WS770: Keep, Change, Delete, Everyday with Max Keller

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:00.0] ANNOUNCER Welcome to the Real Estate Syndication Show. Whether you are a seasoned investor or building a new real estate business, this is the show for you. Whitney Sewell talks to top experts in the business. Our goal is to help you master real estate syndication.

And now your host, Whitney Sewell.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:24.4] WS: This is your daily Real Estate Syndication Show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest is Max Keller, thanks for being on the show Max.

[0:00:32.3] MK: Glad to be here.

[0:00:33.3] WS: Max is a real estate investor, bestselling author and highly sought after consultant, speaker and expert panelist on the topic of lead generation and marketing for real estate investors. In just a few short years, Max went from being a full-time high school math teacher to flipping over 100 houses. Max’s unique marketing approach landed him on stage with Robert Kiyosaki, being presented with the 2019 Industry Innovator of the Year award. Max, welcome to the show, grateful for your time and to meet you personally.

I know your story and your just unique way that you got there I think is going to bring a ton of value to the listeners and so you know, I’m very interested personally in hearing more about it but get us started and you know, who is Max and let’s dive in to this – this is how you did this, there’s so many of the listeners are trying to do the same thing, right? Wondering, how did Max do this, how did you do a hundred deals that quick and how did you just make this life transformation right from a math teacher?

Maybe it was because you knew the numbers so well, I don’t know but you know, but we’ll get into that and tell us you know, get us started with your story.

[0:01:36.4] MK: Great to be on, yeah, for me, I was teaching math at an inner city school in the Dallas Fort Worth area. I loved my job, I’ve never complained about the pay, I just wanted more out of life so I was searching for some ways to do that, ways to increase my active income. You know, I wanted to do something during the summer so I started looking for summer opportunities and my family and I saved up for a vacation with another family that we know real well and it was on that vacation, July 2015 that my friend said, that he had bought a rent house and I really – I had thought about doing real estate in the past but if any of my friends started real estate business, I wouldn’t have picked him, he’s very risk averse and he said you know, “My pay is locked in, I’ve got to do something, my kids are getting older. I bought a rent house.”

He kind of explained how it went and I got interested in it, you know, I went to all the way back from the vacation, we stayed with some family members who are in the coast guard and I said, “Hey, you know, it’s a great house that you have here down at Louisiana, are you buying it, are you renting it?” And my cousin was like, “No, we’re renting it and it’s awesome, we have this landlord that’s like our age.” You know, we’re in our mid-30s at the time. “And he just has like eight houses paid off and he just makes sure that we’re happy and it just kind of drives around all day.” And I was like, “Wow, that sounds really good.”

I just started learning about it, got a mentor locally, did my first deal, wholesaled it for $16,000 which you know, was a lot of money. Nearly a third of a year’s pay in one deal. I went to deal number two and never intended to quit my job, I was just going to get a couple of rentals, you know, start to diversify, build some net worth but you know, I felt like it was a good opportunity and I enjoyed it and my teaching was kind of getting in the way of the real estate career.

So I just went full force, quit my job, started flipping houses, you know, I knew it was right the first month that I didn’t get my teacher check. I was coaching football, basketball and track, teaching high school math. I’ve been getting a check every month on the 20^th of the month for seven years but you know, I had an entrepreneurial spirit.

I felt like maybe I had missed my window of opportunity to start a business but that was definitely not true, that was a self-limiting belief.

[0:03:49.8] WS: Is that because of the age or [inaudible]?

[0:03:53.8] MK: You know, I think it’s harder, in some ways, people told me it’s harder to leave your job when you’re older and you have kids and more routines but for me, I found it to be a lot easier because I was smarter. When I tried to start my own businesses in my 20s and I wasn’t reading a lot and I didn’t have good mentors. I mean, I didn’t know what I was doing.

I started my own business when I was 28 and I didn’t understand how lead generation works. I didn’t understand how to stand out in my marketplace and you know, I felt there were some economic factors that made it harder but I could have been successful if I had the right mindset.

I actually found it easier when I was older and I just went full force, you know, the first month that I didn’t get a teacher check which was around $3,200, $3,400 after health insurance and everything is taken out, I got my check for the third house that I flipped and it was 10 times that amount.

I knew I made the right decision but the way that real estate investing works is you’re only as good as your last deal and it can kind of turn into a hamster wheel. That’s sort of what happened with me if we fast-forward two  years later, things are going well, I’m flipping a lot of houses, I’m doing you know, eight projects at a time, I have a clue, I have an office, I’ve gotten with some really smart people who have helped me and we scaled up. The downside was, is that the market forces in DFW were going in the opposite direction. The margins were getting skinnier, the contractor pay and the materials were getting more expensive and my return on marketing investment was just getting lower.

I was going from a 10x return on my marketing to an eight to a five and I’m starting to think, “Okay, you know, I left teaching because it was a grind and there really wasn’t a lot of opportunity and I’m starting to feel like I’m in a grind right now.” I was making good money as a real estate investor but I didn’t really have the freedom that I wanted.

I wasn’t spending a lot of time with my family and a lot of times I really wasn’t enjoying the deals, I was super – I was actually getting burnt out kind of quick so what I did, maybe this is something that’ll help the people who are listening, is that if you feel like you’re just not making any headway and things are going in the wrong direction, instead of getting down on yourself and just making it worse, I just did a deep dive of the deals that I had already done and I went through the deals that I had already done and for me, I’m just speaking today from my personal experience, what you want might be different. But what I wanted was, I wanted to make a good profit on my deals, you know, I go to work to get paid so I want to make good profit on my deals.

A very profitable deal sometimes takes about the same amount of time as a slim deal so it’s like, “Why don’t I do the very profitable?” So I wanted very profitable deals, I wanted deals where when I’m working with the seller, there is minimal resistance to my offer, my advice, it would seem more consultatively than adversarial and then you know, lastly, I want to have fun, I had a lot of fun as a math teacher, I had a lot of fun as a coach.

I wasn’t having any fun in real estate, it was a total grind, I was miserable, I was actually thinking about throwing in the towel. Fortunately, I made two big discoveries, whether you’re in residential real estate investing or others, you know, my goal is for you all to take maybe some of what happened to me and run with it in your own examples so is it okay with you if I jump into the first discovery, Whitney?

[0:07:10.5] WS: Yeah, let’s do it, I think it’s awesome that you had achieved what some people would have said, well, success in real estate, right? You got these systems going, you’re doing eight properties at a time and it’s like, “Wow, you know, look what Max has accomplished here,” but now all of a sudden you’re realizing that you’re not having fun doing it and maybe you should quit but what are these two realizations that you had?

[0:07:29.1] MK: Yeah, the first one was that I really needed to dial in on who I was targeting, I was trying to be all things to all people. I was working every list, I was doing – I had multiple websites, I had yellow letters, cold calling, texting was about to get started, every list that I could find, you know, pre-foreclosures, vacant homes, tired landlords and although those things were working, they were unpredictable.

I went through my list and I’m looking for these three criteria, profit, minimal resistance working with the seller and I’m looking to have fun. There was good news and bad news in the first part of my journey. The good news was, the bad news, Warren Buffett says bad news first, good news comes later, right?

The bad news was most of my deals that I had done up to that point did not meet all three. I was a little bummed but not really surprised because of the way I felt. The good news was, is that for the few deals that did meet all three of the criteria, you don’t have to be a math teacher to figure out what the pattern was and for me, they weren’t just regular motivated sellers, they were senior homeowners, okay?

I had found a niche that was very different and normally, when I’m rehabbing a house, I’m peeling back the onion, I’m peeling back the walls and the story just keeps getting worse, I’m finding more problems with the structure. But this journey is actually getting better because I’m finding these little discoveries and I’m like, “I didn’t know that, this is great.” I noticed that you know, the senior homeowners, I’m like, “Okay, this is a good niche, it meets all the criteria, why have I not been focusing on this before, how did I get these ideal clients?”

And your niche doesn’t have to be senior homeowners, that’s what it is for me. But whatever it is, find that niche because when you do, it’s ultimate freedom. Because it became so much easier to market to them, to tailor the messaging and it felt honestly, like a winner take all. You know, before I felt like I was a dime in a dozen, I’m here, there’s wholesalers, there’s flippers, there’s agents, there’s hedge funds, there’s I-buyers, I was just this same as everybody else. Now –

[0:09:33.0] WS: Like in Blue Ocean.

[0:09:34.1] MK: Yes, it really felt that way, it felt like it, I love that book, Blue Ocean Strategy, and it did it, it felt like a blue ocean but I was like, “Okay, this is the blue ocean but how do I position myself in the blue ocean because I’m not there yet?” I’m still working with all different kinds of sellers. I did a little fact finding, you know, I noticed that – I did some research, I noticed that the leads I was getting from my blue ocean were converting at a lot higher rate, they were just higher quality leads.

Another thing I noticed was that they needed a lot more help, you know? I was in the senior homeowners homes for three to four hours in their living rooms. They’re trying to figure out if they should stay in their house, if they should sell it, if they sell it, which option? Is the person sitting, that they’re calling, really trying to help them, like who is looking out for you or are they just a sales person trying to talk them into their option?

And then, once they sell their home, where are they going to live? Are they going to move in with family? Mobility issues, there’s 400 different kinds of senior housing that’s out there, which one do they pick, how do they know, how do they pay for it? What I did as a teacher and as an educator is, I was like, “Okay, I love these people.”Like my grandma helped take care of me and I took care of her. I saw my grandma when I was working with these folks and my grandpa.

I was like, “Okay, what can I do to help these folks?” Because that’s how I want to help them. I figure if I help them, you help enough people get what they want, you’ll get what you want. It’s fun. I’m learning about the different senior housing facilities in my area, I’m learning about what’s important to my niche and I’m gaining some expertise and so I know this is the niche I want to be in. I was actually buying some houses that the seller had offers, five, 10 grand, more than my offer and they were still going with me. I didn’t know why.

I actually kind of did a little bit of a shot in the dark, I went back and called one of my sellers. It wasn’t the mom because she’s in an assisted living facility, I called the adult son who is like in his 50s. I said, “Hey, do you remember me? Max, Savior Home Buyers.”  “Yeah, I remember you.” It’s been about six months. I said, “Hey, you know, I remember the time when I was working with you, you had said that you had gotten some offers from other people and that some of them were actually higher than my offer. Just curious, why did you go with me? I’m glad you did but why?”

You know it always helps when the discovery comes from your ideal prospects now, not from what we think and I was just getting this information and it was just like gold, he was like, “You know, we trusted you, we could tell that you genuinely cared, you weren’t just there to do a deal and you know, that trust meant a lot to us and it meant more than 10 grand.”

I was like, “Okay, this is a big eye opening moment.” And so I knew this was where I wanted to be, I knew that I could pull different lists, I knew that I could develop more expertise, I knew that my messaging could change and so that was like part one is finding the true ideal person, I can’t take down every deal in Dallas Fort Worth. I started flipping homes in Oklahoma, I was all about scaling and growing.

I think that’s great but just from me, there were so many leads I was passing up on that I don’t have to take down the whole city or the whole state or the whole US to hit my deal flow goals. Once I got a niche, that also my marketing started getting a lot more effective and I started seeing the increases going back to what they were, what happened after that, the second piece was what really blew the cover off, it was something that I can’t even tell you how unexpected this would be but it changed my business forever so if we have time, I’ll share with you your audience, what happened with that.

[0:13:09.6] WS: Yeah, would love for you to and I was just thinking about, I mean, this could apply to any business ultimately and I hear it so often, you know, even from starting a podcast to having a business and who your clients are and who are you speaking to, really niching down and just the value of that and it sounds like, you’ve experienced that and there’s a great testimony to that alone. I hear all the time, “Whitney, you know, if I niche down too much, I’m not going to have enough clients or I’m not going to have enough investors or,” you know, that worry, but it’s not really, it’s not the case at all and you’re proving that. Go ahead.

[0:13:42.3] MK: I was so nervous about that, so nervous that’s why I didn’t do it sooner because I thought that if I niched that I would pass up all these other deals and if I’m just barely hitting my income, my lifestyle goals for where I’m at now, how am I going to increase it if I’m passing up deals, and it was actually total opposite. A friend of mine who does some sales training in the real estate investment space, John Martinez, I was at his house last week, he’s a friend of mine and we were talking about niches and he goes, you know, “Go so niche until you think there’s like not even an audience for that, that’s how you’ll know where you really need to be.” And that was my experience.

I’m going niche and I’m focusing on it and it’s working and then what happened next was totally unexpected. I was at a motivated seller’s house, it was in the evening and we’re doing the agreement, I’m going to buy their home and then I actually helped them find another place to live. I had some good contacts and I was helping people find different kinds of senior housing facilities so the seller’s adult – I think it was his daughter was there, her daughter was there.

She said, you know, you’ve helped, – she’s about 50, 60 years old and she said, You know, you’ve helped our family out a ton, I really appreciate you now so much.” I really went above and beyond, she said, “You know, have you ever thought about writing a book about all of this that you know?”

I was like, “No, I’m like, I’m Max the house flipper.” I’m actually dyslexic, I was the dyslexia that was good at math, my daughter’s the one that is a little bit more challenging but no, writing has so never been in my wheelhouse like you can’t believe it. And I thought that really, writing also was really difficult and so, I really didn’t even actually start – I didn’t find out I was dyslexic until I was an adult and I didn’t start reading a lot until I got into real estate.

I noticed that a lot of people in real estate were reading a lot of books, that’s how I found out I was dyslexic. I got with a coach, I learned how to read a lot better and started doing audio books and basically all the things. I remember when my students would go to the content mastery lab and they would get with the dyslexia, they didn’t call them coach but they had a name for it and they were getting their help and so now I’m in that boat but I’m learning, I’m reading better.

But still, the thought, reading a book a week which is about what I was up to at this point and writing a book, those are totally different things. I was like, “Thank you, you know, I really appreciate the compliment, it’s very nice of you to say, I think I’m just going to stay where I’m at.” Then I thought about it a little bit and I was like you know, it was just another leap of faith, our instincts are very powerful. I feel like you can meet somebody and tell if they’re genuine and if it’s somebody you really want to work with and the same thing with our ideas.

Don’t ever take your ideas and just like, crush them because when you have a feeling, go with it. That’s been good advice for me. I just said you know, “That’s actually not a bad idea, I have no idea how to do this,” but if I went from the person who knows a lot about senior housing which is what I had done in that year period and really separated myself from 95% of my market, I felt like this would be the extra 5% and I would go from the person who is the expert in this niche to the person who wrote the book on this niche.

What I did was I just made a ‘how to’ book. There’s two kinds of books. Now we have a publishing company, I never would have expected any of this in my wildest dreams and I hang out with publishers and it’s really weird. I like it. Never would have imagined it a million years, it’s very accessible.

[0:17:03.3] WS: It’s so interesting because I think myself, also, and many of the listeners could relate to that feeling of, “Wait a minute, you know, I’m no author, I’m no writer.” I didn’t like to read for many years, I love reading now and on that same track, we’re reading as much as possible, you know, all the time and I contribute a lot of success to that steady habit.

You know, writing a book, yeah, I mean, I would be right there too, it’s like, “Wait a minute, you know, I’m no writer.” So it’s interesting, how did that progress, you know, you did write a book and why?

[0:17:33.5] MK: Yeah, so I wanted to write the book to really position myself differently. Another thing is I like to tell the good, bad and the ugly. So the good was I was helping people in my niche at a whole other level. The bad was I was in these living rooms for three to four hours at a time explaining all of this information that I had learned and it just wasn’t scalable and then the adult child would get into the conversation of my niche and I would have to re-explain it and so it took so much time.

I felt like the book, because I was a teacher, you know you have the book. It’s like I was thinking more of a book as not like telling my life story because I felt like, not to be rude but I am a motivated seller, they care about me, your sellers care about you but you know they care about solving their problems and so I just wanted to write a book that answered all of their questions and so I just sat down, my process was real simple, it took a long time, I had a lot of bumps and bruises.

Now we have created a tool that I am going to share it with your audience at the end. So if they are thinking about going down this journey, we actually wrote a book for real estate investors that makes the process so much simpler, I wish I had it. But at the time, I just made a list of all the questions that I had then asked from being in hundreds of people’s living rooms and then I put what the answers were. I put the pros and cons.

I thought about, somebody gave me term ‘foundational source’ and I said, “You know I want to create a book to where there’s 40 different options in it.” Not all of them point to me. Every chapter I am real specific on telling people what I do and don’t do, just as important. And I really want to create that foundational resource. So folks can read it, they don’t have to go to 1,500 websites and try to figure out who’s telling the truth and which one is a long form sales letter and so that is what I did.

I mapped it all out, I wrote it. It took about two to 300 hours to write the first one. I had to shut down parts of my business to get it done because I was going solo. And then I printed out a 100 copies of the book and I started passing it out and what I found was benefits I would have never imagined in a million years. Do we have time? I can maybe just share one or two?

[0:19:37.7] WS: Yeah, please do share one or two and unfortunately we are running low on time. We’ll have to move to some final questions pretty soon but please.

[0:19:43.6] MK: Yeah, one of the things that I found was is that I would give the book out and people wouldn’t throw it away whereas when I am sending thousands and tens of thousands of dollars of direct messaging, if I am not hitting these folks at the exact right timing bubble, they are throwing my stuff in the trash but when I am giving people autographed copies of my book, not only are they not throwing it away, they are passing it around to their friends.

So it became an ultimate referral tool and ultimate business card. Another thing that we are doing that has great success is before we go over to somebody’s house to look at it, we send them an autographed copy of the book. We tell them to read chapter three before we come over and it sort of switches the whole paradigm from them thinking, “Oh I’ve got the cheese. I’ve got what you want. This is the seller’s market, you are going to follow my process.”

And really it gets them following our process and we’re the real estate professionals so it actually benefits everybody. When we go over to the home what we are finding is that we’re getting a lot more exclusive deals because why would they work with anybody else when they already have the person who wrote the book on the subject? And they’ve already read three or four hours about us. They’re pretty sold on us. So then we could just really come in as that consultant.

And we can do the three things that we talked about, exclusive deals leads to more profit. There is minimal resistance because I’m the position myself with the book as the expert and the authority and the credible person and I am having fun helping these people and so this book that we created, I want to share it with your audience and it’s called The Real Estate Investor Book Writing Checklist. We have never seen one like this.

It is the book that I wanted when I first wrote my book and it maps out how to target the niche in whatever part of real estate that you’re in, how to speak to them directly, how to overcome writer’s block, how to outline a book, an eBook or just update your marketing message. So at the end, I’ll share the link where folks can get that and then there’s some links where they can learn more about what we do as a business.

[0:21:35.3] WS: Yeah that’s awesome, I am looking forward to that and I know the neat thing about your book though, it is very niche focused as well. It is not like you wrote this massive book just on real estate investing, right? I mean it is very niched for your client and I am sure that contributed to the success and growth that you are experiencing now. Well Max, we’ll pivot just a little bit and just ask you a few final questions. In the real estate business right now I mean how are you preparing for a potential downturn?

[0:22:02.9] MK: Yes, so number one is cash and access to cash, that’s number one. I learned that from my friends in my [inaudible] who went through the downturn. You know there is a lot of opportunity in the way up and there’s different strategies work for different parts of the real estate cycle. So if we are kind of flat with the prices, maybe in the future it could be heading down different strategies. So I have already mapped out what those strategies are.

I have been saving, you know I’ve got the dry powder for myself and my cash that I have stored and then I also have access to cash. So on the next up cycle I can do very well and make some people incredibly wealthy and then you know, I’m 39 so I hit another cycle at least in my lifetime. The more of our own cash that we can utilize, the more access you have, the better you can do. So that’s what I have been focusing on. I’ve been on just kind of a cross country circuit in the last three, four years to build those relationships.

They take time because when there’s really good deals out there, you know the folks who have cash and access to cash can control the deal and then my goal is just to get them to cash flow. The cash flow is really the glue that just keeps the deal together long enough for the real mover to takeover, which is appreciation statistically and then I do some lending and I leverage into, some of my students have deals. I get to meet them and get to know them well and invest in their deals.

Lending is a beautiful space and having that access is huge during a downturn. So that is what I am doing.

[0:23:28.9] WS: Nice. What do you predict is going to happen over the next six to 12 months?

[0:23:33.2] MK: Yeah, you know every prediction is wrong, it’s just by how much and then what direction. So I really don’t know.

[0:23:39.6] WS: That is a good answer.

[0:23:40.1] MK: But me I am not sure and it kind of doesn’t matter because if things are solid, we’ll just continue to tap into the retail market and access those strategies if the market is flat, then we’ll just do the same thing but with more creative finance stuff and just sort of wait a little bit and then when the market goes down a little bit, you know we know what those strategies are but I don’t really pay attention to that too much because it is very hard to predict the future.

You know what I focus on is predicting what is going to change is very difficult. What’s actually way easier, so here’s a short cut for your listeners, is get into the business of predicting what’s not going to change and what’s not going to change is that when you identify yourself to prospects as the trusted expert, you are going to be able to capture more leads, higher quality leads and increase your conversion rate. Books and leveraging authorship is not going to change.

Having access to cash is a benefit to being an investor, is not going to change so I focus more on that. I am sorry I don’t have a good answer for that.

[0:24:41.5] WS: No, I thought it was a really good answer. I thought that was a great answer. So Max, I feel like people that are in business and especially real estate, to be successful you have to have a high level of self-discipline and how did you gain such a high level of self-discipline?

[0:24:55.1] MK: Teaching. Teaching was like being in the military. You know I have ADHD, I didn’t actually know that was real. I feel bad for my students because I thought they were making it up but it is actually real. I definitely have that. So being a teacher was a great opportunity because there were 14 bells every day that told me exactly what’s new. So I noticed that when I would do little things over a long period of time, it is sort of like A/B’s.

I had six A/B split testing, you know and so I noticed that when I was disciplined and I followed the routine and I improved the routine a little bit, I improved 1% every day. I would make these huge gains in the classroom and so when I came over to real estate and I was a solo-preneur and then I built out my office. I was like, “Okay, well what made me successful as a teacher? A timer.” So here, I will show you right here, “Boom.” Well, I can’t even, I’m sorry I can’t move my camera. It is locked in.

I got a little clock over here. So I have a schedule. So I think having the discipline, the schedule, I map out income producing activities and focus on those before I start the day. You know maybe on the future show, well if we get an opportunity we’ll talk about it but I have a very, very regimented schedule, which is the opposite of my natural personality but I think it is crucial to business success. At least at the rate that I want to have business success.

[0:26:07.3] WS: Yeah, I would love to talk about that more in depth no doubt and I love that you said mapping out income producing activities every day. Yeah, I would love to talk about that in more detail and you know maybe you can give us a couple of habits. You know I like to ask what are a couple of daily habits that you are disciplined about that have helped you achieve success?

[0:26:26.1] MK: Yes, so what I’m grateful for, what I am proud of, what results I am going to achieve for the day and have achieved, those are things that I really stick to at the beginning and at the end of the day. As a business owner, you know sometimes in isolation I feel like in one day I haven’t accomplished anything but by writing it out, I’ve noticed that I have accomplished a lot, including getting to be here with you and share with your audience, that has been a huge blessing, thanks for that opportunity.

So that is a big one, pre-framing my calls. So when I talk to somebody, laying a note that how much time I have because if you make incremental gains, you know five to 10 minutes here and there, that’s huge. I take a 10 minute break every hour. I don’t like taking breaks. I like to work for just like four hours straight but that’s been a huge game changer, doing income producing activities at the very beginning and the last one is probably ‘keep-change-delete.’

So at the end of every day, I write down what I want to keep that I did well, what are some things I want to change and what are some things that I want to delete. So instead of course correcting on New Year’s Day or once a quarter or once a month or if we do Full Focus Planner, once a week, you know I am course correcting every day and multiple times a day and that’s allowed me to not focus on – it is not 10,000 hours to get to total mastery. To me it is 10,000 iterations.

So as business owners, how can we fail fast? How can we fail quickly and cheaply and get to 10,000 course corrections. I think that is the fastest way to ascend the pyramid and that’s what I am on a mission to do.

[0:27:53.6] WS: I like that and you mentioned the Full Focus Planner, is that something you’re diligent about using?

[0:28:00.0] MK: Yeah, I have been using it for about three years. I save all of them, it is like a huge stack. They come out every quarter. I don’t have an affiliate code or anything. I am just saying it is a tool that works for me. So this has helped me stay really organized as a business owner and now, they really focus on weekly planning and then once I started studying Ed Mylett’s stuff and he talks about how to have 21 days a week and how to break your day up into three individual days.

And just put more time pressure on yourself. That’s allowed me to still be relaxed. You know I don’t have – I mean I am in a hurry. I have a lot of things to do but I am still enjoying my life but it has allowed me to get a lot more productivity because it is not how many hours you work, it is what we get done during the hours that we’re working.

[0:28:40.7] WS: Yes and it is neat you brought that up. I have noticed that video not too long ago of Ed Mylett talking about that and it’s incredible the thought process just to think that way but tell me a way Max that you have recently improved your business that we could apply to our business?

[0:28:54.8] MK: I think the biggest one is just being out there on social more. I don’t like storytelling. So I have done a better job lately of telling the story of what we are doing in our home buyer business, what we are doing in our publishing business for real estate investors and the feedback that I have gotten is that folks have really enjoyed consuming that video content. So coming up with a framework that really allows me to put my message out there and educate and teach my audience. Not feeling like I am trying to sell them anything, the feedback I have gotten is that they have watched the videos and they were very helpful and the motivated seller or the real estate investor deciding you know what to do next in their business. So I’ve got a lot better at doing – I call it educational marketing but it is making videos, getting them out in front of folks and making it really about using stories, using case studies to teach something that’s valuable.

And then in return, get the engagement that way instead of just quotes or distracting pictures, everybody who is listening has some true value and has a story. Are you sharing it with people? Are you getting your message out and being out there for people to find you? That’s what I’ve gotten better at this year and it’s had a lot of rewards for my business and really a lot for my soul because it feels good to help a lot of people. That’s what we have been able to do this year.

[0:30:14.6] WS: Maybe we have talked about it and you can reiterate it again if so but what is the number one thing that’s contributed to your success?

[0:30:20.6] MK: I would say reading. The book Deep Work, really concentrating. You know I have lived 35 years of no resources or tools and just kind of bouncing from one thing to the other and not understanding how to really focus and the people I have noticed who have had the most success that I look at is a lot of these people on Wall Street. A lot of people in the real estate investing space and I got to meet Robert Kiyosaki when I got an award last year at an industry conference.

People who have done big things, they can build a team but they can concentrate. So I think concentrating on those income producing activities and not just getting all tied up in Facebook likes and email has really helped us get the message out and serve a lot of people and grow our business and so concentration.

[0:31:06.4] WS: How do you like to give back?

[0:31:07.9] MK: Education, teaching, you know the way – I told my wife who read the whole book, don’t tell her I haven’t but love languages. I don’t know guys don’t really like to talk about that kind of stuff but the way that I show people that I care about them is I try to find what they are struggling with and then learn about it and teach them how to fix it, you know be a problem solver and so that’s how I like to give back is just helping people.

And I make myself accessible even though I am very into time management, I am never too busy to talk to somebody and try to point them in the right direction and I feel like a lot of people did that for me and I am going to keep doing that and that’s, I actually enjoy just helping point somebody in the right direction, I mean even more than closing the sale, but I enjoy that too.

[0:31:51.3] WS: Nice. Max, I am so grateful to have met you and I am grateful for your time on the show. Great show by the way, just everybody is wondering or a lot of people, when they can leave that W2 job, right? And that is their dream if they haven’t done it already and they want to get into real estate and so I am grateful to hear your story. You love teaching but you still did it. You got a mentor and you were soon flipping eight houses at a time and that alone takes tons of dedication and processes and team.

So in just laying out those two big realizations, you know and niching down and you just hammer that home and I am grateful for that, just how you niched down and then that was your blue ocean and just like no competition there but then there is how writing the book also helped with that. So thank you again. Tell the listeners how they can get in touch with you and learn more about you?

[0:32:40.1] MK: Yes, so they can go to dealschasingyou.com/sewell and you can download a free copy of our book for a limited time and it’s the Real Estate Investor Book Writing Checklist and then if you have any questions, you can go to our Facebook page, you can go to our website. We have some educational videos and you can see what we’re doing, how we are standing out, how we are helping real estate investor’s standout and just check out some more videos and get some ideas so that you can do the same thing in your business.

[0:33:10.4] WS: Awesome, that’s a wrap Max. Thank you so much.

[0:33:13.3] MK: You too.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:33:14.8] WS: Don’t go yet, thank you for listening to today’s episode. I would love it if you would go to iTunes right now and leave a rating and written review. I want to hear your feedback. It makes a big difference in getting the podcast out there. You can also go to the Real Estate Syndication Show on Facebook so you can connect with me and we can also receive feedback and your questions there that you want me to answer on the show.

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[OUTRO]

[0:33:54.9] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Real Estate Syndication Show, brought to you by Life Bridge Capital. Life Bridge Capital works with investors nationwide to invest in real estate while also donating 50% of its profits to assist parents who are committing to adoption. Life Bridge Capital, making a difference one investor and one child at a time. Connect online at www.LifeBridgeCapital.com for free material and videos to further your success.

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