One Deal at a Time (LA 854)

Transcript:

Steven Butala: Land Academy show. Inner city land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.

Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about one deal at a time. You know, this topic qualifies for one of those topics where it's like, "Hey, thanks Captain Obvious."

Jill DeWit: Yes, it does.

Steven Butala: What do you mean you do one deal at a time, isn't that obvious? You just have to do one deal at a time. I just got done, completely done recording and producing Land Academy 2.0, you know Infolots. There's a spreadsheet that's kind of like central, it's like ground zero for buying and selling real estate. And what I asked you to do right in the beginning is calculate how much money you want to make and so, let's say you want to make two, five, eight million dollars whatever, and then break it all down backwards like, "Okay, I have to do X amount of deals" and it's scary. 'Cause like, okay, I'm 210 deals away from making two point one million dollars.

Jill DeWit: When you look at it that way, it's scary.

Steven Butala: But then if you break it all down by how many months it takes and getting organized and scaling and all that, it's not that scary. So I came up with this topic.

Jill DeWit: I love it.

Steven Butala: You just gotta talk about one deal at a time, and every single deal, you build more systems in place so that you have to do less and less work per transaction.

Jill DeWit: Love it.

Steven Butala: It all starts with one deal.

Jill DeWit: I agree, Captain Obvious. I have a lot to say but I'll save it.

Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and as you're listening to us, please drop your questions into the comment section below, specifically in YouTube.

Jill DeWit: John S. asks, "I remember a while back there was lot of talk about Jill live as a direct competitor with Pat live. I was just wondering, what happened to that?"

Steven Butala: Me too.

Jill DeWit: Same here. "As a follow-up, I was wondering what and who you guys were using as an answering service for your mailers. I wanted to see if there were any resources I should consider. Thanks your ideas and suggestions."

Jill DeWit: Well, here's what happened to Jill Live. I spent months and I really, I went down that path. I tried to do that. I tried multiple varieties of doing it. I thought about hiring an in-house staff. You know, like putting people in a room and getting them to answer everybody's calls. And, but the software and everything that went into it got to be super expensive, and so I kind of ditched that idea. Then I tried to do it with a local company. Met with them, talked to them, tested it for a while. Then it got to be uber expensive and so at the end of the day, I had to have a conversation with myself and with Steven and say, "Who do we wanna be? Do we wanna be investors? Or do we wanna kill it here in the phone answering service?" And we decided, we are investors. We are not gonna try to kill it in the phone answering service.

Jill DeWit: So, what we did in the meantime was, "Whose doing it well?" And Pat Live is doing it well. So, we went to Pat Live and said, "What can you do for us?" And they said, "I'll tell the truth. Here are two. We can do anything up to 20%. And you can give your people five percent, you get 15, you can do 10 and 10. Whatever you want." We said, "Thank you very much. We don't want a penny. They get the full 20%."

Steven Butala: Yeah.

Jill DeWit: So that's what's going on. So we get nothing. So-

Steven Butala: Pat Live is a real estate specific call center too. That's what I like about him. It's not ... they're not answering the phone for medical doctors and stuf...