Mastering Lead Flow to Wholesale Houses with Mark Lane

[00:00:05] From cornfields to high rises, office to industrial, houses to hotels and every other asset class in real estate, we cover the people, the projects and the profit. Welcome to The Investing in Iowa Show. This show is for go-doers, action takers and business owners.

[00:00:26] It's for people like you who are sick of Uncle Sam taking a huge bite of your apple. If you're looking to get ahead of what's taking place in Iowa, learn who is doing what and how you can get in on the action. You're in the right place.

[00:00:39] Hosted by Neil Timmins, an Iowa native who has been involved in over $300 million in real estate right here in Iowa. Recording in studio from West Des Moines, here's your host, Neil Timmins. I've got Mark Lane here, Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you for sitting here.

[00:00:57] Good to be here. Good to have you here. For the audience to say, who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? My name is Mark Lane from Des Moines, Iowa. I was born and raised here. So I currently invest in single family properties, mostly wholesale.

[00:01:11] I'd say we're about probably 80% wholesale and then about 20% class A type rentals. Then we have a occasional flip thrown in there as well. How long have you been doing this? This is my 14th summer, so 14 years. 14 years. How do you get into this business?

[00:01:32] So kind of a funny story. I am your typical bottom book of an infomercial type of guy and got started that way. So my story, I was previously working at John Deere in the factory. So even before that I was working at a grocery store at Hy-Vee.

[00:01:51] So had a couple of those big corporate type jobs, big companies. And was trying to go that direction but nothing ever felt like home and never felt right. And when I was working at John Deere it was pretty common that I was working 60 hours

[00:02:08] a week, several weeks over 80 hours a week. And at one point they're asking us to work 16 hour days. And I was just giving my life to the company. And there was one of the nights I came home just absolutely exhausted. I think it was like a second shift.

[00:02:28] So I came home kind of like midnight timeframe and put my launch box away. I went upstairs and my daughter at the time was probably somewhere between one and two. I can't remember exactly timeframe. She was laying there with my then wife.

[00:02:42] And I sat down next to her, just kind of rubbed my hands through her hair. And really just kind of had that huge perspective change. Like everything shifted at that point where I had a vision of her growing up to be exactly

[00:02:56] like I was at that point, which was broke, desperate, had no direction, no vision for the future. And that vision of seeing her grow up, growing up to be experiencing those same things, shifted everything for me.

[00:03:11] So it was like an immediate, just kind of, I describe it as like a cellular change where everything shifted. And so I woke up the next day and I made the vow that night that I was going to change our family's direction forever.

[00:03:24] And woke up the next day and I just somehow I just knew everything was going to change. I didn't know what it was going to be yet, but I knew it was going to change. And so, you know, I went to work with just more confidence.

[00:03:37] Like I somehow, again, I just knew the future was going to be different. And so I happened to be up unusually early one morning, sometime within the next two or three weeks happened pretty quickly.

[00:03:51] And I was watching an infomercial on this guy selling a book on real estate investing, Dean Graziosi, probably familiar with the name. And so anyway, yeah, he's selling the book. I was like, you know what? Like I've always kind of been interested in flipping houses.

[00:04:05] Of course, didn't know anything about it. I didn't have any family in real estate. Didn't I don't even know if I knew any real estate agents. Like I knew nothing about it, but it piqued my interest enough. So bought the book said what I have to lose 15 bucks.

[00:04:19] So I got the book right at cover to cover and, you know, as I say, the rest is history. So I got bit by the real estate bug. And it just to me, it just felt like something I could do like straight in

[00:04:30] the book and like, I can do this. This makes sense to me. It wasn't something where somebody might, you know, you might read a book and I'm like, I just don't understand it. Right. To me, it just made sense. Yeah.

[00:04:39] And so I kind of read numerous other books back to back and then just kind of started moving my way into it. What was very first one? Very first one was a piece of junk house on, I think it was like 800 block of Douglas or Euclid camera.

[00:05:01] I think it was Euclid. Um, so my partner at the time I had a partner for the first year and we went into, we went into it. Um, this kind of stuff I had to learn from the real estate education was just make lots of offers.

[00:05:15] And of course this was starting 2010, you know, we're still kind of the bottom of the recession. So tons of opportunity on MLS alone, right? What wasn't doing any marketing sellers. It was just MLS. So we were launching out or actually our first batch.

[00:05:30] I had a very new real estate agent and I launched out 50 offers like, you know, at one time and we got 11 accepted. So I'm like, holy cow. What am I supposed to do with all this? Yeah.

[00:05:43] So if like it was massive action, but it put me into that position of, okay, I got, I got to figure out the next step. You know, I was only focused on one step at a time. Now I was in step two. Re-chapter two. Yep.

[00:05:55] So, so anyway, had all these deals, didn't know what to do with them. So I started scrambling. So one of the deals, I was on a real estate forum, which was Dean's website and there's had a nice forum you could join.

[00:06:08] And so I would post the deal, post the few deals. And while the guys, I guess from Minnesota drove down, looked at the house with us and said, you know, I'll fund it. Of course, crazy interest rate. But I was like, you know, the deal made sense.

[00:06:23] We were able to make it work. Right. So that was deal one. You, you fixed and flipped it? Fixed, attempted to. So we were trying to go into wholesaling at that time. We just didn't know enough.

[00:06:38] And the market course in 2010, buyers weren't really out trying to buy a bunch of properties like there was really kind of very few aggressive buyers. So we ended up finding ourselves going into rental properties. So we, again, everything I'd read said, okay, you could fix these up.

[00:06:57] You can buy them, fix them up, refinance them, get all your cash back and do it again. So that's what happened. Those first four, that's what happened. We, we did it wholesale and we fixed them up, held them as rentals and said, well, this was kind of easy.

[00:07:11] Like let's just do more of this. And then after the fourth deal, the bank said, the bank, you know, corporate says you guys are too highly leveraged. They basically are pulling a plug. We can't lend you any more money at this time.

[00:07:25] And I had literally called every single bank in the phone book to find somebody who would do a cash out refi at a praise value, not cost. And they were only one that said yes. So we're like, what do we do now?

[00:07:38] You know, so then it was in the chapter three. You say, anyway, so just kept, you know, one obstacle after another. But we did, I think we did end up finding another bank that wouldn't say yes.

[00:07:49] And so that first year we ended up holding a dozen rental properties or so. And then at the end of that year, then I kind of started getting into fixing and flipping. So I had another friend that was into it.

[00:08:02] He had some of his dad's money that we were that he said, Hey, if you find any good deals, I'll partner with you. And then my partner, we basically did the same thing. We found a couple of deals that, you know, why don't we flip a couple?

[00:08:14] So within a time period of like a few months, we flipped four houses. And that was finally some profit starting to come into come in the house. And I'm like, suddenly I went from, yeah, I had quit my job.

[00:08:27] I should mention that I quit my job after we got those first few deals. And my wife at the time was a nanny. We're making 600 bucks a week. That's all we had come out of the door. So it was a struggle.

[00:08:40] And so then we went from and once I quit, you know, again, we had no money come to the door. I wasn't getting paid anything from from our company, even though I should have been because I was one to do it all work. He was working.

[00:08:52] I was out doing the real estate. Yeah. Uh, but it didn't. So finally, once we flipped those few houses next thing you know, I have some five figure checks in my hand. I'm like, this is what I need.

[00:09:05] So kind of I actually sold out of the rental properties to him. I got, got paid, I think about 30 grand and started having the flips come in the door. And then I said, it's time to go out on my own.

[00:09:16] So I actually broke off that partnership, went on my own. Again, I was the one work with the real estate agents. I was the one general contracting all the houses, finding the deals. And I now had a little bit of money on my own.

[00:09:28] I wasn't so desperate anymore. And so, you know, ventured out my own and just started going faster. So going faster at some point, you warped or some of that, some of the deals warped into wholesale. The market changed over a period of time. Yeah.

[00:09:43] The 2010 anybody go buy a house, you just go in there and I'll ask you to need to do much off market or any. Yep. And that changed certainly over a period of up years. Talk for the audience's sake, for those who don't know what a wholesale is,

[00:09:57] what is a wholesale? A wholesale for lack of better words is simply instead of fixing and flipping the house, instead of holding as a rental property, you just simply flip it over to another investor. So, you have the purchase agreement between the seller and yourself

[00:10:13] and you simply assign it over or flip it over to another investor. They step in as buyer and you get paid a fee for being the middle man. Yeah. In order to do that, you've got to go find that seller.

[00:10:23] You have to find somebody who's motivated, which means you've got to you have to do all bunch of lead gen things. But let's talk about the finding the quote unquote, a motivated seller. Somebody's that doesn't want to take it to, you know,

[00:10:35] go listed with the realtor, go parade a bunch of people through. Yeah. I occasionally ask this and it's your land or the answer, but I want to hear yours. Why doesn't somebody just listen to them? Why don't they just listen with the realtor?

[00:10:46] Why would they ever sell it to somebody off market? Yeah. Well, get this question a lot from real estate agents because they don't understand it. Right. The bottom line is a lot of people are in all kinds of distress situations

[00:11:00] and a lot of times they're not suited for the market. You know, so I mean, I could give you a thousand different examples, but you know, sometimes they could be in foreclosure. They don't have, they literally don't have the time to fix it up,

[00:11:14] to list it, to go that route because there are foreclosures in a month. You know, they'd take them longer than that just to get through the listing process. So or, you know, they want to relocate and they want some options as far as

[00:11:28] when they're going to close, when they're going to move and they want to leave their stuff behind and they're just, you know, selling to a private investor like us, they have a lot more options to work with versus listing it,

[00:11:39] getting an offer have to be out by a certain date, that type of thing. Right. Yeah. And you say, stop when you sell it and when you're to buy it as is, when you say they leave stuff, you literally mean they believe just about

[00:11:50] anything, anything they don't want. You know, kitchen table, the couch, all of it. Yeah. Yeah. So sometimes we get literally a house full. Sometimes we get a few things left behind. It's just, yeah. But that's part of the process is we want to make it easy on them.

[00:12:05] Sell your house. Say, you know, I'm, you're selling your house at a bargain. It's just like, you know, anything else with a bargain, there's some, some consequences. Right. And one of those is they get to, they get the benefits of leaving stuff behind,

[00:12:21] not have to fix the house. You know, for most people, I think it's fair to say that money is not their primer. Right. Yeah. And that's especially, I would say like seniors is one where that's a big

[00:12:34] one where they, I'd always tell us people, they're in the phase of their life, they don't care about their equity. Like real estate agents cannot get over this. They're like, well, you're not getting them top dollar. They don't care about top dollar. Right. Right.

[00:12:47] They, they want easy transition. They want comfort. They want no hassle. Right. That type of thing. So, you know, it's like they would gladly give up some equity, just have a much smoother, simpler transition. When, when, you know, we bought a lumber poems here in my office.

[00:13:05] We don't, a lot anymore. But I recall one exactly what you just said. Senior, they, they wintered down south in Texas. They stayed here the rest of the year. When it was time for them to go, they were literally like, we have two houses

[00:13:17] and I don't need two of everything. Yeah. So I'm going to leave a hundred. I'm taking my clothes out of the closet and I'm leaving every single thing. I'm leaving the silverware. I live in everything. Yeah. Everything, everything. Yeah. And it was because it was easy and convenient.

[00:13:32] And then on the broker's side, I'm a broker today, right? On the broker's side, it's impossible to execute on that. What would an agent do with a house full of stuff? You'd have to go solve that problem for these folks.

[00:13:44] It's just a different segment of people out there. Yeah. I think, you know, as investors, we, more than anything, we're problem solvers. The better we are at solving problems, the more money we make. And as real estate agents, they're good at listing.

[00:13:58] They're not, they're not in the problem solving, you know, business. So, I mean, to some degree, but not the same way we are. Hi, it's Ava Bowcamp, the Investment Relations Manager for Neal's firm, Legacy Impact Investors.

[00:14:10] I'm inviting you to join us for our next investor workshop, our monthly legacy briefings. In these tactical Zoom calls, we cover topics and case studies for subjects such as taxes and depreciation, navigating macroeconomic shifts and evaluating deals as a passive investor.

[00:14:27] At each virtual workshop, we are joined by an industry guest who covers their topic in 45 minutes or less. No fluff, no pitches. Just education and conversation with an expert each month. Every workshop ends with live Q&A from Neal and our guest.

[00:14:42] All briefings happen on the last Tuesday of the month at 3 p.m. central. If you can't make it live, recordings are sent out exclusively to those who've registered in advance. To join us on the last Tuesday of this month, visit Legacy Briefing.com.

[00:14:57] Go to Legacy Briefing.com to register. If you're a first-time registrant, I'll send you a free resource at sign up. Head to Legacy Briefing.com and I'll see you soon. Yeah, and you said that what you just said applies no matter where you

[00:15:10] invest in real estate, whether it's single family side, exactly what you just outlined all the way up to development. Development, those guys are problem solvers. How do you do get to X, Y and Z? How do you get retailers in? How do you get all these things?

[00:15:22] They're all just a bunch of problems that one has to solve. Take me back to 2010, 11, 12. You go off on your own. What's that arrow like? Yep. So it was still pretty distressed. So it was, I would say that market was distressed up until it gradually got

[00:15:39] better, just a very gradual incline up to about 2015, 2016. And so we were still 100% with buying off the MLS, get occasional referral here and there at that point about the most marketing I had was like a $100 sign on the back of my car.

[00:15:56] It just wasn't doing any kind of marketing. Maybe very occasionally, like as I kind of started hearing about some other people do it, I started dipping my toes into it and would, you know, randomly send out 500 pieces direct mail or something like that.

[00:16:10] It's just, just like, I didn't know any better. I didn't know how to do it. So, but as we got into it, I would say I was probably maybe my second or third year into the business and I started learning more of the wholesaling route.

[00:16:26] I went to, remember going to a seminar, paid $10,000 to go learn it and came back. I'm like, you know what? I'm just gonna, I'm gonna start you implementing this model. And one of the guys that teaching it was probably one of the best in the country.

[00:16:41] And, you know, he was talking about the volume he was doing. He was doing 30 deals a month. And so I'm like, you know, maybe it was talking all about offers. Like, you know, we need to drastically increase offers. I'm like, I'm already making a lot of offers.

[00:16:55] Like, I gotta make more. So, but I was also up to that point fixing and flipping just about everything. So that was slowing me down massively. Thanks a lot of time to execute. Right. Yeah. So I couldn't, I couldn't really take on much more volume.

[00:17:10] So I said, okay, if I start wholesaling these, I can do a lot more volume, a lot less work on the houses. So that's kind of the direction I started going, not purposely going all into wholesaling. But as I think it was my first wholesale, actually holds

[00:17:25] out to a friend and it was $7,500 profit. So not nearly as big a profit as some of our flips previously, but I'm like, that's all, like that's all I had to do is like just transfer that paperwork.

[00:17:38] I mean, I think that actually that one actually, that lead came off of my car sign. Um, I think maybe the, I only got two off of it total. But anyway, so I flipped it over my friend $7,500. I'm like, that was really easy.

[00:17:54] And so as more came in, I started utilizing that stretch more and it's that our assignments at a time were anything between, I mean, I had some down as low as like 500 bucks. Um, because I was trying to do a lot of volume and, uh, you know, $500,

[00:18:10] 3000, 5000 and then slowly started getting up there to where I started getting either better at getting the deals on a contract, better on my offers or better finding higher paying buyers. What, you know, probably a combination. And then I started getting some in that 20,000 range, 25,000 range.

[00:18:26] I'm like, holy cow, like I need to be doing more of this. It's sometimes somewhere around, I would say probably the 2014, 15, 16 timeframe, I had a guy working for me and he was hired on, um, work for principal, a high level corporate guy that was very smart,

[00:18:44] much smarter than me. And, uh, he was running all of our construction and he wasn't good at it. He was just very, he was a project manager, analytical type. So he understood the numbers of it just wasn't good at the construction side.

[00:18:57] But I had him on long enough to where he was looking at all of our, all of our numbers and all of our deals. And he said, he probably said, Mark, I'm talking myself out of a job here, but your money is all on wholesaling.

[00:19:07] He's like, you got to stop flipping houses. And so I don't know that was necessarily the defining moment, but sometime in that timeframe is when I just started merging more and more into wholesaling and less into flipping. Yeah.

[00:19:22] And wholesaling involves in order to hit that volume game, as you said, you got to make a lot of offers, but just before a lot of offers, you got to have a lot of leads. Yeah. And let's talk about that because I know it's something you're an expert

[00:19:33] in is generating leads and there's lots of different methodologies in which one can generate leads. Yeah. And so talking about some of those in which you maybe have done some of those that have been abandoned along the way and some of those that you still do today. Yeah.

[00:19:47] So my premise of my book is more leads, more deals, more profits, insider secrets of real estate and billionaires. So on my Facebook page, my business page, sometime in last year or two, I asked the question, I said, what are you guys struggling with?

[00:20:06] And, you know, some different people said some different things. One of the guys said finding deals, finding, he said how to find a good deal. And I thought about that more and more took me a while to really process it. And I'm like, that is everybody's problem.

[00:20:20] It's, you know, people don't have the problem of property management. Like you can just go hire a different property management company. You could take it in yourself. Like that's pretty easy problem to solve. You know, contractors, there's a million of them to hire.

[00:20:31] Like that's not a hard problem to solve. But more leads for most people, you know, when they say, well, do you really find many good deals out there anymore? Like that is most people's problem. If they solve that problem, they get rich. Correct.

[00:20:46] So as I really broke it down, I started looking at everything I'd done in the past. I started realizing, first of all, the question or the, or the, how they freeze it of how to find a good deal. That itself is a paralyzing question. Right?

[00:21:01] Like, how do I find a good deal out of the 10,000, 100,000 million houses out in the market, depending on how big your city is? Right. So when somebody's looking at from that perspective, they're thinking, why, how do I identify that one good deal that's out there?

[00:21:16] And you can't, right? Like when you're looking at from that perspective. So instead, the way I broke it down in the book is that 100% of every single deal can be broken down into three different categories. It's marketing, prospecting and networking and networking. I call it the dream 100.

[00:21:33] So it's prospecting, marketing and dream 100. 100% of every single deal will flow into one of those three categories. So if we know how to build, if we know how to create our leads in those three different categories, we'll never ever be without leads.

[00:21:49] And the, our mantra in this book and in my coaching group is we don't find deals, we generate them. And that's really what it comes down to is we need to, we need to be in the business of generating leads, not going out,

[00:22:03] trying to hunt and find them when we can create systems and marketing and prospecting, networking to where all those leads are coming to us. We're now, we're now generating leads, right? We have a business of generating them. We're not running around hunting and trying to find them anymore.

[00:22:17] But then the day that is the business. It is the business. It is the business. Yeah. Because if you can generate enough leads, make it of offers, land something, the exits become relatively. Yep. And you have, you can exit in numerous ways when the deal's good enough.

[00:22:35] So, you know, when, when somebody comes to me, I get all the time, well, I want to get into wholesaling or I want to get in, I want to start doing subject tos. Why? Like what's your reason for wanting to do that?

[00:22:45] How about instead focus because right now you don't even have a business, you don't really have anything coming in. Focus 100% of your efforts on lead generation. And then as those deals start flowing in, then you start deciding what you want to do.

[00:22:57] And, you know, you want to wholesale a deal, the wholesaler, you want to flip it, you flip it. But focus all your efforts on lead generation and then they'll start making more money than ever. Do your focus on the, the access later.

[00:23:08] One of the things I think that's interesting, you broke the book down into three different components. Have you noticed that also aligns with various people's personalities? Some people are more predisposed to want to go network, want to, want to have those kind of conversations in an uncovered deals.

[00:23:24] And some people are more predisposed to want to take a more of a shotgun approach, more of the prostitute approach. Yeah. So kind of, I would say it also comes, certainly comes down to a person's resources that they have. Yeah. Right.

[00:23:36] So if a person is starting from ground zero like I was, they have no money in for marketing. That's, you know, that's got to be brought to the table of, okay, I don't have money to throw into marketing. You know, like we spend right now about 15,000

[00:23:50] a month on marketing and the average person is not going to start there. Right? We certainly did. Um, I say we is got a little bit of a team, but, um, so a person starting from ground zero is probably going to have

[00:24:03] to start with a lot more prospecting. You know, it's going to be, you know, utilizing MLS, even though MLS is not really the greatest place to be right now for deals, but they're still going to be need to be working that one of my students just got three

[00:24:15] deals off the MLS last week alone, utilizing the strategy I teach. So it still works. It just doesn't work as abundant as it did in 2010. Sure. Right. Um, but prospecting involves MLS like auctions, online auctions, driving for dollars outbound calls.

[00:24:31] And when we look at just driving for dollars outbound calls, there is quite literally an endless opportunity there. If a person really wants to put in the time and effort, it is endless. You know, you can't ever run out of inventory to

[00:24:43] work, run out of people to call or talk to. So when if somebody's struggling to make offers to get deals and we could just very easily ask, what are you doing for prospecting? Answer is almost always nothing. Yes. So, but if they're taking a lot of action, they're

[00:24:59] going to be getting deals. See, for those who don't know what, let's just pick one of those. What they don't know what driving for dollars happens to be to elaborate on that one. We still have. Yeah. So something driving for dollars is simply

[00:25:11] driving, you know, ideally driving the neighborhoods that are going to have the most likelihood to have good deals in them. So that's usually not going to be your nice class A type neighborhoods. Yes, they'll be able to be a deal there here and

[00:25:22] there, but that's usually going to be your class C type neighborhoods, class D type neighborhoods. It's going to have a fair amount of distress, a fair amount of problems going on and you drive those areas. And that's also where really where your, that

[00:25:35] your buyers are going to be to where, you know, when you get those deals, you can very easily unload them. And you're looking for things. You're looking for symptoms of distress. Yeah. Long yards. Yep. Snow that hasn't been plowed. Four boards on the windows, falling gutters, rotten sighting.

[00:25:51] Yeah, all those things. And I look at any of that stuff when I see distress, you know, nobody that has their life together is letting their house fall apart. So just seeing those signs of distress is a very good indicator that something's going on there.

[00:26:05] Do they, or do they have some type of medical problems where they can't take care of it? Do they not have the money to where they can't take care of it? Something's going on. So I think, you know, it doesn't mean they're

[00:26:14] always going to be ready to sell. And most of the time they're probably not going to be, but it's still a sign of distress and certainly a person to have a conversation with. If you're a house flipper, execute the birth strategy or do double closings and

[00:26:28] are in need of money. Little Guy loans is your go-to lender here in the Des Moines area. Time is money. Loan approvals in 24 hours. Closings in five days. Little Guy loans was founded by Neil Timmons, an investor just like you. Since he has been in over 10,000 homes in

[00:26:46] Des Moines, there's never an appraisal. Houses, multifamily and commercial property loans up to one million. Check out www.littleguylones.com. Bring me current. What are you most excited about this year? Um, so we're like, we're doing really good with getting into nicer rental properties. Um, yeah.

[00:27:07] So now, um, you know, it's just been fun, uh, seeing things transform, you know, financially, um, getting better into the business to where now, you know, now we're not wholesaling for the sake of making money. Now we're wholesaling for the sake of earning

[00:27:23] money so that we can invest more into nicer rental properties. Yeah. So as we grow, you know, like, I mean, my current goal is to get up to like 50 class A rentals, um, within the next few years. So, you know, at that point, like life is

[00:27:38] pretty easy, you know? So just, just keep rolling with that. And then also, you know, as I get more into the coaching side of things, you know, writing books, um, I got, I'm not sure if you're aware, but I got really ill last

[00:27:51] year still kind of recovering from it a little bit. But a lot of that, um, had a lot of perspective change going through that. I mean, it was really bad. Like thought I was gonna die. It was out of work for four months.

[00:28:02] Didn't, didn't go on any appointments. Did it cut all the marketing off? Everything. Um, but going through that gave me the perspective of how much I want to help people and helped me realize that my life, that I don't want my life to be

[00:28:15] all about just trying to make money and all about business. I really want to give back and kind of leave my legacy behind of what I know that knowledge I've absorbed. I want to give it to other people. So now it's like, that's why I'm

[00:28:26] doing this kind of stuff, how I'll podcast, writing books is to share that with other people. You are a, you're a physically picked guy. How much does, does that and working out help you what you do out of business? Um, you know, I would say that, I

[00:28:43] mean, it certainly helps to a degree. Right. I mean, I have all kinds of friends associates that do this cross country that are, that are not fit, that are successful. So, you know, I think that a person can be successful if they're not fit. Yeah.

[00:28:56] But I think that, um, it helped me better handle stress, the stress management side, because some of those I've see play out and that people are not fit and you know, there's, there's different and sometimes unhealthy outlets for, you know, stress drinking comes to mind. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:12] I think it's just a good balanced approach like, like being the is if we look at, let's say we want to be really good in business, you know, we want to become multi-millionaire and financially free. We should have those same aspirations for health, for our relationships,

[00:29:28] for our spirituality. Like I want to be as well-rounded as I possibly can. I don't want to just be super rich, but I've got to mess up life. Right. You know, I want to, in fact, I want my business to serve my life in every way.

[00:29:43] I don't want my life serving my business. So, you know, like I don't really work all that much. I mean, I'd say I average four to six hours a day. Um, but I, you know, I, I build my business in a way to serve my life.

[00:29:55] So I don't, you know, I'm not always guys that's working 12 hours a day. That's killing myself just to try to make more money. Like that, to me, that just, that doesn't make sense. I'm going to ask a big question. I'm going to follow up with another

[00:30:06] one. Why Iowa? So why, why are you here? What, what keeps you here? Why do you invest here? And then the next piece of that is you, you coach, you train people and a number of people you train are right here in Iowa. Yeah.

[00:30:18] So part of that is why, and maybe this plays into what you just said, but why train, you know, what people, some people would say, why train your competition? Yeah. Well, so first I was born and raised here. So it's everything I know. And I, I, I personally

[00:30:34] like that. I know that now stuff like virtual wholesaling and doing deals across country is possible. A lot of people are doing it. I don't like that model. I like knowing my backyard. I like knowing what's going on. I know every street in the moin.

[00:30:48] I know my value is extremely well because of that. So for me, I like that comfort of knowing exactly what's going on in my market. I suspect that you, you then know you're in buyers, meaning the, the people you're going to sell the property to is a rehab

[00:31:04] or who's going to go remodel it, resell it. You know those people, if you're going to virtual wholesale in California today and in Texas tomorrow, you have no idea how will your buyers going to be or if you could even get a buyer. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

[00:31:17] Yeah. So we've had a couple of deals come in the last couple months that are outside our area. I mean, they're still within state with their outside our area. And I'm like, I don't even want to entertain them because I don't like, I don't know who my buyer

[00:31:27] is going to be there. I don't know. I mean, could I get a soul? Probably. But I just don't want to put forth the effort of trying to figure out who that is. Whereas now, because I know my market so well, I know who my

[00:31:37] buyers are 100% of all my deals now are just sold by a text message. I don't even send them out to email list anymore. It's like a very, very simple business to utilize. But yeah, so to this point, I've always felt there's just enough opportunity right in

[00:31:52] my own backyard. I've never felt the need to go outside the market. So I just say for most people, if you're aggressive enough in your own metro, as long as you're living in a metro market, not like some tiny little town, but any metro markets going to

[00:32:05] have enough opportunity for you right there alone. Why train your competition? So it took me a while to get over this one. You not see it as competition? I don't see it as competition anymore. Now there will I, I'd say interview or qualify anybody I'm going to coach,

[00:32:23] especially if they're going to be in my own area. There will be the people that will just literally instead of doing what you coach them to do, they will copy you and try to take you over. There are certainly those types of people.

[00:32:36] So I will all be very careful if I had certain people come to me and say, hey, I want to I want to be our coaching group. I'd probably say no because I don't feel like they would collaborate. I feel like they would try to compete or steal.

[00:32:48] Yeah. Right. And I've had it happen. You know, I've had different points had like my marketing copied quite literally word for word other than a logo. And I'm like, guys, come on. Like you just killed both of our marketing. You know, when they're that identical, nothing stands out.

[00:33:06] I said we both lose. I said, just like take the ideas but make them yours. But yeah, I had to I had to take just kind of an abundance approach. And what thing I've noticed is that it hasn't hurt at all. You know, I occasionally get

[00:33:21] some deals for my students. I've now had a couple of students that have sold deals too. So it's worked. But I also am now at the point where probably wouldn't take on any more in this market because I now have several. And with my with what I'm

[00:33:36] teaching, let's say, you know, I'm using the MLS. I'm teaching my methodologies on that MLS. I can't have 20 people out there doing the exact same thing. Like I mean those those agents would be getting blasted with 20 offers a day. So that just you know,

[00:33:53] eventually just have to scale back a little bit and say, you know, this this works. But I can only teach so many people the same thing. Mark, ready for the final three questions? Yep. If you had one piece of advice for your 20 year old self. 20 year old self.

[00:34:08] If I was going to teach them about real estate, I'd tell them to at least keep one out of every five to 10 deals they do. Because man, when I look back and I've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of deals now, man, if I could have just

[00:34:21] kept one out of five to 10, especially 14 years ago, a lot of those would be getting paid off now. Life would be completely different. So yeah, real estate side start keeping property and then to learn how to save money. That was a something I didn't learn until about

[00:34:45] 10 years into the business, you know, blew through it all. I mean, as me, you know, threw up to that point. Quite literally made millions dollars and had nothing. I finally got to a point where I had nothing to show for it. You know, I mean, I was supporting

[00:34:56] a family of five on on just my business and trying to pour back to or to add poor money back into the business, into marketing, all this different stuff going on. And there was just nothing ever to show for it. And I didn't understand that saving is

[00:35:13] a skill in itself. And so it took a long time to learn that lesson. So now if I could go back and just be like learning how to save that first 10 percent or 5 percent or doesn't matter what it is to start with, but learning how to save

[00:35:24] two books that change your life changed my life. Rich Dad poured out for sure. That's definitely a perspective change. And paradigm shift and what they say one of my favorites is the richest man Babylon, which one of the things it teaches is starting to save, you know,

[00:35:44] and save saving that 10 percent. Get your house paid off free and clear like now all my wealth is built off of having my house paid off free and clear. I mean, all of my properties are bought with my home equity line of credit.

[00:35:57] You know, I buy them, fix them up to around replace my line of credit, do it over again. So now I teach people like, man, whatever you do, get your house paid off as fast as you can and you'll be amazed how much wealth that builds you.

[00:36:08] All three of my children read the richest the richest man Babylon. Yeah. And I always get give me a one page summary they all done it and it's tremendous. Yeah. Yeah. The if you were cast away on Island for a year, you could only

[00:36:23] get three pieces of data about your business each and every month to know how your business was running. What three things must you know every month? It'd be good. I would say, hmm, I'm a good one. How much how much we spent on marketing?

[00:36:42] How many leads we're getting and our and how many deals were getting under contract? Probably that would give you the direction. Mark, we I know we could talk for hours on end. I've asked you lots of questions. What's one question I did not ask? I should have asked.

[00:37:02] Hmm. I don't know. I wish we had more time to go deeper into lead generation, but it could it could spill into multiple hours. So I was all good. I don't think anything was left out left out. So I'm happy with it.

[00:37:12] For people they want to find you they want to follow you. They like can it connect with you? Where can they go? What should they do? You can either find me on Facebook or Instagram at Markling education or you can go to buy that book off of Amazon.

[00:37:26] Again, it's called more leads, more deals, more profits. It just got released May 1st. So it's fresh. It's new and we'll get a lot of great feedback. Links are below in the show and that's everybody. Mark makes your way. Thank you. Thanks for this name.

[00:37:38] If you're enjoying the show may ask a favor of you naturally subscribe so you never miss an episode. But would you rate and leave an honest written review on Apple podcast? Does a lot for us here at the show and I appreciate reading your thoughts.

[00:37:53] Great guests make for a great show. If you know of another island would be a great guest or yourself have interest in being a guest. Well, get on our radar. Visit investing in Iowa to fill out an application or recommend a guest. And if you want to connect

[00:38:09] with me one on one go legacy impact investors dot com. Click on the invest with us button in the top right corner and there you can pick a time for the two of us to get on the calendar and connect. Until next time, keep investing in Iowa.