How Jack Jill use their Calendar to Succeed (CFFL 582)
How Jack Jill use their Calendar to Succeed (CFFL 582)
Transcript:
Jack: Jack Jill here.
Jill: Hey.
Jack: Welcome to the show today. In this episode Jill and I talk about how each of us, how Jack Jill use our calendar to succeed buying and selling real estate. Before we get into it, though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the LandInvestors.com online community. It’s free.
Jill: We were Jack and Jill, and now we’re Jack Jill. Is this just one word? You just kind of [inaudible 00:00:33].
Jack: Hey, you want to know why it says Jack Jill?
Jill: Yeah, why? I was sitting here going, “Hmm.” I picked up on it at first and I’m like, “He, did it again.”
Jack: Because SEO-
Jill: Where is Jack Jill?
Jack: … doesn’t like the word and. Here’s another reason, we are JackJill.com. We are not JackandJill.com.
Jill: We should just say, “JackJill.com. Hi, my name is JackJill.com.” I’m just kidding. I got it. I was just teasing you, so thank you. All right, Jason asks, “In my most recent marketing campaign I found a landowner who asked me if I could help him finance a land sale to his neighbor. The land owner says that he is too old to do the owner finance, but the buyer’s haven’t been able to find a bank loan for a subdivided section of his land.” Interesting. This is very interesting. “It seems to me that if someone who invested in a promissory note might be interested in that business, but I don’t know how to find such an investor. Do you have any advice on what to tell the seller?”
Jack: Yeah, there’s a website called LoanMLS, L-O-A-N-M-L-S. They have no affiliation with us in any way, but in my spare time I love perusing it because there’s a bunch of notes for sale in there. We don’t talk about it a lot, but note investing is a fantastic real estate vehicle. You can [crosstalk 00:01:55].
Jill: Yeah, I kind of like that.
Jack: Jill and I have personal friends who have made hundreds of millions of dollars buying dramatically reduced loans from banks and financial institutions. You don’t buy the property, you buy the mortgage that’s underlying it. Think of a house that’s got a mortgage on it. It’s a 30 year mortgage. They’re 15 years into it, and then for whatever reason, the owner’s still in the house, the guy who had the mortgage is still in the house, same person, and they stop paying. For whatever reason the bank says, “Hey, this mortgage is for sale. I’ll sell it. What’s left on the mortgage is $25,000. The house is probably worth 200. I’ll let you have the mortgage for 10 grand, what do you say? See if you can get this guy to start paying again.”
Now you’re buying a 200,000 house for 10,000 or you’re buying the note associated with it. By the way, you can foreclose on that if you want, depending on the local rules. This whole business of loans and buying the notes and stuff is really a good idea. I’ve done it several times. We don’t do it right now because this other stuff we have is so incredibly profitable. Every once in a while, to the direct point here, Jason, someone calls us and says, “Jack, will you go buy this piece of land for me? Will you pay cash for it? It’s $25,000. Sell it to me for $25,000, and I’ll pay you over time.” That’s what’s going on here. My answer is no. Not because it’s not a great-
Jill: It’s not our business model right now.
Jack: That’s it, Jill.
Jill: That’s it.
Jack: You nailed it.
Jill: Yeah, it’s not crazy. This is not crazy, and I give kudos to the guy for thinking of this and saying, “Since you’re calling me maybe you’ll do this.”
Jack: Yeah, so the answer is no, and, Jason, your answer should be no, unless this is what you want your business to be.
Jill: That’s true.
Jack: Every once in a while someone asks me if I want to buy a golf corse too, and I say no.
Jill: This is a good example, too, I tell people when you’re getting into this business, “Have an open mind. Your niche will find you.” Maybe this niche might sing to this guy, and Jason might be going, “You know what? This is my niche. Nobody’s doing it. They’re all doing this. I’m going to sit back and do this kind of stuff.” This is not crazy.
Jack: Exactly.
Jill: I love it. Good job.
Jack: This plays to kind of what we’re talking about today where you have to stay focused and stay organized in the niche or the basic, general real estate little section, subsection that you want to be an investor in.
Jill: That’s true.
Jack: Because you can’t go look for office buildings. Jill’s famous for saying you’re going to get sidetracked on one deal and think about how many deals you would regularly do-
Jill: Right.
Jack: … during that time where it’s just, you don’t want it. The office building that somebody just threw on your desk as an acquisition opportunity might be the deal of your lifetime. How many deals that you do, if you’re a regular land investor, how many deals are you going to miss out on now that you spent all this time [crosstalk 00:04:58].
Jill: Because you got sidetracked learning about it. You’re not a commercial person, so you had to learn that. Then we had to learn about this part of it, and then we had to learn about the regulations, and we had to learn about all this stuff. Nevermind you’re not doing your day job buying and selling the things that you know how to do well in your sleep. Then in the end you might have lost some money.
Jack: How many times, Jill, have you and I stood next to each other at a cocktail party? When I say cocktail party I really mean like grown up kegger.
Jill: I was going to say, I was going to go, “Well, I haven’t been to a cocktail party in a while. Let me think, two?”
Jack: People say, “Hey, what do you guys do?” We say, “Oh, we’re real estate investors. We own a real estate data company,” and they say, “Oh, really? My aunt sally-”
Jill: “Has this.”
Jack: “… has a piece of property over here,” and both of us look at each other because that might be the greatest deal there ever was, but that’s not what we do. I call them one-offs.
Jill: Yes.
Jack: That’s what this question’s about. It’s about a one-off. The whole time that that’s happening Jill and I have tens of thousands of letters in the mail. People are opening our offers as we speak. As we’re talking to this person at this kegger. They’re signing them and putting them back in the mail. We’re buying property while this guy is going on and on and on about his aunt’s property.
Jill: About this one great deal, yeah.
Jack: Try to avoid one-offs. If you have a question or you’d like to be on the show reach out to either one of us at LandInvestors.com. Today’s topic, how Jack Jill use their calendar to succeed. This is the meat of the show. In talking to Jill before the show I just learned that she uses a calendar a lot differently than I do. I learn a lot about Jill on this show.
Jill: Here’s what I thought you were going to say, “In talking to Jill before the show I found out she uses a calendar.” That’s really where I thought it was going to end. As I was going in to this I’m not sure you believed me. “I know she knows when we record, so I see her then, and I know she has it down pretty much when our member call is on Thursday afternoons. But, other than that I’m really not sure what Jill does.”
Jack: Wouldn’t that be great? Hey, you know what? That how I know when we’ve arrived. When I’m not sure what you do, you’re not sure what I do, and we’re just like we have to swim through money to get to the bed every night.
Jill: I love it. That was the thing I was thinking about, one of my funny things is when we’re at a cocktail party and people say, me, they’re talking to me specifically, and they like to me before they’ve ask Jack, they’re like, “So, what do you do?” Then Jack, always his response is, “Yeah, I want to hear this too.”
Jack: I want to hear this too.
Jill: “What do you do?” All this time I thought it was a compliment, and now I realize you really don’t know. Let me clarify here. I actually do stuff, and I do have a calendar, and I do use it. Now we’ve got that out of the way.
Jack: Wait, I know you have one. I’ve seen it.
Jill: Okay. It’s not a print out on the refrigerator showing, “Hey, Friday school carnival.” No.
Jack: Here’s a fact, I talked about it a couple of shows ago, I live and die by my calendar.
Jill: I live and die by your calendar.
Jack: Also, in my defense, I said during that show that it’s a super-bad idea to force your version of how you use a calendar on someone else, even if they’re an employ or a child. It just never works. Everybody’s got a different idea about how to use a calendar. Very briefly, this is how I use mine. My whole rest of the year, almost literally, and next year, is plotted out in this calendar. I have time to do research in there. I have time to do video, time to do this show, time for product launches, time for meetings and on and on and on.
Jill: I hope I’m on the calendar.
Jack: There’s a bunch of stuff on there that relates to you.
Jill: Okay, thank you. All scheduled out, you don’t have any time for me.
Jack: In an effort to keep this show rated PG, I will not go into some of the stuff that’s scheduled on there where Jill’s name is.
Jill: Thank you very much. We appreciate that. That’s all I needed to know.
Jack: I wake up in the morning, and I say to myself, “I’m off the hook today because I know exactly what I have to do. I have to work for the next eight to 10 hours, and I have to do what this calendar says.” I’m extremely confident that the net results of the whole thing at the end is going to be tremendous success, whether it’s Land Academy or Offers Academy or all these companies that we started, or, quite honestly, just flipping real estate. If something goes wrong, and it always does, my immediate reaction is to adjust the calendar. For instance, and this happens to everybody, usually on Monday, one of our websites blows up. There’s some issue, huge issue somewhere. Now, I’ve learned over time to just budget some time for that. It literally says, “Website blow up, Monday morning,” there’s like an hour. Good for me if that doesn’t happen, I can do something else.
Jill: Now you’ve got an extra hour.
Jack: Yeah. That’s how I use a calendar. It’s pretty military, and it’s not for everybody, including the people that are in the studio.
Jill: Excuse me, I’m writing over here, “Wednesday afternoon, spousal blow up.” Just kidding.
Jack: “Marital disagreement, 15 minutes,” go.
Jill: I’m going to put that on there every day, and if it doesn’t then I was kidding. You know what I mean?
Jack: You know what I noticed? One thing we don’t schedule socially is like food, which is good probably. You can’t have everything scheduled. It’d be boring.
Jill: I know. You could. You could.
Jack: No.
Jill: I don’t know if I could.
Jack: How do you use a calendar, Jill?
Jill: Well, I print it out.
Jack: No you don’t.
Jill: I don’t.
Jack: No, seriously, this is a serious question.
Jill: You know what’s funny? You use time chunks, specifically, and I use specific start and end times for all meetings, all the recordings, all those things that really have a firm start and end time. Then I use kind of bigger chunks for numerous projects at once, like, maybe I need to revamp my Facebook bio. Maybe all my social media stuff needs to be revamped, because I’m actually working on that right now, so I’m not going to put 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes for all of those. I’m going to do a one hour chunk or a two hour chunk and get them all done kind of thing. I often will do all-day projects. Some of the stuff I’m doing is marketing and you got to just sit down and think about stuff a little bit, so I’ll give my big chunks of time to do that.
Jack: [crosstalk 00:12:26].
Jill: What’s hard is, which I, myself, am bad about this, is getting pulled to of it. You get-
Jack: Distracted.
Jill: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack: I agree. That’s a challenge for everybody.
Jill: When it’s in there you almost got to turn off your phone, close the door and tell everybody, “I’m not available,” because, really, most times is two hours going to make a difference? No. It can wait two hours.
Jack: I read a study recently that said if you wait two hours, and it actually said, if you wait two hours, whatever it was, the person who sent it probably solved it already.
Jill: That’s true, too.
Jack: That’s how I treat email, by the way. If somethings blowing up and it’s on fire, this is with our people now, Skype me. If it’s something that a little bit sideways or it needs to be addressed at some point, send me an email. Know full well that I’ll probably answer the Skype pretty quickly. If it’s a sky-is-falling situation, you’re going to hear about it. Skype is getting used properly in this company, our companies, the right way. The email thing, I’ve seen a lot of people fail in life because they use their email as their to-do list, so they’re allowing other people to control their time, and that’s a really bad idea.
Jill: That’s true.
Jack: If you wake up in the morning, not you, but listener, wake up in the morning, and the first thing you do is check your email, that’s not a good idea. I failed at that for quite some time. My suggestion would be to block out some time, like maybe 10:00 or 11:00.
Jill: Like three times a day, that’s for even-
Jack: I think that’s too much.
Jill: You think that’s too much?
Jack: I just think maybe between 10:00 and 11:00.
Jill: Like, morning, mid, late afternoon.
Jack: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill: Yeah, if you don’t do that, and you are a slave to your email, and then you get nothing done.
Jack: Right.
Jill: That’s true.
Jack: For us, it cuts into our production time. The value that Jill and I add, for better, for worse this day in age, is producing audio and video and communicating with the public. All the other tools that we have, the websites and real estate tools seem to be more successful the more that we put ourselves out there and contribute with unique content. I hope it’s unique, hope it’s quality.
Jill: I’m sure.
Jack: That is a challenge. If you’re sitting and dealing with email all day for us, it’s just a mess. For me, personally, let me wrap it up this way. For me personally, if I’m not doing what’s in my calendar it’s not being effective. I see the wheels turning. Your wheels are turning.
Jill: No, I’m just thinking of our listeners, and thinking, “Okay, this is great, Jack. I need a little more to work on here.” What I hear is maybe it’s you need to create a website. You’re not going to put, “Crate website on Tuesday,” let’s be realistic. But you can put, “Spend an hour on Fiver,” or something, where ever you want to go to find a website guy, or even just spend an hour finding a place to find a website guy, doing your homework there, that could be one thing. Then the next day you’re going to spend an hour on this, and the next day you’re going to spend an hour, this, this. Do like this?
Jack: This is how I would create a website.
Jill: Is this how you would do it?
Jack: I’ll tell you how I would do it.
Jill: Okay, tell us.
Jack: I would schedule it. Let’s say I want to create a website next week, and it’s brand new to me. I would schedule, let’s just for sake of argument, between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. all five days.
Jill: Okay, all right.
Jack: It would say, “Website.”
Jill: But you won’t have specific tasks in there, break it down even more?
Jack: No, but by Friday, I’ll tell you what, that thing’s done.
Jill: Okay, so you already have a specific task in your head?
Jack: Yeah.
Jill: You don’t need to write them down. You could write them down, but it’s not important. You know it’s a five step process.
Jack: If I were sharing the calendar with you, and sometimes we do on projects, I would be real descriptive. I know Monday is, “Try to locate a guy on the internet to do it.” Tuesday is, “Okay, now the guys got it. Is he working on it? He’s working on it.” Wednesday is, “Take a look at the draft.” Thursday, and on and on and on.
Jill: Tweak the content.
Jack: Some projects are two weeks. Some projects like this podcast, it’s in our calendar infinitely to record on Thursday morning.
Jill: Right. Infinitely.
Jack: Jill just shrugged her shoulders. I have to do this the rest of my life?
Jill: Infinitely. I know, we’re going to be like 80. Are we going to have a show when we’re 80? Jack, what’s going to happen?
Jack: If we have more than four listeners.
Jill: “Hi, this is Jack and Jill and the grandkids.” Could you imagine because we’re 80? “Yes, grandma, we’re doing the Jack and Jill show.” Could you imagine? Because we’re out of guests, no one will talk to us anymore, so we pull in random family members to be a guest. This would be awesome.
Jack: “Dad, mom, it’s time to stop.”
Jill: “Stop. Stop, no one listens, no one. I know this is the only thing you know how do on Thursdays, but no one listens. That weekly call, it’s just us.”
Jack: “Dad, mom, everything’s paid for.”
Jill: I know.
Jack: “It’s over.”
Jill: “Stop it.”
Jack: “Come with me.”
Jill: “Stop it.”
Jack: “It’s going to be fine.”
Jill: It evolves, too. You know what this show would evolve to? It’d be evolved to Jack’s corner with fishing lures.
Jack: Yeah, I do have a lot of fishing stuff.
Jill: It’s a lot of fishing. “This is what I caught last week.” What would my corner be? I don’t know what mine would be.
Jack: I don’t know. I don’t know what it’d be.
Jill: What would be mine? You’re going into this whole fishing thing now.
Jack: It’d be more like Jill’s psychology corner.
Jill: Oh, gosh.
Jack: “How are you feeling today?”
Jill: Oh, no.
Jack: “You look so beautiful.”
Jill: Oh, Jack, you think?
Jack: Yeah, that’s the Jill show, okay, yeah.
Jill: Okay.
Jack: “Tell me about your feelings.”
Jill: Silly.
Jack: The Jack [crosstalk 00:18:42].
Jill: “Why do you think you felt the need to yell at the trash man today?”
Jack: Are you talking to me, or is this us having a conversation?
Jill: Just us. I’m following that through.
Jack: My point is, the calendar-
Jill: Don’t let that happen to you.
Jack: The calendar, depending on your personality, very, very effective at getting yourself off the hook. I see a lot of people get stressed out in our group, like, “Oh, what do I do?” Tony Robbins has this whole thing about, and I’m not a huge fan of Tony Robbins, but he has a whole concept of if you want to accomplish something, find somebody else that’s already done it extremely well, and then deconstruct, like, really study what that person’s done, or what they’re trying to do, and deconstruct it down into little events. Make the hill bigger every day.
That’s really what my calendar is for, it’s just to deconstruct where I want to go at some end date somewhere. Probably to you, Jill, it looks like my calendar is like a military thing where if it’s not on time it’s just a disaster. That’s just not the case. I give myself all kinds of wiggle room in there. For established things like the podcast, no, I expect it all to be kind of military, but when there’s new projects it’s pretty loosey-goosey. It doesn’t look like that does it?
Jill: It doesn’t look like that. No, that’s a good thing. Looking at your calendar right now today looks pretty busy.
Jack: Well, it’s Thursday. I have my calendar up right now. Jill’s looking at it going, “Oh, my god.”
Jill: What the heck?
Jack: Right.
Jill: You want me to do what when?
Jack: Oh, my gosh.
Jill: Join us on the next episode-
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
Jill: … where we discuss dual escrow explained, and you are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jack: Does Tom have a question tomorrow?
Jill: I don’t know, we’re just skipping that part.
Jack: Somebody did the script wrong, that’s awesome.
Jill: I’m not even going to trust it right now. I just took it out.
Jack: Tom’s got a question tomorrow, join us.
Jill: Actually, no, it’s somebody else, so we’re not even go there. No, it’s all good. We’re in the after show right now.
Jack: Like our show, subscribe and rate us on iTunes or where ever you’re listening.
Jill: Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
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