Yassin:
Hey, Hey, Hey this is Yassin Shaar with another interview in the series highlighting some of the real estate superstars and entrepreneurs in our industry. And today I have the pleasure of talking to Mike Hambright on the show. Mike, how are you doing buddy?
Mike:
I'm Great. Glad to be here.
Yassin:
I'm excited to have you on Mike. Mike is the leader behind FlipNerd. He runs probably one of the most popular master minds investor fuel. And he's someone who was recently given the 2 comma club award at funnel hacking live for generating over a million dollars from one single funnel. Mike is doing some great stuff out there. He's one of the few in the industry actually who got the award. So, Mike, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you on.
Mike:
Yeah, thanks for having me here. Appreciate it.
Yassin:
Beautiful. So, Mike, why don't you give us like a quick overview of your business model and what kind of offers you've got running right now on the real estate coaching side?
Mike:
Sure, On the coaching side. Yeah. So I have a few different aspects of my business. So for kind of first and foremost, I have always been a real estate investor. So for about, not always, I shouldn't say that for about 12 years, 2008 is when I started real estate investing left corporate America and jumped into real estate. And we actually were pretty successful from the beginning. So we, some of it is, without going too far into the backstory, I just kinda got, fired from corporate America and was in a position where failure wasn't an option. And going back into corporate America wasn't an option because I, I lost a job that was, I thought it was a great job at the time for a multi-billion dollar company that doesn't even exist anymore. So they were kind of on the downward spiral.
Mike:
But at the time it was a big blow to my ego because I had never been fired before and it was the type of job or the type of company at least, where I thought I would be there forever like this. It was just, I was kind of a golden boy on the inside until basically my boss got fired and he was a very high level executive in the company. And then I was his outspoken right hand man. So I was just kinda like, well, if he's going, you got you gotta go to. So I had no control. It really no control. And then I left and went to work for a startup that was flying high. We grew it to half a billion dollars a year in revenue. It was an online retailer actually, my first kind of foray into the online stuff.
Yassin:
Selling what?
Mike:
it was a wireless phone provider, back when it a little bit of a long story, but back before it, back when it was difficult to, you know, cell phones weren't as popular online. So I know that sounds crazy and totally ages me, that company, was flying high, then they filed for bankruptcy cause they just weren't profitable. And right when that happened, my son had just been born two months earlier and we had moved on the other side of the country across the country for this job. And then it was just like, we don't want to be here. This job didn't turn out to be, I was there for 18 months, so it wasn't like a long term thing and it's like i can't, I have no control over my destiny.
Mike:
Like career-wise, even though I'm a super hard worker and everything I've done. I brought a lot of benefit to the company financially usually, and then this type of stuff happens, so what am I going to do? And so kind of jumped into real estate investing. So that's my backstory on, on real estate investing and jumped in and just kind of applied, For as much as we could bash like corporate America i applied a corporate structure to things like, we need to have systems and processes, we need to do things. In a systematic way,
Yassin:
Standardize things.
Mike:
Grow this, right. And so that's kind of my thing is I brought that into real estate investing and then I've kind of brought it into what we do with coaching and online online stuff.
Mike:
So today I hope to build a large franchise, a real estate investor community nationwide from 2009 to 2016 or so. And then I sold my interest in that about three and a half years ago. And then I immediately, I had been building up the FlipNerd brand for a couple of years without really knowing what that was going to lead to. It was really just a podcast that's actually been running for about six and a half years now. At the time it had been running for about three years without really a great way to monetize it, Planting seeds without knowing what was going to grow, you know. And then when that kind of switchover happened, I immediately turned on a number of different coaching programs under the FlipNerd brand.
Yassin:
Interesting. Since you had already build the audience and you launched and that was the launch pad, your podcast, and you've got one of the most popular podcasts out there. I think it's like in the hundreds, right?
Mike:
Oh yeah. We have created in the last six and a half years we've created about over 1500 video podcasts. A few different variations of our podcast. Over the years. I run two different podcasts now, but there have been a couple of others that have kind of come and gone that we still have out there, but we don't.
Yassin:
You have the REI classroom you've got, yeah, there were a ton of the REI classrooms. Those are like kind of five to 10 minute quick tip type things. Is that your main source of traffic?
Mike:
Yeah, organic traffic. Comes from the podcast and from YouTube. And we actually get way more views on YouTube than we do watching videos on our own site, which I don't think necessarily,
Yassin:
Interesting. So you re-purpose, the podcasts on YouTube? Like how do get traffic from YouTube? Do you re-purpose your content on there?
Mike:
Yeah, we give links back to the site? I will say that I fought it for a long time. We actually did not want to put all of our content on YouTube. We want to, cause I thought, well I want, I want that to come to my platform. And the truth is is if you start to have this abundance mindset of like, I don't, I can't, maybe I can't track it, but if I put it out there and so we moved everything. It's probably been about three years ago, we moved everything out to YouTube and now we get more views on YouTube than we do on our own site. So we tried to drive them over and we try to make an impression with our brand.
Yassin:
How do you drive traffic? How do you drive traffic from YouTube to your assets or like how do you control the traffic? How do you divert that traffic? What kind of offers do you put out?
Mike:
Simply, on the show we basically say where to get more access to more resources. And then having having links in the description. So I definitely won't advocate that it's the best approach, but it's just what we do.
Yassin:
So you drive them to an opt-in?
Mike:
Sometimes, sometimes we have a call to action that's going to get some sort of resource and sometimes it's just go consume more, more content on our site. We definitely have a call to action to say if you're, if you're looking to get started in real estate investing, go to our coaching page. Or if you're an experienced investor and you're looking for a new community to join and go check out investor fuels. So we kind of have calls to action inside of there that say like, here's how we can work with you.
Yassin:
Are you running paid traffic too? How much do you rely on organic traffic?
Mike:
I would say with coaching, we have done a lot of traffic, cause we're going after a cold audience. It's investor fuel, which is not coaching. It's a mastermind community. We don't really spend that much on advertising. It's more word of mouth and some re-targeting and things like that. But the truth is, that's very much a kind of word of mouth and more viral, I guess a lot more organic than coaching because the audience that would be interested in that is a much smaller audience.
Yassin:
Interesting. So how do you expand your audience? Is it like you DAP into other people's podcasts? You do a lot of guests interviews. How do you drive this organic traffic?
Mike:
I have an investor fuel podcast as well where we interview members and we have just an insane amount of testimonials, kind of unlimited amount of testimonials. And we do paid traffic showing testimonials and that's primarily what we do. And then some re-targeting. It's a little bit of a different animal. You're, you're talking to it. If you're looking for an experienced investor. It's more of a B2B play if you will. Then B to C, which is more like the coaching model.
Yassin:
Interesting. So you're doing like kind of like a very targeted segment segmentation and I, and I see a lot of 'em and I see it in your office. So now it's like I'm seeing a pattern even, and I'd Love to talk about invest in your field because like you've got the platinum group and you've got the gold group. You've recently rolled out the new offer like a continuity, the FlipNerd boardroom that targeting you. You're very specific with your messaging and I love that. So how important it is to be very specific in your content targeting a specific market segment. Because i'm seeing a pattern here of doubling down.
Mike:
I'll say this like forever, we didn't really try to segment our lists. We just, if you got on the list, you're on the list and we're communicating to everybody the same. So we definitely are nowhere close to where I want to be, but we definitely do a couple of things now to ask the question, how many deals have you done in the last year?
Mike:
So we did an online event a couple months back and drove a bunch of new traffic for that and learned like how to, okay next time, here's how we're going to 10 X this thing. But we simply just said, you know, for example, in that we ran a it was all, we hardly spent any money on traffic. We were just marketing to our own list. Had some of the attendees, influencers marketed a little bit if they would.
Yassin:
Is it the online summit? Are you talking about the online summit?
Mike:
Yeah, we called it new year freedom. It was into your freedom event was a two day online event and it was free. But on the second page we basically said, we're going to give you access to all the recordings if you just simply fill out the survey below, which took like two minutes.
Mike:
But the main thing we asked in there was how many deals, how many deals have you done over the last 12 months? And we kind of had buckets, you know, 0 to 10 or haven't started yet, one to 10, you know, up to 50 to 500 or whatever. So that allowed us to kind of segment who's experienced and who's not. And so like historic, we should have done that a long time ago, but now we're a little more focused on segmenting people because we're going to communicate that we communicate to them differently.
Yassin:
That's interesting. So, and this online, some, was this online, the first online summit you do? Or have you done some as before?
Mike:
So here's the thing, I actually probably, I'm not saying this from a place of ego. I did an online summit before. Anybody else that I know. So about four years ago we did this huge event.
Mike:
It was called the REI power summit. And I had, I literally had 60 speakers online. It was insane. And the truth is, is we tried to make it feel like it was live, but it wasn't. We had everything pre-recorded and edited stuff. It was, it was way too many speakers. And back then, this was probably four years ago, I was nowhere near. I still, feel like I have so much to learn, but my marketing skills were like crap compared to now. We didn't really do a whole lot of paid traffic. It was just, we tried to make it viral because we had so many big name speakers. I mean anybody that's anybody in the industry was speaking there probably. And so I tried to just kind of tie on to the celebrity of a lot of people that were there. And we got a lot of eyeballs on it, it was not very well orchestrated in terms of marketing lead generation and then having some, I don't think we even had, I don't think we even sold anything at the end of it was, it was ridiculous, but it helped certainly a lot with branding
Yassin:
You've built an asset maybe a list, right? Which is the ultimate.
Mike:
Yeah. So you know, if I had that to do over again, it would be very, very different. But yeah, I just think at the end of the day, I think you know, we've improved a lot. We still have a long ways to go for where I want to be. And you know, I also used to try to be everything to everybody and now I'm much more intentional in who I want to work with and I'm going after.
Yassin:
Awesome. Would it be okay if we dig in to the online summit a little bit because something that unique I don't see a lot of people doing. Okay. So for the online summit so what what was the goal behind it? The recent one we did here? Yeah, the business objective to build the list to make money developed the JV network. Obviously there's a lot of overlap. What was the primary objective here?
Mike:
So I think there's, there were two things. One is to kind of build the list and just kind of branding. And then two was based on how they answered that question, if they're experienced or not, Since we were just basically saying, Hey, we're going to give you access to, I think we had a 12 speakers, six a day, maybe it was 14. And we basically said we're going to give you access to all the recordings for free if you just complete this form, which took like a minute or two. The conversion to that form was like super high, like 85% or something. So then we knew that what segment they were in. So at the end of it we basically said we run a physical event. We did it last year without knowing if I would do it again.
Mike:
It was a pretty good success and people really loved the event. So we did a physical event last year called million dollar meeting and that was an in person event, three day events and or pre event paid event, paid event. So tickets were generally 3000. We had some discount offers and stuff, but people could come in and, and here just a who's who list of like some amazing speakers and influencers in the industry, they actually all happen to be investor fuel members as well. So kind of inside of that was like, well if you like what these guys are saying for a three day event, just imagine, just imagine if you're part of this community 365 days a year.
Yassin:
And that was the offer of the event? To upgrade to investor fuel.
Mike:
Yeah. And the truth is is we kind of thought we would give a pitch and I would say, Hey, go talk to, you know really around sales and stuff.
Mike:
At the end of the day people were, we didn't even have to pitch like everybody, they were already asking like, where do I go? Do I talk to you? It was just, they were, they were pre-sold just by the people in the room. Cause we have a lot of our members there. So most of the people in the room, honestly, we're already our members. So it was a free of that for our current members,
Yassin:
Smart.
Mike:
Anyway, so we decided to have million dollar meeting, 2021, that'll be in September this year coming up and after these, this last online event, and we'll probably do a few more. If you're experienced, we're giving you a discounted offer to a million dollar meeting. And if you're inexperienced, we give you an offer to join the FlipNerd boardroom.
Yassin:
Okay. So you're not, you're not inviting the newbies to the a million dollar meeting.
Mike:
No. because newbies can't join investor fuel, so you don't belong in that funnel.
Yassin:
And there is no offer for the online summit, you, you didn't have like an offer to monetize the traffic. Like how did he get all of these opponents on board?
Mike:
So when the event was over, we basically said some are segmented towards newbies, some are segmented towards experience investors. And then we had two offers. So you either saw one or the other, which was million dollar meeting if your experience. It's like a 48 hour sale at the end of the event. Started.
Yassin:
Make sense. And did your guests pitch any of their offers during the summit or content only.
Mike:
Content only. We kind of allow people to say, you know, and if they're a lot, all these folks were friends of mine, they're all investor fuel members.
Mike:
So guys like John Martinez, like, you know, clearly when we're, when I'm talking to John, we're playing up the, the value of going through his sales training. So right now for him it's good PR. Nobody's really pitching but it's more infomercials if you will, that are kind of mentioning their product or how they help people inside of there.
Yassin:
What was in it for them? Like how did you get them on board? You must have some super persuasion power?
Mike:
So two things I gave them, everybody that spoke to the list. I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. I gave everybody the spoke the list of registrations.
Yassin:
So you shared the opt-ins.
Mike:
And then anybody that invited anyone, we gave them referral tracking code so that if they later became a member of investor fuel or they joined my other program, we would pay them a referral fee.
Yassin:
Interesting. So you shared the optin list with all the guests.
Mike:
All the speakers.
Yassin:
All the speakers and everyone was required to Mail or was it optional?
Mike:
With these types of folks? It's always optional. I can't force anybody to do anything,
Yassin:
And you'd still share the optin list?
Mike:
I did say that if they helped bring on a minimum amount of people. I would give them the list.
Yassin:
So there was a minimum. Okay. If you drive X amount of people. I'm just curious and you know, you don't have to share exact numbers, but like number of opt ins, like this event kind of event, like what kind of numbers did you did you expect to attract?
Mike:
We had about 1500 opt-ins in total, in total for the event.
Mike:
And the truth is, is you know, if I had to do over again, which I do, cause we're going to be doing another one here pretty soon, probably within the next 30 days or so. We didn't send a lot of paid traffic to it. I was just marketing it to our list. I saw it on Facebook.
Yassin:
Yeah, I saw it on Facebook.
Mike:
I was relying on affiliates. This is the truth. I've actually never been that great in affiliate marketing. I haven't been able to monetize other people's offers myself very much. And the times that I've relied too heavily on all this allow affiliates to bring me traffic. I've usually been disappointed. Like I usually leave them saying, I really should've put my own money behind it. And so that is in fact what we'll do next time is we just have to make sure, you know, I was careless with other people's actions, drive people to our list.
Mike:
But you know, if I believe in what I'm doing, I just need to, I just need to put more of my own money up front driving traffic. I'm comfortable in my offers on the back end.
Yassin:
Driving traffic, leveraging their platform. Like, Hey, like you know, like John Martinez, And I'll spend $5,000. Retargeting your email list, driving them to the optin. Is that, how are you planning on spending that? A media buying method?
Mike:
I mean, something like that is a possibility I guess or just we have a pretty good size list. I mean we could really heavily retarget our own list and and just really even go after cold traffic. Or you know, targeted cold traffic based on interests.
Yassin:
Interesting.
Mike:
All these things are like, it's not like I know here's the, here's the keys to the kingdom, you know, it's like you just iterate, you try something and Oh that doesn't work, so let me do it.
Mike:
Here's how I want to do it next time. Right. I mean that, that is the one thing that I would say about everything I've done is I, for those that know me well, they know that for the first few years that we were building flipper, I literally lost millions of dollars. Like a lot of it wasn't way over engineering. The platform took, just literally throw it away after it was done after spending almost seven figures on it.
Yassin:
You mean fulfillment platform?
Mike:
The websit Flipnerd.Com. Cause it initially, right now it's just blogs and shows and it's pretty simple. But initially it was a listing platform for off market deals. We had an advertising platform where we're selling sponsorships and ads are showing up all over. And so it was just way over engineered. And part of it is just got sloppy with, you know, I had the resources and I just got sloppy. What if i built, they would come and they came, but they just didn't bring their wallets. So,
Yassin:
Wow, that's a big lesson. I think. You know, a lot of times simple work. So a lot of people are surprised when we'd say like, and I don't have anything against selling over the phone. But a lot of people are surprised when we say, Hey, we sell like 2000, $60,000 high ticket, real estate coaching offers over a Google doc. It's like, really? Yeah. I mean, so when you focus on the core, right? The core is the message and the offer and the audience that you're targeting. If you're segmented, then you're putting the right offer in front of the right people with the right message. All this whizzbang Frankenstein funnels, if you can sell an offer, and I know you know, over a notepad, a Frankenstein funnel is not going to change that, right? Because the core of the process, the offer on flooring. Sorry for the noise here. I'm at a coffee shop so wanted to be in a nice place for you here. So beautiful. So why don't you why don't we dig into the investor fuel mastermind and Mike, could you give us a little bit of an overview of the offer, the deliverables, the pricing, the guarantees, and let's run through with a little bit.
Mike:
Yeah, so it's evolved over time, but we've, we've had the group for about two and a half years. We have a little over a hundred members right now and we really kinda catered a single family investors though there might be some changes there soon. And we do have two groups, like you mentioned earlier, we have what we call a gold group, which is investors that are doing between 10 and 50 deals a year. And our platinum group, which is 50 deals a year or more. And so, you know, there's definitely people in the group that are doing four or 500 deals a year. So some heavy hitters in there, we have people that have transitioned from the gold group up to the platinum group after their businesses have grown. And so initially when I first started it, the, the intention really was to have more of that mid-level investor that's doing, let's say 10 to 50 deals a year. But just because of my network, because of all the relationships I build through FlipNerd and through other efforts, I very quickly attracted higher level people. And so we, we actually, the first meeting, it might've been at the third meeting when we split the two groups. So after there were, we had a couple of meetings, you know, I have a guy doing 400 deals a year sitting next to a guy that's doing a deal a month. It was like, okay,
Mike:
I mean the, the guy, the, not taking anything away from anybody, but the person on the lower side of that loves the fact that he's sitting in a room or next to people that are much more experienced, but the more experienced people are questioning. Yeah. And they're not getting the same value because they're at a different level in their business. Right. And so so we split the groups and then that's when we kind of went to a gold and a platinum. And in fact, I think the first time we did the meeting I had different names for groups. That gold group, I had a different name. And then we changed the name just to kind of gold and platinum all under the investor fuel brand.
Yassin:
And how are the deliverables are, or is there any difference in the deliverables between the gold and the platinum? Or are the deliverables the same as just the the type of people in each
Mike:
Yeah, so the rooms are segmented. So we have one group meets, they come in earlier in the week and the platinum group comes in later in the week. So there's a little bit of overlap, but they're segmented in terms of their hot seat presentations and things like that deliverable deliverability, like we act as an advisor so people call. So I have a couple people on my team that help with support for sure. And we, it's not like we hold back from the gold people like, I, I'm not going to help you less cause you're businesses where it is. So I would say the deliverables are the same in that regard in terms of all level.
Yassin:
So you've got like four events per year, right? You've got a Facebook group, you've got a biweekly group. So what are that I get?
Mike:
Yeah. So we have this and it has changed over the years, but we have a super robust membership platform where members can, so we have a Facebook group and people will say, Hey, does anybody have this checklist or does anybody have an example of this unique contract or whatever. And so we've built up a system where they can upload it to their backend profile and that way, cause you know what happens in Facebook, somebody is like, Oh, what's your email address? I'll send it to you. Oh, can you send it to me? Can you send it to me too? Hey, can you send it to me too? I can't. Somebody posted it here, but I can't find it. So we've just created this back end where people can say, Hey, it's in my profile. Just go check it out.
Mike:
And we record all of our presentations. So those are all in our membership site. So people can ref. People that come in, you know, now have access who knows, two and a half years of presentations. I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds for sure. Beautiful past presentation. So we do have we, last year we did eight events, so we had these kind of mini events that were, I say they're optional. Obviously everything is optional, but we have these smaller kind of get togethers that were a little more fun. Like we would meet for a half day, go to dinner the next morning we'd get up and go on a hike or something like that. And so we call those power retreats. So we tested that for like a year and it was fun, but you know, not enough of the group could participate in not everybody can get away for eight times a year and as well.
Mike:
And so they're kind of regional. Usually. Like if somebody either had extra time or they happen to be in that city or market or not too far away they would come. So that it was good. We just didn't think that it was getting an impact as broadly as we'd like. So this year what we're doing is we do something called a power chat. And so that's effectively two webinars a month that are kind of specialty content. So there might be somebody that is doing some Airbnb stuff, that we don't really have time to talk about in detail at a larger meeting because it's nichey. So we'll have a webinar on that and you know, have them describe their business and some QA because there's other people, there's other people always that are interested in that topic.
Yassin:
So the members present?
Mike:
Yeah, it's all, it's all member driven. So it's other members that are ex experts in certain areas.
Yassin:
You're the one smart cat. Okay, good.
Mike:
We have a lot of amazing people in our community and right. They don't, they don't, they're not able to share everything they do at an, at an event just because of just because it's loud. It might be a niche-y topic. Right. But they still, you know, we've created a culture based on giving and sharing and so they're very forthcoming to share that information.
Yassin:
Beautiful. How important creating culture in a mastermind and nurturing this giving culture and instilling these values. Do you qualify for that?
Mike:
We do. Yeah. We're very big on if you, you know, if you're, we, we, we were, we were acquired giving, like if you're not a giver, there are people that we've asked to leave before because it just didn't feel like they were the right fit.
Mike:
So not very many because honestly, in the process of our sales process and our consultation process up front, we can usually tell who's a fit and who's not. So the truth is, is that people, they kind of self-select. Like if they're a taker, they're a taker and they're there, they probably feel uncomfortable.
Yassin:
So it's just you rise up or you leave. So I don't know if you're comfortable sharing, but like what are maybe the price points that you've got for the mastermid?
Mike:
Yeah, so that's evolved over time. But the gold right now, the gold group is 15. The platinum group is 20. We've been testing charging a $5,000 initiation fee as well on the front end. So our, most of our customers are billed monthly. We have an annual option that's a discounted from that a little bit. We've been putting in place a kind of an upfront fee and then an ongoing fee.
Yassin:
Beautiful. what was the iteration like? How did you iterate through the pricing? Can you, can you maybe just share a little bit like the different price points and how did you treat them and why?
Mike:
yeah, the gold group went from a 12 to 15 and the platinum group has gone from 15 to 20 over the last couple of years. Not huge moves. You know, as you grow and as you evolve and as we add more value than we're able to raise the pricing up as well.
Yassin:
And what's the a thinking process behind the price structure? Why five upfront and then you finance the rest, like over like a payment plan? What was the thinking behind that?
Mike:
Some of it is just, we don't have a huge retention problem, but if you have something on the front end there, people have a little more skin in the game and it's a onetime fee. So truthfully was more around retention than anything. It's just like, how do we get people to join that are fully committed instead of like, well, I'll come check it out kind of already knowing that I might leave after the first meeting. It's not a fit. We don't really have a lot of that. I mean, once people come into our culture, they're like, and I can't imagine not being a part of this forever.
Yassin:
Is that your guarantee? Like I can come to the first event and if I don't like it, I can ask for a refund or just cancel.
Mike:
They can cancel. Yeah. So we usually have a deposit upfront so they can, we ask them to commit for a year and if they come to the event and they say, this isn't a fit for me, then we won't charge them again. But you know, those things are actually fairly rare.
Yassin:
That's, that's interesting. And just to reiterate the deliverables you've got now for live events. You've got a Facebook group. You've got two power chats a month, which is like training calls and you've got a Facebook group. Do members have personal access to you, like a Voxer one-on-ones?
Mike:
They just literally have our cell phones. So me and another guy that's on my team that really provides a tremendous amount of support has been with me for about 10 years and a very big part of our culture. They have direct access to him. And we do. The truth is, is you know, we do a lot of things together. So next week for example, next Wednesday I leave for about five days and we're going to Yellowstone snowmobiling and dog sledding and Yellowstone and almost everybody that's coming is an investor fuel member. And so there's eight, eight couples going to that. So it's usually subsets of our group, but everybody was invited and we would've brought more if more could have made it. But you know, there's things that we do like that.
Yassin:
Feels like a family.
Mike:
Well that's funny cause we along the lines, one of our members came up with the hashtag fuel fam and it's very much a family. Like people really care about each other. really care about changes in people's lives, whether it's health issues, new babies, business breakthroughs, whatever it might be. And so, you know, we're very big on kind of building a culture though. Truthfully, it's not uncommon at all for people to say, I'm a member for life.
Yassin:
Beautiful. You know, Robert Sheldini talks about a lot about community and unity. And that's a big driver in a lot of these masterminds driver for attention. You keep seeing retention and you know, it's about making the sale, but it's about people, people sticking around for a year after year after year. What is, I mean, you don't have to share specific numbers, but what is the average retention you'd like to see? With members?
Mike:
I want people to stay forever. I mean the truth, but, but I don't, I don't have exact numbers to share with you, but you know, we have a pretty good retention. I don't know how it compares to other similar masterminds, but we have a pretty good retention rate for sure. I would say, I can't imagine that it's not better than average, but, but I don't know the exact details. Like I don't know how to compare it to others, I would say the truth is, is for many reasons I've kind of pulled back on my coaching program to lean into more of the experienced investor offering. Because like investor fuel, it's fun. I get a lot of joy out of the relationships and helping people. The coaching side with newbies, which I've done for a long time, it's hard to have those peer to peer relationships cause people are just not as confident or they're not as committed to their business.
Mike:
Right. And so in many ways we're getting into, without derailing the conversation, we launched an agency model for real estate investors that's aimed at experienced investors that will be bigger than everything I've ever done combined by the end of this year is massive. But it's aimed at the experienced investor that I can build up a relationship with or get to know that person. We know their family and we trust them and we're helping them in their business. And so I think going after that kind of B2B model and experienced investors is really the biggest part of kind of my dream to see.
Yassin:
Agency like like done for your providing them for you services.
Mike:
Legion. Yup. Yeah. It's specifically we're, we're data and analytics. We're doing something with data and analytics that is superior to anything else that's possibly available in the market. And then we manage their direct mail and a skip trace their list if they want to do that.
Yassin:
Love it. So how would you I want to just a couple of more questions about the offer and then I want to jump into the funnel. How do you differentiate yourself in the market? I mean, You've got a great community. You've got you know, camaraderie the training, the access, I can experience that unless I'm in, so like on the outside looking in like how do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace? Like how do we make sure that you stand out and to sea all of these real estate coaching programs out there? Like, why would I come to Mike when I, when there is like as living other masterminds with,
Mike:
With coaching or the masterminds?
Yassin:
The mastermind.
Mike:
Yeah, you're right. . That's a challenge that people, once they experience it, they're, they're usually committed.
Mike:
They're like, this is amazing. I'm in that is kind of why we launched the million dollar meeting last year. So it was to give people kind of a sneak peek behind the curtain of what our group is like because the culture there, the feel a lot of the people that we allow our members to come at no additional costs. And so it's very much feels like an investor fuel media. It's like a format different, the format, cause it's more teaching and implementation that hot seats and accountability stuff. But it's a different format. But just you know, that, that's kind of why we did that was to give everybody a sneak peek.
Yassin:
Interesting. So, is that now your funnel? Like, is that like your entries,
Mike:
Yeah. And these things are always in, in progress, right? The truth is, I can't do, I don't want to go do $4 million meetings a year and move them around the country or anything like that because it's just a, from a lifestyle standpoint, that's just not what I want.
Mike:
And then the types of speakers and people that I have, I can't abuse those relationships, you know, to say, Hey, can you come speak four times or whatever. So you know, we've chosen not to do that. And so that's kind of what we're doing is the online events to the million dollar meeting a funnel is a really kind of where we're aiming.
Yassin:
Beautiful. So, how did he drive $1 million through? What landed you to 2 comma club award. Like, I mean I've been to your site and I was like looking around like where's the webinar or where is the VSL? Like all I saw is like application, you go straight to the application. So are you assuming they're coming in pre-sold, like w like how are you, like could you just walk me through like last year or like right now.
Mike:
The word you're talking about was for coaching. So it was a combination of a live events in Dallas that we did under another brand. Actually, that's mostly what that came from. But then we have the, we've really kind of converted now just to have the online coaching versus live events and a higher end ticket. And you're right.
Mike:
So the online program now is I say online because it's not, it's a group based, a group based online program. We have online coaching calls and no, no one on one support.
Yassin:
Is that the FlipNerd the boardroom you're talking about?
Mike:
So it's complicated, dude, if I kind of explain it to you, but it's got the flow, the way that the flipper and boardroom has evolved.
Mike:
That's actually fairly new now over the past couple months. So what that is, is me trying to just be honest, me trying to simplify my coaching model. And so what I did was like, how can I make this easier to execute, give me some time back and maybe pull in a different customer. So what I did with a coach though, historically we had a six month program online group-based,10 K. And when I did live events, we had up to 60 K program in the Dallas Fort worth market. But that were funding deals for, people were actually rehabbing their, for them and with them. And so it was very hands off, very much like a partnership model. But the 10K model is online and we had weekly coaching calls and then we had every month I did this events, a one day event called fly in Friday.
Mike:
So you could come basically be a part of that event once a month. So, you know, not many other programs have that where they have the ability to physically meet that are kind of group based and online.
Yassin:
And that's you're leading those events.
Mike:
Yeah, I'm there the whole time. Yeah. I'm leading the whole discussion Q and a all day long. Like let's talk about lead generation. Let's talk about business systems and operations. Let's talk about, sales training. I might have people that are coming on in the room, like John Martinez or different people that are experts that are coming on and sharing their knowledge via zoom. Right. So they'll join in the room.
Yassin:
Is this is what landed you on like 2 comma club award, the 10K coaching program.
Mike:
Then, what I've done here recently over the past couple of months is I said, Hey, I think the best components of this are the coaching calls and this fly in Friday, that's done monthly.
Mike:
Some people were saying, Hey, the reason I don't come in is because it's one day, it's a lot of travel for one day. So we converted it. So a two day event once per quarter, So kind of a mini mastermind, but for the inexperienced, they're not qualified for investor fuel, let's say. And so, I love the in person stuff. I love the building relationship stuff. So it was a fit for me, even though it takes up a couple of days of my time, a quarter. But I do right by my office there within a couple miles of where I live. So I make it easy. And and then we're really kinda targeting more at somebody that has been through training before. They have some coaching, so they're not brand new, they don't need another coaching program, they just need a support community.
Mike:
And so that is, I basically it pulled out the coaching calls and the kind of two day a quarter events and rebranded that I kinda like productized. I was like pulled out a couple of components and I refer to that as the FlipNerd boardroom.
Yassin:
And you lowered the friction, I mean 10K and it's close enough to fit the 15K like if I want to join platinum, sorry, the gold.
Mike:
So to join the FlipNerd boardroom we're testing prices between $997 and $1997 upfront plus $297 a month. Oh,
Yassin:
Okay. I thought it's $297 a month when I saw it on the website. So it's, there's, there's an initial set up or testing.
Mike:
Yeah, we're testing some different price points and structure.
Yassin:
Okay. And so you're setting it up on the phone or you're just on a page.
Mike:
Yep.
Yassin:
You're driving. How are you driving traffic to it?
Mike:
Right now through the shows we're diverting traffic that used to come in for coaching and stuff and we're on the verge of just trying to figure out how we want to do that. Cause it's, you know, the truth is I'm, I have a hard time not being involved in coaching cause I've done it for so long. I've had thousands of people that I've taught over the years. So it's hard to turn that off. But it's, I will say that I'm more focused on the experience investor type stuff, our best for fuel and a investor machine, which is our agency model. So it's one of those things as a business you have to decide how many of these things can I do, right? Or how many of these things do I want to do. And so it's been something that I've been hard to let go of, but I've been kind of trying to simplify the model, lower the pricing so I don't have to manage a sales team, like all these things to try to make it a little more automated and a little more able to run automatically without a whole lot of my time.
Mike:
And so that's kind of where we're at right now is trying to decide do we run a webinar traffic to that? It actually probably would do well. The question is whether that's what I want to do or not. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. I simplified the model I had and now I'm kind of on the fence of like, do I want to grow this thing or do I want to just, you know, sometimes as a info marketer I guess you have to decide like, is the goal to really grow this as big as it could possibly be and take, you know, build a team around it and then throw money at marketing and all that? Or is it to just draft off of the free traffic that I have already and, and run, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 people a month through there just through organic stuff that I'm doing anyway. And so that's kind of where I'm at right now.
Yassin:
And it seems like your forte is live events.
Mike:
Yeah, we're very good. We're very good at events and we're very good at building relationships with people.
Yassin:
I know we're, we're getting close to the end here. We've got like 14 minutes left. Would it be okay if we dive into a little bit of the live event component? So, how do you first so I wanna just go over real quick. Like what's your model? So are these all, do you do all fulfillment events? Do you do any previews right now?
Mike:
For coaching?
Mike:
Yeah.
Mike:
Not anymore. We did for the 16th anymore.
Yassin:
What? No more previews.
Mike:
No more live events selling coaching. Used to do that. We used to do preview to the three day event to a high ticket sale.
Yassin:
When did you stop?
Mike:
We stopped doing that. Really the end of early part of last year, 2019 we did one event in Q one of last year.
Yassin:
Okay. All right. And then, and now you only do fulfillment events. So like these are old buyers that pay for the event and attend like the millionaire meeting.
Mike:
Million dollar meeting.
Yassin:
And how do you fill up the events right now?
Mike:
So again, I don't do coaching events anymore for fulfillment there. They're investor fuel customers, so they're members. They come to the million dollar meeting that's sold through a sales online sales funnel. Nope, not talking to those people.
Yassin:
Okay. Online sales funnels. So that's what I was getting at. Okay. So the only, the million dollar meeting is an online sales funnel. And so how do you structure these live events for maximum sales? I mean, you mentioned that people are pre sold.
Mike:
We don't sell anything at our events.
Yassin:
The million dollar meeting?
Mike:
The million dollar meeting we do. Yeah. So last year we had it was just kind of pre-sold, like people that were there, you could just tell they were like, before we even gave a pitch, most of them were asking how do I sign up for this or who do I talk to about this? And so we didn't even give a pitch.
Yassin:
Was that engineered or that just happened?
Mike:
It just, happened. My intention wasn't to be, cause these are experienced investors and a lot of our members are already in the room. So I didn't really want it to be a big pitch and I never was going to be, it was just a soft mention like we have this opportunity, but we didn't even, we literally didn't even have to mention it just because everybody that was there, we knew who they were. If they were not a member and they were all, we were are already talking to all of them before they initiated that before we even could give the pitch.
Yassin:
Interesting. And so how do you drop the pitch?
Mike:
And it wasn't, a huge event by the way. It was like 75 people and like 50 of them were already our members. And the truth is, is this year, my goal is that the event will be quite a bit larger,
Yassin:
Like 200, 300?
Mike:
Maybe 150, 200 more than double the size from last year.
Yassin:
And then how do you plan on structuring the live event for maximum sales?
Mike:
I don't know that yet.
Yassin:
Okay. And what we do what we did at a live event last year, which we're planning, we're looking to double down on it is we handed, so like on was a three day event. And on the second day, just before we broke for lunch, we handed, so basically my partner on stage, I'm opening up spots to work with people and like five minute pitch, no mention of price. But Hey, if you want more details, I've got an invitation for you. So they would go to the registration desk and pick up an invitation with their name on it.
Yassin:
And technically it was a sales letter. And then, right. So that would do all this selling, right? We're not doing any of this selling, no heart pitch. Right? and then really the revenue came in on the followup. That's how we structured the event and that we were able to pull in close to a 170,000 from, from about 30 people, 40 people. But the goal was, like you said, a lot of precepting. So prior to that, to the event we did a lot three Q and a three Q and a calls. So we're where we would reveal like the agenda of day one, and then we would collect what people want to do, like, what are the people's challenges? And like, so basically we tried to customize the event to their needs and to their challenges.
Yassin:
And then on the second call we did, Hey, here's the agenda for day two. Here's what we're going to be covering. What are your questions, what are your challenges? And really we, you know, the content we are delivering value, but we were also seeding the offer at the same time, creating demand for the offer. And that's how we didn't have any sales people. We didn't have any sales people at events, so it's just me and the partner and honestly, you know, like we maybe had two or three people like come to us at the event, like wanting to sign up, but people went back and with the sales letter and sat on it and then we'd run like a 14 day campaign as a followup to the event. And that's where the sales came in.
Mike:
Did you know that before you do the event? Or it just how it happens?
Yassin:
When we were going to follow up we were honestly dissatisfied. Okay, this might, be a flop. And it was a new offer. So at the event I did a lot of so we rolled out, we rolled it out as a new offer at the event. And I was able to iterate because conversations with people, so we like, Hey, here's your invitation if you want to talk to me about it, right. We're doing strategy sessions and the strategy sessions is really just market research. How is the offer going to land? So we gave them time to read this sales letter and then I talked to them and then I took notes.
Yassin:
So there wasn't any hard pitch. I was just getting, trying to get clear like what are the confusion points? What are the objections, where are people getting hung up? What I found is, so it was all about like working with banks and asset managers and these people had already bought the product around that and they didn't want like to get more deals with asset managers. They felt, okay, I got all the training that I need. What they were excited about is notes. So they were buying into a new opportunity. They didn't want that improvement offer. So the biggest lesson there is people are more excited about buying into a new opportunity than an improvement. So,they bought before the event. So these are all buyers of about $2,500 a course about how to work with asset managers at banks.
Yassin:
So at the live event like the, it was a 25K offer and our promise was, Hey, how to get more deals from asset managers. So I know it's like, I don't feel like I need like more help getting more deals so I'm not too interested in that. And so we had, guest speakers,uat the event presenting about notes and people were excited about that. So like, are you guys doing anything about notes? And I kept hearing notes, notes, notes. So then we reiterated, we iterated on the entire offer. So we positioned the offer and talked about making money, buying notes and sales started coming in and that was on the followup and that was on the followup. We still deliver it on like how to get more deals from asset managers, but that was this a secondary benefit or secondary promise. We led with the promise. So people wanted a new opportunity around there. Than buying an improvement offer.
Mike:
I think you're part of your story there is that I know that you're sharing this with other marketers, info marketers, influencers, whatever, is at the end of the day, this is what I'll say. I've always, I used to kind of pride myself on being really hardworking and I still work very hard, no doubt. But I think now probably if I have a differentiating factor, it's that I just, I'll just pivot for as long as I have to until something works that I like and in jewelry and believe in. Right. And so I think if there's a message there, it's like, don't be afraid to pivot if something's not working. Try something differently.
Yassin:
Absolutely. And you can mentally masturbate, sit in a corner, Hey, like, what is the offer? What is the message? And, you know, ride the cop and all of that. But Really, until you put the offer in front of someone and get that feedback and let people vote with their wallet. Are they going to buy? I pride myself like, Hey, we've sold multiple seven figures worth of real estate coaching programs like last year. It's like, but you still, like, you know, you get these offers is like, you never know. You think it's a winner, but until you get the market feedback, you'd really never know. I know we're getting to the end of the call here. We've got a couple of minutes left. So is there anything else that I should have asked you about, but I haven't that you think like some of the, maybe biggest lessons learned you know then in this market doing for 12 years, eight years, so someone looking to scale their business from six to seven figures or from you know, seven figures to multiple seven figures. What are some of like maybe the biggest three lessons you learned?
Mike:
Yeah, I'd say certainly one of the biggest lessons is you know, I think we all as real estate investors and as a maybe info marketers are product creators. We sometimes look at other people and try to say who we want to become based on modeling somebody else. But you never know the whole story. Like you don't really understand how hard it was for them to get there, whether they're happy with that. Like you should just, you really have to focus on what makes you happy. And so, you know, I did the live event model, for example, for a year and a half, and we did very well on a P. And. L. It looks fantastic, but I kind of felt like it was you know, it was a, it was an energy drain for me just because what happened more often than not is I wanted success for people more than they wanted it for themselves.
Mike:
And that's just not sustainable. And so at the end of the day, I think but you see people that are doing live events and you know, having selling three, $500,000 at live events, which is good. We've done that too, but it just wasn't at the end of the day it just wasn't what I love to do the most. And there's nothing wrong. Literally nothing wrong with it. Some people are energized by that fact. But you know, I think at the end of the day, it's not about the money and it's not about being like somebody else or modeling somebody else. It's about doing what you want to do, building the lifestyle that you want, and putting your imprint on the world the way that you want it to be.
Yassin:
I love it. What a great way to wrap this up. Mike. you know, you left me with more questions than I thought. It's like you left me with more questions. So first of all, good luck with million dollar event and you know, the online summit model is a great way to you know build influence and bring people together and build up your list. And I took a lot from this. I hope everyone listening to this call also got a lot of this. So I wanna thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations on the 2 comma club award. And I'm looking forward to maybe for a more future conversations and I'm sure keep in touch, like, Hey, here's what we're, it's rating on, here's what's working, here's, here's what we're finding, you know, we want to change. And, you know, I'm excited for future calls together.
Mike:
Absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah.
