Wholesaling Secrets: 7 Powerful Tips to Skyrocket Your Business Growth

John Harcar (00:01.419)
All right. Hey, guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar here today with Andrew Becker. And we’re going to talk about besides his journey in real estate and business, a couple of other service oriented business he spun off of his experience to really help real estate investors. Guys, remember here at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers. I mean, really all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their business by providing tools and resources that help grow the business they want to have to live the life they wanna live. Andrew, welcome to our show.

Andrew Becker (00:34.05)
Thanks for having me, John. I’m excited to be here.

John Harcar (00:36.121)
Yeah, I’m excited we finally got onto this platform versus our last talk, which was great. And I’m excited to talk more about some of these different companies. before we get into all that, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit more about you, kind of your entry into real estate, business, and kind of what brought you to today.

Andrew Becker (00:54.286)
Sure. I’ll go back at the beginning, John. Started right out of college, a career in, I was a civil servant in the Air Force. I worked at the Pentagon for seven and a half years in the Air Force nuclear enterprise. So nuclear stockpile, maintenance, all that good stuff. And then around in 2013,

John Harcar (01:05.081)
wow.

Andrew Becker (01:15.278)
Kind of around the time when HGTV had those, know, flip this house kind of shows going on, love it or list it. I started a real estate team and essentially what would be a second career with my.

John Harcar (01:20.537)
Right.

Andrew Becker (01:28.866)
Buddy from middle school, one of my best friends from middle school. we wanted to start and just see if we could make something happen, because we were always entrepreneurs at heart. During college summers, we would run painting companies together. So that was fun. were like,

why don’t we stop doing this kind of rat race working for someone else and start our own business? So we started the McDonald Becker team in Arlington, Virginia that service the DMV, DC, Maryland and Virginia. And that’s how we kind of got going. Our initial, you know, first year we did obviously sales, but our ambitions were to grow a team and we grew a team together over, you know,

10, 11 years, which is still operational today.

John Harcar (02:19.387)
Wow, okay. Now, if you’ve watched my podcast, like to go back, right? So before, were in college, what did you study in college?

Andrew Becker (02:27.126)
I studied business entrepreneurship and management and then I also got a master’s in business management or administration as well.

John Harcar (02:34.947)
Nice. And you were painting houses in the summertime. Where did the whole real estate bug come from? Was it from painting houses? Or did you have someone in your life, an influence or something that you read or studied or whatever that spurned that real estate drive?

Andrew Becker (02:52.898)
Yeah, good question. So I guess we liked working with homeowners. we, I didn’t paint houses, Sean. We, we ran the painting company. so we hired painters, but I liked going into people’s homes and meeting them and kind of going everywhere around, Northern Virginia, DC and Maryland. but then we, we decided to kind of stick with real estate after we did some trial and error. We, with me and my partner, talked about like starting a chicken sandwich company.

where we would have a little cart outside of the bars in DC when they got out at 3 a.m. and stuff like that. So we kind of made a list and said what would be fun, what would be the most long-term, and real estate kind of…

John Harcar (03:30.416)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Becker (03:37.526)
Checked a lot of boxes for us. So we decided to get licensed I actually did real estate and my Career in the Air Force as a civil servant for a two-year overlap. So I didn’t jump in a hundred percent right away For a lot of different reasons, but there’s a two-year kind of two different full-time jobs going on at the same point

John Harcar (04:00.859)
Got it. So you, you start, you guys start your own or you get your license, right? And this is doing traditional real estate, correct?

Andrew Becker (04:07.778)
Yeah, just retail helping buyers and sellers, correct.

John Harcar (04:10.427)
What kind of were some of the struggles or things that you ran into when you started doing that or kind of like, you know, the mindset changes that you maybe came across?

Andrew Becker (04:19.638)
Yeah, I think the biggest one was you study for your license not really knowing anything and then you get your license and you’re like, cool, I’ll go to some brokerage and I’ll just start doing real estate, you know, like start getting business. And then you’re like, this is a marketing business.

The real estate is kind of like the secondary effect, but first and foremost you have to market yourself. So we were like, how do we get a deal? And we started just to educate ourselves, got mentors, coaches, eventually over time. But it was a pretty big struggle and a big kind of shell shock at first, because you didn’t really know how it worked until you really know how it works,

John Harcar (05:01.893)
Right. How long did it take you to get your first listing or closed listing? I should say it would be a better question.

Andrew Becker (05:10.03)
I’m trying to remember this is back in 2013. So it was quite some time ago I think we might have done like friends family kind of stuff first, but we got into do you remember yellow letters? They were like all the rage We found some guy and I think he was in like Pennsylvania and he helped us build a list You know, we set certain criteria and then he would just mail yellow letters and then I remember he would send us this spreadsheet of everyone on the list and

John Harcar (05:22.629)
yeah? yeah?

Andrew Becker (05:39.936)
and then as people fell off or we met with, we’d have to update the list and then we’d just keep doing that. We got our first listing, I’m gonna guess, John, and say maybe like three, four, maybe five months in after that, because mail takes a long time, you know how that works. You have to send seven pieces before people even recognize or realize who you are. But that’s where we source our first listing from.

John Harcar (05:53.049)
Okay.

John Harcar (05:57.168)
Yeah.

John Harcar (06:06.555)
Okay. And in this time of you guys listing properties and whatnot, did you ever have the thoughts of, maybe we should hold this one or hey, maybe we could, you know, take this one down and flip it or wholesale it or anything like that?

Andrew Becker (06:17.484)
Yeah, we

Not at first, I think we wanted to master what we were doing and we had the ambition and the dreams of starting a team. So we, we needed to figure out how to tell someone else how to figure stuff out first. Right. And you only know that by experience and lessons learned and you know, money spent, cetera. so not at first, John, but, I forget, I think in 16, maybe 2017, we started to actually, as we got into wholesaling, which we talked

about you know on our pre-call we would sort of cherry pick the ones that we would want to flip and we didn’t do a whole lot of flips I don’t even know maybe five at the most but our bread and butter was retail and whole and eventually wholesale which kind of took took majority towards the end of my time in on the sales team.

John Harcar (07:10.075)
Okay, well let’s talk about that. what what spurned the switch to wholesaling properties? Were you just kind of seeing money left on the table or?

Andrew Becker (07:17.774)
This kind yeah, I think it’s it’s a multitude of different variables here but the biggest part was when we started actually tracking what we were doing and K keeping you know KPIs and analytics of sales cycle for both retail, know a retail listing retail buyer or a wholesale the sales cycle was incredibly short compared to a listing and the net income was like 2.8 X what we

we were making from a retail listing. So our average wholesale assignment fee up here when I was working was about 29K. So not a small number. And it was just a little faster and easier to flip the contract once we really got the hang of it. So we kind of started with retail heavy and then a little bit of wholesale. What’s wholesaling? Should we?

John Harcar (07:48.485)
Mmm.

John Harcar (07:56.091)
Nice.

Andrew Becker (08:13.762)
you know, research and figure this out. Then when we started figuring it out and actually started seeing results from our automated, you know, reporting that we were keeping, it went like this. And we were like, why don’t we wholesale? But the really cool part was,

We kept all that internal in-house. So if I got a lead from you, John, and you said, hey, I wanted a cash offer, we would be able to go to the homeowner, you, and say, hey, John, tell us about your situation. Play detective and figure out what you have happening. And then say, listen, it sounds like you need to sell fast for a reason.

You know, ABC, we can buy your home in two weeks for X or, know, if you do have some time, we also have a team at our brokerage and we can, you know, renovate it for you, pay it closing and get you, you know, 550 instead of buying it from you for 375. So we kept that, the spectrum of options all the way from buying it ourselves to renovating it for them and selling it from a listing, opportunity.

So there was no opportunity cost for any of our leads and before we were wholesaling we had that opportunity cost because we We would get you know a lead from you John and you’d say I just want to sell my house cash I don’t want to list it. I’m embarrassed or for whatever reason I’m in California just like get rid of it and we’d have to be like, shoot They only want a cash offer and we would kind of dead the lead and then we realized we were leaving a ton of money on the table So that’s when we started really focusing on

John Harcar (09:43.963)
Mmm.

Andrew Becker (09:49.644)
providing any option that the homeowner really felt was a good fit for them.

John Harcar (09:56.045)
And you have to do that nowadays because I think there’s so many people out there that are doing that. When you switched into the wholesaling, did you have, did you seek out any mentorship? Did you seek out any coaching programs? mean, I know that, you know, your time with, you know, as a, as a real estate agent helped with talking to people and, and, maybe underwriting and all that stuff. But did you seek out any additional like guidance?

Andrew Becker (10:17.206)
Yeah, 100 % especially off of like seeing around the time where social media started like really ramping up, especially in the wholesale arena. 100%. At first we did not and we would just talk to people in our office. I’m imagining people don’t really even go into the offices anymore, but when we did go into the office, we would say, hey, have you ever wholesale? Do you know the different tactics around that?

John Harcar (10:24.688)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Becker (10:44.974)
Avenue. And then we started following people on like Instagram and Facebook. And then eventually they came out with coaching programs that we went through. So definitely did and definitely helped expedite getting us from where we were. At the time, John, we were at like an 11.1 % and this was with a big team and overhead. We’re at 11.1 % profit margin, hired a coach, went through their program. And when we are finished, we’re at like 36.6%.

So it’s an incredible ROI for anyone thinking about coaches out there.

John Harcar (11:15.525)
Beautiful.

John Harcar (11:21.197)
Yeah, for sure. mean, it’s learning from people who’ve already been there, saving time and money on mistakes. now, let’s say you were wholesaling, you were doing all this, you segued out of it. You kind of pulled yourself out of it and created a couple of new companies. Let’s talk about, you know, the new companies and what services that you’re providing.

Andrew Becker (11:27.278)
Right.

Andrew Becker (11:40.526)
Yeah.

So the genesis or where those came from, I think is important. So as the team owner and the COO, I was in charge of operations and tech stack. So the systems, the processes, and then our lead gen vehicles as well. So we wound up building out of necessity like a lot of entrepreneurs tend to do. Kind of two different avenues here. I’ll start with our operating system first, John.

You know, we were like everyone else. There are famous or well-known platforms out there that we were on. I won’t name drop any of them, but we were on about five over the course of my 11 years where I would selfishly want it to do something for me automatically so I didn’t have to remember to do something.

Ask people what happened on their appointments. Can I automate that? And I would hit a limitation around that function in platform X, right? And the solution was get Zapier and then go get solution A and then B and then C and then D. And then at the end, what sort of turned into the prototype of Billions, the team operating system that we built and now we sell was

The CRM database, Zapier and like eight different softwares all, you know, integrated talking to each other. I’m not a tech savvy person either. I architect and I come up with like the master plan and I find good developers and integrators to build it for us. And you know, we have a dev team behind me that, that could talk.

Andrew Becker (13:27.478)
much more about the integrations and the build out than I could, but, it was impossible to maintain for someone like me. It was expensive. And when something broke, I was at the mercy of whoever I got to integrate that certain connection. And I hit you up and say, Hey, John, you know, my, forms aren’t working. Can you help me? And it’s, it’s killing my reporting. And you’re like, dude, I could help you in like a week or two, but you need to get on a managed services package. Cause I don’t sell.

John Harcar (13:28.443)
Yeah.

John Harcar (13:43.195)
Yeah.

Andrew Becker (13:57.184)
hours one off and I’m like, man, I can’t live like this. So.

John Harcar (14:00.443)
Yeah, no, it makes sense.

Andrew Becker (14:02.25)
It was just like that. And we would not to mention have to tell the team, Hey everyone, we’re learning a new platform next month. we’re changing again. So there’s that learning curve, the adoption basically starting over and then hitting another limitation around. It’s not, you know, this isn’t the proper platform for us. So long story short, John, with that one, we built billions on top of Salesforce for our own need. we’re able to get rid of a ton of the day-to-day softwares or

John Harcar (14:20.997)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Becker (14:32.204)
different third-party solutions by building it natively and then we offer that to teams around the United States right now.

John Harcar (14:39.685)
So what specifically does Billions do that other softwares don’t or maybe it does it better or whatnot? Like what are the key features?

Andrew Becker (14:47.33)
Yeah, I think.

Yeah, I think at a very, high level, it’s built on top of Salesforce, you know, $250 billion company data privacy security, which is big nowadays with like, you know, certain acquisitions that I won’t name, and then uptime, it never goes down. So we had a solid platform and we can take advantage of the billions and billions and billions of dollars in, development that they put to move into our product. But the big thing is, I always use an analogy that seems

to resonate is like say you you know you start the John team and you’re like I have to get a CRM and then I want data and analytics and then I want a dialer and then I want

document management, then I want to use Signature. And you have to figure all that out on your own, You’re like, is DocuSign better or Panda? I don’t know. I have, you know, platform ABC. Can it talk to each other? How do I make it? And you’re figuring all this out, but you’re also taking your time away from running your team and focusing on real revenue generating activities. For us, it’s like,

You want to start a restaurant, a burger joint, John, and you’re like, I got a source of the beef, find the plot of land, build the building, figure out the branding, the naming, the kitchen, POS system, the training, hire people, or you can just go get a McDonald’s and franchise one, right?

John Harcar (16:05.571)
Moves by franchise. Yeah.

Andrew Becker (16:07.052)
And they’re like, here’s the blueprint, John, we’ll do everything for you. All you have to do is learn it and adopt it. That’s kind of what we are and what Billions is for the team model. So we’ve been there, done that over my 10, 11 years of running a team and trial, error, blood, sweat, equity, a lot of money, throwing away tech that ultimately didn’t work out. And we can give that to all of our customers tomorrow. If you said, Hey, I want Billions, you have it tomorrow. Obviously there’s an onboarding and.

migration from your old system that takes a little bit of time, but the build is there and there’s no having to figure that part out. So it’s an expedited way to get a true team model operating system running your operation that you don’t have to spend a fortune on.

John Harcar (16:56.173)
Is it easily customizable though, if people want to put in their own type of automation or other types of things like that?

Andrew Becker (17:02.338)
Yeah, 100%. That’s another big advantage of being on top of Salesforce and one of the disadvantages of being on the other platforms that I ultimately had to leave. Again, because their solution was go get this software and integrate it with Zapier. For Salesforce, I don’t like saying this, but it’s almost needed. The sky is the limit with the type of customization you can do on Salesforce. You can literally, if you can dream it and you want to invest in it, you

can build it in Salesforce. There is nothing that we have not been able to do for a team that’s on our platform. Knock on wood that we’ve run into so far. So that’s a huge, huge advantage. Especially, we’re talking about the team model. I’m seeing a big shift in solo agents wanting to start teams and or join their own teams.

John Harcar (17:42.309)
Alright.

Andrew Becker (18:02.092)
They’re almost recruiting as much as they’re lead gen, doing lead gen, right, for clients. We’ve built agent recruiting applications directly inside of Billions as well. So they don’t even have to leave Billions to start recruiting. And each different pathway, so we track buyers one way, sellers one way, wholesales one way, it’s included in Billions. And then now we’re starting to see a trend of, can you help me recruit? So there’s four different kind of

know, personas here. And we’ve actually had people ask us about property, construction costs and that kind of stuff. We’re not there yet, but for the agent part, that app is separate from, you know, doesn’t cross over the retail or the wholesale piece. So you can have your own stages, your own fields, your own page layouts for each of the four personas with its own reporting behind the scenes that comes native and free. I think

John Harcar (18:40.027)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (18:55.78)
Okay.

Andrew Becker (19:02.008)
we offer now like 135 different reports across eight dashboards for free. So you don’t even have to manually update a report ever again on billions. It’s one of the, you know, one of the pros of coming over to us and you could potentially get rid of your database and then your whatever you’re using through your analytics.

John Harcar (19:07.288)
is.

John Harcar (19:20.601)
Okay, and then you have another company here, Brighter PPC.

What made you start a PPC company?

Andrew Becker (19:27.906)
Yeah, kind of along the same lines. We were on different programs. Again, I won’t name any of them, but it was kind of like a spray and pray model where you had to spend more money and maybe they were making revenue share with Google or maybe they weren’t, or it was a percentage, but it was out of a necessity. So we said, hey,

why don’t we just try to figure this out on our own and keep it internal with and at that point it wasn’t like and then we can sell it to people right it was just we need this for our own company

John Harcar (19:57.37)
Right.

Andrew Becker (20:00.406)
So we interviewed and wound up partnering with someone who had been in the Google ad space at that time, you know, 13, 12 or 13 years. Now he’s been in it for 20 years because we’ve been with him for about seven, eight years. But we started seven, eight years ago with him and said, this is what we want. And we did a test between, you know, retail Google ads and cash offer Google ads and all these different kinds of Google ads. And we spent more than seven figures on different landing pages.

John Harcar (20:12.155)
Right.

Andrew Becker (20:30.32)
pages, ad spend, campaigns, negative keywords, all that stuff that comes with it.

John Harcar (20:36.411)
Mm.

Andrew Becker (20:37.036)
Long and we optimized over time, right? We said, Hey, let’s try this. this is working really great. Cool. Put a fence around that. And then that was our number one lead source. And then how brighter actually came about was we had a buddy, a colleague in Arlington at the office. And we are competitors up here, but he moved to North Carolina and he was like, Hey, can you do what you did for your company and PPC down here? And we were like, I don’t know, maybe. So we plugged in our strategy and our.

John Harcar (20:57.051)
Okay.

Andrew Becker (21:07.01)
model and it worked really well. And then by word of mouth, we’ve acquired customers from the East coast all the way to San Francisco, Los Angeles. And we’re starting to fill in, you know, the areas in between.

John Harcar (21:13.882)
Nice.

John Harcar (21:18.747)
Nice. Well, it seems like you found needs and you fulfilled them. And that’s what business is about. If there’s folks that are listening on here, they want to reach out to you about either Billions or a brighter PPC, or they just want to talk to you about your experience and maybe do some deals, I don’t know. How could they reach out to you? How’s the best way to get in touch?

Andrew Becker (21:38.796)
Yeah,

Social media I’m on all the different platforms. So if you search my name and you can find me and connect there or We have two different websites for our two different companies. The first is join billions calm and then the second one is brighter PPC calm So you can go there and check us out schedule a demo time to talk with either of those or just shoot me an email at AB for Andrew Becker a B at join billions calm

John Harcar (22:09.323)
And we’ll put all that stuff in the show notes. So guys, you really, if you want to reach out, you’ll be able to connect. know, Andrew, thank you for coming on here and sharing and talking about your businesses and your journey. I really appreciate it. Guys, hope you took some good notes and we will see you on the next one. Cheers.

Andrew Becker (22:20.27)
Of course.

Andrew Becker (22:23.918)
Alright, thanks a lot.