Sales and Marketing First

Mike: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Today I have my friends Aaron and Ashley on the show. We’re going to be talking about . . . these guys are . . . have left corporate America much like I did, and a lot of you that are listening probably have too, and have applied the principles of running large sales teams to their business. And they’ve just crushed it in a short period of time, so we’re going to share why they think it’s important to build a sales and marketing machine before anything else.
Professional real estate investors know that it’s not really about the real estate. In fact, real estate is just a vehicle to freedom. A group of over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors from across the country meet several times a year at the Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind to share ideas on how to strengthen each other’s businesses, but also to come together as friends and build more fulfilling lives for all of those around us. On today’s show we’re going to continue our conversation of fueling our businesses and fueling our lives. I’m glad you’re here.
Hey, guys, welcome to the show.
Aaron: Hey, how’s it going, Mike?
Mike: Good, good.
Aaron: Thanks for having us.
Mike: Yeah, I . . . hey, I’m excited to have you guys on the show. You guys have really built something pretty incredible in a short period of time, and it’s been awesome getting to know you guys through Investor Fuel as well. And, you know, there’s a lot of people in our network that aspire to do what you guys have done, so I think it’s going to be awesome to learn a little bit more about how you’ve applied your skills learned in corporate America. Like me, you guys are corporate refugees, right?
Aaron: Right.
Mike: And you just apply that into something that you work hard for but you see the benefits yourself instead of building somebody else’s business, right?
Aaron: Exactly.
Mike: Yeah. Well, why don’t you guys just take a, just a second before we get started here and just tell us about your background, maybe introduce yourselves a little bit.
Aaron: Yeah. I’m Aaron Pimpis.
Ashley: And I’m Ashley Skrzypek.
Aaron: So we basically cut off the cord, I would say, last April, 2018. Completely, you know, obviously quit our jobs. Ashley came first, I came second. We were full time . . . so I was working for . . . I was a VP of sales in a private equity company, medical software. Ashley was doing the same thing. It was more a publicly traded company. So pretty big organizations, you know, we were making a very, very good living, put it that way.
But like everybody else, we saw the trajectory, and the trajectory sucked in terms of, you’re going to work more and get promoted more, and you’re going to have less, you know, time to give to your family, kids, everything else. So we’re like, “We’re going to cut the cord off early. You know, don’t want to get in the 50s and . . . worked the sales floor at the trade shows, you know, is just like a sad, sad truth.
So we transitioned over. April of last year was the official kind of start date, and then, you know, from that point on we’ve . . . I think we’re at about 10, 10 about to be 12 team members total. We’re based out of Tampa, and yeah, I mean basically we . . . I think we ended up doing seven plus figures our first year. It wasn’t easy like everybody else makes it sound. It’s not easy. A lot of back and forth, it’s just we’re able to kind of, you know, hone it in, but yeah, we did apply a lot of our background, specifically sales marketing, you know, to this business and this industry.
Mike: That’s awesome. And how do you guys liking working together? I work with my wife, too. My answer’s different than hers.
Aaron: Are you and your wife in the office at the same time?
Mike: Yeah, we had a little tiff this morning already, so . . .
Aaron: Okay, well, perfect. [inaudible 00:03:39].
Mike: Because I’m the gas and she’s the brakes, so . . .
Aaron: We’re both, gas and brake, we’re doing it at the same time.
Ashley: Yeah, it is challenging, but it’s also been great to . . . really to strengthen our relationship, and it really lets us focus on what we can accomplish together. So for us, understanding our why, and being able to share our goals, and sharing what we’re working towards and what we’re building is huge. And we can actually do it together. We really have a partner. But don’t get me wrong, there are definitely days where . . .
Aaron: Yeah, I mean, we’re . . .
Ashley: We have our . . .
Aaron: . . . two Type A personalities . . .
Ashley: . . . disagreements.
Aaron: . . . in our relationship. Working together it’s always a match, it’s a perfect fit.
Mike: Yeah. Hey, I understand. I’ll just . . . just to get a little personal here, it was literally like a half hour ago I heard, “I am not your employee.” So . . . but sometimes you’re like, “Hey, I’m trying to drive a bus here, like . . . “
Aaron: Yeah. We’ve never had that conversation.
Ashley: Yeah. Yeah, I’m trying to drive that bus too, and so is he at the same time, same bus.
Aaron: [inaudible 00:04:32].
Mike: Yeah, that’s awesome. So what’s really exciting to learn from you guys today is, having run sales organizations, I mean, you know, a lot of people that get started in real estate investing or that have been in for a while, sometimes they get either content, or they can’t get out of their own way, and they effectively create a job for themselves, right? You guys are trying to scale something . . . because you’ve helped scale teams before. You understand that sales and marketing have to come first, right? And so that’s the fuel that drives your business, and so maybe talk a little bit about kind of the skills and things you learned in corporate America that you’re applying, that are kind of the foundation for your own business.
Aaron: Yeah. Well, to start off, you know, kind of . . . I’ll talk about my experience and then Ashley will add to that as well, but putting a sales team together, we worked for some medical software companies, so the way it’s structured there, you are marketing, you are dev, you are kind of operations as well, and you are also working with products directly. So what it helped that you realize first is marketing, and really hone that in.
But transitioning that say to any business, if you have marketing and sales down, the rest will take care of itself. You know, you’re a secondary, tertiary, or as the number four, then you’re definitely setting yourself up, because a lot of people I think have that reversed. You can always come back from hitting sales and marketing out of the ballpark, both I’d put all these together, and you can always add in systems. You can always add in, you know, everything else that goes along with that, admin, etc.
So what I was able to do is start in marketing, at least getting the ball rolling, you know, like on things like SEO, the transition to pay-per-click, I think those were our first two channels that we did initially. We’d . . . sales is built in. I mean, we didn’t have to do too much there, but anyway, that doesn’t have that built in. Like, they should have John Martinez on replay all day in their ear. But again, being able to take the marketing aspect, plugging that in, and again, we’re able to handle sales upfront ourselves, you know, before we start building a team on acquisition, disposition, to sales as well.
Helped to really . . . helped us to hit the ground running. There was a lot of, you know, mistakes. We didn’t really know what we were doing initially, just like everybody else, you know? A lot of these podcasts, a lot of this stuff is like, you hear people’s stories, like, “Oh my God. They knew exactly what they were doing.” I think it’s a lot of fallacy. No, dude, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. There’s just . . . like going, “Those guys got it dialed in. I want to be like them.” None of that’s true, right? It’s just . . . there was a lot of mistakes. There’s a lot of, like . . . I still don’t know how to read a [farbar 00:06:52]. I don’t know what the hell I’m looking at. I’m like, “Where is this condition?” Like, I don’t know what I’m looking at. So . . .
Ashley: But I do. It’s all good.
Aaron: Point of the matter is, I had to learn a lot, but those two core competencies you need to have. If you don’t, I think you can hone those in before everybody makes the transition, before anybody really starts to go after it in a way where you may be inverse. But again, taking all of our, you know, seven-plus years in sales experience, you know, enterprise sales and software building teams, helped tremendously. You know, coupling with marketing.
Ashley: Yeah, so for us, we realistically . . . we went from . . . we had sales experience, but we didn’t have any true . . . what I would consider true real estate experience. Aaron did have some basic marketing, and then we went out and just boots on the ground. We learned everything from scratch, most of it on our own through trial and error. And our whole mentality was, you know, don’t be afraid to make mistakes as long as you learn from your mistakes. They’re calculated risks, and I speak a lot about that, even with our team on an ongoing basis, because that’s where you grow, when you get uncomfortable.
Because every time I get the butterflies in my stomach, not really certain which way we’re going to go, or is this a good decision or bad decision, we do as much research as we possibly can, but then Aaron always jokes about paralysis analysis. I do like to analyze things, but we went out there and we just started talking to people. We just got out there and started looking at houses, started figuring out what I didn’t know. I used to bring a contractor with me just because I knew nothing about anything that had to do with houses.
And we’d get out there and then from a sales perspective we just started talking to people, and when you talk to people, as long as you can build some form of rapport, which is basically just be a decent person early on in conversation, you’ll have the opportunity to start learning about what motivates people to get into these situations. Because they came from a diverse background, and you really just need to understand, and that’s where the sales kicked in.
And then from there, you know, it was really about . . . we tried everything first ourselves. We’d learn about, like, all the mistakes we possible could on our own before we would formalize a plan or a process. And then where Aaron really stepped in is he helps expedite. He’s like the fuel or the gas to everything. So every time we’d learn a process or get anything down, Aaron’s next thing was, “Okay, now if you can do it, now go teach someone else to do it.” And that’s where I think we were able to grow so fast, because Aaron would always push us to share that knowledge and teach other people, where everyone else is so afraid of sharing too much information because they’re going to steal it or take it from you. And that’s what’s helped us grow . . .
Mike: Yeah, that’s awesome.
Ashley: . . . as quickly as we could, because now we’re teaching more people to act on our behalf.
Mike: Yeah, that’s awesome. I think . . . so a lot of people don’t . . . you guys were not in . . . you guys were not . . . you weren’t involved in the software development at all, right?
Aaron: Yes and no. So when you’re in sales, you’re boots on the ground, right? So basically . . .
Mike: Yeah, kind of a feedback loop.
Aaron: . . . from customers it goes directly to the development of product, because they all know what we’re talking about, and we know exactly what will sell or move the needle. Functionality, hard market, etc. So you are basically in those positions by proxy.
One more thing I wanted to add that was crucial to our success, we joined mastermind immediately. I know we’re part of the Investor Fuel now. I think it’s . . . if you join anything in any mastermind, we didn’t want to wait for . . . we didn’t have to learn anything on our own. But information, access to information . . . we made a decision on the spot because we knew we saw people that were in the mastermind, we knew what information it possessed. It was speed of play. A lot of people hold off on that. If you can afford it it’s going to save you a year, a year and a half or two, end up getting you closer to where you need to be, aside from getting it, you know, right away.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. One of the things I was just thinking of when you were . . . because, knowing your software background, is, like, some people try to wait until everything’s perfect in any small business, right? Like, “I need to wait until I know everything.” But in software, right, you’re just like, “Hey, this is Version 1.14, or 1.15.” Like, you start to get ingrained that there are iterations. Like, just get 1.0 started and we’ll go to 1.1, and we’ll kind of bump forward. And so I wish more people that were real estate investors thought that way. Like, this isn’t . . . I know this is going to . . . there’s opportunity for improvement in everything I do, but it’s not going to stop me from jumping in today.
Aaron: Exactly, yeah. I think it’s just how humans are wired in general, but it’s one of those things to overcome. I definitely used to be like that as well. I still am, in a way, where, you know . . .
Ashley: I was going to say, “Up until when? This morning?”
Aaron: . . . developing . . . .even developing the current software, where I was like, “All right, this cannot continue.” You have to get it out, you know? And you have to just remind yourself of that.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So you guys . . . obviously you’re focused on building something much larger than either one of you, right? And so talk a little about the importance of a team and the culture that you’ve laid to help you grow.
Ashley: Yeah, so we learned early on that we needed to have the right people in our team, and sometimes they didn’t come in the form that we’re looking for. We might be looking to hire somebody to help with acquisitions, and we start interviewing and we find out that maybe they’re not the right fit for acquisitions, but that’s just the right type of person we need to bring into the organization. And so we weren’t afraid to go out there and hunt those people down, and bring them in, and then find a way that they were able to create and bring value to the company. And so a lot of emphasis on getting the right people into the right seats on the bus has been a constant theme, so they can really excel. Because what you want to do is you want to find people that want to do what they’re doing, because when you like what you’re doing, when you want to be here, you basically are self-motivated. And so we’re not always focused on just driving people. They drive themselves.
Mike: Yeah. Have you found . . . we could probably have an entire show just on finding people, right? I mean, we could talk about that for weeks, right? But have you found . . . there’s a lot of people that don’t add people fast enough. There’s always this fear of, well, I’m just going to teach them something and they’re going to be my competitor, or whatever. Like, what’s . . . talk a little bit about your mentality on that.
Aaron: Yeah, that is something we struggled with for a long time initially. Just like everybody else, it’s just like the scarcity mentality. Most people that you hire, you can just profile them, right, everything else. Like, that is a big savior for us, I mean, you have to do this profile, you know, whether it’s data, or it’s the sales assessment version, right? Or whatever version you have, it’s a huge time saver. Most people are just not geared to necessarily be entrepreneurs. Most people need guidance. They need, “This is your box. This is what you do.” Even sales reps, right? We can . . . it’s the same question with that.
But most of them need structure. They need to be provided with a good place to work, a healthy environment, because we’ve seen a toxic environment in the places we used to work, and one of the big whys to why we decided to do this is that to never have that. One of our . . . it’s, you know, money aside, all that stuff, one of our big three whys in doing this is that we wanted to create an awesome company culture where people want to be there, want to contribute. It’s past the monetary aspect, because we’ve been part of corporate, toxic, toxic cultures where it’s terrible. And then we just never wanted to see that ever again, so whatever it takes.
But to answer your question, it’s something you’re going to have to learn how to cope with, because you have to understand when you’re hiring people, most are just not wired like you, per se. Most people just want a stable, secure job, and they need to be told, “This is what you do, step by step. Now, I’m going to provide you with, you know, leadership and everything else you need to do to be successful at your job.”
Mike: Yeah. What would you say culturally? Like, what’s your secret sauce, if there is any, to how to create that culture? Like, you guys are, you know, you haven’t been doing this forever, but in a short period of time you’ve had some great success, so what’s kind of that secret sauce that you think you have to create a great environment, a culture.
Ashley: Yeah, so we really focus on an environment that we want to be in, and it kind of helps us because we’re trying to bring in people that want to be successful, that are self-driven and motivated, that like what they do. And even in interviews, you know, really just making sure, “Do you even want this? Do you like real estate? You know, what about it do you like?” And then making sure that you keep it fun and lively. Do you want to come to work every day in the environment that you’re creating for yourself? Because that environment is what’s everyone else’s environment, as well.
Aaron: Well, the other biggest, biggest thing that we apply is really help them to succeed personally, rather than just, you know . . . they’re going to get the tools professionally, right? You know, everybody in our company is going to be, you know, on the sales side, is going to be earning six-plus figures, you know, and that’s by design.
The other thing is that we meet with everybody individually and we make sure they succeed as people. So self-development is going to be . . . and multiple books mention this, but this is going to be either make it or break it for your company. I believe there’s a . . . the CEO of Infusionsoft, right? He has the back end to all the companies, and he sees which ones succeed, which ones don’t. He actually did a study to see after a certain amount of time why certain companies continue to go vertical and some ones flatten out. He interviewed the CEOs. It’s the number one reason why, it’s because they were part of self-development with employees. Number one reason.
And that guy, Infusionsoft, I mean, you know . . . I think you guys use, I don’t know, but [inaudible 00:15:43] back end everybody. So it’s a crazy discovery, but it’s one of our, you know, one of our core competencies, making sure that all employees continue to develop and, you know, personally, professionally, and then they succeed, you know, in both places.
Ashley: So what we do, typically, to get down to the actual specifics, is that we have a team Audible account where we recommend certain books. We do read books as a team and come in, and we actually talk about some of the things that they learned. A lot of those things that they learn are not just about business, but it’s a person as a whole, because if everyone in your office is having outside drama, personal stuff, that takes a toll on what they’re actually doing productivity-wise in the office. So we meet with our team individually, we have one-on-ones. We talk about their personal goals and we tie those to our business goals, and so they’re aligned. So they have true . . . just the company goals and the personal goals are aligned, and really moving forward in that same direction, that same path.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome, that’s awesome. So one of the things I know about you guys is you’re also very analytical, and that allows you to test stuff, and we’ve talked about kind of iterate, right? You test marketing channels and move in and out of stuff. If it’s not working, you do less of it, if it is working, you do more of it, right?
Aaron:Yeah.
Mike:So talk a little bit about some of the learnings you’ve had over the past year, things you’ve tried that didn’t work, and then we’ll kind of get into, like, what’s working now?
Aaron: Yeah, so we’ve done, I believe, every single marketing channel available in the investing industry. Every single one. So, you know, cold-calling, direct-mail, SEO, pay-per-click, Facebook, RBM, TV, text messaging being the staple, right? If I’m missing anything else, we’ve done it as well, right? [inaudible 00:17:18] it’s in production. So out of those, all kept, you know, churning and burning. One of the things we got from one of the masterminds we used to be a part of, we were forced to do KPIs. That’s forced. Nobody here does that. One night in San Diego, I . . . exactly a year ago . . . I’m going to see you in San Diego next week. Exactly one year ago in San Diego, we’re sitting there, I think we went out . . .
Ashley: Five o’clock in the morning.
Aaron: We’re, like, hungover. I’m like, “Man, I’ve got to do KPIs,” so we’re sitting there, we’re forced to do them, and holy shit was it an eye-opening moment. You saw things . . . again, once you . . . in a simple spreadsheet that you and I and Mike have seen, I mean, I’m going to try to make a better version of that. Once you put things into a spreadsheet and you average out things, and you see that, like, “Hey Mike, how’s pay-per-click doing?” He’s like, “Oh, good, good, it’s doing good, you know? It’s paying $25,000.” That’s what we’re spending on pay-per-click. And then you back enter and you’re like, “Oh, so we’re spending $25,000 but we’re getting $45,000 back.”
And we’re like, “Yes.” You know, there’s a lot of volume, and you’ve got to . . . like, you go . . . your finger impulse, you’re like, “Oh, it’s, you know, it’s good.” Then you’re looking at it, you’re like, “Oh, so we’re just spinning our wheels and nothing’s really coming out of it, right?” It’s like [inaudible 00:18:23]. So by doing that it helped us to make that a habit, right, and always analyze what’s going on, because once you put data in a simple spreadsheet that you and I have seen, put in, you know, what your marketing expense was, what your source of the deal is, how much your average, right, how many leads you received, it’s very, very simple. Nobody does it. The [inaudible 00:18:45] solution for that soon, but the point of the matter, it makes you see data instead of you thinking that you’re doing good with a marketing channel, that’s a 1X versus SEO was a 15X return. You know?
Ashley: Yeah, so we actually incorporated that. That’s one of the, I think, the easiest shifts for us to have made, and that’s had the biggest return, is that we incorporate specifically review of KPIs now on a weekly basis, whereas before, even though we did it, it was pretty sporadic. A lot of the times it was in preparation for mastermind meetings, and then we started to see how tremendous that value was. So we just do it now once a week. Every Monday we review high-level KPIs, so when we start to see leading indicators we can make a shift, and that’s why we’ve been able to go through so many marketing sources so quickly. It’s because we’re on top of the KPI.
Aaron: We saw pay-per-click dying before it died, right? Everybody’s off of it now, I think, for the most part. You know, direct-mail, we’ve made the same hard pivot, along with pretty much anything else we’ve tried. Direct-mail, pay-per-click were the marketing budget hogs, right? And it’s one of the reasons we decided to go into TV, because, you know, it’s obviously a channel that, you know, I know two people who are doing, but at the same time, the other ones were being so saturated it was just a natural progression. We know we have to try something else in a controlled manner. We have to obviously [inaudible 00:20:03] have something going before a transition. But without seeing your data in a spreadsheet, any kind of spreadsheet, you are not running a business. That may have been said before, but that’s just literally . . . you think you know [inaudible 00:20:15] here because you got your pulse in the business as a 1-man show or a 10-man show, you’re kidding yourself in all aspects.
Mike: Yeah, and you can’t . . . you know, you can see trends too, right? Over time you see things. I mean, that’s the main thing of this business, is like, we . . . in our mind, we’re just thinking of recency things, like, “Oh, I just got one. I love pay-per-click,” right? But if you look across time, you’re like, “Wow, we’ve spent more on advertising than we’ve gotten back in profit.”
Or, you know, it doesn’t have to be . . . it could be that one of the things you find out when you’re looking at a spreadsheet and you’re looking at data is we tend to get hung up on units, right? Like, I spent this and I got a deal. It’s like, well, what if you got a deal from this and you got a deal from that, but one of them has a 50% higher profit? Like, it might be more profitable, right? Unless you’re modeling that out, which isn’t that hard to do, as you know, you’re just guessing, right?
Aaron: Yeah. There’s no tool for it now, like I said, you know, hopefully I’ll be able to solve that soon, you know, for free, but it’s one of those reasons why we, you know, went kind of all-in with text messaging stuff, and we’re seeing something cost $400 cost per deal, right? And we’re already doing it, it’s just, you know, you don’t know that until you really see numbers and you do see a progression. You see averages. You know, three month averages show you lagging indicators, you know, where leading indicators would be like what’s coming in?
Because one of the big things we took away from the corporate world was tracking closed-lost leads, closed-lost deals, right? Closed-lost for what reason? Manufactured home, all retail leads, are there just telemarketers, right? If you back those in, you’re also able to see a different aspect of why is that marketing source not working? Some of those you can resolve, some of those you can’t, but also tracking closed-lost reasons is one of those big things that everybody should be doing as well.
Ashley: Here’s the other interesting thing for us, is that prior to, you know, where we’re going with the software side of this, is that SMS has been one consistent platform, where we’ve gotten . . . we’ve gone through very costly, you know, pay-per-click and other marketing sources. SMS for us has been huge because of consistency and just the overall cost-per-lead, or the cost-per-deal.
And you transitioned over . . . you mentioned that, you know, running KPIs based on units. We did transition over from looking at things on a unit basis to everything being revenue-based, even down to our sales teams goals. Not just measuring the number of deals, but the revenue that they’re trying to achieve on a monthly or a quarterly basis. It should be an aha to everybody, just not number of deals, but everybody gets so caught up in social media, “I got 10 deals,” “I got 5 deals.” That’s great, but was the deal $1,000, or was it $25,000? Because they’re not [inaudible 00:22:52].
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So you guys have had so much success with text messaging that you just started to create your own platform, and then obviously now you’re about to launch that to where others can use it as well. So you want to, without being, like, overly kind of pitchy, you want to just take a minute and tell us about the platform and where people could learn more about it?
Aaron: Yeah, for sure. So Launch Control, that’s the platform. It’s launchcontrol.us. We built it in-house. We used it for a year in-house, since we started, right? And that’s the constant . . . if you look at our trend line on all marketing channels, it’s the constant, right? Everything else, in-and-out, pay-per-click, everything else. It was the constant, and basically I started developing it in a way where it became very sophisticated, and there was an opportunity to us, you know, as part of Investor Fuel there was a need for software. You know, everybody’s asking about it, etc., from our first meeting when I saw you in Salt Lake, right?
Now I’ve got to spread the decision to, look, I could take this to market and help other people benefit as well. Right now it’s not a very well-catered-to market, put it that way, but at the same time there’s a reason why we’ve been able to average 3,000 texts per deal consistently for the past year. I think there’s a lot of current tools that do a kind of masses of asses approach, you know, like the same thing as direct-mail, but we’re like, “When somebody enters, ‘Yes,’ out of 10,000 messages that send, that’s a deal.”
No, we took the sales aspect, like think of like it’s a John Martinez version of texting, and we got it down to a science, which has, like, consistently has been able to get us a deal for every 3,000 messages we send. [inaudible 00:24:24] the stuff that we’ve honed in internally, that has been a big success for us, is really dialing in the follow-up, nurture, and the drip campaigns that live inside the software. Because most of our deals come from that. We had a deal, I think two weeks ago. It was from one year ago.
Ashley: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Aaron: From text. Most of them get buried, and then . . . unless they tell you yes in the first term, you’re done. But again, when we took the complete inverse approach and applied sales, you know, to texting, essentially, and also nurture and drip campaigns to make sure you’re getting the most returns. If you’re not running through a gigantic metropolitan area like Dallas, in a matter of six months you’re out of data. Because I’ve known many people who’ve done that.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, awesome. So would you guys mind? You guys have been members of Investor Fuel, we’re meeting next week, obviously. By the time this airs, it’ll be over with. You’re also speaking at the Million Dollar Meeting coming up, if anybody . . . we haven’t really shared a whole lot on that yet, but milliondollarmeeting.com, for those that want to . . . if you’re an experienced investor and you want to come learn more about how to take your business to another level from folks like Aaron and Ashley here, that have done exactly that, right? But maybe just, if you don’t mind, just take a minute and share your experience so far with Investor Fuel.
Ashley: So we’ve been a part of quite a few other masterminds, and specifically . . . we’ve had a great experience, honestly, with Investor Fuel. First and foremost, the biggest thing for me was the openness of the people in the meetings. People truly willing to share, and really not holding back. In a lot of other meetings, everyone . . . you can see that a lot of information was kept off the books. So it’s like, “That’s my secret sauce. I’ll tell you bits and pieces but you’re not going to get the whole deal so you can’t copy me.” And that’s been big for us. Even you, we truly see the difference. People are genuine and willing to help you, and that’s just reciprocated, because people are open and sharing more information while growing quicker and growing together, and it’s not a scarcity mentality here in masterminds, which is huge.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome.
Aaron: One of the other reasons, you know, so being a part of Investor Fuel, I don’t think we’ve made a decision if we’re part of anywhere else in terms of having launchcontrol.us move forward. In terms of the feedback, in terms of the openness of the group, and again, it’s more . . . it’s a community feel more than anything else. And how active the Facebook group is especially, you feel like you’re always constantly in flow, in motion, in communication, versus once a quarter.
Mike: Yeah, we’ve tried to, you know, as a mastermind leader, we’ve tried to say, “Hey, this is a community 365 days a year.” I mean, anybody that runs a mastermind could say that, you know? But we like, hey, we . . . as you know, we introduced smaller meetings, like, in between our main meetings, and we’re, like, constantly try . . . I mean, the truth is is, for me, with Investor Fuel, it’s my show, right? But this is, it’s my second family. Like, I true . . . like, our customers are my friends. Like, I want to be around everybody more.
It’s not like, “Done with that for a quarter. Don’t have to talk to those people again for another quarter.” Like, not at all. Like, I just like, you know . . . as you guys have seen, sometimes, like, people don’t want to leave. Like, “I don’t want this to be over.”
So, cool. Well, we appreciate you guys, and actually, you know, really appreciate . . . at the end of the day, one of the cool things about Investor Fuel and our community is people like you that come in that are taking it to another level, like right? There used to be a time . . . when I first started real estate investing 11 years ago, it was like cavemen, you know? And it’s just . . . this evolution of the business, legitimizing it for one, and two, just advancing it through technology and using applications that you took out of corporate America, or life lessons, or whatever it is, it is really kind of cool to see that happening. So we definitely appreciate you guys.
Aaron: Cool.
Mike: If folks want to learn more about you guys, what you’re doing in Tampa, what you’re doing with your software, all that stuff, where should they go to learn more?
Aaron: Yeah, so for the text messaging platform, it’s launchcontrol.us. Dot com was taken by some other business. It could have gotten a better name but everything was taken. So yeah, .us, For us, we’re not too big on social media for a reason, not yet. So if anybody wants to get in touch with us would be through the website, or it would be aaron@baycapitalholdings. That’s our main company. Ashley Buys Houses is more of the, you know, the consumer-facing brand. Or [email protected]. That would be probably the most direct way of getting in touch with us.
Mike: That’s great. That’s great. Well, thanks for joining us today, guys.
Aaron: Absolutely. Pleasure.
Ashley: Thank you for having us.
Mike: Awesome. I’ll see you guys next weekend. Everybody, hey, thanks for joining us today. If you haven’t, the Investor Fuel show here is still fairly new. If you haven’t subscribed yet, we’d love it if you subscribe on iTunes, YouTube, Stitcher, Google Play, wherever you might watch the show at. Of course you can see all of the shows by going to investorfuel.com, or even flipnerd.com. So appreciate you guys. We’ll see you on another episode. Everybody have a great day.
Aaron: Cool. See you.
Mike: Bye-bye.
Are you an active real estate investor? If so, and you want to latch onto the power of surrounding yourself with over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors, all committed to building stronger businesses and living richer, fuller lives, you should jump on a call with us to learn more about Investor Fuel. Simply visit investorfuel.com to get started.