WS1073: How to Generate Facebook Leads and Turn Them to Investors with Gustavo Castro | #TechandTacticsTuesday

EPISODE 1073

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] 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]

[0:00:01.5] WS: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. Today our guest is Gust Castro, originally from Mexico. Gus is a former Microsoft senior engineer, turned real estate agent turned inside sales guru. He runs one of the largest inside sales team for real estate in North America, called Power ISA… That is 100-agents strong, making about 50,000 outbound calls a day, and setting about 100 appointments with Mars and sellers every day, mostly from Facebook leads and real estate. He is very passionate about helping business owners be successful through online marketing and lead follow-up and conversion, well, that whole process is so complicated it can see, it’s helpful to know someone like Gus to really think through that process or do it for you one way or the other, there’s so many different techniques, but one thing, if you’re in this business, you need leads, you’re out there trying to put video content out or make posts on Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever, but this is one way that…

[0:01:33.1] WS: Especially on Facebook, could be very beneficial. And if you haven’t considered it, I would encourage you to listen to the show and learn from Gus as he walks through some Facebook ad techniques, really, and things you should know as you’re getting started to run ads just to increase your investor flow, as he calls it, Gus has skills that we all need no matter what a business you are in, I’m looking forward to today’s show, Gus welcome to the show. 

[0:02:00.0] GC: Thanks so much Whitney, glad to be here. 

[0:02:01.0] WS: Yeah, go dive in a little bit to how you got into this position and even some of the maybe clients that you’re helping, so that many listeners who would fit those shoes as well, but we’re gonna jump in and talk through some of the processes and things that you helped them with. As well, but what do you do right now? What’s your focus? Who’s your ideal client? 

[0:02:18.7] GC: So right now I run a team as of this morning, we have 126 full-time employees, about 20 trainees, folks that are training with us, learning, getting launched, and about 106 folks that are in production, helping people, helping investors, real estate agents, loan officers, get more appointments and life transfers from their leads, folks come to us because they have a lead problem, they have a lead problem, they have, they’re generating leads, they’re just not getting the maximum out of them, then I gave the max or they wanna generate leads to outbound prospecting. But we actually handle both kinds of problems, they need help with the conversion aspect, they want someone to call those leads when they come in within five minutes and use the scripts on them and convert them and follow up with the 6-7, 8, 9, 10, 12. Our longest plan is 27 touches in 12 months to get in touch with them and try to convert them, and we also help folks and have a lists, especially in the investor space, people kinda get at the list building aspect of it, how important that is. When you talk about deal flow, lead generation, field generation deal flow, it has a lot to do with how good of a list you can generate for your area for your target acquisition, so we help investors with the most out of those lists, ’cause we call them…

[0:03:36.9] GC: We follow up, we text people back, and we’re just trying to get that conversion game, so if I had to summarize what we do, we help investors, we help real estate agents and those officers convert and get the most out of those assets, whether that’s an online need that’s generated off the web, or there’s a list that they’ve built, those least expensive, Lesser, price. They wanna get the most out of that.

[0:03:56.5] WS: Nice. No, that’s incredible. And so those skill sets or something almost every business needs now, right. As so much as almost everything’s on the internet, go to bed, it’s all there, and if you don’t have a president’s phone line as a business owner, then I don’t see how you’re still in business almost at this point, but you have some skill sets though that I mean as syndicators… As people in commercial real estate, we’re partnering with hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of investors, and obviously always trying to grow that list, the more investors that we can partner with and bring on our team really as limited partners than the larger deals we can do. And the faster we can grow all those things, and even the more buying power to do larger deals, but it also have to find us somehow, and oftentimes, it’s not at a conference, I’ve met lots of our investors at conferences and in person, of course, but majority of them have found me online somewhere, and we get in front of them and then we have to convert that lead, right. We have to build that relationship. And then, so let’s jump in a little bit to that process, and maybe you could speak to that investor or somebody like myself that’s trying to get in front of those convert…

[0:05:02.7] WS: Leads to investors specifically, I know. One thing I read about you like three steps to how your team sets a 100 plus appointments per day with Facebook leads, I mean, that’s incredible. If we were doing that, that we wouldn’t have a money issue and we don’t, thankfully, but still, how do we do some of those things? Let’s jump in.

[0:05:22.4] GC: And that’s a great, great question, Whitney. We help solve this problem for different types of audiences or different types of clients that we have, the real estate agent is looking for clients, the loan officer look at for clients, the syndicator, the investor is also looking for clients, they’re not just looking for deals they want people to work with them, they wanna talk, they want to get to know them, they want them to know I can trust them, and they wanna get that face-to-face interaction or that phone call, that direct phone call to where they’re delivering the value and they’re delivering the pitch, that’s the goal that they hire us to achieve like Gus, I know my stuff, I’m not new, and this is typically the persona we want, we were looking for, but not new in the business. They know that to move their business forward, they have to talk to more people, we have to talk to more qualified leads, qualified leads, Gus, if I can get… I’m very typical for real estate to tell me if I could talk to two unmet leads that are qualified, I’m gonna close one of them, that’s an excellent conversion rate for retail real estate, that’s a really good conversion rate off of a cold lead off of Facebook or Google or one of these other systems, and they can talk to two people they’ve not met that are qualified, they’re gonna be buying a home in the next year, we can be out there and they can convert one of those too…

[0:06:29.7] GC: That’s a great conversion rate. It’s a great conversion rate. So people that know their numbers, folks that understand that they just need to get in front of more qualified prospects, that is the way forward for their business, that kind of a problem lends itself to a solution like that. It lends itself to that. But that’s what we do, we take these lists, we take these online campaigns and we help convert… And I’ll give you an example, when you’re thinking about someone you wanna generate, whether that’s a high net worth individual investor, whether that’s motivated seller, there’s another aspect of the investor space that we help people out with looking for deal flow, well, I wanna motivate sellers at some point in their situation, they want cash fast. I’m looking for a sophisticated investor that has liquidity… Well, again, we just went through the pandemic episode, I think we have a crisis of liquidity in the planet because of the measures people have taken to interest rate, not… Money is gonna lose a lot of value if it’s not going to somewhere doing something right. So the syndicators have that going for that, people are looking for real estate they’re looking for that.

[0:07:28.1] GC: Looking for that, it’s great. You wanna get their attention anyway, and you wanna tell them why, Whitney, why you the solution to the liquidity problem, that’s the person you’re looking for, and you’re… Any kind of online campaign, Facebook is just the natural choice, ’cause everyone is on Facebook, and Facebook tends to skew a little older as these social networks go, you’ve got Instagram and Tiktok and all these systems. Facebook tends to be where a lot of these professionals are a net worth, and Deere gonna be a Facebook, LinkedIn is also another one, but I’ll be honest with you, 99% of the campaigns that we run for that purpose are on Facebook, it’s more interaction. People are on their longer, the ads convert much, much better, so the problem reduces itself Whitney, you wanna create content, you wanna create an ad, you wanna create a video, you wanna create something that’s gonna catch the attention of someone that’s in that mindset. I have liquidity, I would not like to keep it in the bank, so I don’t wanna crypto currency, people found that out in the last 30 days, that’s not gonna go straight up in the straight line every single day.

[0:08:31.3] GC: Right, so maybe they don’t like crypto and that’s too risky for them, the stock market, they don’t have a ton of confidence in the stock market that’s gonna keep going the way it’s been going, so these are real concerns that the investors have… This is real, this is 100% what they’re going through their mindset, they wanna diversify, and what is gonna be more solid long-term than real estate, it’s not gonna have the issues that cryptos gonna have. It’s probably not gonna have the issues. Even some of the investment is not like stocks will have like Stop picking, you know, real estate has that enormous advantage of a lot of these other asset types, so that’s what you wanna talk about, and you also wanna share what has Whitney done for his clients? I wanna tell them, Hey, guess what, I’ve got investor that with us 18 months ago, and I’ve gone through… I don’t know, they’re second round, third round, fourth deal with us ’cause they’re so happy ’cause of this ’cause of that, that’s also a very powerful kind of ad, so you’re creating… The online ad space reduces itself to speak to that audience, speak to their concerns, speak to their needs, it do it with nice images, do it with catchy videos, and Facebook allows a lot of this kind of targeting.

[0:09:39.0] GC: There’s some targeting that Facebook does not allow when it’s talking about real estate, that’s important to say there’s this thing called the Special ads category, special ads category for Facebook. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it Whitney, or not?

[0:09:49.2] WS: No, please tell us.

[0:09:50.6] GC: We wanna make an ad on Facebook related to real estate, and this is gonna be a real estate… You’re going for an investor to invest in real estate is gonna be real estate related, that it can get flag, they don’t want it, they’re not gonna allow you to use demographic targeting, income-based targeting, location-based targeting. The only location-based targeting you can do for these ads nowadays is a 15-mile radius, you drop a pin, let’s say have this down to where you know what the investors in my city are in this part of town, that’s not a crazy assumption to make probably. You can’t target a specific zip code or a neighborhood, like you used to with Facebook, you have to drop a pin… And it’s gonna show that ad 15 M radius. That’s just the way that works. So you’ve got a craft, so the problem has reduced itself, you don’t have these crazy targeting tools at your disposal… Not for real estate, I don’t have them, but you can create some awesome copy, you can create a great image that is gonna speak to your audience, and if you’re talking about diversify your returns, move your money into real estate is a bit…

[0:10:50.9] GC: You’re worried about crypto, will then try something different or group is not the only option. We have other ways that you can actually keep your money safe, keep it growing, give better returns with real estate. I talk about real estate, there’s some restrictions on what you can say what you can promise, Facebook does not want you to say, triple your money, or guarantee… They don’t want you to say that I gotta be careful with the wording, matters, but you wanna tell them that you have options for them if they wanna diversify, if they wanna have as real estate-based investment, you’re the solution for them. That’s what you want, because Facebook, even though it doesn’t allow you to do a lot of this income-based targeting, demographic targeting anymore, it is scary good at identifying who likes those topics, who’s interested in real estate investing, who is a high net worth individual. They might wanna look at that because that ad can be shown to 100 different people, the investor’s gonna react differently to that ad, and I mean that they’re gonna scroll a little bit slower when they see that ad, they’re gonna maybe comment on that ad, they’re gonna share that ad, they’re gonna like that ad, they’re gonna click on Learn More for that ad, and once someone does that, it’s in your target market, the algorithm is scary good at identifying people that are like that person…

[0:12:03.0] GC: Oh, okay, Bob. Like the ad, Bob clicked on the ad. Okay, What’s Bobby? What’s probably about… Look, I’ve got Sally here too, and I’ve got Carlos over here. What do they have in common? The algorithm does, is for us, this is really amazing, that’s what Facebook is what it is, ’cause it does a lot of this work, it doesn’t allow you to do it up front because it can violate for housing laws, but it does allow you to… It does it on the back end without your intervention, it goes what these folks have in common, and it’s gonna around their income, their interests, you can do that, and you can find people that are more qualified, and that’s part of the magic of what Facebook can do. So you wanna get these ads to get people’s attention, you want them click on that button, and you wanna send them over to you, to you, that’s when the magic starts.

[0:12:47.4] WS: Somebody though that’s never posted an ad before, maybe they don’t even know you could do this, Gus, they’re thinking about, Okay, Gus, you’ve got my attention, I’m gonna post an ad, I wanna be able to put something on Facebook. I can see, okay, that makes sense to me. How that could add a lot of value if I can get in front of more people. What about the link to that, and I also wanted to… the cost, what kind of costs should they expect on something like this?

[0:13:09.8] GC: Okay, that’s a really good question. So here’s a good news, and here’s the kind of a twist, the non-intuitive consequence, the good news is Facebook generates leads at the lowest cost of any platform I’ve ever seen, and I compare it against Google paper quick against LinkedIn at special lines, the most expensive YouTube also very expensive to generate, very expensive to generate content and very expensive to generate leads are still on YouTube, LinkedIn is up there, Google is lower cost, but it’s still generating our investor-related lead, it can be 30, 40, 50 per lead on Google, ’cause depending on what kind of keywords you target, but Facebook is always gonna be a fraction of that, you can generate leads on Facebook, even investor-related leads for five bucks a week, maybe even less than that in some markets, but here’s the catch Whitney, everything has a catch… Everything is a trade-off. In Facebook as opposed to Google, on Google, the behavior of someone on Google, they’re searching, I wanna invest in real estate in Salt Lake City. They’re typing that out of being very explicit with what they want, it tends to be easier to identify a motivated investor in Salt Lake City. On Facebook

[0:14:17.2] GC: it’s different. No one goes on to Facebook or I don’t know. People are going to Facebook looking for real estate opportunities. Looking for a real estate investment, that’s not the reason they’re on the platform, you’re trying to get their attention with something in a process called Interruption Marketing, interruption-based marketing, you want… They’re doing something else, they’re looking at cat pictures, they’re looking at pictures from their grandkids, we’re looking at something about golf or whatever it is, and you wanna stop them and go… Stop scrolling, right? Look at what I’m doing here, look at this information, and let’s see if I can catch your attention, so the intent is very different on Facebook as opposed to Google, so you… Yeah. You’re gonna generate more leads. More of those folks are gonna be not that interested, not that motivated, a lot of them can be unqualified, depending on where you run this ad, you can get a combination of one or two qualified individuals and 99-98 unqualified individuals that are gonna come through your ad. So what you have to do with a platform like Facebook is… And this is not intuitive, you’ve gotta put up barriers for people to get to you, you wanna make it harde to set apointments with you, you wanna make it harder to be able to come through the funnel and land in your inbox.

[0:15:25.8] GC: That’s not an obvious thing. Sometimes the reason you wanna do that is you wanna put some friction between the ad and you, because you want to weed out the folks that are not unqualified either because they don’t make enough money, but not really motivated, they don’t have any other investments yet that’s not a good indicator for someone that’s gonna do a syndication probably, so you wanna make sure you’ve got other kinds of assets or other kinds of investments before ever, that’s an important piece of qualification, and you wanna get an idea what’s their net worth, what’s our current network or ask the right question. Are you an accredited investor unless you are a point even know at that is right? So yes or no, how are you that… What’s your current asset allocation, you wanna put in some questions in there, and the platform lets you do this very easily within Facebook, add some questions in there to qualify these leads, so you might get 100 leads through a campaign, five bucks a lead, that’s 500 bucks. You spent generator 100 leads. 90 of those might be non-qualified, just based on the information they gave you, ninety give those are saying, I’m not an accredited investor, and then that’s something that’s not someone you want…

[0:16:28.0] GC: Okay, but 10 of them are, right? So instead of 5 per meet, those leads ended up costing you 50 per lead as you spend 500, you got 10 leads, that’s 50 bucks a lead, and out of those have you got one solid qualified motivated, investor you can work within the next three months, is it worth it to you to get an investor at cost of 500… I would… For me, for my business, client acquisition, at 500 bucks a pop, I would do that every day of the week, I know realistic agents would do it every hour of the week, if it could acquire a client at a cost of $500… That is what Facebook can do. That kind of acquisition number is the best… The acquisition and that ignore, the cost per lead, ignore all those things at the end of the day, how much does it cost to get a deal sign, how much does it cost to get someone through the door that’s motivated, it’s qualified, that’s listening to your pitch, and that is able to go… Yeah, that’s what I mean. Tell me more, Gus, that’s what I want.

[0:17:28.9] WS: That’s what we’re all trying to do it. 100%

[0:17:31.4] GC: Deal flow side and an investor flow side, that’s what you want, what a qualified individuals to live in your value proposition, have them sign on the battlelines.

[0:17:39.4] WS: What are a couple of the systems that we need for that follow-up and conversion process, so we put those ads up there. What happens after that? They click on it…

[0:17:46.6] GC: Great question. So when you click on that ad and that can pretty quickly automatically land in your inbox, you can go into your… hopefully you have some kind of CRM system to kind of follow-up system that’s number one, any time you do an online lead generation with me, the CRM, people don’t know what that is. Customer Relationship Manager, it’s a lead follow-up system is what it is, CRM, a client database I lead database system. It’s a must. If you’re spending money now we’re talking about to generate these clients, you’ve gotta be spending 30, 40, 50 a day, 100 a day, and if you have any kind of modicum success, Whitney, I know of investors spending a 1000 a day, if you find a way to convert these leads and having success with them, you scale these campaigns out… They scale very quickly. Right, but I mean, does get a start at least a 40-50 a day, you need to have a system that’s gonna hold you accountable to that ad spent… That’s not a small amount of money. Right, that’s something… It’s gonna be over 100, 150 a month.

[0:18:41.8] GC: And for a lot of folks in real estate and investors, that’s real money, now, if you’re gonna be spending that. You hold yourself accountable, you need a CRM, you need a system, is gonna keep track of these leads, when did they come in it… How many people are you tall talk to it… How many times have you tried to reach out to them? Oh, that’s interesting. That system. That’s what that’s for. That’s step number one, have somewhere for those folks can land. And within those systems, you can set up follow up plan, all of them allow you to do this, set up a follow-up plan, we recommend within the first 30 days, and this is just a generic online lead, when he said, this applies to a lot of businesses, this does apply to a lot of businesses, not just real estate, not just lead flow, not just investor flower, but it’s common across… You need to try to contact them at least 12 times within the first 30 days. That is a minimum. That is not like, Oh yeah, if you do that, you’re good. Now that’s a minimum, I have a system in place that’s gonna help you keep track of these leads, and you’re gonna go in tense the first seven days, probably gonna reach out to them seven times, the first seven days, and then four or five times the rest of the month 

[0:19:44.0] WS: Is that email, is that text? Is that phone calls? What is that?

[0:19:48.0] GC: Great question? So we’re not talking about these follow-ups, I’m only talking about calling and texting, not that I don’t use email and my business and my clients don’t use it…

[0:19:56.5] GC: Everyone use an email, they use it, but the purpose of those first 30 days is conversion, it’s converted. It’s contacting conversion, I should clarify. Contact qualification and conversion. You wanted to go through all those steps. Email is not great at that, that specific flow, qualification and conversion, it’s good for awareness, email is great for nurturing. Or a kinda lay long term game email is great at that, but when we’re talking about the first 30 days and conversion, it does a really poor job, so that’s why we go heavy on the calling and texting that the purpose is a little bit different and we’ve measured this when we measure this, we did this through a whole month, 500 appointments were set, and we did equal amounts of calling, texting and emailing, equal amounts for the first 30 days, and it was a really simple plan, five calls, five texts, five emails. That’s all we did. So that a lot of leads came through and we said 500 appointments, less than 1% of those converted leads were through email, less than 1% is it makes sense. That’s just not the medium that you would use to… That not a great…

[0:20:56.6] GC: Not a great response rate, you haven’t built enough trust yet, it’s not a great medium to convert leads, but again, email marketing is not dead. Marketing works great in the right scenario, not the conversion rates in a… What

[0:21:08.2] WS: Are a couple of biggest mistakes people make when trying to start with Facebook leads, just give us a couple of things before we move to a few final questions. 

[0:21:15.3] GC: they don’t know under numbers, don’t understand that cost per acquisition, they talked about… We’re looking at, again, the systems can be really complicated, really, really quickly, you need to keep it as simple as possible. How much are you spending, how many leads you’re getting and how many of those are converting into sign deals at the basic level… That’s it, that’s all you should really worry about, and making sure that you’re working those leads as hard as you can, like I said, 12 touches in the first 30 days, you just need to focus on, Am I generating leads? Am I following up with them? And what’s the cost at the end of the day to get a deal sign, you need to understand that, and I think folks get lost with CTMs, CTLs, CTR, CTCs, all of these different acronyms and metrics can generate… Again, all those metrics have a purpose that… Not that they’re not useful. I don’t worry about them. Right, ’cause if you’re not making any money, those really are not gonna help you out on either, right. So you wanna make sure I tell folks, jump into the Facebook ads manager, set up a campaign is designed to do that within an hour, it’s not back complicated, get out there and start testing your messages, you know, within two to three days at a 30 to 50 a day spend, whether you have traction or not, this is not a month and month of time…

[0:22:24.7] GC: That’s why I love Facebook in that aspect of it. You should test a campaign two to three days if you’re not getting anybody… Stop it. It’s not working. Try it again. This is the hottest market, and I don’t know how many decades you’re not getting the traction this market, your messaging is off. Something else, another offer, kind of the message Try another angle to that, you should be getting a… Let’s go on the high end, 50 per prospector, getting a couple of prospects with me a couple of days to at least people that are interested in your offer… Okay, talk to them, Let’s see if can get it on the phone, or at least responding to text, have a conversation with them and see how that goes, if that’s at least an interesting conversation to qualify an individual. Okay, let’s keep going. We get a few more days. Let’s see what else we can do. So I would tell folks, focus on the big numbers, focus on the big picture and test things out within the platform as it out, that’s very, very important. And it lends itself a lot to that…

[0:23:15.5] WS: Tell us a couple of pros, cons, maybe you should… Somebody strong would consider hiring companies, somebody like yourself to do this for them, or is it something that some people have to have maybe a smaller budget, they can figure out some of this on their own. Yeah.

[0:23:29.1] GC: So I would say that our solution really lends itself for the folks that have figured out some of those numbers at this point, they kinda know what their conversion rate is, they can understand their cost per acquisition and just kind of figure that out, then you can actually start the outsource part of the process, like, Hey guys, I used to talk to more people, I did to talk to more accredited investors, so get me one on an appointment a day, two appointments today. ’cause I know that that is gonna work for me. And you should know any campaign, you start with the power, I say anyone else, within the first 30 days, you know whether you’re gonna meet those goals or not, I generating enough attended appointments to meet your goals, you can usually tell within the first 30 days, so if you need a solution to that problem. Start outsourcing this. Then PowerISA is a great solution for you, because if you’ve got a business, you’ve got a model that works, you can start specializing and focusing on the higher value activities you’re adding leverage, you’re at you doing it, and I think an agency like ours is a great way to fill in some of those gaps as you build your team, a lot of times we add ISAS inside sales people, the teams have already have in-house ISAS, they’re just very difficult to find and they’re difficult to retain, and they’re difficult to keep motivated.

[0:24:39.4] GC: So we augment an existing team, actually the investor space we augment edition says, ’cause the team leader, the owner, they’d love to have more people, you just can’t… It’s just difficult, just not worth their time to spend a bunch of time finding folks, we go in there, they keep one of their lead ISAS as the main phone conversion person, and we help them, we offload some of their work on another model, they’ve seen work really well, you have to be at a certain journey, you have to be on a certain point in that business journey to what you can add that kind of leverage, and it makes sense

[0:25:11.2] WS: Now, your team… Let me get this right, wouldn’t really work so much for my business specifically, just ’cause the legal issues as far as other people taking phone calls or A… To have a pre-existing relationship. And so myself or somebody really direct on our team needs to have that conversation with investors, but many other industries in the real estate and many other types of businesses and real estate… That can work at a big scale. Now, you all take calls also, I generate the leads and take phone calls and things like that, is that right?

[0:25:38.3] GC: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, when we have a dedicated, I say within your team, within your company, we help you figure out what their workflow is, their workflow and be… taking calls… The work can be… You typically wanna organize their activities, I order of priority, the number one priority is the new inbound or the incoming phone call, the same thing, it’s an immediate contact, that’s the highest priority, drop everything and make sure you attend to that new leader that new inbound call. That’s number one. Number two, what are your scheduled follow-ups for that day, that means… Remember we talked about that those 12 touches and 30 days, that translates in the daily activities in relatively new leads let came in within the last 30 days that’s priority two. Priority three is probably gonna be calling all your lists of uncontacted leads of longer term follow-up of folks that are further down in that conversion journey, but you still gotta reach out to them is they’re gonna call them and maybe a number four is gonna be outbound prospecting, calling cold lists, people that have not in contact, but they don’t even know who Whitney is, or the company is someone else, and they don’t know who the investor is with the real estate units, but you’re going out there and reaching out to them and try to pitch them and get them interested and get them into the database.

[0:26:46.8] GC: So it usually goes by a priority, like that highest priority is the highest, most motivated is value lead, and the lowest property all gonna be a cold list of list uncontacted.

[0:26:58.1] WS: Transition just a little bit to a few final questions, I would imagine the listeners right now, they’ve learned a lot about Facebook ads and maybe the value and really thinking through, maybe they should be doing this or having some Facebook ads ’cause it… We’re so concentrated. It’s such a concentrated. People are all on Facebook. Everyone is almost everyone. It’s on Facebook, right? But guess what are a couple of daily habits that you are disciplined about that have helped you achieve success?

[0:27:23.8] GC: Oh, this is something I started in the last six months, which has been a game-changing thing for me, which is taken hour every day, and go out and take a walk. It started with 30 minutes, I’ve hooked it up to about an hour, I’m gonna start jogging at some point ’cause I just wanted to, I didn’t wanna make it about a project, I wanted to make it like relaxation almost like a walking meditation kind of a process. That’s how I started the day. Now, I’m out there, I’m not a super early riser, so I’m not gonna… I’m not a Miracle Morning kind of guy, but I am out there like 815, 830 AM, and I’m walking for 45 to 60 minutes on Monday through Friday. So I think the weekends off, and I’ve made a process of that, and that has been huge for me, that is unbelievably important because I have so many things to do nowadays, have a very large organization, a lot of responsibilities, a lot of people trying to get my attention, and you know, I need to carve out some time. Be very intentional about just having some me time to settle to relax, the focus on what I wanna…

[0:28:17.8] GC: Where am I at in my life? Where am I at and my goals and what I wanna accomplish that day, I found the best way to do that is just to go take a walk and relax a little bit and let my mind kind of settle.

[0:28:29.3] WS: No doubt about it. I just did a solo show just to the other day talking about thinking time, but the importance of taking time, it sounds like that’s what that is for you. It’s so important for me as well, not to just live in the madness all the time, just go, go, go. Like you have to really think about everything that’s going on and have time for that, what about the number one thing that’s contributed to your success, Gus?

[0:28:51.0] GC: The number one thing that has contributed to my success, there’s so many things. This is a great question ’cause I’m like, I can be like the top five things, but I think the number one thing has been a supportive spouse, I cannot tell you how important that’s been from the very beginning. I started my business because my wife got licensed in real estate, I was an engineer at Microsoft, She kinda brought me in front of what this was… And it blew my mind. Shee could see that I had the bug, she could see that I was destind other things well, probably wasn’t gonna be an engineer my whole life for all career, and she kinda lightly nudged me in the right direction, and when I took a plane to became an entrepreneur, entrepreneur is that business lifestyle is tough, it’s difficult, you’ve got the ups and the downs of a business owner, this is just how business worked. And without her support, 100% being there, I would not have been able to do that. Right, it’s hard enough to run a business and go through those ups and downs, imagine having someone right by you, it’s just not helping, being unproductive, being negative, bringing toxicity to the situation.

[0:29:50.8] GC: I would not be able to handle that. She’s been unbelievably key and everything at that…

[0:29:55.7] WS: That is a great answer, by the way. I cannot agree more. Yeah, I could not agree more. That is a great answer. How do you like to give back? 

[0:30:04.6] GC: That’s a really good question, and I think the answer that has changed for me over the years, but right now, I have a large organization, I have a large team, I have a large footprint, a lot of stuff under my purview, I look for vulnerable people, vulnerable organizations, vulnerable situations around me, and I try to do my best, and whether that’s like a non-profit organization, I see struggling that I can help out, either with leadership or with the resources, or someone within my team, they’re going through a medical situation, a family issue, or someone close to them is going through a health issue or some kind of crisis, my purview is increased. Now those folks come into my world and I get to decide, am I in a position to help this person yes or no, and if I can… Now it’s my decision, do I choose to help this person yes or no, so I think that kind of a framework has helped me to understand, ’cause we have a responsibility as a leader is as business owners, I feel that we have a responsibility, especially with… To be aware of those issues and help them out as this we can…

[0:31:02.2] WS: That’s awesome, Gus . Just having that mindset are really looking around now who’s around you, right, who can you help, and at least being open to that, having that mindset of being aware of who needs help and maybe you can help, maybe you’re that person that’s next to them that can stick out a hand and help pull him up, so guess a great show, I appreciate you just really opening our eyes to the possibility of Facebook ads and the leads that we could be generating as investors to our business and probably many other entrepreneurs that are listening that maybe you haven’t thought about the value of Facebook ads and what they can accomplish there, especially working with someone like yourself, and so on that note, Gus, tell the listeners how they can get in touch with you and learn more about you.

[0:31:43.6] GC: Yeah, definitely the best way to reach out to us is through my website, power ISA dot com, I talk together, and if you had guested on Facebook, I’m always on Facebook, I have a free Facebook group that we talk about marketing and lead conversion folks, and join that if they wanna continue the conversation, Whitney, we can send you the link, you can post it on there, I would love to chat with folks and continue in answering their questions.

[0:32:05.7] 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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