Networking Strategies for Real Estate Syndicators with Adam Adams

Transcript:

Taylor   0:03  

What's going on guys? This is passive wealth strategies for busy professionals. Thank you for tuning in and happy to be talking with you today. Today we have a great interview for you with Adam Adams from real blue spruce. For those of you who don't know, I'm your host Taylor load. I am a busy professional. I am a real estate investor and a real estate syndicator. I buy multifamily real estate with passive investors. And I love talking about investing and investing my money helping my friends and family and everybody else get into real estate investing without buying themselves another job. Today is an awesome episode from the standpoint of a syndicator who is looking to build their investor database or investor list and their brand. Adam is an expert at branding, building networks, building systems around your business and we're going to talk all about that Today, lots of great tips. If you're someone that wants to run a networking event, Adam is one of the leading experts in putting one of those together and running that as at an expert level. So we're going to talk about all that today. Without any further ado, here we go with Adam Adams from real blue spruce, and the creative real estate podcast. Adam Adams, thanks for joining us today. Thank you

Adam Adams  1:24  

for having me. I'm happy to talk with you. Again, it's

Taylor   1:26  

always a lot of fun. I always get a tremendous amount of value from talking with you. So I certainly appreciate everything that you've taught me so far. But for the folks out there who don't know who you are, could you please introduce yourself for us and give us some context about what you do?

Adam Adams  1:42  

Yeah, great. So my family has always been in real estate investing. So I kind of got into real estate investing, just by thinking there was nothing else out there. You know, my parents weren't doctors or whatever. So I just did what they did. And that's Investing in commercial real estate. And so I started doing that about 1415 years ago now. And I really never looked back to it started as a side gig for many, many years and around 2016 the very beginning of 16 I had doubled my money twice in a very short amount of time while in real estate and so I was like, Okay, well now I'm just going to quit my job Finally, after I'd done it for so long, I just decided to do only this. And, you know, if, if I was doubling my money every eight days, like I was those two times, then I'd be very well off right now. But um, it doesn't always happen. You know, there's big, good ones. And then there's other ones that kind of struggle and sometimes you have to find deals, but in general, what I'm known for in the syndication space is branding. I help a lot of people to brand themselves to grow their Influence through meetups or through Facebook presence through running Facebook groups hacking into the Facebook algorithms or, of course, podcasting, I have several students that have very quickly become a one person top 1% podcast. In just a few weeks, we've got the algorithms hacked in for anything you want to do with Facebook meetup or podcasts. And so really what I do is I help people brand themselves a little bit better so they can attract their perfect target investor.

Taylor   3:37  

Awesome. That's a great summary and a really great topic for anyone out there who's looking to raise money to grow their real estate business. And, you know, I just kind of want to run down the list of the things that you do and some of the areas where you've helped me and my knowledge base and first let's talk about the the meetup and hosting a real estate meetup to attract investors to your business. So you at least used to host a meet up. Do you still do that? And what did it look like when you're doing it?

Adam Adams  4:10  

Yeah, so my meetup history goes like this. I was new to Denver, in 2015. And I was having a really hard time. You know, getting to know other investors. I had been investing at the time for about 10 years and now I'm in a new city. And I was trying to figure that out. How do I do that? And somebody taught me about meetup. And as I started to look at meetups and I noticed that they had something in common. All of the meetups that had anything to do with real estate in my area. They were meeting around 6pm in the middle of the week, and that was a really tough time. For me. It seemed like everybody else I was easy. And so I got this brilliant idea that you know what if I could start Amida So, in 2016, I actually started a meetup group. And with one thing that I hope to relay to the listener right now, is anything that we're going to talk about today on the podcast, it's really more of a ready Aim Fire. Everybody's been really pounded in in it just drilled in that it was important to do. Ready fire aim. And I completely understand that I understand why it doesn't always have to be perfect and why just starting is sometimes better than not. But oftentimes when having a meetup group or especially a podcast, we really want you to walk away from this podcast saying that I need to do Ready, aim fire. Because there's a lot of preparation that goes behind the scenes before you launch your podcast to make sure that you're going to have some real listeners. And, and okay, but talking about talking about meetup what I did to Ready, aim fire is I looked out at all of the different possibilities of having a meetup. Okay, so I could, I could charge this much I could meet at this time, I could, I could meet at this type of a place I could. I could have a try to have a lot of people I could try to have a little people, a fewer amount of people and and as I looked at all of the options of when people were meeting, what they were teaching, what the group was called, how they allowed the members to introduce themselves or not what they would charge. My main goal was to spend a lot of time doing recon. That's the Ready, aim fire to do it. Lots of recon and just understand that I was going to be having a group that stood out amongst the crowd stood out differently from a whole bunch of, you know, similar things that were already there. Because when people feel like they have 10 choices, then what they'll do is they'll just go to the one that kind of just fits their schedule. Oh, well, you know, my kids didn't have a soccer game tonight. So I was able to attend. And so for me, I wanted to have something that was so different, that so special, so unique, that it really was the only one like it. So I created the first lunch club in Denver. I created it because it was the only creative real estate. Everything there was. There's a few, you know, different types, but none of them were called creative. Most of them charged a certain amount of money and so on. I wanted to be able to eloquently express that we're the only one that does this, this and this, were the only place that you can go to get XYZ. And so that's where I started and I went ahead and launched it and in you know, over a short amount of time we went weekly was the only weekly one. And you know, my pitch for that for people was just and it's a true pitch but you're kind of you're going to want to maybe imitate this or copy this in your own market. Because the value that you're providing when you're doing a meetup, your the value of really providing is for the attendees. You want them to be able to get knowledge you want them to be able to get along with people meet people. And so what was really different by just meeting weekly is I could say, you you need to get into this business you need to do this and that and the what you're going to need to do that is partners and which was obvious and If you go to those other meetup groups, and you're trying to find partners, well, it takes on average about six times. And actually now in 2019 2020, it's actually a lot more than six times. But back in, when this was happening, the average amount of times that you needed to meet somebody to start trusting them enough to start doing business with them was six. And so I said, if you want, if you want to get into this business, and you want to take six whole entire months, just to start working with somebody, then go ahead and go to those other ones. But if you if you want to, in just six weeks, actually be doing this business, then come to this group, every single week for the next six weeks, I guarantee you'll find somebody that will allow you to get into this business more quickly. And other things like giving them an opportunity to introduce themselves. Those were all big things, how we how we market How we branded it. We were on Facebook, we took pictures at every single one.

And we use those pictures and put them back on meetup, put them on LinkedIn, put them on Facebook,

Unknown Speaker  10:15  

and

Adam Adams  10:17  

put quotes behind them and started to say things like you missed it. And the other problem and this is the last thing that I'll say before you ask questions. The other problem that I see a lot of other people doing is, oh, we meet every single month and that's all they say. They will say we meet every month, and they will stop and they'll be like, so you should come because we just meet every month but the problem is that most human beings especially me, a father of couple kids, some of them have drum lessons, some have soccer lessons, some have band concerts, whatever. And if we are busy in our business, or working on our relationships with our significant other where we have the Other things that we're working on and our own hobbies, if they just simply meet every month there, and we get busy right before it happens, we're highly probably likely to literally just walk away. Oh, I can't get this one. But it's okay. They're all the same. So I'll just go next month. So what we do differently that's going to help you the listener when you're having your own Meetup group. Is that the way you market the way you brand? Every single event needs to be that every single event is completely special, it will change their life and they will never find it again. Every event has to be special life changing and unique. And they all are and I see you smiling and which means the listeners probably smiling being like Oh, is this just a marketing scheme? And it's not just a marketing scheme. We do things like this, so I'll bring in a fixin flipper to do a scope of work. And then I'll then when I market in a brand, I will call people on the phone or I'll make a Facebook group and literally say, if you're not doing this detailed type of a scope of work, you're leaving a ton of money on the table. And if you're doing multiple flips per year, you're probably losing hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don't come to this one event. And that's what I say to the flippers and then what I'll end it's true. And then I go to the wholesalers and I say, look, every serious flipper is going to be at this event. If you want to meet actual flippers who are actually buying deals and not just tire kickers and you're a wholesaler, you've got to be at this event. It doesn't matter if you need to learn the scope of work or not. The serious flippers are here. And so that gets them there. And all the newbies I can be like it If you want to make mistakes, like all of these flippers that are going to be on my stage made mistakes and lost money, go ahead and do that. But if you want to streamline your success and do your first flip the way that they're doing this after dozens of years of experience collectively, then you need to be at this event. And so it turns it into something more than just Oh, they meet monthly. And it's like, if I don't go there, I'm gonna lose hundreds of thousands this year. Yeah.

Taylor   13:29  

Yeah. Well, there's so much in there right. And and I came to your meetup when I was in Denver for the best ever conference almost three years ago now. And it was great. You packed the house. You had a great panel. It was awesome. And we hadn't actually met at that point. I hadn't met you. I didn't know who you were. I've actually sat next to her. I believe she was your girlfriend at the time. Yeah, you guys are still together whatnot. But we are all right. Well, great. She was very nice and told me about your bed and I was just like, I gotta meet this guy. But so what you think Me, you know, hosting this weekly and then making sure you have a really life changing topic every week and marketing it. Well, I host a monthly meetup here and to be honest with you, I took last month off and this month off because frankly, it's it's not high enough on my list or I don't have the time to really, I mean, make those like events happen like that, like that is an incredible amount of work to do that weekly and get it out there and get the topic going and get the speaker and everything. So you have a lot of my kudos there. Because you know, folks that haven't tried to run an event. Maybe you don't appreciate just what goes into it even a one that's fairly straightforward. It's not an easy thing to do in any sense.

Adam Adams  14:48  

But Taylor, may I address that? Because you're not alone. You're not alone at all. A lot of people, they get busy and they'll skip the summer. They'll be like, Oh, well, no one's gonna come in. It's the summer, and I've got so much going on, you know, it's the summer. And a lot of people also skip on, you know, their Thanksgiving time, Christmas time. And first of all, so they'll skip like the winter months as well. And you know, sooner or later, they're not hosting any events, because like, it wasn't a priority and they felt like it was difficult hosting events. And I'm not going to say it's completely easy to host an event but I want to give your listener a little bit of secret sauce that is going to help them a lot. What you want to do, just like I said, you want to Ready, aim, fire, stop going, ready, fire aim, if you're ready, fire aim, the promise you're always behind the eight ball and and it's always difficult to keep up on it. So what I would suggest instead, the system is going to help you host more events. And what that's going to be is if you're doing a weekly and I know you mentioned that you're doing monthly except you know November and December. But if even even if you're doing weekly, here's what you would do, you would list out 100 topics that are possible. And then you would start writing next to them, the best presenters or speakers or panelists that could speak at that event. And then you want to start determining which of those hundred topics that could be taught at your meetup. Which of those hundred topics could actually draw the biggest crowd? Do you have the easiest time marketing? So once you've done that, you can pick your 52 or even just your 12 different topics for the year. We actually did 51 because we always took Thanksgiving off but yeah, 52 meetings, you just circle the ones that are going to be the best. And then all you do is call one wrap restaurant. And you say I need to book your restaurant, every third week, every third Thursday of the month of every month for, you know, 2021 or whatever. And so you get it all booked out, the restaurants taken care of already, the topics are taken care of already. And then if your listener will use this simple pitch to call the speakers and the presenters and the panelists, they're going to get a lot of yeses. It won't be so stressful. It's usually stressful because what people do is they call and they say, hey, Taylor low, I think the world of you if you're ever coming into Denver, I'd love to have you as a speaker and Taylor loads like Well, I don't know if I'm planning I will be there, you know, for the best ever conference in that area. And maybe we can do it then and it gets like so difficult because you've basically given your presenter too many choices. And so here's the brilliant pitch that you're going to use that solves everything. So you take those 52 times or just 12 times if you just want to meet once a month, and and you actually feel in the calendar 100% everything that's going to happen for next year, in 2021, or whatever. So then you fill it in, and you've literally written down Taylor load is going to speak on July 5. And then what you do is you call Taylor, and like, what's up Taylor? How's it going? I just want to let you know, my meetup is crushing it. And I've got 52 meetings happening and actually have one opening. And I was thinking that I need somebody who's not only an apartment investor, but also runs an effective podcast. So I thought of you first. And that's opening is July 5. And what I could do is I could have you in front of these the audience, I could give you this. I could give you this, like basically, I can give you the list of attendees so that you can stay in contact with them. Or I can I can pass them your your sheets or whatever, you just give him a couple of benefits. So, Taylor, I've got 52 meetings. They're all legit people like Joe fairless and Adam Adams and all these other people are going to be speaking, and I've got this one spot open is July 5. Can you take it or should I call a different podcaster? Who does apartment investing to take that spot? Or if you're calling a self directed IRA investing company, then you say, look, I need a self directed retirement specialist. I like your company the best I vetted you. I've got one spot opening August 9. Would you like this or should I call a different IRA self directed IRA company? And every single time that that is said Taylor loads, like no, no, no, don't give it to a different podcaster that self directed company says no, no, no, don't give it to my competition. We'll make that work we will make that work will be there. Don't even worry. We got you. And then right after they, they agree you have to double check with them. Then you'll say this you'll say look Taylor, I'm writing this not in pencil in pen. I'm this is a firm appointment on my end, I just want to make sure before I get off the phone that it's absolutely in your calendar. So you put it in the calendar before I get off the phone because I'm not messing around. And if it's not you, I'm getting somebody else who's a podcaster. And so you're like no Look at him. I literally put it into my calendar. This is 100% chance I'm not just penciling you in. And that's how you get off the phone and it's literally worked 100% of the time everybody's bent over backwards. Been ultimately they've done the day and the time exactly to what I've needed, because we give them the value. You and then we do the takeaway clothes were like, I'll give it to you or I can give your spot to a different person. That's your exact competition. It works every single time. And then you have it on paper already. And now all you gotta do is buy the certain amount of equipment that you know you're going to need. And the rest is on autopilot. Like you , you can schedule a VA or an assistant or you can just take one day, one full long day to just schedule the entire year. And you'll never have to worry about it again, you can easily have 52 events and it will only take you a max of two weeks, like literally a max of two weeks to get 52 events scheduled. The restaurants are done in a day. The the presenters are just done, you know, a little bit slowly but that is foolproof, that'll work for you and it'll solve the problem from you. Having to take you know, Thanksgiving and Christmas off

Taylor   22:01  

Nice, I really appreciate that. I love the pitch. And I don't mean to I don't want to waffle or make excuses about taking these last month and this month off. I mean, it was just, it got to be. I hadn't done a lot of the prep work and I have deals on my plate and really the podcast and the day job and it was just Alright, something's got us go to the backburner. So I can get all this done. And if I had maybe taken a couple of weeks early on in the year to play in the full year out, then then I might be in a different position. I am working on 2020 as we speak, but you know, it's a great point. I appreciate the the pitch because it's always it's a little intimidating the first couple times when you're approaching potential speakers, and they're like, Who is this guy, he's a waste of my time, like another knucklehead with a meetup that wants to waste my time. And, you know, once you get a few under, I have over 500 members of my meetup right now. And I mean, I can get 50 people in a room. And I mean, that's valuable to a lot of people in the audience of 50 people who are already the vast majority of them are real estate investors with 10 plus dollars apiece. I mean, that's a valuable room to have. But it's taken me two and a half years to get to this point. Yeah.

Adam Adams  23:23  

Well, I hope that that was valuable to a listener who definitely wants to start meetup because I, I troubleshooted for a long time, and you know, I gained these pitches and processes of over to overtime. So

Taylor   23:41  

what you've given me whether deliberately or not, you've given me tasks to do over the next couple of weeks, myself. So moving on down the I suppose down the funnel, so the whole point of from a syndication standpoint, the whole point of running a meetup, really is to build relationships with partners and investors primarily, I mean, we want to build our investor list so that we can go buy a 10 or $20 million building and raise all the equity that we need. And you're at that point now. So let's talk about the actual process of turning those meetup attendees into a pre existing relationship people with pre existing relationships with you who you can present a five or six B deal to and they're going to say, I'm in.

Adam Adams  24:26  

Great. Well, the first thing that needs to be said is that depending on what attorney you're working with, the the definition of you know, having a substance what is a substantive relationship, it changes a little bit. And so one thing that I'll say is, is if you have people sign in at the beginning of every meetup, you have proof that you like saw them multiple times between you know, whatever the date and time because we are I have a sign in sheet. And all we do is we actually at the top, we change the date, the presenters name and the presentation name at the top. That's it. So we'll print three things, three sheets off for everyone and people will sign in. And that shows, look, we were there together at this one date and time. The other thing that my team I planned on doing and have done of the entire time, is I always felt like I wanted to be the anti salesperson, I did so much sales in like I did six years of door to door sales. And as I did that, I learned a bunch of you know, psychological tricks and, and now when other people use those same things when with me, like the Cutco guy was calling me recently and you know They're, they're full of these sales tactics. And when people use them with me, just because I've been around them so much, I immediately roll my eyes. So my goal is always to be able to bring people into my fold without having to persuade them that way. And so I've really decided not to push anything. So but more to just be a light beacon. And I'm an apartment investor, I invest with other people. And if you ever want to invest with me, come and talk to me. But that's really it. I give everyone the opportunity to introduce themselves and then I do to know something that with my coaching clients that are working to go to the next level. I don't think that they have two and a half years to slowly build these relationships. I'm trying to give them more of a streamlined approach. So while I will honestly Say that what I do is just keep hosting events and never push anything. And I still get plenty of investors. What I do to help my clients get there faster, is I do something called

lead magnets. So I teach them how to make these things called lead magnet. So it makes it a bit easier for you. And all that is is you, you. This sounds kind of complicated, so I apologize. But you first take a landing page. And it's it's a sales page or a free sales page where they just get your free thing by putting in a name and an email and that's it and then all of a sudden now they have that thing that they want. That's your lead magnet. That's the thing you spent all this time and effort creating that was perfect for your avatar. I call it an avatar like an ideal investor avatar. Who do you want to invest with you you know if you want a doctor or attorney or a lawyer or or Guests, attorneys and lawyers are the same for an engineer to invest passively in your deal. What are they worried about? What do they want to know? What do they want to learn? What are they struggling with? Do they need to avoid taxes? Do they are they already curious about some type of real estate investment that you know that they would otherwise be searching for. And you can create something like the 10 things you need to do before investing passively, something like that, you know, there's a lot of lead magnets that your ideal investor avatar would want. And so you create this white page or a video series, and then you make it free for them. Where they all do is they go in, they go to your website, you say, hey, if you want this text, this number, this word, this number, or if Hey, if you want this, go to my website, forward slash invest or forward slash, whatever. And then Going to help you go to the next level. So they want that thing, and they automatically get onto your list. And what you'll have after that is follow up emails. And so the minimum amount that I suggest to clients is at least 12. And they're like 12, you know, I would have thought one or two or three, but the minimum is 12. And ultimately, if you could have 52, it'd be a lot better. And so all that means is once you once they get that thing, like this is Harris that three thing three ways that you can get a sponsor, okay? Now, your attorneys are knowing exactly how to get a sponsor, they understand that they need to do a background check or whatever. And in your first email, it sends them something like, it talks about the background check and it says, Hey, in my next email, I'm going to teach you how to do the background check. Not just that you need to do it, but in my next email, I'm going to teach you how to do a background check. And these emails Keep having these things called cliffhangers, okay? cliffhangers. Like when you're watching a show, and you literally have to, you have to go back to back to back to back. You can't even go to bed because you're binge watching your show. The reason why is because how brilliant, the people who have started these shows are, they want to make sure that you have to go to the next one. So you'll do the same thing. You want your perfect avatar, the person who is eventually going to pass away invest with you, and you want them to get that first thing and say, Oh, this next email is going to be valuable to me. I'm going to wait for it. And so you do cliffhangers at the end of every single email and you're just staying in front of them. So that's kind of if you're wanting to know how Adam does it? I just literally become a light beacon and hope hope some of them common I've raised millions and millions dollars through my Meetup group just by doing that, but I've also helped a lot of clients be able to get hundreds of passive investors to opt into their list, because that thing that they're giving that lead magnet is so valuable to their perfect avatar that people opt into it while they're sleeping. Hmm,

Taylor   31:22  

nice. I like all that. I've got my own little text real estate 231996 to learn the five things holding you back in real estate. So got my dream 199631996 year I'm going to run 996 31 996 and folks can hear that, but so that's, that's great. So then the next step is to build that substantive relationship with with the investor but also, I mean, you can have a substantive relationship with someone substantive, whatever, however, it's pronounced and but that doesn't mean that qualify, that doesn't mean they're going to say, you know, once they get your, your ppm or whatever you're offering documents to their email, that doesn't mean they're going to say I need my money to be in this deal.

Unknown Speaker  32:11  

So,

Taylor   32:12  

you know, how are you thinking about really making those investors hungry to, you know, put your money in their deal, in addition to the fact that you, you know, are doing good deals, do great deals, per Absolutely. But we need to present our deals in such a way that folks are, like I said, needing to put their money in them. So what do you think about that?

Adam Adams  32:38  

Yeah, what we do is I, I couple these two terms together, and everybody knows what persuasion is. Everyone's heard of persuasion. There's this other term that got coined by an author, it's pre suasion. It's basically getting somebody to already think like you're going to pitch them later. So you get I'm just starting to think that way. And so I couple pre suasion with education. And what that means to me is I start saying things like, really, let's, let's go through the four things. Here's the four main things that a passive investor needs to know. They need to know the team, they need to know the market, they need to know the deal, and they need to understand the business plan. Okay, team market deal, and the business plan. So those are the four like really main components. And what you want to do is you want to start educating your past investors to what to look for, so that they can be safe and strong. And as you're doing that your priests are waiting for them to, to your way of thinking it's almost like, what's the term for it? It's almost like

Taylor   33:48  

brainwashing

Adam Adams  33:49  

brainwashing. Yeah. It's like brainwashing. No, that's actually that's actually what I was going to say. So it's almost like brainwashing and what that what that means to me is you if you have podcast you do it there if you if you are on Facebook and making a post, you're going to do it there or at your Meetup group that we're already talking about you want to do it there and same thing with these 52 or 12 emails that I mentioned. And same thing with this lead magnet. So for instance, if you say these are the top 10 things that you need to do to underwrite a market to make sure you're investing in a good market. And let's say that within that lead magnet, you start talking about the airplane, how the airplane is flying, and there's either a headwind or a tailwind, and the market is the headwind or the tailwind. So in markets where it's already hit the peak, obviously, you have a headwind. So if you're traveling at 500 miles per hour effort, and you have a 300 mile per hour headwind, you're just wasting your time because you're really only moving at 200 miles an hour. But if you could find a market that's really emerging, you'll do the same effort 500 miles per hour effort, but with that 300 mile per hour, tailwind, you're actually getting 800 miles per hour, which is what's happened with a lot of people that have invested in Texas lately. And actually, right now, we have looked at hundreds of markets out there. I've taken my entire team of 12. We've used all these types of websites that we've gone through, we've used all this data, we've collected all these things. And what we found is that there are a couple of markets that actually will give you that 300 mile per hour tailwind. The main one that we're focused on right now is Oklahoma City, because XYZ and now basically what I'm saying is happening as you go through the education process, which is valuable to your listener or your viewer or your reader. You've also gotten them to say man I want to be in Oklahoma City. So later on Taylor when you're actually giving them the investment opportunity that's in Oklahoma City, they're going to be already pre programmed that they know Oklahoma City is one of those 300 mile per hour tailwind possibilities. That is a diamond in the rough a needle in the haystack, very difficult to find something that's been growing 1% year over year for 30 years straight, and didn't get affected in the last downturn like all the other spots, and have brought on so many jobs and they're going to be like, holy cow. If I ever could find something in Oklahoma City and months down the road. When you have your opportunity. It's on it's in Oklahoma City. They've already been educated or pre-sweated or I guess, brainwashed, that the right thing to do is to be involved in that. And so it also comes along with psychology, as well. And it's something that I said I avoided Psychology but you still have to use it when presenting deals. So if you know that your offering is going to be oversubscribed, then you need to tell your listener your audience, your followers that hey, look, this is going to be oversubscribed, for sure. I mean, it's got my team, which is bad a team. It's got OKC, which obviously is one of the best markets in the nation right now, after hundreds of hours of research, dozens of people agreeing And not only that, but this business plan is perfect for my team. And so it's obvious that it's going to oversubscribed. So if you want to be a part of it, you're going to want to call me right now. And let me know and block your spot so that I don't, quote, give it to someone else. I don't want to give your investment spot to somebody else where you could be making, you know, 20% annualized per year and Give it to someone else so that they can make 20% while you and go and find an inferior investment opportunity, they don't want their investment opportunity be given to somebody else. They want to keep them, you've already given it to them. So when you do that take away clothes and also showing them that, that if humans are like lemmings, or like sheep, we flock together, we don't. We don't want to be the only pioneers. We don't always most of us, most of us. Don't feel comfortable being the first into something, but if we know that how this is going to oversubscribe which means a lot of people want to be a part of it, which means I should probably want to be a part of it. And he's telling me that if I don't move fast, I'm not going to be able to have that great spot. Someone else is going to have my spot, they're likely to jump in right then and there. Other things that are just real quick, other things that we will do is to Is, is how do you reach out to them. And so this is important for your listener right now today. As we already know, direct mail was once a big thing, and then lots of junk mail started happening. And then email was once a big thing. And then junk email started happening. And then phone calls were a thing and then a junk phone call started happening. Right now, the best thing that you can be doing is texting. And so actually with Active Campaign, it's something that we use, there is a phone number that unfortunately, with Active Campaign, it's not going to email you. It's not going to text them from your main cell. It's going to text them from an Active Campaign number. But anyway, what you can do is you can actually create a text blast that is going to have a high Probability of A higher open rate than some of the emails and direct mails and things like that. And so I would suggest that your listener, when they are thinking, I'm going to need to have people invest in my deal that they utilize all of them. So we actually are working to utilize more direct mail. So we actually have gotten the the address of our passive investors now and their birthdays and we're sending birthday cards and things like that. We're also doing email will never not do email. But we're also adding these text blasts which here's the last drop of gold that I'll try to give to the listener with these text blasts, and here's the issue with most people that do text blast or even email blasts, they are extremely business they're very, very here's the website Here's this here's a this is just throwing out information. And so what I would say is Ask Don't Tell. Okay, so we're not into the military ask don't tell it's a different version of x don't tell. What we're talking about here is, rather rather than just giving a bunch of information where you're overwhelming somebody and making them feel like you've really spammed them, get it smaller, stop giving links and start just having a question, the the automated email, a text blast that you might have is, hey, Taylor, did you get my email question mark? That's it. Hey, first name. Did you get my email? Question mark? It's almost sure to get a response. Who's this? Or Yeah, I got it. Or Oh, no, I don't know if I got it yet. And now you can actually start texting back and forth with that person and allowing for a higher probability of, I guess connection with them. So asking don't tell very, very important and shorter is better than long. I know all my answers are long. But when we come to when we come to these questions that you're going to have on a text blast or even emails, you want it to be as short as possible one or two questions, one or two sentences, and that is absolutely the max. And don't go anywhere past that don't give too much information. Just create the engagements, a lot of work. But right now we have something called vas and for 1100 bucks a month, I can have somebody working for me full time following up with these and I can do something that is

very beneficial by always asking questions and which goes if they say this then we do this question if they say this, I think, then we send the other question. And so there's only two options at any one point. Whereas I can lead the conversation by questions exactly where I want it to go. And I can pre script those canned responses ahead of time. And if they ever go outside the box, my VA will just call me on Skype or however you do it and she'll say, hey, this person said this, what do you want me to do? And then I can get involved. So it's benefited us a lot to keep passive investors on our list and actually investing in the deals. Interesting so that VA is just texting is she using the Active Campaign number to text them? Yeah, there's a difference. So we also have simple texting i. So we use Active Campaign we use simple texting and simple Texting can, I believe. So I'm not the technologist in my team. There's two other people that are a lot smarter than me that run these things. But I think that it's simple texting, that allows me to text from my phone number. And I can actually reply to them on that number on Active Campaign, if I remember correctly, you can't reply to them on the text at so I would, I just need to get into it to remember which ones which and how they work. But even though I don't have the full answer, we like to actually use this. So we're using this every single deal.

Taylor   44:44  

Yeah, that's cool. I mean, I would be more than happy to have those folks on the show if they're open to talking. And I think the advantage of partnering with people who know things that you don't know is that they can handle you know those things and be experts. experts at those things and you can be an expert at what you do and everybody goes further together. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all.

Adam Adams  45:08  

Yeah, hopefully, hopefully it's more of an inspiration to somebody else who's saying, Adam, this is going over my head. How am I gonna do this? Well, don't worry. I don't I don't even look at this stuff. It's stressful for me. So I came up with an idea and I talked to the team and I'm like, can we implement something like this? And they go and look for the technology and then we get it implemented and it's been working well like that in our business.

Taylor   45:35  

Interesting Yeah, that's that's very cool. I mean, I was just working on my system today. I mean, we should all be always be working on our systems, but I'm using clothes and MailChimp primarily but you guys did a one of your business partners did a webinar recently on Active Campaign in your Facebook group, and I was not available to time when it was live, but I need to go back and watch that because I'm Sure, there's a lot of great information in there. And I'm always looking for, I'm happy to change systems if there's a compelling reason why and it sounds like Active Campaign so popular that it might be a compelling reason you

Adam Adams  46:15  

to two things right off the bat. Male chimps deliver delivery rate is the lowest of any mailing software because they make it easy, most easy to get people's names and emails on there. So they basically asked you did this person tell you specifically that they want to be on your list? And you just say yes or no, and that's really all they check. And because of that, because it's so easy to get people on the list. Many people have done that. And so whenever it comes from MailChimp, it automatically has been tainted, not by you, but by other users that that just put off put random people on their list and it becomes Spam, so it's best to not use MailChimp, that's probably the lowest deliverable rate. But active campaigns cool because it does everything that MailChimp does. And it also is kind of like a Trello board, you can drag people across, you can pull the deals across. And you can really keep track of things like that. Not only that, but the emails that go back and forth between you and your passive investor. They'll all of those with or without you actually even trying to make this happen. They get saved under the database for that passive investor. So if you ever just go into Active Campaign, because it's attached to your email address, it actually will, will pull up all those other emails so that very easily you will be able to look at all everything that's ever happened with this. person. And when you have 1000 or more people on your past investor list, it's going to make it a lot easier for you to keep track of them.

Taylor   48:10  

Yeah, that's very helpful and you mean deliverable rate on MailChimp, meaning it's low that it gets caught by spam filters just based on the fact that it's coming through MailChimp. Is that right?

Adam Adams  48:22  

Yeah, a higher likeliness than some of the others. We like Active Campaign best. But there's others that are very similar to MailChimp, Constant Contact and a couple of others that make our hearts more difficult upfront to get the investor on your list. But because of that, because they actually have to opt in, when it comes from that server from that constant contact or Active Campaign or you fill in the blank, anything other than MailChimp it is trusted, more By mailing servers or at least that's what I'm told by the smart people.

Taylor   49:06  

Well, I can totally believe that I've heard that elsewhere but with much less explanation so I definitely appreciate the explanation and the and the logic behind that. That's great. And you know, definitely interested in getting your business partners on the show to talk more deeply about the the technology and automation side of the business because I think we can save a lot of time with these different different things and be a lot more effective with us. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  49:33  

automations.

Unknown Speaker  49:36  

I agree. Hundred percent.

Taylor   49:38  

Cool. So I'm going to take a quick break. We're going to take a quick break for our sponsor. All right, Adam. I have three questions. I asked every guest on the show. Are you ready? Yep. All right. First one, what is the best investment you've ever made?

Adam Adams  49:56  

The best investment that I've ever made was investment in my, in my coach and mentor that had nothing to do with real estate, it was more of a mindset coach. So, so that was something where I always thought that I was I thought big. But when I got the mindset coat when I was he challenged me on every level of my business. He's like, Well, why do you want that? Why do you want to do this? Why do you think that? And it really got me to think outside the box. And the day that I did that. And this is not a lie. It's insane. It sounds like an exaggeration. But my income changed 10 times my net income changed by 10 times, not twice, but 10 times from within a few months of hiring that person. Wow. So that was the biggest best investment I've ever made. And I remember thinking It was going to be expensive to hire this person. And, and I just thought it was even going to be worth it like, why would I spend that much but after right after doing that I could never imagine going back to where I was like, with my income multiplied that much I could never go back. It's, it's, it's insane. So I would I would suggest other people look into that

Taylor   51:25  

great ROI on the other side of that, what is the worst investment you ever made?

Adam Adams  51:32  

Wow, great question. I would have to say that the worst investment I made was probably also still a good one. It was a real estate deal that I ended up losing money. But like rod Cleef always says, He talks about these things, these mistakes, more of his seminars instead of mistakes. And really, we become wiser just by making them mistakes. So it was the worst because I don't want to lose money in anything. But it was also the best because at the same time I've, every time I make a failure, I get smarter I get, I get more conservative, I get more educated, I get more wise. And so I don't want to discourage people from making mistakes. I just want people to know that you can lose money in real estate. I've done it.

Taylor   52:30  

You can lose money in real estate and come out on the other side and it's not going to completely ruin your life. I suppose.

Adam Adams  52:37  

It shouldn't, is as long as you fall forward as long as you fall for failure forward. Fail forward.

Taylor   52:43  

Yeah, like that. My favorite question, the end of the show is what is the most important lesson that you've learned in investing?

Adam Adams  52:53  

The most important lesson that I've learned is definitely around partners and If we had two days to go for partnerships, and partnership structures and partners, I think it could be beneficial. But here's the takeaway for the listener, who's gung ho and eager to get involved. And they know that the person that fulfills the other sides where they are weak, is the best person for them to partner with. All I want to suggest here is that you do take some time to learn how to do due diligence on other people. And realize also that we can date before we get married. You don't have to literally meet somebody and become their business partner all the way you can date or do a joint venture on a deal or two. And as you go out to dinner with them or do the first deal or the second deal. As you kind of get to know them over these dates, then it's time for you to propose. So what I've noticed with me and many other people, is they don't look at these business relationships the same as marriage. And that's a failure. That's a mistake. And I've made it, I've made it multiple times over the years. So to sum it up, please before you get into a partnership, understand that you want to first vet them and then you want to start dating them or, you know, do a couple of joint ventures to get to know them. Well, before you decide that you're going to start an LLC and and you two are You three are going to go the same direction forever. Just wait until you get to know each other a little bit before you do that.

Taylor   55:00  

Nice. I love it. Well, Adam, it's been a fantastic conversation today. Like I said at the start of the conversation, you always bring a lot of value whenever we talk, and I'm sure the listeners got a lot of value out of our conversation today. If folks will learn more about you and your business and your own podcast and all that, where can they find you?

Adam Adams  55:21  

Best place is realbluespruce.com. There's the blue spruce tree. I live in Colorado, Colorado, and I got the blue spruce. But we're the real blue spruce. Just go to realBluespruce.com. That's our hub for everything. They could find my email, they could find the podcasts, they could find my bio, look at the deals we've done, look at our past investment opportunities. Everything's there at that hub, just go to real Blue spruce.com

Taylor   55:48  

Nice, nice. Well, once again, I really appreciate everything today I always learn a lot talking to you and and just in addition to the direct lessons that I learned from you, based on you know, Teaching I also get very inspired by your your level of hustle and system is it a system ization or whatever the word is and and creativeness. I mean, you host the creative real estate podcast and you're creative all around. So I definitely appreciate those lessons by osmosis.

Adam Adams  56:21  

Oh, thank you for having me. I love what you're doing. Every time that I've been in person with you. I'm also inspired. I think that you all of the things that you said you respect in me, I see in you. So maybe the reason you're noticing them is because you have them. But you're crushing it. So thank you for the opportunity to be on your show.

Taylor   56:42  

I definitely appreciate that. I'm just a copycat. That's all I can claim claim ownership. Yeah. Thanks again to everybody out there. Thank you for tuning in. If you're enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Very big help. And if you know anyone out there that could use a little bit more passive wealth in their lives. Please share this show with them. bringing them into the tribe. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you have a great day and a great rest of your week and we'll talk to you in the next episode. Bye