#161: Outsourcing Cold Calling and Facebook Leads

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, guys, welcome back to Accelerated Investor. Hey, I’ve got a real treat for you. Listen, if you are a real estate investor and you love looking at properties, going out and meeting with motivated sellers, but you’re not really excited about, you know, vetting out leads, talking to leads on the phone, outbound cold calling, outbound cold calling outreach or doing inbound phone calls. You just want to be out in the field making more offers, looking at more properties. And this is a fantastic interview for you. I’m interviewing a new friend of mine. His name is Gus Munoz Castro. He’s the CEO and founder of a company called Power ISA. 

Josh: And his company is an expert at creating and setting up what are called inside sales agents, inside sales agencies, an expert, somebody who’s really good at dialing the phone, calling and making outbound calls to either warm leads or cold lists to generate more motivated seller leads. And as you guys know right now on the MLS, the Zillow, there’s no auctions happening because the eviction moratoriums and the foreclosure moratoriums. The MLS has only two point seven months’ worth of inventory, which is at a 38-year low. 

Josh:So you’ve got to be more creative in finding leads that are off market. Well, this interview with Goss is a fantastic, fantastic interview about how to increase your conversions of either doing cold outreach or taking your warm inbound leads and converting those at a higher level. So we’ll talk about what an essay does, what the description of an essay is, their background, their sort of disk profile, the personality profile, as well as how many dials they should be making per day and why an inside sales agent can quadruple the number of motivated seller leads that you’re working with. So I think you’re going to love this interview with Gus Munoz Castro Power ISA. Check it out. Here we go. 

Josh: So, everybody, welcome back to Accelerated Investor. Hey, Josh, here I am super excited and honored that you’re back with me again for another edition of the Accelerated Investor podcast, where you’re catching this on iTunes. Wherever you catch your podcasts on YouTube or our blog, wherever it’s at, just thank you for engaging with me today. And go ahead and share this. Share this across all your social media platforms, all your Facebook groups share this so we can share the word get more people into our community so we can build it for everybody’s benefit today. My guest is Gus Munoz Castro. 

Josh:He is a dynamite in the sales business for real estate investors, real estate agents and loan officers to convert more of your leads, whether it’s called outreach, whether it is leads coming from Facebook, leads coming from direct mail, leads coming from just lists. He is an expert at converting those leads through online scripts and dialogs and then getting those into your basically appointment calendar to go out and see these properties and convert more deals. Gus, listen, I’m so excited to have you on Accelerated Investor. Let’s jump right in. Tell us, Gus, right now, what is one thing in your particular business in today’s economy right now that’s really working for you that you’re really excited about? 

Gus: All right. Thanks so much, Josh. Appreciate it. I’d say right now, as we’re recording the podcast from the fall of 2020covid is still raging. It’s a big issue since about March and April because of everything that happened, people getting locked down, different, different states handling differently. There’s been a surge of activity online. So for residential, for investors, I’m telling them, you know, man, we’re getting a lot more people browsing their phone. Not so much to do stick at home. There’s a lot more people trying to do find things online. So finally, get your foot in the online lead gen business is important. Right. And this is a message, particularly for the investor. 

Gus: A lot of the investors, I mean, their base of their business is something like a direct mail. It’s driving for dollars. It’s wholesaling, it’s networking. That’s the base of their business. And I really tell them they should really experiment with online lead gen they should try it out. Right. A lot of investors have tried out Google pay per click. They try to other avenues, the cost of Google paper click in this economy right now, it’s high, it’s adequately price. Those are motivated. Those are good leads, no doubt. But the cost of them, they can be one hundred bucks a lead with Google pay per click. I’m telling investors, give Facebook a try because there’s been a surge of activity on Facebook. Right. A lot of folks at home, a lot of folks will kind of turn and they and they’re browsing those websites. And you can get a lot of sellers on there, a lot of motivated sellers on those platforms. The challenge is get their attention and convert them. 

Josh: Right. So right now, your business, your expertise is as people work through these Facebook ads or whether it’s a cold list, whether it’s direct mail, they have this data, this list that they’ve created of either people who’ve reached out to them or people that want to reach out to. And you build a massive team over seventy-five people that are primarily based in Mexico, but they’re experts at calling these leads, whether they’re warm or cold and converting these leads into appointments. So tell us about this business. How did you start it? What is your expertise exactly and how can you help our audience? 

Gus: Yeah, definitely. Well, you know, I got licensed in real estate in the back in twenty ten. I was still working full time at Microsoft back then. So I’m an engineer by training. That’s kind of my background. But I was always had the gift of gab good with people. My wife got licensed2008 kind of pulled me into the business and back then I mean the world was ending in 2008t right. 

Josh: Yeah. By the time it’s ending again right now and. Yeah. Yeah. We just don’t know what’s going to happen. Yeah. It’s ending again for the seventh time. Exactly. 

Gus: Exactly. 100%. Back then you know two thousand eight was tough, 2009 was just killer. But 2010, you know, my wife started working more and more with investors that they were active in the market, they were scooping up deals, whatever they were, short sales, pre foreclosure, foreclosure. You could find great deals on the MLS back then. This is a long time ago. But but I got involved in that environment. I got I got interested. It got bit by the bug and I went full time into real estate in twenty thirteen. I saw running my wife’s real estate team. So I kind of hired me into the company. Right. And in that role I discover the inside sales agent role within the real estate team, the inside sales agent role. And that was something that kind of blew my mind. Right, because I’m an engineer, I’m a systems guy. When I saw the potential for that role and the importance of it within the real estate team, I’m like, man, I could build it because I’m originally from Mexico. I could I could build a team of inside sales agents, qualified sales guys, killers, and I could do it back home in Mexico and I could really leverage that out. Right. So that’s how it started. 2015. 

Josh: For those people who don’t know what an ISA is, so I know what ISA is because I used to own a brokerage, we would generate online leads from Facebook and Google. They would come in to what was known as an IDX website, Internet data exchange for those of you that don’t know, which means it’s a website that’s built and it’s basically powered by your local MLS and it feeds the properties in your local MLS into your website. There’s a lot of IDX platforms out there. There’s commissions inc, Tiger leads, all these different kinds of companies. We used to own one of those and the incise sales agent. Every time someone would essentially opt in on that website to look at houses, the ISA would outbound call that lead. So this concept of ISA works, whether you’re a mortgage broker and you have people opting in on your website saying, I need a quote for refinancing my home, it works. 

Josh: If you’re a real estate investor and you have a website like we use a software program called Accelerated Investor Office, that website has its own websites. People get traffic to their websites. People opt in whether they want to buy a home or sell a home. And you need someone who’s going to outreach outbound call that new option, that new lead. So the Issei, if you’re not familiar, is an inside sales agent and inside sales rep who bangs the phones and calls these leads. Those are obviously inbound leads. You can also give an essay if you have no inbound leads, you have no website. You could just give them raw lists of. You know, we talk about in our webinar about multiple layers of motivation, Gus, about sellers who are maybe an out of town owner, who also has high equity, who’s also experienced eviction or a foreclosure and who wants to unlock their equity. And that also has a vacant house that they want to sell. So that’s five layers of motivation. 

Josh: Even if they haven’t opted into your website, you can still give an ISA that list, skip trace with phone numbers and they could bang the phones and outbound call those people. Guys, that’s what an ISA is. Gus, I love the concept because I did it myself for a long, long time. So you discovered this back in 2013, ’14, ’15. And you started building a system around that. And now that’s the epicenter of your big business that you get over. Seventy-five people doing this. So let’s go back. I just wanted to kind of stick that in there so my audience knows what we’re talking about. So you became enthralled with this concept, but you’re now at basically ground zero and you start to build from there. So tell us about that. 

Gus: Yeah, and I really like the way you laid it out, Josh, because that’s how I like to explain to folks as well. Right. There is the lead generation aspect of the business generation, which is Facebook, Google list building for investors. I mean, likability is a whole other topic. And I’m glad you covered that. You’re an expert on that. That is generating the prospects, generating the leads, whether they’re inbound or not. That doesn’t really matter. What you’re doing is the I say, like you said, OK, we’ve got those lists. You generated the leads, you’ve done the marketing, you’ve done the list building. Now comes the next part of the equation that you’re halfway done there. You’re only halfway done. That’s half of the equation. The other half is conversion, conversion, conversion rates. And you know, when as a solo investor, as a solo agent, ISA is a role, you are the ISA. The same way that you’re the transaction manager, the same way that you’re the admin, the same way that you’re the runner pushing all the paperwork. 

Gus: The closer you do it all, the closer you’re the everything. Right. So I say once you specialize and you kind of grow and you’ve got people on your team inside, sales agents are that initial touch they’re making. They’re hustling. They’re making those calls because, you know, surprise, surprise, a lot of these leads don’t convert on the first phone call. I love, I would love it if they did the amazing. But that takes two attempts, three attempts, five attempts, ten attempts, especially with the motivated sellers on those that called outrage. It can take several attempts, multiple attempts, and you want to hit them from all sides. Calls is one of the most effective ways. But text messaging works. Email can work. Direct mail is a huge part of Investor’s Business Direct Mail, the yellow letter phenomena. Right. All that stuff, all of those things. Work, say, is another way to help you convert those leads. Those leads are expensive, right? They’re not cheap.

Gus: Those lists, as the more layers you add, that list gets the price. You’re right. Gets more valuable. The list gets more valuable. So you want to make sure using every tool in your arsenal to convert those leads, Issei is one more tool. So I said I discovered that that was like amazing to me. And we built the team. We started with four campaigns in Washington State from my brokerage, the one I was in for. The people join me and we built the team of five offices and I haven’t looked back since. We have a team of seventy five people serving hundreds of clients across the US and Canada, retail, real estate agents, loan officers and investors. 

Josh:So describe for me we talked about this, Gus, we’re getting ready for this podcast as we were leading up to the recording about your ideal client who’s a real estate investor. So let’s say there’s one of our listeners, one of our thousands and thousands of listeners is on the phone and they’re thinking like, man, I really love running appointments when I have kind of a lead that’s teed up for me, somebody who’s already we’ve already talked to. They’ve already gotten the script. How much do they owe? What’s the home worth? It’s a it’s a four-bedroom, two bath or it’s a 10-unit, small apartment building or it’s a duplex. But I’m walking into a warm appointment with a motivated seller I really don’t like. You know, I don’t really like getting on the phone. I prefer to be out in the field. So describe for me your ideal real estate investor client that would use your service.

Gus: Yeah, great question. That that’s important. It goes to the heart of it. I think when you’re when you’re talking about bringing a nice thing onto your team and this is the same for residential real estate agents, by the way. It’s kind of the same concept. You’re adding leverage, right? You’re adding leverage. The only way you can have leverage without going out of business is if you as a rainmaker, you take on a higher level more important activities. You’ve got to be able to do more of those. If you bring on leverage and you do less work, less work gets done, you’re not going to get anywhere. Right. You’re just going to go around in circles. You’re going to spend a ton of money and you’re not going to grow the business. 

Gus: If you bring a nice way to make those calls and set those appointments, your time has to be spent, like you said in the field, closing the deals, closing those deals. So my ideal client on the investor side has deal flow. They’ve got appointments coming in. They’ve got deals. They’re closing one deal a month. They can close a couple of deals a month. They have that ability. But the close four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten, it’s not going to scale for them to make all of these calls and send all these letters on their own. They’ve probably already leveraged a lot of those activities to an administrative assistant. It might be a virtual assistant, might be an in-house assistant. They might already have someone helping them with acquisitions. Right. They’ve got someone making doing the comps, running comps and making those deals happen. They might already have that, but at the very least, their time needs to be leveraged to go on more appointments, to go on one, two, three, four appointments in a single day. That is the kind of investor that really can use and I say to take their business to the next level. 

Josh: Gotcha. And what you do, how do you help them select an essay that’s on your team that based on you guys, used to all be kind of under one roof in Mexico now because ofcovid, they’re all working virtually as well. But these are obviously English-speaking people that understand real estate. They understand how to talk to motivated sellers who are going to sell their property, whether it’s retail or to an investor. A lot of times that personality, if you will, there needs to be because you’re basically taking someone on your team, but you’re also placing them inside of someone else’s team. And there has to be kind of a culture fit. I don’t mean a culture like Mexican versus American. What I mean is team culture, business, culture, that they’re like, if I’m working in the field, I got to know that my Issei is kind of asking the questions I want them to ask, setting up the appointment the way I want it to be set and making sure that I can communicate with them. Personalities fit. So sometimes that just doesn’t happen. You might have to a players who butt heads that can happen to. So help me understand, like if I was a an investor, I’ve got leads coming into my website from Facebook ads or direct mail. How would you help me select the NSA for my team? 

Gus: Yeah, so it’s a great question and it starts with number one, what is the ISA going to do? That’s the first kind of big the big filter that we use. Are they going to be doing cold outreach like a true cold caller, not butting heads with gatekeepers, with other investors, business owners? I mean, that’s one profile. That is the cold calling, you know, super high D for people familiar with the disk profile. It’s very assertive, does not take no for an answer. A lot of grit. They have a lot of those kind of values. A tenacity and grit is important. Those are almost impossible to interview for. By the way, you’ve got to get someone in the room and have them get cold calls all day. They actually have great, by the way. So that’s one profile. 

Gus: The other a little bit of a different profile we found is for folks that there are really more into the inbound lead, a response, nurturing and conversion. It’s a little bit of a different profile. That cold calling person might not have the same kind of success and that kind of campaign, because it is more of a customer service scenario. It is a sale. You’re closing for the appointment, but is a little bit of a different approach. You have to have a lot of empathy. You have to listen to people. You have to have, you know, just be human on the phone. Right. Listen to them and try and get and become a solution for them. Listen to their needs, listen to their fears and say, hey, this is how we can solve that. Right. Just a little bit of a different skill set. So that’s where it starts. What kind of campaign are we talking about for the investor? Right. So we find the right skill set. And the next part that you mentioned, are they a good let’s say you find a name. For either of these scenarios, are they going to be a good fit on the team and we find that out when we’ve placed them in there, we get the feedback they are they coachable within that team? 

Gus: Are they a good fit for that organization? And if they’re not a good fit, gonna switch that person out right away, that’s the best way to do it by learning on the fly, by getting feedback from the team. All of our campaigns have account managers. They’re talking to the clients and making sure that those details are not missed. And, you know, Josh, it sounds like ambiguous, like it’s not true. People know this pretty quickly, right. Within a week or two. Look, judging the quality of the appointments, the quality of the feedback, is the ISA learning? Are they a good fit for that team? We know this pretty quickly. Can we can we get progress or not? And that’s important to understand because we know the ISA is good at that job. They can make calls, no doubt. Do you want to work with them on your team is the next question?

Josh: Got it. So we’ve got two more questions for you. Again, we’ll put Gus’s contact information in the show notes. I’ll have them shout that out here at the end as well. If you’d like to have his team of ISAs call your leads and work in your business. You guys know I’m a big fan of direct mail. You guys know that I love using lists with multiple layers of motivation. And then I have that that yellow postcard that is half pre typed. And you guys know my strategy. I like to actually take that black Sharpie marker and actually hand write the person’s name, their address and then sign off. So it’s partially preprepared, partially signed off with a black Sharpie marker just like this one. And we get a huge response from that, especially if you can take the time to actually go do some driving for dollars. We take this list. It’s got multiple layers of motivation. We went all that down to about one hundred and fifty leads. We then go drive four dollars, those one hundred one hundred fifty leads looking for signs of physical distress. 

Josh: We might get down to fifty-one hundred total leads. Then we send out the yellow postcard with that handwritten message on it. So we don’t want five thousand leads in our campaign. We might only want fifty to one hundred because we know that there’s multiple layers of motivation based on their profile on the list that they fall on. But then there’s also physical distress because we’ve actually driven to that house. So imagine taking that list, turning that over to Gus’s office, hiring one of his ISAs and him nurturing, calling, outbound calling and getting those 50 to 100 people on the phone and setting up appointments for you. That’s one way to do it. Got it. Now, another way to do it. Slightly different. Gus, I know you’re very passionate for Facebook leads. Talk to our audience a little bit more about what’s going on with Facebook, how to set up a Facebook campaign, some high-level things about why they should be using Facebook to generate motivated seller leads for their investment business. 

Gus: Yeah, definitely. You know, and I’m passionate about it. I see there’s an opportunity there. Costs have come down. Attention has gone up on that platform for a lot of reasons. I think. I think the pandemic accelerated a lot of things. Right. More people jump online where people are buying stuff online, where people are spending time online, they can’t. And a lot of areas of the country they can’t meet up in the places they used to go. They’re meeting up online. They’re doing a lot of these things on the Internet. So it’s about tapping into that and getting people’s attention. I will say this Facebook and a lot of these online media sources, they work better for residential and commercial. That is that is a big difference, I think, for commercial. The cold outreach is still the cold outreach. 

Josh: Absolutely. Because commercial brokers that sell apartments are not hanging out in Facebook looking for Facebook leads. You know, the commercial leads, there’s less of them. There’s less transactions per year because you’re talking about, you know, two and ten and fifty million-dollar transactions. But cold outreach would make a lot of sense. I mean, matter of fact, when we’re done with this podcast, you talk about that so we can penetrate my market a little bit more. But those Facebook leads are big and being a really target people based on age. Obviously, most people selling their property with equity are in that fifty-five to seventy-five-year-old range. You’re going to be able to go target them based on zip code. So in Facebook you can drop a pin of where you want your leads to come from and then market, let’s say a five or a 10 mile radius around that pin to people ages fifty five to seventy five years old. Right. Those people are more likely to sell simply based on age. That’s one way to set up a Facebook campaign and really direct your ads specifically to those people that are going to sell that. 

Gus: Absolutely. So I will say one thing is important. Very recently, Facebook has made some changes to that. Right, because Facebook has amazing demographic information about all of us. I mean, it’s just you think about it, you can go and download this stuff. You guys should go and look and look and see what they have. It’s pretty it’s impressive. It’s impressive. It’s one of the most powerful targeting platforms out there for real estate. I think it’s employment. And I think credit or finance, they’ve limited what you can do on the demographic side because the compliance issues in the US. Right. So there’s a little bit less targeting ability in there for sure, but. You can still do the geographic targeting, you still do a lot of targeting for these areas, they took away some of the demographic stuff you can do, income-based targeting, age based targeting, you know, gender based targeting ethnicity that took all that stuff away. 

Gus: But I’m here to tell you, the good news is the algorithm within Facebook is still unbelievably powerful, right? Yes. But you have to give it enough information in that ad copy in that ad title to understand what you’re trying to do. Right. And you’ve got to give it as many hints as possible. And there’s something people should look this up. It’s called the Google, the Facebook pixel. And you know, and you mentioned earlier about that IDEX landing page, that IDEX powered website. Well, you can have some of that, a similar thing for that. You know, for the investor leads as well. If you drop that Facebook pixel where you want your lease to land and the people that actually make it there are qualified leads that helps Facebook learn, oh, this is the kind of person that Josh wants. This is the kind of person I should be targeting. And that algorithm within a matter of days, and I’m talking about weeks or months here in a matter of days, can be trained to find the right people. Right. 

Gus:So in the report, I’ve seen this work on the residential side. Yeah, absolutely. And the cost per lead is only a fraction of what you typically see in Google pay per click for example, which is the closest comparison I’ve found on the online side. So there’s definitely an opportunity out there. Josh, even with the restrictions, when one of those things is definitely it takes more work than it used to, but definitely you can get some success there if you’re willing to put the time into the platform. 

Josh: Just last question, actually, two questions, but let’s assume that someone wanted to have their own ISA in their own office, doesn’t necessarily want to outsource the process, but they love the concept, but they want to do it themselves. What’s a couple tips that you would give our audience in someone that says, hey, I want to have an inside sales person, but I want to do it myself? In-house house? What are some tips and strategies that you would give them to start their own team, their own Issei to outbound call or give them lists? What are some qualities and some characteristics that you use in your interview process? Some things you’re looking for with your candidates? 

Gus: Well, one thing I tell people right now is they want to have someone. And I’d say when you want to hire your I say you’ve got a couple of options. Bring them truly in-house face to face with you right now. The fall of 2020. There is a lot of folks are looking for work across the country, right. Locally and across the country. You’re going to get a lot of candidates. If you’re open to hiring people virtually again just by planting that seed you can get from all over the US, every corner of the country. Right. And you know, the hiring someone in New York City versus hiring someone in southern Texas, there’s a difference there, man. Wise, culture wise, everything. You have access to all of that talent as a business owner right now. So people should definitely consider that. That being said, you’re looking for someone. I recommend understanding what personality profiles are, because if you want someone that’s a true cold caller, you’re looking for someone that’s assertive, has that grit. Right, that has that tenacity. 

Gus: And, yes, the test can tell you some of that. It’s an indicator. It’s not deterministic, but it’s an indicator. And you want to test them out in-house, right. I tell people if you’re spending a month in the interview and selection process, you’re doing it wrong. Right. This job, you understand, instead of having one person in the role for 90 days to see if they work or not, I’d rather have five people in that role for those 90 days and put a put them to call right away immediately. Right. We have people in my company. They don’t last a week. Yeah. They just cannot perform on the phone. They don’t have the tenacity, the grit let’s just the courage to call it, let’s call it what it is, the courage to get on the phone with a US consumer. Right. And have to have a tough conversation with them. So you figure that out within days. 

Gus: Josh, this is not a three-month process. You figure that out whether they have at least the work ethic, the tenacity, the grit to actually do this job. So my recommendation is, yes, have a hiring process for sure, but get them on the phone right away and so you can figure out whether they’re going to be a good fit or not. And that could be a week or two of time. It’s not three months of time whether they have the work ethic and the values to actually be a good fit on your team. So that’s my main recommend. It is. You find great ISAs by hiring a lot of ISAs not by having a lengthy, lengthy, lengthy hiring and selection process. 

Josh: That’s nice, Gus, how many leads per day do you think ISA needs to be successful? And I guess, again, there’s just two buckets, right? There’s the cold, true outreach and then there’s the warm inbound lead. Those might be the answer, might be different based on those buckets, based on volume. But what is in your opinion is keep somebody busy, let’s say full time. Forty hours a week, eight hours a day on the phone bucket, a being cold outreach bucket being warm leads. What’s the amount of lead that you need to provide someone to be successful? 

Gus: Yeah. So amazing question. The way we tackle, we have to tackle this every day. Josh, I have to balance my team. I have to figure out what we can do. We look at it from the other way around, not the leads coming in. It’s the calls going out. I’m Gyasi on a single line dialer can do about two hundred dollars a day, full time person. It can be as little as one fifty can be as high as two fifty, maybe up to three hundred depending on the ISO in the past. Kind of. And let’s just say two hundred is like an average. That’s what we used to estimate. Two hundred outbound calls per day. So within a full month it’s about four thousand outbound calls you have to play with every month. So how many leads can they handle? How many calls do you want to make per lead. Right. Yeah, my recommendation within the first 30 days you shouldn’t make less than ten to fifteen attempts per lead, ten to fifteen attempts. 

Gus:So working that back in the ballpark of about two to three hundred leads. If you want to have an intense follow up process, if you want to do five calls, then you’re done. Well you can put eight hundred leads and that and that is plate. Again, this depends a lot on the lead search. Like you said, it definitely does. So that’s how I would analyze it. You’ve got four thousand calls a month to play with. Where do you want to put that? You want to put them on a super intensive follow up plan, which I would recommend for some of that cold outreach, because those lists are valuable. You got to get every single last thing you can get out of them. Versus a Facebook lead. I wouldn’t want to call a Facebook lead twenty times in the first month. I just wouldn’t. I don’t think that’s the right way to convert those. A little bit of a slower burn. I would spread out those calls a little bit more. The real answer is it depends, but the analysis is how many calls can you make? So I would start there and work backwards. 

Josh: Nice. Love it. Because last question, you’ve obviously learned a lot about sales. Been in the business since 2010. You’ve kind of started your business and got your license after the Great Recession. You’ve seen a couple of different types of economies, the run up and then now sort of the downturn in the economy due to covid. The real estate market right now, though, is still super-hot because there’s almost no inventory. According to the National Association of Realtors, there’s only two point seven months’ worth of inventory. It’s the lowest since 1982, the lowest in thirty-eight years, the lowest amount of inventory. That’s why prices actually went up last month, 15 percent year over year. Prices went up in the middle of COVID because there’s no inventory. 

Josh:So you’ve seen a lot. You’ve done a lot. You have a team now. Seventy-five people. They’re virtual. You obviously learn how to be an entrepreneur, how to build a company, how to work with a team in-house, and also now how to work with them virtual. You’ve learned a ton. What advice would you give some of our audience that maybe is not at your level? Or what advice would you give your younger former self when you were just starting in business after all of that growth that you’ve had over the last 10 years? What’s a couple things that you think really stand out that you’ve learned that you like to pass on and kind of pay forward? 

Gus: I think the number one thing, just that I would like to have told myself even ten years ago or not even that long ago, ten years ago, is patience. Right? And the worst decisions I made was patience. Patience. Yeah. So, yeah, I know exactly right. You know, but, you know, the worst investment deals I’ve done, the worst hires I’ve done the well not even hiring. I’m going to take that out. But the worst business deals, the worst, some of the worst decisions have been because I’ve got that money burning a hole in my pocket that I’ve got to make this happen right away. Well, you know what? Give it a minute. Right. Or, hey, I’m making deals happen. How do I make that accelerated? So I follow Gary V. and Gary Vaynerchuk, marketing guru, is always saying a phrase that I really like. 

Gus: You’ve got to be quick in the micro. You’ve got to be patient in the macro. You’ve got to be, as a business owner. You have to react quickly to circumstances. We do. But to have your business go to the next level, that doesn’t happen in three months. That doesn’t happen in six months. You’ve got to go through the pains of growing up, making a bad decision, go down and you’ve got to go back up because of those circumstances, those difficult situations, difficult decisions that don’t go your way are going to teach you. And that’s part of the journey. I wish I knew that. I think I had heard that before. I never really internalized it until I lived as a business owner. Write those ups and downs, make you a better business owner. And I didn’t I just I thought failure was failure, like, holy cow, I’ve messed up. This is the end. Like, No, bro, this is the journey. This is exactly what happens when you’re learning this stuff and you’re playing around with your own money and you’re taking your own risks. Right. So that that part of it, I would tell people, look at the big picture, always have patience. Do do react quickly in the micro, but always have patience in the macro. 

Josh: That is fantastic stuff. Just listen. If one of our audience members wants to reach out to you, wants to talk about hiring an essay from your firm, just wants more information about converting more leads, working to get a hold, working to get your information, the best way to find me is Power Ask.com. 

Gus: That’s our website. Check it out. Your company Power ISA. You can also look me up on Facebook. You can type power ISA into Facebook search bar. I’ll pop up there. I have a free Facebook group. You can also join where we talk about marketing tactics and tips and tricks, all that kind of stuff. So we’d love to continue the conversation there as Facebook as well. 

Josh: Awesome Gus listen, it’s been fantastic. Appreciate all the information. Thanks for joining me today on Accelerated Investor. 

Gus: Thanks so much. Appreciate the opportunity. 

Josh:So guys, there you have it. Hope you enjoyed that interview with Gus. I had a blast interviewing him and again when I own my real estate brokerage and I was really focused on wholesaling and buying rehabs and I own my brokerage and we had about 12 to 15 realtors that worked for us. I had an inside sales agent that did nothing but work with inbound leads and outbound cold calls. This is something I’m very, very familiar with, had a lot of success with as well when we were very transactional in our business. So if you’re wholesaling, you’re a realtor, you’re looking for more rehab deals or building a rental portfolio. Definitely reach out to Goss’ and check out his services for an inside sales agent. If you enjoyed this interview, leave us a comment. Levasseur rating share this all-over social media. 

Josh: And don’t forget to join our private Facebook group exclusively for accelerated investors. Go to Facebook, search Accelerated Investor in Facebook and join our group today. I can’t wait to see inside of that group and share more strategies with you. If you enjoyed this, leave us rating, leave us a review. Share it all over social media. It’s super important to me. I can’t tell you how honored and privileged I am to share this information with amazing guests and siliceous with you a couple of times a week. It’s an absolute blast for me. I can’t wait to share some more with you on the next episode.

Hey, Josh here. And do you want to win a free Accelerated Investor T-shirt? All you have to do is give Accelerated Investor our podcasta rating and a review on iTunes. OK. Do that now then send us a screenshot on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. What we’re going to do then is every week we’re gonna pick our favorite rating in review and we’re going to send that person a free T-shirt and maybe again, some other cool fun stuff as well from Accelerated Investor. So, again, don’t forget to take a screenshot, leave a rating review, take a screenshot, send it to us so we know exactly who you are. And then once a week, every week on the podcast, we will announce a new winner. Don’t forget to take a screenshot and send it to us so we know exactly who you are. We’ll announce a new winner every week.

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.

For a real estate investor who wants to move to a higher level and focus on bigger income generating activities, leveraging a tool like an ISA will help you spend more time closing deals. Gus Munoz Castro could see that real estate investors needed more reliable ways to do cold outreach or convert warm inbound leads. That’s why he started his company Power ISA.

With a team of 75 based in Mexico, Gus’s employees speak excellent English, and more importantly, they understand the language of real estate. In cold calling, a lot of your leads won’t convert on the first attempt. Having an ISA agent will help you increase your touch on every lead, and they’re easy to integrate into your team.

For Gus, the ideal real estate investor is someone who already has deal flow. They’re ready to scale, close more deals, and go on more appointments. An ISA agent can integrate into your current team depending on the campaign you’re running. How team personalities mesh together is definitely a consideration when an ISA agent is assigned to a company.

Gus is a huge fan of Facebook ads, but cautions against approaching the leads from this platform like you might approach a list of absentee landlords. We talk about some of our preferred digital marketing tools, and their benefits and limitations.

If you don’t want to outsource your ISA because you’d prefer to do it in house, Gus has some tips for you so that you can make that happen. You can get talent all over the US if you open yourself up to virtual work, and Gus would love to help you get the training you need for your team.

What’s Inside:

  • How many leads per day does an ISA need to be successful?
  • Why you don’t need 90 days to figure out if an ISA is a good fit for your team.
  • Leverage tools like an ISA so that you can spend more time closing deals.

Mentioned in this episode​

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