How to Grow Your Real Estate Business Fast and Maximize Profits – Interview with Roland Frasier

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How To Grow Your Real Estate Business Fast and Maximize Profits

So, you want to grow your real estate business, but you’re on a limited budget, and you don’t know where to start. Are there creative ways to extend your reach that don’t cost an arm and a leg? Are there hidden profit centers in your business? What steps can you take to build your brand and increase your revenue now—and make your business more attractive to buyers when you’re ready to sell?

Roland Frasier is the Principal of DigitalMarketer, a firm that provides tools and training programs for individuals, teams and marketing agencies. The company also sponsors the annual Traffic & Conversion Summit, the largest digital marketing conference in North America. Roland also serves as the CEO of War Room Mastermind, a community designed to help founders grow their wealth. A serial entrepreneur known for facilitating exponential growth, Roland has bought, scaled and sold 24 businesses over the years.

Today on the podcast, Roland joins Oliver to offer advice on growing your real estate business. We discuss how to turn cost centers into profit centers and explore how buying a top podcast or Instagram account in your niche can yield a 10X return on investment. Roland also walks us through the process of doing deals with little or none of your own money and describes how to make your business more attractive to a buyer via recurring revenue. Listen in to understand how Roland grew a Facebook following of 1M in just eight months and learn why he is investing in brand-building, relationships—and 3K bottles of wine!
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Here is how the interview breaks down:

[0:27] How Roland got into the business of buying and selling companies

[2:35] How Roland maintains a relaxed demeanor

[4:22] How Roland prepares for a negotiation

[7:22] Roland’s first real estate deal

[11:29] Roland’s insight on choosing action with multiple benefits

[12:52] The hidden profit centers in a real estate business

[18:32] Roland’s approach to growing a business

[21:57] How to do deals with little or none of your own money

[30:35] How to leverage media platforms to scale your growth

[33:04] Roland’s advice on making your company more sell-able

[38:39] How Roland grew his Facebook page to 1M followers in eight months

[47:45] How to vet a digital marketing service

[51:20] Roland’s take on how the block chain may impact real estate

[56:34] Why Roland is unwilling to ‘bet the farm’

[58:55] Roland’s secret to staying calm and avoiding stress

[1:04:02] What Roland is investing in at present

Listen Here:

How to Grow Your Real Estate Business Fast and Maximize Profits [Founders Club Ft. Roland Frasier]

Full Transcript:


Oliver: Welcome the Founders Club. I’m sitting here today with Roland Frasier, the partner of Digital Marketer, and someone that has sold and scaled more than 24 businesses.
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Roland: That is correct.

Oliver: Very impressed.

Roland: Of my own, I’ve sold a whole lot more than that, but that was when I was practicing law.

Oliver: That was when you were practicing law. So, I wanna start there because the theme of this episode is gonna be growth and growing your business, and we have a lot of real estate entrepreneurs out there that are very interested in the things that you’re doing and the different strategies that you’ve used to grow businesses very quickly. And I think there’s a lot of things that they can learn, that they could take, and kind of implement right away. How did you get into the buying and selling of businesses?

Roland: It just happened accidentally. I… My father practiced law years ago, and so entrepreneurs were in my life, all these crazy entrepreneurs doing crazy things, and so, they would be buying and selling businesses. And I saw it and just thought, “That’s really cool,” and then this is… Now we’re into the ’80s, and there was Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham and all of the crazy… That was really the leveraged buy-out which I think he basically invented, was something that was super hot. And they had this thing called the predator’s ball, and there was all these hostile takeovers and friendly take-overs and everything else. And I just saw that it was super interesting, super complicated, which I’m attracted to, and it was the fastest way to grow a huge business.

Roland: And so I read everything that I could read about it. I did my best to get connected with the investment banking world in New York. I ended up getting a securities license, and I hung my shingle with a firm in New York City. And I ended up meeting some top people at Prudential Securities in New York. And actually, that was one of the first leveraged buy-out deals I did for one of the companies that we owned. And it just seemed like it was magic. It was just really nothing wrong with it on any front.

Oliver: And this was the first one that you were a part of?

Roland: That was the first higher-level one that I was a part of. Yeah.

Oliver: And I wanna dig into that a little bit more ’cause one thing that I noticed about you is that you’re very even-keel and very relaxed most of the time, even when you’re doing business deals and you’re going after things that you want. And I think that a lot of people, when they’re in that type of situation, they tend to kinda go on tilt, as they would say in the poker world, right? They lose their cool. So how do you go about… What’s your approach in that sort of a situation to keep that sensibility and that calmness?

Roland: It’s to be intentional about everything you do. I think that we have a tendency to be reactive, that we’re waiting and we trade our reaction off of someone else’s stimulus that they give, so it’s more reacting than responding with the measured, thought-out answer. And so, if you can do that, if you’re mindful of that, then throughout the whole interaction, you’re listening, which is such a valuable skill that so few people have. And you’re listening with, like the Zen thing, a beginner’s mind, you’re listening without any preconceptions as to what your response should be, without any preconceptions as to what they’re going to say or how they’re going to respond. And then you let it come and then you’re considering all of the options cleanly with full information about what they said, and responding to the thing that they asked. Because you want to be responsive to what they’re asking, not to what you think they’re asking, if that makes sense.

Oliver: Totally make sense. And are you doing this in real-time in your head, or are you preparing your answers and your objection handlers and whatever you may be thinking they might be thinking in advance?

Roland: That’s a really great question. So in a negotiation, absolutely, I’m preparing in advance. I have a sheet where I write down the things that I think could happen. It’s like chess moves. It’s like, “Well, if they do this, then I need to do this and this and this, and here are the things that I want, here’s the priority of things I want, here are the throwaway things that I’m okay to to let go. I’d love to have ’em, but I’m okay to let them go.” And then the complete spectrum of those things gives you the outcome that you want.

Oliver: So there’s the must-haves, then there’s the you’d like to have but they’re not deal-killers, and then there’s the what you think they might have, objection-wise?

Roland: Right. And in addition to that, there will be things that I believe will be important to them that will be their must-haves. And so I like to guess what those things are going to be. And if one of their must-haves conflicts with one of mine, then I need to find a way to get them what they wanted without it adversely impacting the thing that’s important to me.

Oliver: Mmm. That’s great.

Roland: And so, if you think about that in advance, then when it comes up, it’s a very natural flow and it’s not awkward and it doesn’t get heated, and you don’t really feel pressure because you’ve got a grasp on what’s going on.

Oliver: And you’re then able to tailor your presentation to their potential expectations or things that they must have and kind of address them in your pitch while you’re pitching them.

Roland: Correct.

Oliver: I love that.

Roland: Yeah.

Oliver: That’s very cool. So I wanna shift gears for a second because I didn’t even talk about the lovely wine that we’re drinking here, and I know that Roland is a big wine buff. So I’m gonna let you explain the bottle that we popped today and talk about what we’re drinking.

Roland: Oh, this is a Napa Cab. It is called Altagracia. It comes from the Araujo family who now have sold to… I think they sold to Constellation. They sold to one of the bigger ones. And now they’ve started a new thing called a Chandon, but the Araujo had the Eisele Vineyard for years and years and years. And so their top of the line is called Eisele Vineyard, and then Altagracia is their second line. But it’s just a lovely little wine that I think has lots of flavor to it and a good mouth feel, and it’s one of the more affordable Napa Cabs…

Oliver: Wonderful.

Roland: In the scheme of things.

Oliver: Well, let’s give it a try.

Roland: Yeah.

Oliver: Cheers!

Roland: Cheers!

Oliver: And thank you again.

Roland: Likewise.

Oliver: Yeah, if you’re lucky enough to share a bottle of wine with Roland, it’s usually a pretty good experience, so thank you. So I wanna take a step back to… You started out in law, right? And then I know that you transitioned into real estate.

Roland: Mm-hmm.

Olver: So tell me about your beginnings in real estate, ’cause most of the people that watch this are in the real estate space, and would love to hear a little bit about that backstory.

Roland: So I actually started in real estate before I did anything else. I was involved… My father did a lot of real estate where he would buy in the path of progress. So he would go out buy untitled land, watch the growth of the city outwards.

Oliver: Oh, my God. I would do an entire episode on that.

Roland: And then he would get it entitled, the values would go up as it reached, and he made quite a bit of money doing that. So I got to see that and participate in that. I thought that was really, really cool. And so, when I had saved enough money to get with a developer and invest a tiny little bit of cash into something, I was able to do that and we developed, I think it was four lots that we developed from an unentitled land to entitled, to sub-divided, to four lots, to built the houses on them, and then sold them. And over that period of time, the return was pretty ridiculous. And I think it was about three times my money. We’ve done lots of developments, lots of buy and sell, lots of fix and flips, commercial, residential, industrial, kinda everything. So, it’s always a part of the portfolio.

Oliver: Very cool. And we’re sitting in your beautiful new place here in Rancho Santa Fe.

Roland: Yeah.

Olivier: So, congratulations on that as well.

Roland: Thank you. And this was one of those crazy opportunities that I say that the once-in-a-lifetime deal comes two or three times a year. And we had been… So our house that we live in now is five houses down. We’re gonna keep that and turn that into a conference center kind of thing, like a mastermind thing.

Oliver: Yup.

Roland: And we came here a few times when this was listed, ’cause when houses in the neighborhood get listed, we’ll say we should take a look at them. So, we came here, and over a period of about 18 months, the price kept going down, the seller finally got a job in Newport and so decided they just had to be out. So, they took the price down to… This house is I think about twice as big as the house that we’re in currently. So, it came down to about the same price. I was like, “Okay, twice the house for the same money.” And then we’re talking back and forth and I said, “You know, it’s just… ” He’s like, “Does that make sense? Do we have a deal?”, and I said, “It’s just… ” I said, “I hate the whole loan process,” and I went to my mortgage broker and she said, “Okay, yeah, just here’s the portal, upload all your stuff,” and I clicked on the link and you know when the scroll bar gets big and then it get smaller and smaller and smaller as there’s more and more stuff that you have to upload? And I looked at her and I was like, “Hi”, I told her I just don’t wanna go through that. And he’s like, “Well, I’ll carry back some of it.”

Oliver: Ooh, nice.

Roland: He said, “I’ll carry back 1.1 million,” and I said “Well, my loan on my current place is three and a half and I don’t really wanna get rid of that. It’s a 30-year fixed at three and a half.” And he’s like, “I’ll do it at three and a half.” I was like, “Okay, well, that’s cool.” And I said, “But still, I’m probably gonna keep the other place, I don’t wanna let it go,” and he said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll do 1.1, 10 years, interest only, three and a half fixed.” And I said, “That’s cool. How about 2.17?” And he said, “I can’t possibly do 2.17. I’ll do 1.6.” And I said, “How about two?” And he said, “Okay.”

Oliver: Wow.

Roland: So, my payment is $5,833 a month. I can Airbnb the house…

Oliver: That’s amazing.

Roland: For about three times that, [chuckle] so that’s pretty cool. Yeah.

Oliver: Good for you.

Roland: So I love deals. Creative financing.

Oliver: Yeah, he does love… You do love deals, you do love deals and creative financing, that’s for sure. Tell me about the development process. You said you connected with developers.

Roland: Mm-hmm.

Oliver: ‘Cause I think that’s a really smart thing for agents and investors to do, is to get with people like that. So what was your approach to them?

Roland: Just think about from an effort standpoint. I always want my effort to yield more than one thing. So, I want my downside risk to be limited by having any deal that I get in have multiple exit points and I want any action that I take to have multiple benefits. And so if you think about the time that it takes to go and get a single listing versus the time that it take… Well, let’s start with the very first part. Leverage-wise, the time that it takes to get a listing on a $50,000 house is the same generally as it takes to get a $3 million house or a larger, right? So, your payoff from your effort, the same amount of effort is dramatically greater with the greater value. So I’m always gonna look for, and think everyone should, as much as possible, look for the greater value. The other side of that is is that if one connection can yield multiple sales, then that’s way better than one connection, that’s one sale and then they moved to or wherever they go, right? Yeah, that’s my thing, is I always wanna find the center of influence where it’s gonna yield multiple opportunities.

Oliver: Yeah, multiple opportunities I think is the name of the game, and that’s something that you’ve actually taught us a lot about, and just looking for hidden profit centers in your business. For real estate professionals, what sort of things should they be looking at in terms of growing their business, and maybe some hidden opportunities? Or maybe we tackle those separately.

Roland: Yeah, you guys have have, at this point, a much longer list than I do, so that’s… I think you guys are the best people to… I’m gonna interview you about that.

Oliver: Alright. Okay, we could talk about that.

Roland: ‘Cause, I mean… So the opportunity for someone who’s in real estate is to look at all of the points that are going to be in every deal. And in every deal, you’ve got an escrow, you’ve got title, you’ve generally got a mortgage, you’ve got a broker, so, there’s four right off the bat, and I know you and Sam can rattle off probably 60 more. And you’ve done an amazing job of going out and building those ancillary businesses so that if something happened, let’s say that you decided that you wanted to give away Big Block Realty services for free. That might not actually be a horrible idea. You’re already 100% commission, but what if you said, “You don’t have to pay us anything,” right?

Oliver: And then you’ve got this ridiculous supply of people who are doing deals who are gonna use all of the services that you’ve got. That’s kind of an interesting model, right? But you don’t do that yet. So, what you do right now is you’ve got a Big Block and they pay a fee to be a part of it. And that’s really cool, but if anything happens to that part of the business, you have all of these other things, and you’ve built them up on the back of Big Block, which is brilliant. So, I like those networked, leveraged opportunities where you’ve got kind of a hub and spokes and the hub is feeding all of these other things., and you’re building other businesses which are exitable from this core.

Roland: Main core.

Roland: Yeah. So I like that a lot.

Oliver: So then if the main core is buying and selling houses, just to put some examples out there, and to your point about finding things that are attached to every transaction. So, one thing that you could do that’s pretty easy would be hiring a photographer, starting a listing photography company. It’s one employee, you get a substantial discount on all your properties, and then you can also sell that to other agents in your office or other people in the… Other developers, things like that.

Roland: And a spin-off of that would be if you see that that’s a benefit, but now let’s go look for centers of influence, well, real estate photographers are centers of influence with brokers. So, let’s say that most real estate photographers don’t know how to work a drone, then I would start a drone specialty thing and I’d say, maybe I might even say, “We’ll provide the drone services for free,” but at worst, I’d say, “We’ll take care of all the drone shots because we have it and we know how to do it, we probably won’t kill anybody with a drone. You might,” that kind of stuff. And then you have made friends with, and customers out of, all of these photographers who have all of the customers that you want, which are the brokers for whom they’re taking pictures, right?

Oliver: So now when you’re looking to grow your team, expand, maybe get off-market deals, now you’ve got another source of relationships to to work with.

Roland: Exactly.

Oliver: I love that.

Roland: You can have value that you’re creating as an agent, but those are hard businesses to sell. If you own a brokerage, it’s not; but if you’re an agent, let’s say, you can still, as an agent, be building these things that can actually be sold, like a photography business or whatever, a staging company, that you’re just using it in your own business or maybe the other agents that you’re working with don’t do that. So, now you’ve got direct access to all the people that are in your brokerage that you can talk to about this service. And why wouldn’t… If they like you, why wouldn’t they use it? Now you’ve created not only an additional income center, but a wealth asset that can be converted to dollars at some point in the future.

Oliver: Another area that I think could be a huge opportunity for the real estate community is bringing on a marketing person onto your team, and then selling their services to other agents. So, as content becomes more valuable and needing to be better and better, a lot of people are bringing media people onto their teams, which has a good amount of cost attached to it, but if you look at it like it’s another business and set it up as a separate entity, now you can sell those on monthly recurring revenue contracts, “Hey, we’ll do your social media,” “Hey, we’ll do your video marketing,” things like that, and then that’s a good recruiting tool for you and your business because now you can say, “Hey, we’ve got all these services, we’ll do ’em for you for free, if you come and join our team, our company.”

Roland: Document prep would be another one that I’ve seen people do quite a bit, and then setters, because a lot of people don’t… A lot of salespeople, which agents would fall into the genre of, don’t have someone in the middle who’s setting the appointments and doing the vetting. So, if you have a team of people who are doing the lead qualification and then setting the appointments for only qualified leads to go out, then you can save people a lot of time. So if you ‘ve hired that person and that person has capacity, that’d be another center that would be a cost review…

Oliver: Cold-callers, all that kind of stuff.

Roland: Exactly.

Oliver: Yeah.

Roland: Yeah.

Oliver: So I love that. So that’s several different things that you could add on to your business in terms of growing and different revenue streams. How are you looking at growing businesses? And one thing that I’ve heard you talk about is the AGILE growth framework, which is assets, goal, inventory, leverage, and execute. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Roland: Yeah, because that’s a pretty long conversation, I’ll just shorten it to the continual process of assessing where you are, setting goals, and then going into acquisition and growth mode, and then executing on those goals, is a great circle to be in. What we found is that the fastest way to grow any business is to look at the growth elements, which are typically media, the ability to get leads; talent, the ability to have people who can handle the leads, who can help with the lead gen, who can help with operations, that kind of stuff; the products and services that you buy; the channels of distribution that you have, whether it be in a manufacturing business it would be raw materials manufacturing. But in any business, there are distribution channels. In the real estate business, distribution channels would be straight at the brokerage. And then IP. And last but not least, competitors. So you have those seven areas that really are going to move the needle for any company, and so there’s seven areas that you can think to acquire in.

Roland: Now, let’s take a look at at one of those areas and say, “How can we skin those down and slice and dice them into smaller, digestible chunks?” Well, media, you could buy a giant media company. We were talking about a podcast that somebody we know is buying that’s one of the top I think five podcasts, and at least in the real estate, right? And that would be a great way to capture a ton of people who would be potential candidates for customer for Big Block or…

Oliver: So buying media sources within your niche or within your space.

Roland: Right. So that could be as big as a giant podcast or a huge blog that has a ton of traffic, or a small thing like a Facebook group or a YouTube account or an Instagram account, right? So, what’s cool about it is that you can scale as big or small as you need to in each of these areas. It doesn’t have to be, “Well, I need $100 million ’cause I’m gonna buy this huge company.” It can be, “Well, I’ll buy that Facebook page, and that Facebook page in this particular local market has 5,000 people that spend a lot of time there.” Well, that’s 5,000 potential customers that you can get. And as you and I know, Facebook groups, you might pay anywhere from $200 to $1,500 for that one deal. One deal is gonna get you 10, 15 times your return on your money.

Oliver: Yeah.

Roland: So, that’s what’s cool, is you can look at all of those seven different categories for acquisition and say, “There’s no faster way to me to get to where you wanna go than to find people who’ve already done it who are not monetizing at a high level, and then simply buy them out.” Now you own all those customers, all those assets, all those leads, all that media.

Oliver: So, that could be anything from media sources, content creators, Instagram accounts.

Roland: Yep.

Oliver: To full-on teams, and…

Roland: An actual company.

Oliver: And actual companies. And I think when a lot of people hear that, they have a mental block or, “I don’t know how to do that,” or they get intimidated by the money. And one of the things that we talk about a lot is putting deals together with little or no money of your own in the game. So why don’t we talk a little bit about how to approach these leverage points in terms of acquisitions, and how would you approach them, and how would you put together a deal with little or no money involved?

Roland: Well, first, let’s talk about points of disbelief, because the challenge that you’re talking about is a belief gap. “I don’t believe that I can do that because I don’t have the money, I don’t have the skills, I don’t have the time, I don’t have the connections,” whatever. So, if we can get the people who are watching to acknowledge that they have a failure point, like they have a point of disbelief, in their ability to go do that, then that’s the first step, and then we say, “Well, how can we get past that?” And I think in real estate, it’s especially easy because… Have you ever bought real estate for no money down?

Oliver: I’ve flipped contracts using none of my own money, but…

Roland: So, to flip a contract, you have to go to someone who owns a piece of real estate, and you have to have them sign a contract which requires you to have no money out of pocket, at least for some period of time.

Oliver: Right.

Roland: Right? So you’ve done this?

Oliver: Yes, yes.

Roland: Okay. Did it blow you away the first time that you did?

Oliver: It absolutely blew me away. It doesn’t seem real, actually.

Roland: It doesn’t seem real. And so, before you did that, you were like… You had to have gone… I’d say how did you feel… And I guess that’s what I would say, is that it’s an incremental formation of your ability to believe that you can do this. So, I would encourage everybody who is watching this, everybody who’s watching this is in real estate in some way, right? To go out and buy a piece of real estate for no money down. Go get someone, sit down with someone and give them a presentation, which will be amazing in helping you with your confidence all around, and you ought to know how to do this, and you should have this experience, but go and do this, and the minute that you’re sitting in front of somebody and they sign the deed to transfer the title to their property to you for no money out of your pocket, something magic happens in your head. Now you know you can do that. It is absolutely the same thing with companies, right?

Oliver: That’s a good point.

Roland: So, you can buy real estate with nothing down. And that’s kind of what happened for me, is I was like, “Well, gosh. I can buy real estate.” I was just blown away the first time it ever happened. I was like, “Wow, you just signed your… Okay.” It was cool. It was, at that time, small single-family homes, $200,000 to $400,000. And I just said, “Well, it seems to me like I could do exactly the same thing with companies.” But it turns out, once you start doing it, companies are way easier. And when I say companies, maybe better… The better word would be “profit center.” So a profit center… And the profit center might not be making money, so maybe it’s a potential profit center.

Oliver: Right.

Roland: But like a Facebook group. So a Facebook group, to me, or an Insta account, or a YouTube account, some account that people have an audience of people with, is a really simple place to start. And when you realize that they’re really not making anything with it and you can structure it in a way where you don’t have to come out of pocket right away, chances are you shouldn’t be paying more than a couple hundred bucks to a couple of thousand bucks for that anyway. But even when you do that, don’t let yourself say, “Well, that’s only 200 bucks or 1,000 bucks,” or whatever; say, “I’ll tell you what. Let’s do this and I’ll give you this much money after 30 days,” because you effectively are getting them to carry, and then that frees up your capital to do the things you wanna do with while giving you access to the asset that’s gonna generate you money. And you guys are in the middle of doing one of these right now, which I think you ought to, without saying what it is, explain, because…

Oliver: Yeah. So, I’m gonna explain our exact scenario, but I’m gonna relate it to a local neighborhood Facebook group. So, like you mentioned, Instagram account, YouTube channels, Facebook groups that have a large audience. And a large audience could be a few thousand people in your local area, for example like San Diego real estate-related groups, Instagram accounts, stuff like that, and there really have… Most of the people that have these accounts, they just did it for fun and they’re not making any money, they’re not monetizing them at all, they don’t even know how to monetize them. So when you approach them, they’re usually not gonna ask for a lot of money. And then when they do ask for a lot of money, you can say, “Okay, great, I’ll agree to,” let’s say, “call it $1,500 to buy a local neighborhood Facebook group,” and you say, “Alright, I’ll give you the 1,500 bucks, but I’m gonna give you zero in cash and I’m just gonna give you the first $1,500 in profit that comes from the group,” and that was the deal that we structured that you’re referring to.


Roland: So now you just need to go and go… You can go out, get three sponsors, get an insurance guy, a mortgage guy, and a solar panel company to give you $500 to be the sponsor of the group, and now, all of a sudden, you’ve got yourself a local, niched, active audience in your space for no money down.

Oliver: Yeah. It’s so cool, right?

Roland: Yeah. It is so cool.

Oliver: And now you’ve got lead flow that you wouldn’t have had before. Think about… So here’s a great way to look at the value of that, too. Let’s just project out from the thing that we’re talking about now. How many contracts should come from that over, say, a 12-month period, would you guess? You’re just kind of taking a wild guess.

Roland: 20?

Oliver: 20. Okay.

Roland: Ultra conservatively.

Oliver: Okay. So let’s cut the 20 by 90% and say it’s two. Okay? How much is a contract worth to you?

Roland: 15k, average, in our market.

Oliver: Okay. So two times 15 would be 30k.

Roland Yeah.

Oliver: And you pay 1500 for it, is that what you were talking about there?

Roland: Yep.

Oliver: So that’s a 20 times a 2000% return…

Roland: Exactly.

Oliver: On your money at the most conservative rate.

Roland: Yeah.

Oliver: But it’s a 20,000% return at what you think is the minimum, right?

Roland: Yep, exactly.

Oliver: So it’s pretty crazy, the returns that these generate.

Roland: And you still get the asset afterwards. You’re still the celebrity of the group.

Oliver: And that’s every year?

Roland: Yeah, exactly.

Oliver: That’s every year.

Roland: Exactly.

Oliver: Yeah, you’re the celebrity of the group and you’re also gonna grow it. So you get branding, and so now think about what is the average cost to acquire a contract if you were to go out and use paid media and the other ways that you generate leads, not content marketing ’cause that costs so much.

Roland: It could be thousands.

Oliver: Yeah. So let’s say that it’s… Let say that it’s…

Roland: Less if you’re buying Zillow leads. [chuckle]

Oliver: Any idea? Let’s use Zillow would be a great example since that’s…

Roland: So I would say…

Oliver: What’s the average Zillow lead cost?

Roland: Well, you buy them by ZIP code, so it just depends on the ZIP code.

Oliver: On the ZIP code. Let’s just say on average.

Roland: But I’d say the average agent that I know that’s having success with it is spending at least five grand a month.

Oliver: Okay, so they’re spending five grand a month, then how many contracts comes from that?

Roland: The sad part is they’re breaking even, or maybe a little better.

Oliver: Right. So $5,000 versus $1,500, breaking even, versus…

Roland: And that’s 5,000 a month. That’s 60k a year.

Oliver: 60,000 a year, right, versus 1,500, and maybe we break even or make a little bit of money versus we get 20,000% return. It’s just crazy. So, that’s why when you get past that point of believing that it’s actually possible, the math, just the math, tells you that’s the best way to go. And what’s cool is it’s not like you’re competing for one of three possible things that you could buy. There’s thousands and thousands and thousands of those accounts in every city that’s of any size, and at least dozens in any city that’s not of any size. So, that’s what’s so cool about it: Everybody can do it.

Roland: Yeah. You could realistically probably buy/acquire one every three or four months. So if you get three or four of those a year, now, all of a sudden, you’re really rolling on your results. Now, you can… Let’s say you bought an Instagram page and a Facebook group and a YouTube channel, now you can all promote them to each other so they all grow faster and it all kind of…

Oliver: And there’s something about the number of touches that it takes. The Direct Marketing Association I think still says it’s nine touches, Google says I believe it’s 24 touches, with someone and your brand before they feel comfortable enough to take an action with you. So the more of those touch points that you’re creating by acquiring all those things, the more you’re increasing the velocity with which people will have the 24 touches or the nine touches, and actually do business with you.

Roland: Yeah. And then in terms of the touches, you don’t even need to really necessarily be… You’re not asking for business; you’re just nurturing the group. For example, if you bought a local foodie group, if you’re a foodie or a local wine group, now you’re in front of these people and you’re just the real estate guy that’s passionate about wine, and now you’re connecting with other wine buffs in the area, and now you’re building your network with the right type of client base with the people that have the same interest as you and that you’re aligned with.

Roland: And I’ll give you a perfect example of how something so simple as an Instagram account can turn into money for you. So, today, so we’re in a house that we just bought and we’re in the process of remodeling, we were talking about that a minute ago. So, on Instagram, I follow a San Diego wine cellar design company called Vintage Wine Sellers, and they’ve just post pictures of the amazing work, that that’s all they do. There’s no pitch, there’s no nothing. So when we bought this house and we have this giant area over here that’s gonna become…

Oliver: Your wine cellar.

Roland: A 2,300-bottle wine cellar, I reached out to them through Instagram, through the messenger, sent them a DM, and said, “Hey, we’re here in San Diego, and we’re thinking that we’d like to do this.” They came out today, they’re gonna get like an $80,000 contract from posting pictures about themselves up on the Gram.

Oliver: And not asking for the sale.

Roland: Couldn’t ask for the sale, ever.

Oliver: And then they got Roland Frasier sliding in their DMs.

[laughter]

Roland: But you never know who’s out there, just like with your podcast. That audience is so cool.

Oliver: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Very cool. So now, I wanna talk about the other side. Let’s say someone’s getting towards the end of their career and they wanna get out, they’re ready to sell. And I know you have a lot of strategies in terms of making your company more sellable, and not only more sellable, but more sellable at a higher dollar amount. So can we talk about your approach to that?

Roland: Sure. So, the easiest thing that you can do, we talked about earlier, is… And if you think about buyers are concerned with reducing the risk of buying your company. They don’t wanna pay you a multiple of years of profit of your company and then you go away and they get one year and it’s gone, or they got a half a year and it’s gone. So, the more that you can reduce their risk, the more that you’re gonna get for the company. So one of the ways that… One of the easiest ways to reduce risk is rather than having to go out and generate sales every single time, to have one sale continue to pay you either annually or monthly, and we call that monthly recurring revenue, MRR, or annual recurring revenue, ARR, and those businesses are typically worth significantly more than businesses that don’t have that component. And depending on the industry, it might be four to six or even higher times revenue, not times profit. And that’s probably the biggest thing that any business that I get involved with or that I’m advising, that’s the biggest thing that we’re trying to do. And a good friend of ours who owns a photography business… You know who I’m talking out about, right?

Oliver: Yep.

Roland: Is in the middle now of… We transitioned his static income, he teaches online photography stuff. So we took his one-time sales of courses, turned it into subscription revenue over the last couple of years, and now he just got… He’s in the middle of negotiating and he’s going to get an offer for a multiple of his revenue, which he would not have gotten had he been… He makes great money, and a multiple of his income would be good. But remember, even if you’re on, let’s say, a 20% net margin or let’s say 50% net margin, and you’re doing $5 million a year, that means that your profits are $2.5 million. If you’re multiple on your profits is, say, five times the 2.5 then you’re at 12.5 million, but if it’s five times the 5 million, it’s 25 million, so you’re literally gonna get paid twice as much for your company as if you had not…

Oliver: By making that adjustment.

Roland: Yeah. So that’s a really simple thing. And so that’s why finding the opportunities to have monthly recurring revenue are so important, I think. Another thing is taking cost centers and turning them into profit centers, and we touched on that a little bit before. Photography might be a cost center for you, drones might be a cost center for you, paperwork might be a cost center, setters might be a cost center, marketing might be a cost center, all of those are potentially profit centers that you can offer to other people, and you can offer it to them on a recurring basis. So, we’ll do all of your houses for X dollars a month, we’ll do all your paperwork processing for X dollars a month, recurring revenue. So that’s a way to build businesses within the business that you’ve got.

Roland: And then the third most easy way I think to add a whole lot of value and increase the value of the company is to do what we call bolt-on on businesses. So to take something that you do that someone else does not do that has already has your customers and provide them that service, and you basically end up owning it together, or you do a strategic relationship so you’re embedded in their company.

Oliver: Tell me what that looks like.

Roland: Yeah. So, I was trying to think of a good real estate example, and I think the example would be if you had a brokerage and you were co-located with a title company or a mortgage company or an escrow company or… And by co-located, they could be literally within your office leasing space, or they could be in a building that you bought and you put ’em right next to you, but you’re gonna give all your business to them, unless you hate them, because it’s just so easy.

Oliver: Proximity.

Roland: In other businesses, it might be… A good example was Sears, who has gone out of business, did a thing with a tax preparation company called H&R Block. And so in this giant department store where there are all these people all the time, they leased space and cut a deal with H&R Block to put a tax preparation service in the department store. It’s absurd, it’s obscene, but that actually worked. Or Motel 6, I think, Days Inn does it as well, will do deals with Domino’s Pizza where those hotels do not have restaurants, but they do have hungry people who are tired who have come in who don’t wanna go out of the room, so they cut deals with Domino’s Pizza to put little Domino’s cards and say, “Want room service? Too bad there isn’t any. Want a pizza? Call this number.” And then because of the relationship between the hotel and Domino’s Pizza, they have effectively embedded a restaurant in a hotel that doesn’t have a restaurant through that strategic relationship, so that would be considered a bolt-on business. So, those are three of about 20 different ways that you can add significant value to your company to make it more sellable.

Roland: I might take a total side step.

Oliver: I love it.

Oliver: So, one thing that you did that I thought was really cool was you found a Facebook hack, and I don’t know if “hack” is even the right word, but you got yourself a million followers on Facebook in how long of a period of time?

Roland: Eight months.

Oliver: In eight months. So how did you do that?

Oliver: Sure. So, this was a challenge. So, for everybody that has a challenge creating content, to me, this is an easy solution, and I’ve told this to a lot of people and they’ve only all come back and said, “Oh, my gosh. This is so easy.” So if you’re having trouble creating content, this…

Oliver: Listen up.

Roland: Yeah, listen up. This strategy really works like crazy. So, it happened when I was at a breakfast with one of my partners and a couple of our clients, and we were just talking like we talk. And a couple of really cool things were said, and I took notes ’cause I like to remember the cool things that are said. So that was nothing different than I do any other time. So any of you that have meetings with anyone, who is in any way interesting, write down the notes and just take a few signposts of the topic that you talked about. If you don’t have anyone who has anything interesting to say, have your connections and your meetings with more interesting people. Get rid of all the people in your life, right now, today… No. [chuckle]

Oliver: That’s good advice, though.

Roland: But that’s… Seriously, I mean, if you don’t, you’re probably hanging out of the wrong people. So, now we’ve got you to you’re doing what you always do, you’re eating and you’re meeting with somebody, at some point, who has something interesting to say, and you take a little note. Well, at the end, just say… And this is what I did, I just took out my iPhone at the end and I said, “Hey, we talked about some really cool stuff. Would you mind if I just shot a couple of videos about the things we talked about?” And everybody was like, “Oh, yeah. That’d be cool.” I’ve only had, out of… I think I’ve shot over a thousand of these now. I’ve only had one person who couldn’t do it. He didn’t say no; he just couldn’t… When I was like, “Okay, so what do you think about that?” and he’d be like…

Oliver: Some people get super awkward. [chuckle]

Roland: I mean, it was the weirdest thing. So I was just like, “That’s okay.”

Oliver: Yeah, “We’re good.”

Roland: “Don’t worry about it. We’re good.” Yeah. But the other 999 people, it was no problem. And I just do a one to four and a half minute, never over five, excuse me, video about what we talked about. And that…

Oliver: And that’s just hitting the high points that you wrote down?

Roland: Yeah. Now, what’s cool about that is so now, rather than the hour-and-a-half-long lunch that you had where you talked about a bunch of stupid stuff that nobody cares about, you have… That you care about, the two of you care about, but the world does not. Rather than that, where somebody would have to watch all that stuff to pick out the…

Oliver: Couple of nuggets.

Roland: The golden nuggets, you have boiled them all down for them, extracted them, and delivered it in a short period of time. So I’d take those videos and then I posted them to Facebook. I realized pretty quickly that Facebook is all about pay-to-play, pay for reach, so, I was posting them on my personal Facebook and I would get… And I have almost… I think I had 2,000 or 3,000 followers, and maybe I would get 20 likes to 120 likes. And I was like, “This is cool,” and people were responding and putting comments, so I knew that it was good, but I also knew I didn’t have enough reach, and you can’t pay to get more reach on your personal account as we record this. You used to be able to; now you can’t. So I realized, “Okay. Well, I need to put this on my Facebook page.” So I had done a page and begged 100 people to like it so I could name it my name before maybe six years ago, and then never looked at it, so I had literally 100 followers. And I was like, “Okay, so I’m gonna post these videos there and then I’m gonna go through the stupidest, most inefficient, and expensive way of getting reach,” which is to boost the post. A Facebook agency would say, “You should do the Power Editor and this and this and this.”

Oliver: “You’re crazy.”

Roland: I’m like, “Yeah. Ain’t gonna do it,” ’cause I’ve seen me not do it, so I know that’s not gonna happen. So, always think about where is the breakage point in your plan. My breakage point would be if I had to edit the videos. I don’t have to edit ’em because I’m just doing the little, quick things. Most people can’t… I don’t think any of them except that one guy ever screwed anything up. I was interviewing John Assaraf, and the waiter, while we were recording video, came by and knocked his tea over and spilled his ice tea in his lap, and the whole time he went… We were just kind of laughing, and he was like, “He just spilled the tea on my…,” “Yeah, he just spilled the tea.” So that’s on the video, but that makes it real and it makes it interesting and people like it.

Oliver: So, we would record… I would record those things, and then put them up and I would boost them for $10 a day for five days. So for every video I recorded, I spent about 50 bucks, and I would get 1,000 views, 800 views, 7,000 views… I mean likes, a lot more views, but likes. And it just kept ballooning and I created… I think I ended up creating like 12 or 16 audiences. And over time, I went from a few thousand likes a week to a few thousand likes a day, and it just snowballed and snowballed and I was pretty quickly at about 12,000 likes a week. And then I noticed there’s this little button at the top that says “Promote your page”, and I was like, “I’m not promoting my page. I’m just getting people who liked the video, who then decide they wanna go and click Like the page.” That’s a two-step. That’s like a big no-no in marketing. Don’t ask ’em to do any more. I want you to watch the video, click like, and then hopefully you’ll find the little button somewhere…

Roland And they go to the other thing and then click the other button.

Oliver: That I’m not even asking for, right. So I click the button and I’m like, “Okay, I’m gonna spend $10 a day,” so that’s 300 bucks a month, I think, is that right? Yeah. 300 bucks a month, $10 a day to promote Click the Like button, doubled from 12,000 likes a week to about 25,000 likes a week. And then it was just a question of time, and so it took about eight months and then I had… I think I had a million and 100,000 followers.

Roland: And I think the key, which I think you mentioned before, was that your targeting was worldwide as opposed to localized.

Roland: Yes. Yeah. I targeted English speakers in all of the countries that I had an interest in developing a brand in. So, that was United States, Australia, UK, Canada, and then other countries that I knew had people who I wanted as my audience, like the Philippines has a lot of people who are willing to pay money. And I actually, later when I started monetizing through events, had people who would get visas and come over from the Philippines to come to our events.

Oliver: Wow.

Roland: And that was… So I was all about branding myself in all the places that I wanted to have a connection.

Oliver: Cool. So there it is, a million people in eight months. How much did you spend, roughly?

Roland: 40 grand.

Oliver: 40 grand?

Roland: Yeah.

Oliver: So if you don’t have 40 grand to spend, spend 400 bucks and get yourself 10,000 fans. [chuckle]

Roland: Well, think about this: From a credibility standpoint, if you have someone who’s looking online and they find someone who’s a real estate agent or broker, and they’re looking at two or three of them, and one of ’em has a page that has 16 likes and one of ’em has a page that has 150 likes, and one of ’em has a page that has 12,000 likes, which is nothing, to get 12,000 lines is nothing, who are you going to think…

Oliver: Exactly.

Roland: Right? You just can’t help yourself.

Oliver: And people are looking.

Roland: They are looking.

Oliver: We know they’re looking. They’re looking you up before they meet with you, they’re looking you up before listening presentation, they’re looking up probably even while you’re on the phone talking to them. So to have those social proof…

Roland: So those pages rank, by the way.

Oliver: Yeah.

Roland: So those pages rank, plus if they’re on Facebook looking at all and which more people are, it’s just another credibility point.

Oliver: Love it. Great strategy, highly recommend everybody trying that. And…

Roland: By the way, if you are running your Facebook ads from a page like that, your customer acquisition cost, your ad spend, will be typically 60% to 80% less than if you have a personal account and you don’t have a page, so that’s…

Oliver: So let me see if I heard that right. You’re saying because you have a page with a large audience, you’re now able to run ads for a lot less money.

Roland: Absolutely. A lot less money.

Oliver: So even though you spent money upfront, you could easily make that money back in a few months.

Roland: Yeah. Even if you don’t do anything else.

Oliver: Just off the ad spend savings?

Roland: Correct.

Oliver: Love it, even better. Alright, I wanna jump over to some Facebook questions, ’cause I announced that we were doing this interview and had a lot of people that were very interested in asking some questions.

Roland: Alright.

Oliver: So we’ll start with one from Sal, shout out to Sal from War Room, who you know.

Roland: First we have to do this ’cause this is tragic.

Oliver: Yes, thank you very much. We’re refilling the wine, which is very much appreciated. Thank you. So back to shout out to Sal, who we both know from War Room.

Roland: Hey, Sal.

Oliver: He’s asking if someone… And I think, actually, I hear this question a lot, too, with people on our team, is, if someone’s pitching you marketing services, what questions would you ask them to make sure that they know what they’re doing? So basically, how are you filtering the wannabes that just graduated, like a Tai Lopez seminar on social media agencies, versus people that are the real deal and can bring results?

Roland: So the first thing I would do, which doesn’t require you to ask them anything, is I would look at their social media and see how many followers and subscribers they have. Do they have social media presence as a business, not as a person? Do they have… ‘Cause if they’re in the business of doing this, they should be doing this for their business. So, if their business doesn’t have a Facebook page, an Insta account, a YouTube channel, et cetera, and those channels and accounts have some number of followers…

Oliver: Content, followers, engagement.

Roland: Then I’m gonna say I’m a little skeptical. And actually, that’s a filter that we use for every new hire in our marketing department, so not just for agencies, but for employees for us. We look at all that stuff.

Oliver: Oh, I like that. Tell me more about that.

Roland: If you haven’t done that for yourself, then how can we hire you to do it for us?

Oliver: So people that you’re hiring in marketing positions, you’re looking up their social media presence and seeing what they’re already up to.

Roland: Yes. So that’s the first thing. The second thing would be, do they have any certifications from our company, Digital Marketer, which does certifications, or another company that does that? Although there is none as good as Digital Marketer.

Oliver: Definitely none as good as Digital Marketer.

Roland: But that is indicative of their desire to learn more about their craft and hone it and get better, so I’d be interested in that. And then I’m going to look at their… Typically, if it’s an agency, they’ve got a resource or a case study page, I’m gonna look at their case studies and see what they’ve done for other people and then I’m actually gonna reach out to two or three of those and say…

Oliver: “How did it go?”

Roland: Yeah. And what’s interesting about that level of due diligence is that occasionally, you will find, “Nah, they really didn’t do much for us. We actually brought somebody else.” And I was like, “Wow, okay.”

Oliver: Good to know.

Roland: So it’s good to do that follow-up as well. So I think those three levels of due diligence are pretty important.

Oliver: I love that. That’s a great triple filter. ‘Cause if they check all the boxes on that, then they’re at least at a point where you can test them out, you can move forward.

Roland: And then we don’t sign long-term contracts. They wanna get you, “Well, we need a six-month commitment,” but then I’ll say, “Well, here’s the deal. You need to believe me when I tell you that I don’t want to find someone other than you because I’ll fulfill that I have wasted my time with you and failed if I go find somebody else. But if you suck, and I don’t know that you won’t, then I’m not gonna be stuck in a five- or six-month contract with you, I’m gonna let you go. So if you’re not cool with that and you don’t believe enough in yourself to have the confidence that we’re gonna continue to work together for some period of time because you’re doing good things for me, then this isn’t a fit.”

Oliver: And that’s a great answer. So the other one is from Long Don, who’s in Closing Table, I know you know.

Roland: Long, yeah I know Long.

Oliver: How do you think that blockchain will impact real estate?

Roland: It’s really interesting because we have a blockchain company that we’ve talked about before, and we actually had some of the folks come in called Cribs, which is designed to facilitate and expedite the real estate transaction. And ultimately, the vision of our folks that are involved with that is that through blockchain and messenger services, and blockchain is just a fancy way of saying a way to validate transition.

Oliver: Ultra-secure validating.

Roland: Ultra-secure, but it’s validating through multiple distributed computer networks any transaction through an extended transaction record. So, for title, I think title companies and banks and other faceless, person-less, customer service-less companies like that will have some significant challenges and they’re gonna go away. I don’t think that the average real estate seller, especially who’s selling their home, maybe in commercial, this will be a challenge ’cause I think commercial, much more sophisticated buyers and sellers, but I don’t think that those people are going to, for a long period of time, want to trust the transaction with the biggest asset that they’ll ever own in their lives to the super. I think that will be a challenge. I think that the process of showing a home, marketing a home, et cetera, I think that there are skills that real estate sales people and brokers have that the average person does not. I think you will lose sophisticated customers.

Roland: You might see that the top of the market where people are paying on three and five and $20 million houses these giant commissions are like, “Eh, I don’t think so.” I think that the move to the purple bricks and other models and Big Block models of… Well, actually, Big Block isn’t currently that. Big Block is a real estate agent-friendly model, but I think commissions are gonna change to flat fees. I think I’d be really surprised if I do. And all of that will be a result of the simplification of the process of selling a property, particularly mortgage, banking, escrow, title, through blockchain and the ability to verify those transactions without third parties so plugged in at such cost.

Oliver: Quickly.

Roland: Yeah, instantly. That that will be a big chain.

Oliver: There’s gonna be a lot of technological advancements with the blockchain stuff. And like escrow and title and those things you mentioned are definitely things that could probably be just put on a blockchain-type system and…

Roland: But think about this. I think that the successful real estate agent is going to be more of a technologically-aware transaction facilitator than a shake-and-howdy salesperson. I think that’s gonna… The people who are selling using these technologies aren’t going to be masterful in these technologies. And unless somebody… Unless Amazon, Bezos might do it right, can take all of those disparate functions and consolidate them into one easy button, the summer house is sold. Which if you think about it is what… Is it OfferPad and Zillow, and these guys are doing now, is they’re like, “Yeah, we’ll just buy your house.” But they’ve got to sell it. So at some point, you still have to have the person who can take the end customer and help them take all of these complex technologies and disparate services and consolidate them in one place and be your quarterback.

Oliver: Yeah.

Roland: So if the real estate salesperson, agent, broker, turns into a technological quarterback with facilitating multiple blockchain transactions, I think that’s likely to happen, but I don’t see him going out of the picture.

Oliver: Yeah. I think “quarterback” is probably the operative word for me because I think there’s so much emotion wrapped up in buying and selling houses, both on the buy side, the sell side and the agent side, that there’s just the people element, the human element, I don’t think will ever be completely removed just because it’s too emotional, it’s too big of a thing, but I think that changes are coming, and I think we all just need to adapt and embrace them.

Roland: We have to embrace them because those changes are the opportunity to displace the incumbents. All the big real estate brokers and all the agents that are dominating an area, you have an opportunity to unseat them if you embrace this technology.

Oliver: So there you go, embrace it, learn to love it ’cause it’s coming, and it’s not stopping, and we’ll just have to see how it all plays out.

Roland: It is coming. [chuckle] Absolutely.

Oliver: Let’s see. So, this one’s from John Purdy, so shout out to John Purdy.

Roland: John.

Oliver: You also know John, he’s at Closing Table. How many times have you gone all in over the years, and how much of your success has come from those type of calculated risks?

Roland: So assuming… I feel that I’m all in on anything that I do, meaning it has my attention and I wouldn’t be doing it if I don’t, I think what he means his bet the farm, and the answer is I had the benefit of watching my father accumulate a great deal of wealth. He built about a $50 million net worth betting the farm. He bet the farm, he bet the farm, he bet the farm. But if you go to Vegas and you bet on black, that’s a little bit less than a 50/50 chance of winning at the roulette wheel, and you bet on black and you win, and you bet on black and you win, and you bet on black and you win, eventually…

Oliver: It’s gonna hit red.

Roland: One time, only one time, and you’re done. And that happened to him. He lost everything. Everything.

Oliver: Wow.

Roland: So, I have the benefit of having seen that happen, and so I don’t ever bet the farm. I think that you have to be… I will pass on the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that requires me to bet the farm because I know that a few months later, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that won’t require me to bet the farm will surely come along.

Oliver: Will show up again, yeah.

Roland: Here’s the thing, is if you’re creative, you should never have to bet the farm.

Oliver: That’s a great point.

Roland: So, if the deal that you’ve got requires you to bet the farm, figure out how to take the amount that’s required to do that deal down to not the farm, or less than the farm.

Oliver: Defer it, partner.

Roland: Defer it, partner. Yeah, exactly. There’s so many ways to not have to do that that, to me, it never makes sense to do it. Never.

Oliver: That’s a great tie-in to what we talked about earlier in terms of doing deals with no money in. There’s ways to get creative to not have to bet the farm…

Roland: Which is why we have eight really solid ways to not bet the farm… I mean, to get for no money down that we use on a regular basis, plus God knows how many permutations of that.

Oliver: Yeah. Very cool. Let’s see what we got here. So Cory Boatright asked, how do you stay so cool, calm, and collected while managing so many ventures? And I gotta say, after knowing you for a while, you are always happy, you never seem stressed out, you’re always in a good mood, you always just come gliding into the room like you’re floating on air, not worried about anything. So, how do you do that while having such a big plate full of things?

Roland: I think that this is… So I’m a bit on the woo-woo side, so, for the hardcore business people out there, this is actually true: Don’t be such a hardcore business person. Or consider not being such a hardcore business person. But my happiness does not come externally; it comes internally about how I feel about how I’m showing up in the relationships in my life. So if I’m showing up for my wife and my kids and my business partners, my business family, if you will, and my extended family, then I’m good with that. And what I know from my life experiences that I’ve had very, very, very low lows, very, very low, and I have had very high highs, and I know that none of them last. I’ve actually experienced about as low as you can go, “I wanna kill myself,” to about as high as you can be, “Oh, my God, this is amazing!”

Roland: And so taking all of those things that I’ve seen and done and been through, I know that the things that matter are the relationships. I know if I have my relationships, I can recreate any amount of money. So, I’ve had money, I’ve not had money, having money is better, right? Absolutely. But the one thing that when you realize that you can create money and that money solves lots of problems but money is not what is going to ultimately make you happy, then it doesn’t really matter. And you also know that, and I was telling my wife this I think this morning, it was either the last night or this morning, I said, “Being an entrepreneur is freaking hard. It’s just hard.”

Oliver: Yeah.

Roland: And so, if you expect that things are gonna be going well in that world all the time, you’re up for a lot of unhappiness, because they’re not.

Oliver: ‘Cause you’re gonna get hammered.

Roland: You’re gonna get hammered. You’re gonna have major setbacks. You’re gonna have people that sue you that shouldn’t. You’re gonna have deals that fall through that shouldn’t. You’re gonna put lots of time into something that’s not gonna pan out. You’re gonna have employees that say that… It’s like on and on and on, you’re never gonna have enough money to do the business because if you’re always trying to expand the business, you never have enough money or customers or talented people that are working for your company. So if you can just accept all that, which that’s kinda where I am, and it’s not that… I’m very driven and I’m never complacent or even content with where things are because I always see somebody thinking bigger than me, and it pisses me off every single time. Just as I think I’m doing amazing, somebody’s like, “Oh, well, yeah, okay, I could have done that.” Yeah, so just do that.

Roland: But so I’m pushing myself, but I’m not pushing myself with an unhappiness and a displeasure or a contempt at, “Why didn’t I think of that?” I’m like, “Argh, think bigger, think bigger, think bigger,” and all the other stuff just doesn’t freaking matter. It doesn’t matter. It will all… Tomorrow is going to come and whatever bad news you just received should not affect the fact that you were happy only a moment before. We’re such interesting creatures as humans that we can be absolutely happy and you get a phone call, and you’re freaking miserable.

Oliver: Yeah.

Roland: That’s messed up!

Oliver: Yeah.

Roland: So, what if you take charge of your emotions and you become responsible enough to say, “That thing that just happened, I can’t do anything about it right now. I can choose to be happy or unhappy, I’m gonna choose happy.” I can choose to be, “Oh, my God, I’m overwhelmed!” That’s one of my least favorite words. To me, it’s like stress is a weakness. “I’m not stressing. I can do anything.” But that attitude helps me to deal with all the crap that comes down the road by saying, “I’m not going to let this get to me. I’m not going to let this stress me out,” that’s how I think of it, “and I’m gonna really work to not let it affect my attitude and how I show up for the people I care about in my life because that’s not fair to them.” I’m not always able to do that, I really try hard and I think I do it a lot. But not always, and so… That’s it. I don’t know if that’s a helpful answer or not.

Oliver: Yeah. No, I think it actually really was a helpful answer. I think my big takeaway from that is that you have a choice, and a lot of people stress about things that aren’t in their control, especially if they get the phone call. And first thing you gotta ask yourself is, “Okay, do I have any control over this? Yes or no?” If yes, then it then do something about it.

Roland: Then do it, exactly.

Oliver: Immediately, and don’t stress about it.

Roland: Shut up about the whining and get to the doing.

Oliver: Or no, and then it is what it is, and you don’t really need to worry about it anyways. So I think just making that choice to not worry about those things is a critical mental shift.

Roland: It is.

Oliver: What are you investing in?

Roland: I am investing in real estate and companies and relationships and personal brand building. So, I’ll do those, hopefully in reverse order. The personal brand building, I have, for a long time, was a behind-the-scenes person doing lots of deals with lots of folks, and I realized that, especially with being Internet-famous or the ability to be Internet-famous, that it really behooves you to get your personal brand out there and have people know who you are. Not because, “Look at me,” but because if you want deal flow, and I know I approach everything that… I approached life in business, that everything I’m doing right now is gonna be completely obsolete and not work three years from now. So I need to, for my personal satisfaction… ‘Cause I’ve seen it happen right, and I’ve got businesses that have been around for 20-some years, but maybe they’ll be here next year, maybe they won’t, I just don’t know. ‘Cause you could have been the plastic straw company and…

Oliver: All of a sudden, we don’t allow plastic straws anymore.

Roland: The world hates plastic straws, it’s all paper straws, and now the thing that you invest… That’s how fragile your income and finances are. Personal branding helps create deal flow so that I can continue to find new things to get involved with just in case all that stuff happens. How’s that for a weird philosophy? Companies, because I have been on the inside of lots of public and private offerings, and I have found that the market is amazingly irrational. And so, I don’t want or feel comfortable with my wealth being tied up in something I have no control over that is also irrational. That seems foolish. Now, those of you who are investing in stocks and winning, that’s awesome.

Oliver: Kudos to you.

Roland: Kudos to you, and I am wrong in that philosophy with people who invest in a diversified exchange, an ETF or a SNP index fund or something like that, but for me, I can make way more money than I could ever make in the stock market by buying and selling companies, doing the stuff that we’ve been talking about, real estate because, hey, it’s real estate. It’s just a great investment.

Oliver: And we love it.

Roland: It’s… Ultimately, if you can live in your worst mistake, that’s a good thing. So I like that. And those are the primary things. And then relationships, which ties to the personal branding, because I truly believe that your net worth is related to your network and the relationships that you’ve got. And that’s not, “Let’s go out and just collect as many business cards as I can.” It’s like our relationship. We’re in the process of doing a deal because I helped you and you helped me, and we did that without thinking we might ever do a deal. And every relationship that I have came about as a result of that. So, that’s the go out there and do good for other people. Don’t not do good for people that can’t help you out, but be smart with your time ’cause you only have so much of it.

Oliver: So be… Anybody that reaches out to me, I respond to personally on social media, but I’ll have people that’ll say, “I would like for you to review this deck for me,” and I’ll say, “I just don’t have the time.” And I reserve that for people who are in our War Room mastermind or our business partner, whatever, and they’re okay with that, generally. I haven’t ever had anybody say, “You’re a jerk because you wouldn’t review my thing,” ’cause I’ve already responded. So, choosing carefully the people that you’re going to help and then helping without an expectation of anything in return I think is that investment in relationship. So, relationships, personal branding, real estate companies, all day long.

Roland: I love that you said relationships ’cause I asked this question to everybody, and you’re the first one that said that. And I think that above all else, I think your relationships are really… They are the difference-maker. They are the difference-maker between opportunities, between being able to do deals or not, being able to find deals or not, being able to get connections, different things like that. So I think I love the relationship capital and I think that’s a big thing to be investing in. Tell me about wine. What’s your favorite wine?

Oliver: Wine is good.

Roland: We like wine.

Oliver: We like wine.

Roland: We do like wine.

Roland: Wine be good. What would you like for me to tell you?

Oliver: What’s your favorite wine?

Roland: Oh, man. I don’t have a favorite. My wife and I have assembled a way too large collection of wine. We now have multiple… I think we have… I think we have like nine lockers of storage off-site from our house in addition to five 350-bottle of refrigerated storages in our garage, plus another I don’t know how many inside the house. So, we have decided that we are at the point where we should only buy the wine that we really, really, really like, and so we’re drinking now the special occasion wine every time we drink wine because otherwise we’re gonna die and our kids are gonna have a lot of really nice wine, and we would not want that to happen. So, if I was gonna say, my top, top wines would be Colgin, which is on Pritchard Hill in Napa Valley, and we lean towards Napa Cab and Cab-related…

Oliver: That was my next question.

Roland: Boudreaux blend. Yeah, yeah, so, I think in Napa, it would be Futo, it would be a Abreu, it would be Colgin, and Harlan BOND, gonna forget a whole bunch of ’em. Those are 100-acre scarecrow. Lokoya, my wife is helping with Lokoya. Lokoya, Mount Veeder and Mount Howell.

Oliver: Love it.

Roland: And there’s a lot of others like those. But if I could just pick a few, it’d be those, then I would go down to this is kind of the second tier that are still just amazing, like Checkerboard and Dana, and those kinds, but there’s a ton. Ilsley Vineyard is insane, that’s probably up in the top for me.

Oliver: I haven’t heard of most of those, so I’m definitely gonna make a note of all of those and start building my own collection, but I would highly recommend you trying all of those ’cause they’re probably fantastic.

Roland: Those are all great, yeah, and they’re hard to get, unfortunately. But I’ll tell you a hack to get on any… Almost any. There’s only a few. Getting on… The wine is sold by allocation at that level, those are considered colt cabs, so, there are only a certain number of cases and they always sell out, and they’re really, really hard to get, and you have to wait years to get on the list.

Oliver: So that means it doesn’t even hit the market.

Roland: Well, it doesn’t hit the market at all. It will be in restaurants because they want to brand, but at way high prices. But the hack that’s really cool is if you want to get access to some of these wines, like Checkerboard was a hard one for us to get on the list. We kept getting their second wine which was like, “No, we want the good stuff. We don’t want the second wine,” is if you go to the place, and this applies to Australia, France, where you want, wherever you like your wines, but if you go up there and you stay in like a five-star hotel that has an amazing concierge, the concierge, you have to tell them in advance, “See if you can get me into that winery.” Those are called PIE experiences, because PIE purchase is expected, meaning when you go there, don’t be a cheap person…

Oliver: Bring your checkbook.

Roland: And buy a case of wine. And those are bottles that are gonna be $250 to $1,000 at the winery, but you can’t get ’em. When you go to the winery and you make that purchase, you’re on the list. You bump up in front of everybody who was waiting years and years and years. And so we found that. And then we go to Napa fairly regularly now. And what’s awesome is the wine culture is a glass of wine in one hand and a bocce ball in the other, and life is good. And all of the people, you end up… At that level of winery, you end up sitting down with the winemaker or the owner, and they’re always full of interesting stories, so it’s just great stories…

Oliver: That’s great.

Roland: Great wine, bocce ball.

Oliver: Having some fun.

Roland: Yeah.

Oliver: So the hack was, just so I understand this, stay in a nice hotel in Napa, contact the concierge.

Oliver:In advance.

Roland: In advance. Tell ’em you want… Do you have to reference the PIE experience.

Oliver: No.

Roland: Or you don’t just assume.

Oliver: They will tell you that usually. They’ll say, “Oh, now you know this is PIE, right?”

Oliver: Okay.

Roland: And you’re like, “Yeah, I know. I know what PIE means ’cause I’m cool.”

Oliver: Of course, PIE, come on. Okay. So then you go there and you’re basically in after you buy a case.

Roland: Yes.

Oliver: That’s a good tip.

Roland: And you might have to wait. Like at Colgin, we had to wait about a year ’cause they just didn’t have any wine. They had already sold it all, but we bumped up to the top of the list.

Roland: And now you’re a VIP.

Oliver: Now we are at least allowed to spend a lot of money on their wine.

Roland: So are you looking at that as like an investment, or is that it surely drinking pleasure?

Roland: Absolutely. Yeah, and I probably should have said that. We really do have an investment in wine, because when you’re at that level, that wine that… ‘Cause nobody can get it, so supply and demand, so like Harlan, we’ll buy a bottle of Harlan for $700 and two years later, we can sell it for $1,500. Four years later, we can sell it for 2,000.

Oliver: Okay. So this is something that I’m very curious about because… Do you actually sell them?

Roland: We actually have sold probably… We’ve probably sold about 500 bottles.

Oliver: Oh, wow. So you actually do sell them?

Roland: Yeah.

Oliver: ‘Cause what I’ve found is when I buy art, I’ll be like, “Alright. I’m gonna buy this. Two years, I’m gonna flip it ’cause I’ll get it on the release. I know it’s gonna double, whatever,” but I never sell it. It’s just like what you have is…

Roland: Well, but that’s okay because it is increasing in value. So it’s like you don’t have to sell it, but you could, so it’s still an investment if it’s increased in value, whether you ultimately do sell it or not. And the wine, for us, I will, in fairness to the story, we would not have sold those 500 bottles if we had not continually upgraded our wine-loving experience.

Oliver: The whole staff.

Roland: I can’t imagine that we can go any higher than we are now, but I’m sure that there’s… I’m thinking too small, I absolutely guarantee it, I know…

Oliver: How many bottles do you have now?

Roland: We’re in the 2,500 to 3,000 range.

Oliver: 3,000 bottles. And so you’re building a new wine cellar to…

Roland: Right over there.

Oliver: For your personal collection of 3000 bottles.

Roland: Yes.

Oliver: Very cool.

Roland: Yes.

Oliver: I love that. Looking forward to doing that one day, and I’m looking forward to bringing you over to my house and telling my wife about how great of an investment the art thing is and to not worry about selling it.

Roland: Well, my wife is standing right here. We are heavily invested in art now, and we went on Saatchi and just arted out the whole house as our Christmas present to each other.

Oliver: Awesome.

Roland: So in the garage, there’s all these crates of art that we bought from seeing it and studying. And she does this amazing research of, “These are the up-and-comers and these are what artists are exhibiting here,” and so she knows all the cool things. And then we go in and say, “Okay. Now we’ve limited it to the people who have the likelihood of increasing in value, what do we actually like?” And we bought it, and now we’ve got a bunch of it sitting in the garage and we haven’t seen it yet, so I’m super eager to get to get to crack that open.

Olivedre: Very cool. Unpack those.

Roland: Yes. So we should have an unpacking party complete with wine.

Oliver: I love it. I wanna wrap up by just thanking Roland.

Roland: Thank you for having me. Thank you guys for watching.

Oliver: Yeah, also talking about Traffic & Conversion Summit because that is your guys’ big event every year. I can personally say it’s been a game-changer for us. We’ve implemented a lot of the strategies that you guys have taught at that event over the last, I don’t know, seven years or so.

Roland: Given the fact that your growth, I think the last ink that I looked at, you guys were growing in about 8,800% a year. Something seems to be working.

Oliver: Yeah. So thank you. We’ve implemented a lot of the strategies that you guys have taught at those events.

Roland: Fantastic.

Oliver: And also, definitely check out Roland’s podcast, Business Lunch. That’s a great way to get more of Roland and all of the genius that he talks about on a regular basis, and he’s gonna give away a lot of golden nuggets that you can implement in your business right away. So, very thankful to have you on.

Roland: Thanks for having me.

Oliver: Really appreciate it. Great conversation, great wine, and look forward to it. We’ll do it again soon.

Roland: Absolutely. Thanks.

Oliver: Now you’re in the know.

Pullout Quotes:

“Be intentional about everything you do.”

“I always want to find the center of influence where it’s going to yield multiple opportunities.”

“There’s no faster way, to me, to get to where you want to go than to find people who’ve already done it, who are not monetizing at a high level, and then simply buy them out.”

“The minute that you’re sitting in front of somebody, and they sign the deed to transfer the title to their property to you for no money out of your pocket, something magic happens in your head. Now you know you can do that.”

“The more of those touch points you’re creating by acquiring all those [social media platforms], the more you’re increasing the velocity with which people will have the 24 touches … and actually do business with you.”

“Buyers are concerned with reducing the risk of buying your company.”

“I was all about branding myself in all the places I wanted to have a connection.”

“You still have to have the person who can take the end customer and help them take all of these complex technologies and disparate services and consolidate them in one place and be your quarterback. So, if the real estate salesperson, agent, [or] broker turns into a technological quarterback facilitating multiple blockchain transactions, I think that’s likely to happen. But I don’t see them going out of the picture.”

“All the big real estate brokers and all the agents that are dominating an area, you have an opportunity to unseat them if you embrace this technology.”

“I don’t ever bet the farm. I will pass on the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that requires me to be the farm because I know that a few months later, the once-in a lifetime opportunity that won’t require me to bet the farm will surely come along.”

“Here’s the thing: If you’re creative, you shouldn’t ever have to bet the farm.”

“I know if I have my relationships, I can recreate any amount of money.”

“What if you take charge of your emotions?”

“I can choose to be unhappy or happy. I’m going to choose happy.”

“Personal branding helps create deal flow.”

“If you can live in your worst mistake, that’s a good thing.”

“I truly believe that your net worth is related to your network and the relationships that you’ve got.”

“Be smart with your time because you only have so much of it.”

Kent Clothier and Real Estate World Wide  provides several educational service platforms for agents who want to maximize their productivity in real estate investments . His boardroom puts you in a mastermind with some of the Top investors in the country while Smart Suite is full of tools for effective lead generation and selling. For more information please visit: https://reww.com ********************************

Connect with Roland

Connect with Oliver

Resources

Other episodes:

Mike Ferry – How to Crash Proof Your Real Estate Business

Cory Boatright – How to Make Big Profits Wholesaling Real Estate

Thank you for watching!

If you’d like to see more episodes go to: www.OliverGraf.tv/FoundersClub

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas on How to Grow Your Real Estate Business Fast and Maximize Profits contact me here.