Renegade Millionaire Blog

PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2011: Joe Gebbia from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

Over the years, I have heard various studies that detail how we end up becoming just like our closest friends.

* If you’re closest friends are heavy drinkers, chances are you’ll be a heavy drinker
* If you’re friends are overweight, chances are you’ll be overweight
* If you’re friends are doing well financially, chances are you’ll have financial problems
* If the real estate agents you hang out with aren’t selling many homes, chances are you won’t sell many homes

I’ve thought about this theory for many years and I believe it’s true. The reason why is because the people we spend the most time with impact how we think and what we do. This is one of the reasons why high-level mastermind groups are so powerful.  You have instant access to a new group of people who think and live differently. You get to hear what they are doing, what is working and what isn’t working. You get to hear about their challenges and how they are overcoming them. You get to “see” things from a different perspective and this change in perspective has a massive impact on what you think and do.

Over the years, I have participated in many high-level mastermind meetings and I can honestly say they have changed my life.  The bad news is many of these high-level mastermind groups have large financial investments to participate. The investment has always been returned 10-fold, but if you’re slugging it out in a flat real estate market, a large investment may not be an option.

Another way to change how you think is to read a biography.

Some of the biographies I’ve read over the years include: Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, John Jacob Astor,  Donald Trump, Walt Disney, Sam Walton, David Ogilvy, Henry Singleton, Richard Branson, and Steve Jobs.

Here is what I have come to learn…

Biographies change how we think and when we change how we think, we automatically change what  we do.

This is the same process occurs in a high-level mastermind groups.  In a biography, we get to “see” how these men handled adversity. We get to “see” how these men pursued their goals. We get to “see” how these men thought. We get to “see” how these men lived their lives.

Right now I am reading “The First Tycoon” by T.J. Styles. This biography is on Cornelius Vanderbilt and how we became the richest man in the world. I am only partially through the book and I can tell you that he lived through many “disasters” throughout his life. These disasters included personal tragedy, near-death accidents, and many economic financial panics that spread through the economy including currency failures; stock fraud and several market crashes.

It is virtually impossible to read this book and not “see” our challenges differently. It’s also virtually impossible to read this book and not “do” things differently, because you automatically look at your life and your challenges from Vanderbilt’s eyes.  How would Vanderbilt handle this situation?

So…. if you’re going through a rough period now or in the future, I highly recommend making time for a biography. In fact, I actually recommend that you create your own mastermind group through multiple biographies. Don’t borrow these books from the library. Buy them. Highlight them. Make notes in them. Fold down page corners so you can refer back to important lessons. Read one biography a month for one year and I promise you’ll change your life.

Further Reading:

How Steve Jobs Transformed Apple

Andrew Carnegie’s Business Strategy

A Page from John Rockefeller’s Play Book

My family and I moved into our current home in Willoughby, Ohio back in 2001.  Right down the road from where we live is a little diner called JT’s Diner, which is a great little place. Sadly, I drove by this diner for many years and never stopped in for a meal. The crazy part is that it IS always packed, which is obviously a sign that it’s a great restaurant.

However, last year I finally stopped in for breakfast with two friends after competing in a mini-triathlon. We were starving and figured we could get a big breakfast quickly.

Within minutes of walking in, the owner was making fun of us. Unfortunately, I can’t share what she said, but it was pretty funny. Turns out, she teases all of the customers and they absolutely love it. We definitely enjoyed her and the diner. The t-shirts they wear at JT’s Diner read as follows:

“Eat and Get Out Dork”

I sneak in there every few weeks for a big omelet and coffee. Every time I do, I think about what the owner has created and believe it might be the ultimate lifestyle business. Here’s why…

1. Limited hours: The diner is only open from 7 am to 2pm. They only serve breakfast and lunch. I’m sure she could fill the place everyday for dinner, because of her loyal following. However, she has purposefully passed on this opportunity to increase revenue.

2. Limited menu: Her breakfast menu only offers 9 items. Obviously, you can special order various items and customize your breakfast. This limited menu has probably been designed for speed and effectiveness. After ordering, your meal is served very quickly. The tables turn over many times during peak hours. PLUS, it’s probably easier to find a cook because they don’t serve 88 different meals.

3. Limited size: JT’s Diner only has 12 tables and these tables are always full. There is often a waiting line out the door on weekend mornings. Most entrepreneurs would probably look for a larger space so they could serve more customers. The small size offers many benefits for the business. The biggest benefit is that they can run the business with just 2 people. A cook and a waiter/waitress. In fact, the owner typically is the only waitress and she covers the entire diner with ease. She isn’t dependent on 12 different employees who call in sick, quit and give poor service. More importantly, she has low overhead. She doesn’t have to pay a mortgage or rent on a large building. She doesn’t have astronomical heating and air conditioning bills or other expenses to run the business.

4. Limited marketing: As noted above, I have lived very close to this diner for a decade and I don’t ever remember seeing ONE advertisement for the diner. The reason why is because she doesn’t have to advertise. It’s such a cool, fun place that it’s always packed with customers. This is apparent by all of the giraffes displayed throughout the diner. The owner loves giraffes and her customers have brought her dozens of giraffe gifts over the years. Assuming you have a sense a humor when you first visit JT’s Diner, you’ll definitely go back.

Did you notice the word “limited” in each item listed above? Less really is more.

As I was building my real estate company, my goal was always more. More leads, more agents, more sales, all with the goal of more commissions. Always wanting more led to…

…more work
…more employees & employee related problems (my former personal assistant is in jail for stealing from one of my businesses)
…more stress
…more overhead
…more office space
…more risk

The owner of JT’s Diner could move to a larger space, or she could extend her hours to offer dinner and late night service. These changes may well bring additional revenue. However, they will also bring additional risk, work and stress.

She has designed a business that suits her lifestyle. She works until 2pm and can spend the rest of the day as she wishes. If she wants to take time off, she only needs one waiter/waitress to cover all 12 tables. When she does work, she has a blast and enjoys every minute. This is evident by her smile, laugh and attitude. I have no idea, but I’ll have to assume that the money she earns through her business also serves her lifestyle. This is because she has intentionally decided to not chase various “opportunities” to increase the revenue.

All of this leads to one very important question:

Are you designing your business for “more,” or are you designing your business around how you want to live your life?

How do you really want to live your life? How many hours a week do you want to work? What days and hours do you want to work? What type of client do you truly enjoy working with? Do you enjoy your work? Start making changes today that bring you closer to a business that suits how you want to live your life.

Oh and if it’s not 100% apparent, I highly recommend JT’s Diner. If you’re ever up in Cleveland, stop in and grab breakfast and be prepared to be teased! You can check out their website at: http://jtsdiner.com/Home.html

As many of you know, I sold my real estate business in 2007 for 7 figures. Nobody thought something like this was possible. How can a small real estate business be worth 7 figures?

The business was worth 7 figures because I engineered systematic lead generation and conversion, which delivered a reliable flow of monthly home sales.

In fact, here is how my monthly numbers looked on average when I sold my business:

New Leads Generated                                    400
Prospects Applying to be Clients                   30
Applicants Signed to Buyer Contracts          22
Number of Homes Sold                                   28

You might be wondering how we averaged 28 home sales a month when we were only signing 22 new clients a month?

Our clients bought more than one home.

The person who bought my business bought the systems that delivered these numbers. Hopefully, this highlights how valuable systems are to your business.

In this newsletter, I thought I would share one of the strategies I used to generate and convert leads. The strategy I’ll be sharing was a “manual” lead conversion strategy that can be easily automated today.

Below I’ve included an advertisement I ran back in 2005:

(Click on the Image to Enlarge)

This advertisement is for a free real estate investing class and you might notice that this advertisement was offered in the Willoughby Parks and Recreation City Guide.

In our area, each city offers various activities and classes to the residents. Some of these activities are free and others require a fee to participate. I made my class free because it was a lead generation and conversion tool for my business. Notice the class above mine was offered by an attorney and she was charging $15 to attend her class. Who do you think had more attendees?

What most small business owners don’t realize is that you can offer to teach a class for the city and use this opportunity to extract new clients.

The cool part about this strategy was that it was FREE! The city wants to offer a wide variety of activities and classes for their residents and would provide a classroom, projector and market the class in their guide without cost.

More importantly, they would handle class registrations on my behalf. To attend the class, the person would have to register with the city by giving their name, mailing address, phone and email address. The registration lists would be provided to me for each class, which represented “targeted” leads for my business. I could add these targeted leads to my monthly newsletter and market to them each month going forward.

During the actual class I would give great content on real estate investing. At the end of the class, I would offer a free private consultation to answer attendees questions and help them get started looking at investment properties.

These classes delivered very high quality clients that bought several homes over the years.

This strategy delivered such high quality clients that I started to market free investing classes to the public in larger circulated newspapers. Free classes quickly became a consistent source of new leads, clients and sales.

However, free classes were NOT automatic.

The classes offered through the city were a little easier, because the city handled almost everything. I simply showed up and taught the class. The classes offered to the public were a lot of work, because my office handled the class registrations and all of the follow-up, plus we hosted the classes in our office conference room.

Today all of this can be automated through technology by offering free webinars instead of free classes. To see an example of how this works, you can register for a free webinar I teach each week:

http://www.renegademillionaireblog.com/webinar

As you register to see how this technology works, understand that this webinar is completely automated from week to week. Once this is setup, it runs on autopilot.

The webinar sign up page automatically adjusts the date based upon when the visitor sees the page. This simply means every visitor to the sign-up page will see the next webinar date and time.

Once someone registers to attend, the webinar software automatically confirms the registration and plays the webinar at the scheduled date and time. You should play prospect and watch my webinar to see how this works. It’s awesome!

My webinar is programed to play every Thursday afternoon at 2pm EST. It simply plays automatically. I might be at the picking my kids up from school, working on a marketing piece, or reading a book and “targeted” prospects are attending my webinar.

The service I use for automatic webinars is:

http://www.StealthRecurringWebinars.com

On their home page, you’ll probably notice they offer the opportunity to “see” how their program works from an inside perspective. It’s definitely worth your time.

For the most part, this automated webinar technology is only used by information marketers to sell training courses. In my webinar, I’m promoting my Ultimate Foreclosure Boom System, which is a damn good course… but I’m a little biased.

I’m hoping that you change the game and leverage this technology to automatically convert your prospects into clients.

In essence, you would turn a free class into a video. The webinar service turns your video into a recurring webinar. The best part is that the webinar appears to be a “live” event.

You can have webinars for buyers, sellers, investors or any other prospective client you might want to work with. Instead of selling a product at the end of your webinar, offer a free private consultation like I did with my free classes.

Here are a few webinar ideas for you…

- How To Sell Your Home in a Down Market
- How To Buy A Foreclosed Home for Pennies on the Dollar
- How to Turn the Real Estate Crash into Monthly Income

This recurring webinar system is very powerful and does require some time to setup. The time investment is definitely worth it because once it’s setup, you won’t have to lift a finger going forward. Everything happens automatically and you could be hosting several different webinars each week.

You might setup a weekly webinar for buyers, another one for investors and a third one for sellers. Imagine how many appointments you would have each week with 3 different automatic webinars playing.

Back when I was physically teaching my free classes, I would spend around 3 hours at every class. This included the setup time before the class, teaching the actual class, and talking with attendees after the class.

To offer a one class each week would require around 12 hours a month. This time was definitely worth it, because these classes delivered high quality clients. To repeat this process the next month, I had to trade hours for dollars and invest another 12 hours teaching a weekly class.

With this recurring webinar technology, you might invest 12 hours setting up your recurring webinar and it would be completely automated from that point forward. Your automatic recurring webinar will be a very valuable sales asset that can drive new clients to you on a consistent basis!

We often hear Michael Gerber’s famous words, “it’s better to work on your business than it is to work in your business.”

Setting up automatic recurring webinars that systematically convert leads into appointments is definitely a “working on your business” activity.

P.S. As I write this article, it looks like StealthRecurringWebinars.com is sold out. I would suggest two things:

1. Watch the videos on the site and register for the daily webinar that is offered in a pop-up window. As you do, think about how you might use the same strategy with your leads.

2. If you’re interested in using their service, email their support team and let them know that I referred you. You may be able to get access to the software without having to wait for it to open to new subscribers!

Over the last few years, we’ve all learned some very valuable business lessons as the real estate market tanked and the economy sunk into “recession.”

The BIGGEST lesson is that we need multiple income streams and the reason why is because any ONE income stream can disappear rather quickly.

My mentor, Dan Kennedy, taught that the number ONE in business is the very dangerous.

ONE employee…
ONE sales/buyers agent…
ONE administrative assistant…
ONE lead generation advertisement…
ONE lead conversion system…
ONE source of income…

Depending on ONE of anything puts us at significant risk. Your ONE buyer’s agent can leave you, quit the business, or simply stop selling. Your ONE lead generation advertisement might stop generating new leads. Your ONE lead conversion process or system might stop converting leaving you with zero new clients.

The problem is that once we have things working in our businesses, we tend to just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

We have to fight this tendency and always work to build diversification into every aspect of our businesses. TWO buyer’s agents are better than ONE. Two part-time administrative assistants are better than ONE full-time assistant.

It’s a pain to design your business with diversification built-in, but you’ll have a lot more protection.

For the rest of this article, I want to focus on diversifying your income and to do so, I want to ask you a very important question:

Are you an agent with one business selling homes or are you an entrepreneur with multiple businesses, one of which, is selling homes?

Here is how the typical real estate agent’s business looks:

When the real estate market is strong and sales are increasing, the income flowing into your bank account increases. However, when homes sales drop, the income into your bank account drops, too.

This is what we’ve all dealt with over the last few years. Now what most agents do in this situation is they work harder trying to sell more homes. The reason why is because they see themselves as a real estate agent instead of an entrepreneur.

Sometimes their hard work increases sales and increases their income, but their dollars per hour definitely drops because you have to work so much harder for each and every sale. The BIG problem is that your business is still dependent on ONE income stream – commissions from home sales.

Another option to consider is to view yourself as an entrepreneur and leverage other business opportunities to your advantage. The cool part is that you have some very valuable skills and assets that you’ve acquired in your real estate business. These skills and assets can be leveraged into additional income.

More than likely, you have the following valuable skills:

1. Can generate and capture targeted leads using online and offline marketing.

2. Ability to convert leads into appointments using email, outbound phone calls, print sales letters, video sales letters, client newsletters, free classes, tour of homes, and more.

3. You can sell one-on-one! (Getting sellers to list their homes with you or buyers to write an offer on a home)

4. Ability to follow-up consistently to nurture relationships and built trust with prospects and clients for referrals and future sale opportunities.

These 4 skills transfer into almost every single business in every single industry. And to see how valuable skills are, watch this cool movie clip from Taken below. Fast forward to 3:30 for the best part of the clip:


“What I do have are a very particular set of skills that I have acquired over a very long career!”

Well, we might not be trained operatives who can hunt down, find and kill bad guys, but we are trained at making money out of thin air, which is what we do in real estate. And these skills that we have acquired over our career very valuable to you – if  you leverage them! In addition to these valuable skills, you also have the following valuable assets:

1.  Database of local residents who know you, trust you and who pay attention to you.

2.  Network of other professionals in your area. These professionals include other agents, insurance agents, lenders, accountants, attorneys, inspectors, title agents, inspectors, contractors, painters, landscapers and more.

These skills and assets can be combined into something like this:

Instead of working harder trying to sell more homes in a down market, reinvest this time into creating a second or third business that might provide diversified income and cashflow.
When considering different business opportunities, I believe it’s important to follow a certain set of rules or guidelines. I’ve detailed these rules and guidelines in my Zero Negative Cashflow Report (ZeroNegativeCashflow.com) I wrote a few years ago.

You don’t want to run off and start any old business because most businesses opportunities aren’t very good. You want to focus on the “right” opportunity. Here are four things I look for with every new business opportunity:

1. Doesn’t require a great deal of money to get started.
2. Provides recurring monthly income.
3. Doesn’t require 40 hours a week of your time.
4. Low overhead.

The goal is not to create another “job” and work harder. The goal is to create and run a business that provides monthly income with limited risk and limited time.

A great example of a business meeting these criteria would be a residential cleaning company. You can start this business out of your garage. You don’t need expensive equipment or inventory. You don’t need expensive cash registers, and have no set hours where you have to have employees standing around waiting for a customer to appear.

You can hire people and pay them hourly to provide cleaning services on your behalf. They can drive their own cars or you can provide a small inexpensive car for them to drive with your real estate website and phone number on it.

The best part about a residential cleaning business is that it provides recurring monthly income, because you clean the same homes each week/month. If you charged your customers $100 a month to clean their homes and you had 100 customers, you would generate $10,000 a month. You’d probably pay half of this to the people actually cleaning the homes leaving you with an extra $5,000 a month of income. Remember, you don’t have any overhead for rent or utilities in this business!

Do you think you could get 100 cleaning customers with the skills and assets you have at your disposal?

I certainly do.

You could obviously market your cleaning company to your database and offer new customer specials. You could ask other real estate agents and professionals you know to market your cleaning company to their databases, too.

On top of this, you could obviously market your cleaning company to the public by generating and converting targeted leads.

Now I’m not suggesting you run out and start cleaning company and I’m not trying to sell you anything at all.

My goal is simply to try and get you to think like an entrepreneur instead of an agent. My goal is to get you to value the skills and assets you already have and possibly leverage them into additional monthly income and cashflow. My goal is to help you diversify your business and protect your family.

P.S. In this newsletter, I included a snap shot of you owning multiple businesses providing monthly income. One of these businesses should be engineered to funnel a significant amount of money into your retirement account. You can see how to do this at FamilyMoneyMachine.com. In my opinion, this is the most valuable report I’ve every written. I’m not kidding. If you only invest in one of my products or reports, please make it the Family Money Machine Report, because it will have the biggest long-term impact on your family.