Real Estate Investing With Jay Conner
It doesn’t matter if you are earning a million dollars a year unless you are enjoying the freedom that comes along with your business.
In today’s Real Estate Investing show with Jay Conner, Jay and his guest Danny Johnson talk about automation and organizing your business. How it will greatly help you build a real estate business that works for you and not you working the business.
Danny Johnson is a veteran real estate investor that has been flipping and wholesaling since 2003 having done nearly 1,000 deals. The financial and time freedom his real estate business created for him has allowed him to use his software background to develop the Forefront CRM for real estate investors.
He also hosts a new podcast called ‘Braver’ which is devoted to being honest about what’s holding you back so that you can transition from doing everything in your business to having the business work for you.
Timestamps:
0:01 – Get Ready To Be Plugged Into The Money
2:00 – Jay’s New Book: “Where To Get The Money Now” –https://www.JayConner.com/Book
2:41 – Today’s guest: Danny Johnson
5:17 – Getting involve in different Masterminds greatly affects the success of your real estate business.
7:25 – “ Flipping Houses Expose” – Danny Johnson
9:19 – What is your conversion now compare to when you started?
12:04 – Importance of attending immediately to a motivated seller.
13:30 – Danny Johnson’s different marketing strategies
16:17 – Significance of building rapport with your motivated seller.
18:16 – How Danny got into real estate?
21:39 – How did you transition from wearing all the hats to building a real estate business that’s working for you and not you working the business?
27:02 – The Forefront CRM for real estate investors.
29:03 – Connect with Danny Johnson – https://www.forefrontcrm.com
30:15 – Danny’s parting comments: Look at the next step that you need to do. Do it and take action.
Private Money Academy Conference:
https://jaysliveevent.com/live/?oprid=&ref=42135
Have you read Jay’s new book: Where to Get The Money Now? It is available FREE (all you pay is the shipping and handling) at https://www.JayConner.com/Book
Free Webinar: http://bit.ly/jaymoneypodcast
Jay Conner is a proven real estate investment leader. Without using his own money or credit, Jay maximizes creative methods to buy and sell properties with profits averaging $64,000 per deal.
What is Real Estate Investing? Live Private Money Academy Conference
YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/c/RealEstateInvestingWithJayConner
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Listen to our Podcast:
Jay Conner and Danny Johnson
Jay Conner
00:00:30
Well, what in the world was I talking about a second ago on plugging you into the money? Well, you see back in 2003, my wife, Carol Joy, and I started investing in single-family houses here in Eastern North Carolina. The first six years, we relied on local banks and mortgage companies and institutional money. And you know what? In January of 2009, we were cut off, lost our lines of credit, no way to fund our deals. I was introduced to this wonderful world of private money. And since that time, we have not missed out on a deal for not having the money.
And when I say private money, I’m not talking about hard money. I’m not talking about brokers. I’m not talking about institutional money. I’m talking about getting funding from individuals right now. We’ve got 46 individuals investing in funding our deals. We haven’t missed out on deals since 2009. And guess what? You can experience the very same thing and be in control of your real estate investing business. So what am I talking about? I got a free gift for you. I just released my brand new book, “Where To Get The Money Now,” subtitled: “How and Where to Get Money for Your Real Estate Deals Without Relying on Traditional Hard Money Lenders.” It hit number one on Amazon just a few short months ago. And so I want to send this book to you, just cover delivery. I will tell you how you can get this brand new book for free. Go to www.JayConner.com/Book
You know that I have amazing guests on the show and today is no different whatsoever. My dear friend, my fellow mastermind member is a veteran real estate investor. I’ve been doing this for a long, long time. I mean, he’s been flipping, he’s been wholesaling all the way back to the very same year that Carol Joy and I started, back in 2003, and he’s done almost a thousand deals. Well, the financial and time freedom that his real estate investing business created for him has allowed him to use his software background. Yes, his software background is to develop what’s called The Forefront CRM for real estate investors.
In other words, how do you keep up with all those contacts? How do you keep up with the buyers and the sellers and everything that’s going on? Well, he’s going to be telling us about that because I tell you what, I was still totally paper until about 4 years ago, maybe as recent as 3 years ago. So you want to organize your life. My guest is going to get to helping you on that in just a second. He also hosts a podcast that’s called, “Braver,” which is devoted to being honest about what’s holding you back so that you can transition from doing everything in your business to having the business work for you. And I tell you that reminds me of what my dad taught me years ago. “Make sure you get your business to where you’re running it and it’s not running you.” So we’re going to talk with my special guest right now about automation, organizing your business, and one of the best CRMs for keeping up with all your contacts, which he developed and calls, “The Forefront CRM.” With that, welcome to the show, my friend, Danny Johnson. How are you?
Danny Johnson
00:04:40
Doing great. Thank you for having me on, Jay.
Jay Conner
00:04:43
Absolutely, Danny. We’re glad to have you and tell everybody where you are speaking from today.
Danny Johnson
00:04:49
Well, I’m in San Antonio, Texas, and yeah, I like that, you know, we both started in 2003. And how you introduced me that way, that you didn’t just read the bio, like you really put it out there in a great way. It made it sound a lot more interesting. I was excited. I was like, “Who’s he going to be talking with?” But it was actually me.
Jay Conner
00:05:16
Absolutely, Danny. Well, you know, we are in a mastermind together and masterminds, being a member of a mastermind, has just been such a huge part of my real estate investing business. I really started getting involved in masterminds- Right now, I’m in 3 masterminds, got involved back in 2009. And so when you’re hanging around people that are of light minds and you’re helping each other and your business, it’s bound to grow, right?
Danny Johnson
00:05:44
Absolutely. I’m a part of 2, been a part of probably 6 in my investing career. And it was a pivotal moment in the first one that I joined where I was doing everything in the business. My ex-wife and I were doing everything in our business, wearing all the hats. We had contractors, we had an agent to sell properties, but beyond that, we did everything and that was 8 or 9 years. And it wasn’t until I joined a mastermind and hung out with people that were operating the business in a way that allowed them the time to actually work on the business more than they worked in the business. And having that firsthand experience with people that were doing it, showed that it was completely possible, and cut out a lot of time and headache and hassle and mistakes. So that was great.
Jay Conner
00:06:41
Well, I can certainly relate. I remember I had been in the business from 2003 until about 2008, five years. And I came around the corner one night and there was my Carol Joy sitting at the kitchen table, crying with 3 different checkbooks in front of her. And that was at 10 o’clock at night. And she told me she couldn’t handle it anymore. And I learned right there that you can be making a million dollars a year and it doesn’t really matter unless we are enjoying the reason we got into real estate and that’s to enjoy the freedom that comes along with it. So yeah, it took me an entire year to really hone in and start automating my business. So I can definitely relate to your story, Danny.
Danny Johnson
00:07:23
It’s interesting. I had a book that I put out a while back called “Flipping House Exposed,” and that was 34 weeks in the life of my business where I documented every single lead that came in. And basically week by week I was breaking down what I spent on marketing, where I put my marketing, the leads that came in, all that kind of stuff. But the thing that came out of that was out of those 34 weeks, I generated 495 motivated seller leads. So these are qualified leads where people called or submitted on my website that they wanted an offer on their house. Guess how many of those I turned into a deal?
Jay Conner
00:08:04
Probably less than you would have desired.
Danny Johnson
00:08:09
Right. I wouldn’t bring it up. But yeah, it was about 11 during that 34 weeks. Right? Yeah. So that’s about one out of every 45. And so a lot of people, got into this business after reading that book and were telling me it was so great because it showed me it was a numbers game, but it wasn’t until a little bit later that I realized looking back, it was like I was killing myself trying to have more success by doing more of the same thing that I had original success with. So it was okay when I was generating, doing maybe 20 to 30 deals a year. It was okay to be focused mainly on the lead generation. Right? If I want to do more deals, I’ve got to get more leads. I mean, in my mind, that’s how it was. I don’t have a business background. I wasn’t structured in business, and looking back in hindsight, it was treating it like a hobby. It really was just, “Hey, I’m having fun. I’m doing that,” which is great, but it comes at a price. And that price is that hamster wheel of having some success and trying to have more success by just doing more of the same thing without really dialing anything in, where I’m really looking at them.
Jay Conner
00:09:18
What’s your conversion now compared to when you started?
Danny Johnson
00:09:22
Well, now I’m actually back to operating as a solo-preneur with the real estate and just doing rental properties. But we did grow from that, we were doing everything and built a team and we got to the point with the team where we were getting about one out of every five leads became a deal.
Jay Conner
00:09:41
That’s different than one out of every 40 or 50.
Danny Johnson
00:09:43
Right. So looking back, had we had the team, had we had the business dialed in and this doesn’t even require a team. It really just dials, it requires somebody to know what’s going on in their business and fix the parts that are broken because it wasn’t so much the leads were a problem. It was what we were doing once the leads came into our business. Right?
Jay Conner
00:10:06
And in addition to not only what you were doing with them, but what you were not doing with them.
Danny Johnson
00:10:13
But that’s probably the bigger issue. So what happened? What made the transition? Obviously the team helped because as a one-man-show, taking the calls, going on appointments, scheduling contractors, checking on jobs, you get to where you’re having a lot of appointments and meetings with different people. And when those motivated sellers are calling, if you can’t take those calls right away, number one, that’s a huge problem. Somebody has to live answer that call right away because that’s a truly motivated seller, the one that’s saying, “Hey, just get over here. I wanted this thing done yesterday. I’m just done.” If you’re not the first person that answers that call, whoever is, is getting the deal most likely. And so having a way, no matter what you do.
And I did this business 3 years part-time while I was a software developer working for a defense contractor where I couldn’t even have my cell phone with me at my job. I know it’s been long enough. I had it on vibrate and if it went off, I would run out into the stairwell and return the call right away because I didn’t want to miss out on those. Once you do that, make sure you’re answering all those calls, having those come in, what happens with the building of rapport, talking with that seller, listening to them, not just asking for all the details of the house and just being all about that and scheduling an appointment, just being done. There’s a lot that goes into building that rapport with the seller. Almost all of my deals came from motivated seller direct to seller marketing. Just found that those were always the best deals and helped us actually get through that market correction back in ’07, ’08, but by just going direct to the seller and getting those great deals.
Jay Conner
00:12:03
Since you bring it up, let’s talk about it because this is a really important point. And that is, in my experience over the years, there are 5 key components to a successful real estate investing business when it comes to talking with and marketing to motivated sellers. And this podcast is about you. It’s not about me. So I’m only going to talk about one and you already said the word, and that is the word, “immediacy.” When a motivated seller, and of course we’re talking about off-market sellers, we’re not talking about sellers or bank-owned properties that are in the multiple listing service in this market, you can’t rely on that anyway. But when that call comes in, whether it’s from a Google ad or it’s direct mail, or doesn’t matter how you are getting leads coming in, it’s like the most important thing that could ever happen is for someone on the team, your acquisition is to ever to be talking to that person like right away.
And you know, it’s the age-old argument. Do you take the calls live? I mean, there’s an argument for that. Do you have them get an operating service? And then you’re like, get through the rigmarole of trying to get them back on the phone. So share with us your experience of taking the call live, wherein if you’re not doing it yourself, which I never recommend to people. So if you have an acquisition, do you answer the phone live in the morning to when at night?
Danny Johnson
00:13:50
That’s one of the big things that made a huge difference. So we had somebody come in as an acquisitions person to take that off of my plate. And they did take the calls for a while because it made it also seamless for when somebody is answering the phone, they talk to somebody and then that’s the same person that’s coming to the house. So that’s beneficial. As you grow, that’s going to be to where it becomes a problem because that person is going on appointments and they can’t take those calls while they’re at an appointment. And we don’t want them feeling like, “Oh, I’m going to miss a call or a call came in. I missed it. I need to wrap this appointment up.” Everything that we do, we spend so much time and energy looking at different marketing tactics, executing on those and doing all of that stuff to get those calls in and then to get to the appointment.
So all of that stuff to that point is to be at that appointment. And if we’re not spending the time that’s required at that appointment where we’re wasting all the rest of it, why are we doing anything else? So our acquisitions people, it was spend as much time as you need to at each of these, make sure that you’ve got at least 2 hours so that you can sit down on that gross couch or whatever it is, and have a conversation with the seller because this is what this is all about. It’s really getting to the bottom of why they’re selling, understanding their problem, and then showing them how we can help them. It’s not just, “Here’s the offer. Do you want it? Come on, sell your house.” It’s none of that stuff. So, in answering the calls, once you have that where you have the ability to bring on that lead intake person, then that person should be somebody that’s super friendly.
That’s easy to build rapport with. That’s the first person that they’re gonna interact within your business, right? They’re representing your business. And so if you can have somebody that doesn’t even have to be in an office or anything like that, this could be your mother-in-law, this could be your aunt, somebody that’s just at home all day that can take these calls. It doesn’t need to be a professional hire or anything like that. And just a part-time, “I’m going to pay you per call that you take,” or something like that. And you train them up just to be friendly. It really requires somebody that’s super friendly that’s not going to just go down the list of questions, ask them, get them answered, and then get off the call. Because we want the person saying, “Wow, that person, this company is great. I really liked that person I just talked to.”
Jay Conner
00:16:15
Building rapport is so important and people are gonna pick up on as to, do you really care about what they’ve got going on? As you say, if there wasn’t a problem with the property, if they didn’t have a personal problem or both, we wouldn’t be there looking to help solve the problems. For example, this past Friday, I was at a seller’s house myself, right here in Morgan City, North Carolina for 2 hours and 10 minutes. Myself personally. Most of the time that doesn’t happen because even with crazy times going on, I’m still traveling a lot or I’ve started traveling a lot. But something told me that I needed to go on this appointment. We were in a small market, only 40,000 people willing to do 2-3 deals a month, but the average profits were $70,000.
So not to get into the details of that visit, but I knew it was going to take an un-rushed amount of time, un-rushed. And when I’m visiting with a potential seller, I use a technique that I call, “awkward silence.” I ask a question and I just let them talk. And when they sound like they’re finished, I go, “Uh-hmm” and they talk more. And so I tell them right up front in the visit, I say, “You know what, there’s a good number of times I’m not able to help people. And the reason why is because every transaction I do, it’s got to be a win for you. It’s gotta be a win for your husband. It’s gotta be a win for me.” And so I go ahead and get the white elephant out of the room and just let them know that I’m not here to high-pressure you. I’m here to see what we can do to work together, to make things happen. And as you said, establishing a rapport is very, very important. So let’s get right into what your specialty is, Danny, and that’s the CRM keeping up with all the leads, right? That you developed from your background as a software developer. But before we jump into that, just tell us your background as to how you got into real estate.
Danny Johnson
00:18:33
So I got into real estate. I was going through college to get my degree in computer science. My father started flipping houses and when I was growing up, he was a contractor for a real estate investor. And so as a kid, I would go to the demos and I would have to haul out the junk and all this stuff from the demos of the houses. So I got an early taste of that, but my father was a contractor at that time. So in college, he began being mentored by the person he had done a lot of contracting work for in the past. And I just saw his joy. It was just like a whole new him, my father. I’d never seen him like this. He had always struggled in his life. He had always started in different businesses that didn’t succeed.
And we had to move year after year and sometimes getting evicted. And it was just a rough, rough time and I’ve got three other siblings, but in college, it just all broke loose for him. Like he was just having so much fun talking about the deals he was doing driving around town. And I just felt this surge with him. He was like, “Oh, I want to do that, too. That’s what I want to do.” So I started part-time, also getting into the business and he worked with small towns around San Antonio and I worked in San Antonio. So the relationship was really, “Well, you go find out how you want to invest, whether that’s fix-and-flip or rentals or whatever, you just go and learn what you want to learn. When you have an issue that you come against as you’re taking action, call me.”
So it wasn’t hand-holding, what-do-I-do-next? kind of thing. That relationship was like a mentor relationship. And then his mentor also was available to me, too, whenever I had questions, which was great because it forced me to take action and make mistakes. And I tell people that one of the first, I think it was the first contract that I did directly with a motivated seller, I signed the contract then I went to the title company and I was in the parking lot. And I had to, literally, call my dad and say, “What am I supposed to say when I bring this inside of here?” I didn’t even know that step of it, but the beautiful thing was I was out there taking action, right? And even though I wasn’t well-versed in all the different things, from putting a deal under contract to getting it sold, I was taking action.
That was the important thing. So I was in the business part-time for 3 years. I was making good money as a software developer, it was really hard to leave that steady paycheck. And they let me go, thankfully, I guess they caught onto the fact that most of my day was spent on real estate investor forums and things like that. But anyway, they let me go and I became a full-time investor and my ex-wife and I ran that for 8 or 9 years alone. And then we started bringing on a team which started with my brother-in-law. He was one of the first people to sign on. And we grew that team and learned a lot after we joined the masterminds. And that’s where we started really systematizing the business, and a great book called, “Traction” by Gino Wickman really showed us how to operate the business like a true business.
Jay Conner
00:21:38
You just mentioned the phrase of transitioning in your business. So walk us through that process. How did you transition from doing everything, wearing all the hats to really building a true real estate investing business that was working for you instead of you working for it?
Danny Johnson
00:22:03
Sure. And I’ll tell you what I did first really quickly so that people don’t do what I did first because it wasn’t the right way to go about it. So the first hires, how it went down was, “Hey, yeah, sure. That’d be great. Yeah, come on and help us out. You know, you’ve been on a couple of appointments with me to talk to sellers.” And they would come in and I would just say, “Well, shadow me for a week. That’s how you’re going to learn what you’re supposed to do.” That was not the way to set somebody up for success. And so everything that I had learned over the years and doing the business 8 or 9 years, wearing all the hats, that was all in my head, and I was expecting them by just shadowing me for a week to pick up on all of it.
So when it was time for me to not be there for them to go on the appointment, they were really not set up to succeed. And I was thinking, “Well, they’ll find their own way. Like I did,” right? Not a good way to do it. So I don’t recommend that. What I recommend is setting things up. There’s a good, really good book called “Work The System,” that I forgot the author’s name, but he talks about setting up your procedures. And I wish I had done this even before I planned on bringing people in because there were so many times where I came up against the situation that I had solved before, but I didn’t remember how I solved it. And so I had to go back and spend all this time trying to figure out the right solution.
Whereas if I had just documented what to do in this situation, I would have known. And the beautiful thing about when you do that is you realize a lot of times, even with the things that you do on a weekly or daily basis, is pretty inefficient. And when you document it out and you’re like, “Whoa, what am I? Wow, I’m-” and then you realize how much you’re doing as well, which will make you want to hire someone to take a lot of that off your plate. So getting all of that documented, I use a tool called “TETTRA.” It’s free. I think you get a free account and you can document your procedures there. And then whenever you hire a team, they have a place to easily find all of those procedures. And then they have a way to communicate and update those so that they’re living documents, they’re living processes.
And so when you set those things up like that, when you bring somebody on, number one, they’re going to have a lot more trust in your company because you don’t want to be starting a job where you’re feeling like everything is just shooting from the hip and nothing is structured at all. And job security might be in question. And so having all of that to bring somebody in, to follow what you’ve proven to work, and then they can just pick it up. And what that does is that truly does free you from having to interact as much, because they have something to go off of and they won’t be calling you every hour or 30 minutes, even asking you questions about things, making you question whether even hiring somebody was the right thing to do.
Because I found that I would get into situations where I would say, “What am I doing? I can finish this faster than it would take to explain it to them.” And you do not want to fall into that trap. And so documenting those processes is absolutely critical. The next thing I don’t want to spend too much time on is, but the next thing is really having that system in place where everything in the business is in, the data is there in a place that everybody on the team has access to it. And even if you’re a small team, even when it was my ex-wife and I, having that place where everything about the lead in the deal is right there in one place, keeps everything so much more organized and less communication needing to happen. I didn’t have to bug her to find out some situation about this deal because it’s all right there in the system, right?
Yeah. And things that you can do these days with what we’ve done with Forefront and several other systems out there, all the communication can be tracked within the system. So not only do you have the deal information for one of these properties, you also can have all your communication that was ever had with them within that same record. So you can see no matter who chose the call, who sent the text, who received the text, it’s all right there on a timeline. And the beautiful thing about that is when you do that, you start to get into things that really help you also dial in your marketing because you can track, you get a different phone number per marketing channel, or even campaign. So everything’s attributed properly and it’s really producing not just the leads, but the ones that become deals. And then the profit you actually get from those deals per campaign. Because if you’re not tying all that stuff together and figuring that out, how do you make decisions on where to put your marketing?
Jay Conner
00:26:56
I love the way you got that set up. So in your CRM, Forefront, if you can get the phone numbers to track all the marketing from that same system, right?
Danny Johnson
00:27:11
We actually integrate it right now with CallRail.
Jay Conner
00:27:16
I use CallRail, but I have a VA that I actually manually puts in the information. So it’s really cool for you to have a CRM that you develop that CallRail actually communicates and it goes straight into your CRM. Right?
Danny Johnson
00:27:33
Right. And then the text messages, everything gets routed through. So you can see and listen to those calls, listen to voicemails. That’s a good way to stay on top of your team, too, when you look at the KPI page and you’re seeing that, “Hey, for some reason, we’re having less appointments being set, even though our lead count is the same or better. What’s going on?” You can go into those records and listen to the calls. And there was a situation that we ran into where that happened. And it turned out that our lead intake person taking the calls was making assumptions about the seller’s motivation level. They had plenty of equity. They didn’t know much, but they were saying, “They’re not motivated. So I didn’t set the appointment.” It’s like, when did you decide to start doing that? Like, that’s completely against what we’ve trained, you know? But something happened maybe where somebody was angry or who knows, but you’ve gotta be able to see that kind of thing in your business.
Jay Conner
00:28:32
Well, you just told the story of, by listening to the calls, you’re learning that, “Oh, my lands, what in the world is this person saying?” which reminds me of a very, very important principle that I learned years ago. And that is you cannot expect anything in your business that you cannot inspect, so you can’t expect it unless you can inspect it. And one way that you’re inspecting is by actually being able to listen to those recorded calls that come in. Danny, let’s go ahead and let folks know how they can learn about your software, your CRM system, and keeping up with all the leads.
Danny Johnson
00:29:12
You can find out more at forefrontcrm.com. We’ve got it where there’s a button to book a demo, go ahead and do that if you’re interested in finding out more, and that way we can find out what you’re looking for, what you’re needing in your business, and then tailor that demo specifically to you to show you how it can actually help you with that and show you all the cool features, everything that we’ve built, but not spend a whole day running you through everything, but just showing the pieces that make sense and matter for you and where you’re at in your investing business.
I’ve been on a couple of interviews, but it’s quite a few actually, but the big thing that I’m seeing with investors wanting to get to the next level, even if you’ve gotten to a good level, is this thing where we’ve overcome some fears and got our comfort zone and got to the next level. But sometimes we don’t realize when we get to another plateau and there’s new fears that we’re not acknowledging. And so taking a look at, no matter where you’re at in this business, if you are avoiding things and doing things that keep you in your comfort zone, or even having false beliefs about what’s keeping you stuck. Looking at that, accepting it, and then just looking at the next step. What is the next thing that you need to do? And just do that. Don’t give it too much thought. Just do it and take action.
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