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Show NotesFocus, focus, focus. That’s the key to success.
You don’t want to be distracted by your first ideas. You need to stay focused when it comes to growing your business so that you’re on top of your game.
The steps to staying focused isn’t that difficult. Here’s what we do to stay focused:
Hunting leads can be difficult to find, we know. Searching on the MLS can be exhausting. The biggest mistake an investor can make is staying in their comfort zone. If you only ever do bandit signs, how are you going to generate consistent deals?
That was just an example, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with bandit signs. But you need to focus in on at least one method – direct mail, bandit signs, PPC, SEO, online marketing, driving for dollars, etc. – and become an expert at that.
Send out as much as you can, be active. The more you do, the more you’ll learn. Stay hyper focused, gather data, find a way to turn it into a system, become the master at it. Only then should you move on to the next thing. In no time, you’ll be an expert at every aspect of real estate investing. At the end of the day, you need to be making progress.
In these podcast episodes coming up, we’re going to be having an open Q & A with you guys. Your questions are important to us. It’ll help you learn, but it will also help us to know what it is you’re struggling with so that we can make content that’s helpful for growing your business.
Have a burning question to build your business? Just ask! The steps are easy:
There’s no such thing as a bad question. Anything that you’re curious about, we’ll help you through it. Let’s stay focused, let’s become experts, and let’s make progress in building our businesses!
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Episode TranscriptionDanny Johnson: This is the Flipping Junkie podcast episode 84. [music] Welcome to the Flipping Junkie podcast, the podcast for flip pilots everywhere. Flip pilots are the house flippers that work more “on” our business instead of “in” our business by keeping a 30,000-foot view. You’re now part of a small group of house flippers that considers themselves flip pilots that strive to build the life of financial freedom and time freedom so that we can spend more time doing what we love with who we love. In this podcast, I give you a glimpse of the daily life of a flip pilot, so let’s gets started.
All right, guys. Today we’re going to talk about the biggest gold nugget and it’s a five-letter word that starts with F. If you can guess it, you win. And if you can guess it and use it, you win even bigger.
So I do a lot of interviews and get interviewed quite a bit and everybody’s looking for gold nuggets, right, and listen to podcasts. I listen to podcasts because I’m looking for gold nuggets – things that I can put to use to my business to make a difference. It got me thinking about what’s the biggest one, what is the biggest one to help people with hurdles over hurdles in their business, getting started flipping houses or just scaling their business and doing more in their flipping business. And it’s that five-letter word and it starts with F; and it’s focus. Okay? Because I find myself even with this problem all the time. Even lately it seems like it’s the biggest one that I’ve been dealing with. I’ve got all these ideas and I hear all these great things. I want to implement all of them and I’m thinking about all of them. I start working on one of them and that gets me to think of something else and I start going down that path and I go this way and that way. It’s only when we have focus that we finally make progress in one direction in the way we want to go.
So let me lay this out step by step in how to be focused because you probably knew, “Okay, well I understand focus. I’m going to focus on growing my business. I’m going to focus on getting into flipping houses.” That’s great, but it needs to be a little bit more detailed. It needs to be a little bit better planned out so that you can stick with this plan. And really what it is, is if you’re just getting started in the business, what matters most is getting leads. Okay? So if you don’t have a plan to start generating leads whether just going on MLS working with realtors to get deals on MLS or doing some direct to seller marketing, motivated seller marketing through a website or direct mail or any of these things, you’re going to find trouble getting going because you’re listening to all this great info, you’re taking all this information and a lot of it has to do with us wanting to stay in our comfort zone and it’s easier just to go around and listen to other things and learn it and look for some magic bullet, some gold nugget that we’re going to be able to find that we hear somewhere buried that maybe other people aren’t doing and we’re going to be able to go out and do it, it’s going to be easy. But the truth is we’re just looking for more of those things because it’s comfortable to learn it and listen to it and get excited about than it is to put forth the effort to do it.
So the first step is to understand if you’re at that level or even if you’re already doing a certain number of houses a year and want to grow your business even more, it always goes back to getting those leads, so doing that marketing, focusing on that. And really, all the things that you hear about people doing direct mail, online, pay-per-click, Craigslist ads, bandit signs, driving for dollars, all these things work. Okay? And a magic bullet is not out there that people aren’t using that you can go out and do very easily and find success. All those things work. We get overwhelmed with all of them because we get excited about wanting to do all of them but really, you need to pick one thing, start with one – one of those methods, the one maybe that seems the least scary to you and become the expert at it. Get it to start working for you and become the expert at it so that when you are learning things, you’re learning for that one specific thing.
So let’s say driving for dollars. We’re going to become an expert at driving for dollars and start to get leads and deals that way. So I’m going to go out and find all the material I can on driving for dollars. I want to plan to execute to drive for dollars and to send that mail out, to find people’s phone numbers and call them, leave business cards and flyers and stuff like that at doors of houses that are vacant that I find as I’m driving for dollars. And just start on that, okay? Just get out there and start doing that and build a plan around it. Become the best at it. Find a way to maybe systematize it and scale it and then focus on another thing. I think too many people want to do all of this stuff at once and get overwhelmed and not sure where to focus and day to day they feel like they’re not making progress. It’s when you focus that you can make progress and look at the end of things and say, “Okay, I’m one step further.” You know how motivating that is? Because that’s what I’ve been working on lately in my own businesses, is really narrowing down my focus and at the end of each day really looking back and saying I made progress and it feels great because I was making a lot of progress and a lot of different things over the past couple of months. But I always felt like I never got as much done as I wanted to because I wasn’t real clear about what I should be doing. I was doing a bunch of little things in different directions. So I always felt like I had more still to do at the end of the day than what I’ve already accomplished, and that’s kind of demotivating. It’s to the point where it’s not recognizable and noticeable progress and it can be hard to keep the momentum and keep the excitement.
So that five-letter word starts with F: focus is the way to combat that and keep your energy up and feel like you’re making progress and just either getting into the business or scaling your business. Melissa and I were just talking about how it’s so cool that there’s so many people that we hear from now that have listened to the podcast and read the blog and use Lead Propeller websites that have studied what we’ve taught out there and put it to use and found success and they would ask some questions in the beginning and we’d answer them and help them out and then they’d have some new questions. But it was almost always like a path of success where they were asking the right questions in the beginning. It wasn’t a question about something that has to do with title issues when they have never even looked at a house to make an offer on to buy it before. You know what I mean? It’s questions about “How do I get this marketing to work better?” or something and as they got deals then the questions would be because they were doing deals and they were going through that process.
And it’s so cool and it’s why we do these podcasts, that’s why we do these videos, that’s why we do the blog and everything. It’s to help people and it’s so cool to see that success and help people to get to that place also in their life. I ask you to do the same thing. And the fastest way to success is to help other people find success and even if you’re not real far along, you can still help people. What you can do is you can share this podcast. If this message resonates with you and you know somebody else that can benefit from it, by all means share it and let them know about it.
If you have questions about certain specific parts of getting this implemented and working through the marketing and stuff like that, what I’m going to do is Just Ask podcast episodes, real quick episodes where I answer a question in detail and the way to do that is join the Flip Pilot group. If you go to Facebook, search for Flip Pilot or you can go to FlipPilot.com and get an invite into the private Facebook group. What you’ll do is just tag me, Danny Johnson, in the post on there and ask a question, tag it Just Ask. What I’ll do is I’ll take those and the ones that I can really expand on, I’ll answer in a podcast episode in detail. The cool thing is, even before I get that podcast done and out and live for you, people in that group are going to help you out and we’re going to help you out answer the question and help you when you get support that way and it’s a great way to keep you focused. So join that group if you haven’t joined it and again, the process is to get in there and post. Tag me, Danny Johnson and then also use hashtag Just Ask. I don’t know, maybe it should be Just Ask Flipping Junkie or something but either way, I’ll know. Right? So Just Ask or Just Ask Flipping Junkie, you know, hashtag and we’ll get to that. I’m looking forward to helping people with specific questions as we continue on with the podcast and doing these. I want to do some short episodes because I think it really helps people and we’re also busy. It’s nice to have some episodes you can go to that you just have a quick drive to the grocery store or something like that and you want to pop in a podcast and learn something really quick. But I urge you to focus. Okay?
So if you are struggling with making progress and having momentum and you find that it’s demotivating you, then sit down and make your plan. And only plan out that first piece. Plan out how you’re going to find the deals. Plan out what you’re going to try to do that. And don’t make it a list of 20 things. Make it a list of one or two things that you’re going to study and become an expert at and start implementing your business and then at the end of each day, you can look back and say “I’ve made progress, it feels great. I’m building momentum.” And before you know it, you’ll be getting calls from sellers and you’ll be moving into the next step that you need to focus on being an expert at and grow into. So, I hope you enjoyed the episodes and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, leave a rating or review. I’ll be doing shout-outs for people that leave rating and reviews and saying them on the longer interview podcast. Have a great week and talk to you later.
