Robert Wensley & The Rise and Fall of National Wholesaling: Lessons from Million Dollar Months

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This week I'm joined by Robert Wensley, the founder of Investor Lift. We're going to talk about the national wholesaling model, why you should have less diversity in your exit strategies and specialize more, and marketing that companies are using to get to one or two million dollars per month in wholesale assignment fees.

"How you doing today, Robert?"

"Excellent, excellent. Thanks so much for having me on, Brandon."

"Yeah, super excited. Sounds like today is day number one for you in the DR, right?"

"So we will at our new office. You know, a lot of people, they look at investors, they see we're moving billions of dollars of deals every year, and they assume that we have this massive office with hundreds of employees. We've actually been working out of like a couple little apartments here and there for the last few years. And actually, I'm sitting now today in our first official office that we just opened. I think there's gonna be... I'm gonna post an office tour video on YouTube pretty soon, but officially just moved in yesterday, so pretty excited about that."

"Yeah, cool. That's fantastic. Why the DR of all places?"

"You know, so my co-founder is Ukrainian but was born in Russia, lived in Ukraine for the last 15 years. And as a result, a lot of our team is Russian-Ukrainian. And when the war started, I was like, 'I got to get you out of Ukraine.' He didn't want to leave Ukraine, so I played a little trick on him. I'm like, 'Hey, for my birthday, why don't you come down to DR and we'll rent a yacht for the week?' And he said, 'All right, cool.'"

I'll continue with the rest of the text in this format. Let me know if you want me to proceed.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. This week, I'm joined by Robert Wensley, the founder of Investor Lift. We're going to talk about the national wholesaling model, why you should have less diversity in your exit strategies and specialize more, and the marketing that companies are using to get to one or two million dollars per month in wholesale assignment fees. How are you doing today, Robert?"

"Excellent, excellent," Robert replied. "Thanks so much for having me on, Brandon."

"Yeah, super excited. Sounds like today is day number one for you in the DR, right?"

"Yes, we're at our new office. You know, a lot of people look at Investor Lift, they see we're moving billions of dollars of deals every year, and they assume that we have this massive office with hundreds of employees. We've actually been working out of a couple of little apartments here and there for the last few years, and actually, I'm sitting now in our first official office that we just opened. I think I'm going to post an office tour video on YouTube pretty soon, but we officially just moved in yesterday, so I'm pretty excited about that."

"Yeah, cool. That's fantastic. Why the DR of all places?"

"My co-founder is Ukrainian but was born in Russia and lived in Ukraine for the last 15 years. As a result, a lot of our team is Russian-Ukrainian. When the war started, I thought, 'I got to get you out of Ukraine.' He didn't want to leave Ukraine, so I played a little trick on him. I said, 'Hey, for my birthday, why don't you come down to the DR and we'll rent a yacht for the week?' He said, 'All right, cool.' So we came down on February 21st for my birthday, and of course, while he was down here, Ukraine got invaded. I was like, 'Called that one,' so I had him got him out. He came down here for a week for my birthday and ended up never going back after the war started. Over the last couple of years, we've moved our entire team, everyone from Russia and Ukraine, to the DR because you get visa-free access from all countries, and it's on the same time zone as we are on the East Coast. I do not want war interfering with my business."

"That's crazy."

"Yeah, well, that's a unique solution, though. So you actually took these people and moved them from their home country into the Dominican Republic? Was there resistance to that, or were they happy to get out? I'm sure you got a mixed response from different people."

"Now everyone is happy. I mean, we have two guys who stayed behind because they have older parents or grandparents they are taking care of, so they're kind of stuck behind enemy lines, so to speak, taking care of their older family members. But everyone else was like, 'Yeah, this seems like a good opportunity.' I mean, we live in a beautiful place. We're a few blocks away from the beach here, and we have swimming pools, soccer fields, a gym, and pools. It's not like we're in a third-world country; we're in one of the nicest areas in the Caribbean, so it's a good place to run a satellite office."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, good for you. I'm excited. I'm honored to be your first podcast appearance in your brand new, not studio studio or whatever you're calling that place you're recording from. I'm honestly just really grateful and excited for this podcast episode overall. It's funny; we were just talking before we even got started about what to talk about because the overlap between what we both believe in, what we care about, and what we teach is just so massive. I feel like making this podcast shorter than eight hours is probably the biggest challenge of them all."

"We both believe in the gospel of making millions of dollars."

"That's right, but believe it or not, there are different gospels of making millions of dollars. We subscribe to a specific denomination that tends to be really effective, but it's newer, and that's why people are less into it. In many ways, I think that every big movement that happens will always have a few companies behind it, enabling it and making it possible. I think of Investor Lift like that for the virtual and national wholesaling model, where it makes it so much more feasible."

"On the chance that there's somebody listening that doesn't know you, your background, or how you got into this, I want to spend the meat of the episode just talking strategies, tactics, and all that kind of stuff. But I think it'd be super helpful to know kind of like, who are you, what is Investor Lift, what are you doing here, all that kind of stuff."

"I was born in—no, I'm just kidding. We'll go back a little bit but not too far back. Growing up, I always wanted to make a ton of money, and my friend whose dad made the most money was an investment banker. So I actually grew up trying to become an investment banker. I asked him, 'How do you become an investment banker?' He said, 'Go to a top school, preferably Harvard, study economics and finance, work on Wall Street, and try to get a job at a big investment bank like Goldman Sachs.' That was the ladder I was trying to climb for the first part of my life. I got into Harvard, got Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room, did economics, did finance, graduated dean's list, but I was doing summer internships at finance firms, and I realized I didn't really like doing finance. I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm going to make a few million dollars a year, but I'm working for some other rich person.' I was more of an entrepreneur. So right before graduation, I turned down all my job offers and decided, 'Hey, I'm going to learn how to be an entrepreneur.' But I didn't have a good idea at the time. It wasn't like I had some billion-dollar idea that I wanted to kick off, but I remember looking at this one stat from the IRS that said 90% of all millionaires make their money in real estate. I'm like, 'Well, a safe bet would probably be to learn real estate.' So I started cold calling house flipping companies, pitching them on coming to work for them, and ended up taking a job on Brad Chandler's team at Express Homebuyers in Washington, DC. I came in thinking I was going to learn how to become a house flipper. Little did I know that would really turn into me learning how to wholesale, which I didn't even know about, and then not just how to wholesale but how to create this new era of mega wholesaling that we've never seen before. I believe it really is the future of real estate investing. You're going to have this split between the guys doing the construction and the guys sourcing the deals. That split has started to emerge, but it's just going to accelerate more and more."

"I worked on Brad Chandler's team, took his team to over a million dollars a month, then after I left there, I worked on another team and took them from about $150,000 to over a million within, I believe, about six months. Then five months later, we broke two million a month in assigned fees earned. I thought, 'Hmm, done it twice, let's see if I can do it a third time.' I started working with a few other companies, like Charcoal Moose's team, took them from pretty much zero wholesaling to over two million a month, and I believe we did that one in about seven months. We started doing it over and over again, taking these companies that had some real estate experience and were maybe making a few hundred thousand dollars a month flipping, a lot of times keeping the existing team in place or even shrinking the team to a much smaller, leaner, lower overhead team with less burn and pivoting them into wholesaling. We turned them into these mega wholesaling machines that pump out millions of dollars a year and have super high net margins. We were doing this over and over again, and every time we tried to do it, we did it. But of course, dispositions were always our bottleneck, right? Acquisitions, you know, you get..."

"It's somewhat easy to crank up Google Ads, you know, to come and double your budget," he said. "I know it's a little bit more complicated than that, but you know, if you want twice as many leads, double your budget. You're going to have some diminishing returns, but you're going to get more leads."

"Um, you want to double your sales team? Hire twice as many salespeople," she added. "On dispositions, when you start scaling out into multiple markets, you have a really good core buyers list in one market. Then, you start scaling up into other markets. A lot of times, you get kicked in the ass real hard because you don't have the buyers you need to move the deals at the numbers that make sense, and you end up having a high contract fallout rate. You end up not making the assignment fees you should be making."

"There are a lot of issues you run into," he said. "So, after getting kicked in the teeth a few times myself trying to branch into multiple markets, I built this product called InvestorLift originally for myself and my friends."

"Originally, it was just kind of like our secret sauce, right?" he explained. "I'm just like, 'This is just going to be our secret sauce. I'm not opening it up publicly.' And we used it to allow ourselves to branch out into multiple markets and become nationwide wholesalers."

"Then, a couple of years ago, about a little over two years ago, I opened it up to the public, and it just took off," he continued. "We now move more real estate investment deals than anyone else in the world. Last time I checked, we were doing two and a half times more properties per month than all the iBuyers combined."

"Um, and generating just, you know, billions and billions of dollars of offers and selling billions and billions of dollars of deals," he boasted. "So, we got a lot of data, and we're changing a lot of businesses."

"And also, the cool thing is I see a lot of trends in the data because we have, we're spinning off over a quarter billion data points per month," he stated. "So, what that gives me is a little bit of a crystal ball on where things are headed, where things are going. And, um, to be honest, I haven't even talked about much of that on a podcast. I don't think I've talked about very much of that at all on a podcast before. So, we'll dive into some of that today, and I think it's gonna be a great episode."

"Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm really excited to do that," she replied. "And for what we've, uh, yeah, you may not have talked about this on podcasts, but I know we've certainly talked a lot about it and used some of those insights and everything to kind of drive our location strategies across our clients."

"Um, because it all starts with the product that you can sell, right?" she continued. "You need to get contracts that are sellable and ideally with larger gross margins. And to do that, I mean, understanding the dynamics of what produces that, I think is, I think is huge. So, that's fantastic."

"So, InvestorLift, if I were to simplify it," she asked. "Let me, let me see how I see it. You can correct me because I'm sure you've thought about this a lot more than I have. I think of it like access to this list of cash buyers along with the technology and some of the tools required or needed on a day-to-day basis to kind of manage that whole piece. You know, whether it's like emailing or texting buyers or whatever the case is and accepting offers. So, it's sort of like the data is the list and then, and then some tools for contacting that list. Um, and that's what I view is like the bulk of the product. Is there anything to add to that?"

"Yeah, I mean, the main thing we're trying to do is give you liquidity on your deals," he explained. "Give you liquidity in your contracts. We're going to help you sell your deals faster at higher prices."

"The average wholesaler in America typically off of InvestorLift will have an average assignment fee of 14 or 15 thousand dollars," he noted. "But our guys consistently clock average assignment fees, and last month nationwide, um, I believe was 32.1 thousand dollars nationwide across the entire InvestorLift network, which is huge, right? Like that's, that's over twice as much money per deal."

"So, people ask you, 'Okay, how the hell do you get assignment fees that high?' The way we do it is just by giving people access to better tools to drive more demand for their deals, better data, more buyers, putting more eyeballs on their deals," he elaborated. "So, you know, if you had one deal with one offer on it and you had the exact same deal with five offers, which one's gonna make you more money, right? And on a half a million dollar house, it's really easy to make another five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars per deal, right? For the buyer, they're only paying a fraction of a percentage more for that property to secure that deal. But for you, the wholesaler, if you go from a fifteen thousand dollar assignment fee to a thirty thousand dollar assignment fee, you've just increased the profitability of your business by 100 percent."

"So, that's really our goal," he said. "To like really shed light on like the real money in wholesaling is in nailing dispositions. Everyone focuses on acquisitions, but you can do everything right on acquisitions, but if you don't get dispo down, nothing on marketing and sales and acquisitions matters. It's always, you gotta cash that check at the end of the day."

"Yeah, in my opinion, it seems like there's way too many companies that just focus on selling the deal, right?" she observed. "And that's kind of the focus of dispositions is we're going to do this until we get an offer, and it's accepted, and we have found a buyer for the property, and not nearly enough effort put into how do we sell it at the highest price we could possibly sell it for. So, I think that's, I think that's super interesting. Like you, like you said, the distinction of InvestorLift could be, in some cases, the difference between one offer and five offers. You know, in both circumstances, you may have sold the property and you would have made a profit, but you can make significantly more profit if you can, um, if you can sell it for more. And you've already gone through all that hard work of acquisitions, and you've already gone through a lot of the hard work of dispositions and all that stuff to make that happen."

"Um, that's fantastic," she continued. "I kind of think of you as, as sort of leading the change to more of this virtual model, um, because so many of these people that we talk to, they've been in a local market model for a long time, right? You talk to these real estate investors that say, 'I'm a Salt Lake City or a DMV or Orlando, Florida, you know, whatever the case is, real estate investor. What I look for is more deals in whatever that study is, and then I have a variety of exit strategies for those deals.' That's like the standard model right now."

"Um, some of those people lean really heavy towards flips, do some wholesales, some lean heavy towards wholesales, do some flips, like everybody seems to release a little bit of everything. Novation is getting really popular, et cetera," she noted. "So, I'm really curious to hear about your, like what would you say to that person about different ways that they could go about their business?"

"Yeah, so I'm gonna go through, I'm gonna shoot straight on all this," he replied. "Everyone's up on, okay, if you think about how to make a ton of money really fast, the way that most people are looking at their businesses right now is they're like, 'Hey, I'm gonna go nine out of ten, like I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be in the top 10 at what I do.'"

"If you're in the top ten percent, you fast forward three to five years, you're out of business," he warned. "Okay, and there's some guys that are gonna be like, 'Okay, I'm gonna go 10 out of 10. I'm gonna be the best, right?' If you're the best, you're gonna do okay, but you're not gonna absolutely crush it. What you really got to do, what I always tell everyone on my team, is you got to go 11 out of 10. 11 out of 10. You got to be better than the best. You need to develop some sort of competitive advantage where you literally are the best in the world at one specific thing."

"And the problem I see with so many of these real estate investing businesses is they're all over the place," he stated. "They're doing buy and hold, they're doing development projects, they're doing fix and flip, they're doing wholesaling, they got a coaching program, they got affiliate sales, they got a podcast, they got a million different things going on. They're a jack of all trades, but they're a master of none."

"And you know where you see that?" he asked. "You see that on their net profits at the end of the year. You'll see that on their tax return. You'll see that on how much do they actually take home to their family. Because when you're doing a million different things, you're never going to develop a sustainable competitive advantage on one thing. You're never going to really dial in the numbers on one thing."

"So, like I remember when I was working at Express, we had 70 rentals, we were doing 60 flips at a time, we had development projects, we had a coaching business,

and we had a ton of wholesale stuff going on," he recalled. "And it was just, like, so hard to really dial in the numbers on any one of those."

"And it took a long time," he continued. "It took me about three years of getting kicked in the teeth trying to figure it out before I got it dialed in. And I think it's the same thing with a lot of people. So, what I tell people is, hey, you know, if you want to be a mom-and-pop shop, stay focused on one market, do a little bit of everything. That's cool. But don't complain when your profit margins are small. Don't complain when you're stuck at a certain level, okay?"

"But if you want to really grow your business, and you want to be really hyper-profitable, what you should do is you should laser-focus on one specific thing and become world-class at it," he advised. "You know, be world-class at one thing and develop a sustainable competitive advantage on that one thing."

"Then, you can go out and grow," he added. "And that's, like, the hardest part of my job every day is focusing on, okay, where are we going to go? Because we see so many different opportunities every day, and it's like, okay, how do we focus on what's really going to drive us forward in a significant way?"

"Uh, so that's what I tell everyone is, like, be hyper-focused, laser-focused," he urged. "You know, do one thing, become world-class at it, and then once you've got that locked in, then you can grow."

"Okay," he concluded. "So, I guess I'm kind of curious, like, I don't know, so, um, you, uh, InvestorLift's primary purpose is to increase the number of offers you get and to get the offers higher, right? Um, so that you can make more money, especially if you have the same deal. So, if someone wants to get started with that, you know, because you mentioned it's primarily driven by the data you have, and so, I mean, how, how do you collect that data?"

"Yeah, so we have a bunch of different data sources that we pull from," he answered. "So, we pull a lot of data from, uh, different skip tracing providers, from tax assessor records, from county records, from, uh, public and private sources. And we have some machine learning algorithms that take all that data and piece it all together. Because you have a bunch of fragmented data, you need to make it useful. And so, we piece it all together and create what we call a unified data set."

"And then what we do is we just pump that into a system," he explained. "And we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of buyers on our system. Um, and we're constantly updating it. And then when you want to sell a deal, all you do is you just post your deal on InvestorLift. Uh, we'll tell you exactly where it's gonna be located, how much it's gonna sell for, how long it's gonna take to sell, how many offers you're gonna get, and then you can just start marketing that property to your buyers."

"And then when you want to sell it," he said. "You can send out text messages, you can send out emails, um, we have some direct mail capabilities we're about to roll out as well. So, you can really market that property to the entire InvestorLift network and get a lot of offers really fast."

"And that's the key," he stated. "Because when you're just selling a deal to your buyers list, you're only marketing to a very small percentage of the entire buyer pool out there. And when you get a lot of offers on a property, it's gonna drive that price up really fast. And that's how you get higher assignment fees."

"That makes sense," she responded. "Um, and that's kind of been what I, what I was saying earlier about, like, you're leading this transition to virtual and kind of helping investors not be so dependent on their local market and things like that. And I think that also leads to better business models. Um, but the more and more we work with a variety of different companies, the more we realize that, like, this is actually, um, in the best interest of the business to go virtual. But it's also in the best interest of their own personal lifestyle, um, because it's really hard to have a work-life balance when you have to drive everywhere and you have to meet with people face to face."

"So, I think this virtual model is actually really, um, compelling to both those people that want to go from seven figures to eight figures, um, and, you know, kind of get to that stage," she added. "But I think also, it opens the door to all of these other people who want to get in real estate investing, but it's hard for them to do that because they just don't have the time. So, um, there's lots of people I talk to where they have a full-time job, and maybe they don't want to leave their full-time job, um, but they do want to kind of start investing."

"Um, and if they're virtual, they can do that, right?" she said. "Because it really opens the doors to them to be able to do it a little bit more in the evenings, a little bit more on the weekends, and things like that, which I think is great. So, I know we're starting to come up on time here, but I do want to get one last, um, sort of word of advice from you. And, um, you know, if you could give one piece of advice to someone who's just getting started in real estate investing, what would it be?"

"I would say focus," he answered. "You know, focus on one thing, become world-class at it. You know, it's like, I see so many people, they get distracted by all these different things. And, um, you know, I, I think the best piece of advice I could give anyone is just focus on one thing, become world-class at it, and then once you've got that locked in, then you can grow."

"That's awesome," she replied. "Well, thank you so much for your time today, Robert. Um, I'm really excited to see where InvestorLift goes from here, and I'm sure we'll be in touch."

"Thank you," he said. "Appreciate it."

"Awesome," she concluded. "Well, uh, thank you to everyone who tuned in, and we'll see you next time."

"Um, the reason why I like wholesaling as an exit strategy better than, you know, wholesaling or novations is because novations are like a really popular thing right now, right? There's like a new fad every couple of years, and the latest, greatest fad is novation. I think there are some instances where novation makes sense, like if I was in Seattle, you know, when I had leads coming in on million-dollar-plus houses that were built after the year 2000, the novation model makes sense on a lot of deals like that.

"The challenge that I've seen people run into with novation and wholesaling is that wholesaling is much more capital intensive, but with novation specifically, it just takes way more time to get the deals done. There are way more steps in the process, so your cash conversion cycle goes way out, right? You're not turning your money as fast, and also you need a lot more people to handle the same volume of deals. It's not simple turn and burn like doing a deal a day. When we're doing million-dollar months, we're doing multiple deals per day. You can't do that with novations, right? You could get to a few hundred thousand dollars a month with novations, but you can't do a million dollars a month in novations. At least, I've never seen anyone do it.

"And a lot of guys that I've seen go really heavy into novations have run into really serious cash flow issues. I get calls all the time, once a month, from guys that are really in cash jams. They're investors who have bills bouncing because they went too heavy into novations too fast, and they screw up their cash flows. You know, people never pay attention to cash conversion cycles. If you go from 30 days on your cash conversion cycle to 60 days, you make half as much money per year—half as much money. And when you go from 30 days to 120 days, you make 25% of the money you did. So when you add onto your cash conversion cycle like that, every day you're adding on decreases the percentage, decreases the amount of money you're gonna make in the business.

"So I like wholesaling because it's super, super scalable. It's simple; I can run it like McDonald's. It has great return on ad spend and great cash conversion cycles, better than any other exit strategy. And the other exit strategies, you know, if you're just getting started, like I'm talking about this just in the context of trying to build a million-dollar-a-month business. In the context of just doing a few deals, yeah, learn seller financing, learn novations, like get every tool in the shed, because when you're first getting started, you're not spoiled with a bunch of leads. But in the context of building like a real money-printing machine, I like to just stick with wholesaling.

"I understood a lot of people would use the same, what's the word, uh, like, I guess train of thought, so to speak, that you're using with focus and specialization. They use that to argue why they should be in one market versus in multiple markets versus what you're arguing here is one exit strategy, and then it seems like you almost don't care about the number of markets. Or you're a little bit flexible towards that, which is like the same, the same underlying principle driving it, but a really different application. What do you think about that?"

"Well, you know, fix and flip is a completely different business than wholesaling. You know, wholesaling is marketing and sales, right? You have a certain skill set that you need there—a marketing and sales skill set. Fix and flip is construction, construction management, operations management. Completely different business, right?

"So doing both of those at the same time, you really need to run two companies. Doing two markets at the same time, yeah, it might take you a few days or a few weeks to get to know the different buyers in that market and get to know the geographies, but we're not doing an entire—it's the same core business processes. We're running the same business processes; we can use the same salespeople with the same skills, we can use the same marketing campaigns, and we're running the same business.

"Yeah, there are going to be nuances to that market. There are going to be different areas that are high-crime areas we want to stay away from, but we can educate ourselves on those very quickly. It's not like we're reinventing the wheel; we're just running the same gameplay in a different place.

"Now, the reason why you want to do that is imagine this. So, Brandon, let's say you won the jackpot tomorrow, and you win a billion dollars. You're now America's newest billionaire, and you want to go invest that billion dollars and get a return on investment. Would you put it all in one stock? No. Would you throw it all in Tesla? No, right, because that'd be crazy. You'd be putting all your eggs in one basket. You would diversify your risk by investing in an entire portfolio of different stocks, different companies, different asset classes to diversify your risk, so you're not beholden to one stock going up and down. Elon Musk tweets something, and all of a sudden, you lost 100 million dollars, right?

"Even if you love to—I love Tesla. I only drive Teslas, and I would never put an entire portfolio all in one stock just because it would be insanity. That's kind of the same thing with putting all your eggs in one basket with one market. Okay, I'll tell you an example of this. So there've been times where I'm in a market, and I'm running Google ads, and then I have a competitor who hasn't been in Google ads that all of a sudden decides, 'Hey, I'm going to start running Google ads.' And I'm pretty dialed in with my numbers where I know how much I should pay for a keyword to get the return on ad spend that I want to target. And then, all of a sudden, they come in, and they start paying crazy amounts where, like, I'm like, 'You're just gonna spend yourself out of business, idiot.' But while they're spending themselves out of business, my sales team is not getting any leads off those campaigns.

"Now, if my numbers work and I know their numbers don't work, I know they're gonna be out of that campaign within a couple of months, and then my leads are going to come back. But in those couple of months, I'm up the creek not getting leads, right? So if you're just in one market, you have exposure to competitors coming in that market and disrupting your market position. That's number one. But then, number two, you have market exposure to the entire macroeconomic environment.

"I'll give you an example. The guys in Phoenix right now are all getting their asses kicked because that market is behaving right now like the East Coast and the rest of America was in November and December. November and December, all us East Coast guys, we got our asses kicked really hard, right? It was some of the worst months in wholesaling the last few years. Average assignment fees went sub-20k on Investor Lift in December, the lowest they've ever been. Now they've bounced back up to the 30s, but we got our asses kicked in November and December.

"The thing is, on the East Coast especially, seller expectations have gone down, so we're now able to get stuff at efficient prices where we can now make an efficient market between the buyer and seller expectations and capture a sizable profit there for making the deal happen. In Phoenix, the seller expectations haven't gone down. The sellers still want last year's prices, so all the Phoenix wholesalers, they're just in Phoenix, they're all screwed right now. They're getting their asses kicked really hard, and I see it in the numbers. And I've talked to some of the biggest guys in the country, and I've been like, 'Dude, why the hell do you have all your eggs in one basket in Phoenix? Like, you need to diversify out of just one market because all the macroeconomic forces of that market now are impacting your business. When that market is up, your business is up. Everyone's happy; everyone's buying Lambos. When that market is down, you're cutting the staff and cutting salaries and cutting bonuses. So why not diversify? Why not tack on three, four, five more markets? Is it really that hard? Think about how much time it takes to go learn the nuances of comping and stuff in a few different markets, building up your buyer relationships in a few different markets. Yeah, that's a small cost, but you can get through that in a few weeks or a few months, and then you get the benefit of not having like the micro exposure to competitors and not having the macro exposure of the actual market, whatever the whims of that market are. So it's an absolute no-brainer to be in multiple markets, and if you're not, you're leaving money on the table, and you're taking on this unnecessary risk that you could de-risk from your business very easily.'

"That's, yeah, so interesting. For what it's worth, I really believe in what you're saying here because I see the numbers across our clients, like our clients who are in multiple markets versus one market and how that affects things. There's also some aspects of, depending on the marketing channel that you're using, that could be more friendly or less friendly. And the channels that I'm personally familiar with—the digital channels—tend to excel in that kind of scenario versus some other channels might be a little bit more difficult to manage in those scenarios. So there's something to that, I think.

"But it's so interesting because a lot of people would say specialization in market, diversification in exit strategy. You're saying diversification in market, specialization in exit strategy, and it's a completely different model. I have noticed that a lot of people seem almost irrationally fearful of that. Maybe it's just because

they haven't done stuff in other markets before. You know, one person who I actually had on this podcast, Aaron Gaunt—you might know him—he's a client of ours and of Investor Lift as well, doing fantastic. He texted me the other day. I think he had like 40-something contracts last month, and they're dispositioning pretty well, mostly from PPC. So he's doing awesome.

"But he started in Southern California. When we started working with him as a client, he's in Southern California. Then he got one, because you know how this kind of happens with PPC, you get these stray leads in areas that you're not familiar with? Yeah, it happens all the time, right? So he gets some lead in San Antonio. He's like, 'Well, might as well try to make the most out of it,' and he successfully dispositions the property. And then he thought to himself, 'That wasn't actually that hard. I can do that. It's not my backyard. I don't feel comfortable with it, and I'm not familiar with it, but it's totally possible.' Now he's in at least probably 15 or 20 states, and every time he's gone a little bit wider, he's done a little bit better.

"So some people kind of get over that. Maybe they just need a little bit of a kick in the butt to see that they can actually do that. But do you have any opinion on the people who are listening to this and are just thinking, 'Ah, that sounds nice, Robert, but I can't do that'?"

"Okay, I think where this stems from is when we first started pumping million-dollar months, we kind of told people we're national wholesalers, okay? When we said we're national wholesalers, we didn't really mean we're like in every single city, county, state, but we started putting the word out. Like, people were, you know, we jumped on podcasts—some of the initial investors, guys that were hitting really big numbers doing a couple million dollars a month—and they're like, 'Hey, we're a national wholesaling company.' And then we accidentally started this whole national wholesaling trend, where everyone was like, 'Oh wow, national wholesaling!' And you had a bunch of gurus that were pushing out courses teaching people to go on Google ads and just target the entire United States of America, because your cost per lead is like five dollars, and you can get the cheapest leads in the world. So that was a trend last year where all these guys were learning that strategy from a few people in the game and testing it and getting their asses kicked."

"Um, so you know I've said it many times before: if you want to get Ferrari assignment fees, you got to buy some Ferrari leads. But you also got to know the price, you got to know the price."

"Yeah, just start on Disco, start on Disco and work your way back."

"That's fantastic. I want to ask you about one more thing. I think if there's like three main things that kind of show how much a company is doing, the first one's going to be the number of markets. Next is the number of exit strategies. We've talked kind of about both of those in terms of diversification versus specialization. What about marketing?"

"There's a lot of people who are doing TV and radio and SMS and cold call and direct mail and PPC and Facebook ads and SEO and billboards, and you know, the list goes on and on. Although I think that was a pretty comprehensive list. But there's a lot of available marketing channels, and it could be said that diversification in marketing channels is important. It could also be said that each marketing channel kind of has its own type of lead it generates and its own processes internally that are going to be most appropriate for that marketing channel. In that way, companies that specialize sometimes do really well. Like as an example, our clients that are heavy on cold call and then turn on PPC, they tend to not close as well as our clients that do PPC only because if you're just used to sifting through a pile of junk to find a good lead all day, then it's going to be weird to get just quality leads. It's much more likely that you kind of miss something good because it's a different mindset, right? Your PPC maximizes every lead, cold call finds something that's good hopefully out of the list, and it's a volume game, right?"

"So that's just an example, but what are you seeing about these companies that are doing really well? Do they have one marketing channel, three, seven?"

"I would say that any one of the best, making more than half a million dollars a month, is spending 80% plus of their budget on one channel, and that's Google ads. The reason being is it's the number one lead source in terms of quality. It's got the lowest cash conversion cycle, and the return on ad spend is really solid. It's predictable."

"But the more important thing too is on these other channels, you can't develop a sustainable competitive advantage. For example, if I go and try to get really good at Direct Mail, like how do I develop a competitive advantage on Direct Mail? We're all buying data from the same places, we all have the same lists. You can't really develop a competitive advantage unless you maybe try to get the data a little bit earlier. But everyone knows with Direct Mail, you got to hit the guys five, ten times before you actually get a lift, actually get a good response. So even if you get your first mail piece out a few weeks earlier, like does that really do that much? And then as soon as you figure that out, someone else is going to figure it out."

"You could A/B test, right? That's the thing that I used to always do, is just A/B test, A/B test, A/B test. But then you know what's going to happen? Your competitor is going to get your mail piece and they're going to copy it, so you can't really develop a competitive advantage on Direct Mail."

"Could you do it on TV? Could you do it on radio? It's the same. You can't really develop a competitive advantage. With Google, it's different. With Google, it's a lot different because as you start spending money on that account, that account gets smarter and smarter and smarter. You're feeding the algorithm, you're feeding Google's neural networks more and more data, and Google's getting better and better and better. It's going to get better and better and better at finding more people that look like those people. The more you spend, the more intelligent it gets. The more intelligent it gets, the more money you make, and the more money you make, the more you can afford to spend and throw back in."

"So like, if you're just getting into Google ads right now, you're already late to the game. You're five years late to the game, but five years from now, like you're not even going to be able to compete. So that's again why I think you're going to see this trend towards Mega wholesalers taking more market share here in the next few years. Because a beginner wholesaler that's spending five thousand dollars a month in their account is not going to be able to compete against a mega wholesaler that's spending a million dollars a month."

"That's why I like Google ads. It's because you can develop a sustainable long-term competitive advantage if you can get the numbers working and keep that campaign growing and growing and growing, and get more and more capital invested in every dollar you spend. That is strengthening your competitive advantage."

"I think that's kind of the irony of what we both do, if you think about it. The companies that have the most buyer relationships have an advantage, right? You could think of building a buyer's list kind of like one of those things where the biggest companies are always going to have an advantage compared to a smaller company because they're adding more and more and faster. So they have the ability to disposition deals at larger spreads, and in a way, investors kind of shortcut that. In the same way, we kind of are the same thing when it comes to PPC. We, like our clients collectively, are Google's biggest client in this industry, and we have data-sharing practices between those clients to where our clients that spend one thousand dollars a month in PPC don't actually statistically have a different return on investment than our clients that spend six figures every month, which is highly atypical because usually the companies that spend the most money are going to have the best results. Even those companies that spend six figures each month, we can make it as if they were spending even more, right? Because it's not like once you unlock this certain amount of spend, then suddenly the algorithm is fully learned, right? AI is just going to get smarter and smarter the more data you can feed it."

"So that's something I think is just really neat. In a way, InvestorLift and Pavement Collective have the same business model. We're just tackling different problems."

"Yeah, now I remember you showed me how you're doing the cross-account little trick there that you got going. But I was like, that is the freaking gold mine right there. As soon as I saw that, I was like, okay, anyone asks me where to go for PPC, I'm sending them your way because I know the power of that. I know the power of that and how it could jumpstart an account and give them such a competitive advantage on day one."

"Yeah, we're doing the same thing on InvestorLift with buyers, basically the exact same strategy. Let's work together to go strengthen our competitive advantages as a collective instead of trying to just develop it on our own."

"Yep, totally agreed. Well, this has been fantastic, Robert. Super grateful for the time that you've spent here and all the insights that you shared. Is there anything else that you'd want to share that you think people need to know?"

"I think if you're in the business right now, one of the biggest mistakes people make is, you know, they'll hear me talking about building million-dollar-a-month businesses, two million-dollar-a-month businesses, and they're like, well, I don't want to do that. That's not me. I'm happy with 200k a month. That's fine, but the strategies and the playbook that you should run to get to a million a month, you should run regardless of whether or not you're trying to get there. Even if you're trying to go to 200k a month, build your business as if you're trying to go for a million because you're going to do stuff right, and your 200k is going to be a lot more consistent, or your 300k or 400k or whatever it is."

"So it's like, you know, one of the things I always tell entrepreneurs is, 'Build your business to sell it.' Build it as if you're going to sell it, even if you keep it forever. Build it as if you're always going to sell it next year because you'll build it right. You'll start doing things right, you'll keep your books clean, you'll hire the right people, you'll put the right systems and processes in place."

"Or another analogy I like to use is like, you know, if you want to keep your house clean, the best way to keep your house clean is just to invite guests over every couple of days. If you invite guests over every couple of days, you're always going to have a clean house, right?"

"So yeah, that would be my advice. Even if you're not trying to go to a million, build it as if. Build it as if, because you'll do things right, and that will make your life a lot easier. You'll have a lot less risk in your business, you'll sleep better at night, and overall you're just going to be much, much happier as an entrepreneur and as a real estate business owner."

"Love that, very, very sound advice. I also want to put in a little plug for our clients. We have different segments of clients that we track from a return on investment standpoint. Our highest return segment right now is our national clients. That's why you'll hear me talking about national wholesaling on this podcast a lot. That's part of the reason that I wanted Robert here to kind of share what he's doing because 100% of those companies, as far as I'm aware, are InvestorLift customers. It's almost non-negotiable if you're going to do the national model. It was so much harder to do it without that, so I highly recommend if you're interested in that and learning more about InvestorLift, definitely check them out

."

"We do have a discount code. How much is it, Robert? 10% I think off of InvestorLift?"

"Yeah, if you go to get.g-e-t.investorlift.com and you use the coupon code 'Bateman,' then you'll get 10% off the first year."

"Alright, so get.g-e-t.investorlift.com, and then when you get to checkout, just put in the coupon code 'Bateman.' That will give you 10% off your first year on InvestorLift. So please, yeah, please do that if that's the right fit for you. Thank you again for your time, Robert. It's been fantastic having you on here, and we'll have to do another time. For everybody else listening, I will see you next time."

"Absolutely, thanks so much, Brandon. Appreciate having me on, and we'll see you next time."

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