Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and your investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast. 

Josh: So, hey, welcome back to Accelerated Investor. This is Josh Cantwell as always, and I am so excited to be with you inside of your brain, inside your ears, wherever you’re at today at the gym, out for a walk, hanging out with your friends. It would be great if you were hanging out with your friends and all listening to me. And whether you’re building your real estate portfolio, building a business, looking for strategies to make more income, leverage your time, your in the right place. And I have a fantastic guest with me today. Her name is Samantha Riley. She is a thought leader, a business leader, a bestselling author. And we’re going to have an amazing discussion today around different strategies that you can implement to multiply your revenues, your profits from the same amount of work. What we’re talking about today is leverage, right? So have you ever wanted to maybe get into a conversation and instead of telling that message to one person, tell it to 25 people at a time and gather more influence, more revenue, more profits, more deal flow by having a larger audience. 

Josh: Or have you ever wanted to maybe go from owning one or two rental properties to leveraging again, your time, your talent and your money to owning a portfolio of 25 units inside of one building. And so Sam coaches, entrepreneurs, business owners and leaders throughout the world. She’s based out of Australia. I’m super excited to meet with her and talk with her today because I was introduced to her by a very good, mutual friend. His name is Alex Neem and I’m really privileged and just really excited to have Samantha on the podcast to learn more about leverage, to learn more about growing    your business without having to put in a tremendous amount of more work and time. She is also the founder and the host of The Thought Leader Business Lab podcast. So your name is Samantha Riley. Sam, thanks so much for joining us today on Accelerated Investor. How are you? 

Samantha: I’m doing so well Josh, and as a listener of your podcast, I’m very grateful and humbled  and very blessed to be here with you today. 

Josh: Absolutely. So Sam as we were getting ready for this. Again, the one thing that stood out, which we talked about kind of in the preparation for this was some of the strategies that you teach about being able to not work more, but to actually leverage your time, leverage your talent, speak to larger audience, gain more clients, gain more deals in any industry, and you teach this throughout the world and have a huge audience and presence. So I’m interested to jump more into that. So let’s start with your passion for this. Where did your passion for this leverage? Where did your passion for this really begin? 

Samantha: Yeah, so you know, I think a lot of us have got some sort of, you know, sad story of how we get into what we’re doing or why we do what we do. And mine started because I, my business partner was my husband. We’d been in business 20 years and we separated and I lost the businesses. And I had this moment where I’m like, wow, what did I work these 20 years for? Why did I work so hard? Because my focus had always been I wanted to retire early. You know, I wanted to spend time with my family and then it was just all gone. And I went, wow, what was that all for? And you know that I think that that low point was also the launching pad for where I’ve wound up because I had to really do some soul searching and say, well, what do I work my life to really look like?

Samantha: And when I thought about it, it was, I wanted to spend more time traveling. I wanted to spend more time with friends and family, more time just hanging out, but also spend more time in my business doing the things that I loved, which a lot of that was bringing people together and having really cool, inspiring conversations. And so I really thought, well, what is it that I can do that’s in my zone of genius? How can I do it in a way that creates this amazing life and this is how I am, you know, this is how I’m here. There was a lot more in between, but that’s essentially how I’ve wound up here doing what I’m doing. 

Josh: That is, that’s great. You know, a lot of times it’s in a point of pain. It’s in the point of being in the abyss, if you will. Maybe don’t recognize, I think all of us naturally can kind of take for granted the good things that are going on and when things are going well, you’re kind of cruising along and maybe not learning a lot. I’ve found that it’s in the worst parts of my life. It’s in the toughest situations, the biggest challenges where I learn and grow the most. And it sounds like that’s how it was for you as well. 

Samantha: Totally. Yeah.

Josh: And so I’m curious, to jump into some of these techniques and strategies that you teach. You teach a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners and lots of different niches about    ways to get more without having to put in more time. And your focus was really in on instead of the, speaking of the one to one message is more of the one-to-many message. And I think for even for real estate entrepreneurs, this is very, very important because in order to gain market share, to buy more properties, to have a bigger influence, we need to get away from having one-on-one lunch meetings or one-on-one breakfast meetings. Like let’s meet for coffee one-on-one, get away from that and gain more market share. And I know you teach this and you’re very, very compelling in it. So let’s talk about some of your top techniques. Just first of all, why don’t you, in your own words, describe the concept and why this is been working for you and for your clients. And then we’ll jump into some specific tactics. 

Samantha: Sure, so there’s three reasons that I love this. Firstly, it’s to get your time back, which is what most people think of, but where the next two pieces come in, it gets really exciting. You leverage your income as well. And this is the part that I love. You leverage your impact. So while you’re having one on one conversations, your, you know, getting paid as a one on one person and you’re impacting one person. Now if you were having that conversations 20 times in one day and instead you could get those 20 people in one room, share the message once, your sharing your message once you’re impacting 20 people, you’re getting paid 20 times over and you’re only, you know, using or utilizing one unit of time. So that’s how it gets really cool. 

Samantha: And what I also love about this strategy is the more that you have these one to many conversations, the more your authority positioning increases. And that intern exponentially grows this and you get a really great momentum where all of a sudden you’re now earning even more income, spending even less time. But the impact just goes through the roof. You know, you can, you’re now impacting thousands of people. So that’s where this is really exciting. 

Josh: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I’ve always said the best way to sell is face to face, but the second best way to sell is kind of digitally face to face. Maybe on a webinar on a podcast like this on YouTube or maybe on Facebook, but to be one to many in a real live seminar or in a room, or even at a meetup or at some sort of real estate function for my audience, people say that that’s the guy, or that’s the girl that stands out and then all of a sudden you’re standing in the back of the room and what does everybody do? They come and they kind of heard over by you in the back of the room. That’s essentially the real world way of gaining authority, right? So many people, Sam, are afraid to be a public speaker. So I guess the first question or first thing that some of my audience might say as well, I don’t know that I’m really comfortable jumping up in front of a big audience, right? So how do you talk to them? What do you say about maybe some of their fears or having those one to many conversations instead of the one-on-ones? 

Samantha: Yeah, I love this because I was that person that, you know, you’ve heard that people, sometimes they’re more afraid of dying than public speaking, as ridiculous as it sounds. That was me, I was that person. So I can talk from experience on my experience and this is going to be different for other people. But for me it was like what could that next step look like? So I’ve been podcasting now for five years, even at the beginning that was super scary for me. Now I love it so much. It’s so easy to do. Running webinars at the beginning was a little bit scary, but it was just, you know, dipping my toe in the water. I    could still sit behind my laptop and speak to, you know, hundreds of people. Then moving into that, I do love to be around people and I’m an extravert, but speaking on stage was scary. 

Samantha: So running a VIP day or VIP event where you are sort of in an environment where you’re speaking with people, rather than from the stage is a really great way to get into that. I love running boardroom days because your, you know, at a table with people and you just sort of move into that speaking on stage because once you practice speaking about your topic enough and start to really get comfortable about what it is that you’re saying, it becomes easier and you start to, to go into that place of service where you know your topics so well. It’s very easy to share it. 

Josh: Yeah, that’s fantastic and I think even, you know for a lot of people can leverage simple social media, maybe making posts on their Facebook page and talking about some of their expertise or some of their deal flow or things that they’re doing or not doing and getting some audience to pay attention to them. That’s pretty low risk. Doing it in writing, maybe doing a Facebook live, getting used to that a bit at a time to the point where maybe it’s somebody else’s group where you’re jumping up and speaking even for 30 seconds or five minutes at somebody else’s boardroom or somebody else’s meet up just to kind of break the ice and get used to it. Nobody’s a natural born public speaker that on day one they’re really, really good at it, but you’re right, it is the highest profession paid profession on an hourly basis in the world and being in front of audiences gives you an extreme amount of authority with that audience to say like, I want to do business with that person. I want to give them money to do deals. I want to buy properties from them, sell properties from them, have them consult with me, mentor me because they’re up in front of the stage. So if you have a vision for a big business it’s something you’ve got to get used to, right. 

Samantha: It’s hardly, and you know what else this, and I think this is super exciting. My prediction really, and it’s already sort of, you’d probably already see it happening, is that we’ve just gone through this age where people are leveraging social media a lot, talking behind their phones. That’s all cool. But what is it that makes you want to buy from someone? It’s being in front of them and I think that coming into 2020 and over the next few years, what is going to make you stand out is being with people, creating real life relationships, having real conversations. Because whilst we’re in a place in time where we’re super hyper connected, we’re feeling less connected than ever. So to really, you know, to create those connections I think is going to be a super power for us that we can really, you know, take forward with us and create a business around deep connections.

Josh: Fantastic. Absolutely. And what’s resonated with me, Sam, as we’re talking is as a CEO, right? And this is maybe a conversation more for that CEO, high level leader, high level executive, or if you’re building your real estate business, you’ve got to have a vision for a bigger business, right? Because you could do a lot of real estate deals sitting at your desk by yourself. But if you want to have a big business, leverage it into multiple assets, big cash flowing properties with many units. Oftentimes the CEO, it doesn’t matter if it’s fortune 500 or a mom and pop business, the main job is to broadcast the message to teach and broadcast the vision. The message for the business is to get out in front of big groups, this one to many strategy, right?    

Josh: And so many CEOs I find are stuck behind a desk. They’re looking at numbers all day. They’re playing with figures all day, maybe talking to their employees. But where they really belong is out in the public marketplace, right at events, speaking podcasts, webinars, casting the message and gaining market share back for their business. So let’s jump into some of these specific strategies to actually do this, to escape the kind of time for money trap and be able to leverage your time. So what are some more specific strategies to actually do that, to gain more leverage and more authority? 

Samantha: Absolutely. So one of them I did mention, it’s a great way to start and that’s running a boardroom mastermind. Because these are nice and intimate. It’s about bringing people together, usually 10 or 12 people and spending a day really masterminding and jumping deep diving into tactics with people at the table. These are fantastic depending on the level of the people that you, you can actually charge quite a lot of money for these and make a super lucrative day. What also is great is that when you’re with people in this kind of environment, you create super fans or what I call super fans because you are learning about someone in a very intimate environment. So boardroom masterminds are a really great way, I believe one of the best ways to get started to be in front of people. Another really great way I love to run events is what I call a preview event.

Samantha: And that’s a free or a low cost event. Usually for half a day or up to two days depending on what your industry is and bringing people into a room and giving them a preview on what you do, what you’re teaching, what your program is and a preview events are really great. With a preview event, you’re not making money on the front end like you would be with a boardroom mastermind. Usually with a preview event the money’s being made off the backend and that is a strategy that a lot of people get confused with because they, you know, they’re really trying to, to create a high ticket cost to come in. But that’s not the way to think about it. It’s about getting people in the room, having people access you and then moving them into whatever the next stage of your process is. 

Josh: Yeah. I know some guys in my own market who use a very similar technique a type of preview and a little bit different, but like for example, my friend Jack, he’s looking to raise more capital to fund more of his apartment deals. So what he actually do is he broadcasts on Facebook that he’s doing a free two hour training on multi-family investing and he’ll broadcast that on Facebook. Now he’s not soliciting money on Facebook. What he’s doing is building relationships and teaching people all the aspects of multi-family investing. So he’ll actually, he’ll open up a room at, a kind of a moderate to upper end restaurant. He’ll reserve the room in the back, may be room for 20 people and he’ll teach for two hours. But then he also buys appetizers. He buys drinks. And then he’ll talk about all the different places. 

Josh: Because in a big multi-family real estate deal, there’s maybe six or seven different places that somebody can participate. They can be an equity investor, they can sign a personal guarantee on a loan, they can be an asset manager, they can find deals. All these different places. Jacks, I believe, you know, he’s just trying to find more deals and more money. But he’s basically using the preview type of event to get people there, to hear from him, to see his face, he’s up in front of the audience, he has an authority with them and sure enough then people at the end are like, hey, you know, I might a deal for you    or I might like to join venture with you or I’d like to invest capital with you. And now they’re like, I built a relationship with Jack for the past two hours. 

Josh: Now he’s not selling a product, but he’s essentially asking people to join venture with him or invest with him or bring him deals. It’s the same end result. But what he’s done is built the authority through essentially a preview event and it’s worked really well. Another guy that I know, Steve in my market, he just tells everybody, meet him up at the bar, he picks up the bar tab and you know he has like a one and a half hour basically meetup mastermind if you will at the bar. But Steve will jump up for 15 minutes in front of the group and everyone will kind of quiet down and he’ll kind of teach something or talk about a deal or say, hey, thanks. Thanks for coming. Appreciate you guys all being here. Hopefully you’re getting value out of your relationships on my dollar. But people all know that Steve’s the host, right? So you bet you butt that all those people are then going to Steve to do deals with him. It’s very similar to this preview event strategy that you’re talking about. 

Samantha: Well, off the back of that, I’ve also done it where I’ve brought together two of those ideas together where I ran a preview event. But at the end of the day I invited 20 influences who I could potentially joint venture with. So they weren’t the clients that were in the room. They were influences that had those people in their market. I invited them to the events so they could see what I did. But then I took these 20 people out for dinner. I paid for their dinner and their drinks. So I actually combined two of those strategies together and that worked really well. 

Josh: That’s great. That’s fantastic. Any others, what other strategies do you teach?

Samantha: Yeah, so for people that have online products already, so there might be, let’s just say it was, I guess someone in the real estate industry that’s, that’s who you’re talking about. They may have some online products with how to get ready to invest or how to, you know, to structure your investments. They might have all of these little courses. Putting them together as a product bundle and selling those is a really great way to leverage your time and a great way to leverage your income and really a great way to build your audience. So completely different strategy. Again, you need to know what the outcome that you want, but product bundles are a great way to not create more content, but to sell what you’ve got in a different way. 

Josh: That’s great. And I think a lot of our audience probably has maybe their contracts that they can package up. So if they don’t have, if they’re not a like an info marketer or a digital marketing company or have products necessarily, let’s get creative in the way we’re thinking. You probably have, if you’re a real estate entrepreneur, you have your lease agreements, you have your purchase agreements, you maybe have your private placement memorandum, your operating agreements or samples of these agreements that you can package up and offer for a small cost or offer even for free in order to build your list, right? 

Josh: Build your list of followers. Build your list of people who are either buying your products or just gaining more eyeballs your direction by saying, Hey, if you’re in real estate or you’re interested in being an active or a passive investor, Hey, I’m just going to give you,    or maybe charge, you know, $97 bucks or $47 bucks, I’ll give you all my agreements to start your own real estate investing business. And by the way, some people are going to look at those and say, Hey, this is too much work. Or I don’t know how to fill these out. Can you help me? So now you’ve made that connection in a similar way. 

Samantha: Totally. And I get people saying this all the time, but what, these are worth so much, why would I give them away? And that’s exactly what I say. How many people are going to take this and go, oh, actually now I’ve had a look. It’s too hard. You know, I’ll pay you to do it. So of course there’s always going to be the people that will run with it. But it’s a great way to generate leads. And super hot leads too because you know exactly where they are in their investment journey as well. 

Josh: Fantastic. Yeah, we call that in some of the digital marketing spaces, a lead magnet or a trip wire offer where somebody steps in, it’s so easy that they kind of trip over it because it’s something that’s so low cost that they’re willing to just be like, Oh, it’s only that amount of money. I’ll just buy that. I want that. But now it’s in your database of somebody that maybe is interested in doing a deal, buying, selling, looking for mentorship, those kinds of things. 

Samantha: Absolutely. So the next one I’m going to share might at first seemed like it’s a bit strange, but I think this one’s super powerful, especially for people in real estate because what I found is that a lot of people that are playing at these levels, they love to be surrounded by likeminded people and they love to, they love to experience life in the fullest sense of, you know, experiential things. And this is running a retreat. And while this might sound really strange, how awesome would it be to bring people together that are likeminded that are going to go to a beautiful tropical Island. They’re going to, you know, talk about their strategies they’re going to mastermind, you know, have the full experience, you know, the masquerade party, the James Bond party, the, you know, the fine wine, you know, after dinner kind of thing. And turning this into a three or five days where you’re fully immersed with your tribe at talking about these things. I think retreats are the best way to bring people together and, and create a tribe that will really stick together. 

Josh: That’s amazing that you bring that up. Matter of fact, a friend of mine and one of the guys that do a lot of joint venture deals with, uh, his name is Tim Bratz. He’s actually this weekend down in the British Virgin Islands, I think at the Ritz. And they rented like, some super yacht cost them like $100,000 for the week or some crazy amount of money, but they did exactly this where he has other influencers, students, people who want to invest with him. He basically said, look, I’m going to go down to the British Virgin Islands. It’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go. I’m going to host basically a mastermind or a retreat, but do it at this amazing resort in this massive yacht. You guys all pay X amount of dollars to come. And I know that he most likely brought in enough money from everyone else to more than pay his own expenses and make a profit. And then he was in front of this audience of maybe six, eight, 10 people. I just saw some pictures on Facebook today of them sitting in a boardroom hanging out, talking about their real estate deals. Tim was maybe doing a little bit of teaching because he’s already the authority in the room and he was able to do that, charge a lot of money for it and    pay for an amazing vacation for him and his wife. So a real strategy that you’re talking about that I saw somebody executing on this morning. 

Samantha: Yeah. Yeah. So good. And how much does that position him when everyone’s looking on Facebook and going, I want to be on that yacht. Or you know, those people coming back and just and telling their family and friends, oh my goodness, I just had the best week. This is what we did. This is what we talked about. The positioning from that and the influence from that is huge. 

Josh: That’s fantastic. Love it. So Sam, I know we have just a few more minutes, so I wanted to ask you if there was a couple more that you wanted to kind of squeeze in and then I know you’ve got some free tools and resources for our group. 

Samantha: Totally. I’ve actually got a free download that explains all of these in much more detail. There’s nine strategies that I’ve put together. Like I said, you can mix and match a lot of these strategies. This is not the only nine strategies there are. There like when you really start to put your head together and think, what can I do? You know, for my clients sort of bringing clients, it’s, gosh, there’s strategies I’m sure that exists that I have no idea that even exists. But they’re really cool. And so apart from retreats, I guess my favorite strategy is VIP days. You know, I think that a lot of people forget that, you know, 80% of our income comes from 20% of the people and those people are right underneath our noses already. This is a strategy that I’ve done for over 20 years, I’ve always, you know, twice a year, pull the stats. Who are my VIP clients? Who are the people that are bringing in, you know, 80% of my income, let’s put them in a room, let’s give them champagne. Let’s acknowledge them, talk about, you know, how amazing they are, how much we appreciate them. Really roll out the red carpet for them. I think VIP days are fantastic and I want them, like I said, one of my favorite strategies. 

Josh: That’s awesome. I was just thinking about that in my own business. I was talking to my business partner Glenn and I said, look man, we manage all this money like $34 and $35 million bucks. We’ve got investors that have been investing with us for a long time. I know that they would like to know more about us and probably meet some more of the other investors that are in our deals or in our fund. We should be inviting them to like some sort of VIP day and like, it’s right around the holidays right now as we’re recording this, I’m not sure when this is going to be released, but we’ve got to get through the holiday and do it after all the muck of Christmas and all the hubbub of Christmas and maybe do it maybe in February when things are a little slower business. 

Josh: You know, people are ramping up their year. But then bring them all in, maybe teach some things, help them level up their education. But you know that, like you said, there’s a small group of people that make up a big percentage of your income and your audience and your clients. And you know, typically they also have either more money to invest that they haven’t told you about or they have friends or family that could invest with you or buy your products or invest in your deals. And so whatever they’re already doing with you is probably just a fraction of what they could do if they experienced some VIP experience with you, right. It’s really about building a deeper relationship where they have more trust for you, more connection. And that’s ultimately going to lead to, in my world, more investment, more deal flow, more referrals.  Page | 9

Samantha: Well, let me tell you, this is what happened the very first time I ran a VIP day. I knew that it was a great strategy. I wanted to try it. I hadn’t done it before, but once I had these 20 people in the room, I was walking around as you know, as the champagne was flowing and really saying, you know, how are you, what’s going on in your world? How can I serve you better? Now this is what happened off the back of it which totally surprised me because my idea was going in and you know, giving these people a great experience. I ended up making a lot of money. I didn’t even think I was going to make money on this VIP day and I ended up doing so many sales. It was incredible. Made a lot of money. So it’s just about always asking, how can I serve you better. 

Josh: Love it. Now your model is called The Freedom Business Matrix. I’m talking about these strategies that we talked about today plus a whole lot more, where can our audience. Get a copy of that 

Samantha: Yeah. Just head to SamanthaRiley.Global/Freedom. And you can download a free copy  there. 

Josh: Fantastic. We’re going to put that in the show notes. Everybody should grab that. Just again, I think the bigger part of this conversation I think is expanding what you think is possible. If you’re having small thinking and you’re having one on one conversations, it’s time for you to start thinking about having big conversations with big people, with lots of people in a room. If you’re already doing a lot of deals, it’s time for you to monetize your influence, your experience, the deals you’ve done. Again, bigger rooms, bigger audiences, more authority, more influence to just continue leveling up your game. It’s SamanthaRiley.Global/Freedom. Check that out. Sam had an absolute blast. Getting to know you more today, learning about some of your strategies to really leverage our time. Thank you so much for being here and making time for us today on Accelerated Investor. 

Samantha: Thanks so much, Josh.

You’ve been listening to Josh Cantwell and the Accelerated Investor Podcast. Leave a comment on our iTunes channel and let us know what you want to learn next, or who you’d like Josh to interview. While you’re there, give us some five star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his companies, the Strategic Real Estate Coach and Freeland Ventures on all social media platforms now and stay up to date on new training and investment opportunities to start your journey toward the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Apply for coaching at JoshCantwellCoaching.com.