BiggerPockets Business Podcast

No business has had a tougher time this year than physical-based businesses, and that is certainly the case for our guest, Ralphie Martinez. Ralphie owns Martinez Elite Fitness in Northern California, and was just reaching his business’s peak when COVID-19 started to spread, rendering his business closed until further notice. 

Ralphie is the definition of someone with an entrepreneur’s mentality. He was working a 9-5 job when he opened up his garage gym for friends to work out in. Friends would invite other friends, and before he knew it, he was teaching a class before going to his full time job, then coming home and teaching two more classes. 

Like so many entrepreneurs, Ralphie turned his passion into something that not only helped other people, but made money. For the past 6 years, Martinez Elite Fitness has been a local success, gaining more and more members every year. 

Even in an unprecedented time like 2020, Ralphie has found ways to keep his business going, regardless of shutdowns, curfews, and other roadblocks. Having a positive attitude, the support of his partner and family, and a strong community has helped him and his business stay fighting.

In This Episode We Cover:

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/bizshow85

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Are you lacking in motivation? Don’t have the focus on you want/need to succeed? Not sure how to define who you want to be and how to get there?

If so, today’s episode is for you!

Dre Baldwin -- former professional basketball player and current motivational entrepreneur -- has worked hard to get where he is today. He went from sitting on his high school basketball team’s bench to walking on at an NCAA D3 school to building a 9-year professional basketball career AND building a brand online at the same time in 2005. This all led to the foundation for the Work On Your Game business Dre runs today, having reached over 73 million people over the last 15 years through 27 books, 4 TEDxTalks and more content than any human on earth.

In this episode, Dre gives us his strategies for building motivation and taking yourself to the next level through discipline, confidence, mental toughness and mental conditioning. Dre talks about his entrepreneurial growth -- including the consistency to have created over 7,000 educational videos in past 15 years, generating over 73 million views!

And he provides a framework for how we can do it to…

Make sure you listen all the way into the Four More segment for Dre’s amazing tip on how you can be more successful at building an audience from scratch the first time you try!

Check him out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: http://biggerpockets.com/bizshow84

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you know that over 200,000 entrepreneurs currently sell over $100K per year on Amazon? Sales continue to skyrocket with no indication of slowing down anytime soon… and this week, our guest is here to help you get in on the action!

Mike Begg -- co-founder of AMZ Advisers -- started a side-hustle business selling on Amazon with three buddies while they all worked corporate jobs. Making mistakes and learning lessons the hard way in the early days, the team never gave up, continuing to learn and tweak their business model until they achieved massive success on the platform. Fast forward five years and tens of millions of dollars in sales, Mike and the team now run their business from the sandy white beaches of sunny Mexico, also helping other business owners generate over $1M in sales each while carving out their piece of the Amazon pie.

Mike lays out a step-by-step roadmap for identifying product needs on the platform, sourcing inventory, and building a stellar brand that speaks to buyers and generates sales. He talks about the right way to work with vendors overseas, achieving the right mix of pricing and volume, and determining when it makes sense to create additional sales funnels across multiple channels. And most importantly, he reminds us that anyone-- with focus, dedication and a bit of expert assistance-- has the opportunity to generate significant additional streams of income online.

Make sure you listen all the way to the end, when Mike gives us some excellent resources to learn more, right NOW.

Check him out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/bizshow83 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you want to get your business to the point where you can simply leave for several months without worrying about things continuing to operate and grow? Do you want to get there quickly and with little risk?

If so, today’s episode is for you!

Justin Silverio - real estate investor and founder/owner of the real estate marketing company, Open Letter Marketing -- is here to tell us how he he was able to position his company to run on its own in just a couple years. Justin talks to us about key hiring, setting up processes and organizing operations in a way that will allow you, the CEO, to put your team in charge and free you up to focus on other pursuits.

In this episode, we talk about pricing strategy (and mistakes), how to massively reduce your expenses, and how to hire the perfect employees who you can trust to manage and run your business.

And, for you real estate investors, Justin provides his expertise on how to best handle acquisition marketing for your deals in today’s crazy real estate world!

Make sure you listen for Justin’s tip on how to ensure you hire the right person THE FIRST TIME, and don’t end up making a bad hire because you didn’t have all the information you needed about the candidate. This may be one of the best hiring tips we’ve ever heard!

Check him out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show:

Check the full show notes here: http://biggerpockets.com/bizshow82

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have strengths that can help other business owners? Do you have skills that can be used to help elevate someone else’s business to new heights? Do you have expertise that makes you the perfect partner for someone else’s business?

If so, starting a business isn’t the only way to become a successful business owner!

Dustin Reichmann -- partner and co-owner of FireCreek Snacks -- was able to take his marketing expertise and turn it into an opportunity that has propelled his and his partner’s business to new heights. In this episode, Dustin provides us a blueprint for using your strengths and expertise to find opportunities to help other business owners, and ultimately create new opportunities for yourself as well.

Dustin talks about how to analyze your abilities and use them to start generating income for you TODAY. And also use them to generate opportunity for tomorrow. Specifically, Dustin provides us two great ways to turn anything that you’re good at into a potential new income stream! We also dig into the nitty-gritty of product marketing, including how Dustin was able to get his product into some of the largest retailers in the world, including Walmart.

Make sure you listen til the end to hear Dustin’s amazing piece of wisdom for those scared to take massive action.

Check him out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show

 Check the full show notes here: http://biggerpockets.com/bizshow81

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being a business owner is exceptionally rewarding in so many ways… but as all successful entrepreneurs know, it’s certainly not all glitz and glamour! We ALL experience problems, and the way we navigate those problems can make or break our business. But what happens when we take it a step further, creating new opportunities by choosing to not only navigate, but instead TACKLE complex problems head on? 

Check out Stephanie Betters, founder and owner/operator of SocialMediaREI, Left Main Real Estate Investment Lifeline and Better Path Homes. Mastering the skills of managing it all, Stephanie talks with us about how she started two new income streams that originated from complex problems she solved to help her own business. Realizing many other business owners faced the same challenges, she began offering her product solutions on a broader scale -- all while raising three young children and continuing to practice medicine full-time as a cardiac surgery nurse practitioner.

Stephanie tells us about her creative approach to self-solving a problem that would have otherwise cost nearly $100K to outsource, which ultimately led the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce.com, to come knocking at her door. She serves up a valuable roadmap of the right way to go about finding help (including that first daunting hire of a personal assistant); the critical importance of creating measurable, time-sensitive goals to move your business forward, and avoiding the all-too-common entrepreneurial trap of “starting to drive the bus without knowing where you’re going.” 

And make sure you listen for Stephanie’s tips on working with your spouse, significant other, or partner… a challenge we all face when growing a business while keeping family front and center.

Check her out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: http://biggerpockets.com/bizshow80

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Growing a business isn’t easy. But, it gets much easier when you understand the growth process and how you should be navigating that growth as your company’s CEO.

Matt Rodak -- founder of Fund That Flip, a real estate crowdfunding company and #647 on this year’s Inc 5000 list -- is with us to talk about how he both started his company and then grew it, with over $500M in total investor loans originated since 2015. Fund That Flip both lends to real estate investors and provides opportunities for lenders looking for passive returns -- Matt discusses his strategy serving two very different customers in your business.

Then, in the second half of the episode, Matt walks us through his roadmap for company founders, including the 5 distinct phases of growth every successful founder must follow to take their business from concept to world domination. When should you “go to war?” When should you “focus on peace?” And how to traverse the point in many business owners lives when they start to find themselves getting complacent.

Make sure you listen for Matt’s absolutely best tip for how you can stay focused on your business and not get sidetracked by others who don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart!

Check him out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: http://biggerpockets.com/bizshow79

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have a very special episode for all of you real estate investors this week. But, even if you’re not a real estate investor, you’re going to get a TON of great tips out of this show!

Nathan Brooks -- founder of Bridge Turnkey Investments and #1304 on this years INC 5000 list -- has built a turn-key real estate investment firm that has bought, renovated and sold over 500 houses in the past 5 years. While we talk a lot about real estate in this episode, we focus on growing and scaling a business, whatever industry it might be in.

Just some of topics we cover in this jam-packed episode:

And don’t miss the part of the episode where Nathan gives some absolutely fantastic tips on how to find employees, how to interview them, and how to make successful hiring decisions. Make sure you listen for Nathan’s unconventional -- but absolutely spot-on -- tip about that one things we tend to avoid when hiring, but that we should instead be focused on!

Plus, Nathan gives nearly a dozen of his favorite book recommendations, many that I promise you’ve never even heard of.

Check him out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/bizshow78

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thinking about buying a business, but worried about getting taken advantage of by the seller? Not sure how to finance the business and purchase with the least amount of your own cash? Want some assurances that the seller will stick around to help in the case where you have an issue or problem?

If so, this episode is for you!

Elliott Holland -- Harvard MBA and founder of Guardian Due Diligence -- spends his life helping entrepreneurs select businesses, underwrite them, and then perform the due diligence process that will keep those entrepreneurs from getting taken advantage of by sellers. And he is here this week to walk us through how we should be approaching due diligence, how long it really takes, what’s involved, and how it’s different than the DD process we might be accustomed to as real estate investors.

In this episode, we also talk about getting seller financing when buying a business, and how we can get a whole lot more seller financing than we might expect. In fact, combined with bank or SBA financing, seller financing a deal may allow us to put little -- if any -- of our own cash in the purchase.

Make sure you listen for Elliott’s explanation of why the typical seller has a 4 times greater incentive to lie about the income being generated by the business than you might think. At the same time, he also provides an amazing tip on what we can do upfront during the purchase process to ensure that the seller picks up the phone and helps us when we run into a question or issue after the purchase!

Check him out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/bizshow77

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever wondered what it took to get a patent? A trademark? A copyright? Or even the difference between the three of these things? Ever wondered how they could be used to protect your business, as well as be used as an income stream for your business?

If so, this episode is for you!

Devin Miller -- engineer, MBA and attorney, and founder of Miller IP Law -- is an expert on both intellectual property (IP) and business. And he is here with us this week to dispel a ton of myths about IP, as well as provide the information you need to start using IP to protect and enhance your business.

In this episode, Devin tells us how each of these different forms of intellectual property can -- and should be used -- how much it costs to register each of them, how long it takes, and when we should (and shouldn’t) consider doing it.

And make sure you listen to the end, when Devin tells us about two books that have changed his perspective on entrepreneurship, and will likely do the same for you!

Check him out, and subscribe to the BiggerPockets Business Podcast so you won’t miss our next show!

Links from the Show

Check the full show notes here: http://biggerpockets.com/bizshow76

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices