87: Affirmations and Getting Money For Deals

Beka Shea

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Show Notes

I’m the youngest of 4 daughters and I grew up in rural Pennsylvania.  Being the favorite child has given me an overabundance of confidence, which I use to my advantage quite often.  (My sisters will kill me for saying that, but only because it’s true. :)). I’ve always been an exuberantly tenacious person, setting stretch goals and moving on to the next one.

Looking back at my life I find certain experiences really stand out.  I spent my junior year of high school as a congressional Page, working and living in DC running errands for Congress.  It was a truly amazing experience and I’m sad the program doesn’t exist anymore.  (But the fiscally conservative side of me totally gets it.)

I went to WPI for mechanical engineering on an ROTC scholarship, where I met my husband and some of my amazing best friends.   When I graduated I became a US Naval Officer.  My dream was to be a pilot, but unfortunately my eyes disagreed; instead I served on an Aircraft Carrier.  It was a great consolation prize, and even though it was incredibly tough at times, I will treasure it.  

After about 4 years in the Navy, I got a job as an engineer working in the energy arena, helping to build a power plant to support aircraft carriers stationed in Japan, and then a bunch of other awesome projects.  I felt way out of my league and also incredibly excited to be a part of something so massively cool.  I worked with that company for 7 years, and again was fortunate to be around some seriously amazing people.

When my 3rd daughter was born, I decided to spend less time traveling and more time at home.  We bought our first rehab, which was a hoarder house that we essentially gutted, and I was hooked.  Making ugly things pretty is my favorite.  The first year I flipped 3 houses, the second year I flipped 6, and then I moved up to one a month and started building out a team to support that.  This year we’re on track to do 20+ flips and a few wholesales, as well as venturing into the rental arena.  

As an aside – It’s crazy that I always feel like the little fish because I keep moving to bigger ponds.  If you had told me 3 years ago where I would be now, I would not believe it.  But here I am, and it still doesn’t feel like “enough”!

Recommended Books

Getting The Money by Susan Lassiter-Lyons

Getting The Money - The Simple System for Getting Private Money for Your Real Estate Deals.

The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

links

Late Day Sun

YouTube.com/FlippingJunkie

FlipPilot

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Episode Transcription

Welcome to The Flipping Junkie Podcast, the podcast put pilots everywhere. Flip pilots are the house flippers that work more on our business instead of in our business but keeping the 30,000-ft view. You’re now part of the small group of house flippers that considers themselves flip pilots. Let’s strive to build a 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 pilot. So let’s get started.

Hey everybody welcome back to The Flipping Junkie Podcast. I have a good friend on the show today I’m excited about, Beka Shea. She’s going to talk to us about flipping and everything. She’s got a background as a mechanical engineer on an ROTC scholarship. She served in the Navy for a few years, got out, and did mechanical engineering, quit engineering after her third daughter, so that she could be a part-time mom and do part-time work. Her husband left his engineering job to do a startup and so she went full time flipping houses last year. She bought a flip a month and this year she’s ramped up to include rehabs and wholesaling and they’ve got 24 in the pipeline, will hopefully do at least 40 by the end of the year which is awesome. You can see that massive improvement and that’s what I’m going to find out a little bit more about. We’re in the same mastermind group and I think that’s got a lot to do with how much she’s improved over the last year or so. If you didn’t hear the episode that I did back in episode 83 last week, if you go to episode 83 flippingjunkie.com/83 or on iTunes just look up 83, talk about that mass my group and what it’s done for Melissa and my business and we’re in that same mastermind with Beka. Let’s go ahead and just get right into it and talk to Beka.

Danny Johnson: Hey Beka welcome to the Flipping Junkie Podcast.

Beka Shea: I’m excited. I don’t think my level of excitement can be understated.

Danny Johnson: Well that’s cool. I’m excited too. I’m glad to finally have you on the show. I had to think I don’t know if you were on the show before I guess this is the first time isn’t it?

Beka Shea: First time.

Danny Johnson: Right. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Beka Shea: Just starting to play with the big kids now.

Danny Johnson: Oh yeah. Now you’re doing awesome and I already, in the intro part, I talked about your growth and your business over the last year has been incredible and congratulations on that. It’s really cool.

Beka Shea: Thank you.

Danny Johnson: And I know before the show we were talking a little bit and you talked about some of the things to help you with that growth and one of the things that you do that intrigued me and that I also do and I think a lot of successful people do and should do is affirmations and can you talk to us a little bit about that.

Beka Shea: Yeah, although I’m not sure we’ve just been brainwashed by people to do these things, but whatever. I’m doing it. Any advantage helps right? So I read The Miracle Morning about a year and a half ago and my business is getting crazy and spiraling out of control a little bit, so I figured I was going to pull it back. I was going to start doing The Miracle Morning. I wrote these affirmations as part of that and every morning I just kind of sit down and I read them. So the first one when I started, you and I talked about this before, but when I started rehabbing I had a really hard time believing that (A) I’d be able to find these houses where I could make money like, “Why would people sell to us?” And then also (B) where would I find the money to do this, so one of my first affirmation is, “I believe in the value my business creates in the lives of others.”

Danny Johnson: Yeah, I like that.

Beka Shea: I think I was telling you that when I first wrote that it was I knew I needed to get to that place. I knew I had to believe in the solution and I wasn’t there to begin with and now that I’ve done this we’ve flipped quite a few houses and talked to a lot of settlers. We’ve had some fantastic closings where just the feedback has been amazing.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. So it’s incredible seeing how much you really do help people out of their situations and giving them an option. I think some people, like you said, you struggled with it a little bit where you’re wondering like, I’ve got to offer lower than maybe what the property might be worth, but then I’ve got risk and I’ve got fixed up costs and all this stuff involved. But still, it seems kind of hard to see the value that you’re providing until you provide the value and see how happy people are that you’re providing that service to them when they maybe don’t feel like they have another option or you’re helping them avoid some of these situations that are just embarrassing. We helped a lot of soldiers that don’t want even their neighbors to know that they’re selling the house.

Beka Shea: I’ve definitely come across that. I think for me having that conversation and we’re very – people will call us and sometimes they’re like, “Oh, is this a scam?” That’s the first question we always get. No, not a scam but we’ll be upfront with you. You could probably list your house for $140 today, we might only be able to give you $100 grand and then we have that conversation of “Does this make sense?” If you list it at $140, you’re probably going to walk away with maybe $125 to $130 so that $25,000 dollar spread, can we provide enough value to you that it makes it worth that equity spread. What I’ve found is that yeah we can, especially with a flexible closing times and there’s a lot of things that we can do as investors to make people’s lives easier that a traditional buyer comes in and they’re like, “Well my least ends on the 31st, I want to move in on the 1st” but you don’t know where you’re going but I don’t care, like, we care.

Danny Johnson: Right, so flexible closing dates things like offering to – you do like leasebacks or anything like that where people can stay in the house after they received some money from the closing so that they can move and have time to deal with all that and then how quickly can you guys close? Do you also you know close very quickly for people?

Beka Shea: Yeah. We got one right now we’re trying to close in two weeks. It won’t be dependent on us. It will be dependent on the city and whether the city gets all their boxes checked in time, but we can close pretty quick. I think starting out as a rehabber, understanding the value you provide why someone would sell to you is something you have to internalize and have that conversation and know that you’re not the right fit for everyone.

Danny Johnson: Yeah and totally a mindset thing. I think seeing other people have success with that and helping sellers and then when you finally start doing it you start seeing the other side of it and think “Why was I feeling that we were thinking that way before?” When you have people tell you that you are the answer to their prayers and everything, it’s a good feeling. We get to make a little bit of money for the effort and we have to have the risk involved in everything, but help each other it works out for everybody. So, what is the next affirmation?

Beka Shea: So this one, “The success of my fellow investors fuels me with energy and joy.” I think every person starting out like they read all the literature, they listen to a ton of podcasts and at some point you hear this story like “How so-and-so went from two deals a year to three million deals a minute in two years.” And at some point I just like I kind of burned down. I kind of shut down and I was like, “This is so hard.” I kind of resented people for being successful and then I got past that and I was like I needed to get into this mindset where other people’s success brought me up. It didn’t stress me out and I’m happy to say that I’m there now.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, it’s good. I can see that. It’s true. I think a lot of people do struggle with that and you know it’s either be a little bit jealous of their success or say hey they did it, let me find out how I can do it too by modeling what they did, right?

Beka Shea: Right? I mean, that’s exactly it.

Danny Johnson: So asking the right questions not “how come they had success and I didn’t” but “how can I learn from their success.” I had struggled with it too and I probably still do with certain things where when you hear about people success you’re not hearing about what they went through to get to that. You’re just hearing about the start and finish not all the between that’s really 99.999999999% of it, right?

Beka Shea: Yeah, like Flip Pilot right? It’s just going to come out and dominate the market, but no one’s going to see that struggle.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, that’s for sure.

Beka Shea: You’ll be competing with all those other software companies I’m sure.

Danny Johnson: Really it’s just going to an instant success. That one there isn’t really any struggle, it’s just done.

Beka Shea: It’s just perfect. I think that there is blueprint that you can follow. I think that’s what I’ve really seen is that other successful investors are not – it’s not magic. There’s not some secret sauce. It really is certain steps you just – if you follow them consistently, intelligently, you can do it too.

Danny Johnson: I agree with that completely because I think it’s easier for us or for me, I don’t know I can’t speak for you, but what you’re trying to do is get more deals and get better deals and more profit. And in order to do that you’ve got to find houses to buy and so you’re trying to generate leads and it’s easier to just go out and say well what else can we do? What else can we try that’s the new great thing that’s the magic bullet or whatever that’s going to bring these great deals to me? And it’s easier to just get excited about doing that rather than taking what already works and making sure that it’s better and we just had this talk recently here in the office about trying some things to up our leads for a goal for this year because it’s an insane goal and I know that we can reach it, but it’s like, how do you best do it. How do you best go about it?

Beka Shea: What’s your insane goal?

Danny Johnson: Well, it’s 108 deals for this year.

Beka Shea: Okay, that’s awesome.

Danny Johnson: So we’re going to add we’re going to do some things, some new lead sources and we have talked about them and there were two and I was like, “Well that’s great. We can focus on these two, add these two to what we’re already doing to help bring in more and become the best at doing those two things. But the very next day, I heard talk of all these other things. It’s like here’s five or six other things and it’s like, “Woah, woah, woah!” Here’s the problem, so whenever somebody doesn’t have success with something and I just read this in a book I think it was The 12-Week Year Book.

Beka Shea: Oh, I just got that. I’m so excited to read it.

Danny Johnson: It’s been good so far and I just read this page that morning where he talked about whenever there’s a failure in something, it didn’t work as well as you thought greater than 60% of the time, you know obviously these are like made up statistics because who the heck can know that, right? But they’re just saying the majority of –

Beka Shea: 60% works all the time.

Danny Johnson: 66.23%, so it’s a matter of execution not planning. So more often than not it’s execution and not planning. And so if we just focus on these two things like I felt like we should, it’s not just try it once or just do it a little bit and then say “Well it’s not really producing, let’s add these other things.” It’s like, “Let’s figure out why. Is it the execution? Are we not being persistent enough and are we not doing it correctly, can we tweak it? And just kind of focusing on being the best at it and I think maybe that’s what people getting into the business feel like it doesn’t work for them especially like direct mail and stuff like that.

Beka Shea: Well, ___ engineers and that’s right, like, I need a big enough data set to really rule something out. If you do it once or twice and it doesn’t work, is that really a big enough dataset to know that it doesn’t work or was it just the time of year or the color of the postcard, whatever. My mantra before my affirmations was “Just do the basics well but don’t get distracted by a thousand shiny things. Do the basics well before you move on to something else.”

Danny Johnson: Oh yeah that’s huge and I don’t think that that should be underestimated ever. There are core things that the biggest investors in the country do and they do it because it works and it’s not that they have some secret thing that nobody else knows about that they’re doing. it’s not. I think it’s easy for people to think maybe that’s the case but it’s really not so that was the second affirmation. Is there more?

Beka Shea: There are. I have six. I’ll share at least four with you. We talked about this one, “My failures have made me a better investor.” This is another one that I felt like maybe when I started when I added it to my list I wasn’t so sure about it and now every morning when I read it like in my heart I think yes this is true. I’ve lost money on deals. I’ve accidentally pissed sellers off through bad communication. I’ve learned the hard way some things with contractors, but every time something like that happens, it’s a learning moment and you can become better from it, so we’re really focusing on that one as a team right now.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s like knowing that and growing that’s going to happen and that’s how you grow. I just re-read the book, have you ever read the book The Obstacle is the Way? it’s sort of like the stoic philosophy.

Beka Shea: No. But I do now.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. It’s sort of like the stoic philosophy thing, Marcus really isn’t all of that objectivity and focusing on what you can change and not worrying about what you can’t change, but then understanding that whenever things happen to you, it’s because it’s going to lead you to where you want to be. It’s like the problem came up because you needed to know how the importance of communicating with sellers throughout the process and dealing with contractors so that next time you know how to do it and if you never had those problems you just keep going and not grow and how to handle all of it.

Beka Shea: I mean, if you were to think about look back when you started and realized all the things you learned along the way, you could not have learned them all at once. You had to be at a place mentally where you could accept the lesson and hopefully take it gracefully and move on from it. But there’s no way I could have – if I had known all the lessons I would’ve learned when I started, I wouldn’t have done this and I’m glad I did.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, especially thinking about them altogether like as if they all happened at once. Thankfully they didn’t, right?

Beka Shea: Right after another, right.

Danny Johnson: Okay, so you said four and I think you’ve said three. So what’s the fourth affirmation?

Beka Shea: Fourth, “My business is set up for massive success and growth. This is the inevitable outcome of my hard work.” This one a lot of my business over the past year it’s just been building a foundation underneath of it and Bill and I talked a lot about sustainably growing your business and responsibly growing your business. One day, if you do that thing where you get a deal and you put all that money into marketing and then you don’t market for six months, that’s not going to work. So the past year for me has been okay with consistent marketing, slow growth, we reached this point when you go plateau and I didn’t really see any massive results from it and now I’m really starting to see the outcome. So now I read that my business is set up for massive success and growth and I think okay I have done the set up and then this is the result of my hard work. It was hard and there were a lot of days that I didn’t want to do it. There’s still days where I want to hit the snooze button, but it’s a good thing. Keep working hard, you’re doing the right things, you’ll make this.

Danny Johnson: Nice. So doing things for future growth and like you said building that foundation toward maybe immediately – it’s like hiring somebody and training them. You feel like taking time away from getting deals because I’m having to train, but you’re laying the foundation, so that you will have time more time to do the deals. But it’s all about working and I’m going to have to do the shameless plug for The Flip Pilot Facebook group because that’s like what it is like being a flip pilot working on your business. If you haven’t joined go to Facebook or search for Flip Pilot and join that group because that’s what we’re all in there. You are you in the group yet?

Beka Shea: Yeah. Those are some the affirmation I do. The other ones are more related to like personal life, but those are my business thoughts and I’m glad to hear one or two of your affirmations. Curious.

Danny Johnson: You put me on the spot. I wasn’t going to share any of that. A lot of it’s personal. It’s a mix of the personal in the business and so obviously I kind of do my affirmations more as prayer and profit citing so thanking God for having already accomplished them. So it’s like thank you for helping us build the team necessary to be able to do 180 deals this year and for us being able to do 108 deals and then software stuff like that, so building the best software for real estate investors and helping all the other real estate investors to be able to achieve their dreams through the use of the software to help them. You know what I mean? It’s like helping people and thank you for helping them to do that. So that’s what most of them are and then the rest is sort of just health and family and spiritual stuff.

Beka Shea: Sometimes I read them and you know about the family ones and it’s good I think to have the business and the family together because sometimes there’s the tension there between business and family and if you don’t put them on the same level, you know, sometimes I read it and I’m not putting too much emphasis on business right now, I need to pull back in the personal and then sometimes like, “Okay, I kind of been slacking” time to think back into business.

Danny Johnson: I forgot who said that, was it Gary Keller in that book I think maybe about the whole like balance thing where you’re never going to be able to do a complete balance of the same equal amount for family, spiritual health, and business. It kind of varies and it’s just making sure that you don’t swing too far in one direction before coming back and spending time back in the other one, but it’s constantly changing and everybody has different seasons in their life and kind of understanding that.

Beka Shea: Yeah, seasons of business. My husband is now doing a startup. Well there’s they’re starting to gain traction and so now I’m pulling back. We’re rebalancing a little bit, so just figuring that out.

Danny Johnson: Cool.

Beka Shea: Yeah. So you told me in this PDF to talk about things that are helping you my business right now.

Danny Johnson: Did I?

Beka Shea: You wrote that PDF four years ago didn’t you? You don’t even know exactly.

Danny Johnson: I didn’t even know it is still going out. I guess it’s like the show prep right, so just be prepared to talk.

Beka Shea: I feel like I’ve been telling this to the newer investors all over you to get to a certain point before it resonates, but like this year with The Miracle Morning starting but also going back to Gary Keller and Keller went to time blocking, I started doing that in January, carving out set times for things and protecting them on my schedule and that has been a huge help. Also my struggle is to protect them.

Danny Johnson: I know it for sure. So was that part of also because we probably started listening – I don’t know if you recommend it or just Terry recommended it to both of us, but the Buffini Podcast.

Beka Shea: Oh, love that podcast. Yeah, you were in the car. Terry recommended it last year and then I think you’re talking about it that we saw each other last. So yeah he’s a big fan of time blocking. I mean it’s kind of a standard thing, but then The 12-Week Year he’s talking about that and setting your goal because before I just felt like I was constantly responding to whatever thing just popped up and not necessarily the important things of the day, like, I have four deals closing next week, I have to find money for all of them, but if I just respond to like every little fire—

Danny Johnson: So how do you do that though? How do you plan it? So it’s something that’s sort of like a known thing, but how do you actually do that? Do you every that evening planned the week and the priority stuff or the stuff that’s most important in your life at the moment first and block those off?

Beka Shea: I was looking to see if I had a turnout on my calendar here. But I sat down and I thought long and hard about what were the items in my business that had to be done on a consistent basis and basically every morning from – so I do my miracle morning from 7-8 or 8-9 depending on what’s going on with the kids that morning and then from 9-12 I time blocked. On Monday I do finances, so my bookkeeper runs are her reports. I review those. I do a 6-week projection of all the deals we have in the pipeline and make sure that I’m not going to run out of money. And then Tuesdays I set aside for team like we have all our team meetings Tuesday morning and Wednesday it’s just like an admin day to clean out my inbox if it’s gotten overwhelming and then Thursday I try to touch base with my lenders and Friday I do marketing. Usually it only takes me around an hour or an hour and a half to do any one of those things except for the team meetings. But inevitably little distractions do pop up so having that 3-hour window is kind of necessary.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. So it’s not like rigid where you feel bad at the end of each day because I still kind of have a problem with that with my plan. I don’t have it on my desk right now, but it’s like I put an impossible amount of stuff on there every day and so at the end of every day instead of feeling like “Man, I conquered the world” it’s like, “Oh I didn’t do all this stuff.” That’s like a big struggle always.

Beka Shea: I try to write down – I think last fall I bought one of these planners. It’s got hour by hour each day and at the bottom I write all the stuff I want to accomplish. It has a priority level there I don’t listen to that, but it also helped me see in a block where my time was already committed and so every Sunday night I sit down and I write out for the week any hard appointments and on Monday I put all the to-dos and I cross them off. Whatever doesn’t get done gets moved to the next day. It’s not perfect. I still feel like, you mentioned the spinning plates, I still feel like I’m the bottleneck. Last year, it was just me and a project manager and then in June I hired my first guy. He was kind of helping answer the phones and book my appointments and now there are six people who are at heart of this and I just feel like there’s never enough of me to go around.

Danny Johnson: You guys have grown a lot though I mean over the last year because of that. And then like you said, a lot of it’s like doing the foundation and starting to see the results of that and the benefits of that. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the funding of all this because I think a lot of people struggle with how the heck do you paid a scale like that. How are you able to keep enough money coming in to handle these rehabs and keep everything going?

Beka Shea: Yeah, there’s a reason why that’s the Monday morning task.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, before the meetings even.

Beka Shea: Yeah, before the meeting where everything. I think those were my two biggest mental blocks when I started were (A) How am I going to find these houses at a discount? Do they really exist? And (B) How am I going to fund it when I do? So the first property I did, actually, I partnered my first property. I had some money, probably not one half a deal and I went to someone I knew who had some money and we partnered on our first deal. We split 50/50 and then that deal went well and we both decided amicably to split ways and do it on our own, but we still remain great friends. And so then even with the profit on my first deal plus my initial money I still didn’t have enough to do another deal, so I had to go out and raise. I knew I needed to raise about $50 or $60,000 and I figured – I knew this even back then that people don’t lend money – they’ll lend money based on a deal, but they’re really lending money based on you and your credibility. So I put together this letter and I sent it to all my friends and family. I probably sent out like 50 of them and it just said, “You know that I started doing this rehabbing things. I did my first deal. Here were the numbers on it. I want to do another one. I’m looking to raise money. I’m looking for a minimum of $10,000. I’m giving you 12% interest on your money if you let me have it and the first five people that say yes I’ll give you 13%.” I still remember somebody calling me up and being like, “Did you really just send me a letter asking me for $10,000? Are you crazy?”

Danny Johnson: But did it work out?

Beka Shea: It worked. I raised my money. I used it to do a house and it was secured, so we had to go through this kind of – I brought an attorney and we went through this complicated set up an LLC that had a security position against the property, which all the six lenders were part owner of and then after that it got done and I was like “Okay, great” moved on to the next one. I just asked, I said, “Hey would you be willing to lend me your money long term? Like on a year promissory note. It was not going to be secured but I’ll give you a good interest rate and at the end of the year you can decide what to do with it” And that was really key. I mean, basically they were making me a business loan and I still have some of those lenders to this day, they’ve lent me more money now—

Danny Johnson: So before you decided to do that though, did you have that doubt why would anybody do that for me? I mean did that cross your mind or did you just think “Oh, I’m going to try that. I don’t know.”

Beka Shea: Lots of doubt.

Danny Johnson: But you just did it anyway just to see, right? I mean it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Beka Shea: Yeah. I think I had read somewhere about people around you have more money than you probably think and they don’t really know what to do with it. They’re so busy with their lives they might not know what to do with it. So I figured, I was an engineer I knew some people had some money and I also knew, this won’t apply to everybody, but I knew that if this house flipping thing tanked and for some reason I lost all $60,000 that I could go back and get another engineering job and I could pay them back in a year, so there was kind of a backup plan, but luckily that didn’t happen. I paid some of them back and some of them let me keep the money

Danny Johnson: Nice. And so with you ramping up the business, did you start reaching out to people that were already lending to other investors or had bigger amounts that they can lend?

Beka Shea: I did. And then I read Susan Lasater Lyons’ book Getting The Money, have you read that?

Danny Johnson: No. I haven’t read that. I read it last January. It was recommended to me by another investor and it changed the way that I approached getting money. It was like a mindset shift. As Bill says, “I’m the price.” Once you start getting credibility and doing what you say you’re going to do it repeatedly, kind of building up that social credit, it’s a lot easier. I’ve used hard money in the past which is great. if I’m going to do a deal and maybe it’s $30,000 profit and I have to give $10 or $12,000 of that to a hard money lender but otherwise I wouldn’t do the deal then it makes sense, but they have a lot of hoops to jump to. So I just started having a conversation after that book of reaching out to people and just saying, “Here’s what I do. If you’re interested in hearing more, here’s my last lender, made $7,000 on this house. Are you interested in something like that? Do you have lazy money sitting around?” And so now anyone who shows interest to me, basically we have a conversation. I sent this lender credibility packet that talks about my company, what we do, have some examples of some deals we’ve done and then I kind of nurture that relationship. When they’re ready and when I have a deal available then I’ll send an email and I’ll say, “Here’s the deal coming up. Are you interested?” And it worked great.

Danny Johnson: And you were kind enough to send me that credibility packet that you send out.

Beka Shea: I’m very proud of it.

Danny Johnson: It’s like what, 6 pages, 7 pages maybe. So you have to go to YouTube and watch the video to see each of them. I’ll put it on the show notes page.

Beka Shea: There are before and after pictures in there which is what everyone really wants to see.

Danny Johnson: That’s true and then you’ve got pictures that looks like of your team and it shows some of the numbers from those deals. This is incredible. So yeah, it’s going to be on the show notes page at flippingjunkie.com/87 you can download that. And then you also have the lender letter that you send out.

Beka Shea: Yup. I sent over the first letter I sent to lenders after my first deal. So if you’re just getting started, that’s a good one to help build your credibility and send out to friends and family and then as you start to get bigger— yeah, I was so cute back then.

Danny Johnson: But we should also recommend everybody have these checked out before you send them out because there are sort of other security things right and things like that about requesting money. Do you know any of those rules you got to be careful for?

Beka Shea: Yeah, the one is like I don’t blast – If I have a deal that needs funding, I won’t blast it out there. I try to build those relationships beforehand. You can’t just walk up to somebody on the street and be like, “I need $100,000 to buy this house” because that solicitation. You can’t walk up to people on the street and do all kinds of things. It’s considered solicitation. I like to put it out there and just kind of tell them the story, “Here is what I’m doing and I’ll need access to capital at some point. If you’re interested in being part of this journey, give me a call and we can talk about what that might look like in the future.” Because then you establish that relationship and so you’re not soliciting them. They’ve shown an interest in lending.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, that’s good. You can also share numbers from previous ones like Mr. X lent this amount of money and I was able to pay him this much because that’s not soliciting, you’re just telling them what you’ve done in the past.

Beka Shea: It’s a fact.

Danny Johnson: Statements of fact. Yeah, so that’s important to be careful of. And so, how many lenders would you say you work with right now with how many you guys are doing?

Beka Shea: So we probably have about – I don’t even know how many deals we have going right now—8-10 deals and I probably have to date a little bit I probably a rolodex of about 30 people showing interest who have shown interest at some point in lending. So I try to touch base with them frequently, kind of tell them where we’re at, what we’re doing, and then when a deal comes up that fits their criteria, like someone may say, “I have $100,000 to lend” and I’m like, “Okay, great.” So I know that if I have $200,000 house I need to purchase and I need to find funding the whole thing, I need to probably find somebody else or – I’m trying to of any of them have any criteria, but also some of them will say – I’ve had people come to me and said “Hey, I’m buying a house next year. We have set $100,000 aside for a down payment and we know we’re going to buy our house sometime of February, can you use this money between now and then and pay us interest on it?” And those won’t be secured to a property, but maybe 6 months or 7 months. Instead of that money just sitting in a bank account or closing, it’s with me, it’s working, it’s making interest and that has seemed to work out really well for all parties.

Danny Johnson: Nice. So most of this is all sort of been word of mouth and you’re just reaching out to friends family and that kind of thing. Cool.

Beka Shea: Tell people what you’re doing and tell them what you need. I think in all things are like people actually really want to help you succeed if you’re a nice person. And I have gotten much better in the past year or two at asking or what I need, saying, “Hey, this is the thing that I’m having trouble with right now. Can anybody help me with it?” Inevitably somebody comes up and it’s like, “Hey, I can help you” or “I got a friend you should talk to them.” That’s my other give.

Danny Johnson: Networking Yeah that’s yeah really really really big because you never know when you talk to somebody and just even an idea or somebody for you to talk to maybe they don’t know how to help you but they know somebody that’s been through the same thing recently and they talk to you about it. But just like you, you shared with the software stuff one of your friends that had gone through setting up a startup and running that and being successful and you put us on a call and so that thought that was really cool and helpful. So thank you.

Beka Shea: Yeah, right. I think there’s a lot of power just connecting people. We don’t expect stuff in return, but hopefully somebody will return the favor to you someday when you need it, so good karma.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. Well it’s just setting up things the right way and when we started this conversation you talked about you know helping sellers and at first you were wondering, am I really helping, I’m trying to make a profit, and am I helping them, then you come around to where it really is and you’re striving to help more and more sellers. And I talked with somebody just the other day, Grayson, who works with us and we were talking about that exact thing and finding what true success is and the true success is helping people and a lot of people do go into it with wanting to help provide for their family and things like that, it’s fine. But you find that you start to really find true success when you turn it around and realize that what you’re doing is helping people and that’s what you strive to do and the success comes with it. And so I just want to throw that in. It seems like that’s what you’re doing and it’s big.

Beka Shea: Yeah. I agree completely with that. I’m not struggling, but I’ve been mulling over the thought of like what’s the point, what’s my purpose here. Once all your financial needs are met, what is your purpose? I keep coming back to the thing that I think it’s relationships, that relationships are what matter and so if if that’s my belief then helping other people solve whatever their problems are is my driving force and also not yelling at my kids as much.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. It can be trying.

Beka Shea: I heard your daughter locked herself in her bedroom the other day.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. Melissa took the doorknob off. It’s still off and in fact before—

Beka Shea: You get no doorknob.

Danny Johnson: Right. Before I came back to the office to do this interview I was actually at my house real quick around lunchtime and the kids were there and playing in her room and they’ve created a huge tent. Their older sister was there and she created this huge tent inside of the room. There was like a teepee in there and they’ve got the sheets coming off of it and so it’s like a movie theater underneath very cool. But they wouldn’t let me in. They were trying to hide from me and they wouldn’t let me in. She was just holding the door and so I stayed out and I just looked through that little hole where the doorknob used to be and she was looking right at me and then she blew, but there was like a bunch of the wood pieces and stuff in there still that just all went right into my eye.

Beka Shea: And I’m sure you didn’t yell at them. I’m sure you were like, “Oh, honey”

Danny Johnson: Exactly. That’s the way I am. It’s like, “Oh, it’s fine. My eyes are bleeding but that’s okay.” She didn’t mean any harm by it. I really didn’t get mad at her, but I mean maybe just a little bit.

Beka Shea: Man, you’re amazing if you didn’t. I’m Irish though, I have a temperate control.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. Well, Melissa is usually the one spending a lot more of the time watching them, so I think her fuse is a little bit shorter than mine. But she’s been awesome with managing the flipping business and the family and everything so it’s been really cool and she’s been on more podcasts with me and she’s actually going to be on Pili and Jason’s podcast believe it or not.

Beka Shea: Awesome. I love it.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, so very cool.

Beka Shea: I can start a podcast but that market seems saturated.

Danny Johnson: I thought it was just mine and a couple other of my friends podcasts and that’s all. I don’t check.

Beka Shea: There’s like three, The Flipping Junkie, Brian Buffini, and Planet Money. That’s it.

Danny Johnson: I haven’t checked out the Planet Money one. I have to check that one out. You do have your blog though.

Beka Shea: I do have a blog. I was inspired by your blog. I have to do this blog that you are, this story gets old after a while, but you’re the reason I got into flipping being because you wrote your blog detailing all your numbers, your leads and being an analytical person, I was like, “Oh! Okay.” You lifted up the hood and I got to look inside and when I saw that, I was like, “Okay this is magic. This is a numbers thing. I can do this.” So I was so inspired by your blog that I decided to chronicle my journey in the hopes that someday maybe it would help somebody else, forward, back whatever. So I have a blog now these days it’s mostly kind of business related but in the beginning it was like the nuts and bolts of “I sold this property. Here is my numbers.”

Danny Johnson: Well that’s very cool. I think everybody listening right now is like, what is the blog?

Beka Shea: Oh sorry, sorry. I’m not really good at promo. It’s called latedaysun.blogspot.com. My favorite color is yellow and late day sun is a particular shade of paint that I think is just beautiful so that’s how it got the name. I’m wearing a yellow shirt you can see, so obviously my favorite.

Danny Johnson: I just keep looking at the Three Little Pigs picture in the background. It’s a very well done piece of work.

Beka Shea: Budding artiste in my family.

Danny Johnson: It’s nice.

Beka Shea: They’re not going to be engineers. They’re probably going to be like actresses.

Danny Johnson: Yeah, let’s see. So latedaysun.blogspot.com and I’ll put that in the show notes page also at flippingjunkie.com/87, so that people can go check it out and read it and there’s a really good write up in there. One of the blog posts I really enjoyed because it was all about flipping junkie and how flipping junkie—

Beka Shea: I wrote a blog last night about being on the podcast today and how excited I was.

Danny Johnson: I need to go check it out. I’m going to go check it out.

Beka Shea: So that’s all in there. And it basically was like, “How did I get to this point? How did they get to the point where I was reading this guy’s blog to now I’m in the same arena as him and being interviewed?” It was very mad.

Danny Johnson: I know it’s cool. It’s also been such a short period of time too.

Beka Shea: Yeah. Sometimes it feels really long and sometimes it feels really fast. It’s like kids I guess, the longest shortest time.

Danny Johnson: Yeah. But if you just keep at it and before you know it you’re here and having success and growing quickly and it’s very cool.

Beka Shea: Yeah. One of my other life goals, part of my meditation thing it’s like to bring my employees success levels that they couldn’t achieve anywhere else. That’s my goal. I don’t know how big my company will get to be, maybe it’ll just stay the 6 of us or just 6 people, but I want them to look back at some point and say, “I’m so glad I joined her team. I can’t believe what I’ve accomplished.” And so let’s see in 4 or 5 years if that’s the case.

Danny Johnson: I know you’re going to be absolutely a huge success seriously though because like the reason why and the goal like you mentioned is to help the people around you and that’s what makes true success like we talked about just a little bit ago, so very nice.

Beka Shea: Right. Yeah.

Danny Johnson: Alright. So we’re going to just wrap it up. Is there anything else that you’d like to say to everybody listening? Any piece of wisdom?

Beka Shea: Sometimes it’s better not to know the journey that you’re on, just set out and do it and enjoy every step of the way as much as you can, but just do it. There’s no magic sauce. If you’re committed to it, you make it happen too.

Danny Johnson: Great, couldn’t said it better.

Beka Shea: Thank you. I’m so excited that I got to be on this podcast. If I could only frame a podcast and put it on my wall.

Danny Johnson: Well, you could print out a screen grab from the video.

Beka Shea: Excellent.

Danny Johnson: Have you seen the mail? Like there’s direct mail where you can pay, I don’t know how much it is, but you can actually pay to have direct mail with a video. It’s got a little screen on it and you can play a 4-minute video on it.

Beka Shea: This is awesome, the moving picture.

Danny Johnson: Oh wait. We just shared the secret thing that we’re doing to get all of our deals that nobody knows about.

Beka Shea: Oh man. People should put all their money into that. Yeah, right now.

Danny Johnson: We haven’t really tried that, but if somebody does let me know how it works out. I don’t know if the cost— maybe if it’s a highly targeted list it makes sense. But you might just freak people out.

Beka Shea: I would be creeped out about that actually. You don’t want to be too much up in people’s business. You just want to knock on their door. You don’t want to just bust into their house. You know what I’m saying?

Danny Johnson: Yeah a battering rant, “Hey, heard you were facing some troubles…” Alright. Well thank you so much for being on the show Beka.

Beka Shea: Yeah. Thanks for having me Danny. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Talk to you soon.

Alright. Another podcast episode. Thank you so much Beka. There was a lot of great information shared in there and lots of stuff to get on the show notes page including the first lender letter and then the credibility kit which is super helpful and that’s going to be on the show notes page flippingjunkie.com/87 and I wanted to do some shout outs for the ratings and reviews on iTunes for the podcast. I’m going to be doing some of those, so if you are enjoying this podcast please go to flippingjunkie.com/rate, R-A-T-E, to find out how to do that or just on iTunes. Click there to rate and review. Share it with me and I’ll give you some shout outs for people that do that. And so, we’ve got a new one here, “Great podcast.” There’s no name, so I can’t give a shout out for the name, but “I’m almost embarrassed by how excited I get to listen to the podcast. It’s been excellent providing insights and answering questions I didn’t even know to ask. Thank you so much for putting it together.” Well, you’re welcome and thank you leaving that rating in review.

Another one here by Huckneck which is, “Best podcast for flippers. If you’re looking to flip houses, there’s no better podcast out there. I drive a lot, so I went through a lot of podcast on the topic real estate. This by far is the most focused, approachable, and filled with usable content. Danny’s very down to earth, not pushy salesperson and really focused on creating value for the listeners. Started from Episode 16. He goes to a different aspect of the business that you need to know in order to succeed. Broken down by bite-sized chunk step-by-step format. Thank you Danny for the amazing podcast.” No, thank you for taking the time to rate and review I really do appreciate it.

Everybody have a great week and we’ll see you next time.