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Podcast Transcription
Dave Dubeau [00:00:09] Welcome to Free Flow Friday, powered by the Property Province Real Estate podcast. I’m Dave Dubeau, and I’m very excited to give you an over-the-shoulder learning experience around raising capital, as well as other tips, tricks and strategies to help you on your real estate investing journey. So let’s start. Let’s discover together how do you like to get telemarketers calling you up, trying to sell your stuff over the phone? Hardly anybody likes that. Nobody likes getting those calls, and nobody likes doing those calls. You piss a lot of people off. David Bow, and today we’re going to take a quick little Facebook Live to talk about the demise of dialing for dollars, right? I mean, chances are you’ve probably heard about the whole idea of cold calling people and dialing for dollars and. And pick it up the phone. Make things happen when it comes to raising capital, because that’s what all of them. Salesy type trainers tell us to do if we want to raise capital, you got to pick up the phone and start calling people and talking about your deals. Now we see this in movies all the time we see this in. Things like Glen Ross, I think it was called see this in the wolf of Wall Street. I see this in all kinds of sales type things. But I mean, really, it’s the one thing nobody really wants to do, and that is picking up the phone and dialing for dollars. And why would you why would you want to pick up the phone and try and raise 50, 75 hundred thousand dollars from people cold? I mean, it just it’s just going to lead to so much frustration. I mean, bottom line, even if you’re doing a good job with cold calling and dialing for dollars, you’re still going to be setting yourself up for massive rejection. Just put yourself on the in the other person’s shoes, right? I mean, how do you like to get phone calls? How do you like to get telemarketers calling you up, trying to sell your stuff over the phone? Hardly anybody likes that. Nobody likes getting those calls. Nobody likes doing those calls. You piss a lot of people off it. You just take them off and sets things off on the wrong footing, right from the get-go. And bottom line for most of us who are not that thick skin, for those of us who are not accustomed to rejection, for those of us who haven’t done this kind of stuff before trying to do this, it’s just going to lead to a lot of discouragement and frustration, and you’ll end up fizzling out and quitting on that. What are the big costs that all the big cost of that is that it makes you scared? To get out there and try and raise capital, if you’ve tried doing this, have you tried cold calling dialing for dollars and it didn’t work for you? It’s going to scare you off trying other things and it’s going to encourage you to just kind of sit there, stalled out and stuck and stagnant with your real estate investing business. And that’s definitely not what you want to be doing. All right. So that’s the biggest challenge you see with most, most real estate investors. That’s why over 80 percent of active real estate investors are stuck with just one or two or three properties in their portfolio. And then they stall out is because they don’t know how to go about attracting investors and raising capital. So it kind of reminds me of a couple of stories of myself about the two times I can remember trying cold calling and dialing for dollars, and both times I failed miserably. Right. So it’s usually the first time was way back in the day got probably two thousand and four starting up a new business, an advertising business called doorknob ads. And if you’ve never seen them, they’re kind of like a hotel, do not disturb sign. You know, the things that you hang on the doorknob in your hotel room says do not disturb or clean the room or what have you. It’s kind of like one of those that on steroids. So these things are, oh, probably. I don’t know. I think there are 16 or 18 inches long and had a bunch of different coupons on them. From local businesses advertising their businesses. So the big advantage of this whole idea was, first of all, it’s getting put right on the front door of people’s houses, so that seems pretty appealing. The second thing was that we made these things exclusive, so we could only have one business per category. Advertising at any particular time. Now the reason I got into that business in the first place was that, Hey, what a great way to get my I buy houses message on the front door of every single house in town and get other people to pay for it. That was my original idea with getting into that advertising business and the guy that I bought the license for this from, I wasn’t very helpful when it came to the whole sales thing. In fact, he just told me, Hey Dave, these things sell themselves. Just show them to a business owner, explain that they’re exclusive and they’ll jump right on board. And these things will sell themselves well. No, that’s not how it works. So I remember I got into this whole thing, went out and I was driving around my little I buy houses minivan at the time and I went out. Selling these doorknob ads to local businesses by cold, calling on them, so I wasn’t necessarily picking up the phone and cold calling, I was actually going to their place of business, showing up cold and trying to get them to pay attention me and buy my advertising. Now that was a that was a drag. These damn things definitely did not sell themselves. And I can remember just getting rejected and rejected and rejected. I finally did sell one or two ads, but the whole process was so disheartening. In fact, I can vividly remember after a day, you know, I’ve been doing this for a while and there was kind of at the end of the day and I was going to go into another business and try and sell them my advertising. And I remember sitting in my van just white knuckled on the steering wheel, petrified basically of the idea of going into another damn business. And how because what happened? I would go in and the business owner would initially look excited because they thought, Hey, maybe I’ve got a customer that just came in the door. And that look of excitement would quickly turn to a look of dismay, and they realized there was just another sales guy trying to sell them something. And then they would, you know, quickly the thing would go downhill from there. And typically, I’d get booted out and sent on my way. All right. So that was no fun. Luckily, I found a different way to do things, I’ll talk about that. Now that was the first experience I had with the whole idea of cold call sales, and I sucked miserably at it and just hated it and would rather do anything else but do that. So about five years later, five or six years later, I was well on my way into that time doing rent to own deals. And I had self-financed my first two properties, like most of us do, and I had those deals up and running and I ran out of capital and credit to do more deals. I had the perfect tenant buyer, attentive buyers up and running. These folks were just ideal. They weren’t like they were. It was great. In fact, we got out looking at houses. We were on our third house. We finally settled on. I put an offer on the property. They were all excited that they gave notice where they’re living, where they’re renting, and they were getting all excited about this. And I had two weeks to remove subjects, you know, specifically the financing subject on this property. And I tried everything. I mean, I ran out and I networked up a storm and that failed and I spam people and that failed and I tried my hand again at dialing for dollars. But this time it was for raising capital. And I called and got rejected and called and got rejected and called and got rejected again. It was such a weird, creepy kind of experience. You know, think about it, you’re calling people up, you’re saying, Hey, here I am, I need it. At that time, anything, I needed $85000. I’m trying to pitch them on a deal over the phone and trying to get them to invest eighty five thousand dollars with me. It just went nowhere. I mean, looking back on it, 20 20 hindsight, it’s pretty obvious why it didn’t go anywhere. But that’s what I had heard years have to do. You have to pick up the phone and dial for dollars. Well, in that case, I ended up getting an extension on the on the deal. On the timeframe for closing on. That deal still didn’t work and I ended up losing that deal and that’s when I really decided, you know what? This is just stupid. I never want to be in this situation where I’m desperately chasing after the cash again for another deal. So thankfully, I came up with the whole process and found that there is a better way to do things than to do cold calling. And that’s why I became so passionate about marketing. In fact, I was passionate about marketing in the first place. I don’t know why. I just kind of forgot about it. Other people told me that I should be picking up the phone and dialing for dollars, so that’s what I thought I needed to be doing. All right. So imagine what your life could be like if instead of chasing after people desperately and calling them up and trying to get them to invest with you over the phone, imagine what things would be like if people were reaching out to you. Already interested in your deals, asking you for more information, requesting that you do a presentation with them to show them what your deals are all about. How cool would that be? That is a completely different conversation than you chasing after people and trying to convince them to listen to you about your real estate. Best deals. So going back to that whole first story, when I was doing those doorknob ads back in the day after falling on my face and failing miserably at the whole Konkani thing, I decided one day would be an idiot. Apply what you already know about marketing, and let’s try something different. So I did so what I did. Instead of chasing after people, I switched my old model and I started using marketing to sell my marketing right because I was selling doorknob ads or selling advertising. What I did was I created business builder workshops in the local areas where I was selling the advertising, so I would invite business owners out to come out to an evening presentation. Did marketing around that got? We did pretty well that and then we got 75 to 100 people out per workshop. And then I would do a 45 minute presentation on how to create an effective act. All right. So I did a I entice people out because I was showing them how to build their business, which is what they’re interested in. That’s in their own best interests. I did a presentation about how to create effective advertising and coincidentally I was offering advertising. And then at the end of that presentation, I made them an offer about my doorknob ads. And guess what? Instead of me chasing after people trying to convince them to buy my advertising, I actually got a lineup of people eagerly coming after me with their credit cards in hand to buy my advertising from a completely different thing I was. Now, instead of being perceived as a just another sales guy because I was up on stage, I was talking, I was teaching and I was educating people. I was perceived as an expert, as an authority, and people love doing business and investing with people who they see as experts and authorities. All right. So that was very, very effective. Now I applied the same concept for my real estate investing business after that very painful experience of losing that deal and getting on my face and just feeling like a complete schmuck. I applied that same concept of marketing to attract investors to me, just like I had with all of my other businesses before it took a little bit of trial and error and going back and forth. But I did crack the code on that, and at the time when I was doing rental deals, I raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from investor partners to do those rental deals. And then fast forward, a few years later, when I got into multifamily properties, I raised several million dollars for that. In fact, just three weeks ago now raised three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a couple of small multifamily properties I’m working on following that exact same process. And more importantly, my clients and people that I’ve worked with have raised literally hundreds of millions of dollars again by applying marketing, educational marketing to attracting investors and raising capital. It’s just so much more pleasant than chasing after. Well, hey, there, thanks for tuning into the Property Profits podcast, if you like this episode. That’s great. Please go ahead and subscribe on iTunes. Give us a good review. That’d be awesome. I appreciate that. And if you’re looking to attract investors and raise capital for your deals, then we invite you to get a complimentary copy of my newest book right back there. There it is the money partner formula. You got a PDF version, an investor attraction book dot com again. Investor attraction, book dot com. Take care.