Jeff Charlton: Gave it all up, put the zero in income. Mhmm. Went in my basement with nothing but a credit card. Just gotten divorced. I had pretty much nothing.
I decided, you know what? No better time than now to start over. So I I knew that I could do it. Well, instead of hiding from that, trying to lie to people, I would say, you know what, mister prospect, you know, I'm just a guy in my basement right now trying to sell printing. I can tell you this much.
My printing's not any better. The quality's not any better. We do good work just like every other printer. Mhmm. What they don't have is me.
You give me a chance, give me one order, and I will prove to you that you'll never lose. That's all I can do. Yeah. Because I'm better than me. And I really believe that.
Steve Trang: Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's episode of disruptors where millionaires are made. Today, we have Jeff Charlton with REI Print Mail and Jeff Fluent from Saint Louis to talk about how he jumped from 4,000,000 to $31,000,000 in sales in seven years. Now, guys, I wanna make sure you create a 100 millionaires. The information on the show alone is enough to help you become a millionaire in the next five to seven years. If you'll take consistent action, you'll become one.
And, guys, if you're already a millionaire, please scan that QR code so we can recognize you here on the show. And if you need help getting there, scan that same QR code as well. And before we jump in, if you're here to learn how real entrepreneurs are building real empires, make sure you hit that subscribe button because every week we're talking about how to create your first or your next million. And guys, our AI lead manager is now up and running. If you want to hear what our AI lead manager sounds like, text AI caller to the phone number 33777.
That's AI space caller 33777. You ready?
Jeff: I'm ready.
Steve: Alright. So first question for you is, what was your life like right before you got into business?
Jeff: I was very young. I actually started out as an entrepreneur when I was 11 years old. And, didn't know I was doing that, but I was a boy scout. And boy scouts, we sold fertilizer for fundraisers.
Steve: Okay.
Jeff: Lawn fertilizer. Not cookies, not stuff like that. Lawn fertilizer.
Steve: Not pre packaged cookies like to do.
Jeff: Which seems insane, but I didn't know any different. And Yeah. We used to have to sell 40 bags of fertilizer to get a free summer. So that was my goal, to sell 40 bags of fertilizer. Alright.
And first year, I did that. Second year, I, sold over 200 bags.
Steve: Okay.
Jeff: The third year, I sold a little semi little semi truckload fertilizer. Every other kid was selling, like, 10. I'm selling 800. Yeah. And I did it knocking on doors, door to door.
And I also used because I didn't know back then anything about direct mail, but we printed up flyers, and we'd go back to the people's houses we bought from last year and went to the whole subdivision, put flyers in the mailboxes. Retarded. Said, hey. Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, I did that, and I was successful. Never thought anything of it. I just wanted to get free. So Yeah.
Steve: You're just being smart and efficient.
Jeff: And then when I was 14, I used to cut lawns. So one of my lawn jobs, said, hey. You wanna paint my house? And I just painted my house with my dad, so I knew how to paint. And I said, yeah.
I can do that. I remember back then, the minimum wage is $4 an hour, and the guy offered to pay me $7 an hour paying this house. Mhmm. And I did it. I don't know how long it took me, but I made, like, $200 on the day.
Yeah. And I thought I was paying at the time, I was doing lawns for $5.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: So $200 was like I got rich. So I just said, this is it. I'm gonna paint houses for this lawn thing. So I proceed to then go. I had one job.
I did a good job. The guy was happy. Use that as my one testimonial Mhmm. And knocked on doors in the neighborhood and said, hey. I painted that guy's house.
You want me to paint your house? And two other people in that same summer said, yep. And so it started from there. And by the time I was a senior in college, I had 12 guys working for me. It was just a summer gig.
But I had 12 guys working for me, including my four football coaches that from high school.
Steve: Wow.
Jeff: And so I I didn't again, I didn't really realize it. I didn't think anything of it. I just was naturally enough.
Steve: You're just hustler.
Jeff: Yeah. I did get a college degree. I got a civil engineering degree. And so when I graduated from college, I thought, well, I better use my degree, and I went to work for Procter and Gamble as an engineer. Mhmm.
I did that for three years. I realized now this is not for me. Entrepreneurship is where I'm at. So I knew I had to get the business for myself. I didn't wanna paint.
And, it's kind of a long story, but I kinda fell into the printing business accidentally. Mhmm. But I took it seriously, and that was almost thirty four years ago.
Steve: So how much were you making? There's 12 people working for you in college while you're getting an engineering degree. How much were you making? Do you remember?
Jeff: I do. I made $30,000 cash in my pocket in three months in the summer, which back then was a lot of money.
Steve: Right.
Jeff: Everybody else might make, you know, 1,500 the whole summer, and I was making 30,000. So And
Steve: then what were you making as an engineer?
Jeff: My starting salary was $27,000 a year.
Steve: So as an entrepreneur
Jeff: Yes.
Steve: You're already ahead.
Jeff: Yes. But you were kind
Steve: of doing what you kind of were not told to do, but, like, this is just the way what what everyone does.
Jeff: Yeah. I never thought I I just you know, it was. I thought, you know, you got this degree and, you know, you got this thing about corporate America. It seems real glamorous. Mhmm.
And, I realized very quickly corporate America was not.
Steve: How did you realize that?
Jeff: Well, just the whole thing. It was I felt like you spent 50% of your time in meetings that were totally unproductive. Mhmm. And it was a lot of, you know, it's not whether you're good or not. It's more how you can, you know, suck up your boss and work your way up the corporate ladder, which wasn't necessarily how good you are.
Alright. It's just I don't know. It felt and it felt like I had no control over me. Remember Procter and Gamble, which was a good company. Don't get me wrong.
I thought of of corporate companies. Grant was my only experience, but I thought it was a good company, and they were fair. But they had salary scales. I remember I remember talking to my boss about this. Like, no matter how good you were, the best you can do is be at the top of your scale.
Might be like a $3,000 difference for the lowest to the highest. Yeah. A year. You know? And I thought that sucks.
You know? You know, what if I'm really good? You know? And and we're limited. I don't like being limited.
I wanted to be able to make whatever I could make based on my own efforts.
Steve: Yeah. Well, you're speaking my language here because, I mean, that was the reason why I quit Intel. It was like, I could never make more. Being the best, I can never make more. So then at that point, only thing I can control was how fewer hours I can work to get the same amount of work done, and that's all the time was spent.
Right. How can I work less and get the same amount of work done? Right. Which is probably not what you wanna hear as a business owner or as a owner, or as a as a manager. But, yeah, I I totally get that.
Okay. So then you decide after three years this is not for me. What was direct mail like your first
Jeff: No. And, actually, I I I skipped the three year period in this. So when I quit Procter and Gamble, I was married at the time. I got married very young, and it was my father-in-law. That's how I got into printing.
He had a little small printing company. I didn't know anything about printing other than he had a nice car and a nice house. He had his own business, and he was getting old, and he had no kids to give his business to. So I thought, you know what? There I could do that.
I could go into work for him, learn the business. Now when he retires, I'll take over his company. Right. So that was my plan. And but I didn't know anything about printing at all.
So I proposed that plan to him, but I said the caveat is I'm gonna take a week off of work. I wanna follow you around for a week and just see what you do Mhmm. See if I even like printing. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't even know what printing was really until I got it.
But, anyway so long story short, I did that. I liked it. Decided I could do it. And, I became then and I by the way, I was very much an introvert back then. I was an engineering type, analytical, shy, and I knew I realized when I started looking back on my career my life, I realized this engineering thing is not for me.
Mhmm. What is for me? And I thought, you know, you have been a salesman your whole life. I just didn't even know it. My whole family's salesman too.
I never that seemed like a suck job to me. I just didn't think that would be good. Yeah. But when I started looking at what I did, I kinda was a salesman. So I thought, alright.
And I knew to have your own business, you had to be a salesman. You had to sell the jobs. Especially when you're small, you gotta do everything. Yeah. So I thought, alright.
I'm gonna be the best salesman. I cannot sleep. So I took sales training, and I went all in to learning how to sell.
Steve: Mhmm. And I
Jeff: went from introvert to extrovert, learned how to sell, and I was very successful doing that. And I really treated it like a skill set that I had to learn.
Steve: We say learn how to sell, but you already had some instincts. Right. I mean, selling what was it say? It's a half a semi, a fertilizer is a sixth grader.
Jeff: I just had no fear, but my pitch back then was, hey. You wanna buy some fertilizer? And there was no objection handling it. And I can't. So,
Steve: you know,
Jeff: but as you as you learn the skill, you learn you learn all that stuff. And then and then you get confidence.
Steve: Where did, I mean, did you go through Park and Gamble? Did you go through the corporate training? Like, how did you get better at sales?
Jeff: Carnegie sales school. And and that and just that helped. But, honestly, a lot of that sales training, I kinda rejected because I thought it was kinda bullshit training. Mhmm. It wasn't bullshit, but it was it was hard closing stuff that I wasn't comfortable.
Yeah. But part of it was good. But what they did teach you is, I don't know, just how to present yourself. A lot of that sales training was just getting in front of room and make presentations. Mhmm.
Every week, it was a weekly thing for, like, sixteen weeks. And you'd spend, like, four hours a night for sixteen weeks, and you get up in front of the room every week. You have to do something. And I get comfortable getting up in front of the room. But what really trained me wasn't that when I got my job from my father-in-law, he handed me a desk about this big and said, there's there's a phone.
Go set up some appointments and go sell something. Mhmm. I mean, zero training. Yeah.
Steve: And I
Jeff: didn't know anything. That was before I did the sales training. I knew I knew nothing. So I didn't even know how to make cold calls. I just got on the phone, literally looked up accounts in the phone book.
He gave me about 30 kind of house accounts as a starting point, none of which really were worth anything. But mainly, I had to make cold calls. I made thousands, and I got really good. And it it totally eliminate all fear. And that's what that alone was really kinda turned me from the introvert to the extrovert because I realized I can say anything to anybody over the phone.
Mhmm. And worst thing can happen is a hang up on me. So what? I don't know who they are anyway. Yeah.
And I still remember to this day my pitch. I can do it word for word.
Steve: Let's hear it.
Jeff: Hey. My name is Jeff Charlton. You probably don't know me, but I'm calling to see if you have some time in the next couple weeks to set up fifteen minutes to talk about printing. And you're not supposed to ask yes or no questions in sales. I asked yes or no questions.
Yeah. And they would either say, sure. Let's do it. Let's say rarely said. Or they'd say, well, I'm really busy.
Say, I understand you're busy. I'm really busy too. What if I call you in two weeks? Maybe you won't be so busy. Call you in two weeks.
We'll see if we can assess something. How'd that be? They'd always say, sure. Call me in two weeks. Right.
And then my CRM is before computers pretty much. We had computers, but we didn't have anything like we have today. There were no CRMs. No. Maybe there was a couple on the market, but I didn't have one.
Mhmm. My CRM was a index cards in a little plastic file box with a one through 31 on it. Mhmm. And I would have a card for each lead, and I'd put the name, address, phone number, and then I have my own little coding system on there. They have to write a book.
And if the guy said one of them was CB4 AP. That was callback for appointment. Mhmm. When I'd make that pitch, and the guy said yes, I would write in there the date. And and I put CB4 appointment, and I put it two weeks out.
Mhmm. And then in two weeks, I'd say, hey, mister prospect. My name is Jeff Charles. You probably don't remember me. I called you two weeks ago talking about set up an appointment to talk about printing.
At the time, you're too busy, but you said call in two weeks, and you probably have some time. So it's been two weeks. I'm calling you. Let's set it up. Yeah.
And boom. I do that. And they wouldn't always say yes to that either, and I would play that dance for, like, three rounds. K? And I wouldn't argue.
I just okay. I'll just call you two more weeks. At the end of the third one, if they're still saying no, I'd say, you know, mister prospect, I've looked at I've I've called you, like, three times over the last few months here, and it seemed to be really busy. So it sounded like maybe you don't wanna talk at all, which is okay. It's okay to tell me no.
Mhmm. So if it's if if it's no, that's fine. Tell me. I'll cross you off my list. I'll never call you back.
But if you think there might be an opportunity, can we just set something up? If we got to set up a month in advance, can we do that today? And that at that point, it would get to, okay, I'll set it up or cross me off the list. Alright. And I really would.
If he'd said cross me off the list, I would. I'd never call him back.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: That was it. And didn't, you know, it didn't work every time. Nothing works every time, but it worked enough that I went from well, first, I worked for somebody else. In three years working for him, I went from nothing to making enough money that I was selling over $1,000,000 a year in printing, and I was personally putting $150,000 a year in my pocket in three years in sales on commission. Yeah.
And at the end of that, the guy ended up not being the guy I thought, and so I didn't wanna work for him, and I didn't wanna take over his company. Yeah. So I decided just to go out on my own. I gave it all up, went to zero in income Mhmm. Went in my basement with nothing but a credit card.
And I and I just gotten divorced in the process, and my ex wife, I didn't have much money left at the divorce. So I had pretty much nothing. And I decided, you know what? No better time than now to start over. So I but I'd I'd I knew that I could do it.
So I'd proven that I could sell, so I had confidence in that. I just had to do it again.
Steve: Alright. Well, you know how to sell it. So you started over.
Jeff: Yeah.
Steve: You had to learn the rest of the business.
Jeff: Oh, we're by the way, we're brokering printing too, which means Oh. I didn't produce anything then. I bought I was just a sales owner. We would get the order, and then we had manufacturers that we would we're the middleman. So we would get the order, we put a markup on it, and we'd have somebody else make it.
We're the middleman. Okay. So I knew how to do that too, and I knew the manufacturers. So you need some operations? Yeah.
So I just had to sell it, and then I had to do everything. I had to sell it, coordinate the the job, went on by myself, and then I had to do the accounting and everything. So Got it. Which that really put me I already had in my painting business, even though I was kid in college and high school, I still did. I paid people.
I did accounting. I had some very rough books. They're handwritten, but I had some experience of doing that. Yeah. And we got a computer.
But, anyway, the point is, in doing all that, I learned the entire business. But I I I just it was it was brutal. First couple months in my basement, because I had nothing to offer at that point. And so instead of hiding from that too, because I'm by myself. I don't have any reputation of a company.
I have nothing. So So instead of hiding from that, trying to lie to people, something I I'm not. I would say I I leaned in. I said, you know what, mister prospect? You know, I'm just a guy in my basement right now trying to sell printing, but I can tell you this much.
My printing's not any better. The quality's not any better. We do good work just like every other printing company. What they don't have is me. You give me a chance, give me one order, and I will prove to you that you'll never go anywhere else.
That's all I'd ask. Yeah. Because I'm better than everyone else. And I really believe that because I if there's more to it than just putting ink ink on paper, it's a Sure. Printing's a complicated product.
And I got had gotten really good at designing marketing things. And back then, forms were really big. That was a really good forms design, and that was kind of the engineering in me. I was really good at finding a problem and then finding a solution for it. So I knew I could do that.
Steve: Though, is that you went to work for somebody else for three years.
Jeff: Learned it. Yep.
Steve: Right? Which is, you know, we have a lot of people that are trying to learn things through, you know, content like this, which, I mean, obviously, I believe in the product, the the content we put out there. But when people ask me, like, hey. What are the things I can do to get started? Like, I always suggest, like, go work for somebody
Jeff: 100%.
Steve: Exactly what you wanna do. 100%. Because because there's two things. You're gonna learn the skills, and you're getting paid to learn the Hey.
Jeff: You're on somebody else's dollar for sure.
Steve: On someone else's dime. So I I always say it's either that or find, like, a tribe that's doing exactly what you want or they're a little bit further ahead. Doing one of those two things will put you in the right direction. So you put in the three years to learn how to sell, how the operations works. Well, not the full operations, but, like, how to outsource it to Right.
Someone else or to middleman, someone else. You got all the skills. Now you just gotta go do it again on your own on your dime. Right. Yeah.
Jeff: And then the confidence is everything. Because when you it's it's brutal. When you're in that I was there was days ten hours a day making cold calls, and I'm getting no. Mhmm. You know?
And if you if I didn't have the experience to know that I could do it, it would turn into something productive, I might get I might have given it.
Steve: Yeah. You
Jeff: know? Yeah. But because I knew I could do it. Yeah. Yeah.
I said I just gotta put in the time. I knew that. And I I learned I think Dale Carnegie taught me that every no is one step closer to So I didn't let the no's get to me. I just hope that's just that much closer or less than a to a yes. I had that in my mind.
It really did. That motivated me to keep going. And it does go in waves too. Everything goes in waves. And you'd go I might go one day with no appointments at all.
And then the next morning, I get four in a row. Mhmm. You know? And it's always that way. So you just you gotta keep waiting for that hot streak.
You know?
Steve: So how was that first year?
Jeff: It was tough. I mean, I mean, I remember the numbers. I made 30,000 net in my pocket after all in first year, which is barely enough to put food on the table. Mhmm. Because I had to pay I had a child, and I was paying child support.
So I did everything I could to support the child, and I'm I survived. I had a little bit of money in the bank. That was enough. It was mainly on credit. I was able to secure credit line with the bank, and that's how I funded the operation, you know, the the orders.
It was slim. Mhmm. But the second year, it took off.
Steve: What does that mean?
Jeff: I mean, I went from 30,000. I think I sold a couple 100,000 in sales, and the second year I got back up. So it really took off.
Steve: What what changed? What was the difference?
Jeff: Well, number one, I I got a little momentum, and I got a couple big customers that really started. I kinda, you know, like I said, I let me prove it to you well. I was selling general commercial printing, which was mainly forms and labels. That was my main thing. And this is stuff involved in mainly manufacturing.
Well, they test you out at first. They might give you a couple small orders, but when they finally prove them, they like you. They might like, one of my big customers, a company called US Paint. Mhmm. They made specialty paints for airplanes.
And and I was doing one label for them, but then they gave me their whole line. Mhmm. And so that that alone was, like, 300,000 thousand account just for one. So Right. And that came.
So just had a few big accounts hit. It just like anything, you know, you build a base, you do a good job, keep the accounts you have, and you keep adding on top of it. And we're all about in printing, it's all about repeat business. So once you have an account, they keep ordering more and more, it can be achieved up. So that's kind of sales I was looking for too.
Things that I used up in manufacturing. Name of
Steve: the game in printing is just, retention?
Jeff: Oh, that's true in everything. But, yes, it's big in it's big in printing because the products we sell, even today, our main focus is direct mail for real estate investors. That's the same thing. We're doing marketing for them. They do mail.
You know, they do it every week every week or every month, and they if you're doing a good job, they keep coming back. Mhmm. That's how you do it. If you if you always have I never liked one of the reasons I did pick printing, I did put a little thought into this, is I knew it was a product that got used to it. I didn't want my dad was a salesman.
And way back when he sold main frame computers, the kind that filled up a room this big, and he might have one sale a year. And it wasn't repeat business. Yeah. So he'd have a really good year and a really bad year. And it there was no just that just seemed like it sucked.
Steve: Yeah.
Jeff: So I wanted something that was smaller incremental sales that got used up a lot. So once you build a relationship, it just keeps, And printing is that.
Steve: So it's kinda like, I remember when I first got into the business. Real estate, the reason why I chose real estate was, like, with high margins. Right? Not as many recurring because it takes people move over seven years, but it was higher margins versus, like, insurance.
Jeff: Right.
Steve: But you look back, like, if I was doing insurance twenty years ago, what would my book of business look like today? Because, yeah, you're only making $20 for every sale or $20 per month for every sale. But after twenty years,
Jeff: a little bit. That's a lot like printing because a lot of the orders are not big orders. Salesman doesn't make a huge number. Mhmm. But it's a lot.
Alright. It just adds up. Yeah. Yeah. Insurance and financial, those are the two things.
I always said if I I didn't do this, if I had to go back and start over, I would be either insurance guy or financial guy because I would hate the paperwork, but the rest of it, I can handle because I'm good with numbers. You know?
Steve: Yeah. I I I'm laughing because of the paperwork. Yeah. Like, today with AI, you don't have to worry about it. But, man, back then
Jeff: Yeah.
Steve: It it was an absolute nightmare. Okay. So so first year, you land a couple of accounts. They turned into big accounts in second year. And then what was it like, you know, like, the next
Jeff: decade? Slow. I mean, I my my I joke around that it took me twelve twenty seven years to figure out how to be successful. Yeah. And not that I wasn't successful.
Out of of the twenty seven years, and with that took us through the y two k crisis and a couple major recessions, we had some down years that were really, really late. And, actually, I lost money in a handful of years. Not even a handful. Less than a handful. Most of the years, we made money, but I wouldn't get rich.
I was making a fair living, putting food on the table, had a good family, was able to live the life I want, travel, try to take a trip every quarter. I still do that to this day. I try to take I work really hard, but but I like every three months to go somewhere and get away from five to seven day. Maybe a long weekend or a week long. I've always done that.
Mhmm.
Steve: And
Jeff: I always made time for the family. I always went to all the kids' events, all that stuff. So I never let work consume me. Yeah. But I work hard.
But, anyway, we grew steadily from '20 from from the time I started, which was 1992. All once I got out of the work of the other company, I started my own business in 1992. And from then till seven years ago, we went from 0 to 4,000,000 sales, which, you know, still it's respectable. It's a decent sized small printing company and 4,000,000 in sales. Most small printers are, you know, 300,000, 500,000 a year.
So we were good size, but still no amazing success story. To be
Steve: clear, you're saying, like, seven years ago. So, like, 2018 approximately.
Jeff: Yeah. Approximately.
Steve: 4,000,000 in total sales. Alright. And and annual sales.
Jeff: In total sales. Yeah.
Steve: Gotcha. Because that's what we're talking about today. Right? You went four to 31. Right.
So something happened.
Jeff: Alright. So here's the key. And this is the key. Alright. So the problem I had all those years, and I knew it, but I couldn't figure out how to solve it.
The problem was in printing, that's not true of all industries, but it's true of printing. We're trying to be all things to all people. Meaning, I can literally put your name. You've got a logo shirt on. I do too.
We do embroidery. Mhmm. We do shirts. We do ad specialties. We do signage.
Mhmm. You know, business cards, forms, labels, anything. You wanna put your name on anything, we could do it. Well, that's great. And you say it's great to expand your product line, but it's not so great for sales.
Mhmm. Because, you know, what are you good at? Well, I'm good at putting your name on anything. Alright? That's not a compelling story.
Alright? It's not like I'm gonna change your life because I can print something for you. And nobody gets excited about printing it. People see it as an office expense. So when we had recessions, we got killed in recessions because they start cutting what they things that they don't think they needed.
Printings a lot of times. So So I knew I had to get into marketing printing. I didn't do a lot of marketing printing back then. I did more business running the business type print.
Steve: Branding.
Jeff: Yeah. Or manufacturing stuff.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff: And then a lot of that stuff kinda cut when times get cut. Marketing, if people are smart, they don't cut it. That's a different story we'll talk about later. But, anyway, what changed was I knew I had to find a niche and get really good at the niche so I would have a compelling story. I didn't know what that niche was.
Mhmm.
Steve: Well,
Jeff: that brings us to real estate. Yeah. I have been in my entrepreneurial spirit. I started buying real estate when I was bought my first property when I was 20 years old. I'm I'm not flipping houses.
I never did that. I just bought a couple of rental properties. I bought the house next door to me, you know, and I rented it out because it happened to go up for sale, and I got it for a good price. So I bought it. Yeah.
And back then, I did creative financing to figure out because I didn't have any money. So I figured out how to get it, you know? And so I've always had a handful of rental properties, and I had them for a few years and I'd get sick of it and I'd sell them. And then I'd think, man, I wanna get better estate back, so I'd buy some more. And so back in the actually, in 2006, I I had gone through a period where I I liquidated right before the two thousand eight crisis at the height of the market.
Oh, wow. So I was smart about that.
Steve: Very good. I didn't have
Jeff: a lot of properties. I think I had six properties, and I liquided them all.
Steve: Did you know? Or I
Jeff: didn't know what crash was coming, but I knew that the prices were wildly overpriced. And I thought they weren't worth it. And I thought this is insane. This is gonna crash. I gotta sell.
I'm gonna sell while I could pocket this money. Yeah. Because I had these kind of crappy two family flats in the South City Of Saint Louis, which wasn't the greatest neighborhood. And I just I bought these for, like, 30,000. They're worth, like, 150,000.
Mhmm. I'm thinking that's they're worth as much. You know? So I sold and I pocketed the money. Yeah.
Well, then a couple years goes by, and I'm getting antsy. So in 2006 but I didn't I'd gone through managing it all myself, and I didn't wanna do that. So I need to find a turnkey. Well, there's this company named Memphis Invest in Memphis that had this turnkey operation. So a friend of mine recommended them, and I drove down there and I met him.
And I liked the family, and I bought six properties from them. And they had this really easy way to and I had some money in my pocket to be. Right? So I did that. And that was in 2006.
And through them, I met it was the clothier family, and there was a dad and three brothers. And one of the brothers is a guy named Kent Clothier now. The dad and the two of the brothers were in the house and best running that company, and Kent had his own company.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: It was called eight hundred sell now. And he had owned he he he owned the he was a franchisor for the number 1800Sell now. Mhmm. He was selling that nationwide to real estate investors all over the nation to get the rights to that phone number in their area.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: Well, he didn't have any kind of marketing, and he didn't have a website. I mean, he'd sell them the number. They didn't they need business cards and signs and all this stuff. He didn't have any of that stuff. So I made a deal with him and said, tell you what.
I'll build your website, and I'll create a whole bunch of materials to sell to your people that buy your number. All I ask is that, you know, I'll do this for free for you. I just ask you to promote me. He liked that idea because he didn't have any of that.
Steve: Yeah.
Jeff: And so we did that, and I started a relationship with him. And through that, I started getting into real estate investors. And I realized there's a mark there's opportunity here Mhmm. Because they need marketing. And, he then went in from that to coaching real estate investors.
And two thousand eight crash came, and that kinda reset everything. So it took a few years, but I started dabbling. So he
Steve: was on 01/2020 now in o eight. Oh, 06/00/2008.
Jeff: Yeah. He still sold a few years after that too. I don't remember when he got out of that. I don't remember the number. But he he kind of started graduating with coaching.
And at some point, he started the boardroom mastermind. I think it was about ten years ago. But, anyway, I I started dabbling and doing some mail for real estate investors, and his relationship kinda got me into the market. And I still have a relationship with him today, and I'm active member in his boardroom and everything. Yeah.
It's really like that. Yeah. It's a really good com I mean, it's a really good organization. Yeah. And so, anyway, I I just realized there's a niche here.
And so I I thought, okay. This is what I've been needing all these years. So I started dabbling and having some mild success, but I was still missing the formula. Back to my my explanation. So when you're all things dull people, in printing anyway, to have a salesman successful, you have to be a salesman.
You have to be, a guy that can solve a problem, then be have someone of creative minded to design help design some kind of creative printed piece Mhmm. And then be organized enough to handle the order and do everything. Well, that's like four different skill sets that don't usually exist in the same person. Mhmm. So finding somebody to do that in the salesman is almost impossible.
I could do that, and my brother who has is a lot like me, he was able to do that. He works for me today. Still, he came worked for me twenty seven years ago. But we probably hired 20 or 30 salesman along the way, and every one of them failed. Salesmen and women, we tried both, and they all failed because it just wasn't niche enough.
It was too hard. Mhmm. If I knew I needed to break it up into marketing and sales so I could find somebody just to have different skill sets that are more narrow.
Steve: You're saying, like, what they were selling because the you had too many skews. It was
Jeff: Too many skews and too many skills to do it. You gotta you know, a salesman, you got if you gotta find your leads and close your leads Mhmm. And solve the the engineering problem Mhmm. And design the piece. So you don't have to be the designer, but you just gotta be in the process to have some ideas.
Maybe write the copy. Right. You know? Oh, yeah. And process more.
Since we were brokering at that time, you had to then get involved in processing the order and arranging with the contractor. Yeah. And then the follow-up and all that. And I did have customer service people to help out, but it was just too tough. But what we did and I started dabbling in ways to do it.
Well, the long story short is we ended up coming up with we had the niche. I developed some mail pieces that worked, found some data sources that As we
Steve: clear the niche, meaning direct mail for real estate investors that buy houses.
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. You know, we wanna buy your house for cash. Everybody knows that that's in real estate. Yeah.
And so but the the thing is, how do you still gotta find the leads and close the deals? How do you do that? And now well, the other thing is, I was a local company selling just to the St. Louis area. That's limiting.
It's kinda hard. You can only go so far in a local area. Well, I wanted to find something I could go national with. So once you have a model, you can then sell that same model to other cities just like a franchise does.
Steve: Right.
Jeff: So I didn't wanna do franchising, but I wanted the the idea of franchising makes a lot of sense for for growing a company. Mhmm. So long story short, I'm long story long, I guess. I'm talking a lot here. But I today, what we do is we do things like
Steve: this.
Jeff: We do we have relationships with guys like Kent Clothier or other coaches in the industry. In fact, we have 200 over 200 coaches we have relationships with that feed us, you know, make them affiliates and they feed us their students. Mhmm. The you know, they recommend us for direct mail. We then do our thing with the direct mail and they get an affiliate commission from that.
We also do Facebook and Instagram and various social media marketing. Yeah. We also go to events ourself. We'll go to over 80 events this year, and we either put up a booth. Sometimes we pay for them.
Sometimes they're free. It depends on what it is. We try to get on stage and speak if we can. Can't always do that, but whatever. We try to somehow be active in events to have a presence, a physical presence there.
And, you know, all that brings leads in the door. And I also have an in house telemarketing department. So I have 12 people that work for me now that are on the phone all day setting up meetings for the Salesforce. Mhmm. And the salesmen are coaches.
Now we call them coaches, not salesmen. And they really are coaches. They we we train them in a a narrow so what I've done is I've taken they don't have to find the leads anymore, and they don't have to handle the orders. They don't have to come up with the the engineering problem or the self. I did all that for them.
Mhmm. We came up with the system and the the designs and the data and the way to mail. We have all that figured out. They just have to sell what we already have figured out. And they coach people what's the best campaign strategy based on their needs and based on what we have to offer, and they put something together to say, okay.
We think this could work for you. So it's just a very narrow area they have to get good at.
Steve: So I wanna talk about that in greater detail in a moment. Yeah. But before we do that Hey. My name is Brian. I'm a real estate investor.
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Steve: You mentioned something interesting. Right? Talking about marketing. So, you were doing, branding pieces, stationery pieces. Right?
Stuff that's like it's not a monthly sale. It's not a product that I need every month.
Jeff: Exactly.
Steve: It's a product I need maybe once every year and a half, every three years.
Jeff: Branding. That's true. Yes.
Steve: Yeah. Like, hey, Jeff. We're we're changing our logos. We've updated our logos. Can Can we get some new shirts?
Can we get some new pens and so on? Mouse pads, whatever. I'm guessing that you did all those things.
Jeff: Oh, yes.
Steve: Right. Which is not a monthly expense. So you're saying, like, the marketing is where when you said, like, hey. We're gonna do printing for this particular niche. This is when things became consistent.
Jeff: Well, it depends on what it is. We did sell back to what I said earlier, when I was selling labels, like paint can labels. Alright? Mhmm. It's a manufacturing plan.
They're making paint cans every month.
Steve: Right.
Jeff: So those were monthly orders. That was regular business. So I like that. But when you go to marketing, you're right. Things like redesigning a logo or coming with a campaign, that's not monthly for sure.
Mhmm. It's not regular. But things that are regular are as regular advertising. Sending out direct mail pieces every single month Mhmm. Is regular.
K? But what I'm seeing in marketing, when when times get tough, one of my philosophies is you can't cut your way to success. Mhmm. And what happens in tough times, most companies try to cut their way to success. Mhmm.
Times get tough. First thing they do is they start look our expense, they cut everything.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: And they cut marketing most of the time, which is a huge mistake because you're definitely sawing off your leg when you cut marketing. Mhmm. And I don't believe in that. Okay? I'll cut office supplies and stuff like that.
Mhmm. Maybe maybe reduce your staff a little bit. Do whatever you gotta do. But when it comes to marketing in fact, that's another story we'll talk about. I've done 20 I just finished my twenty sixth acquisition in twenty seven years just last week.
One of the things I've done when times got tough, I started acquiring other companies too. When they're hurting, it's the time for me to go and inquire. That's another story. But but anyway, point is it when you're tied to marketing, if you have a system that works, it does work for the customer where they're getting leads or whatever you're trying to sell them, they're getting that and they're happy with it. They're going to keep coming back.
And so that's not so tied to recessions like other things are. So it's a more steady thing. And it's a story you can tell because now I can say, hey, mister real estate investor, you know, you wanna get more leads and make more money and get more deals? Come to us because we can help you get more leads that lead to more deals that leads to more money. And that's a story that I can get excited about.
Okay? And I can sell that. I can't say, hey, we can do your printing. You know, that's not really exciting.
Steve: Well, it's and I bring this up because, so we have sales training component.
Jeff: Mhmm.
Steve: Right? And then we we roll out an AI product. We do three different things with our AI. We do one. We do call reviews, automatic reviews.
Right? After every single appointment, we automatically review the calls. We also do role playing bots. Right? So, like, you can practice.
You got five different bots right now. You can practice every single day, get better at sales. But those things are not you can't tie it directly to revenue. Those are things that we know improve revenue, but we can't say we got this sale because of this call or because of this role play.
Jeff: Mhmm. The
Steve: last thing we have is the AI lead manager, which will call all your new leads. That one, everyone's excited about because that we can tie to revenue. That one we can see, okay, a lead came in at 05:00 on Saturday. AI called them, booked appointment. Sunday, we contract the property.
That's gonna be 20 k in revenue. We can tie that house to that AI tool, turn to revenue. Everything else is like, yeah, we know it helps, but we feel like it helps.
Jeff: It's really hard to get attribution. We struggle with this in our business. We we spend a lot of money on technology, and we use HubSpot for a CRM now. Cost me a $100,000 a year just for HubSpot. And Wow.
It's it tracks everything. Okay? But even with all that tracking, it's very difficult to sometimes tie a to b to c to figure out did a really get to c. Mhmm. You know?
So it it's hard, but you do the best you can.
Steve: Well, you do the best you can. But once you tie it but once we know this is marketing related, we're gonna this is gonna lead to appointments, leads to opportunities to contracts to revenue. It's an easier sell. And and I'm bringing this up because you're saying, like, you know, to go from 4,000,000 a year to 31,000,000, we're talking about, you know, to to grow 27 in in seven years. Would you say the biggest thing was the finding the niche, finding the marketing, or or or or
Jeff: Combination. Right? So the first thing is the niche. K? Getting really good at one thing and being the best, better than anybody in that one.
Mhmm. Alright. And I think that's important for any company to find something they're really good at and then be the best. Mhmm. Given you're the best, you got a story to tell.
Right? Yeah. That's different than just saying, well, I could do that, and I can do this, and I can do this. We can do 25 things. Mhmm.
And I'm not the best in any of them, but I can do anything. K? Yeah. That's not really a very compelling story.
Steve: Sure.
Jeff: So be the best at something, get a niche, and then find the formula to make it work. Like what you just said about your system, you you gotta get a lead, you gotta nurture the lead, you have to talk to the lead, you gotta close the lead, you gotta come back to them later and get an order again. All that stuff is part of the system. You have to figure out what that system is for your product. And then once you have that, then the the last component is putting fuel on the fire.
Mhmm. So the reason we grew so fast, once I had the first two, then I just started hiring as fast as I can hire. And I started expanding as fast as I can hire. So like you have Reinvesting profits into more affiliates, more events, more salesman, more callers, more ad spend. Mhmm.
And it's just seemed for for, like, a three year period, I was at, like, a vertical growth period. It was just we're just doing more of the same thing. But what happened is it was working. So what what then also happened to us, we kind of almost went viral within the real estate industry because our stuff is working. Mhmm.
And because we're going to all these events, we're everywhere. And so people say, I heard REI Printman. I heard of you guys. Mhmm. Even if they don't know anything about us, they heard of us.
Yeah. So then when the cold caller calls or the salesman talks to them, it's an easier yes just because they heard of us. That's what the whole social media thing's all about. That's what marketing's about in general anyway. And one of the things I talk about when I talk about marketing is the the object of marketing is to touch somebody often enough that when it comes time for them to buy what it is you have to sell, they think of you first.
That's marketing. K? So The mic drop business. Yes. The more you can put your name in front of people, the better chance they'll get your EDS.
Yeah. And so that's what really has all that together has been why we've exploded.
Steve: So let's just break that down, more granularly. Right? So you you work with Kent. You, he's got excellent influence impact. He's got he's putting you in front of, real estate investors.
Jeff: Mhmm.
Steve: And now you've got the niche. You've got you know what works on the direct mail side. Now you say, alright. Let's hire more salespeople. Let's get more affiliates.
Let's hire more salespeople. Let's get more affiliates.
Jeff: Mhmm.
Steve: Is this this is basically I mean, we're really getting like, we're high level that's it's it's really simple, but that's basically what we're doing.
Jeff: It is. Now you have to justify every investment. We don't do it all at once. I didn't go from one sales guy. I have 16 sales guys now, so I didn't go from one to 16 in a month.
Okay? It's one guy at a time. K? So and every anytime you invest in marketing or a new person, it's an investment. So you have to justify the investment.
It's always a risk because when you hire somebody, nobody is instantly successful. Even as good as our system is, they don't go from zero to making a bunch of money in the first month. It doesn't work that way. Okay? Yeah.
There's a ramp up period. We can usually get a salesman from we pay by we pay a draw. So we have a a guaranteed amount of salary for, like, six months, and we turn it to a draw. Well, usually, if they do what we tell them to do within six months, they can be above their draw. Mhmm.
So then they never look back then. And then they're they're making whatever they really wanna make. Yeah. We basically just pay straight commission, but we we help them out in the beginning. Anyway, that's an investment.
You hire a new guy. You're committing. That depends on what you gotta hire them at. You know? People come at different levels depending on their skill set, what you gotta hire to bring them in.
But let's say you pay a guy $60 a year. You know? Well, you're gonna put at least $30 out before you really know if he's any good or not because it takes about six months to figure that out. You know? You gotta give him enough road to to really figure it out.
And we have to give him enough road so we can train him properly and make sure we've given him all the skills that they need. Even our system is a lot easier than it used to be. It still takes some time to learn it all. You know?
Steve: So, let's talk about the worst, maybe not the worst, but the most memorable, like, flame out of a salesperson you hired. Like, because you've hired a lot. You got 16 now.
Jeff: Yeah. If
Steve: you have 16 now, I don't know how many hundreds you've gone through.
Jeff: Not hundreds of salespeople. I have hired I did we had our, thirtieth anniversary three years ago, and I I made a speech to the company. And I was thinking about all the people that came and went over the years, and it was over a 100. Yeah. And and I just couldn't believe it.
I'm thinking a 100 people. You kidding me? That's impossible. Mhmm. But, you know, it's all one at a time.
You know? It's not all at once. You know? And And when you hire, you have the best intentions for everybody.
Steve: Of course. But was there one that you're like, man, this guy is gonna be awesome. He's gonna change our business. And, like, we don't have any names, but it's like, wow. That wasn't even close to us.
Jeff: Yeah. That's happened more than once, unfortunately. So we've been real I have found and I don't know if it's just luck, but I have had more luck hiring people that don't have college degrees and that are really hungry, that have been struggling. Those are my best guys. K?
The guys that have all this education and everything, those tend to not be my best guys. And I don't know I don't know if it's entitlement. I don't know what it is. I can't put my finger on it. Yeah.
But guys that are hungry do the best.
Steve: You know, it's funny. Yeah. If I, if I'm hiring for sales, a college degree is kind of a
Jeff: Kind of a negative. Blemish. Kind of negative. Right?
Steve: Yeah. Kind of
Jeff: the same way.
Steve: When I see
Jeff: it on a resume, I actually it's a black mark.
Steve: Yeah. But if I'm hiring you for operations, like, it's a plus. Yeah. And then right now, what we're trying to do, we're trying to scale and build. You know?
At some point, it's like, I I hate Ivy Leaguers, but, like, we're gonna get to a point where, like, if we're gonna try to sell this company for 9 figures, I'm gonna need, I think
Jeff: Well, they're really smart usually. So you need really smart people. You know?
Steve: Yeah. So we're gonna get to that point. But, yeah, I'm I'm with you on it right now.
Jeff: Like But the flame, I don't know. It's I've had so many stories. I mean, some stories I couldn't even say on on this thing, but
Steve: After the cameras are off.
Jeff: Yeah. It's people steal from me. I mean, I unfortunately, I've had more than one embezzling issue.
Steve: Really? Yeah. How how do they end up?
Jeff: Sales I have two different sales guys steal from me, and they were doing it through falsifying expense reports. That's how I do it.
Steve: I see.
Jeff: And taking, you know, taking flights that weren't business flights and writing it off in the company. And we didn't have very good controls, unfortunately, and so they got it. They didn't get away with it forever. I eventually figured it out, but Mhmm. Got away with it for a while.
And then, you know, that's unfortunate. I had I had two different bookkeepers steal from me as well. So, like, just about every businessman that I know that's been around anytime at all has had at least one embezzling situation in their career. Unfortunately, that's a part of business that you don't like it. But luckily, none of these deals were huge money, so it's not like it was hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Steve: But it
Jeff: was still fast, and it was still enough to justify getting rid of somebody. If I can't trust somebody, then they're gone.
Steve: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Jeff: I don't care if it's the smallest thing. If I can't trust you, forget it.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. So then let's talk about yeah. 16, and you guys are doing well right now. And I think Ryan is on your team.
Is that Right. Right?
Jeff: Ryan Dixon. Yeah.
Steve: Hey, Ryan. So, obviously, he's he's helpful as well.
Jeff: He's my vice president of sales. Yeah.
Steve: So what are you doing today to make sure, like, to maximize the possibility and potential of the salesperson? What are you doing now to make sure you get the right people in?
Jeff: Well, we're we're one thing we do that I really believe in is testing. We do personality and aptitude testing for everybody, not just salespeople. Anybody that I hire, I have a company that I use. It's an online company, but it's called Criteria. And they've got a battery of tests, and it's they got a pretty slick system.
So when we interview somebody when they I don't do it right away, but when they if if we look at their resumes and if they kinda get past that stage, then we'll send them a link to take these tests. And it's three tests, that are both personality and aptitude. They're not hard. It takes about a half an hour. But it gives you an idea on paper what kind of what's behind the curtain.
Mhmm. And I I didn't used to do aptitude. That was something that's relatively new in the last couple years. But I'd find, especially for salespeople, I'd have a person that has a perfect personality for sales, and there there it says hire this person, but they're not smart. Mhmm.
K? And I I found you have to have some level of intelligence. You have to be a genius Mhmm. But you can't be a dummy either. Right.
And so I found if I just go for personality, I often had failures even though it said hire the guy. Mhmm. When I added the the smart part of it, I've been really good at hiring people and them not failing. We're we're about 80% of successful. Yeah.
Steve: We're really good. That's remarkable.
Jeff: But it's a combination. And I have to pat ourselves on the back. I have to pat Ryan on the back. Ryan is an excellent, manager. He's really good at the culture and supporting people mentally because guys it's an up and down thing, and guys get down.
And if they're down too long, they'll destroy themselves. Mhmm. And they don't they're shouldn't, but they do. Yeah. And so you you really have to worry about the culture and the mentality.
And we I focus a lot on company culture. It's a big thing. Our company is a good place to work. Nobody quits. We have, and we fire people, but we I can't say nobody's ever quit, but it's rare.
Mhmm. Because it's a good place to work, and we pay people fairly. And we're not the high end of the wage scale. We're not the low end either. It's above average, but it's fun.
You know, we're not looking I give people my philosophy is my door is always open. You got a problem, come to me, but I leave you alone. And all my managers do we give people the tools they need to do their job, and we leave them alone. Let them do their job. Yeah.
And then we oversee it, but it's not looking over their shoulder every minute of every day because nobody likes that. Right. And, culture's a big deal. We have quarterly parties just to have fun. You know?
And it I don't know. It's what are we doing today? I use the I use the hiring thing. I use the when we hire, we put we just put ads in Indeed. It's something fancy.
Or my my one of my top sales guy was a coach in a gym that I go to. Mhmm. And he was just a guy kinda running the class. It's a like a boot camp class, and he was running it. And the guy went there for, like, a year, and he this guy really is a nice guy.
He seems like a hustler because he had I got to know him over a year, and he had, like, three different gigs going. But he wasn't making much money, and I thought this guy would be a good salesman. So I approached him, and I said, hey. What do you think about coming to work as a salesman for me? And he'd never done sales.
But long story short, very short period of time, he was one of my top guys.
Steve: He'd been
Jeff: with me for a couple years now. And so I was we've been pretty good. Ryan does the same thing. We're pretty good at identifying people in our lives that we come across. We think that person might be a good salesperson.
But we also put ads out. And we, not just sales. It's any job. But we put ads, and then we do the personality testing. And then we, you know, we look at social media too.
I look at before I hire somebody, I look at their social media, make sure there's nothing on there that seems crazy that it would not fit in with our culture. You know, and I don't know. It's
Steve: So it sounds like a lot of the the six months. Because because six months are on the way. Like, you know, like, if you come in and join a real estate investor organization, two months, three months max. Right?
Jeff: And That's not enough time. You can't if you put too much pressure on somebody, they freak out and they're that's part of the whole idea. You you gotta give them enough runway that they're gonna relax. And and it's not like I say, okay. You got six months or you're fired.
You know? Mhmm. It's not even that. It's just that we show them. This is what other people have done.
I keep track of all kinds of stats on from month one to wherever I got there, and every person's ever worked for me. And I could say, here's all the guys. Here's our top guys. Here's what their path looked like. Mhmm.
Here's the medium guys. Here's the low guys. Here's the guy that didn't make it. You know? So if you get somewhere in this range, you should be successful.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: Then we're gonna be a regular one on ones, weekly one on ones with them. I don't, but the sales manager does. And he's going over, you know, what's going on? What are you thinking? We listen to calls.
One good thing about HubSpot and AI that that has been the best. AI has been great. K. We're we're embracing AI in a lot of ways. Yeah.
Because we can the calls all get recorded automatically. We use an a system called air call. We gotta call everything through that. Mhmm. It automatically records a call and transcribes it Mhmm.
And summarizes it in bullet points. So we can very quickly review calls without having to listen to every minute of every call. Mhmm. And that really has been very helpful. So we do it.
You know? How how your call is doing? And if a guy's struggling, we do a deeper dive and other calls going. You know? Oh, here's here's your problem.
Like, asking for the money. We got a guy right now. He's one he's extremely impressive guys. He's been with you about six, eight months. Doing okay, but he's he's not doing as well as he should be doing.
I don't get it because he talks great. He looks great. He makes a great presentation. Everything's great except for asking for the money. K?
He his way of asking for the money was terrible, and he couldn't do it. And we finally realized that and found out that's his head trash. He's he he thinks asking, hey. You got a credit card? He thinks that's like being a jerk.
Mhmm. So he can't do that. And it's his own head trash because it's not. Sure. You know?
And so we we've been coaching him to get around that. And just in a couple weeks of coaching him, he's already doing better. Yeah. But it took us a while to identify that, you know, because it wasn't obvious. So I don't know.
It's it's a lot of things. There's only one thing.
Steve: Oh, yeah. We've been talking about the sales. Yeah. That was let's jump into culture. Okay.
So you say you're really big on culture. What does that mean to be really big on culture?
Jeff: Well, I think you have first of all, you have to be as a boss, you can't be a jerk. K? There's a lot of bosses that are jerks. And what I mean by that is I mean, what is a jerk? I don't know.
That's a general term. But it's what I said earlier. I don't I I have high expectations. I lay out this is what I expect you to do. Go do it.
K? And, yeah, we'll watch over. And if you're we'll correct something. But even when we correct like, for instance, in printing, errors happen in printing. We every job starts with a blank piece of paper, and you can screw it up.
K? People screw up all the time, unfortunately. I wish it didn't happen, but it does. Most of the time, it's our customers' mistakes because we we're pretty good at doing everything right. We have proofs and everything.
But But even so, we make mistakes sometimes. Mhmm. Well, when somebody makes a mistake, I'm not coming down on them and yelling to scream at them. You know? Even if it's the stupidest mistake ever, I will never do that.
And I have a very even keels of personality. I I don't get hardly I can't think of more times I can't think of the times I've lost my temper more than five times in my entire life. I just don't do it. So that helps because people know that it's okay to make a mistake. You're not gonna lose your job.
They're not gonna yell at you. They're not gonna chastise you. They'll let's let's see what you did. Let's learn from the mistake. Let's not do that again.
You know? Yeah. It makes a big difference. That alone is a good way to keep a positive culture. And we do things we you know, I said we try to have quarterly parties, get everybody together.
Because in any kind when I worked for Procter and Gamble, I saw this too. I worked in a manufacturing plant in Cape Girardeau. It was 1,200 manufacturing people. And I was an engineer at the manufacturing plant. Well, they all even though we were in manufacturing, all they did was complain about the idiots in in at the home office that didn't know how to run the company.
Mhmm. Because all the manufacturing guys thought they knew what they were doing. And the sales guys were the idiots, and the corporate guys were idiots. You know? And they would complain because we'd send them a big order, and they'd have to work overtime to get the order out, and they're complaining about that.
Mhmm. What do you mean you're complaining? This is you wouldn't have a job if they didn't sell that order. You know?
Steve: Right.
Jeff: They didn't see it that way. So every organization that's kinda big has different sections of it that don't necessarily get along. Mhmm. So we try to do quarterly events to get everybody to just kinda see each other outside of the office to say, hey. These guys are nice guys.
Mhmm. Or maybe they're not idiots, and we're all working together. We're all make sure that and the the production guys understand that they wouldn't have a job if the sales guys didn't sell and if the art people didn't do their job and all that stuff. So it's you have to work with that. It doesn't happen automatically.
Steve: Alright. Is everyone local? Yeah. All the South guys?
Jeff: All but one. We have I bought a company. One of my acquisitions was a company named REI Vault that I bought almost four years ago now, and they were a remote company. Mhmm. And so I inherited a remote business.
So I have people now in The Philippines and in India, and there's a guy in California that manages that. Got it. So but other than that, everybody's in Saint Louis. And I don't like remote, by the way. I'm not a fan of remote work.
However, you know, I bought the company, and I knew that's what I was getting. So
Steve: Let's talk about that. Why why are you not a fan of that?
Jeff: This thing is hard. For for my culture, being in the same building is important. Mhmm. We did have another sales guy that we recently let go that was remote. And you don't know what they're doing.
You can't you you just don't know if they're really working. Mhmm. I mean, you can look at the numbers. You get an idea, but you really don't know what they're doing. It's real it's just way harder to coach them.
When they're in the office with you, they're right down the hall. You know what they're doing. They come to you. I mean, our business probably, I don't know if your business, but we're wheeling a deal in all the time. K?
So, yeah, we have price list and all that stuff, but it's always, well, we're at 65¢, and the guy wants to do it for 62¢. Can we do it? And so there there's a endless line of people, either my office or the manager's office, saying, hey. I got a deal. How can we make this work?
Yeah. When you're right down the hall, it's real easy. It's not if you can't do that remotely, it's just way harder. And we found
Steve: You got a buzz inside the office.
Jeff: The buzz is it makes a difference. It really does. Especially when guys are down. You're remote by yourself in your house. Like, I don't even like it.
I can I mean, I'm I'm in the company? I can do anything I want. Sometimes I'll work at home because I do a lot of writing. Or Or if I have to create things, I I I don't wanna get interrupted. Sometimes I'll stay home for a couple hours in the morning.
And after a couple hours, I'm ready to go to the office. Yeah. I like being in the office. I like being in the environment around other people because it makes me feel good.
Steve: Right.
Jeff: So
Steve: okay. So you're doing quarterly events. You wanna bring people together to eliminate this us versus them because I think that is one of the things that's most toxic in larger companies. Yes.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Steve: It's like, oh, well, that department and this department. It's not because of us. It's because of them. Right. I think it's one of the most toxic things.
Anything else you're doing to breed great culture?
Jeff: Well, I do that. Not only do we have events, not all the parties, it's me constantly on a regular basis. I will have meetings with I'll have a meeting with production department, and I'll explain I can let production know what we're doing in marketing. So they have an idea. It's not like it's this blind thing and just the orders just show up and they have no idea where they came from.
I let them know, hey. We hired this guy. We're doing this marketing campaign. Mhmm. This may or may not work.
I just bought a company, whatever it might be. And so they all feel like they're part of it. And then I get them involved. Hey. We're gonna be doing this.
What do you think? Doing you know? This is what I'm thinking. What do you think about that? You know?
Yeah. And I'm always open for ideas too. Yeah. Yes. I'm a strong leader, and I have a lot of ideas about a lot of things.
I'm very opinionated. However, I am open to other people's ideas. And if a good idea is a good idea, I don't care if it's somebody else's idea. Oh, that's another thing I do too is I make sure people get credit for their ideas no matter who it is. I go out of my way to do that to say, hey.
Joe, your production came up with this idea, and I think that's a great idea. We're gonna do that. And let everybody know that. Yeah. Because I think that's important.
People want to be able to get the credit.
Steve: Yeah. They want the credit. That's one of the things that you hear of gripe. It's like, oh, they just took my idea and took all the credit. Yep.
Alright. Let's talk about the the the marketing side. And what I'm talking about the let's start off with the affiliate side. So you're talking about this formula that works. You're you said you 80 events last year or this year?
Jeff: This year, we're doing I don't know exactly. Between sixty and eighty. Yep.
Steve: A lot of freaking events.
Jeff: It is. Yeah.
Steve: So, talk to me about this model of working with the coaches. Like, obviously, you saw that I'll work with Kent. Is this something that's, like, alright. That worked. Let's just get like, just double down on this, and we're not gonna do any of the marketing.
What what do you
Jeff: Now we do a little bit of everything. It's what I said earlier, you have to get your name in front of people in different ways all the time. Mhmm. You want people to feel like they see you everywhere. Not social media tries to do that for you.
They try to take care of that for you. That's what retargeting is all about. But you still have to make an effort to do that outside of social media. Mhmm. And we have found, honestly, although we spend money on social media, it hasn't been very productive marketing in terms of the orders we get from that aren't very profitable, and the people don't stay around very well.
Mhmm. We don't find any good prospects usually. However, it's hard to measure, but I think the fact they see you helps.
Steve: It's kinda like billboards. Yeah. Like, you can't really tie revenue to billboards. Yeah. But it makes everything else easy to convert.
Jeff: Exactly. Or TV and radio is the same way. I've I work with a guy that's TV and radio advertising. We talk about this all the time. People that do TV and radio in real estate, they don't do the orders they get from that aren't that great, but all their other mail and everything works way better.
Steve: Right.
Jeff: Yep. Yeah. Because if because they see you, it's just it's just about what I said earlier, it's about those impressions help people say yes easier. Because people wanna do business with people they know, like, and trust. Mhmm.
K? And if they feel like they trust you because they've seen your name 10 other times, it's easier for them to say yes. So but, anyway, back to the affiliates. So there's a lot of there's there's a lot of ways to do that too. So it's there's not even one formula.
Steve: Who is responsible for the affiliate relationship?
Jeff: Well, we just had one of our callers. We we didn't have an affiliate manager until three months ago. We now have an affiliate manager, which is one of our callers who was really good, and she was looking for a little bit more, but she didn't wanna go in sales. So she is now and but we're still learning how to do this right now, but she's Me too. Trying to That's why
Steve: I'm asking these questions.
Jeff: Yeah. Trying to because we just had all these affiliates. So what happened before is the sales guys, they go to all these events. The way the way the natural the thing naturally happens is we tell the sales guys, you need to go find a couple affiliates. That's part of what we expect.
And I can't give them leads for affiliates. They gotta go into the world, the Internet, wherever they go, or ask their customers, who do you know? Hey. Steve's a good guy. Mhmm.
You know? Yeah. He's got a he's got a podcast or he's got an event. And so they'll do that, and they try to figure out, can we go to that event? Do we have to pay?
What do we go for free? Or if we make an affiliate, we'll pay you a percentage. Can I go to the event for free? You know, we do all that stuff. We try to get somebody to say yes.
But the pitch to the affiliate is, look, you're trying to teach people how to be successful in real estate. They need leads. Okay? Direct mail works for getting leads. There are other things that work too, but it is a tried and true method to get leads.
So do you have a direct mail source that you recommend? Most of them don't. Mhmm. And so, well, recommend us, and we will make you I totally feel it's we'll make you look good. Because if we can help your people be successful, they're gonna make more money.
They're gonna think your coaching is awesome. Mhmm. They're gonna come back. Right. And and when you recommend us and we do a good job, they're gonna think you're a genius because they say, yeah.
Those are your print mail guys are great. You know? I love you. So that's the promise. Now we have to deliver on that.
Steve: Of course.
Jeff: And that's part of what we try to do. Mhmm. I'm not gonna say we're perfect. We we don't always make everybody rich. Mhmm.
But we our tracker is pretty good. You know? We most people, if they give us a chance to do what we do, do well. But anyway, so that's it. And you get the guy hopefully, a guy says, yeah.
Yeah. Let's try that out. And she usually let's try an event. Let's see what happens. Come to the event.
You know? And sometimes we'll put up a booth if they have that. Sometimes they don't. It just depends on what it is. If it's a mastermind, a lot of times masterminds don't have booths.
Like the boardroom, for instance, they don't do booths. It's a mastermind. Yeah. So you just get in there and you you participate in the mastermind. You do the best you can to network, however you can do that.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: And you hopefully get a few customers out of it, and they have a good experience, and they start talking to other people, and then you that's that's the whole referral thing. Right. So that's one way. And then there's other ways. We're experimenting now with buying literally influence.
Like, I got two or three influencers that we're looking at to literally buy their time because they don't just give it away. Mhmm. And so we're saying, alright. We're gonna buy some time, and you're gonna like, what we're doing, we got a couple guys right now that we're doing, I'll draw a total blank, test campaigns Mhmm. Where we'd say, they're they're not big direct mail guys.
They don't have a lot of experience in direct mail, but they got a huge following. Mhmm. But they don't wanna recommend us if they don't have some experience. There are real estate guys, but they're not using direct mail. So we're doing a test campaign to prove to them that direct mail works with their own experience in their own real estate business.
Yeah. Hopefully, that's good. We've got one that it's early in the test, but it's going really well on one. We it's too early to tell. We don't know.
But, hopefully, we'll prove that, and then we, you know, paying them to to to recommend us. So we'll see how that works. I don't know. I'm sure but the the ones that do the best are the people, like, we got Josh and Tiffany Hyde that do really well. Mhmm.
And they use direct mail in a big way for their own business, and that's their favorite way to market. And they get and they have a coaching business, and they stand at the top of the the mountain and say, direct mail works, and these guys are awesome. And we use them, and we get great results. And they do that every single day. And so the people they push to us are already presold.
Mhmm. And the yeses are high high percentage of close rate because they're presold. A couple other guys do that too. A lot of the affiliates think what doesn't work, I'll tell you this, is to say, okay. I got a website, and we got a page.
We got some affiliates or some referral partners. We'll we'll give you a page on that. Mhmm. And then there you go. You know?
It doesn't do anything. K.
Steve: It just
Jeff: I mean, look at the you've
Steve: heard from
Jeff: a reference. Nothing from that. Alright? Yeah. Because people don't we're not just gonna go look at the website and see a logo or a name and say, okay.
I'm gonna click on that guy. Get excited about it. It just doesn't I'm not saying it never works. But for sure, the ROI sucks. If you're paying money for it, especially.
Somebody does it for free. Okay. I'll take it. Yeah. But even if it's free, like, in printing, I for years, people always come to me and say, can you a lot of golf tournaments.
Can you give me some free printing for my golf tournament? Golf tournaments always have a program. Mhmm. And they'll ask for it for free, and they'll say, we'll give you an a page ad in the golf book. And I'm saying, guys, keep the page.
I don't care. I don't need it. I'll give it to you for free, but I'm I don't need the page. I don't care. Because I've never, in my entire career, gotten one single new customer out of an ad from a golf tournament book.
You know?
Steve: It's amazing Yes. How many phone calls I've gotten over the years. I'm like, hey. We'll put you in, the this book, in in our golf. I don't even know where you can get the book, right, when you're when you're golfing.
Jeff: Well, they give it out when they're,
Steve: Yeah. But no
Jeff: nobody looks at it. That's the point. It's just a bunch of ads. Who's looking at that? Who cares?
Yeah. It goes in the trash. It's the back of your cart where you're playing. Mhmm. It goes in the trash the end of the round, and that's it.
You know? Right. Yeah.
Steve: It's funny. I mean, I think I don't know what's that's probably the worst one because, like, I I get the shopping cart ones as well also written back, you know, back when I was a realtor. But, yeah, I would say the golf ones. Like, why?
Jeff: Yeah. But I will say when it comes to marketing in our world I can't speak for other worlds, but the only way it really works when it comes to affiliate marketing is they have to push you on a regular basis. And for them to really push you, they have to have a personal experience that they feel good about. If they don't have a personal experience, they're kinda lying if they push you, and most people don't wanna lie. So they gotta say, man, I use this all the time and it's the truth.
And they gotta really feel good that we really are gonna do a good job. And if that if you have those two formulas together, it works really well. Yeah. Fortunately, we've got a lot of affiliates that have had that experience. So that's been part of our reason for growth, you know.
Steve: So, I wanna move on to talking about, like, how you've acquired 26 companies and then why, like, why direct mail with RA Premier. Before we do that, guys, this episode is brought to you by, Beck CFO, the go to tax and CFO, firm for real estate entrepreneurs. If you're making money in real estate and you're not confident you're paying the least amount legally possible in taxes, you need Beck CFO. They specialize in entity structuring, tax strategies, and CFO level support that saves their clients thousands every year. And, guys, I use them for tax planning, and you should too.
So book a free consultation at beckcfo.com. So this stat really jumped out
Jeff: at me here. K.
Steve: Acquired 26 companies. So I've got a lot of, very envious because this is, like, one of the things I wanna do. You know? Someone asked me, like, if you had a big exit, what would you do? It's like, I'll probably just start buying a bunch of companies.
Like, I really liked how Marcus Lemonis, with the profit, he just owns between 3051% of all these companies, and they all use use each other's services. So when I saw this, I was like, man, that's really cool. We gotta talk about this. So 26 companies, what what is going on? If you're a real estate investor with a sales team and you're stuck babysitting reps instead of growing your business, this is for you.
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Jeff: Alright. So what started that is out of survival. It started back. I don't remember exactly what year, but I told you earlier I was a broker or a distributor. I bought and resold.
So I did that for about ten years. And it got tougher and tougher to do that because printing is a it's a low margin business. It's a race to the bottom. People are always they don't know how to do anything but give you a cheaper price. Mhmm.
So and that's also the problem. When you don't have a niche, it's a race to the bottom. K? Yeah. Just like Amazon.
If you're on Amazon, it everything's a race to the bottom in Amazon because nobody has anything to price. Mhmm. So if you have a niche and you're really good, you can justify charging more because you're really good at what you do and you can justify it. So that's important. Well, anyway, it was getting tougher and tougher to be a broker because that's all it was, and I didn't have a niche at that point.
So I decided to get into manufacturing. Well, one of my manufacturers working with was a small print company named Zert Printing. And so long story short, I bought him and brought him, and he didn't have any salesman. He was relying on guys like us to bring a business, but that was sort of drying up too. Mhmm.
So the timing was right. I didn't know anything about buying companies back then. I didn't have any money. So but I was able to do a deal with him where I didn't put any money up front. I paid him over time.
Mhmm. And he moved his entire business into my building. We got well, actually got a bigger building. And then we and I was renting. I didn't own it, but I we rented a bigger space.
He came in, and I'm now in manufacturing. And I knew nothing about manufacturing. He did. So I just brought him in. He ran the manufacturing.
I still ran the sales arm of it. And that and I thought, wow. This worked good. And it worked really good. And he had it was he was about a $600,000 company back when I was about a $2,000,000 company.
Mhmm. So that was a pretty big increase, you know, almost 25% increase in my business in one chunk. And since he brought his entire customer base, we didn't lose any business. He brought it all. It was easy transition.
So then I thought graphic design was another sticking point because I was using freelance graphic designers, and it was really a pain in the butt. So that was something I need to bring in house too. So I bought a small graphic design company. Same deal. I was able to do it for almost no money down.
So I thought, wow. This really works. Well, then I just decided, you know what? I like this model. And I wasn't like I said earlier, I was not having good luck hiring sales guys.
So I thought, you know, rather than hire guys, I'll just buy the business. That's easier. K? And maybe I'll get lucky and get a sales guy to come with it too. It's already trained and already knows how to do it.
So I started but then I used direct mail, and I thought, you know what? Rather than those kind of fell in my lap because I knew the people. But I wanted to buy another one. I didn't know anybody. So I decided to buy a list of all the printers in the whole Saint Louis area within 50 miles of Saint Louis.
And I sent them a letter saying, hey. You know, I'm a small printing company. I'm looking to acquire somebody else. I'm not a broker. You know, I'm I am an actual guy that wants to expand his business.
If you're looking to retire or you're just losing money, you're sick of the rat race, give me a call. We'll work something out. And I sent a letter out, and I got two or three calls. And I was able to find a deal out of that that made sense. And I started doing that every year.
I did, like, one deal a year every year. And then one time, 2008 crash, I bought two companies that year. Because when I would that killed sixty five percent of printers went out of business, that year. It was just devastated the printing industry. Yeah.
And so I was be able to get things for next to nothing. Mhmm. I never had to put hardly any money up for anything. I would put maybe a small down payment, but I always worked it out over time. I couldn't make every deal.
Some people, you know, they, thought their company was worth more than it was. You know, I like Shark Tanks, if you watch Shark Tank. Those aren't really realistic deals in a lot of cases because they they overpay almost every time. Yeah. But in the real world, my one of my mantras is I gotta make all my money back.
Whatever I put up, I gotta make it back in one year. Mhmm. I'm not looking at a five year payback because it's too unknown. There's no contracts in printing. Too unknown.
I gotta get my investment back in one year. So if I can't make the deal work so I could get back in one year, forget it. There's no deal. Now the payoff sometimes is longer than one year, but I wanted whatever I put out, my cash, I got that back in one year. So it was profitable for me after twelve months.
Steve: That's a pretty good model.
Jeff: Yeah. And the one I just did, I just did a deal last week I closed. It's the best deal I ever closed. And this guy has been pursuing for five years. Mhmm.
He he put it up for sale five years ago, and he wanted a million dollars for his company. It was a 1,400,000.0 no. $1,200,000, and he wanted a million dollars for it. We had huge profit margins, which is not normal in the printing business. And I didn't believe him.
I thought the guy was fudging the books. It just it seemed too good to be true. Mhmm. And so he he wouldn't go for my normal model, so we couldn't make a deal. But I kept in touch with him because I thought, I think there's something there.
But he's gotta come down this price. So five years passed. I kept in touch with him about once a year. I just happened to call the guy about a month ago. Mhmm.
My annual thing, and this time he said, guess what? I'm ready. And his million came down to 400,000. And and now he's a $1,600,000 company. And his numbers are still just as good.
And so but what happened the difference is his motivation. He wasn't ready back then. Mhmm. Now he's ready to retire, and he's got several other businesses. He's just trying to liquidate everything because he wants to retire.
He's older. He doesn't care about the money. He just wants somebody to take it over and take the grief off his hands. Mhmm. And so I was able to make the deal.
It took five years to do that one, but that's gonna be very profitable. That one, I'm getting my money back in six months. So Really? Yes. That's that's fine.
Yeah. And that doesn't happen very often, but it's just because I I had the the wherewithal to know that this is a deal that I maybe could eventually make.
Steve: So these are all I've had
Jeff: a couple of those happen that way where I pursued them for several years and eventually came through.
Steve: These are all in printing then?
Jeff: Printing. Yeah. So what I didn't do, or I used in real estate, guys teach this. Okay? And I think it's smart.
They'll say if you're a real estate house flipper, you need title companies, you need construction, and you need there's, like, potentially 10 different services in a real estate transaction. And if you buy a company in every one of those niches, you can take a piece of that entire transaction, and that's smart. I'm not doing that. Okay? I'm just buying other failing companies.
I'm not say failing, but there are people that are either failing or the guys retiring, And they're closing shop, and I don't care about their stuff anymore. I got all the equipment I need. I just want their customers.
Steve: To find the book of business.
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I do it for if I can make the deal work for me, I do it. If I don't, shake hands and we walk away. Yeah.
There's a I made 27 26 deals, and I've probably looked at 50 that I didn't make. You know?
Steve: It's, it's interesting. There's this, today, you kinda have this roll up model where, like, you're buying all the companies. And then because you have a larger revenue model, larger revenue, you can now sell it a larger multiple.
Jeff: Right.
Steve: You've been doing this
Jeff: forever.
Steve: Decades. Because, like, it's popular now. It's been popular the last few years, but you've been doing this
Jeff: for a long time. Have to, it's it's you have to be creative. I've always been really good at finding seeing deals where nobody else sees it. Mhmm. Not not only in acquiring companies, just in general, marketing and whatever.
I'm really good at finding seeing something that other people don't see to look at the same data. And, I don't know. It's just the gift I have, I guess. But Yeah. And I and I never no matter what, I have an open mind to anything.
Mhmm. But even if a deal seems like it's crazy, this will never work. I don't just turn away and walk away. I'll still pursue it to at least get far enough down the road to see if really there is something or maybe there isn't anything. Yeah.
And, and, you know, I don't know. It's just, it's worked for me. It just really has. So a guy named Roland Frasier that actually had me on about three years ago. He started a whole business in teaching people how to do buy companies for pretty much no money.
Right. And I was his first guest he ever had on his podcast to talk about how he did it. So just about being creative, being open minded and creative and realize any kind of a sale, two people have to win. If it's not a win win transaction, there is no transaction. And I always tell my sales guys, if there's no pain, there's no sale.
So you have to find the pain, and you have to solve the pain. If you can do that and make it win win, then you have a deal. If you can't, there's no deal. That's the same thing when you buy in a company. They the person selling it needs something.
You gotta figure out what that is. Then can you give that to them? If you can, you can work it out. If you can't, you can't. You know?
And there's there's many different ways to work things out. There's there's not there's a million different models. You just gotta be creative on how to do that.
Steve: And one of the things that, I saw here is you do millions of pieces a mail a month?
Jeff: Or between three and four million a month, right now. We've been doing that for at that rate for a couple years. So
Steve: A lot of freaking mail.
Jeff: It is. So We have a box truck that gets filled up every single day to the post office, sometimes twice a day.
Steve: So one of the things, I heard you say something along the lines, if you're not using direct mail, you want
Jeff: If you're not using direct mail as part of your comprehensive marketing strategy, you're leaving money on the table. And, I've been saying that for years. Mhmm. So what does that mean?
Steve: Yeah. So elaborate on that.
Jeff: So what I'm talking about, alright, I believe I talked about earlier. My company uses all different kinds of marketing. K? And I also use direct mail. Obviously, I'm in direct mail.
I believe multi touch marketing makes sense. But in the real estate space, a high percentage of the people that you're looking for to make deals are older people. Senior citizens that have lived in their house for many years, decades Mhmm. Probably haven't fixed up the house. They're getting old, and maybe that it takes too much to fix up the house to sell at retail.
Or they die, or they get sick and go to a nursing home, or whatever. That's a high, and they have a lot of equity. So that's a target market. Well, older people tend to not be technically savvy. They're definitely not going to Google, searching on Google to find somebody to buy their house.
Okay? And so but they aren't going to their mailbox. They're reading their mail. In fact, the post office did a study a few years ago. Ninety two percent of Americans still go to their mailbox, and they still pull out the mail, and they still read it.
K? Even millennials, the young people, like mail, even though they're all glued to their phones Mhmm. They like mail because it's, like, cool to get a mailer within your name on it. K? And they actually pay attention to it.
Okay? Yeah. So it works. Well, if you're using and we see this all the time in these different masterminds. Everybody wants that the latest coolest thing.
Alright? That button the magic button they can press, and they get all these leads, and they're they get rich. K? Everybody wants that. And they think the answer's on the Internet because there's people all over the place advertising that, whether they starting Amazon business, start a whatever.
You see it all over the place. Log in for us. $8,000 a first month, you know, and you don't have to do anything. You sit at home in your chair, and the money just rolls in, you know. Mhmm.
And it's mostly all BS. Right. But that's what people got in their mind. They think it's possible. So when it comes to marketing, they think the same thing.
So people are drawn to this electronic answer. And I'm not saying it doesn't work, but what I found in my career, the electronic stuff, it comes and it goes. And it comes and it goes really quick. Okay? Whatever works today doesn't usually work tomorrow.
Yeah. And there's some new thing. You don't know what that is, and it never has a long term thing. And whether it's cold calling, cold texting, pay per click, pay per lead
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: You know, space ads, whatever. All this stuff, I don't say it doesn't work, but it doesn't necessarily work for everybody. And even if you have something, this is where the you're leaving money on the table thing comes in. Let's say you're doing pay per click advertising, and it's working for you. You're happy.
You're getting deals. You're making money. But you wanna you wanna ramp up. But you can't make somebody click. You can give Google, hey.
I wanna spend I'm spending $10 a month. I wanna spend $20 a month. Mhmm. They may not spend the $20 because if there's not enough clicks, there's not enough clicks. You can't make them click.
Or the lead quality goes down because of whatever their algorithm is. They don't tell you what their algorithm is, but I know this from experience. Just spending more money in Google doesn't double the leads. It just doesn't work that way. You don't know how it works.
They don't tell you. Mhmm. Point is, if you wanna expand, the guy that doesn't go to Google to buy a house, no matter how much money you spend on Google, you're never gonna sell to that guy. Mhmm. But he's never going to Google, but he is going to his mailbox.
K? So that's the only point. I it depends how big you are. You know, the smaller people tend to have one or two methods of marketing. The bigger you get, the more different avenues you have.
But direct mail should be one of those. Mhmm. Because if you don't, you're missing out on a huge chunk of the market. And it's a chunk of the market you're probably gonna make more money on. And it's a proven fact, and we know this.
Our customers tell us all the time. The deals they get from direct mail are more profitable almost always. Yeah. And, because I think there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, you tend to go there's less competition.
And I think the people that pick up the phone and call you from something they got tend to be more serious versus somebody you cold call Mhmm. And they happen to answer the phone. A lot of
Steve: work they took for them to pick up the phone. Yes. Absolutely. So, and I've always heard the same. Right?
I mean, you get the big three. It's just direct mail, TV, PPC. Like, everyone I know is doing really well. It's those three. And it's not like which of the three?
Like, no.
Jeff: It's All three.
Steve: All three.
Jeff: Yes.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. So then, why ARIA print mail? I mean, obviously, you guys have this reach. I mean, you used 31,000,000 in sales in any one year.
It's remarkable. Right?
Jeff: So Yeah. It's over you know, you do the math. We're just doing over 40,000,000 pieces a year in mail. That's a lot.
Steve: That's a lot of freaking mail. So, why should I use REI print mail to mail to my audience or to mail to my targeted list?
Jeff: Well, what we do is different than our competition. There's not a huge amount of competitors, but you've got two kinds of competitors. You've got the people that specialize in REI in this market, which we're one of those. And there's there's probably five other ones in the nation that do that. We're the biggest of all those by a lot, but there's other people that do similar things to what we do.
Then you have the other type is just the local mail house. Every city has them that can do any kind of mail. They don't know anything about real estate. They don't know anything about anything other than putting mail out. So if you go to that kind of a person, you gotta come up with everything.
You gotta come up with the marketing, the list, everything. Just give them the stuff. They'll print it and mail it, and they'll be cheap because that's what they do. That's what printing is, is get it out cheap. Okay?
But they give you zero expertise, so you better know everything. Okay? Most of our competitors have some version of that. They're just a little bit more expertise. What we do is different.
Number one, we have a data company. One of my acquisitions was a data company Mhmm. Called REI Smart Data. We bought that from Ken Clothier, actually. And so we can get the data.
Steve: That REWW? Yeah. I remember that. I was I was a client of REWW.
Jeff: Smart was their system, but yes.
Steve: Yeah.
Jeff: And we bought that and then we upgraded it, and it's better now than it was then. But, not that there was anything wrong with it, but I'm saying we we've gotten really good at data. K? It's not just about having the data source. Yeah.
We've gotten good at knowing what filters work in different counties because we do so much mail. Well, that's another thing we do. We track it. K? We not only do the mail.
We have a when I bought REI Vault, they had a division. That's why people in The Philippines and India. We answer the phones, and we track the data. So now into the mail, when the people could pick up the call, we answer the phone, and we put all that information in the CRM for our customers. Well, now we have all the data.
We have all the response data. And we know everything. So and we don't do that for everybody, but we have enough volume of that. We have a couple different ways we can capture the data. We capture the data on 75% of the mail we do.
Mhmm. So we know what mailer worked, what list worked, what area it worked. We know that nationwide in every area they own in The United States. So we can use that knowledge to advise our customers, the new guy that comes in and says, what should I do? Mhmm.
We now have something to look at that's real data, real mail
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: To say, this is what we did for another guy. That's what works. We can help get you started. Nobody else has that. It's the tracking that's the key, but it's beyond that too.
It's the data and the tracking. So my my sales guys who are coaches, they've gotten really good at going into the either our list system or other list systems. We know how to use PropStream, and we work with DataFlick and eighty twenty and all these different data companies. We know about all those guys. Mhmm.
And so we know in every one of those what's better, what's worse, because we do all this volume. We track it. We can advise people, you know, yeah, we want them to buy from us. But if they don't, if they bring us somebody else's data, that's fine. Mhmm.
We'll take that data and we'll mail it. We still take that, and so we advise them on how to use that strategically to get the best results. Right. And then the mailer design is another thing. I'm really good at mailer design.
I'm really good at coming up with unique things that work. Now they don't it doesn't always work. But what we always do is we come we're constantly designing new things, and then we put them out there and we test them before we roll it out to anybody else. We make sure there's some level of success before I ever tell anybody this is available. And so if it doesn't work, then we don't even put it out.
So every mailer we have out there has some level of success, that's proven. And then, you know, it's just the the whole strategy. So we put all this together because we know, like I said earlier, if we don't help them make money, they're not coming back. Mhmm. So it's in our best interest to help them make money and not just get leads, but get better leads that lead to better deals and higher closing rate and more profit.
So in the end, they might spend a little more more because our model does cost more money. We charge more than most of our competition.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: But we more than make up for it because in the end, they get more profitable deals and easily justifies the spend. They're still way ahead. Yeah. And they and they and they have a level of confidence. So
Steve: So you like to do the the the design part of it? Yeah. And the copy too?
Jeff: Yeah. Right. Copy when I say design, I'm not a graphic designer, but I come with ideas. I work closely with my graphic designers. I come up with the idea, write the copy, then she'll make it look nice.
Let me go back and forth till we're happy.
Steve: And then we could say, like, alright. Here's what we know works. And for example, I'm I'm in Chandler, Arizona. I can say, alright, Jeff. I'm looking looking to do some direct mail in Chandler.
You can say, alright. Based off these ZIP codes, here are the here's here's the copy that's resonated. Here's the the design that's resonated.
Jeff: Here's a list. But it's more than that too. We start being before that. We say, okay. What kind of deals do you wanna get?
What's your buy box? You know? You want what's your what's your price range you wanna buy? Do you want high equity? What do you want?
Every investor has different things they're gonna have. You're a wholesaler. You fix and flip. You whole tail. Whatever you do Yeah.
What are you looking for? How many deals you wanna get a month? What's your closing rate? Do you know your closing rate? How many leads does it take you to close a deal?
You know? Mhmm. How much profit do you make on average per deal? So we take all that math and we go backwards and say, okay. Based on all that, you need to get whatever.
Five we need to mail 5,000 pieces of mail in your area based on the stats we have for your area Mhmm. To get that deal flow you want. Say one we usually start with one deal. It's like you want one deal, takes as many mailers for one deal. So if you want five deals, you multiply it times five.
Yeah. So and that's all part of the consulting we do to because you can't believe how many people have no clue of any of that stuff. The new people, especially. And then you say how many deals how many leads it take you to close the deal. They don't know.
But we know because we know if you don't know, we can tell you, well, based on other people we have in your area, this is about what they're getting. Mhmm. And, of course, the good salesman do better than the bad salesman. The the newbies take more leads than the guys are really good at it.
Steve: Yeah.
Jeff: It ranges anywhere from 50 leads to get a deal to 20 leads to get a deal depending how good they are Mhmm. And depending how good the lead is. But all that factors into it, we help people with all that stuff. And so we're constantly coming out with new things. Because no matter what works in direct mail, it it has a life just like other marketing has a life.
The same mailer doesn't work for ten years. So we're constantly testing new things to keep on the leading edge the next new thing that's gonna work. And almost every major thing that's worked in this industry was designed by me. The Street View mailers, when you take a know, picture of the house on the mailer Mhmm. The first guy that ever did that, I would have patented that if I could, but, unfortunately, Google allows you to do that as part of their code.
You can't patent it. But in all industries, I'm the first guy that ever did that. Now insurance does it. Roofers do it. Construction guys do it.
Everybody does it. So I did that seven years ago when Google first came out with the the street view images of the houses. I've, offer mailers. That's big in the the industry right now where you actually make a physical offer. Nobody did that before we did it.
And that really got popular in COVID because people were getting all these checks in the mail. And I had had check designs, fake check designs in my library five years before that. And a handful of people use them. They always worked, but people were afraid of them because they're afraid of committing to the offer. And but in COVID, nothing else was working.
Mhmm. So people started doing that and started working like crazy. Before you know it, everybody's doing that. And all our competitors steal all our designs. We suspect we started copywriting everything.
Last year, I've started copywriting everything I do Oh, really? Because I had problem with every major design we have that has worked. My competitors have stolen from this.
Steve: Well, I mean, that's, I know for us online marketing. I mean, like, I've shared this before on this podcast multiple times. Like, when I when I first got into buying houses, I just copied Sean Terry's entire online campaign and made it mine. Yeah. And he knows about it.
He doesn't care. But, yeah, I think this is it's it's horrific, online. But, Yeah. I could totally hear what you're saying.
Jeff: I do care because it I mean, we spend a lot of money to do what we do. Mhmm. And if I if I spend my time and money invest and make something work, you can't just go steal it. So, anyway, I'm I'm taking legal action now with with copywriting to to protect myself as best I can. It's hard to totally protect it, but there are things you can do that Well, I
Steve: mean, the biggest thing is the the threat alone is often enough to deter.
Jeff: What's good for the investors too, people don't realize this. The reason things stop working is any given mailer gets swamped, everybody starts using it. So if all of a sudden everybody's using the same thing, it doesn't work anymore. So if I copyright something where only you can use it if you're doing business with me Mhmm. And all the competitors that do miss everybody else, they can't use that mailer.
That gives you the investor a leg up. So it's your advantage for me to protect that intellectual property. Mhmm. And people never think about it that way, but it really is it's it's better for everybody. So I'm making sure.
Confident we will continue no matter what happens in the market, we will continue to do better than our competition. The only thing I didn't talk about is AI too. Mhmm. We have been on the leading edge of AI with our data to come up with AI algorithms to make the data even better. How?
Well, it's the magic of AI, which I don't I'm not an AI guy, so my computer guy does this. But Yeah. But, basically, we take lists, and we factor with AI, you put in various different factors related to property. It could be demographics, could be characteristics throughout the property, whatever. And then you identify compare that to other properties that have sold in the past.
Mhmm. And through the magic of AI, it figures out of this list, we score the list. What we do is we'll do the best we can to pull a list out of our database if we're doing the list. And then we run it through our AI algorithm to score the leads, and it goes from most likely to sell to least likely to sell. And then we'll throw away the ones that are least likely to sell.
Mhmm. And it's generally about 40% of the list we throw in the trash. Then we mail the top 60%. And we have found in doing that is dramatically increased results because we're it's not so much that the most likely to sell sells more. It's just you throw away the garbage more.
Mhmm. We're really accurate in identifying the garbage that these guys aren't gonna sell. Yeah. How it does it? I have no idea.
It's the magic of AI. You know? And it's ever changing, but we're on we're we're working on a new one right now that nobody had what we have here, but there's a new one that really nobody has. And we're we're in the early testing stages, but so far, it's going really well. So Gotcha.
I just believe in staying whatever the whatever's happening, I'm trying to stay ahead of it.
Steve: And then there's other thing you're talking about, which is, what a lot of real estate investors get wrong when they are doing direct mail?
Jeff: Well, they get a lot of things wrong. So one of the things they get wrong is going cheap. K? People think and it's it's ironic. The guys that mail big tend to be cheaper than the guy the smaller guys.
Mhmm. Because what happens is when I say cheap, they they go the cheapest list, the cheapest mailer Mhmm. Because they're writing big checks. If you're mailing 50,000 pieces a month, let's say your mail cost 80¢ a piece, you're writing a $40,000 check, it's a big check. K?
And people start thinking, wow. Especially if times get a little tough. Wow. That's a big check. You know?
So if I could save a nickel, maybe I save $5 on that check. I wanna save that $5. The problem is saving that nickel usually means going from the guy that knows what he's talking about to the guy that doesn't know what he's talking about. And so you're taking the chance that your results are gonna be as good. And the little bit of money you save usually is not worth what you lose in effectiveness.
So Yeah.
Steve: Well, that's the mistake I made.
Jeff: Yeah. Or they copy other things. Or another mistake they make is they think they're smarter than the market. Mhmm. So they design they take we have all these proven designs at work.
They say, no. I wanna do my own design. Mhmm. And they come up with their own thing that's totally untested, and they put their whole budget against the totally untested thing. And almost always, it totally fails.
Mhmm. Because, number one, they do what they think is gonna work, which usually isn't right. K? A lot of people think glossy fancy. Mhmm.
I put my logo on it, you know, and picture my building. And it's this fancy glossy postcard that almost never works. K? It just almost never work. This is true in the commercial world too.
People, it's an ego thing, and they wanna talk they got a picture of their staff and a picture of their building Mhmm. And their logo, and the whole thing is about how great they are.
Steve: Yeah.
Jeff: People do not care about how great you are. They care about what's in it for them. And everything you ever do in marketing should focus on what's in it for the customer that's reading it. What's in it for me? That's all we care about.
We don't care about your logo and your building. We care about what you're gonna do for me, and what you're gonna do for me today, not yesterday. So and that's the key that the marketing, and a lot of people do not get that. So they, you know, they think they know better, and they don't test it. I would say yeah.
Go ahead. Where do
Steve: you study marketing?
Jeff: What I do?
Steve: Where did you study marketing?
Jeff: Real world. I have zero. I mean, I'm a student of marketing, so I'm reading constantly. I'm a big fan of Dan Kennedy. So I didn't I didn't go to any school.
But when you're in engineering school, they don't do marketing.
Steve: Right. Oh, I mean, I think it probably anywhere else. They don't study marketing either.
Jeff: And even if you go to business school, the marketing because I have hired guys that have marketing, and they what they teach them is useless.
Steve: They teach them, branding.
Jeff: Yeah. So and by the way, your small business branding I'm not saying branding is not important. There's a place for it. But you you have to every single mailing you do has to produce directly. You can't just do branding mailings because Alright.
You lose your bot. You don't have enough money to do it. You're not Coca Cola. No. It's more it's a real world.
It's trial and error. And I would say it doesn't matter what you think or what I think about a given marketing plan. It's what the market tells us. Mhmm. We don't know what the market tells us.
Then we put it out there and see what the market says.
Steve: And Which you have the data.
Jeff: Yeah. Sometimes I'm right. Sometimes I'm wrong. You know? It's funny.
Sometimes I've had several things happen that I didn't think were gonna work, and they did. Mhmm. And then I bought other things I really thought were gonna work, and they didn't work. You know? Yeah.
So
Steve: What, another thing you talked about in the past was lack of, answer rate.
Jeff: Oh, yeah. That's a big thing too. So we learned this. This is a recent revelation in the last year. So I told you we answer the phones for people.
Mhmm. The division of our company, we have people. We have various different levels. We have a call center. It's not an outgoing call center.
It's an incoming. So when, you know, we send out mail, we could we could put a tracking phone number on it, and then we answer the phone with a live person. Well, in doing that, we also have customers that use part of that system. They use the tracking phone numbers, but we don't answer the phones for them. So we know they answer their own phones.
Well, we know through millions of lines of data that the average real estate investor misses 55% of the calls. 55%. More than half.
Steve: K? That's atrocious.
Jeff: It's insane. I didn't believe it. When I first saw it, I thought there's no way that can't be true. Mhmm. K.
But it's true. K? We have the data. And so and I started talk before I even did anything about that, I started talking in the boardroom. Hey.
Just found this debt. What do you guys think about that? And everybody, every one of them said, oh, yeah. It's probably true. You know?
Why is it true? It's because most real estate investors are not huge organizations. They're either a one man show or a small organization. They might have people, acquisitions people, whatever, they answer the phone. But most of the time, they're they're busy.
They're working deals. We're on the phone. So So if a phone call comes in, you're on the phone, you don't answer it, you miss it. Goes to voice mail. Or if you're closed, you miss it or whatever.
There's a lot of reasons why you don't answer the phone even if you have people to answer the phone. Well, the second part of that is most real estate investors are not good at follow-up because they're busy. K? So they might make one or two attempts to call somebody if they miss it, maybe. But if they don't get through to them, usually that's the end of it.
And so we have found through our studies that the follow-up is almost zero Mhmm. For most people. If they miss it, they miss it. They lose that lead. You think about that.
If you miss over half your calls, whatever money you spent to generate that, you threw that in the trash.
Steve: Half of
Jeff: it. That is insane. Half of
Steve: it's in the trash.
Jeff: So we can fix that by just letting us answer the phone. Mhmm. And we we've done this. In fact, the the last year, we've really been pushing this. We're getting a lot of people to do this.
And, it's amazing. Not only do we answer it, we then ask them a series of 10 questions to find out if the person really has a house, and they're really serious about selling the house. And is it the right address? Is the right owner? All that stuff.
We ask them a series of questions. We put all that into a CRM that we give people as part of the service, and then we identified a qualified lead. So if you're a busy real estate investor, you don't have to answer every call and talk to every person. Just gotta talk to the qualified leads Mhmm. Which is a small percentage of what calls in, and those are the deals you wanna really talk to.
And we have people raving that, you know, this is awesome. It's freed up my time. I know I'm not missing any leads. I only talk to these ones that are good. And and then the one but even the ones that aren't qualified, we still keep them that's the outgoing part of our thing.
We still follow-up with them indefinitely until they either tell us to take them off the list Mhmm. And they become qualified. And, you know, because people aren't necessarily ready today, but they might be ready two years from now. You know?
Steve: That's a huge service.
Jeff: Yes.
Steve: And then if someone wants to do business with you, how would they go about reaching in reaching out to you guys?
Jeff: Well, you can go to ariaprintmail.com, and there's our our our standard offer is a fifteen minute free coaching call. Mhmm. And so all that is is you get on the phone with one of my coaches, and we ask about your market, what's your buy box, and we'll do a free market analysis, decide if use some of the data we have in your market, try to figure out, can we help you? Will the numbers work for you? It doesn't work for everybody.
You know, if you don't make enough profit per deal, Direct Mail may not work for you. Mhmm. For most people, in most markets, it can work. But we'll figure that out. You know?
Not high pressure. It's just an introductory call to figure out if there's a chance to do business together. And if there is, we'll set up a secondary call and get more serious about it. If not, we shake hands and say thank you very much, and that's the end of it. Not high pressure.
We're not high hard closing people because we know we're looking for long term relationships. You don't hard close into long term relationships. So it's, you know, we want you to be happy with it, and we gotta perform or it's not gonna work.
Steve: Yeah.
Jeff: It doesn't do us any good to twist your arm into something that's not gonna work.
Steve: No. No.
Jeff: I'm not gonna recommend something if we know it's not gonna work. Yeah. Because it's just shooting ourselves in the foot. That's stupid. You know?
Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. I know your brand's too important. Yeah. Something else you've talked about was knowing how to use filters to find hidden deals or hidden data. What's that about?
Jeff: Well, there's all kinds of all data companies, no matter where they come from in the real estate space, go to property tax record offices, and they pull the data from property taxes. There's a 156,000,000 households in The United States. Every single data source, I don't care who it is, has that same 156,000,000 records. So but in every property tax office does things a different way, and they report it a different way. Some might report how many bedrooms are vast, others don't.
You know, it's it's different. They're all different. There's something like 250 different potential characteristics about a house that may or may not be reported. So we've gotten really good at figuring out in different areas what they report, what they don't report, and to pull out stuff that other people don't see. Because if you don't know that, you do some generic thing, you'll miss some of that stuff.
And so that's what we got really good at doing. And that's all from trial and error. We just know doing that. We we find these hidden pockets that other people don't find.
Steve: That's through, the county or I'm sorry. You're you're saying that we're all pulling from the same data. Everyone's pulling from the same data. But you're saying you guys have additional tricks in
Jeff: your back. Like our our smart system, it's got, the search page has got you put in the ZIP codes and everything. It's got all these different filters you can pick from. But it's combination geography goes to different county tax offices, and they report different ways. So we know based on geography where you are, what your tax office does, and we've gotten really good at pulling stuff out of those various different tax offices that aren't obvious.
And the only way you know that is through trial and error. Mhmm. We're doing what we do for all this tracking, all this data.
Steve: And you have an example of something that would be like a a a like a house, a case study of some a client recently who got a deal that was
Jeff: Well, the by the way, the AI helps with this too. So the AI helps to take that on steroids Mhmm. Because it helps to find things that we're not smart enough as humans to find. The computer can find it. Mhmm.
So we put those two together. It's really good. Yeah. But it happens all the time. We have what we find is what sometimes we'll have is like, we're always competing against the eighty twenty list or the DataFlick and eighty twenty, the two companies we we compete the most with in terms of lists.
And we have a lot of customers that bring those to us. They're good companies. Alright? They have good lists. But they're AI companies too.
They have their own way of doing it. They both do it differently. And I don't even know what they do, but they do something with AI. Mhmm. They could say, hey.
These are the good records. Well, sometimes their data beats us. Sometimes we beat them. But we found sometimes there's a work for a while, and then all of a sudden, it stops working. And then our data works better, and then we'll say, okay.
Let's let's go pull and these this area here, let's let's look for this certain kind of a it's not a contract, but the I'm trying to blank for it is. Now you have a contract for a house. There's all there's all different ways to register a house with different contracts Things are sold on different contracts. Right. And there's a house, when somebody dies, it's one way.
If it goes to probate, it's one way. If it goes to is it here, it's another way. There's different contracts.
Steve: Special warranty deeds.
Jeff: Yeah. So we'd say, hey. You know, let's go look for this little thing. Let's add this to the list. Mhmm.
And lo and behold, all of a sudden, the guy found, oh, I just got two awesome deals out of there. I made a $100 on each deal. Mhmm. And all we did was pick a little thing, add a little bit to list. We also got a couple of special lists.
One's called the invisible list. One's called the shipwreck list that have these weird characteristics. Invisible, we call invisible because we don't even really know what's in it. That came from REI Vault that they developed over ten years ago. Mhmm.
And they lost the algorithm for that, but it's plugged into the computer. It still works.
Steve: Okay. So we
Jeff: literally call it the invisible list because the criteria is invisible. Mhmm. But it routinely performs better than a lot of these AI lists.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: But not always. So it's just a matter of testing. Shipwrecked is a list of people that have all kinds of really bad problems. Mhmm. And it's a combination of all those.
And so it's not a big list, but it's when we add to it. So we're not one thing. It's just getting really good at pulling out all these little niches, and we've just gotten really good at that.
Steve: Gotcha. Yep. And then the other thing I I saw you say was beating your competition is the number one goal for investors. That's an interesting statement.
Jeff: Yeah. We run out
Steve: of time?
Jeff: No. So it's a key thing. Alright. In the investing world, everybody thinks they gotta go find the magic or the hidden deal. Now there's part everything I'm talking about is part part of that is finding hidden deals.
But what's really behind that is you're finding houses that the competition is not hitting so much. Mhmm. If you go to basics, back up and say, every investor, like I talked about earlier, people older people are target market, high equity. So high equity, people over the age of 50, they've been in their house over twenty years, they're absentee owners. Those are the obvious characteristics to find houses that are probably a good target for so every single real estate in America, investment in America is going after the same characteristics.
So everybody and their brother is gonna be sending postcards or letters if they're using direct mail to those same people. So if you go to talk to somebody, you might have a stack, you know, two inches high of mailers they've gotten. And so how do you stand out in the stack of two inches high? Well, there is a way to stand out. Part of that comes into the design of the mailer.
So we can help with that with these creative designs. But what if the stack wasn't two inches high? What if the stack was only one inch high
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: Or half inch? Or maybe there's no stack. Maybe yours is the only mailer you get. That's That's why I talk about beating the competition. So two things.
Number one, we try to, through the data, find leads that don't have so much competition because it's kinda hidden. So the competitors don't know it. They don't get it in those obvious things. Mhmm. But number two, it's having better mailers or you as the investor doing a better job of handling lead once you get it.
K? It's answering the phone. Okay? It's following up with them, the sales stuff, the stuff you teach. Right?
How do you turn that lead into an actual deal? Well, you do that with a lot of different ways, but that's all part of competing your competition. Because most of the competition, we know this because they're our customers. Okay? You know, 70 we lose 60 to 70% of customers every single year no matter how good of a job we do.
Okay? Most of those people are newbies. And what happens is there's hundreds of thousands of people all The United States every year that go to weekend seminars, They're put on by the coaches we do business with Mhmm. And say, I'm gonna teach you how to get rich in real estate this weekend. And they go to a seminar and they get excited.
They may or may not buy coaching program. They learn something, and they they learn a little bit. They go out and say, okay. Let's do some direct mail. Let's get some leads.
And they go get the lead and maybe they get 20 calls. Half the people won't even call the people back. Okay. Because they're afraid to call. They haven't been taught how to do that.
Right. They're scared. So or they call them one time and it doesn't go well, and that's the last time they call them. Most of those people do one campaign, they never come back, they're gone. So that's your competition.
So just being I teach multi touch, multi different mailers, touch be unique and be frequent. That's part of that's branding, but part of it is just beating out the competition. If you send a a mailer to somebody over and over again, and you're still around six months from now, and a year from now, and two years from now, when they finally are ready to sell, you got a much better chance of getting a deal than the guy that mails one time and goes away. Yeah. There might be 50 of those guys that mailed one time and go away.
Mhmm. But there most of them are gone. So if you do the right things with follow-up, being a good company, being responsible, being honest, you're gonna beat your competition most of the time. That's really important. You gotta think about that.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff: That's so important. Just being good.
Steve: You gotta be a good business owner.
Jeff: Yes.
Steve: Yeah. Alright. So RA, print, mail. So moving to, wrapping up here, a few questions I wanna ask you. What do you wanna be, remembered for?
Jeff: Well, I like you know, everything I'm talking about is we want people to respect us that we are helping bring value to their business. And for us, bringing value is helping them to get more leads that lead to more profitable deals, but it's more than that. It's helping them to be good businessmen. Now I'm not gonna do business coaching. K.
We're not going that far. We don't sell coaching. Everything we do is when we talk when we talk about coaching, free coaching calls, it's all free. You're never gonna see us trying to sell you a coaching package. We don't do that.
K? And we we limit our expertise to marketing coaching. Mhmm. But that's still a big deal. K?
And we help people, especially over time if they stick with us. We help them get be better marketers because we impart the information we know on them, and they will make better decisions about marketing and do a better job and probably have more success. So I wanna be known as, hey. This is a guy that knows what he's talking about. That's just I say guy, me, but I mean my whole company.
We know what we talk about. We care. We're honest, and we really care about helping people to do a better job and be more successful.
Steve: Yeah.
Jeff: That's really what I'm all about. I mean, it's gotta win. We have to win. It all comes down. It's gotta be win win.
We both can't win. There's no deal. There's no long term relationship. So I'm always looking for that win win deal. And winning means we help people do better.
Is that so?
Steve: Gotcha. What is your superpower?
Jeff: I think it's finding win win deals. I mean, I really think that is. And, all the stuff I'm talking about kind of feeds into that, but and and also seeing seeing deals where other people don't see it. I think that's the two things that I'm looking at. And What do
Steve: you think attributed to that?
Jeff: I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think part of it's being analytical. I'm analytical. I'm open minded but everything, not just business.
I mean, you know, I I'm a conspiracy guy. Right? You know, I'll I'll and it's not that I I'm a guy that promotes conspiracies, but I will listen to anything no matter how crazy it is. Mhmm. And I will seriously consider if I think that's legit or not.
Steve: Mhmm.
Jeff: You know? And I'll actually do the research and say, does this make any sense? It's not making any sense. Is this crazy? Is it not crazy?
And I think having an open mind leads me to a lot of possibilities. I love shows like the Shark Tank Mhmm. And the Prophet. I like that show too. Mhmm.
When you do stuff like that, I'm always reading about marketing and business. I have a lot of friends who are business owners and entrepreneurs. And I think when you're constantly thinking about that, I think it helps you see things with other people. So you just become a better businessman in general.
Steve: So, is curiosity then
Jeff: Yeah. It's probably good. Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. Because I'm the same way. Like, I'll I'll listen in about anything. Yep. Until we find out very quickly this thing doesn't have legs and you're just talking about nothing.
Then then I I can't listen forever. But, like, yeah. Like, it's this has got legs. Let's see this. Let's keep talking about this until we see where this theory breaks.
Yeah. I'm definitely the same way there. Which failure would you say you learned the most from?
Jeff: I fought the IRS for ten years, and it was painful. And I actually ended up that wasn't a failure. I ended up actually winning the case. Mhmm. But what I learned out of that is it worth it.
K? It isn't worth and I I didn't do I I won because I was in the right, but I, you know, from tax it's a long story, but I was walking the gray area line in Texas, and the IRS didn't agree with my gray area. So They
Steve: felt they had
Jeff: a different
Steve: point of view on it.
Jeff: Yes. And in the end, it was very expensive and very painful, and I just thought it's not worth it. It's not worth walking the gray for the potential pain. So I don't do that anymore. You know?
I just I just, but other than that, no. I mean, it's everything in business is a journey, and you you make in business, you lose you lose the money all the time. Mhmm. I mean, every single month, I piss money away on something, marketing especially. I mean, you're always doing marketing things, you know, that may or may not work.
You know? I don't know if it's gonna work or not. We'll try it, see if it works. You measure it. Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you can't figure it out if it works or not. You know? And it's just it's an ongoing risk. And all these companies I bought, I not everyone worked out.
I I had I didn't track it in super detail, but I had a couple of them that end up being a total waste. Mhmm.
Steve: I had
Jeff: a couple that were massive home runs. Most of them were in the middle somewhere. You know? But they'll move in the right direction. I don't regret any of it.
You know? I don't I don't regret any mistake I ever made. Partners, you know, I would say here's having partners. I recommend against partners in general. My when I first went to business, I didn't say this, but my my brother I have two brothers.
The brother works for me now, still works for me. I had another brother that was my original business partner after I started a year into it with our partners. In the beginning, we didn't have any money. It was okay. But what happens in most partnerships is it gets out of whack at some point.
One person's doing more than the other person, and the either the money's not working or something's not working. Mhmm. And it's just not even. And it's rare for a partnership to work long term, so I don't do it anymore. I Yeah.
I I want I'll people make deals, but and I'm not saying you can't have somebody have a piece of your company or something like that, a small piece, but I still have to be the boss. I have to be in control Yeah. Because I just think it's asking for too much. Partnerships are great. When you're both broke, it's great for moral support.
Mhmm. But beyond that, it's not so great. You know?
Steve: You still talk to me?
Jeff: That's probably my biggest brag. My biggest regret is, doing that partnership with my brother, really. You still talk to me? Never done it. I do, but our relationship has never been the same.
It was when we parted, it was not good. Yeah. And we we didn't talk to each other for, like, ten years. We've since sort of mended fences, but it's still It's never
Steve: the same. No. Yeah. It's you know, looking at this, I haven't done this as long as you have, but the the things I've seen is, like, even with the best of intentions, it's impossible for the vision to stay aligned
Jeff: Right. For a
Steve: long period of time. It doesn't matter what's going on.
Jeff: People are different. They change over time. Yeah. And even if it's aligned, you a different part in your life. You know?
You know, I might wanna retire, and the other guy doesn't want to. Now what? And, you know, and he wants half the business, but you don't think it's worth you know, he wants more than it's worth, and then what do you do? You know?
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. Alright. So, I want you to think about some last thoughts I wanna leave all the listeners with.
I'm gonna share one last thing. Guys, if you get value out of this episode, please make sure you subscribe. That way, we can get even more disruptors who are coming down, breaking down the exact moves they made to win, and we can reach more people become millionaires. What are some last thoughts you'd like to do all those centers with?
Jeff: I've talked about so many things. I think well, number one, about my company. You know, I always say everything we've talked about works whether you do business with me or not. So but REI print mail, if you're interested in leads or as a real estate investor, you know, but I said earlier, if you're not using direct mail as part of your comprehensive marketing strategy, you're leaving money on the table. And that's true about the call center too.
If you're answering your own calls and you're not really doing a good job of answering the calls, you're leaving money on the table big time
Steve: there too.
Jeff: So consider that. We can help you do better. I promise you that. So then Yeah. Any of our competition.
When it comes to business in general, I think as an entrepreneur, you I don't know. You it's it's about drive. It's about, you just have to just keep going. You know? You have to keep no matter what is put in front of you, you have to figure out a way to overcome it and keep pushing, keep trying new stuff, you know, and figure out a way to make it work.
You know? Mhmm. Everything you do, you have to think about. Every move you make financially. You have to think about what's if this works, what's the best case?
What if it doesn't work? I never take any risks that gonna risk the farm on one deal. No matter what I do, I always consider if this totally goes bad, what happens? Mhmm. And if it's too bad if that negative is too bad, I don't do it.
K? Never risk the farm on any one thing. And a lot of people do that. They put all their eggs in one basket, and it doesn't work, and they're screwed.
Steve: Yeah. Well, that's that's a sad reality we see over and over again.
Jeff: Yep. So Yeah. I don't know. It's I I have no other thoughts, really. Yeah.
Steve: Well, I appreciate that. Yep. Thank you so much. It's a compliment.
Jeff: I really enjoyed it. Yeah.
Steve: And thank you guys for watching. We'll see you guys next time.
Jeff: Steve train. Jump on the Steve train. Disrupt us.
