complained about (except the crazy high priced ones, which I agree with)
– mostly they just want it to work!
They want more real one on one mentorship
and they want the gurus to put their money where their mouths are.
I had a few personal observations that feel I must share. Many of you are
familiar with the 80/20 rule. In short it says that 80 percent of the people
WANT something but are unwilling to do what it takes to get it. It states that in any given group 20 percent of the people make all the money, do all the work and basically get all the results. It holds for anything you can think of – sports, career and real estate investing.
I personally believe that’s what got the old time gurus rich in the first place.
As many people mentioned, myself included, it was and is possible to garner some education from the existing system if you are committed. The problem has been “which educator is selling education and which one is selling junk”
Many of you mentioned names – which I edited out for legal reasons -
Would I like to make it easier for people who really want it? – yes absolutely. Would I like to change the way this is all done? – without question. Can I change human nature? – never.
So what’s the answer? I’ll tell you what’s NOT the answer - which was suggested numerous times.
It is IMPPOSIBLE to teach people for free in hopes that they’ll do something and pay you back.
Come on gang does that even sound practical? Especially in light of the 80/20 rule.? People who get things for free - ascribe no value to that thing. Heck over 80% of the people who PAY never do anything – including read the material!
So what IS the answer you ask? Well I think the answer is a combination of things but I do want to hear your feedback on the issue. I believe seminars, webinars and tele-seminars with no pitching is a start.
But here’s a problem I see with that: there has to be some type of selling for the teacher’s to stay in business. So what would that look like? We have to have “butts in seats”.(and on the phone and on the web)
BUT (the other butt) - WHAT IF - once they got there the teacher was motivated to actually pour his or her heart out by some type of incentive or follow up?
Please forget about the idea of splitting deals here gang unless you get a personal, one on one mentor. It is fraught with WAY to much legal, accounting and “babysitting” issues. Believe me I’ve tried it over and over and - well – just think 80/20 rule again.
I’ve wasted more of my time and money with PEOPLE I’VE ACTUALLY PAID A SALARY TO TEACH THEM HOW TO BUY HOUSES FROM THIS OFFICE THAT I SUPPLIED THE LEADS FOR! People who professed that they were the ones, they wanted this and they would work hard to learn! Thousands of man hours and hundreds of thousands in wasted leads and LOST deals later I realized that is not the way to go. The people who paid me to learn are today successful.
If you still want this thing –and I certainly think you do
– as the said on the “Six Million Dollar Man” – “we have the technology -
we can rebuild.” We can rebuild this whole industry and as a result you can get what you want and need – the real estate investment education to move your life to the next level of financial freedom.
The educators have the knowledge and experience and you have certainly proven you have the willingness, desire and resources. So let’s put our heads together and figure this thing out. More comments are of course welcomed, expected and awaited.
Be well,
Mike
**LEAVE A COMMENT: Please take a moment to express your opinion about my letter. Simply scroll to the bottom and fill out the comment form to join the discussion.**
Are you as tired as I am of the slimy book and tape salesmen, that haven’t bought or sold a house in the last five years and definitely are not really still in the business today, feeding the poor newbies and the people trying to learn the biz their brand of evangelical sales crap?
Then read this mini-manifesto:
FROM THE DESK OF: Mike Collins
Tuesday 11:32 AM
I really, really wanted to learn how to invest in real estate.
Over twenty five years ago I attended a “free” seminar that the late night television infomercial said would help me do that. On the appointed evening I arrived early and settled in to my seat as other would-be investors gathered in the other chairs and the speaker took the stage.
I still remember to this day how excited I was as the presenter told us his story of rags to riches through real estate investing. I knew right then and there that I could do this thing I had moved 1,237 miles from home to do.
Then about an hour and fifteen minutes into the speech a funny thing happened…
My new best friend then began a process that I had never seen before. He began to sell the REAL education process (or his version of it anyway) which was a very expensive seminar and/or the equally expensive books and tapes. Not only didn’t I have the money for that seminar or those tapes I didn’t even have a credit card to put them on.
Over the next two decades, through basically trial and error, I eventually pieced together the information I needed to become successful in the field but it still bugs me that I couldn’t just go to the only thing I had a frame of reference for: a real class. A class like other places of education where I give them money and they give me education on the topic that I want.
It seems to me that an education system that must sell pitch style just to pay its primary bills must - by virtue of its very survival - have its priorities focused on the wrong things.
The path I had to take was much longer than it needed to be.
I bought sooo… many BAD information products attend so many bogus pitch fests that were supposed to be educational seminars - all just to get the few nuggets I needed to learn my craft. Years wasted, energy wasted and money wasted trying to sift through the book and tape salesmen (and women) so that I could be schooled by true educators who were really still investing in real estate day to day.
Real estate investing education and other topics taught in this fashion are very important topics. I wouldn’t say life and death although some weight loss education may be. Real estate education is certainly financial health or possible financial ruin, if done incorrectly, and possibly even jail or no jail stuff.
The reason I’m telling you this story is because I’ve ALWAYS wondered if it could be different.
Over the years I’ve know and learned from so many quality real estate educators that were terrible salesmen in the “sell stuff from the front of the room” vein. But those guys taught me the most about what I wanted to learn – real estate investing. That’s not to say I haven’t bought quality products from that type of seminar. I absolutely have. But as I think back when I did buy I knew an awful lot about the presenter and the product before I did.
So just how do we fix this? Does it even need fixing?
Is this the best way to disseminate education and information?
I almost gave up on the business of real estate education.
I don’t really need to do it for money. My real estate investments and my ongoing real estate wholesaling business provide a comfortable no stress lifestyle. If you ask the folks in my office you’ll see that I’ve told them being a real estate guru, as that term is used and looked upon today, is not how I want my kids to describe their father at college.
The industry just has a slimy feel to it. Mostly, I believe, it’s a hangover from the years of its evolution during the go-go television years and the late night infomercials. But, still today, lots of that hype and BS has migrated online.
Now don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are real estate gurus. Honest hard working people who are following a passion to help others succeed the way they did. I believe it’s a passion similar to my own - a passion to help others avoid the many pitfalls that made their journey longer and harder. I believe in education of all types. Not just formal education either.
I believe seminar and online education is the most powerful, real world combination out there. Every success I’ve ever had came from some type of seminar or online education. Gosh I wish I could say that about my college degree.
It is my sincere heartfelt belief, backed up by reams of data, that the most recent real estate boom was caused and fueled by the people that had such sincere desire to succeed in real estate investing over the last 25 years that you did what I did.
You weeded through all the crap that passes itself off as real estate investing education and persevered. The fuel for the boom came from you and the seminar industry! Then when the boom began (or did YOU begin the boom!) YOU were all in place and fairly active. Add in all the people that want to “get in while the getting was good” and you have one big real estate boom.
A full 23% of all real estate transactions during that time were considered some type of investment. They were non-owner occupied homes. Contrast that with the average ratio of non-owner occupied transactions and ownership ratios of 12% and you can see a boom in the making.
My problem with all this is the carnage left by the people who got bad information from the over-zealous and admittedly very proficient book and tape sales people. They are still feeling the consequences. We get three calls a day from “investors” who did their first or second deal during the boom and are STILL sitting on it – unable to sell it and upside down as a rental. Those people were done a huge disservice by our industry. I know it’s hard and we can’t be responsible for everyone but can’t we at least ban together and figure out how to get this info out in a more responsible way?
Look, those platform/tele-seminar guys are GOOD! Really good. That is a literal art form. As a student of professional speakers I’m in awe every time I watch one of those good presentations.
…But here’s the rub…
The fuel for the fire (read sales at the seminar or webinar) is absolutely 100% dependent on virgins. Now don’t knock me for my choice of words here because there really is no other term in the English language. Or maybe you like newbies better?
The people that the speakers and promoters need to attract to both the massive hotel pitch fests and the new and more powerful tele-seminars and webinars must be fairly new folks. New to both this style of education and new to the topic of real estate investing in general or, any topic for that matter.
The reason I say that is because most of the people reading this letter/mini-manifesto are NOT virgins to it at all. You’ve been to one or a hundred of these “pitch fests” either in person or over the phone. I’m not telling you anything new here.
We’re in the same boat you and I. You want to move your education forward but you can’t stomach even one more pitch.
So you, like me, do something even worse. You start thinking you know enough to get by and that maybe you don’t need any more education - all because you simply don’t have the time or the extra money to wade through the hucksters to get to the educators.
That’s definitely not the right way to go. One of the first true educators I learned from has a saying: “If you think education is expensive – try ignorance”.
One of the benefits for me in learning about the Internet world was that I knew just how to weed out the hucksters from my years doing it in the real estate space. Can you imagine how long it would have taken me and how long it must take a new person to learn to navigate the world wide web for a profit?
Given that the hucksters and scammers can move so much quicker I just can’t just sit by and watch the beauty and power of the web education business go the way of the real estate education industry. Nor can I, any longer, sit by as the seminar business continues to be ruined as well.
As a group - speakers, promoters and attendees - must draw a line in the sand.
We must ban together and stop this madness. We must have a fee for defined education system for all this rapidly evolving education.
Leave a comment on this post!
Sincerely,
Mike Collins
Founder, PitchFreeSeminar.com
PS: If you have interest in learning about our very special brand of Pitch Free seminars please check our newest one coming up soon: PitchFreeSeminar.com
If you are a real estate speaker or an educator of any kind who agrees with my little rant please comment and share your thoughts and leave a comment!
