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Personal Development Through Small Habits with Zach Beach
Our guest is Zach Beach. Thanks for being on the show, Zach.
I appreciate you having me on. I’m grateful. I look forward to bringing some value to your audience.
I’m honored to have you on. Zach is with SmartRealEstateCoach.com located in Newport, Rhode Island. At 25, he joined the family business. He works alongside his wife, Kayla, his brother-in-law Nick, his father-in-law Chris, and a great support team. He’s a successful real estate investor completing over 100 deals under three years. He continues to buy and sell property without using his own cash, credit or investor’s money. He’s co-authoring their second book coming out in early 2019, The New Rules of Real Estate Investing. Give the audience a little bit more about who you are and let’s jump in.
When I hopped out of college, I was a bartender and personal trainer. The reason why I did that when I jumped out of college is that I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just knew that I wasn’t going to go into the corporate world. After about four years of doing that, I was burning the candle at both ends. I was serving drinks at night, waking up extremely early and training those exact same people. Obviously, much wasn’t getting done. My father-in-law, Chris, started a real estate business. He has been in real estate for many years now. I went to him and said, “I’m not sure if I’m going to like real estate as I know zero about it, but I figured it’d be better than this. Let’s go ahead and try it.” I dove on into the business. Fast forward several years now, over 100 plus deals, I definitely got to give my props to my family team as I wouldn’t be in the position without them and our associates around the country who we buy and sell property with. We know we’re doing well over 100 plus deals and counting.
You had these other jobs you were doing and making a massive change like that to real estate. What was something very important to that big switch to help you to be as successful as you’ve been?
I did jump off the cliff. It took me about three months. I was calling on properties. I was doing my bartending and personal training gig. I added that in when I had some free time because why not just add something else in there? I started getting used to being on the phone and start learning the scripts. It’s super important. I started learning the foundational items. I started educating myself and get a feel of exactly what this real estate business was. As I continue to progress through that, my family has been involved in real estate for a long time so I let them guide me at the beginning. As soon as I started to hit my stride, I started doing a lot more things on my own. That’s what the progression has been since all three of us are much running and that’s why the business is constantly growing over time.
[bctt tweet=”There’s a significant mindset change when there’s nowhere for you to turn back to.” via=”no”]
Essentially, you had a built-in mentor.
Yes, I did. I got lucky. People always say, “You had your father-in-law, he’s your mentor.” Why should I pay to be a part of your coaching programs? “You didn’t have to pay for it.” I always crack up because normally people come and pay for our mentoring services but don’t implement and made deals. That always cracks me up. I was extremely lucky to have a father-in-law who’s been in the business for a long time. It was my job to take all that knowledge and put it to work. I’m very grateful that I decided to make that happen.
Was he your father-in-law when you started in real estate?
Yeah. I have known my wife since middle school.
I wondered if there was some pressure to perform there.
I was already married. It’s still a family business. That’s why at the beginning, I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, but we might as well give it a try and see where it went. Things just naturally have fallen into place and have naturally grown from there.
You’re learning the scripts. You’re learning the business. You’re jumping in. We talked about you having this built-in mentor. You mentioned people pay for mentoring, but they don’t perform. Nothing comes from that. What was different from your experience with a mentor, I know he’s a family member, but still, you’ve made it happen. Now, you’re well-respected in your niche. What was different from you to these other people who even pay for the mentor?
It has to start with the very small habits that you have to develop in order to start implementing, especially a new business. I didn’t have a choice either. As soon as I cut off my bartending gig and my personal training, I said, “I’m going all in here. I burnt the ships like Cortez.” I had to learn these habits in order to progress forward to put a paycheck on the table. I joined a family business but we only get paid if we do deals and that’s how every single person should look at it. What the problem is a lot of people will come in and they’re working in a corporate position. They’re starting to just dabble in real estate. They’re like, “One day I want to be a self-employed entrepreneur in real estate.” They haven’t fully made that commitment yet that like, “I’m going to one day chop this off.” It’s easy to say, “I didn’t reach my goals this week. I didn’t develop the habits this week because I still have a paycheck coming in.” That was the difference. I had a clear set in my mind that I had to make this happen compared to others that maybe haven’t drawn that line in the sand yet.
There’s a big mindset change when there’s nowhere for you to turn back to.
Living on the fence is the most dangerous place. It’s not making a decision one way or the other. You never fully become a real estate entrepreneur. You never fully leave your jobs. You continue to complain about how your business isn’t progressing. You’ve got to make a decision. I always recommend that you set a timeline or a dollar amount of when you decided to switch over to become full-time. “If I have X amount in the bank, I’m making a leap,” and make that leap at that time.
You have something you’re looking forward to. You’re working towards in that. You can also reverse engineer. You said, “To get to that point, this is what’s going to have to happen. This is what I can be doing every month, every week and every day and how I’m going to get there. It starts with small habits.” Do you have some examples of initial small habits to where you’re at now?
Every business has particularly small habits. What it came down to was personal growth and development for myself and that’s why I’ve been able to progress. That’s why when you’ve noticed a lot of our students and things like that, they progress once they start putting together these personal development habits. This may sound extremely simple, but it was journaling, reading and being consistent with my mental health and my workouts. It started with workouts in general. I need to have energy. Being self-employed, we need to have the energy to sustain business growth. That’s why I would start there. Scripts would be after you’ve developed these business developments. It’s learning how to talk to people as that’s extremely foundational whether you’re raising capital like you do or speaking to sellers themselves. You have to be very good at your script in order to have a nice educated conversation to know which types of options you can present to people.
The journaling and reading, there are all the self-development and growth. Any tips on the journaling method or maybe a miracle morning routine that you have developed to say, “This is what works?”
I don’t have a huge science behind anything. I have a journal. I would always start with each and every morning when I was especially learning to journal. It originally starts as a task because you’re like, “What am I going to journal about?” Eventually, it becomes a necessity in your life. I would just originally was writing down my thoughts and getting out everything on paper, things that happened to me in the day, things that frustrated me and things I was excited about. Eventually, I started writing action items that I need to accomplish and other bigger ideas that I may table for now, but in the future, I’ll go back and take a look at it. After I’ve journaled, I started putting sticky notes into it to refer back to. It became a working document for me as I started to progress in my journaling.
[bctt tweet=”There’s a lot more to life than just wealth.” via=”no”]
You’re finding that you’re journaling things that are valuable. You need to be able to go back and find that they’re going to be useful in the future. Are you using any specific journal or is it just blank paper?
No, usually I’ll get them for Christmas and my birthday or something like that, whatever anybody wants to buy me. This is me, but I like a nice pen and a nice thick journal. It makes writing in it a lot more fun.
What about reading? As far as when you started learning this industry, you’re probably reading a lot. Any specific books or any reading habits you’ve developed that you’ve been able to continue?
The best thing about technology nowadays is you can read but you’re listening to audibles which has been extremely impactful on my life. I started by reading a book a month. I have a young child. He’s eighteen months. Listening to audibles is a lot easier. I usually can get through one to two Audibles a month and one book reading because I do still like to physically touch the book. I’m not big on the digital books yet but maybe one day. As far as books that got me started, I would say You Were Born Rich by Bob Proctor was a huge book that got me into the personal development world. I 100% relate any of my successes with personal development because as soon as you start developing yourself, it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do whether it’s real estate or anything else, you’d have to have that personal development foundation.
What was it in that book that helped you think differently or to push towards this goal?
I come from a single mother, a loving family but not a wealthy family whatsoever. I have a lot of wealth paradigms that come with baggage. That’s my baggage that I was born to the world with. With You Were Born Rich, I had a lot of paradigm shifts on how to think about wealth, capital and money. That made that shift because at least my reason for developing, especially at the beginning, I worked on my personal development was I wanted to make more money. You can never make more money past what your actual ceiling is. I think T. Harv Eker talks about your wealth ceiling. I wanted to increase my wealth ceiling. That was my number one reason I wanted to be a better person or anything at that time. I want to increase my wealth. Luckily, I’ve got these other benefits and I started to realize there’s a lot more to life than just wealth. That book helped me shift my mind around making more money.
I know you’re coaching lots of people in real estate, old and young. Old or young they respect you because you are what you’ve done in such a short amount of time, how educated you are now and the success you’ve had. What’s the biggest thing that you find are holding people back? What’s holding them back from success and moving forward?
We continued this conversation with what we’ve been talking about. It’s the six inches between your ears. It depends on how big your head is. Let’s say it’s six inches between your ears. It’s all mindset. We teach people how to buy and sell real estate without using your own cash, credit or investor’s money. It’s on terms, lease options, owner financing, subject to deals. A lot of it is getting over these paradigms that people have associated with buying a property, especially by having conversations with people is where you’re putting together contracts. That mindset that there are no sellers out there that can do it. There are no buyers that will qualify and buy a property through a rent-to-own program. There’s no way that I can build a real estate business and all the other basic ones that stick with, “I’m not worthy,” and every other paradigm that’s out there. As soon as we can get somebody over the mindset, into a positive frame of mind and into a place where they can be successful and truly believe it inside and out in their heart but in their mind, their business takes off. It’s immediate. It’s amazing how the light turns on. It’s not because they didn’t understand how the business worked. It was because all of a sudden, they become in alignment with what they’re trying to accomplish.
They have some faith. They had some belief that this system will work and jumping in. Tell us a little bit about the business model, how you all are buying real estate.
We buy property on terms. When we say terms, lease options is one way, buying and selling on owner financing that’s done a lot in the commercial world but we do it a lot in a single-family home. Buying properties subject to the existing loan, which means that you’ll close on it and take the title, but there’s a preexisting fine. It still stays on the property. That the mortgage is not eliminated until it’s officially cast out on the future. We’re able to buy some of these properties without our own cash, credit or asking investors for money.
How are you finding these deals?
We primarily focused on single-family homes. We find a lot of them on expired listings, properties that were on the market before and they expired. For sale by owner homes, for rent by owners are fantastic. We’ll do some other lists such as some very direct mailing associated especially with free and clear properties if we want to take the title on a home.
How are you finding your list? Where do you get your list?
[bctt tweet=”You need to become aligned with what you’re trying to accomplish.” via=”no”]
We have a simple service or a database online. There are a couple of them. My +plus leads is what we use. REDX is another one. I know there are a couple of other ones out there. They all give you access even if you don’t have your real estate license to all the expired listings to withdrawn listings to canceled listings and the for-sale by the owner and the for rent by owners. We’re fishing on the same pond as the majority of the traditional investors are. When I say traditional investors, they are people that are fix and flipping or wholesaling in the single-family home market. We’re just looking for completely different sellers and buyers than other people. It’s an untapped niche.
What’s the biggest issue that people have when contacting a seller in this niche?
Let’s just say it’s not knowing what to say or not knowing what information to get. We’re buying and selling with a lease option and owner financing. We want to know the finances on the property. That’s very hard for people to ask when you first get involved in a business. It’s, “Do you have a mortgage on your property or how much is that mortgage? What are the taxes and the insurance on the property?” You’re trying to find out the finances on it to make sure that it’s a good deal for you to buy because you want to make sure that you’re going to be able to sell the property at a higher price. You’re going to make sure that you can cashflow it, getting a nice spread every month. You want to make sure that when the property does cash out in the future that you’re getting either some nice principle paydown on it and you’re able to create nice backend profits. As I alluded to, we get three paydays on those. The non-refundable deposit we collect from a buyer, the cashflow that we get every month and the principal paydown in the additional premium when it gets sold. Three paydays, you create some amazing profits on single-family homes.
What’s a way that you’ve improved your business that we could all apply to ours?
It always comes down to systemizing everything. We’re a family business. In the beginning, before we started growing, we were able to read each other’s mind in a way because we were always together. The systems weren’t always in place. As you start to expand, as you start to include more and more support team, the systems in the business need to be improved. I would always suggest that you take a vacation every six months and don’t be available on the phone and see what happens with your business. You’re going to find out a way like where the kinks are. When you come back, you figure out a system around where those kinks are because if you’re talking about any business, the systems and the people that work the systems are the two major factors there. If you can create good systems and have great people, you can have big growth in your business and have a sustainable business. It could be sold in the future as well if you so choose to sell your business. Those are definitely things people are going to look at as being investors to potentially buy our business.
You’re never going to sell your business if you don’t have great people and systems where you can walk away. You’re going on vacation and seeing how the business operates. You’ve had success. You dove in like we talked about and burned the bridge. You’ve covered a lot of ground. You’re coaching people now. What’s the one thing that has contributed to that success or maybe something that we haven’t already covered that you would relate to being this successful?
Thank you. I appreciate calling me successful. I’m a long way from where I truly want to be. If you want to increase your success, it is teaching people. Even if you don’t fully grasp everything, if you have a family member or somebody that you want to tell about what you’re doing, I highly recommend you do so. If you’re going to teach somebody, you have to absolutely internalize the knowledge and implementation in which you’re going through in order to teach somebody. That’s the reason why I’ve been able to make some big leaps in my life over the last several years is that not only did I have to know how to do it, but I also have to be able to teach somebody how to do it as well. If you want to internalize something, I would just start teaching somebody about it as well.
How do you like to give back?
I give back to one place. My family gives back to another place as well. My brother-in-law, Nick, got into a bad snowboarding accident when we were young. The doctors told him he wasn’t going to walk, talk or eat again. He now works with us. He is doing absolutely fantastic. The Franciscans Children’s Hospital is where he went. We give a piece of all of our deals that we make to Franciscans Children’s Hospital. He has been doing that for a long time now. I also give back to The Purple Project which is by Chris Herren. He used to be an ex-Boston Celtic. A lot of my family and friends have gone through bad drug problems, including myself. He has a big foundation that helps support people that are going through addiction and things like that. I give a piece as well to The Purple Project.
I appreciate you sharing that It’s a great opportunity to be able to give to and doing some great things. Zach, tell the audience how they can learn more about you, get in touch with you and tell them about your book as well.
We are going to give away our free Amazon bestselling book because our new book is not available on Amazon just yet. We’ll give you our Amazon bestselling book Real Estate on Your Terms. You’ll be able to find out a lot about what we do and our family business as well. You can get that from FreeSRECBook.com. That stands for Free Smart Real Estate Coach Book. Go ahead, it’s absolutely free. We won’t make you pay for shipping or handling. It’s 100% on us. You have to give us your address. Once you guys get that book, we will definitely give you the notification about when we go live with our new book The New Rules of Real Estate. You will be able to get that book as well. Get reading.
It’s an important part of any entrepreneur’s daily routine. It should be anyway and being successful. I appreciate you putting that offer out to our audience. As a reader, there’s no reason you shouldn’t take advantage of a free book. I hope you’ll reach out to Zach and their team and get the free book. I also hope you’ll go to Life Bridge Capital and connect with me. Go to our Facebook group, The Real Estate Syndication Show, so we can all learn from experts like Zach, grow our businesses as he has, jump in and make this happen.
Important Links:
- SmartRealEstateCoach.com
- The New Rules of Real Estate Investing
- You Were Born Rich
- My +plus leads
- REDX
- The Purple Project
- FreeSRECBook.com
- The Real Estate Syndication Show – Facebook group
About Zach Beach
Zachary with Smartrealestatecoach.com located in Newport RI. He works alongside his wife Kayla, brother in law Nick, father in law Chris and a great support team. He is a successful real estate investor, completing over 100 deals in under 3 years and he continues to buy and sell property without using his own cash, credit or investors’ money. Zach is coauthoring their second book, coming out in early 2019: The New Rules of Real Estate.
Zach grew up in central Massachusetts but relocated to Newport, Rhode Island when he graduated from college. After graduating from college, Zach had no idea what he wanted to do, and decided to bartend and be a personal trainer for the time being. He soon realized that he was burning the candle at both ends, working late nights and early mornings. He knew there was a better way.
At age 25 he decided to jump into the family real estate business. It was one of the first big risks he took in his life as nothing was guaranteed. Plus, he knew absolutely nothing about real estate. Through hard work, training in house by his father in law Chris and implementation Zach has now completed over 100 deals and growing. On top of that, Zach coaches’ students and Associates around the country on how to buy and sell property as his family still does.
Now as a group they buy and sell 5-10 properties a month with predictable and scalable systems, and controlling between $20 million – $25 million of real estate at any one time with little to no money in the deal, and no banks
involved.
