This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show for fifty two, I wholeheartedly believe I can take anybody if they have the desire, I can take anybody and train them to be a good salesperson, because what we've done is we've basically engineered sales and sales for most of my career. Most of my life has been an art form. All right. That guy just has charisma. But now that we've learned there's actually a science behind it, you're listening to bigger pockets.

Radio simplifying real estate for investors, large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from bigger pockets. Dotcom, your home for real estate, investing online. What's going on about?

Brian Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. David Jazy Green.

What's up, man? How are you doing?

Is this because I called you a rapper when we were when we were talking there? Yeah, you called me a rapper earlier.

Need to make I said Bradin should wrap it up, but instead of WRP, you wrote rap and I thought I could rap. I could wrap it up. He actually did half the song while first you did. Will Smith said it Will Smith, then I did Fresh Prince of Bel Air. And then you did Eminem. Yes. And then I did Jay-Z. But I think you saw that one. Yeah, I gave up on anyway. What's up, man?

You are in Mexico. That's cool.

I was in Mexico and we recorded a couple of podcasts there and I came back so I could make sure we did it with better Internet. And I thought today's show went awesome. Today's guest is a style. I don't think we brought it up, but he was actually born in a refugee camp and he came in and he's just like exploding all over the real estate game, doing all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, he's killing it like he's got a brokerage title company wholesaling. But what Steve is known for is being a phenomenal sales trainer. And when I say still turn around, talk about specifically is and what we talk about a lot today is how do I, like, get on the phone with a motivated seller and get him to want to sell you their property. Like what? What is that? What does that look like? And so he goes through like in depth, like this is what we say.

This is how we do the mistakes that people make. This is how you keep them on the phone. This is how you get them to commit on the phone call to actually selling a lot of really good stuff today. So you're gonna love that. We ought to go into, like hiring how to build your team partnerships in the hiring section, make sure you listen for is like three, I guess, like qualifying questions. He asks every person when they're hiring them.

Really, really good stuff anyway. How to build rapport and expectations. All the stuff plus just a story is really, really powerful. You're going to love this. Like he got in and had a lot of setbacks in the beginning and then kind of rediscovered real estate later on. So all of that and more today. You're going to hear that. But first, let's get today's quick tip.

All right. Today's quick tip is brought to you by David Green, which means I didn't think of one.

So, David, what are you guys? How did I know that this was coming? Well, lucky for you, I actually did think of a quick tip. We mentioned in the podcast today that it's action that gets people results, just straightforward. The people that have a motor, what we called it, are the ones that tend to be successful. And what are the things that stops people is waiting till they get in the right situation before they actually develop their motor.

There's all kinds of reasons why we don't want to push forward. We don't like feeling stupid. We don't like rejection. Were unsure what to do.

Today's quick tip is look for where you are right now in your life, whatever it is, and ask yourself how you can develop your motor where you are. If you have a job that you don't love, where can you give more and do better? Can you start going to the gym? Or if you are to go to the gym, can you workout harder? If you're reading books, can you focus more when you're reading or can you read more of them?

Whatever you're doing, what habits can you develop right now to do it better so that when your opportunity does come, you're prepared for it?

Yeah, me thinking to think about that later, you can start by being a better friend to me. I will.

I don't think it's humanly possible to be a better friend. You're probably right about that. You've reached the pinnacle of friendship. I got to say, you're an awesome friend. I know I won an award or two for it.

It was it was it was a good award ceremony. Let's get let's get to today's show sponsors. All right, everybody.

So we recently did a whole show about this, the big three roadblocks for new investors. What are they. That's right.

Not enough time, not enough deals and not enough money. Well, the people over rent to retirement, they get it. That's why they offer fully turnkey properties in markets where the numbers actually make sense. Rent, retirements, property. They're already renovated, leased and managed, allowing you to invest with confidence out of state. We're talking about markets like Birmingham or Memphis or Cincinnati. You know, where I actually have bought property.

You can choose from single family and multifamily investments and get this rent to retirement works with a network of lenders who can help you with financing, including private lending and self directed IRA loans. So, look, there's no excuse not to get started when you have the right team and the right systems in place. So that rent to retirement dotcom, that's rent tío retirement dotcom or call this number. Ready, ready. Write this down. One hundred three one one six seven eight one again.

This one in hundred three one one six. Seven, eight, one, and you can find that number and more information about to retirement on the show, not it's bigger Pocket's dotcom SASHO for 12. Here's the thing I love most about realty investing, there's so many different ways to build wealth in this business, like did you know there's a way to invest in real estate that gives you a similar cash flow to rental properties, but without tenants repairs or vacancies?

That's right. I'm talking about real estate not investing. If you want to get started and not investing, you need a check out PPR No company. So Piano Company's founder, co-founder, CEO Dave Van Horn, he literally wrote the book on real estate note investing for Bigger Pockets. And he joined us right here on this show and show 273. You know, since 2007, PPR has managed distressed mortgage investment funds that have bought and sold thousands of residential mortgages nationwide, managed by a team with expertise in real estate, finance, property management and better investing.

They provide investors with passive income for over a decade. If you want to learn more, check out our note COCOM such BP again. If you're looking to supplement your active investing and get a nice return, passively learn more about how to get started today in notes or a diversified note fund at PDPA. Note KO Dotcom slash BP again PPR notes ko dotcom beep. All right.

With that said, let's get into this interview with Steve Trang. I think you guys are going to love this. All right, Steve, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast, man, good to have you here. Thank you for having me. This is such an incredible honor. Well, thanks, man.

This is you're one of those guys that I see your videos all the time on Instagram and on YouTube stuff. You you're everywhere. And I've always thought, man, we should get the guy on the podcast. So I'm pumped to do this today. So why don't we always start with we'll go back to the beginning. How did you even get into the idea of real estate?

You know, I think like a lot of other investors I read, Robert Kiyosaki is rich dad, poor dad. And I said, man, wait, there's another way to develop wealth versus working a nine to five until I'm 55, 60 years old. And so I read the book with my best friends are starting to start investing together. That was a disaster because we started in 2006 and 2007 happened. And along the way, though, I kind of lost track.

I like to call it like the lost years because as I was learning about real estate on the investor side, I learned about the traditional real estate side of being a realtor. It's like, wait, you guys make how much money? What do you guys do? And I said, Oh, I just got to talk to people. I can do that.

And so I left a really well-paying engineering job to become a realtor, and I did that for nine years. And in the process, you being lost. I found my focus again when I started accidentally buying houses as a realtor, the average person.

Listen to the show right now. Let's say they are working a job. Maybe they don't love their job. That's why they're trying to do real estate. They're trying to get into rentals or flip houses or whatever.

Do you not? Do you? But what kind of person would you advise to do kind of what you did, like jump into the real estate agent game as a way to make income until you can get into the investing side? Or do you think that's a bad idea?

I think it depends on the person, you know, because we talk to people right there, say, you know, I want to start buying rentals and ask and tell me what you do. And they tell me about their job. And they might not like their job, but they're getting paid really well.

And I see some of these guys, they'll jump from their job into real estate, whether traditional realtor or wholesaler, to buy rentals. You don't need to do those things to buy rentals. You could do those things because you want to be your own boss. Right. And I was more or less unemployable. Right. And so it made sense for me that transition to be self-employed before I started buying rental properties. But you can jump in the buying rental properties and supplement your income until your passive income taxes exceed your active income and then quit your job.

Right. Just because you drive a soul crushing doesn't mean that you have to quit it. You don't have to.

What kind of person makes a good agent like you? You want a brokerage, right?

I own a brokerage. We have almost a hundred agents. OK, yeah. You've seen a lot of agents come and go. And David, I'm going to fire this at you as well.

But like what personality trait or type or what kind of person should pursue the agent thing? Like who's like, oh yeah, that guy is going to be awesome because he does this or that lady is going to be a killer agent because she's this way.

The most common myth is an extrovert. Right. Extroverts don't necessarily succeed themselves. That's one that I hear all the time. It's like, no, that's not how that works. They're just they're just great marketing billboards for themselves. That's what an extrovert is. So the best people to jump into are are people that will take consistent action, the ones that will go out there and actually do the work that's necessary. Because, you know, believe it or not, real estate's not rocket science.

You know what you need to do? You need to do it every single day. And so anyone that is willing to do the work and feel forward, that's all. That's the only ingredient you need, I believe, to succeed in real estate. That's really good.

Davey, what do you think? Anyone out of that? Yeah, Steve's answer was really good, Steve. That was awesome. I can tell Steve's the kind of guy that just from talking to him right now that does a lot of different things and does them all well. I think, Steve, you probably are one of those guys that just like they throw you in a situation and you figure it out faster than everyone else. And I would imagine you spent a good chunk of time like why is everyone else having a hard time with this?

Right. I know. I could just tell I would say that this is such a good question you're asking, Brandon, because our listeners often they know they love real estate and they're trying to figure out like, where am I going to fit in in this whole thing? And so I bought it out of four reasons. One, if you love real estate, don't become an agent because you want to be an investor. Steve was dead on there, different skill sets there, different end goals.

You're building a different bridge. One hundred percent. But Steve's comment that you should stick with your job if you're making good money is absolutely true. Being an agent is just a different job. You're just you're just exchanging one mean of time for another. So if you can make more money selling houses and you really want to do it, that's one reason. If you don't make good money in your job would be the second reason. Like if you're just you're a truck driver or something and you're just you're capped at what you can do and you wish you could do more being an agent.

There's no ceiling on you. Steve is exactly right. If you take infinite action, you'll get infinite benefit or if you can embrace the fact you're a salesperson, you don't have to be an extrovert, but you do have to understand that you are a sales person. You will be overcoming objections. You will be dealing with people's fears like you're not a transaction manager, like a lot of people think that are just. Oh, just I just want the what paperwork do I need to fill out and I'll do it.

That's not what you're getting paid for.

And then that's what I. It was when I got into it, yes, yeah, I wanted it to be that I was mad when I got there and realized that's not how it worked. And I actually had to listen to people and figure them out. And then the last thing I'd say is, if you come across as trustworthy, if you're a kind of person that people just do not trust, you've you've either lived your life in an unsullied way or there's something else about you that people don't trust your word.

You're going to be banging your head against a brick wall when you're selling someone's house. It's obviously a huge risk that they're taking trusting you when you're helping someone buy a house, it's the same thing. So you do need to have a personality that other people would feel comfortable talking to you. Like you can tell Steve just talking to him right now, like this guy knows his stuff. He open his mouth about ten words. And I could tell he knows a lot.

So but I would also say, Steve, is it fair to say you're probably not a huge extrovert?

I'm not an extrovert, no. I'm an introvert. Naturally, you know, if we were to look at, you know, on a football field about a thirty five forty yard line on the on introvert size, I'm not completely close off, but I'm not out there talking to people.

Brendon, what would you say you are on that football field. Yeah, probably the same. Where would you say I am? I don't know. I think you're more introverted than people think you are.

I yeah, for sure.

I thought you're going to say, like, I never even made it to the end zone or something because you talk well and you're a good agent. So I think people would assume you're naturally like out there and you're extroverted.

But yeah. Now. All right, Steve, I want to go back to your story a little bit. You said 06, 07 was you said I think the word you used was disaster. What happened and why when you first started in.

Right. Everything's always going to work out. Well, that's us. That's the entrepreneur thought process. Like, I'm going to do this, I'm going to crush you, and then I'm going to do this. I'm going to crush that. Right.

It's just everything is going to work out well in reality. You know, we had the whole a recession, you know, the big recession. And this is me with my irrational confidence, which is a strength and a weakness is that I'll figure it out and I'm going to succeed no matter what. But I didn't. I racked up massive credit card debt, almost lost my house to foreclosure. The D word was thrown around a lot during the marriage right at that time.

You know, we're still happily married, but it was thrown around so that the crisis said a lot of people back.

But we lost one property to foreclosure, one property. We did a short sale on which we would have waited just a few more months. It wouldn't have been because that's when the market did this and we had no idea that was coming.

But, yeah, the I would say the biggest thing was jumping into real estate as a realtor and expecting to just crush it. You know, that's the mindset and being humbled. That was that was a very humbling time.

Yeah, well, thanks for sharing that. I know that it is tempting to just as an entrepreneur, to think things are always going to be good and they're always going to be great.

Do you mind if I jump in here before we move on with his story? Steve, I just want to know if we can dive a little deeper into how you because a lot of people out there listening to this are like, that's me. I got that PTSD from what happened before. Can you share how it affected your psyche, like what emotions you experience that you think might be different than someone like me that stepped in in two thousand nine and I just wrote an elevator all the way up.

I would say it definitely tested the fortitude. And again, you know, my whole life, I've always had irrational confidence. My friends always joked about it. I was the guy that would walk into the hottest girl in the club and just, you know, start talking even though I'm an introvert. Right. I got no fear. Right. But it definitely tested self-confidence. What you knew about yourself. And when I left Intel, they tried to keep me.

And when I when I was like, you know, it's not going to work. I'm leaving. They said, well, the door is always open. So in two thousand nine, I actually went back and I'm like, yeah, the door was open, but we have no opportunities to hire.

I know. And at that point, I'm really grateful for that because that's when the bridge was finally burned, you know, like the whole time was operating. It's like, you know, there's an opening. I can always go back in 2009 when I say, hey, we'd love to have you back. We would all love to have you back. We can't have you back. Right. The company is flat out not hiring. And so that was really helpful for me.

So it tested my, you know, my resolve. And then when I went back and get get that rejection from Intel, I'm actually grateful for that because that made me dig even deeper to to make this happen to to succeed in real estate. And that's back when I finally got my Aristocats, you know, listing properties for like Wells Fargo, Fannie Mae, Chase Bank and and and those other accounts.

OK, so you worked the agent thing for a while and then you said you rediscovered investing. So how did how did that happen? Like what you find?

I was being creative. I was learning direct response marketing. And I was thinking, OK, I need listings. Right. That the bank foreclosures, the banks aren't handing out any more listings. I need listings. And so I went back to what I knew, which was direct response marketing when Google paper click. So I learned it. I taught it, taught myself it. So I started advertising to get sellers. And at this time I had your home loan guarantee or will buy it.

And what happened was I would go to these people's appointments and they're like, well, we want you to buy my house like, no, you don't want me to buy your house. Like, look, here's the thing.

If I listed, here's how much you're going to walk away with. If we do a cash offer, here's what you're going to walk away with.

And the. I've got a couple of things, and then the guy is like, yeah, no, I want the cash, I feel like, no, you don't let me explain it again. And so I took a cash offer, so I bought that house a contract. I wanted my car. I got a contract, bought the house, call my wife on the way home, say, hey, honey, we just bought a house. And then I called my dad's like, Hey, Dad, do you have money?

Because we just bought a house. So that was the first time I got a couple more listings, you know, with the with paper click marketing, buy my house, sell my house fast, whatever. And then we bought another house and then I said, OK, there's something here. You know, I've heard of wholesaling. I thought it was a fad. But people genuinely are willing to sell their house a steep discount if you can close fast.

And so we bought a couple as flips and then kept working and we ran out of money. And that's when I actually had to actively wholesale I.

So explain explain for those who don't know what is wholesaling and like why is it why is it a good idea and why is it a sometimes bad idea that throw both wholesaling.

It's just arbitrage. Right. You're no different than when you're going as a as Best Buy to buy refrigerator directly from GE and then selling on retail. I guess the difference is you would sell it to somebody before the end retail buyer bought it. But all you're doing is arbitraging is no different than insurance or you're buying a used car and then flipping that used car to another person on Craigslist. You're just selling the rights to a contract for wholesaling. So you're buying from a seller and you're selling to either a buy and hold investor or a flipper and you're pocketing the difference.

You're never closing on it. You're never on title. You're just selling the rights to a contract. In a lot of ways, it's very similar to acting like a listing agent, but it's different because you're not selling the house. You're selling the rights to a contract that's all.

Selling the great things about it is you can generate a lot of active income and a relatively short period of time.

The bad things about it is you better know what you're doing because you're putting people's faith in you. One of the things that we see, unfortunately, from time to time on the selling side is people contracting properties and they're not able to perform on it. And you got this home owner that's been relying, hoping, possibly praying that you're going to come through and you let them down. So that's the downside. And, you know, there's a lot of grief, you know, that people are you know, I'm saying I've been putting this message out more and they're not liking it.

But I look at it no different than the listing agent that's willing to take an overpriced listing. You know, that guy that says, like, your house is worth three hundred. But yes, I lost it for three fifty and instilling all this false hope and somebody instead of telling them the truth and give them the reality that they need at that time.

So the downside of wholesaling is there are some some bad actors, not that many, but there's enough.

And it causes problems for the guys that are trying to do a good job out there wholesale, going to have a bad name and maybe it's deserved sometimes is there is a lot of holes that are just super unscrupulous. That's the word. Or there is a super new and fresh. They don't know what they're doing. They just go put random properties under contract that they then can't. Yeah, it just it just gives it a bad name.

Well, let's clarify real quickly what we're talking about. What we're referring to is when you say, hey, I will buy your house on these terms and your intention is to go with sign that contract to somebody else in the event that you cannot find someone else to assign it to. There's usually something written in there that gives you an out a contingency. It allows you to back out of the contract. And because you're not acting in the capacity of a fiduciary when you're wholesaling, you don't have to actually spell that out for the person who's signing it, the homeowner.

You could just throw it in there. They sign it. Now, that's completely legal, but they often trust you as if you're an agent and maybe they know that you could be an agent. And that's what a lot of wholesalers will do, is they'll say, I will buy your house. They will go to offload it. They can't find anyone. Oops, sorry I didn't do it. And this whole person's life is now screwed. They may have been planning on moving.

They maybe stop paying some of their bills because they thought they were leaving and now they can't. And I really like that. You're calling attention to that Steve, because that's the type of behavior that gives real estate investors in general a bad name.

Most people are good operators, but man, those bad ones, they make it to the front page of newspapers. Yeah, very much so.

And plus, just for everyone's like knowledge out there, there are some states that are much more anti wholesaling than other states. So make sure you guys know the laws of your state. What's allowed there. You know, you can learn a lot of that just by Googling or spend some time in the bigger pockets forums. You'll find that again, some states are. And and there's ways to do it in those states. There's ways not to do it.

There's illegal ways to do it. The whole thing is, yeah, it's a super fascinating way to make money. And I mean, there's been some Holstead we've had on the show who are bringing in hundreds of thousands a month and wholesale fees. It's just insane. Right. But the key is then they are just really good at finding properties. They're really good at finding great deals. And the better deal you find, the bigger fee you can then extract.

And so what were you doing to find deals then? Was it just that paper clip stuff with Google? What were you doing then and then how did that kind of evolve?

So at that time I was doing strictly pay per click and that worked really well. I got into really early. There wasn't that that much competition, you know, in Phoenix was really John Terry was our major competition. And he's a big deal, right? And so I did that, and that worked really well into the I kind of started, you know, puffing their chest and that kind of screwed up a lot of my opportunities as on paperclips side.

So not recently. What we're doing more is direct mail. We've been doing more TV advertising on TV. So right now those are our top two sources, which is very different than just a year and a half ago when I was predominantly cold calling and texting.

It's funny how it changes. Like I talked to somebody recently who told me, yeah, you know, we were doing direct mail marketing and and radio and we just it's dried up now. We're doing cold calling and texting is working really well. It's funny how different areas tend to like move in these different patterns where it gets oversaturated in one area and then it moves to then move to another. So I guess the lesson there is just like test a lot of stuff, figure out what's working in your market and test and surround yourself with really successful people.

So. All right. So I want to talk TV commercial. That's cool. What's that? Are you the guy in the TV thing or.

You know, I'm not. So so we were in Albuquerque. We just pulled out. And then right now we're on in Phoenix on television, Telemundo and Univision. OK, so my business partner Maximon is you know, he runs our whole holds on the company and he's the he's the face because on Spanish radio, Max looks a lot more like our target audience than I do. And so so, yeah, Max is on the show and on the commercial and he's exciting.

He's awesome. And he's really I'm incredibly blessed to have him as a business partner. He's the one that makes the whole operation run because I'm not heavily involved in the whole selling side. Max is responsible for it and he just knocks out of the park. But he's the face. That's awesome.

Yeah, I've always toyed with doing the TV commercials or maybe start with radio. I don't know. I think that radio would be fun.

Steve, what is it about your partner that you feel makes him knock it out of the park? He's a grinder. You know, he's he's got it. You know, Dan Sullivan, I believe he was on your show. He talks about people you want to hire, people we want to hire, the ones that come with batteries included. Right. They're just going they've got a motor. They don't need to be pulled along like the most. The people that are exhausting to work with are the ones you got to pull along, Max.

Going to keep pushing forward. And he's going to make me uncomfortable with how much we're pushing forward. And that's what I want. Right. Let's make a mess. We'll figure it out. And so that's Max. And he's always pushing forward. And that's that's why I know he's successful. That goes back to that comment I made earlier about successful realtor. Someone is going to feel for it. It's going to always just moving in the right direction.

It came in the wrong direction. But you can correct to the right direction as long as you're moving. So I want to get your opinion on this, Steve.

One thing that I've told agents when they work with me, and this doesn't just apply to agents, this is anytime somebody wants to work with somebody else, like, hey, can I join your wholesaling business? I want to intern for you, but you're looking for is that motor.

And what I've said is that if you're if you've got a motor that wants to go really fast, I can keep you on the track. I will teach you how to handle that car. This is how you handle the different things that come up. This is how you drive. I won't let you crash, but I don't want to get behind that car and push it because you're afraid to go or you don't want to go. Is that a similar feeling to how you get.

Exactly. And that that is the one single, I think, strong the strongest determining factor in success is the one that's going to move forward and then one that's going to be chilling on the sidelines or waiting for somebody else to make them want to take action or make them want to do something.

Brandon and I talk a lot about how important momentum is in life. And what we'll tell people is you need to start going somewhere because you can change direction once you have momentum, much easier than waiting until you know exactly where you want to go to get started. So I'm glad to hear that that's been a similar experience for you.

If I if I could bring back what you said earlier to about, you know, why what kind of agent become successful.

It's that agent, right. That that is not rocket science. And real estate investing is not real estate agent stuff is not owning five guys. Burger place is not like. No, like business is fairly simple in most cases. It is. It's more about are you doing those things you know, you need to do. And so here's a question I just throw out. Everybody listening is like, are you doing if you're like listening right now, go, oh, yeah, that's me.

That's that's definitely me. I always I'm I'm that guy. If I was in real estate or if I had a bunch of rentals, if I was an agent, I'd definitely do everything I said I'm going to do. I would just ask the question like, are you doing it in all areas your life, like the little areas of your life? Like are you are you getting up when you set that alarm or are you hitting the snooze button twelve times?

Like, are you doing your dishes after you eat, after you eat dinner? Do you let them pile up for a week at a time? Like when you when you tell your kids are going to go play with them later, do you go play with them later? So it's like either you are or aren't a person who just does this stuff repeatedly. And a lot of times when people I'm sure people right now listening going, oh, man, like I have not I have not proven myself as somebody who does that.

But the good news is we can change at any point. Right. Like you can just make that decision. Absolutely. Yeah. I am now somebody who does what they say they're going to do, even the little things, you know, come in.

Hey, let's take a quick break from this episode. We'll continue in just a moment. But first, let's hear a word from our sponsors.

Managing rental properties can be tough, stressful and caused you to lose sleep at night. But did you know it could be easy with rent ready? Rent ready is the perfect proper. Management software that can help you fill your vacancies faster, find better tenants and collect rent more easily and even better, maybe even get a good night's sleep with rent ready, you get one flat affordable price for all your units and tenants.

That means they're not going to charge you more. As you grow, the price stays the same, whether you have three doors, four doors or 50 doors. It's also an easy number to work into your cash flow. And we hope this puts a little spring in your step. They're giving away our listeners 50 percent off any rent ready plan using our special code BPE Spring, get 50 percent off any rent ready plan when you sign up using our code BPE Spring at rent ready dotcom.

That's rent ready. Oriente R.E.D. I dotcom using code BPE Spring as BP like bigger pockets spring like the season for 50 percent off any rent ready plan.

If you have thirty minutes free, you never have to worry about a break in at home ever again. That is how quick and easy it is to set up a security system with simply safe. It's the kind of thing that is so easy to do. You can do it during a Netflix binge, watching the game or listening to a certain podcast I personally love simply because I don't like to be locked into long term contracts or spend a bunch of time and money setting things up simply safe is incredibly easy to customize for your home.

Just go to simply safe dotcom sites pockets. You can easily choose the exact sensors you need or get help from one of their experts. And we'll get to your house in about a week, which means by this time next week, you and your whole family can go to bed knowing your home is being guarded. It's easy to assume everyone in your house already feels safe, but they might not. And it's worthwhile to talk about. And simply safe is a small, easy step to make sure everyone feels safe at home.

Going to simply safe dotcom stocks pockets today to customize your system and get a free security camera that simply safe, as I imply, safe dotcom pockets. All right. Well, let's go back to your story. So what happened next? I know now today kind of bring us up to where you're at today, maybe. I know today you do a lot of sales training. You teach a lot of people how to do this stuff. But what's kind of your overall business life look like today?

I'll start with life because that's my favorite part. So I got three beautiful girls. They challenge and test me every single day, but I love them to pieces. And I got an amazing wife, three, four, eight and nine. She just had a birthday a couple weeks ago for you and I said, yes, I love the pieces. I've got a wife who is every bit as committed as I am. So I could not be more grateful than that because I know that's some challenge that some entrepreneurs have is a wife that's not as supportive.

So I'm incredibly blessed to have that. And for me, my goal is to work less than forty five hours a week. You know, with all the businesses I run, my intent is to work less than forty five hours per week. And so as far as businesses go, you know, I got the brokerage, I got I own a title company, I got a podcast, got sales training, we got the wholesaling company. And I'm sure there's something else out there as well.

Oh, we have our app, you know, for creating an aftermarket MLS. But yeah, I just I got all these different companies. And the coolest thing is and all these different companies I've got is that there's someone in charge that's making a function at a high level that's not dependent on me because the one joke is a bad joke. Right. But I say like we're waiting on Steve, then it's just not going to get done.

So let's say the exact same thing about my life. So. So you basically are I see you then as like to use terminology from like traction or iOS, like you're the visionary. It sounds like you're in the vision. This is where we're headed and you've got integrators that are set up to run each of these things.

Yeah, we've got integrators for each each company. Exactly how I'm trying to do this as well. That's awesome. What have you found? Has been working with that. And where have you struggled with that over the last few years as you've built this kind of empire?

What's worked really well is just having regular meetings and everyone hates meetings. Meetings suck. All right. But for me, having a regular meeting that I'm committed to, and that's one of the hardest thing as an entrepreneur, because most entrepreneurs are drivers and they don't want to sit down for a meeting. It's like do it like I don't have time for it. Figure it out. Let me know what happens and reality. The meetings, the reason why we're able to have so much success, because we have so many meetings, they got to be efficient meetings.

They can't be time wasters. I'm terribly impatient. It was a time wasting meeting. So I think that's the most important thing. And then the most challenging thing is you got to remember, you know, we're all people. We're imperfect. We've got we've got emotions. We've got things happening at home. Life happens. Right. So that's the most challenging thing. But that's just reality.

So you can't do anything about that advice for people that are dealing with the entrepreneur or the driver, like you're saying, that often don't understand. If they rely on you, it's never going to get done. So I have a feeling you're looking for people around you to step up and say, I'll take this off his plate because it would be easier. And maybe you give them the training and the resources and the ability to do it, give them all the resources.

There you go.

This is what's odd is people like you are saying, look, I have this bounty, this cornucopia of resources to give to you. And you're looking for someone who's like, I need this stuff so I can go put into place. And so many of these people are waiting for someone to tell them, you have permission to go do something, you have permission to go. Have you noticed a similar like just a miss in your business?

There were a lot of hires I made that were the wrong hires. And unfortunately, being a business owner, again, the optimism, I just think everyone's going. Awesome at their job, like this person is going to change my business, right? And unfortunately, you're wrong way more than you're right on that category. But, you know, that's just part of the experience of having and having a business. You know, you got people that interview really good and they just blow it.

You know, other people like, I don't know, but let's give this guy a shot and they crush it. Right. And so all you can really do is, you know, we we filter as best we can. We interview the best we can. And at the end, you'll find out once you put was it once the rubber hits the road?

At the end of the day, that's the ultimate test. That's when you'll find out what you've got.

So what about advice for those people that want to work for someone like you that don't quite understand what it takes to be successful, but they know they want to?

Yeah. So we got people that DM me all the time like, hey, I work for you, I'll even work for you for free. And I know I don't want free interns. Right. So anyone that says I want to work from wants to work for me, I encourage them to do whatever they want to work for. But anyone that demands me, I just send them to my integrator. All right. Here's a potential candidate. Go interview them, see if they have what we're looking for and what we're looking for isn't necessarily like if it doesn't fit for us.

We're not saying you're a bad person. It just doesn't fit our business model because there's a bunch of different ways, a bunch of different models, much different business owners. There's no right business model, but someone doesn't fit in our culture is because it wasn't a good fit with us.

You know, Michael Gerber from the Emet talks a lot about like you're building a machine like a business of the machine. Right. And there's this cog moves into this cog and this lever moves this device here. Right. And so a great run business is run. That is just a very well oiled machine.

And so what I never really thought about before and this kind of picture that like the piece in the machine, like you can't take a six wheel cog and put in a seven wheel cog or seven cog wheel. Right. I got, I don't know, machines, but it just wouldn't it would not work. The entire machine would fail if you don't have the perfectly right part in there, which so what you're saying is that it's not that you're a bad person or even that you're anything, anything whatsoever negative, which is our machine has a spot that we need a six peg cog thing, whatever.

Like it has to be that piece there. And I really like that way of kind of thinking. And so as we're trying to build these machines, these, you know, and I mean that even if somebody's trying to build their very first get their very first duplex on a contract where everybody in the beginning gets a machine, you're building like, who's the agent? Who's the lender? All these things, a property manager have to work with each other in the right way.

So just kind of think that like it's not you, it's not going to have a have a it's not good enough to have a mostly good employee or a mostly good partner. My agent's pretty good. He's all right. That good that Congress is going to muck up your entire engine.

Yeah, you're going to get frustrated now. You've got to be in love with them. It's what we learn from from Darren. How is it? Was that a hell?

Yeah, it's a hell, no. Yeah, it's so important.

So what have you found? Worked for hiring. Like we're what kind of, I guess tricks do you have or is it just you just run a lot of people through the funnel and try to find that person. Like what? What's your kind of secret to hiring?

One of the things that we use is, is for a super basic like ten bucks a month. But what we have in there is we look back one day and we said, OK, what are the things that frustrate us? And it's the ones that don't understand the value of coming to the office every day that seems to think that trainings and meetings are optional and don't seem to understand that prospecting is a muscle that you require to be successful in this business.

So we've actually updated our job form. Was this these three drag downs which which says, I understand I need to be in office five days a week. I understand that all meetings and trainings are mandatory and I understand that as required for me to prospect three hours per day. And if you don't hit yes. And all three, then we don't we don't even interview you. Now, let's say you hit yes. In all three. Then we send you to your predictive index, which is kind of like a disk profile test.

And from there, we kind of see, you know, what your drivers are, you know, whether you're a dominant person, social, whatever, process oriented. We'll figure that out and then we'll look at the overall picture and see, OK, is this person that is worth bringing in and then if they're worth bringing in and we'll screen them. Right. And we have 10 simple questions for screening. And then for the interview, we run The Who model, which is written by Jeff Smart.

So we use that model for for interviewing. And then the last thing we do is before we'll make them an offer as we do field testing, hit the phones. I don't care how good you sound in the interview. Let's see how good you sound on the phones. And at that point we'll make an offer.

Yeah, that field testing is so, so important because you said earlier people can interview well and then they're just complete, you know, like horrible employee to work with the. I love that you first of all, you like you do that like answer these two questions are going to be I bet you a lot of people go to fill out your application or they're applying for you and they immediately just go, oh, no, not the right culture fit for me, not the right company, but just like I get half of my way right there.

Well, because you get hundreds of. Amaze in your email and what do you do with that? We had a job position we opened. I don't know this a year ago now with 700 people apply for it. But in there, it was like we said something like just reply or reply with an email, with the subject, line this and then do like it was like a simple thing. And like six hundred of them didn't do that. And like so it just just a lesson to everybody out there.

If you're trying to get a position like working for a real estate investor or any job whatsoever, I mean, like the bar is fairly low for just get it in the first round of, like, interviews, because, like, most people can't even do the simplest thing. There's like job opening fire off a quick resume. They don't even read the job descriptions. It's amazing.

What's brilliant is you're forcing people to get on the same page with you, with that, with expectations before you even start. There's no investment made. And that's if I'm being honest with myself. Like literally every single relationship that has ever gone sour in any way could be boiled down to most expectations. It is so easy to do it. It's so hard to get it right. But that's what everything lands on. And you learn this when you're in real estate because you're dealing with people that own homes, that don't understand all the things that go into it.

And where every mistake is made is they had an expectation that you didn't meet or you had an expectation that they didn't meet. So just getting that out of the way up front, this is what you're agreeing to do that solves that problem. And many people that that would have been a problem for them because they weren't going to meet your expectations will actually change their own mind and say, oh, well, that's what it's going to do when they walk in the door with the right mindset because you set that path for him.

Would you mind sharing with those three things are again, I understand that I need to be in office five days a week. I understand that I need the prospect three hours a day. And I understand that meetings and training are mandatory. And I've had some people ask like, is that can you do that? You know, ten, ninety nine. And the important thing is we're not saying it to be in this seat at this time. Yeah. We're just saying you need to be in the office.

Make sense.

Let's talk about what these people are doing. They're prospecting. What does that mean? The prospect? What do you what do you mean by that?

So they're cold calling. They're cold calling the same list that everyone else is cold calling in the Phoenix market. And they're calling distressed homeowners saying they're interested in selling. And then there's also some follow up there as well. But it's predominantly prospecting.

And this is what you now I know you you have a book out there on sales and you do a lot of sales training. So I thought maybe we'd spend a few times. I mean, as long as we got you. Let's pick your brain on. What do you what are you teaching people? I mean, what what let's at the beginning, if I want to start cold calling, I was out prospecting. Hmm. What do I do?

Like, I'm brand new. Never done this before. What do I do?

So the first thing you got to do is you have to get rid of everything you've ever learned about quickly. And so one of the things that you guys hear this you guys get these calls from these people, right? Has your mom ever called you and ask, is Mr. Turner there? No. OK, one of the things we have is we got to do is we got to get out of this so and so there. And so what we do is I just call you like I'm like, we're friends.

Hey, Brandon. And you're going and you're going to pause. And Tony Robbins causes a pattern interrupt. And what's going to happen is like, oh, this person knows who I am. I better pay attention. And the experience we're looking for is I just want you to imagine the last time you were at the supermarket or at the mall and someone walked up to you with a big, bright face like, Hey, Brandon, how are you doing?

And your mind, you're like, it happened yesterday.

Yeah. The church lady is like, Oh, hi, how are you? I was like, I'm good. She's like Brandon. Yeah, she knew my name. And I, I have never talked to that lady.

I don't know who she is. It was the experience we're looking for. Yeah. So hey Brandon, you're like, oh, I better pay attention and then I'm going to call us and we can continue conversation. Hey, Brandon. Well, you know, my name is Steve Trainmen, real estate investor. Probably got you the bad time. And the reason why is because every real estate training or sales training is like, you know, is now a good time or is now a bad time?

That's the general sales training, which it works. But those are. Yes, no question. You generally get hung up on. So I say it probably comes at a bad time and you're going to say, well, well, you know, like what's what's this about? And then I'm going to start my high pitch, then I'm going to start the conversation. But what I've done is I've bought some time to have more conversations versus hi, is this Mr.

Turner? My name is Steve. Have you thought about selling your home? I mean, it's a click either on that first question or the second question. I just want to get past those two check points and then we can have a real conversation.

What are the mistakes that most newbies kind of make is I mean, it's really like they they just ask the questions like that. I mean, like, do you see other things that are very common?

They ask those questions, how are you doing today? Is now a good time? Oh, I hate. Yeah I hate. How are you doing today. Yeah.

Right. Like do you really care. Because if it's a yes then they can't wait to tell you how awesome their day has been. You know, I got to do my yoga. I got from my parents this and that which is not conducive to, to income or if it's a bad times, like where do you go from here? You know, my grandmother passed away. I'm still recovering. Where do you go from that conversation? So the point is we don't ask, how are you doing today?

We just asked them. You got your home. One, two, three, Main Street. I don't suppose you've ever thought about selling it. I said, well. Maybe and then once we hear that possibility, then we'll have that conversation, but like no real interest in selling it. OK, great then. Didn't think so. And we just kind of move on.

I've noticed a couple of times here you phrased it in kind of a negative way. Is that on purpose for you're saying like, oh, probably got you in a bad time. You don't want to sell? Yeah, absolutely.

Because I would imagine all of us here and most people listening hate being told there's something that we can't do. Like best way to motivate me is tell me I can't do it and I will go prove you wrong. And so we always tell them, you know, probably catch at a bad time and interested in selling. Well, that will be a conversation starter versus. Are you interested in selling your home? No.

Click It feels good to say no, especially to a cold caller. So as if the no, it actually gets you what you want.

It's just to protect your ego because your feelings aren't hurt. They didn't reject you.

That's really good. It's similar when I'm when I would look for partners back in the day, like when I was like I got that kind of style. Do it today to the line I would always use is like I'm I'm looking for a whatever. I'm trying to buy this duplex. I'm looking for somebody who can bring the down payment. I would say you don't know anybody who would be interested in that, do you? And it was it was a way and it's not quite a negative.

But what I was doing, I was I was making it so that they could easily say, well, actually, I might be interested. Right. I took it off of a direct asking of them to a kind of a side. I was asking if they knew anybody and they got their money. And every time they answer, well, I might be interested. And it worked really, really well like that.

So I think that's a big component to people that are trying to get started and they're not sure what to do. It feel so awkward when you just fumble your way through there and then once you figure out a semi natural way to do it, it goes from being horribly awkward to not that bad.

And for the new people, they think it's going to be that awkward every time they're like going to make one hundred phone calls that are this painful, but it doesn't. You slowly figure it out. You start picking up these little things that Steve said like, well, if I say it this way, I make it easy to slam the door in my face. I say it this way. I buy myself another couple of minutes. I know the few times that I did it, I would rush through the initial intro, Hey, this is David Greene.

The killer waves like nobody wants to hear that. And I would slow down right when I got to the point of, hey, we just listed a house right across the street from you over there on on spruce. And now there's much like, oh, yeah, I know that street. What's what's going on? What's the house for? And once I figured that out, those calls became much less painful. I just pushed through the fast the awkward part, and you start learning how to build that rapport.

So would you mind sharing a couple other, like, pieces of advice for what you do psychologically to increase your conversion, but make it less like you said, the rejection isn't as bad?

Yeah. So Brandon mentioned earlier. Is that is that take away? We're negative. We're telling them how they can't help us, you know, so, you know, probably got a bad time. And I understand selling that property. I think the biggest thing is that awkwardness that you just pointed out. And awkwardness is one of those things that it's a muscle. It's a you got to develop that callus because it's awkward as heck the way we talk.

It's not a natural talking style. But what happens is when you make those awkward statements like you print out, you know, I'm looking to get this property funny. I don't know anyone that's interested in investing in this and then they can't wait to jump in. The other thing I would say is you get the best exercise for this in trying to get them to use awkward silence, to get someone to communicate their thoughts more. And just think about the last time you had a conversation and someone was saying something and you need the word but was coming.

You just knew it. You were just waiting for it instead of saying, but say the word. And and when we say and they all keep talking and they'll finish their stream of thought so and is when I use a lot because is when I use a lot they'll say something and I'll say because and they'll just keep talking, they'll finish their thought. And then the ones that my my partner Max, he uses all the time so much that he almost got thrown off his car by his wife is which means, you know, they'll say something which means and then they'll continue that thought and give you more information.

And when we're in sales, it's a game of intelligence right now, how smart you are, how much intelligence you gain from the other side. And so we deliberately do not talk very much. And by not talking very much, it forces the other person to talk. But if they're talking, guess what? They feel heard, they feel listened to, they feel appreciated. And if you can deal with a prospect who feels hard listening, appreciate it.

Are they going to do business with you versus the sales guy? They're going to talk over them, talk over, talk over them, waiting to get the word and waiting for someone to finish a statement so they can jump in interject, which means with that that like the right way is exactly it.

All right. I really like that.

Which means or and that's that's good. Yeah. If you get people talking to me a lot better. So what do you do if they say no, I mean like no, I don't want to tell or no, I haven't thought about telling you just. OK, thanks.

Yeah I didn't think so. And you probably don't have any other rental properties or pieces of land you've thought about selling. No. Got it. And you don't know anyone that's. Possibly think about selling property, no, great, have a great day. Do you have a follow up after that that we just move on?

Yeah, there's no interest there, but your ego didn't get smashed because if you say, would you sell your property to me? No, he just you get a little deflated. Do you have another property you might sell to me? No. Oh, and you're just like digging deep to try to put yourself out there. I like the way you said that. What are the ways that I'll do that is when I'm when I'm saying, hey, I'm looking for a person who would be good at doing something that I want to hire someone for.

Right. Do you know anyone would be a great loan officer that would be wanting to make around three hundred thousand dollars a year to do this and that?

And they're thinking, I would want that. But that's so much better than if I say, do you want it? They're like, no, I like my job. Yep. Hit them from the side. Yeah. Yeah. And the other piece was that you're capitalizing on moments in the conversation, so you get you're slowly building that up. You're getting a couple of easy answers and then they answer and then you say and that means and it just keeps that momentum going as opposed to what we said earlier, trying to start from scratch with a new conversation every time.

That's very smooth. I see how you picked up all those girls at the club.

Steve, you're giving us your secrets. And I was an engineer back in those days.

You but I don't know anybody who'd want to buy you a drink do that, but I don't know anyone who'd want to drink for me. Right. Do you know anyone who might want a free drink right now out a really good conversation.

That's funny. All right. So what are what are the tips you got for people? Obviously, you you've written tons of stuff on this. You've got a book on it. You've got training. But now one of the things can help people if they're just they're afraid to cold call, but they know that they need to get that first deal. What should they do?

An exercise that we've done in our training program is and you know, so bear with me. I'm going to kind of explain it versus doing it, you know, on a spreadsheet. But if you just think about any time you get whether it's an assignment fee or a commission or a deal, whatever, there's a there's a value associated with it.

So, you know, just take for for example, in wholesaling, you know, fifteen thousand dollars is a pretty common assignment fee. And so we celebrate the. Yes. Like we get a yes, we get a contract. We're excited. Right. So every closing is about fifteen thousand. But we also know that you don't close every single deal. So really, we know it takes about two contracts to cash a check. So then we know really we've got to get to contracts to get that fee.

And then we do the math, say, OK, well, we don't get to contract. How many points do we need? We need about six appointments. OK, so we know we need six appointments, OK, to get six appointments. How many conversations we need to have. OK, maybe 60. All right. We'll have sixty conversations. How many cold calls we need to have. About six hundred, OK, but what do we know now when we do the math, it works out.

It's about two dollars and fifty cents per call per dial, you making two dollars to 50 cents per dial. And let's just say we're we're fluffing a little bit. The numbers are a little off. Let's just say it's a dollar per dial. Could you slam on sixty dollars per hour? That's a six figure job. If you could slam out sixty dollars per hour, that's a six figure job. Right. So that's the mindset you got to go in.

So people are always, you know, I hate rejection, hate rejection. And they celebrate the yesses in our team. We celebrate rejection. So whoever gets the most rejections in the week gets a free lunch of their choice. Oh, no, I love that, because now we know whoever gets the most rejection is going to get the most contracts. But instead of focusing on contracts or focusing on rejections, that's so good.

What we're doing is you're taking it from a results oriented goal into a process oriented goal. So rather than I'm going to lose 20 pounds, it's I'm going to eat two thousand calories a day. I'm going to work out five days a week. That's genius. I love it. And I love how. Yeah, it takes a lot of the emotion, the sadness of, oh, I've been working at this for a while and haven't gotten anything yet this week.

Well did you make your calls like you can kind of reverse engineer success then. A lot of ways I like to say like like success shouldn't be a surprise. You're like, wow, I got four deals this week. Well, yeah, I did for ten more calls and I did last week.

If we teach a bigger pockets all the time with the laps, final laps, you got to get leads that come in. You got to analyze them, you got to pursue them. So make an offer and at the bottom success, you're going to get success on some of them. And so if you want to like you want more deals, just open up a little more, get more leads, analyze more, make more offers or pursue more. If you want less, then do less.

It's not rocket science. But to go back to what you said at the beginning, like this isn't rocket science.

It's just it's just knowing what you got to do in the end actually doing it. Hmm. So good. A couple more questions on this topic. First of all, where where do you recommend people get like who should they be calling? Who where do you get these lists from?

So there's distressed homeowners. So there's a few different places you can go pull the best data as directly from the county. All right. It's kind of hard right now with covid, but the best that is going to be from the county. And then you got Prop Stream was, which is a big company, Bash leads. That's who we use. And then after you get the list and it doesn't really matter what list I know almost like this list, that list.

What's the best list? At the end of the day, it's the activity that generates the income. Right. And so but if you're going to if you're going to skip trace it, you know, we have our own skip tracing partnership with Skip Face.com so we can skip trace that data and then you call it. And once you're calling it, then we use the scripts we just talked about. But as far as the the list best is from the county directly, whether it's probate, divorce, whatever, pre foreclosure.

But if you're going to pull it, you're going to pull it from a service provider. There's prop stream in this batch.

It's one of my guys out here in Maui has been cold calling lately, one of my team members, and he's finding that he told me that most of his calls just get they just ring forever. Like the number like it's almost like they're not a real number. Like they don't go to voicemail this ring and ring ring or they're just a dead number. Like where you get do you find a lot of that? Do you have a way of screening out all the crap numbers first, that you're only getting people who are like you're legitimately talking to them.

So when we get the numbers, I think it depends on the on the the data provider. And I think that is so important. You know, if you're spending money or resources getting the list, we see some people, they try to skip trace with a cheaper price product, which I understand because I was I was at that point, too, right. At one point. So I get that. The other thing the other mistake I see sometimes, which is that doesn't answer your question.

I apologize. It's still higher voice, you know, from the Philippines is they can hire these guys up to four dollars an hour, which I understand as well. But what happens is you spent this time and energy to get distressed homeowners and then you might ship out on the rest of the process. And it doesn't matter if you've got this beautiful Ferrari, if you're putting eighty seven and the gas in the gas tank. Right. And so I think that's something that I don't know what skip tracing provider use might maybe look at that or it could just be maybe no one answers the phone in that region.

Maybe they're tired or getting cold call. I mean, that's happens. That happens too.

Yeah, it's very possible. I'm not even sure where he got the list from. He's not doing it from his uniform himself. He's one of my uh. He's awesome, but he's.

Yeah, I don't know. It's it's interesting what I talk to him about doing. Well, maybe you can hire somebody. I think he I think he actually did this hire a VA not to talk to anybody because he knew he needed to talk to them. They have to understand Maui. But just like at least call the list down like it like if it goes to a busy signal or there's it's a you know, this number is no longer connected.

Fine. Like, get those out if you want to pay somebody two dollars an hour for that. But don't let the VA talk to him like it's just it's a good way to kill that quickly. And I mean, when I'm called from a virtual system that doesn't understand, like they can't pronounce my street name like that, I'm like, OK, I'm not going to like it just immediately turns me off from that because I know they lost our rapport.

Yeah, I lost everything. So, yeah. Really good. All right. Last question on the thing. SCRIPS. How much do you recommend, like an investor who's trying to get into calling or an agent or whoever is doing the cold, should they have a very well written script that they're kind of reading or how much is it improvisation goes into that.

So I think a script is a great backbone, but I don't think you should rely on it forever. A lot of what we teach is really the psychology in the process. You know, like the first few things we need to have again is like, Hey, Brandon, and probably catch the bad time. Don't you thought about selling that property? Like, that's really the the framework. The rest of it is just learning the psychology of sales. And you can have a conversation.

The the problem with a lot of scripts is you got to hit these. You've got to say these words, which works, but true sales or true or poor building is taking what you just said and responding to what you just said and having a conversation based off the words you just said versus off a script. And the script can't possibly know what Brandon just said.

My husband just passed away. That's great. Do you have any interest in selling?

Yeah. Where do you go from there? So you can have a framework, you can have a process on the script, but you've got to understand the psychology of sales to a certain degree to have a quality conversation that's so good.

I think what I'm getting out of, like one of the main things I'm getting out of this interview is how sales is. So like it's a skill, I guess I'm trying to say it's a skill that you can develop, you can learn, you can take courses on it. You can read books on it. Like it's not like, oh, it's not a good salesperson. I'm not good on the phone. I'm not a good cold caller. It's like I mean, do you think anybody can anybody be good at this if they if they apply themselves.

I wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly believe I can take anybody. If they have the desire I can take anybody and training and be a good salesperson. Because what we've done is we basically engineered sales and sales for most of my career. Most of my life has been an art form. Right. That guy just has it charisma. Right. But now that we've learned there's actually a science behind it, there is things you do to develop rapport, to develop trust, to move the conversation the way the direction you want to go.

And then David mentioned earlier setting expectations. That's one of the things that most people get wrong. Like the most common objection most investors get is I need to think about it.

And if you get I need to think about it, because you didn't set the proper expectations in the beginning. The appointment, which was by the end of our time together, is going to yes or no where we teach it, how to say it politely and professionally. But really what we're saying is give me a yes or no and you're not going to think about it.

And you're telling me in the first ten minutes that you don't have the ability to say yes or no, I'm out of here because I'm not can spend an hour and a half here for the time.

You need to think about it.

Steve, do you mind if I use you as a sounding board for one of the some of the content I'm putting into the next book I'm writing for your place?

It's it's for real estate agents. And I've got this method that we sort of teach. I'm curious if it's the same as yours. That's basically three points.

The first point is you have to isolate or identify a pain point in the person you're talking to. The second is you have to draw a path for them to walk like they need a direction that they need to know where to go. And then the third is at a certain point, you have to make it very clear where the destination is. So they don't think that they're walking this road forever or they wonder if they're on the same road. So when we're having conversations, we'll usually try to figure out, sounds like what you're doing is they're a pain point with this house.

Is it to have a lot of repairs that are needed? Are you getting drowned by the mortgage, whatever the case is? And that's basically what we call negative reinforcement in psychology. It's negative reinforcement, not giving someone something bad to reinforce them. It's the removal of adverse stimuli, which is like the most powerful motivator that we know of in human condition.

And most people are in pain, but they often are in denial about it. So you're never hurting somebody, but you are peeling back the layers of protection they've used to expose it. Now they're in pain and they have to be given a place to go or they'll just bounce around like they're crazy and go nuts. So we draw a path. OK, this is how we could help you out. But we do this with buyers. This is what the home buying process look like with sellers.

And then at the end we say, let me take your hand, let's go walk on this journey. Is that more or less very similar to what you guys find yourself doing?

I think there's a lot to it. Absolutely right. Or it's going to be we can figure out whether the solution we provide will help you with your current situation.

I think that the biggest thing, one of the things that we harp on a lot on the pain side is to take it from a conversation where intellectual and we're talking about numbers and facts and figures and this and that to actually emotional things.

So I want to just think about you deal with someone in pre foreclosure, you know, back in two thousand seven twenty six, that was a big deal. Like you, you couldn't face foreclosure. Like that was a bad thing. You know, you kind of be a little ashamed today. Foreclosures, OK? Yeah. I mean, foreclosure. What's the problem? Right. And so for us. What we're trying to do is we've got to remind them all the different things are happening with the foreclosure, right.

We're going to let you know what's causing it. As you know, they might say, like the hours are cut back. What have they done about it? Have asked for help. Are they trying to do other jobs? Is it affecting their credit credit situation? Are they racking up credit card debt? Is it affecting things at home? Is it affecting the wife? How about your car? You know, where are you going after this? Like, what happens if you can't solve this problem?

So we're going from this. Foreclosure is not a big deal. It's like, holy crap, things are really bad and I need help. And where you just mentioned right there, like, let me hold your hand. Let me show you how we fix this. That's the next step. But before we get to the next step, we do spend more time than they might. They may want in the pain step that goes back to when you go through this process.

Someone trusts you. They believe in you because you've understood them at their core versus, you know, a a eviction notice or a name on a foreclosure list. You've actually had a real conversation with them. So good man.

Really good. Before we get out of here, a couple quick other related questions. A rental properties. Are you doing any of that stuff right now? What's your what's your rental property philosophy like right now?

So we have a couple. We're trying to buy more because when I went to go pay my taxes in twenty twenty four. Twenty in twenty, twenty for twenty nineteen, that was a gut punch because that was a rental property by itself and twenty twenty I realized it too late so twenty, twenty one I had the same problem for twenty twenty and so but I could tell you you know our philosophy, we own two rental properties free and clear you know, and that's been great for us.

And I know it goes against the grain from every book, every trainer, every educator out there. But you know, I mentioned early in beginning, my wife and I, we had conversations about the D word, right. Like, I mean, things are bad. And so we have PTSD from that recession, you know? And what did they see when I was as a realtor helping people buy properties? What did I see? People buying properties, cash.

You know, I still remember as an agent getting a proof of funds from Blackstone for eighty six million dollars, you know, which is a crazy number. Right. But you know, all these I was watching all these wealthy people buy properties, cash, and I said, OK, if this is how wealthy people do it, this is how I'm going to do it. So we bought these properties. We didn't buy them cash. We we paid them down.

But now they've gone through the whole tax thing and paying way more taxes than I ever thought humanly possible. We are now shifting strategy to acquiring more rental properties that we're not going to pay off.

Because I know that's kind of my last question is where do you see the next few years of your life headed? More wholesaling, more rentals, multifamily? What do you where you see yourself go in the next five years?

You know, I always looked at real estate as a vehicle. You know, I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. Real estate was just a vehicle. And so for me, I've put it out there. And, you know, this is the biggest thing to say here. But I'm gunning for grand cardoon. I want to be the top sales trainer in the country. I want when people think of like, hey, I need to get my sales people better, it's like, well, have you checked out Steve Tranqs program?

That's the goal. So five years from now, that's the vision. And again, it's kind of old. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm going to dream big a lot of men.

Oh, before we get out here, let's head over to the last segment of the show.

It's time for our famous for.

These are the same four questions we ask every guest, every week, every guest, the weird accent, every guest every week.

And we're going to throw that to you right now, Steve. So let's just get to, number one, a favorite or either All-Time Favorite or maybe a current favorite real estate related book.

You know, what's really relevant right now is a shift by Gary Keller. You know, he talks about increasing market share when markets go up and when markets go down. So I would say, you know, I've always loved a real estate agent because he basically took real estate and combine it with math. But I would say right now, price shift is the one that's probably the most appropriate great recommendation.

I don't know that we've heard it before, but they write really good books over there.

It Kellaway is publishing not quite bigger pockets quality. Oh, you know, I am not that bad. All right. What about your favorite business book?

They were a business book, man. Right now, I would say I haven't read it twice yet, but the road less stupid man.

I don't know. That's a good name for a book and.

Oh, yeah, by Keith Cunningham. That book. I mean, because, you know, what was it? Warren Buffett rule number one, don't lose money. Yeah, right. And so this book is all about like how to be less stupid and stop making careless mistakes. That's set you back, because if we just only counted the months that we had positive months and we made a lot of money and we could just delete all our bad months and bad decisions, how much wealth would we have right now?

And so the book is talks about how to make fewer dumb decisions, I think calls it the dumb tax, how to avoid the dumb tax. All right.

I just bought it while you were saying that. Just buy it on Amazon so you can have it here, my house in like six days because thank you, Steve, for making my best friend a little less stupid once you read that book.

It's my pleasure working at work and. All right, when you're not in the process of becoming the world's top sales trainer, what are some of your hobbies right now? So it was kung fu until covid. So, all right. Now I'm spending a lot of time at home with the family and I enjoy it. I really enjoy. So, like, you know, every Sunday we go right around the bikes, around the neighborhood, the little cold for it.

But we do it and the kids are getting good enough. Now we're thinking maybe it's time we go go on a trail. And I'm not an outdoors person. I hate the outdoors. I love electricity. I love the Internet. Right. But it's a good time with the family. All right.

Where are you located, by the way? I don't think I even asked you that. So we're in the Phoenix market. I live in Chandler, Arizona, southeast suburb, the place.

All right. Well, final question for me. What do you think separates successful real estate investors from all those who give up, fail or just never get started?

I think it goes back to what we said earlier. Consistent action, consistent activity. And this is not just true in real estate investors. I think it's everybody.

We all know what we need to do. And if you couldn't, the great thing is there's a forms, bigger pockets, there's a place for it.

So there's no there's no excuse to not know what to do.

So we all know what we need to do is just that the your success is directly proportional to amount of activity you apply in the right direction.

I hope everybody listens very close because Steve runs a whole bunch of different businesses and he's seen what makes it what makes it successful in several different arenas.

And it looks like it's the same secret sauce no matter what you're doing it in.

And there's no magic pill. They're always trying to sell those magic pills, but there are no magic pills. All right.

Last question of the day. Where can people find out more about you? Yeah. So the best way is we do have a podcast as real estate disruptors and then we Instagram at Steve Trang. And then lastly, you know, disruptors, dotcom disruptors, dotcom as where you can find where we there's different all sorts of different ways to work with us, because I believe in all things real estate. There's no shortage of ways. Thanks, man.

Really appreciate having you here today. It's been phenomenal and I can't wait to show it to all my my team who does the cold calling stuff. Very cool.

And I'm happy you want me to talk to them.

Well, I might take you up on that offer, man. All right. Well, thanks, David. I want to get a thought here.

Thank you, Steve.

This is David Green for Brandon.

The road less stupid Turner signing if you're listening to a bigger pockets radio simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from bigger pockets. Dotcom, your home for real estate, investing online.