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18: 5 Steps To Setting and Actually Achieving Goals

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Marcus Maloney

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Marcus E. Maloney is a Real Estate Investment Strategist that has an eye for real estate oriented solutions. As the Founder and Principle of 3rd Generation Mgmt & Holding LLC, the firm has done and assisted with an innumerable amount of real estate transactions. Marcus holds a Master of Business Administration; which provides him a proper knowledge and understanding of business applications and practices. As a philanthropic effort Mr. Maloney also has assisted with the development of State licensed facilities that acquire property for transitioning youth.

Marcus’s childhood was a lot like mine in that we both did demo on rehabs as children. His parents were fixing and flipping and my dad was working as a contractor for real estate investors. We both learned how hard that kind of work was and that may be one of the reasons we both decided to aim bigger.

This episode covers a very important step in your path to becoming a successful real estate investor.

Marcus’s first goals when he was getting serious about real estate investing revolved around building the right connections. He hustled and hustled and stayed persistent. He talked to a lot of people and built lasting relationships where he was able to provide value and gain education.

This isn’t just for new investors. This is for anybody, at any stage in their life. There is always something to be learned and the best way to learn it is from someone already doing it.

Marcus talked about some of his goals for 2016 which include:

Writing his first Ebook about birddogging
Increase his deal conversion rate to closing 1 deal per 25 leads
Writing 26 blog articles
Giving away more money than he did last year

Here are the steps Marcus outlined and went into detail on during the interview:

1. Define Purpose – Who you are. What you are trying to do.
2. Visualize and Confess – Visualize yourself the way you want to be with regards to Spiritual goals, physical goals, family goals, community goals and business goals.
3. Association – Find someone that is doing what you want to do or being the way you want to be and ask them for help so that you can do what they did
4. Strategize – Determine your results for the end of the year and reverse engineer your goals so that you can get specific in what you need to do this week to get started
5. Take Action – Goals are worthless without action. If you don’t have your “why” figured out correctly, you won’t last outside of your comfort zone, which is where you need to be if you are to grow. Welcome embarrassment. Challenge your fears.

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The Secret

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Click Here to Download the Pro Goal Setting Worksheet

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Welcome to the Flipping Junkie Podcast. My name is Danny Johnson former software developer turned house flipper, flipping hundreds of houses. Each week we bring you interviews, strategies, stories and motivation to help you get started flipping houses and on your way to becoming your own boss and achieving financial freedom. Thanks for spending time with me today. Now let’s get to it.

Danny Johnson: Hey guys welcome back. I’ve got a great episode today. My friend, Marcus Maloney, is on the show. He’s going to talk to us about goal setting and being the beginning of 2016, we all want to make it our best year and this is how you do it by setting goals. If you don’t know what you’re focused on and what every day you’re working towards, how are you going to get to the right place, it all starts with goal setting. If you don’t set the right goals, you don’t have that always in front of you all the time, you’re not going to get where you want to be and I find that there’s a bunch of benefit out of even just sitting down and clearly figuring out what you want in life. Sometimes if people don’t ever think longer term and think about what they’re really after, they’re sort of working real hard at things and then find out that they’re still sort of lost because they never had that clear sort of objective to reach over all those years so today is a super important episode about goal setting. Marcus this is a real estate investment strategist. He’s got an eye for real estate oriented solutions. He’s the founder and principal of Third Generation Management and Holding LLC. Now the firm has done and assisted with an innumerable amount of real estate transactions. Marcus holds a Master of Business Administration, which provides him a proper knowledge and understanding of business applications and practices. As a philanthropic effort, Mr Maloney also has assisted with the development of state license facilities that acquire property for transitioning youth. He’s just a great guy. Super glad to have him on the show and actually he reached out to me after I did a blog post for 11 experts and what they would do with $500 dollars a month in marketing and $5000 a month at marketing and it was funny because his comment caught my attention because he said he was appalled that he wasn’t included and I had no idea he wanted to be, but he caught my attention. We started talking and decided to have him on the podcast, so super glad to have Mark is here. How are you doing Marcus?

Marcus Maloney: I’m doing great. Thanks Danny. Thanks for the nice introduction and thanks for welcoming all to the show and speaking to your listeners.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. Great to have you. The second or third episode in the series that we’re doing, the flipping houses training series, through these podcasts episodes so that people can start with the beginning with getting their mindset right and then creating goals for themselves and just going through the progression so that each week we’ve got something that builds on the last week instead of just jumping around from an episode about owner financing and then another one on asset protection and another one on mindset. We want to do sort of a natural progression with these episodes so this is early on in the game and the series of flipping houses training for the flipping junkie podcast and for people out there that have questions or want to have something included in this process in one of these episodes coming up you can go to facebook.com/flippingjunkie is the page and just enter something in there and we’ll look at those and include those and answer your questions and get you guys involved. And then you can follow us in what we’re doing in our flipping business on Instagram, Instagram.com/flippingjunkie. But anyway Marcus, let’s find out a little bit more about you and how you got started. What got you interested in real estate investing?

Marcus Maloney: Sure Danny. Like we were speaking earlier, my family – my parents, they started flipping houses back in the late ‘80s early ‘90s and I didn’t understand what they were doing. I was just a kid at the time and they just bought this burned down house and I was thinking, “What the heck are they going to do with that?” The only thing I saw was work and all and it was work for us because I think being at the time I was ten or eleven, we were part of the demo crew so they would drop us off at the house with the contractor and they would come back and pick us up maybe six or seven hours later and I didn’t understand the whole process and everything that we were doing. Until I see them you know show us a $50,000 check that they have got from that one deal, so after that, it kind of clicked.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, that’s incredible. And it’s funny because I share the sort of the same story because my father was a contractor doing work for real estate investors when I was a kid, so I got dropped off also and had to do demo and clean up and all that kind of stuff, so I know what that’s like.

Marcus Maloney: Yup, yup. It was hard work but at the end of the day it taught us the hard work ethic and things of that nature and there was some fruit at the end of workday for us also, so that was great. They just bought houses. We were in a small community about 45 minutes south of Chicago and the area that they were buying in was just a traditional hard working, roll up your sleeves kind of town and they were buying the properties and we were going in rehabbing them and in then reselling them. That’s basically how we got started.

Danny Johnson: Nice so. So when did that transition happen though? What age or what happened to where you transitioned into actually doing it yourself on your own?

Marcus Maloney: Well it took some years, Danny. I took the traditional path like some of the others. My brother, he four years older than me so he took the college route and at the time I just wasn’t you know college material. I was a young kid. I just wanted to do what I want to do. Hanging out, have fun. I was into sports, but wasn’t good enough you know to play collegiately or anything like that. My brother was getting all of the praise about going to college, “Hey Michael is doing this, Michael is doing that…” So I kind of followed in my brother’s footsteps – went to the same college, same university at Southern Illinois University and even during the years I was in school, I was like, “This is just not for me. This is just not for me.” However I went through the whole process, got my undergrad degree, received my master’s degree, graduated and never really worked in the field of my study. So with that being said, I graduated with tons of student debt debt and went back to the basics. I really just started talking to my mom and my dad about how they got started with the real estate and that’s what I started doing, I would say, about eight or nine years ago. So it was a start-stop, start-stop, start-stop and that was really because I didn’t have any goals outlined. I was just kind of hanging in the wind, I make a few thousand bucks here, a few thousand bucks there. But it wasn’t any clearly defined and wrote out on paper.

Danny Johnson: Right. And so what did those first goals sort of look like when you started making a turnaround to becoming a serious investor? Do you remember what kind of goals you outlined for yourself once you started making that transition?

Marcus Maloney: Sure. My main thing was connections. Danny, honestly, I didn’t put pen to paper and say, “Hey, I want to make $90,000 a year” or anything like that. My main focus was make sure I get connected with the right people, that way I can learn from the inside out because I know a lot of people when they first start out, they spend a lot of money on boot camps trying to learn and I just didn’t want to go that route because I already had tons of student loan debt and I understand sitting in front of someone and learning from a book is not always the best way. My main thing was connections. I wanted to connect with three or four people that were investors that were doing deals consistently and that’s basically what I did.

Marcus Maloney: And how did you find those people and connect with them?

Marcus Maloney: Man, you know what Danny, it was basically just putting boots to the ground and just grinding. I was doing some blogging – well, back then it wasn’t blogging, but I was doing quite a bit of writing and research and then I was just going to quite a few networking events and I was talking to people. I had some history, some knowledge so it wasn’t like I was going in green, but at the end of the day, I would always tell people, ‘Hey look, I’m just trying to learn and if you can make some money off of me by lot by me learning the process, so be it.” And I got with a good group of people and really started learning and then I kind of branched out on my own.

Danny Johnson: Yeah it’s powerful and I think some people hearing that might think, ”Well, he went to some meetings, talked to some people, got lucky and maybe found the right people that were willing to work with him.” I’ve gone to a meeting before and talk to somebody they were really interested in helping me and so it didn’t work out for me like that, But the thing to remember is I’m sure you probably hustled and went to a lot of meetings, talked to a lot of people and ended up just connecting with some of them and that’s what made all the difference. So I’m sure it wasn’t something from one meeting, right? I mean, you went probably consistently or something for months, right?

Marcus Maloney: Yeah, yeah. I mean it was persistence basically Danny. I talked to quite a few people and it was, “Yeah, come on. You can you can help us out, do some bird dogging.” And at the end of the day, they were just looking for someone to feed them deals, and I wasn’t learning in the process, so it just took time. I was constantly going to the boot camps, to the trainings, every guru God that came in town I was pretty much going, not for the guru or not to learn from them, but just to see who’s in the crowd because normally when a guru comes to a city, someone invites them to the city. I would try and find out who was the coordinator of the event and then really talk to them because I know that they were the ones that was doing the deals.

Danny Johnson: Yeah I’m writing that down that’s such a great thing to keep in mind that there’s somebody that got that person to come to the city that’s doing a lot of deals. And there’s also, not only them, but also other serious investors that know what they’re doing.

Marcus Maloney: Exactly.

Danny Johnson: But know that you’re continuously learning, that you’ll never know everything and just getting one great idea from each of those seminars or presentations is well worth going, right?

Marcus Maloney: It definitely is and I was actually at one this past week and learned something totally new and it was a benefit. One guy always told me, whenever you go to a meeting you know make sure you give something and make sure you get something, not every time you’re going to connect with someone, but make sure you give something and make sure you get something. So that’s what I try and do. That’s my aim whenever I’m networking.

Danny Johnson: We can go on a tangent and just talk about doing that because it’s such a powerful thing but let’s move into the goals for this episode. Do you want to start with maybe sharing what goals you currently have for 2016 if you don’t mind.

Marcus Maloney: Sure not a problem Danny. I want to write and get my first ebook done, so that’s one of the goals that I have set out for myself and I have a strategy where I do so much a week, so I have objectives to reaching that goal. That way, I can evaluate myself at the end of the week, at the end of the month, at the end of the quarter. That way, I can make sure I’m reaching that goal. That’s one of the goals that I have in mind.

Danny Johnson: Do you want to share with us the topic of the ebook or is that something you’re not prepared to release yet.

Marcus Maloney: The topic is going to be about bird dogging because a lot of newbies come into the investment arena and they just really don’t know where to start, so I’m just going to try and outline a detailed plan for them to get started on bird dogging. That way they can learn while they earn a little bit of money versus going to the boot camp spending $15-, $20-, $30,000 with a guru and not get anything from it but a bunch of materials.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, I like that. So you got to make the whole sort of tagline or subtitle to the book, “Earn while you learn.”

Marcus Maloney: Exactly.

Danny Johnson: I like that. All right so what are the goals you’ve got for 2016?

Marcus Maloney: Okay and then another one I have, my conversion rate being in Phoenix, it’s challenging because you have a lot of competition and you have a lot of other voices in the arena, so I’m just trying to increase my close ratio to one per every 25 lead. So I’m really reverse engineering, so I can make sure I hit that one every 25 lead that comes in. So that’s actually the main goal that I have, That way, I can work more efficiently versus just working harder.

Danny Johnson: Yeah I like that because it’s very specific and something you can measure to see if you’re actually improving, right?

Marcus Maloney: Exactly, exactly. And if you have a goal that you can’t measure, it’s no reason even put that goal down on paper because it’s just a dream. You have to make sure you have measurables to your goals.

Danny Johnson: Right. Yeah, absolutely. All right, what else do you got?

Marcus Maloney: Let’s see. Another thing that I have, I’m actually going to be doing quite a bit of blogging on my site so I’m looking to get 26 blog articles done this year. It takes quite a bit of time and quite a bit of effort, but I’m challenging myself to make sure I get that done. So that’s one every other week. So far I’m doing pretty good although it’s the beginning of the month and beginning of the year, but I’m going to make sure I nail down that goal and get the done.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. I think that takes a lot more time than most people realize. Whenever I do a blog post, it usually ends up taking about six hours plus.

Marcus Maloney: Yup, yup. It can definitely take that that length the time. So those are just some of the general goals that I have wrote down for this year. I have quite a few I don’t want to go in depth because we have a short period of time and I can go on and on and on for hours.

Danny Johnson: Oh yeah. Well, let’s start with how you sit down and how other people can go through this process of setting the correct goals. Do you follow anything like the SMAR acronym for laying out goals?

Marcus Maloney: Yes, yes I do. But the first thing that I do Dan is I define. I define my purpose and that’s what I always tell people. I say, “Don’t sit down and try and write out goals because you’re going to just try and write out the goals from where you are to where you’re trying to go. So you have to define your purpose – who you are, what are you trying to do and what is important to you.” So one thing that I have is that the most frightening things is to be a person without purpose. Money cannot be a purpose. I know a lot of people get into real estate looking at the dollars and cents aspect of the business. But you have to have a purpose, why are you doing what you’re doing, and not all the time that is just the bottom line is the dollar.

Danny Johnson: Right.

Marcus Maloney: So I always tell people to start out by defining a purpose.

Danny Johnson: So how do people do that? How do they nail that down a little bit more? If they were thinking, “Yeah, I just want to make a ton of money” and then you tell them, “Well, that’s not a really good one because it’s not going to be enough to push you through getting out of your comfort zone constantly to grow.” How do people maybe define what their individual purpose is?

Marcus Maloney: Well that’s a lot of quiet time of reflection Dan. Every morning before I get up I always have an hour of just meditation and I know that may seem challenging for people because a lot of random ideas come in. But when you sit down and you find that place of peace, they can truly define who you are and what you want to be. Your purpose cannot be driven by dollars. So yeah, you want to make a lot of money, but why? Why do you want this money? Is it for security? Is it for your family? Is it to put your kids through college? Is it to expand your business? Exactly what is it that that drives you every morning? What is it that gets you up out of bed every morning? Why aren’t you working for someone else? Why are you working for yourself? So that’s the main thing is to really nail down, take that time of reflection to find out who you are and what you are. Before you can find out what you want to do, you have to know who you are and what you are.

Danny Johnson: Yeah it’s perfect. I like that for several reasons. Number one, you talked about the quiet time and time to reflect and time to look inside yourself and learn more about yourself. And to me for this year, even though I felt like maybe I’ve done it to some extent over the last several years, but this year my biggest thing is self-improvement. It’s like what Jim Rohn says, “Don’t become a millionaire for the money. Become a millionaire for the person it’ll make of you to become one.”

Marcus Maloney: Exactly.

Danny Johnson: And so, it’ about improving yourself and it goes into one of those things that if you don’t improve yourself with self-improvement becoming a better person and just understanding who you are and what you want in controlling yourself and all kinds of things, then even if you do somehow get a windfall and you win the lottery or something, it’s not long before you end up losing that money because you never became the person it took to acquire and manage that kind of money.

Marcus Maloney: Exactly, exactly. And one of my goals that I didn’t state to you is this year, I want to be able to give away more money than I gave away last year. That’s one of the things. I like to sow seeds, I like to plant into other people’s lives, so my thing is I want to be able to give more this year than I did last year. Every morning that’s one of the things that I state to myself, that I am a giver. That’s one of my daily confessionals that I say over myself and I started it last year and actually I have been seeing a lot of fruit to the daily confessionals.

Danny Johnson: Yeah I like that. And what you mean is sort of like the affirmations where you have a list of things that you repeat about who you are and what you do and how you do and all that kind of stuff?

Marcus Maloney: Exactly, exactly. Because throughout the course of the day and throughout the course of the month or the year, you begin to figure out why you’re doing what you’re doing. And by doing that every morning, it just ingrains into you and it helps you build your character, “Hey, why am I doing what I’m doing?” “I’m doing this because I am a giver.” “I am doing this because I have a drive to help someone else today.” So I’ll make sure I say those daily confessionals every day, and one of the books I read is The Secret and it’s just the power of positive affirmation. If you don’t believe it, you can’t expect someone else to believe it.

Danny Johnson: Absolutely. Yeah, I like that. Do you have a vision board? I know that’s something mentioned in the secret. It’s a powerful thing isn’t it?

Marcus Maloney: Yes. Yes, it is yes, it is. And I’m actually trying to work with my wife to convince her and to show her that it’s important. And just from some of the successes that I’ve seen, I’ve seen her now start to write things on paper and continuously reviewing throughout the day.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, that’s awesome. And for the people that don’t know what a vision board out there is, it’s from the book and the movie “The Secret.” It talks about you know having visions and imagine yourself already having accomplished or received the things that you want and where you want to be. And so, you take sort of go and print out pictures or whatever of the things that you want or that represent where you want to be or how you want to be and then you put them on this board, so that you always see them all the time as an affirmation or it’s always sort of there and that’s your goal. It can be pretty amazing because even if you don’t look at that thing all the time, sometimes if you let a year or two go by and you go back and look at it and you’ll find that a lot of the things that were on there you’ve achieved without consciously you focusing every day on trying to work towards it. You just end up sort of going that way because you defined who you wanted to be and what you wanted. It’s very powerful. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Marcus Maloney: Hey, Marcus. So we talked about defining the purpose, the way to start with quiet time introspection and asking themselves “why.” Keep asking why. So if you say, “I want make a lot of money.” Why? Why do you want to make a lot of money? “I want to have a big house?” Why do you want to have a big house?

Marcus Maloney: Exactly.

Danny Johnson: Because I want to impress my friends. You just have to get down and keep asking why, so that you can determine the real reason behind what you’re doing. So what’s the next step after that?

Marcus Maloney: Well I visualize and it’s similar to the confessional. You have to tell yourself what you want to be, write it down. Where do you want to see yourself in five years, in three years, in one year and you have to work towards that. So always tell people you need to do it for your spiritual life, your physical life, financially for your family, and then externally for the community. So you have to visualize what you want to do, where you want to be, and how you want to get there, and not only that, not just I have the things but to be a good story. That’s one of the things that I always tell people, “Yeah, you may want to make a lot of money. You want to increase your business, but are you being a good steward of what you already have now?” So visualize and confess. Those daily confessionals, those two things are key. And then another thing that I do is the associations. Like I said, one of my goals is to be connected with the right people, so I make sure I find someone doing what I want to do and do not take no for an answer. So again, if I want to learn something and I know someone is doing what I want to learn, I go up and I ask them, “Hey, I want to learn what you’re doing. How can I do it?” And then I ask them a lot of “whys.” I’m like the kid. Why did you do that? Why are you doing it this way? So that’s what I always tell people, “Do not be afraid to be vulnerable. Do not be afraid to be open to people.” Especially when you’re doing your goals because you’ll find out if you make all of those goals that you’re going to need help in order to accomplish them and you can’t be scared to go up and talk to someone and really dig into them and find out how they’re doing what they’re doing and making sure that you can accomplish those goals and dreams that you set out for yourself.

Danny Johnson: Yeah absolutely. The thinking that when you see somebody who’s really successful and you think, “Oh they did that really quick and made it look easy.” But the truth is, they started where you are now and they went through the same exact thing and know what it’s like. So when you go up and you humble yourself and say, “I don’t understand how you did this and I’d like to learn.” And even if you think you know a lot, who cares? There are things that you don’t know that you can learn from somebody else and to always be open and ready to learn those things and to ask for help and all successful people ask for help. That’s how they got to where they are and so yeah I like your message there.

Marcus Maloney: Exactly. And one thing that I always do in conversations when I’m meeting someone new or someone previously, I always ask them, “Okay, now who do you know that I need to know?”

Danny Johnson: Yeah.

Marcus Maloney: So that gives me an introduction and to now expanding that connection. If they say, well, you need to go and meet so-and-so over on the west coast, then I’ll just talk that person, hey, you know what I was speaking with so-and-so and they told me that I really need to meet you and get to know you about doing creative financing. So that’s a segway in an open door because you have a mutual relationship between someone. Now they’re more open to speak with you and converse about what you’re trying to learn.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, I am writing these things down.

Marcus Maloney: Feel free, feel free.

Danny Johnson: Take notes. All right. I’m not sure if we ran into a third one with that, so I have defined purpose figuring out why and then number two would be to visualise and confess which is visualizing where you want to be, who you want to be, not just financially but spiritually, physically with your family and community, and then confessing to yourself whether you are doing the things that you should be doing with what you have right now because just getting further and getting more is not going to make you a better steward of that. You’ve got to start right now. Give right now. That’s one of the things too from Jim Rohn. I’m always talking about Jim Rohn around the office. I’m sure everybody’s tired of hearing me talk about it. He talks about people that say, “Well, when I make a lot more money, I’m going to give. I’ll give money then.” Then he says, “Well, I’m sorry but if you’re not giving right now, what makes you think you’re going to give then? It’s a lot easier to give you know $10 out of $100 than it $100,000 out of a million.”

Marcus Maloney: That’s exactly true. That’s exactly true. And I stand on the principle of tithing. It’s a Jewish custom where you plant seeds, so like you said out of every hundred dollars, I give $10 and I know that as a seed you know that’s really going to come back to me in some form or fashion. It may not come back to me monetarily, but it may come back to me in building a connection with someone or may come back to me in a favor down the road, something like that.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. It always comes back. So give in order to receive. So again, define purpose, visualize and confess and then number three—

Marcus Maloney: The associations.

Danny Johnson: Associations.

Marcus Maloney: And always ask why. Find someone doing what you’re doing and do not take no for an answer and always ask why. Ask why and how. How can I do this? How did you do this? Is there someone that I need to know that can help me get to where I’m trying to go?

Danny Johnson: Yeah. “How did you do this?” And part of that that people need understand too sometimes jealousy comes in, right? And so you see someone else being successful at what you’re trying to do and the temptation is just to have the jealousy and making excuses saying, well, they had this or they had that. I didn’t have that. My parents weren’t flipping houses. I’m not in that kind of city. Prices here are really expensive and the jealousy will make them find reasons why they can’t do something but instead of looking at that way, you need to look at it like they did that and I need to find out how they did it so I can do it too.

Marcus Maloney: Exactly. And people are open to help. They’re open to assist. As long as you have that perseverance and that persistence, eventually someone will get tired of you and say “Okay, I’ll give you an hour of my time. Let’s sit down and I’ll answer any question that you have.” And people are willing to do that. I just did that Saturday. Someone in a Phoenix market that I know that’s doing very well and I sat down with them, “Hey, talk to me .Show me what I’m doing wrong. Here is some of my marketing material, here are some of my pieces. What do you think I need to do in order to tweak this to make it better?” It was an hour out it is time, but I left with a wealth of knowledge and possibly a mentor going forward.

Danny Johnson: Nice. How did you find that person? Why did you choose to want to approach them and be persistent in trying to get their help?

Marcus Maloney: You know what, like I said, I attend quite a few meet ups and I was just watching this person because I always want to be connected with people that stand for integrity and not just out looking for the next buck. So I used to watch him, watch his deals, how he was doing things and I say, “You know what, this is a person that I really need to get connected with.” And it took me a while, six to eight months. We knew each other, we would talk and I would ask him about a deal or something like that. And then one of my coaches did an interview with him on the radio and we were doing our goal setting and he said, “Well, you need to talk to this person.” And I just call him and I set up an appointment and he set out what was supposed to be an hour meeting and we sat there for about two and a half hours.

Danny Johnson: Nice. So it works.

Marcus Maloney: It works. You just have to get out of your cell. You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable and you will find yourself going a long way.

Danny Johnson: Yeah absolutely. So we’ve got defining the purpose, visualizing and confessing and association, and then what comes next in this goal setting plan here?

Marcus Maloney: You have to strategize, then you have to reverse engineer your goals. You have to say, “Hey, if I want to close 100 deals for a year. How many deals do I have to close a month? Then, “How many leads do I have to get in order to get eight deals a month?” So it’s reverse engineering, it’s going backwards. If your goal is 100 deals, then you have to know how much you need to do per month or per day and actually per hour. You have to drill down and know what you want to do. So for an example, if you want to buy ten units this year, what do I have to do daily? What do I have to do weekly? What do I have to do monthly? What do I have to do quarterly? And then, you have to make sure you reassess those goals, those weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals because most people they set the goals at the beginning of the year and they never go back and look at them.

Danny Johnson: You don’t even remember what was on there after four or five months. I’ve been there that’s why I laugh about it. No I absolutely agree with you 100%. It’s not so hard to figure out when you do start at the end. So you start at the end place where you want to be, like you said, 100 deals and then if you’ve maybe had some sort of estimation of how many leads it’s going to take or how many houses you’re going to have to look at and make offers on to roughly get that and then you have something very specific that you can do, and then you’ve got to determine what kind of marketing can I do will generate that many leads. You can get it down to daily, like you said, even hourly like what you would need to do in order to accomplish that. As an example, let’s say you’re going to do bandit signs, which as a word of warning, are illegal in a lot of places. You want to find out what your rules are in your city and whether they have permits for them or whatever, but there’s a lot of research on that that you can do on the Internet. So I’m not going to go all over it right now. But if you do bandit signs, let’s say, that if you’ve never done this before and you’re sort of guessing, just make a guess like Marcus was saying, what was it 25 leads should equal one deal is what he’s working up towards as a goal. So let’s say you’re not as experienced, you think maybe it’ll take 40 leads to maybe close one deal, so now if your goal is 10 deals for the year, you’re going to need 400 leads because it’s 40 leads to get a deal and you want 10 of those, so you’re going to need 40 x 10 which is 400 leads and that’s absolutely doable. If we look at it in terms of how many bandit signs you need to put out in order to get a lead, you might find that you’re putting out 10 bandit signs per lead. Obviously, you’re going to do more than one marketing method, but if we just keep this simple and say it’s all going to be bandit signs then that would mean that you need 400 leads x 10 bandit signs per lead = 4,000 bandit signs.

Marcus Maloney: Yup. And that’s the simple process. It’s not rocket science. You just to have to drill down and that’s where I find a lot of people make the mistake, they don’t want to drill down. They see the end goal and then they say, “Okay, how am I going to get here?” And they start and then they stop.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. This is great because also when you do that, the way we talked about, it’s measurable so you can see where you’re kind of going and you can adjust as you go because you might find that it’s only taking you 20 leads to get a deal. And you’re going to want to tweak your marketing. You’re going to find out that maybe direct mail or a website maybe is providing you with more leads for the money and stuff like that. So yeah that’s great. So you got to strategize and then reverse engineer. So start with the end in mind and work your way back to nine months, six month, three month, one month, one week — what do you have to do this week, what do you have to do today and get started and then look at those every single day.

Marcus Maloney: Exactly. That’s it. And then finally, you just have to take action. You have to take action. You have to be willing to welcome embarrassment and challenge your own fears. I tell people welcome the embarrassment. If you feel embarrassed or uncomfortable, that’s a good thing. You’re expanding your knowledge, you’re growing. And just challenge those fears.

Danny Johnson: Yeah and that’s how you grow, right? Why would you grow if you were just doing the same stuff that you do that’s you’re comfortable in. How are you going to grow with that.

Marcus Maloney: Exactly, exactly. That’s the basic outline. That’s as simple as you can get. You can drill down further. But the main thing is just to remember to take action/plan, take action/plan, take action/network and make sure that you have the end goal in mind.

Danny Johnson: Right. Marcus, you’ve blown me away with this goals setting episode. I had high expectations, but you’ve met and exceeded all of them because not only did you talk about specific house flipping real estate investment goals, you went into what’s really important for everybody should be important for almost everybody, not just having solely those types of goals. You need to have the spiritual, the physical, family, community and then making connections. All that stuff for a lot of people maybe it might be a little bit hard to look into themselves and to accept the fact that maybe they haven’t focused on all those things, but it’s necessary.

Marcus Maloney: That’s very true Danny. You have to be balanced in every area of your life and that’s where you see a lot of people where they may be millionaires, but they’re not happy. Your family life is crumbling. They’re not balanced. You have to have balance in order to actually be and actually accomplish what you want to accomplish.

Danny Johnson: Yeah and each thing sort of helps everything else out. You might think that it’s not related but it really is.

Marcus Maloney: Exactly.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, like what you said. And I saw something just yesterday I think on a video about a book and it was talking about if you’re not happy while you’re riding the bus, you’re not going to be happy driving a Ferrari. You might be you know for a day or two or a week or something but it’s going to go away. That’s not what’s going to keep you happy. Be happy now while you’re riding the bus and you’ll be happy no matter what.

Marcus Maloney: That’s true, that’s true. You have to be happy internally. If you’re not happy, like you said, on the bus, you won’t be happy in a Ferrari.

Danny Johnson: All right Marcus. Excellent show. I really do appreciate it and you’ve been kind enough to send over to me a Pro-Goal Setting worksheet that people can work through that spells out step by step what to do with the great work sheet. I’m going to make that available on the Flipping Junkie website so if you go to flippingjunkie.com/18 for episode 18, that’s flipping junkie dot com slash one eight, you will be able to download that Pro-Goal Setting worksheet that Marcus has provided for all you guys to download. And hey, Marcus, do you have a place that everybody out there listening, if they want to contact you can reach you? Do you have a website or anything?

Marcus Maloney: Sure let me just state the Pro-Goal worksheet that is actually from my business coach Ray Silverstein, so you can find that it has all of the contact information at the bottom of the sheet. But Ray really helps me out and keeps me on task, but you can find me at yesibuyhousesphoenix, Twitter @yesibuyphoenix or you can just find me on Facebook @yesibuyhousesphoenix as well.

Danny Johnson: So Twitter was @yesibuyphoenix and then Facebook is yesibuyhousesphoenix.

Marcus Maloney: Yes.

Danny Johnson: And then your website was the yesibuyhousesphoenix.com.

Marcus Maloney: Exactly. You got it Danny.

Danny Johnson: All right. Well, thank you so much for taking an hour out of your time today and I feel like I got to know you a lot better and I really appreciate you sharing with us.

Marcus Maloney: Hey Danny, I appreciate it. I hope it’s a valuable lesson for your listeners and they can feel free to reach out to me if they have any questions.

Danny Johnson: Great. Well, have a great day and a great 2016 Marcus.

Marcus Maloney: Thank you. You too Danny.

Danny Johnson: All right. Take care.

Marcus Maloney: Bye bye.

All right. Thanks for listening this week. We had a great episode here with setting goals beginning of 2016 and really for any year it’s going to be very powerful. That’s a great start we’ve had so far in this series for Flipping Houses Training through the Flipping Junkie Podcast. We’ll be talking about some more mind set goals and getting started episodes in the coming weeks, so be sure to come back and listen in. And then also visit us on Facebook at facebook.com/flippingjunkie and provide some feedback there, ask any questions you have, or if you want to hear something specific, or have me interview somebody specific please leave us a comment or post on the Facebook page. And then also if you want to see pictures of some of the rehabs and some of the stuff that we’ve got going on, check out Instagram.com/flippingjunkie and “junkie” is J-U-N-K-I-E. And then of course for the show notes for this episode with Marcus and to download the Pro-Goal Setting worksheet that he was willing to share and go to the flippingjunkie.com/18, that’s episode 18. So flipping junkie dot com slash one eight and you’ll be able to do that there. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes and leave us some feedback and a rating if you would. I really appreciate it. It really helps us to get more traction with this podcast and to be able to do more things with it – interview more and more people. So thank you very much for listening and we’ll see you next week.

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