Street Smart Success

The profits to be made on land investing can be stratospheric. Today’s guest makes anywhere from 300 to 1000 percent returns on buying and selling land. Mark J. Podolsky (AKA The Land Geek) is widely considered the country’s most trusted and foremost authority on buying and selling raw, undeveloped land within the United States. He has been actively investing in Real Estate and Raw Land since 2001, and has completed over 5,000 unique transactions.

Literal fortunes have been make in multi-family real estate. Seasoned investors live off the monthly cash and the appreciation can be tremendous. But like anything else, you need to know what you’re doing. Today’s guest is a founding principal of one of the nations largest privately held multi-family syndication companies with over 20,000 apartment units under management across almost 90 properties. Mark Hamilton, founder of Hamilton Zanze, explains the ins and outs of multi-family investing.

One of the hardest parts of property management is dealing with contractors. And one of the hardest parts of being a contractor is finding steady work and getting paid. Today’s guest has developed  technology that connects property managers with reliable contractors in real-time. Bo Lais is founder and CEO of Lula, a Kansas City-based company that provides on-demand maintenance for property managers.

Sales prospecting is evolving with social media and artificial intelligence. It’s just getting way more efficient to drive outbound leads and convert more inbound leads. Todays guest is helping companies take their outbound and inbound sales efforts to unprecedented heights. Chad Burmeister, CEO and Founder of ScaleXAI, has created incredible sales tools that’s making a world of difference for companies looking to increase their sales.

Everyone says find a need and fill it. But today’s guest identified a hole in the market that’s worth literally billions of dollars. Billions are lost because of poor transactions people have with customer service centers. Marc Bernstein, founder of Balto, created a way to solve this enormous problem and it’s super easy to implement. With online commerce and the overall growth of call centers, Balto is a company that’s poised for amazing growth.

People are the most important asset of any company. And without high-performance leadership and strong teams, no company can reach its full potential. Today’s guest, Susan Drumm,is a real- deal Executive Coach and team-builder extraordinaire. Her company. Meritage Leadership, has done work for Viacom, L’Oreal, Microsoft, A&E Networks, Merrill Lynch, Genentec...just to name a few.

The dream of working from home, for yourself, completely on your own terms can be an amazing lifestyle. Today’s guest has not only one, but two businesses he runs from his home that produce repeatable, predictable monthly income. Andrew Alleman is the founder of DomainNameWire.com, a daily domain name blog he started many years ago, and PodcastGuests.com, a matching service for podcasters and podcast guests. These are both great niche businesses Andrew built from scratch that he runs with complete autonomy.

Only 5% of Court Reporters who start Court Reporting school get a degree. That’s because learning how to type on a 22 key stenograph machine is like learning a foreign language. 70% of Court Reporters are self-employed freelancers and the work is grueling. Today’s guest, Lauren Lawrence, founded Stenovate, a company that created a content management system for Court Reporters than can reduce their work load as much as 50%. It’s a brilliant idea that’s taking off. The market is huge with 30,000 court reporters in the US plus more abroad.

Cutting your teeth in Hollywood is no easy task. But today’s guest moved out from the East Coast by herself, made all her own connections, and has achieved great success. Erica Wernick, the Hollywood Success Coach, has a thriving coaching business, she’s a graphic artist who’s work has appeared on many popular network TV shows, and movies, she’s a blogger, a speaker… and an author. Erica has a great story about what can be accomplished by putting your fears aside and taking the necessary steps to succeed.

For those of you thinking of owning your own business, here’s a question… are you going to start a business from scratch, or are you going to buy an existing business?  Today’s guest will tell you hands down you’re better off buying a business. That’s because only 10% of startups succeed, and out of those, only 4% ever get beyond one million dollars in annual revenue. These are not great odds. My guest, Walker Deibel of Quiet Light brokerage, started four businesses on his own. Then he bought seven businesses in 10 years with several successful exists. Walker clearly has experience doing it both ways, so he has an incredibly valuable perspective.