Motivation Week – Get Past First Deal – Just Do It (CFFL 0281)
Motivation Week – Get Past First Deal – Just Do It
Jack Butala: Motivation Week – Get Past First Deal – Just Do It. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It’s super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don’t even have to read it. Thanks for listening.
Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.
Jill DeWit: Aloha. I just had to do something different.
Jack Butala: Gosh your personality comes out with one word sometimes.
Jill DeWit: I couldn’t resist I just had to do something to shake it up.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show. In this episode Jill and I … Hey it’s motivation week. This is show 3 of a 5 part series in how to get past that first deal. Just do it like Nike says. Great show today. Jill, before we get started let’s share something funny that happened to us recently.
Jill DeWit: I wanted to go back and share the whole 360 camera experience because I think that was absolutely hilarious. You and I, I think, were in Best Buy for how many hour?
Jack Butala: I can’t go to Best Buy.
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh.
Jack Butala: It’s a $3,000.00 event.
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh. So we’re in Best Buy we were in there Go Pros. It was a Go Pro sale.
Jack Butala: Yeah. It was on sale.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: That’s why went in there.
Jill DeWit: That was the only reason. Go Pros and microphones.
Jack Butala: Their marketing works.
Jill DeWit: Which they didn’t have the microphones we wanted, so we were in two Best Buys. You know in your gut we just knew there was something that was missing, so we’re looking at these Go Pros is this really going to solve the problem? Can I really walk around? Because we’re going to have some fun filming and some fun …
Jack Butala: We have some video related shows coming up that will be released, one of them will be released next week. I’ll talk about it a second.
Jill DeWit: We’re just so excited with the stuff that we got coming up but we needed the right equipment. We need to walk around with it, that’s the whole point, and any wearble thing they’re just not the quality and not what we need in the end. I swear we were in there for 4 hours, I’m not kidding.
Jack Butala: Oh my gosh.
Jill DeWit: And then in the end we finally found it and walk out. Here we are returning Go Pros and buying this other stuff, but one of the things we picked up is the new 360. It’s a Theta S …
Jack Butala: It’s a Rico Theta S 360 degree camera.
Jill DeWit: It rocks.
Jack Butala: It is unbelievable.
Jill DeWit: We used it Sunday night. Okay, we’re at the beach with all of our friends at a concert.
Jack Butala: Weekend festival. All summer.
Jill DeWit: It’s every Sunday night at the beach at the pier and they have different bands come in. And you ride your bikes down there.
Jack Butala: There were 12,000 people there.
Jill DeWit: That’s right.
Jack Butala: The band said it 12,000 people on the beach. It’s like Woodstock.
Jill DeWit: [crosstalk 00:02:27] we’re going down the beach on our bikes with our backpacks on our back and Jack has us all rigged up. He’s got a Go Pro on his head, he’s got a Go Pro on the front of my bike.
Jack Butala: It came out good.
Jill DeWit: I know, and I realize as I’m peddling along I’m like he’s filming nothing but the back of me. I’m like what the heck, so I turn to Jack and I said does this beach chair make my butt look too big? I couldn’t help it. [inaudible 00:02:58] what are they going to see? They’re going to see the back of my butt below a beach chair on my back on a beach cruiser in a basket. It’s the funniest thing. I don’t know how much of that is going to see because that was a test day. It was just comical.
We get to the beach and we’re there with our friends with our new 360 camera and we’re like okay are people going to think we’re weirdos. Then we realized too nobody is even paying attention.
Jack Butala: They don’t care.
Jill DeWit: They’re all drinking, having fun, they could care less.
Jack Butala: Drones were hitting each other. Everybody else was doing the same thing.
Jill DeWit: We’re testing it, we had a kid with our group stand up and test it and then it turned into a whole social event. We’re showing the footage to everybody on the beach and they just think it’s the coolest thing, and we’re learning stuff and it was just so much fun.
Jack Butala: It was a social media event before social media.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: We were making friends, people we didn’t even know because we were sharing content but all not on the interest.
Jill DeWit: On my phone. Because we showed my phone to my friend and she’s like oh my gosh, so my phone is being passed along. I’m like who has has my phone? I don’t know where my phone went. That guy down there has it. I’m like okay hang up everybody I am going to post this on Facebook. It’s coming.
Jack Butala: Yeah, check out either one of our Facebook pages or the Land Academy Facebook page it’s on there. You can really literally if you’re looking at it looking at Facebook on your phone you can scroll through the picture literally and see a 360 degrees.
Jill DeWit: Sunset. You can see the band. My joke is Where’s Waldo? It’s like you could see us.
Jack Butala: There was 12,000 people there you could really. It’s amazing.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. It was really fun. We were kind of right in the middle of it too.
Jack Butala: A lot of times you just buy a bunch of stuff because you just buy it. Electronics, and it sits in the box. We broke this one up quick.
Jill DeWit: I’m excited to go play with that some more.
Jack Butala: Me too. That was interesting. That’s a good choice. You can sit there and stare at the picture that we ended up with that’s on Facebook now. You can sit there and stare it there’s 12,000 people there. There’s like 12,000 little situations going on.
Jill DeWit: It’s amazing.
Jack Butala: If you get into it you can spend some time looking at that picture. It’s crazy.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. It’s like you said that night, all the little stories. You can look at these people and just imagine what are they talking about? What’s their story? Or look at these kids and she’s doing a cartwheel right now. It’s just the cutest thing.
Jack Butala: This show really is about real estate.
Jill DeWit: Oh yes. I kind of forgot.
Jack Butala: Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on successplant.com, our free online community.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Jason says, I can’t seem to get the 2 documents to talk to each other in my mail merge. A little help please. Jack, that’s you.
Jack Butala: Jason. I spend in our program a whole chapter on mail merges and there’s a bunch of videos in Youtube from experts about how to do mail merges. I would suggest you look there too. There is actually one that I’ve done on Youtube also on our Youtube channel landacademy.com. But for the rest of you here’s the good news, we’re very soon going to launch our own printing company in conjunction with the Backend Printer in Scottsdale that is a a personal friend, and we will start doing the mail merge for you. Don’t throw it in the closet and wait till then. You really need to learn how to do to this in the concepts anyway, so here’s a secret.
A mail merge creates a ton of documents through a database that looks like you’re sending a note, whether it’s an email or a letter, to that specific person. You could write 1,000 offers to property owners. There’s obviously 1,000 different property owners and 1,000 different prices based on the stats. You want it to look like each person is receiving it. Like you’re sending a love letter to 10 girls.
Jill DeWit: I was just going to ask that. Jack, did you ever finish that?
Jack Butala: Yes, I did finish it.
Jill DeWit: Did you ever post it though?
Jack Butala: No.
Jill DeWit: All right, will you please back up and tell this. This is so good.
Jack Butala: How to do a mail merge 101. If you wanted to write a love letter to 10 girls …
Jill DeWit: Jack was really doing a Youtube video to post up this exact example.
Jack Butala: …and you do not want any of each of those girls to know that you’re writing it. They’re all going to find out anyway, but that’s not the point of the story.
Jill DeWit: You’re writing the same letter to 10 girls.
Jack Butala: And you want one to go to Stacey, and Janet, and everything, you don’t want to just to whom it may concern, you don’t want to do that. You want to say Dear Stacey you’re the only girl for me.
Jill DeWit: Does Stacey and Jill get a letter? [inaudible 00:07:50]
Jack Butala: There’s a girl inside named Jill named Stacey and Stacey comes out in certain situations.
Jill DeWit: On Friday night. Stacey was at the whiskey Friday night.
Jack Butala: I adore Stacey by the way.
Jill DeWit: Stacey is a lot of fun. Stacey does not want to go home.
Jack Butala: Stacey has no inhibitions and just she might as well be throwing money around literally. Yeah, exactly.
Jill DeWit: That seems like a good idea.
Jack Butala: Right. Anyway that’s the gist of a mail merge is you can take a database full of 1,000 people, or 10 girls or whatever, at the end of it it looks like you’re just sending it to them. I teach that. That’s how we send out offers. It involves taking an Excel spreadsheet of ownership data and merging it into a Microsoft Word template. They’re made for each other. When you’re done you have a huge Microsoft Word document that you convert to a PDF, it’s very very simple, and then send the letters out. Send the offers out. In our members’ case just send it to the printer. Pretty soon we’re just going to do all of it for you.
But you have to start in Microsoft Word, and I think this is the gist of the question, and link the document literally. You have to click on in Microsoft Word there is a data section on the right side. You click on data and start a mail merge. From there it’s going to ask you which fields you want and every column in Excel is a field. Again, there’s a ton of videos out there on Youtube and they make it real simple, from professional people that do this all the time.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: I think that answers it. Does it answer it?
Jill DeWit: Yeah. Without sitting here and doing a screenshot, I mean that’s the next thing would be we’d show you but that’s what Jack’s saying there are screenshots out there.
Jack Butala: If you’re a homeowner I’m pretty confident you’ve received a postcard in the mail that says for current resident we’re real interested in buying your house, and you threw it away. That is exactly how not to be a real estate investor. It is also the most prominent prevalent way that you hear about in bigger pockets and everywhere. Send a lot of postcards out. The printing company that we’ve started doesn’t even do postcards. That’s how ineffective and silly it is. What happens is somebody’s going to call you back. You know what, I do want to sell my house. Thanks. You called this perfect time. I want $380,000.00. Now you talk back and forth 14 times and you end up not buying it because you only wanted to buy for $100,000.00. Anyway.
If you listen to the show at all you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Jill DeWit: You know, I want to add a little point. Thank you Jason for thinking bigger. I see people handwriting 10 letters a week. Do you want to get 1 deal this year? Then maybe 10 letters a week. I don’t know.
Jack Butala: Last Friday, the name of our show was how to make 10,000 offers in an hour. I mean think about that for a second. That’s what we all do here. You think that if you make 10,000 rock bottom low ball offers to, hand selected by the way not just throw some stuff at the wall and let’s see what comes out, do you think someone is going to sign it and send it back? I think so. Are you going to make more than it cost to do the mailer on a deal that you flip? I think so.
Jill DeWit: Probably. That’s just …
Jack Butala: It literally takes the same amount of time to write 1 offer as 10,000. Literally.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. I know.
Jack Butala: If you haven’t listened to the show on Friday go back and listen to it.
Jill DeWit: Thank you Jack.
Jack Butala: Motivation week Jill. I love it. Get past that first deal. This is the 3rd of a series of 5 shows that we’re doing about staying motivated. It’s just as important to stay motivated as it is to learn about how to do deals. There’s lots of stuff in your life that can get in the way. One of the things that I see very very often from our members is they’ve done everything right … Just like Jason, he sends the letters out, he’s getting a response, but man it’s like I just got to get past that first deal.
What can we say to somebody who is right in Jason’s spot, that you’ve got the mail merge out the whole thing, mail the offers out, people are responding, some maybe sign and send back. It just, I don’t know if I’m doing it right.
Jill DeWit: You’ve just got to do it.
Jack Butala: That’s what I think Jill.
Jill DeWit: You really do.
Jack Butala: You go into it expecting that it’s going to fail.
Jill DeWit: It doesn’t matter. Whatever your career is. You were new there sometime too.
Jack Butala: Right. Think about having kids.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. That’s not my favorite example.
Jack Butala: There’s no perfect time to have a kid. No one is ever prepared for what really happens. But once you start down the path you can’t undo it. Maybe we should do a real estate deal like that. You have to do the deal.
Jill DeWit: Well you’re pregnant now.
Jack Butala: Here’s your due date.
Jill DeWit: You’re pregnant there’s no turning back.
Jack Butala: Your REI due date is x.
Jill DeWit: What the heck?
Jack Butala: And instead of 9 months it’s like 1 month, no like 3 weeks.
Jill DeWit: I think you’re going to freak everybody out that is not a good example, Jack. Oh my goodness.
Jack Butala: And you have to do the deal.
Jill DeWit: Maybe it’s finals or something or I don’t know. You just got to do it. You know, you got to do it and here’s my thing. If you go into it, and this is where I sound like you Jack. You have different expectations of things than I do and my expectations are usually pretty ohh it’s going to be all beautiful and great and think the best.
Jack Butala: Crossing the Mexican border recently comes to mind.
Jill DeWit: And was I right?
Jack Butala: Yeah. You were right and we’re not in prison. Tune in tomorrow where Jill and I discuss the Mexican border.
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh. Okay. We’ll get there in a minute. We’ll get to that.
Jack Butala: And why we should be in a Mexican federal prison right now.
Jill DeWit: No. You’re so silly. Oh Jack.
Jack Butala: We’re going to do a show from federal prison in Mexico.
Jill DeWit: Oh, Jack. You know what, that is for tomorrow. We will talk about that tomorrow.
Jack Butala: I know.
Jill DeWit: Okay. All right, getting passed that first deal and just doing it, that’s step 3. You just really got to get out there, expect that you’re going to make some mistakes. Be ready for it and be prepared and be motivated so you’re just going to power through. Something might go wrong. You might get all the way through to the very very end and the deed’s wrong, you sent it to the recorder wrong. There is a lot of little steps and that’s why we’re here. That’s why you visualize your goal, you want to get there. That’s why you got all this education so you know where to go to go back and look at your notes and your information and just take that step. Pick up the phone.
Jack Butala: Pick up the phone. That’s great advice Jill.
Jill DeWit: Some of our members are afraid to answer the phone.
Jack Butala: Pick up the phone. I love it.
Jill DeWit: They have sent out offers, the phone is ringing, and they’re afraid to even answer the phone. It has nothing to do with money or anything like that. They’re just like shucks now I got to answer the phone and talk to these people. You just have to do it. Force yourself, after 10 phones calls you got this. You’re going to go oh I actually do know what I’m talking about. All right.
Jack Butala: You know more than any seller. I’m telling you right now.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Jack Butala: Just by the fact that you’re an REI, you’re an investor and you want to do this and you’re interested in it, you know way more than homeowners x or landowner y.
Jill DeWit: After 10 phone calls you have talked to 10 sellers. They have only talked to 1 buyer and that was you. They’re nervous too going I don’t know how this is going to go. I got this letter, I want to make sure is this for real? That’s half the time why they’re calling anyway.
Jack Butala: I’ll tell you what they’re really thinking, it’s man I hope this person can just get this thing out of my life.
Jill DeWit: I hope it is real.
Jack Butala: I hope they can just send me a check and I can just check this off my life list because I’m never going to use this piece of land that I inherited, or I bought 20 years ago that I thought I was going to use, or just I’m over it.
Jill DeWit: I didn’t know what I was going to do with this. I was trying to figure out am I going to list it?
Jack Butala: That’s why they’re calling you.
Jill DeWit: Gosh. Like ahh the heavens opened up and they’re all excited that you sent them a letter. They’re excited to talk to you. They’re calling you so answer the phone.
Jack Butala: Yeah. Exactly. A lot of new people and a lot of seasoned people they still just don’t believe that they want to check it off the list. Every once in a while someone will call and they want to negotiate and get their price, but not very often. They just want it out.
Jill DeWit: One other important point. The more confident you sound, you don’t have to be knowledgeable, you can say I don’t know. I’ll check and make sure I can have the notary that day. I know I said Sunday, but let me make sure I can line up a notary on Sunday or whatever it is. It’s okay to say I’m going to have to get back to you on that, but just have confident and that makes everyone feel good and you’re believable and trustworthy.
Jack Butala: I mean you’re going to have to call them back anyway because you do have line up notary and go get a cashier’s check and all that stuff, as we all teach throughout our program.
Jill DeWit: And you know, what if your first deal it was a 5 back and forth phone call scenario. Jack always says I do it in 1 or 2 phone calls. So what? It took you 5 phone calls to get it right. I forgot to ask the guy’s address okay I got to call him back. That’s okay. The next time you’re going to get better and better and better and that’s part of just doing it.
Jack Butala: You know, the way these phones are these days you can record. There’s apps that are free, some of them cost a couple of bucks. Listen to yourself.
Jill DeWit: That’s not a bad idea. Even just have a recorder in the room if you want to hear yourself.
Jack Butala: Sure. Listen to yourself and say boy I dropped the ball there or man I just knocked that out of the park there. The more times you do that …
Jill DeWit: That’s good advice.
Jack Butala: … The more times you do that, it will be perfect at some point and probably a lot sooner than you think.
Jill DeWit: That’s really good advice. Then when you have those sellers you’re like that was so easy, what was it? I’m going to do that again.
Jack Butala: If you go on Facebook in certain groups, we do this too sometimes especially when you have a funny phone call with a seller. You can put that recording on there and it’s just really really really hilarious. It’s funny to share. In our programs we share some of Jill’s phone calls with county people and all that. We got a lot of positive feedback from people. It took the mystery out of calling the assessor or whatever.
Jill DeWit: Right. It’s like you feel like you’re calling the Secretary of State. You know what I mean?
Jack Butala: And you’re smarter than they are.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. That’s the funniest thing. Oh my goodness. How many times has that happened.
Jack Butala: Not just county people, you’re just smarter. This is motivation week. Trust me. You are smarter than all the sellers you’re going to talk to and all the county people.
Jill DeWit: It’s true. This is your business. This is not their business.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: You’ve got this.
Hey, I want to add one thing real quick before we wrap this up because today is the day …
Jack Butala: If you want to be on our show, call 800-725-8816.
Jill DeWit: Now can I share?
Jack Butala: Yeah go.
Jill DeWit: Okay good. Today is the day the show is probably being released an hour or so before this is about to happen. Today, right now, August 31st Wednesday, at 5:00 Pacific time. If you can get on a computer you might be on your phone right now listening, get on a computer, and go to one of our Facebook pages and you’ll find the event and log in information to jump in on a live webinar that Jack and I are doing for 30 minutes to answer everybody’s questions. Anything you want to ask us about what we do, something you heard on the show, anything with motivation week. Dream it up. Have your question ready because if you get in, we had to cap it at 100. 100 people are going to be able to log in and be on the webinar and type in questions in a forum for Jack and I to answer live. That’s the cap there.
I realize now the way this is going I didn’t [crosstalk 00:20:37].
Jack Butala: There’s a lot of interest.
Jill DeWit: It’s going to be a Facebook live event too. If you want to just be able to listen and hear everything and watch, go be at 5:00 Pacific time today. Facebook live. Friend me, Jill DeWit, because it’s broadcast from my Facebook page, and I will absolutely accept everybody my friends here for what we’re doing, and you can watch it there.
Jack Butala: Does your Facebook page have log in instruction for the actual 100 people in the webinar.
Jill DeWit: I will. It’s going to be in there all the time. I’m going to be doing constant daily posts so you’ll see it.
Jack Butala: All right. Great.
Jill DeWit: Good question. Thank you, Jack.
Jack Butala: Join us in another episode where Jack and Jill discuss how to use information, that’s me.
Jill DeWit: And inspiration, that’s my part.
Jack Butala: To get just about anything you want.
Jill DeWit: We use it everyday to buy property for half of what it’s worth and sell it immediately.
Jack Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Good show, Jill. I think this motivation thing is working out okay
Jill DeWit: You know, it’s such an important topic.
Jack Butala: I need it, even at this point I need to be motivated about certain stuff. Not buying and selling land anymore so much. Not Land Academy stuff. But other stuff like video production or whatever.
Jill DeWit: The shows that we’re working on [crosstalk 00:21:59]. Books that we’re working on.
Jack Butala: Everybody does.
Jill DeWit: Next step stuff that we’re working on. This is something we should probably do it, I think Jack, we should revisit this every couple months.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Because like you just said …
Jack Butala: We’ll see how the numbers come out, but yeah. No matter what we do there’s always some people that say man you guys didn’t talk about real estate anymore. And then there’s some people that say, man you’re talking about real estate a lot.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Always.
Jill DeWit: You know, it’s all part of it. You know.
Jack Butala: The satirist in me makes me want to do a show about motorcycles or something. It’s like, all right you know what, I don’t need to do this. This whole real estate thing is all set for us.
Jill DeWit: Today I’m going to talk about the … That’s funny. I saw by the way at breakfast today people were asking me about your motorcycle.
Jack Butala: Yeah. I have a silly little motorcycle. I call it a sleeper. It’s a 500 cc Piaggio which is the company that makes Vespas you know. It looks a little bit like a Vespa but a serious one. They’re very popular in Europe because it’s a form of transportation.
Jill DeWit: And it can go 80.
Jack Butala: Oh no no, like 120. It’s 500 cc’s. Super bikes are 600. He knew it. This guy knew.
Jill DeWit: That was funny. He was obviously waiting for you to come out, it was hilarious.
Jack Butala: He had some serious questions like how can that be 500 cc’s. It’s cool. I’m releasing on our Youtube channel a moto-log about me going 180 all around Los Angeles.
Jill DeWit: I want to talk about that more and I think we will on a day coming up here soon.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
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