Welcome to the Get Real Podcast – your high octane boosted in the trenches, tell it like it is reality therapy for personal, business and real estate investing success. With your hosts, powerpreneurs Angela Thomas and Ron Phillips. It’s time to get real.

Ron: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Get Real Estate Podcast. We’re gonna get real today about what’s going on, and what we can all do. Kind of a follow up to last week’s, and I’m here with Heather Marchant and we’re gonna crank this thing up. Before we do, we really appreciate all of you. Appreciate you listening, we appreciate you sharing this podcast, liking, commenting. We love all the feedback we get and we love the feedback because it informs the show, because this, really we’re doing this, for you. It’s a lot of fun, for us, Heather I think, I mean, we both have a lot of fun doing this, but we do this specifically to give you the information that you want and that you need. So, if you need something specific, email us, make a comment. You know, and then don’t keep this a secret. You can find us on getrealestatesuccess.com, subscribe and share on social media. Every freaking person in the world is on social media right now. So, one of the greatest things you could do to help us out is to take the getrealestatesuccess.com link and just throw it in your social media, tell everybody it’s an awesome show and we really appreciate that. Heather, let’s jump into this.

Heather: Yeah, I’m excited because I’ve had several clients ask for an update because I think everyone knows this is changing every day, nearly, you know, what the status and how it affects everybody, is changing just about every 24 hours.

Ron: And here’s the thing, like I want to kind of name this show the Nothing Changes show. Heather? Because I’ve been on, maybe six different podcasts and Facebook lives and things like that with people, with leaders in the industry and I’ve been on three mastermind groups with countless people who are big heavy hitters and players in this space and you get varying degrees of responses from people. About what they’re doing and how their businesses is going. Here’s what I would tell you. All of the really big players in the space, the only thing, if anything, is changing, they’re leaning in harder. They’re not pulling back. They’re leaning in harder, and without exception. The people who are pulling back are people who really didn’t have their financial house in order, from being honest. And unfortunately, that’s a lot of people. And for you, business owners who are not in the real estate space and who have inadvertently, through no fault of your own, been shut down. Man, I 100 percent feel for you. And we’ll talk a little bit about that, there’s some really cool ideas that people are doing out there that are making a difference. So, Heather, I mean, right now, if you think about it, we’re being separated as a people. So before this, we were being separated as people. If you think about it, because we’re all in our social media, we’re all on our phones all the time, we don’t hang out in person as much as we used to. The new generation basically communicates entirely on devices, right? In addition to that, if I got sucked into the news because this, you know, when big things happen then I get sucked into the news. But I try really hard not to watch the news Heather because if you watch the news, I don’t know what happened to you when you watch it.

Heather: It builds negativity for me. I’ve limited my news consumption but you’re right. With this, I wanted to know how many cases in my area and what’s happening. And sometimes, very rarely, the information can make you feel more calm. But not all the time.

Ron: Yeah, most of the time they sensationalize everything. And again, I think, I mean, everybody knows that, I mean, last week I was almost harsh with the people who are not taking things seriously but that doesn’t mean you have to be scared, right? But that is what the media does. They sensationalize things because that keeps the eyeballs coming back, that’s a business decision. And we all need to understand that. In addition to that, whether we have this or not, they’ve been separating us for years along racial lines, along financial lines, they keep trying to put us all in buckets and keep us apart from each other. And I would just submit that, you know, before we start talking about things that you can do in your business and in your personal life, and your best investing life, that we all take stock of the fact that that is happening and that it is very much on purpose, not necessarily of just this, but it is very much on purpose. The media likes drama. That’s how they make their money and they try to separate us. There is more that unites us than divides us. And if we would just get out of our stupid devices and go talk to human beings, we would find that. So why don’t we take this opportunity to not go talk to people face to face, but maybe stop being such a douchebag on social media and actually communicate with people?

Heather: Yeah, it’s true. There’s so much need out there right now that if you have your eyes open for the things that are more common among us than the things that divide us, you’ll find you can make an impact, you know.

Ron: Yep, for sure. So let’s talk about markets. All markets are based on certainty. And part of the challenge that we’re going through right now is that, nothing’s terribly certain right now.

Heather: Yeah, we’ve never done this before.

Ron: Now I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, Heather, but there’s a lot of seems to be a lot of people that are pretty certain that they know what is going to happen. And they keep saying things that, frankly, they don’t know. One of the big takeaways that I got from this from this last week of all these meetings and guys, I mean, I’m I don’t usually work twelve hours a day, but I’ve literally been on phone calls and on things like this for literally twelve hours a day, every day since this this thing happened. And the general consensus is that, you know, people are planning for things that they don’t even know are going to happen. And they’re not doing things that could make a significant impact in their life right now. Which is that right now is when most of us need the pact. So one of the things I think we can talk about Heather, what is it that we have control over? Because there’s certain things right now we just don’t have control over.

Heather: 100 percent. There are some things that I mean, I’m home schooling my kids. I don’t have control over that right now, but I have control over the way I respond things. You know, my reactions.

Ron: Yeah, that’s one of the things that we have definitely have control over. What are some of the things, I mean, if you guys are out there and you’re listening, just think that through for a second. Like, what is it that you actually have control over? We can’t control much of anything about what’s going on right now. I mean, the government has told us to stay in our freaking houses. So here, Heather and I are we’re in places with no one other than us, right? So we can’t control that. Well, what can we control? We can control our outrage attitudes, we can control our feelings to some to some extent, whether we can control our finances. We talked a little bit about this last week when we’re talking about the how people talk down about their renters. But let’s talk through that just really quick. By the way, Heather is better at this than I am. I think we joked about that before, but talked to people a little bit about personal finance and then maybe all kind of sum it up with a little bit of a business. Do you have a little control over your finances, right?

Heather: For sure. I mean, for myself and I would encourage my clients to do is have six months in reserve. I also already keep about a three months’ supply of food in addition to what I consume regularly. So I don’t know.

Ron: So you’re one of those preppers?

Heather: I am. And I’ve always been that way. I mean, my husband and I’ve been married for gosh, I hope I say it right. Thirteen years, I think. And I am I have oh, we’ve always been that way since we were newlyweds. Buying a little bit extra, storing a little bit extra. And so I turned my husband last night and I said, you know, if everyone had six months of expenses and reserves and they had just an even two weeks supply of additional food, this wouldn’t have been this catastrophic failure for the country, you know, or whatever one’s fearful of ,I should say. It because they would have just that little bit extra. So it makes a huge difference. And same with investors having six months of expenses in reserves for your properties just in case they do go vacant or the tenant can’t pay or whatever. And it’s interesting, Ron, I haven’t told you this yet, but I reached out to three property managers yesterday, our main property managers that have most of our properties in their market. And I think a total of the hundreds of units they managed together. I think they said they had seven, maybe eight phone calls so far of concerned tenants of not being able to pay or asking to pay late or any kind of concession. And that’s I think that’s the total. I think it was eight between all three-property manager.

Ron: There’s a lot of people who and I don’t mean to downplay the people who have been laid off or really, really heavily impacted by this. But there’s a lot of people who are working from home. And all of these that I’m on, everybody’s staff is at home. Their teams are working from home and they’re still working and they’re still getting paid. And, you know, but I know there’s a lot of people who have 100 percent believe they got laid off. And companies have gone out of business. I understand if you’re caught up in that, then there’s also some things that you can do. Because there are other places that are hiring right now that actually don’t have enough people to work. And so but back to the finance thing. I mean, it’s really, really important. And so I was on a podcast they’re like, “Ron, well what’s changing? How does this change everything?” And I said, well, what do you mean? Like, I don’t understand what that means. Because it doesn’t change anything that we’re teaching. We teach people to have six months’ worth of reserves for every property you have. And if you have that, then this is not imminent. It’s inconvenient because your cash on cash return is going to go down, OK? It is. But If you have six months of reserves for all of your property, you’re not going to be up in the middle of the night concerned of whether or not you can make it through this few months of and I actually don’t think it’s gonna be that long, a few months potentially of this thing, right? It’s going to suck for your returns. But it isn’t gonna suck as bad as if you had all that money in the stock market potentially, right? So anyway, I mean.

Heather: That’s a good point.

Ron: In addition to that. If the numbers worked, if the fundamentals worked before and that was your plan, then the fundamentals still work after. So what’s changed? I don’t know. Maybe the ability to in a few months, depending on how protracted this is, maybe we can pick up some better deals down the road. But nobody really knows that. And I don’t think it’s all. I don’t say that without any data to support it, right? I think a lot of people think that this is 2008. Heather?

Heather: Yeah, I’ve heard that quite a bit.

Ron: And fundamentally, in the real estate, in the housing market, it’s not even comparable to this. Now, if this thing goes on for like eight months, it will be way different than 2008 in a major way. But it’s not an oversupply of houses. It’s not a lack of financing. There isn’t a mortgage bubble. It’s not the same thing.

Heather: It’s not bad that loans given to people who couldn’t afford them.

Ron: Yeah, and before this cute little bug arrived here from Wuhan, China and screwed everything all up, we didn’t have an oversupply of homes. If anything, most markets had an undersupply of homes. So as soon as everybody can get back to work, then I think everything’s going to, generally speaking, go back to normal unless you’re one of the businesses that closed down and then you’re restarting. And I’ve had to do that myself. I understand exactly what that’s like. And it sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. Okay. Let’s talk about some of the things that the business owners who are still in business can do. And let’s talk about some things that folks in the real estate world can do right now.

Heather: Yeah. I mean, Ron and I have been talking about this and it actually made me super pumped and excited where the media is out there teaching fear. And, you know, scary times ahead. I actually left our conversation about this the other day, Ron, just like totally pumped. My husband came home from work and I was talking about it, too.

Ron: So I am really, really excited for the direction of our company in spite of the fact that our sales have slowed a little bit. I mean, I’m not here to blow smoke up anybody’s skirt. This is like was the most P.C. I could come up with. I just don’t think I mean, I’m excited about certain aspects of this. And I guess we can talk through some of those. Number one, we’re using this as an opportunity to do something that we’ve already done, which is I mean, this whole last year, we’ve been slashing expenses and really going over our books and knowing our numbers. We are using this time to even do that more. And what’s really cool is as we started to do that, what we realized is that because other companies are pulling back, like on Facebook, for instance, one of the places that we market? Well Facebook ads have gotten way, way less expensive. Because people are pulling out of market and we’re not doing that. We’re actually spending more money on marketing right now because when everyone else pulls out of the marketing space, that means you can own the marketing space. Think about that. So if you’re in a business right now, I mean, one of the coolest things, Heather, is the ability to pivot, be nimble and take advantage of openings that are given to you. And one of the openings that you have right now in whatever business I was just on a call, the other guy and I said he said, what would you do if you were a new real estate investor and you didn’t have, you know, this marketing machine, that kind of that we have built? You know, our company spends a lot of money on marketing and we have these great funnels and all this cool stuff, right? So what would you do if you didn’t have that stuff? And what do you guys think? What should the new guy do? Go hide in the closet until you know the Wuhan bug is gone? For heaven’s sake. No. I said whatever course you have. Whatever they told you to do for marketing, if they told you to go put out ugly signs, put out two or three times the ugly signs, put them everywhere. I said if they told you to drop mail, drop two or three times the amount of mail because everyone else is pulling back right now, that means there’s opportunities right now that other people are literally giving to you.

Heather: Yeah, they’re scared of it. You capitalize on other people’s fear.

Ron: So that’s one of the main things. So first thing and Heather talked about this applies both personal and business. So Heather was talking about having reserves, which is a great idea. But I think a lot of people when they have challenges in their personal life. For whatever reason, they don’t actually go in and cut. Go cut the fat.

Heather: Yeah, we had someone on our office go through our credit card statements and bank account statements. And I think she carved out pretty, I mean, it’s almost effortless. It was a thousand dollars a month.

Ron: There’s twelve grand. It’s twelve grand a year. And literally we weren’t even using it at the stuff.

Heather: Yeah. It was stuff we weren’t using that we didn’t realize we had a small life insurance policy on staff members that really wasn’t even anything exciting. We were spending 100 bucks a month.

Ron: So what? Nobody even cared. I don’t think anybody even knew we had it. So you can do that for your personal life, I would encourage you to. And if things are really tight right now, cut the fact. Cut it.

Heather: Easy. Cut the Netflix.

Ron: Yeah. Cut things back and then play board games with your kids. You know, there’s other things that you can do that don’t cost money, that you can put in place and do that for a couple of months until things get back to normal. You don’t have to do rice and beans for the rest of your life. But my gosh, when you’re in a crisis situation, cut the fat. It’s really, really important.

Heather: And I think sometimes we think that some things are basic needs that really aren’t a basic need, you know?

Ron: TV is not a basic need, just F.Y.I for anybody out there that thinks it is. And then the same thing in your business, right? So cut the fat. Marketing is not fat. Then let’s talk about team. I think one of the biggest opportunities out there right now for you business owners, right now today is that there’s unbelievable talent being cut from imprudent businesses because they don’t have enough money to keep them and therefore they have to let them go. Which means there’s going to be incredible talent. Ready for you. And if you’ve needed some incredible talent, my gosh, right now is a great time to pick them up. And you can bless their family’s lives as well, because they’re probably feeling some real serious heat right now. The human capital right now, I think, is one of the biggest opportunities that there is. And if you own a business SBA loan seven A was just passed through the through the Senate, I believe. It’s going over to the House right now. It passed 96 to 0. So if it goes to the House and they don’t pass it, then they’re just a bunch of frigging douchebags over there. So I can’t imagine that happens. I mean, everybody voted for it in the Senate.

Ron: Again, I’m not a big fan of government handouts, but if you have a business and you have a solid team, this loan is really cool because what this is, it is specifically for paying your payroll and your payroll expenses. And the coolest thing about this loan is that if you use it for payroll expenses over the next couple of months, they will forgive it.

Heather: Pay your people for free.

Ron: That that pause was for emphasis. Traumatic effect, yes. You should go and get this loan and use it to keep your people. Now, if you’ve been keeping somebody around and they suck and you don’t even like them, well, then go ahead and cut them off, nothing wrong. Yes. Cut them and hire somebody better because probably somebody better out there. Right. But right now, man. Human capital. Big, big, big deal. I think another thing, no matter what business you’re in, now is a fantastic time to connect with your clients. I mean, you may be able to get some business from it, but at least by connecting with them when this all kind of blows over. They’re going to want to do business with you once they can. Connect with your clients. Follow up on all the old leads that you have. No, go ahead.

Heather: I’ve been following up on customer service issues my clients have had, just had a meeting to go over any outstanding customer service issues that our clients have. And I said to my assistant, like I want you to reach out to all these clients and make sure we’re ready to close this ticket, that we had it resolved and done. Stuff that just kind of is easy to push to the back burner. Get that stuff done now, that builds more loyalty with your clients, that they want to come back and buy more property or more whatever your business is.

Ron: Absolutely. There’s not a better time to do it. Make it happen. That’s fantastic. What else?

Heather: Offer value to people and service, you know, that you can be able to Ron and I were talking about that right now all over social media, I’m sure many of you have seen it. All of the people that are giving things away and I exhume that we use a lot internally for video conferencing. We as a company, we all work remotely as it is. Most of us work from home. It’s awesome. And we communicate over Zoom and Zoom has given their platform to students and teachers to be able to use, you know, to help facilitate school, right? So there’s so much that you can build value and add value to people and great I mean, let’s look at the bottom line. I mean, it’s great marketing for Zoom, right? People will use Zoom, see what a great platform it is. And even if they gain a handful of clients from it, it was worth it, you know?

Ron: I just got a stat, one of my master, my meetings that zoom usage is up six thousand percent. and so look for the opportunities, right? So there’s opportunities to serve. But man, how can you serve your, another stat that I saw, which is another way that you can serve your clients and just everybody else, is to take anything that you see that’s like that. The zoom is giving the stuff away. Good for them for making things available so that people can continue to live some kind of a normal life. All kinds of companies are doing things like this right now. Churches are doing things like this. Individuals are doing things like this. What I would encourage everybody to do and I actually would plead for you to do this, because these things are being drowned out by the media. So when you see them, post something about it and share it. When you see something on your Facebook page or your social media about something like this, don’t just like it. Share it. Let everybody know of all of the really cool stuff that’s going on right now and then become one of them. Be a part of it. Serve other people, reach out to your network. If you don’t have a network, man, what better time than right now to create your own network?

Heather: Yeah, it’s a great idea. You have lots of time.

Ron: No matter what business you’re in. Name a business that couldn’t, right now, start doing some kind of videos on Facebook. And just so you guys know, I mean, look, this stat up. So take over for just a second.

Heather: I mean, one idea I had when you were saying that, Ron, is I have a client who listens to this. So he loves it when I talk about him but he has a window business. And when you were saying that, he’s saying, well, if construction goes down my window, business goes down, taking the opportunity to communicate with other business owners in your similar industry and share ideas, you know, collaborate and be able to help each other through something like this to give ideas and strengthen your core business.

Ron: So I was talking to a guy last night. He wants to do some video work. So he called up this guy and he said this videographer, he’s a really good videographer. And he said, hey, what’s your schedule like? As I’d like to get on your schedule. And he goes, everyone is canceled. Everyone has canceled. And my buddy goes, really? Yeah. And my buddy goes, then how much would it cost for me to buy a month of your time? And the guy was like, I don’t know, but I’ll give you a really good deal because all of his money was gone. So here we have a win win. This guy has no money coming and he can give my buddy a really good deal and he’s got work for a month. And my buddy’s getting a fantastic deal to do a project that he already wanted to do, but he didn’t think he could afford to do it. So now we have two people who are helping each other out. And then the work product that comes from that is going to help countless other people and it’s getting done right now while they’re at home with literally nothing else to do, right? Here’s the other thing. The stat that I was looking up, I just heard this the other day is unbelievable. Stat: average daily watch time through 2019 was eight years on Facebook. Now I don’t know if anybody got that, ok? Let me state it again. The average daily watch time was eight years of content. In the month of March, the watch time is forty-four years. Now, tell me if you have a business that there is not some kind of video content that you can put out with that many eyeballs. Because let’s face it, most of America and most of the world right now is on social media all day long because they’re at home. Tell me there’s not something that you could put out that would benefit those people and potentially gain new clients, whether now or when this thing ends. And why not take market share now?

Heather: When it’s cheaper, too if you wanted to turn out marketing, I mean.

Ron: Yeah, I mean, you don’t even have to pay for the marketing. But if you if you get a video that’s working really well, then you can boost it on Facebook very inexpensively and hit even more people. I mean, we’re running low on time of telling you guys things that you can do, right? If you need to hire people, hiring is up on Facebook big time because there’s so many people out of work. Give some stuff away. Give great content away to people on Facebook or on social media everywhere. And build some brand loyalty, build a group, build a network. It’s easy. It’s easy to do.

Heather: Yeah. We’ve talked about doing a private, what is it called, Ron? A private Facebook?

Ron: Private Facebook group? Yeah. And I think we’re gonna do that, right? Because I was just about the say, I was about to lie to people, Heather. I almost lied to people. And I said, because we have time. Absolutely not true. We were busier than we’ve ever been. So if you’re sitting at home and you have spare time. Fill it, because there is no shortage of things that you could be doing right now to fill it. And I’m coming up with all kinds of ideas because I’m thinking about what is the opportunity. And the question to ask is, what is it that my customers or clients need right now?

Heather: Or what skills can you hone right now? I mean, I’ve been looking at a course for my son, who is actually getting to be really good at editing video content like really, kid? He’s 10. And I don’t build his ego too much by telling how good he is. But I’ve looked at an animation course and online animation course from a Disney animator. I mean, he’s home and he’s bored. And after school is over, I mean, stuff like that. If you can look at a course or something that you can do to improve yourself, to be ready when you have downtime. I think that I think the main thing I see in this conversation today is having the glasses on to see opportunity instead of the glasses of negativity, because the glasses of negativity are easy and they’re everywhere.

Ron: Super easy. Turn the damn TV on now that they’re in a vegetative state and watch the news. That is the best way to put yourself into a depression coma that I can think of right now.

Heather: My husband’s a psychologist and that’s been their biggest concern on his unit is how many people aren’t going to the hospital and that are really depressed right now. And I think that it comes from just that, just not seeing the positive and the opportunity in around you and sharing it with others, like Ron said, with having sharing what the positivity that you see is a great way to have to create those glasses. As you look for opportunity and share the content, you see more of it in your newsfeed and more of it in your email or what have you, then it’s easier to recognize the positivity and the opportunities.

Ron: Last thing I’ll say is that it is literally impossible. It is physically, mentally and emotionally impossible for you to be mired in your own problems when you are in the service of someone else. Because when you are serving someone else, whether they’re your customer or they’re just another human being that you happen upon. When you serve someone else, you are thinking about them and your brain cannot think about two things at the same time, as much as all the women would like to tell me otherwise, it cannot happen. And I’m going to get hate mail for that.

Heather: No, my husband actually says that’s just how fast your brain can switch between the two things.

Ron: There you go. So don’t switch. Serve other people. If you lose yourself in service to other people, if you’re a business owner and you want to serve people by creating awesome content and being a leader in this time of uncertainty and providing certainty for folks, you will be richly rewarded for that. It’s not necessarily the reason to do it, but you will be, I promise. But If nothing else, when you’re serving someone else, you cannot think about the myriad of problems that you have. So just go do it. Look for the opportunity. It’s everywhere. Heather and I literally don’t have enough time to do all of the opportunity that’s around us.

Heather: Yes. We were trying to figure out how to delegate who to assign it to.

Ron: And I’m telling you what. And in the certainty. And I’m telling this SBA loan thing. This SBA loan thing. I’m gonna go get that. I’m gonna go get that and I’m going to hire more people. Because there is so much opportunity right now. I need more bodies. I need more people here with skills who can help us create the rest of the stuff that is just literally sitting there for us to pick up and we are not unique. You guys have it, too. Everybody does. And so when you hear people out there who are complaining about stuff like this, spread the word, positivity. You can you can be positive in this. You can find opportunity in this. We’ve only given you just a smattering of ways to do that, there are so many.

Heather: We have another episode of it in our notes. It’s easy.

Ron: Easily. Easily. So guys, go out there. Stay safe. You know, do all the stuff that the CDC tells you to do and all that good stuff. But don’t let this thing control you, your emotions or anything else. Fear is not your friend anymore. And on that happy note. If you like the show, give us a thumbs up. Leave us some notes. If you really love us or just because you want to be nice and you listen to this, you thought, man, I think we should just serve to get real show. Leave us an awesome review too, right? And then share the show with everyone else. Give us some feedback. Tell us what you want to hear. If you need to hear something different right now, tell us. You can find us our other company at rpcinvest.com. And this show is at getrealestatesuccess.com. We appreciate you guys. Share us. See you later.

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