Stay in your Lane : My Real Estate Mentorship Success Story

John Harcar (00:00.988)
All right, hey guys, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Lawton Makovec. And what we’re going to talk about is his mistakes, how you can learn from them. Remember guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, I mean, all real estate entrepreneurs, 2 to 5X their business. We do it by providing tools and resources to help grow the business you want to have and live the life that you want to live. So Lawton, welcome to our show.

Lawton Makovec (00:27.438)
Thanks for having me, John.

John Harcar (00:28.824)
Awesome. I’m excited to talk about your mistakes because, you being in the business, I’ve obviously made a lot of my own. But before we jump into the weeds, tell our audience a little bit about you. Where you came from, what your background is, how you got into real estate.

Lawton Makovec (00:43.15)
Sure. So I first got into real estate when I was 18. I moved to the market that I’m in now in Wichita, Kansas. Greater Metro is right under a million, I think, our total Greater Metro. And I moved here from a town of 300 people. had 13 kids in my senior class, real small.

John Harcar (00:57.212)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (01:10.981)
real small.

Lawton Makovec (01:11.822)
Yeah, we were like eight man football, no stoplight, like every, yeah, everything you hear about and read about in a country song or in a Hollywood movie about a small town, that’s the town that inspired it. But it was great. I loved growing up there and I always wanted to go into real estate. And unfortunately, you can’t go into real estate in a town of 300 people.

John Harcar (01:14.492)
Two, yeah, two teachers in the school.

John Harcar (01:23.516)
Right? Awesome. That’s awesome.

Lawton Makovec (01:40.142)
There’s not enough houses. so I moved to the big city, Wichita, and moved here with a credit card and a dream and just decided to get into real estate and go from there. So I cut my teeth as an agent. met my business partner at a networking event and followed up with him relentlessly. He’s, he’s

John Harcar (01:40.144)
Yeah, I mean

John Harcar (01:59.248)
Mm-hmm.

Lawton Makovec (02:06.446)
a billion years older than me. Now he’s only, he’s 20, 22, 21 years older than me. I hope he hears this. He’s 20 years older than me. So very different stage. And I met him at this networking event and I was like, yes, you, I want to be, I want your life. I want your car. want your, I want every, I want your job. I like, I just want to be you. And he was like, cool man, leave me alone. And then I,

John Harcar (02:09.18)
you

Okay.

John Harcar (02:23.387)
Nice.

John Harcar (02:30.886)
Right?

John Harcar (02:34.236)
You

Lawton Makovec (02:35.862)
And then I totally didn’t, I totally didn’t leave him alone. I emailed him, I called him a billion times and he never ever, ever got back with me. So eventually I got tired of waiting and I quit my job. I drove to his office and just sat in his lobby and just waited until he met with me. And he came out and he was like, you got two minutes. Like, what do you want? I take the hint. I don’t want him, I don’t need, and I was like, man, I already quit my job and I don’t know, but this seems right.

John Harcar (02:50.972)
Mm.

John Harcar (02:56.475)
Mm-hmm.

Lawton Makovec (03:03.158)
want to go into real estate and you’re super cool and rich and I just want to be you and he was like I all right I mean I got an old laptop in the back like if you just want to do some bitch work and I was like perfect so I was his intern for like 90 days and then he was like you should get your license like you can you can do this and I was yes. Well, both.

John Harcar (03:07.61)
Yeah.

John Harcar (03:24.848)
So was this a real estate agent or real estate invest? Okay, so this was an agent. Okay.

Lawton Makovec (03:31.282)
He’s a real estate agent. He’s got a property management company and he’s a he’s he’s got a couple hundred doors big real estate investor and So I was around him that that was my first and only impression of real estate and I was like cool that all of that I’m just gonna pick that up and set it over here into my life, right easy So finally he was like you should get your license. You should do this and I was like cool I don’t have any money and he’s like I’ll pay the two thousand dollars ish,

John Harcar (03:51.108)
you

Lawton Makovec (04:01.136)
or whatever to get your license and your dues and everything up and running and you can pay me out of your first check. And a month later I had my first closing and I a check in my hand for like $13,000 and I was like, this rocks. And I never stopped. And now that’s all I’ve ever done is real estate.

John Harcar (04:02.46)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (04:16.4)
That’s awesome.

John Harcar (04:21.444)
Okay, back in the day when, what were you doing before? You said he left your job to go do this. What was your job before? okay. And you said he’s always wanted to be in real estate. Where did that influence or where did that come from? So no family members, no friends, nobody in real estate?

Lawton Makovec (04:26.86)
working at a golf course. I had just graduated high school.

I tell you. I… No family in real estate, no investment background, no, you know, no rich dad, poor dad, no nothing. Just I… Everybody my whole life was like, you should go into sales. And I was like, all right, cool. I don’t know what that is, but everybody always told me to do it. And I was like, what am going to sell? And I was like, I like houses. Like, I like…

you know all the TV shows about selling houses I’m like let’s let’s give it a whirl like worst case I’ll just go back to school with everybody else so

John Harcar (05:05.959)
Yep. With YouTube U, why was it important for you to get in a mentor, someone who, I mean, why were you seeking someone out to learn from for free, basically, versus just say, hey, you know what, I’m going to do this on my own and I’m going to, get there.

Lawton Makovec (05:09.943)
Yup.

Lawton Makovec (05:18.094)
Sure.

Lawton Makovec (05:22.286)
Yeah, I think looking at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to give you an answer. It just seemed like the right thing in my gut. looking back on it, because people have asked me that question before, it was more about like shortening the learning curve and just opening up doors. But it’s so different what I did and like the route that I took, so different than

John Harcar (05:31.984)
Hmm.

John Harcar (05:39.856)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lawton Makovec (05:50.38)
the people that reach out to me or people that I know reach out to other investors that are like, can I buy you a cup of coffee and pick your brain? And I’m like, I don’t need you to buy. I can buy my own $6 latte in exchange for a decade’s worth of information. No, I came to this guy and I was like, I don’t know how, what this looks like, but I want to be you. I just want to be around your ecosystem, your whole everything. And

John Harcar (05:59.216)
He he.

John Harcar (06:15.93)
Mm hmm. Sure.

Lawton Makovec (06:18.058)
I was like, I’ll work for free. I don’t care. Like the only thing I asked him to do was share his calendar with me so that when he had an appointment at one o’clock, me too, I was leaning up against his car. I’m like, I’m going.

John Harcar (06:32.656)
Love it. Love it.

Lawton Makovec (06:38.798)
to sit in the passenger seat while he took phone calls. And I got to take notes about how he talked and what he said. And he would introduce me to different people that later down the road, they would become lenders or investors. what you know goes hand in hand with who you know, of course. And I think that…

John Harcar (06:49.669)
So valuable.

John Harcar (07:01.531)
yeah, of course.

Lawton Makovec (07:04.396)
I think that everybody talks about, you know, it’s who you know, it’s not what you know, it’s like adding up bullshit. you, who you know will get you in the door. What you know will keep you there.

John Harcar (07:13.948)
Mm.

Sure.

Lawton Makovec (07:17.588)
So I mean, if someone goes out on a limb and your uncle makes an introduction or gets you an internship, but you’re a moron and you don’t know anything, you make your uncle look bad and you’re going to lose your job. It’s like, you still have to be good at what you do. And there was a ton of education. I did go to YouTube U-Round.

John Harcar (07:25.813)
Yeah, right?

Mm-hmm.

Lawton Makovec (07:36.63)
read the books and I was listening to podcasts and was practicing my pitch, all that, all the time. It was a constant learning and self-education, self-investment. While I was, it was the who you know and the what you know at the same time that just hockey-sticked my career.

John Harcar (07:48.314)
Yes.

John Harcar (07:59.44)
Did you have savings put aside for, or mean you weren’t making money, how are you paying the bills?

Lawton Makovec (08:05.134)
Credit cards. I mean, I sold my first house inside of the first month of me getting a license.

John Harcar (08:12.021)
okay, so you had a knack for this thing.

Lawton Makovec (08:18.318)
do think that there is some natural talent of just sales. So yes, I had a knack and have a knack, guess, but the, I know I wouldn’t have had that first closing that fast if not for my mentor.

John Harcar (08:23.856)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (08:35.29)
Sure. yeah, of course, and the preparation and the studying him and the practicing, all that type of stuff.

Lawton Makovec (08:40.558)
I was ready when the opportunity came.

John Harcar (08:46.32)
Got it. So you got your license. You said it took less than a month to get your first deal. What were you think some of the challenges that you were going, you know, coming across or mistakes that you made when you first started doing this, getting your license, doing all that stuff.

Lawton Makovec (08:48.77)
Yep.

Lawton Makovec (09:05.034)
saving money and like really learning how to learning how to ride the roller coaster of being on commission and like I don’t think that you know in my first year or two there’s any like handful of mistakes of like man if I’d have done this and this and this differently it’s like that’s just your first year of

John Harcar (09:15.024)
Yeah.

John Harcar (09:24.475)
Right.

Lawton Makovec (09:27.53)
sales like you don’t know anything and it’s eat eat what you kill or you don’t eat kind of thing so i think for me the the biggest thing that i

John Harcar (09:33.028)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lawton Makovec (09:42.658)
I would say that I shouldn’t have done. I saw something that I regret because, you know, it was cool and I was eight, I was 18 years old, whatever. But I think in my first, I got licensed in March and then by like the end of that calendar year, I think I had like, I think I cleared a hundred thousand in those like first eight months or nine months, whatever it was. And so like any self-respecting 18 year old, went out and bought a Range Rover, like a moron, like a.

John Harcar (09:50.508)
yeah.

John Harcar (10:06.906)
Okay.

John Harcar (10:10.812)
Spent all your money.

Lawton Makovec (10:13.466)
moron, I spent all my money, didn’t have any money set aside for taxes, I didn’t know any of this crap and so afterwards I went to my mentor and I was like, I just got this tax bill and he was like, well yeah and I was like, what do mean yeah, I didn’t know about any of this, I didn’t know any of this was gonna happen, like I don’t know anything and he was like, okay I need to like actually teach you everything and so he did and you know from then on it was more, you know like that was really I think when it became not just a

John Harcar (10:14.906)
Yep. Yep.

John Harcar (10:26.364)
Hahaha

Lawton Makovec (10:40.626)
and you’re an agent relationship, but like, okay, let me make sure you don’t squander this opportunity you have. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was good. And then, I mean, obviously I think there, you know, there’s a lot of lessons along the way. You know, my past life as an agent of, you know, I wish I would have house hacked. looking back, I wish I would have bought a duplex, lived in one half, you know.

John Harcar (10:42.268)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (10:46.884)
You don’t fail too hard, right? Yeah. Yeah.

John Harcar (11:05.69)
Yeah, me too.

Lawton Makovec (11:09.9)
Not had to pay rent, blah, blah. But no, I wanted to live downtown in a cool apartment and and blah, just like, there was a lot of ego driven decisions that, you know, they weren’t catastrophic. Like they didn’t hamstring my career. I would just be farther along if I didn’t make those mistakes.

John Harcar (11:22.428)
Alright.

John Harcar (11:29.244)
Got it. So you were with this guy and then did you go out and start your own brokerage? Where did all this lead to?

Lawton Makovec (11:36.066)
Sure, sure, sure. So we built up a team at a large…

big box brokerage and eventually we outgrew that. We had our own office, we had our own staff, had our own, like we had everything. We were like an unofficial, official satellite office. I don’t know how they let us get away with it for as long as they did, but we were bringing in lots of deals. So maybe that’s why eventually, eventually we were like, huh, we paid them how much money last year?

John Harcar (11:52.742)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (11:58.438)
Yeah, right, money talks.

Lawton Makovec (12:06.126)
We had to pay to put their logo on our business cards. That’s dumb. We didn’t get anything else from them. So we decided to take the leap. started our own brokerage in 2019, 2020, one of the two. And that has just kind of…

John Harcar (12:11.292)
Right?

John Harcar (12:18.778)
Okay.

Lawton Makovec (12:24.27)
grown into its own thing. wasn’t long after that that I exited it, the day-to-day operations of it and decided to invest full-time. So I started investing and I’m sure we can get into it more. I started investing in 2018. It was more of an occupational hazard. Like I was an agent doing lots of deals. I had a good relationship with other investors in our community, you know, cause the investor deals as an agent, those will keep you fed during the

John Harcar (12:30.993)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Lawton Makovec (12:54.254)
months where, you know, retail stuff, they’re already in school, it’s Christmas, you know, they’re going on summer break, no one’s looking at houses, the investors keep you fed in those down months. I, I just ingrained myself with a ton of guys that were just kind of starting out and I’ve still got good relationships with them today. And they’re huge buyers of ours on the wholesale side. I,

John Harcar (12:55.994)
Your retail stuff ain’t going. Yeah. Yep.

John Harcar (13:06.318)
yeah.

John Harcar (13:16.26)
Mm-hmm.

Lawton Makovec (13:20.014)
I started investing in 2018 and I started flipping houses. That was my first kind of, I had seen other guys do it and I saw the settlement statements and I’m like, I’m only making $3,000 on this as the agent, this guy’s making a killing. I’m like, and he’s a moron, I can do this, this is great. So I started doing it and I lost $60,000 on my first one because I gave all my money to my contractor.

John Harcar (13:39.845)
Right?

John Harcar (13:44.198)
Bye.

Lawton Makovec (13:49.966)
He was a buddy. looking back, he wasn’t. But he was a buddy. And he was like, he had what I thought was this big reputable construction company. And I went to my mentor and I was like, I’m going to flip this house with Andy. And it’s going to go great. And I’m just going to give him the money. And I’m going to keep doing the real estate thing. And he was like, don’t get distracted. Be an agent. Do that full time. You’ve only been doing this for two years. You’re not.

John Harcar (13:52.614)
So you gave a blank check.

Lawton Makovec (14:17.932)
It’s not on autopilot yet, man. Like you should stay focused and stay in your lane. And I was like, I’m just going to give him a check and he’s going to give me the keys when it’s done. Like it’s not going to take any of my time. Wrong. I gave him the check and nothing freaking happened except people were showing up at my office wanting paid because the contractor I gave $60,000 to didn’t pay the painter or the tile guy or the sheetrock guy or anything. So the house got done, but

John Harcar (14:43.899)
Jeez.

Lawton Makovec (14:46.766)
to spend another 40, 50, $60,000 on the house.

John Harcar (14:53.21)
Where’d this other guy go?

Lawton Makovec (14:55.212)
He was town just running around, but I didn’t have anything in writing. didn’t have anything. Uh-huh. Moron. Moron. Get everything in writing. Don’t pay your contractor’s labor deposits. Buy the damn material yourself. Control your costs.

John Harcar (14:59.814)
Okay, mistake number one to make sure writing in writing

John Harcar (15:12.016)
Yeah. So how long did it take you to do this flip?

Lawton Makovec (15:17.746)
Uh, like three or four months. Like I just, I dubbed every fight. It got done really quick. The f- I just had to pay for it twice. It was brutal. No, nothing. I mean, I don’t think he’s in business anymore and he’s been in and out of jail a couple of times, but like I didn’t get any recourse. I just, you know, the world kind of took care of that. The universe. Sure. Yep.

John Harcar (15:20.196)
Not bad. Yeah.

John Harcar (15:28.75)
And no recourse on the dude. Jeez.

John Harcar (15:42.596)
The universe did now. Did you continue to flip? Did you just okay? Because a lot of people in that situation would be like, hey dude, I’m done with flipping man. Forget that forget contractors. Yeah.

Lawton Makovec (15:47.022)
Bye everybody.

Lawton Makovec (15:51.566)
go make the money back. I had to go make it back. was like, okay, if I can remove like this actually went pretty well and it sold the first day on the market and know, buyer repairs were good. Like everything went well. If you remove the contractor from the equation, this really didn’t go so bad. I could do this again. And so I did and I’ve probably done see that was 2018.

John Harcar (16:12.196)
Right. Right.

Lawton Makovec (16:19.534)
Yeah, so I was 18. I would say it was, I was, uh, yeah, I would say it’s probably probably 120 houses later and,

John Harcar (16:30.969)
Okay.

Lawton Makovec (16:35.47)
It went really good until I decided to make a business out of it and not just a side hustle. It stopped being real estate investing and I accidentally built a construction company and I’m not a contractor. And the amount of meetings I was in about sheetrock and tile and paint bids and Lowe’s versus Home Depot, I’m I’m a sales and marketing guy and this wholesale business we have is killer.

John Harcar (16:40.208)
Then what happened?

John Harcar (16:49.21)
Yep.

John Harcar (17:00.273)
Yep.

Lawton Makovec (17:03.67)
and I’m funneling money out of this wholesale business to throw at these houses to get them done because I want to be the big flipper guy. Scale up frigging construction moron. A big dumb guy. That is an arena that is so difficult to have an advantage in at least in our market. Like in our market if you

John Harcar (17:11.883)
Mm-hmm.

Lawton Makovec (17:29.55)
a not a home run, but a solid flip. You’ll make 18, 20 grand a pot. A lot of risk and a lot of everything, but I was, I think our, our average before we like really scaled it up was like 16, eight. So call it 17,000 and we’re doing 10 of them a year, 12 of them a year. And I’m like, boom, this is a nice little side hustle.

John Harcar (17:36.88)
Hmm. Okay. Yeah.

John Harcar (17:57.701)
Sure.

Lawton Makovec (17:58.318)
It’s not bad. You know, it’s an extra couple hundred grand a year. I’ll take it. Then we did like 40 houses in one year. And I was like, dude, if we could just make 15 grand on 40 of them, that’s way better than 17 grand on 10 of them. I think we probably lost $200,000. Moron. It’s an insane thing to try and compete in.

John Harcar (18:16.019)
my gosh.

Lawton Makovec (18:27.284)
Unless you are liquid, you don’t have to go borrow money or you’re a contractor and you can use it and like you can use your own crews and your own internal infrastructure and get labor at cost or at least near nearly at cost. But

John Harcar (18:30.865)
Yep.

John Harcar (18:45.68)
Did you ever go out and build or find private or hard money? mean, hard money’s everywhere, but you ever go out and find private money to use as well? Yeah? Okay.

Lawton Makovec (18:53.198)
Yeah, that’s all I’ve done. I have, I’ve only ever done a flip with a bank one time. Everything else has been private lenders. tens of millions of dollars in a deal is done there. Dozens of millions.

John Harcar (19:06.628)
And in this whole time, you said you were wholesaling too, right? So you said you were funneling the money from the wholesaling to this. So when, at what point? No, no, no, it’s all good. What got you to start the wholesaling part of it?

Lawton Makovec (19:10.232)
Yes! Yeah, we gotta skip over that part, man. I’m sorry about that.

Lawton Makovec (19:20.684)
All the wholesalers in town, in our market, and see this was 2020.

we were Philippine 15, 20 houses a year and all the wholesalers on our market sucked ass. Horrible. They were shady. They were always trying to renegotiate the price. The day before closing, they would, you know, call me and give me the, Hey, we need you to pay seven more thousand dollars. We gave you too good of a deal. And I was like, that’s not my problem. Like we got a contract and they’d be like, man, we’re, you know, we’re just not going to show up to closing.

John Harcar (19:50.554)
Yeah, you’re bad.

Lawton Makovec (19:56.942)
Like, what are you talking about? Like, I got everything lined up. This whole deal is in place. And that happened probably five or six times with.

John Harcar (20:03.96)
Where did these guys learn to do wholesaling is my question.

Lawton Makovec (20:08.526)
from investor fuel let me tell you. No, I’m sure maybe they learned from buddy Greg Halbeck. I said maybe they learned from Greg Halbeck. I’m just kidding. The OG, the OG. He’s a good guy. He’s good. Anyway, so I was like, man, this is…

John Harcar (20:10.14)
No, well, that’s for damn sure. That’s for damn sure. What’s that? Good old Greg, good old Greg Halback. What a great dude. What a great dude. Yeah, I haven’t seen that guy in a long time. Okay.

Lawton Makovec (20:30.798)
This is bullshit. I’m going to start my own direct to seller marketing just to buy flips. I don’t want to wholesale. I got the agent thing. I’m a lippin, you know, buying a couple of rentals. I don’t need another business. The wholesaling side. I was like, this stinks. I was like, I don’t want to do it. It seems like way too much work. I’m just going to.

John Harcar (20:36.783)
Yeah.

John Harcar (20:48.348)
Yeah.

Lawton Makovec (20:53.518)
drop some postcards and control my own inventory of flips. we did that in July of 2020. And by the end of August, 2020, we had bought two houses and wholesale three of them. And I was like, this was way easier than I thought. I just called all the investors I was working with as an agent and I said, hey man.

John Harcar (20:58.405)
Yeah.

John Harcar (21:08.635)
Nice.

Lawton Makovec (21:17.122)
you buy over here. And they’re like, yeah, I’m like, you want it for this price? And they were like, sure, I love that. was like, that’s it. That’s the whole thing. That was awesome. I want to do this again. So I was like, this is great. So I doubled down on that. And I think that next month, yeah, September, I hired like a transaction coordinator to kind of.

John Harcar (21:24.494)
Awesome. Easy peasy.

Lawton Makovec (21:39.168)
run everything because I was still busy as an agent and doing the figures and the wholesale and I was just trying to figure out what I was best at and the wholesale side just hockey stick it just blew.

John Harcar (21:41.593)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (21:51.29)
Love it. What does your team look like down?

Lawton Makovec (21:53.822)
I’ve got one acquisitions person, their acquisitions and dispositions. He fields all of the inbound leads, on the appointments, makes the offers, does everything. And then he also handles the dispositions of getting it sold to the buyer, getting the walkthrough, getting their eyes on it, all that. And then have a transaction coordinator.

John Harcar (22:06.598)
Okay.

John Harcar (22:13.894)
Mm-hmm.

Lawton Makovec (22:19.03)
in-house as well that handles everything with the seller and the buyer and the title company side.

John Harcar (22:20.431)
Okay.

John Harcar (22:24.028)
Got it. Okay, perfect. Now you’re a Legion. you still doing postcards? Are you? you?

Lawton Makovec (22:28.174)
Yeah, that’s probably 80, probably 70 to 75 percent of our deals are from our direct mail.

John Harcar (22:35.726)
Okay, what kind of response rate are you getting on this?

Lawton Makovec (22:40.558)
I was on Greg Helbeck’s podcast two years ago and he asked me the same thing and when I told him he spit his water out. We’re currently getting a like a 7.8 % responsible, almost 8%.

John Harcar (22:45.03)
Uh-huh.

John Harcar (22:55.184)
Wow, whoa, that’s way better than the national average. Why do you think that is? Is it more of a homegrown type of, you know, that type of market to where, you know, it’s like people will open mail more?

Lawton Makovec (23:03.182)
We do.

Lawton Makovec (23:09.806)
Maybe I mean I haven’t dropped mail and you know other major metros So I I can’t like really speak with any level of confidence But I mean we’re from what I understand at least from talking to the other guys in our market that are Wholesaling now that are doing direct mail. I mean they’re they’re not even close to you know that

John Harcar (23:16.859)
True.

Lawton Makovec (23:35.308)
that level of response rate. So I think it has a lot to do with being really targeted with your lists and broadening that criteria with other marketing mediums, whether it’s outbound dial in or grabbing for dollars or texting or digital, Facebook, PPC, all of that. You can get really.

John Harcar (23:40.88)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (23:51.888)
Yeah.

Lawton Makovec (24:02.434)
I guess wider with that because you get the instantaneous feedback like you get. You get insights on the performance of that a lot quicker than you do with direct mail. Anytime we roll out a new card or a new list or anything, I’m married to that for at least four months before I’m like go or no go.

John Harcar (24:05.988)
Yeah, true.

John Harcar (24:19.238)
Sure. Yeah, you gotta have time to test it and get the results. Yeah.

Lawton Makovec (24:24.118)
do especially with something tangible where you’re waiting on someone to read it because maybe they got it three months ago and it wasn’t the right time but they held on to it and so it’s like you’ve really got to let it get into the system. really what I think our secret sauce if you want to call it that is our marketing. We do everything in-house, we design our own postcards,

John Harcar (24:32.411)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (24:38.01)
Right, right, right.

Lawton Makovec (24:53.142)
visual assets and the copy like wholesaling is a marketing company disguised as a real estate company. So the faster you realize it’s not real estate investing, it’s marketing and you treat it and run it like a marketing agency. That’s when we really started to see our leading and lagging metrics improve a ton.

John Harcar (25:00.305)
Yeah.

John Harcar (25:04.698)
Uh-huh.

John Harcar (25:17.018)
Yeah. So let’s talk real fast because we like I told you before, mean, I could talk. We talked real fast. We’re already at you know, what are the mistakes, right? What are the things that people need to look out for not make? What can they learn from you to not do?

Lawton Makovec (25:30.53)
The best piece of advice I ever got was probably a year ago when I was, I mean, I’m in the trenches of just digging out some big mistakes and some big bets and losing a couple hundred grand, flipping houses, like just digging back out of that. And I had a…

business mentor of mine talked to me. I was talking to him just like, man, does everybody go through this? And he was like, I’ve, you know, he doesn’t have real estate business. He’s got a different business. And he’s like, here, here’s the mistake I made. lost a million dollars in two years because of.

the same thing that you’re doing, but in my industry, in my business. And he said, and it’s stuck with me and I tell everybody about it. Chase two rabbits, you lose both of them.

John Harcar (26:24.235)
yeah.

Lawton Makovec (26:25.474)
And I think if I had to go back three years ago, I would have just said, man, let’s shutter this flipping thing unless it is just a screaming deal that we can cherry pick that we get where there’s no assignment fee, there’s no markup. It’s in a killer area and it’s 30 cents on the dollar. you know, the re after rehab, we’re in it for 46 cents on the dollar. Like

John Harcar (26:42.362)
Mm-hmm.

Lawton Makovec (26:50.676)
Let’s do those, the rest of it, let’s assign them. Let’s just wholesale them off and get them done.

John Harcar (26:57.073)
Yep.

Lawton Makovec (26:58.442)
Our business would be farther along. I would have more hair. I would have less stress. My shoulders would hang a little lower. Everything. I mean, it’s just like you chase two rabbits and you lose both. find the thing that you’re really good at. And I found it. I had the agent thing. I was starting the ellipse, the wholesale. I was like, let’s give it a shot. And it blew up. And that’s when I was like, OK, I’m.

John Harcar (27:02.812)
Yeah, I got that.

John Harcar (27:23.44)
Yeah, sounds like it.

Lawton Makovec (27:26.798)
the brokerage of the day-to-day. I’ll see you every month for the P &L meetings but I’m going over here. This is this like I have to take this opportunity and for two years I mean we were the market leader essentially overnight in our market and we just continued to grow on the wholesale side and I think for that I don’t know if I got

John Harcar (27:35.973)
Right, right.

John Harcar (27:45.68)
That’s awesome.

Lawton Makovec (27:56.93)
bored with the day to day or there’s probably some ego in there as well, but I was like, cool, wholesale King of Wichita. Now I want to go be the flipping King of Wichita and I am the flipping moron of Wichita. I’ll tell you that dumb. I’m so bad at flipping houses. I’m a sales and marketing guy and that’s all wholesaling is. And I’m very excited to be on the other side of that. And, you know, getting back to.

John Harcar (28:12.028)
to them.

John Harcar (28:15.814)
Yeah.

Lawton Makovec (28:25.934)
being focused on the wholesale side because when we shifted that focus back internally, almost immediately, every single one of our leading and lagging metrics went through the roof when all of the focus of the resources of everybody in the business went from, okay, that was horrible, let’s get back to doing what we do and it was like we never left.

John Harcar (28:39.696)
Mmm.

John Harcar (28:50.812)
Well, and that’s a problem with like social media stuff today is that, know, you get in, you’re doing good and wholesale and you see someone else that did that, did a flip and they post on there how it was so great. they stick to your lane, man. Get rid of the shiny Algyx syndrome. Man, awesome stuff. How can people get in touch with you? Right. If they want to reach out, if they want to talk to you about how you, you know, your growth, your pains, all that stuff, how do they get in touch?

Lawton Makovec (29:16.91)
They can text me, I’m an easy guy to get a hold of. My number’s 316-217-3538. And you can find me on Facebook, Instagram, all that. I’m on that too if they really want to.

John Harcar (29:28.252)
Okay.

Okay, and then I’ll put all, I’ll make sure we put in the show notes all of your contact information. But guys, I hope you took notes, man. I mean, I think that last part that we talked about is really one of the biggest keys is people get and they see so much out there that they think they wanna go and do it all. Stick to Elaine. Master that, master that, master that. That’s gonna be your success ride. Lawton, man, I’m so glad you came on our show, man. I appreciate your time today. Guys, I hope you had a great show as well and I forward to seeing

on the next one. Cheers!

Lawton Makovec (30:01.646)
appreciate it, John. Thanks a lot.