Compound Innovation and PPC Strategies: Business Growth with Forrest Blackburn

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Forest Blackburn. Forest is most well known for taking a wholesale company from about forty thousand dollars a month in revenue to 2 million in just about five months. He is a fantastic leader, an understander of systems, all these different things that are important to kind of pour the gas on the fire to grow a wholesale company, especially on a national level. So I'm super excited for this podcast episode. We're going to talk about how do you optimize your marketing, even marketing for buyers, which is something a little bit newer to me that I was interested to hear about, and all kinds of other different things regarding split testing and stuff like that. How you doing today, Forest?"

"I'm doing well. How are you?"

"Yeah, doing awesome. Happy to hear you're doing well. You in California or Phoenix now?"

"I'm actually in Phoenix right now in Tempe, Arizona at the Green Elephant Development office with Cody Sperber. We were doing some podcasts yesterday. Always very high-level people, we had Robert Kiyosaki in the office last week or maybe the week before. You know, that's the cool thing about working with Cody Sperber, is that there's always, well I should say there's never a shortage of very high-level people coming through the office door. And that gives me an opportunity to meet and greet and develop relationships and have conversations at extremely high levels that give a different perspective on not just real estate and where the market's going, but just on the world as a whole and how all the pieces kind of fall into place and how that affects real estate and market trends and the ebbs and flows that we're all going through in pivoting through this new world of wholesale that is nothing like it was in 2020-2021."

"Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you seem to find a way to be surrounded by celebrities in the real estate space somehow. Somehow or another that's been your whole experience."

"You know what, there's little things that I pick up from high-level people. I say there's a phrase that I use a lot, especially in wholesaling, to kind of alleviate the noise on your plate. A lot of people in the space are working with very small margins. They're picking up these three thousand, five thousand, seven thousand dollar spreads. And for the longest time, I didn't know who to give credit to on this statement, but I saw something the other day and ironically enough, it was Donald Trump. And he said the reason that he developed his wealth in real estate, over and above his father giving him a nice head start, he looks at everything and he says, 'The bigger the cookie, the bigger the crumb.' He looks at these larger-scale projects because even at a small margin, those large-scale projects give off very good-sized crumbs."

"And Richard Branson and Elon Musk both said, independent of one another, to circle back to your question - and I don't even know if they both know that they said this - but they said that if you want to be a billionaire, your top five friends need to be billionaires. So it's always been something in the back of my mind that you have to surround yourself by people that know more than you."

"When I was a kid, I was an actor, and my talent manager at the time, she said, 'Never go into an acting class where you're the best one because you'll learn the least.' So I'm always on the lower echelon of the knowledge base in a small room so that I can soak up and learn and really absorb what these high-level people are doing. And it's not necessarily our wins because we celebrate those, but we learn from our losses."

"So really getting to be personal with a lot of these bigger players and working in billion-dollar deals and such enable me to really learn. And in that learning, I can then transcribe that into the different companies that I work for, my own businesses. So yeah, I try to surround myself with the heaviest of people that I can because that's where I'm going to learn the most. So it's kind of a thing for me."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. So let's dive - for anybody that doesn't know you listening to the podcast - I'd love to dive a little bit into your story, you know, what got you here."

"I can tell you my story of knowing you is that, saying you're around for a while and then it wasn't until, it was in Houston I think we were both in an event and got to meet and realized that there's quite a few synergies between what we do and that sort of thing. And I've recommended that some of our clients work with you and I think you've done the same. So anyways that's kind of how far we go back, but you go back significantly farther than that. Do you want to talk about how you got into this real estate niche?"

"No, absolutely. I was in the entertainment industry as a kid and I was an actor and then I got into music. And I was signed to Capitol Records and toured around and had a lot of fun, but that didn't happen until I kind of took over the band situation. And previous to having the band that I had that got signed to Capitol Records, everybody was, you know, we were all a band. So everybody had equal input, there was a lot of infighting. I'm a lead singer and a writer, and amongst the other players, there was all kinds of drama. So I just figured I'd just nip that in the bud and I went out and hired people and really kind of turned it into a business. And that's really when I learned that if you treat things like a business, if you have people in their designated roles, that you can really build something incredible."

"So fast forward a couple of years and I got into marketing. I took a step away from the music industry. I was the music supervisor for the UFC out in Las Vegas and that kind of took me away from being on stage and it gave me some perspective on a lot of things that I wanted to work on. Previous to that, I was working for Paramount Pictures and doing a lot of their social media marketing. It's back in the MySpace days before Facebook really took off. And so I got into Google marketing and working with small and medium businesses and I grew a very large company very quickly."

"From 2010 until about 2019, we built a little more than 50,000 websites and about 24,000 app developments. Everything was full-stack development. And these were all small medium businesses in every niche across the country. And grew that from about seven agents to about 1500 agents nationwide with 17 franchises and really kind of grew a monster."

"But I started becoming a consultant for a lot of Fortune 100s and 500s and 5,000 companies to kind of scale their business, specifically online. UPS, Travelocity, Disney Cruise Lines, Keller Williams, 1-800 Dentist - there were a lot of big companies that I was able to work with. And in growing their revenue base from a marketing standpoint and then making sure that there was a sales infrastructure in place to service that influx of good quality leads, it kind of layered a blueprint. It gave a very specific blueprint that really kind of worked in every industry."

"I was approached by HGTV, specifically Tarek El Moussa and the show Flip or Flop, to help them really grow the business behind the show. The business needed a lot more houses, a lot more content for the episodes. So I had a big decision to make to go in and instead of working for all these separate companies as kind of a consultant, to go in and for two years work with just one specific company. And that was a big decision, but I'm really glad that I did."

"And the first changes that I made were to really make a hard pivot into wholesale because of the fast cash churn. Flipping has a much longer cash cycle. So with wholesale, you're able to get that fast cash churn and roll that into marketing. And I very quickly got up to between PPC, TV, radio, pretty much every medium you can think of, I was spending a half a million dollars a month. But within five months of getting there, we went from forty thousand to over two million dollars a month in assignment fees."

"And again, like we were talking about, it was 2020-2021. These were much easier times. There was no inventory, interest rates were on the floor. It was very easy to move properties. A lot of people were overspending on properties because inventory was so low, so things were selling like hotcakes. And you didn't have to focus so much on your buyers list because as long as you had a property, there was going to be a buyer on the other end because there really weren't that many properties out there."

"So I grew that company rapidly and successfully using, leaning on PPC very heavily. You know, PPC weathers all storms. If you're really focused on social media, you know, you have something like a Trump-Biden election and you cannot get any screen time on Facebook. But PPC, if you search for 'how do I sell my inherited home' or 'who cash buyers,' you're going to always come up in those searches. You're not going to see anything for Trump or Biden for 'how do I sell my distressed house.' So that's always been something that is a constant."

"And I do a lot with TV and radio as well, but as I got out of that contract where it was very exclusive - I couldn't work with anybody else or help anyone else - and I had a lot of people knocking on the door looking for guidance and assistance, especially with the numbers that I was doing. And I had people like Robert Wensley of InvestorLift, you know, touting those numbers because we were using InvestorLift quite heavily on the disposition side. It became widely known, those numbers that we were achieving."

"So I really made a decision to not renew that contract and become kind of a free agent so to speak and be able to help others and kind of pass along the wins and losses that I had had using OPM, using other people's money to spend on these marketing campaigns and then develop sales infrastructure around that influx of inbound leads to cultivate more properties and also more buyers as the market has pivoted."

"You know, I really focus a lot on cultivating more buyers and buyers that are asking for something right now, not just a buyer that buys things here and there and oh, they bought properties over in this area six months ago. But if you find somebody who's, you know, it's a hot lead when somebody raises their hand and says, 'I want a property in this area right now,' you can really speed up your dispositions process."

"So I had done a few deals with Cody Sperber and as soon as I became a free agent, we had a conversation and I signed a non-exclusive agreement with him to come in and make him my priority and really work with Green Elephant Development to build out their wholesale channel in a pivoting, changing market, which has always been a challenge. But what's really weathered that storm is our PPC bringing in good quality, high distress - whether it's a distressed property or a distressed seller - leads and then also targeting our PPC onto cultivating more buyers that are interested in buying right this second and developing buy boxes and funnels for those buyers."

"So there's PPC on the entire mechanism on the front end and on the back end for both acquisitions and dispositions. And I think that that's what's really kept us afloat. And I implore that into all my students - I'm a coach and a mentor now that I'm available to do so. So over the last eight months, I've cultivated a large base of people that I'm helping and it's really working. And it's able to keep people, to be able to weather this storm through this ever-changing wholesale market that we're in and a lot of innovations as well, getting past some of these investors that are offering very low based on fear. But yeah, PPC is always the biggest weathered storm for me. So that's kind of what catches us up to our podcast today."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, I it's great to have you here kind of saying that PPC weathers the storm because I always think that way but, you know, nobody believes me because I run a company that does PPC, right? So of course I'm going to say that, right?"

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