10 Essential Business Strategies for Aspiring Real Estate Entrepreneurs

John Harcar (00:01.472)
All right. Hey, guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with John Cullen. And we’re going to talk about besides his journey in real estate and business, we’re going to talk about personal growth and why it’s a passion and why it’s so important to him and and why it should be important to you as well. Remember, guys, here at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, really all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their business.

We do that by providing the tools and resources to help grow that business, which in turn helps live the life you want to live. So John, man, welcome to our show.

John B. Cullen (00:39.464)
Hey John, thanks for having me. Appreciate you.

John Harcar (00:42.444)
Yeah, I’m super excited to talk with you a little bit more. I know we had some conversation offline, but personal growth for me is a very, important part as well. But before we talk about all that, let’s talk about you. Give our audience a little background on you and your business, how you get into real estate, et cetera.

John B. Cullen (01:02.548)
Yeah, well, I started out, actually worked in the medical field for 23 years before I jumped into real estate. And there was a point in time during my medical career that I really wanted to get out of that. I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore. So one of the things I thought I would do is open a bar, which, yeah, that was something that really actually

John Harcar (01:25.486)
Okay.

John B. Cullen (01:31.796)
thoroughly embedded in me that I wanted to do real estate and the reason is because I had some real estate experiences with the leases that was not favorable to me. So I thought to myself, know, I want to be on the other side of this deal. I’m not going to be on the leasing side anymore. I want to be the guy that owns the building that leases to business owners.

And after that experience, just swore that I’d never be on that side of the fence again. And so I jumped over to the dark side some years later. around 2016, I sold the bar and got, you know, recouped some of my investment, went back to work in the hospital. And around 2020, I think it was, is when I really started to kind of…

dig deep and go to the YouTube channels like most people do and start to learn a little bit about real estate. you know, I think that…

John Harcar (02:26.894)
Mm-hmm.

John B. Cullen (02:30.825)
Probably around 2022 is when I did my first deal. So I haven’t been doing this that long. Fortunately for me, I’ve had some really good mentors that have helped push me along and kind of shown me the way. But that’s kind of how I got into it. let’s see, it was, I think, March of 2023 when I finally decided to retire and go into real estate full time. And fortunately, I have a very supportive wife.

who was all for it and she said yeah go for it and so here I am.

John Harcar (03:06.774)
I love it. Okay, so let’s go back. If you watch any of my podcasts, I always go backwards. Before we have the whole lease thing, right? You know, if you mentioned that to be your kind of entryway into real estate, was there anybody in the past, any influences, any people in your family, good friends, anybody in real estate that might have planted that subliminal seed or, you know, that knowledge back in the day?

John B. Cullen (03:33.895)
Yeah, it was the bank in the form of a foreclosure in 2009. Yeah, yeah. So I got my house was foreclosed on and again, that was something that planted the seed. And I thought to myself, man, I see all these people like I see the signs on the road. Hey, we buy your house for cash. Like, where’s everybody getting all this cash in a recession? And that always that that’s what really planted the seed right there. And I had always thought about that. And I thought, well, you know, first things first, I have to become an agent, which I never did. And I’m not.

John Harcar (03:39.17)
jeez, okay.

John Harcar (03:51.534)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (03:58.157)
Okay.

John B. Cullen (04:03.762)
But I thought that that was kind of the route. I thought that’s how you had to do it. again, back then I was in my medical career, so the thought was fleeting. It was there, but it was fleeting.

John Harcar (04:15.544)
Sure. Now this whole time, like, were you doing any type of, I mean, at what point did you start that YouTube U type of process?

John B. Cullen (04:22.265)
yeah, yeah, sure. Like around 2020, we’re still in COVID.

John Harcar (04:27.278)
Okay. Did you have any, I mean, did you look up mentorship? Did you look up, you know, a coach?

John B. Cullen (04:35.839)
I, my wife and I were renting a place and about that time our lease was up and I said, hey, we should buy a house. And she said, okay. So I called a real estate agent who I knew and I said, hey, my wife and I want to buy a house. He said, okay, fine. He showed me a house the very next day. And it just so happens that this house was from a wholesaler friend of his and we ended up buying the house.

Well, I looked up the information on the county website to see who owned it before, because I knew that this guy was an investor slash wholesaler. I thought, hey, let me call this guy and see if he can help me out and kind of direct me. So I did. I called him. He was really cool. And he talked to me about it. And he said, if you really want to get serious about it, you got to find a good mentor. And I said, OK, do you got any suggestions? He said, yeah. I’m part of a group called Advisors Council with Lee Kearney.

He said you should join that group and I said, okay great

How much is it? And he said it’s 25,000 a year. I said, yeah, that’s not happening. Not right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So eventually though, did eventually join that group. I did take the plunge and join it. And that was the main mentorship that really gave me the push for what I needed and the kick in the butt to get going. So that’s kind how that started.

John Harcar (05:41.312)
I’m little too new for that right now.

John Harcar (06:00.13)
Why was it so important for you to have a mentor versus just continue down the YouTube U track?

John B. Cullen (06:07.392)
well YouTube YouTube’s great for the beginning, but if you really want to get into business and start doing things you really need people who know what they’re doing to be able to guide you because YouTube will tell you They’ll tell you what they’ll tell you when they’ll tell you where but they won’t tell you how They save all that for the paid programs and so you can get to a certain degree But a lot of the big gurus, you know, they’ll tell you

or I should say YouTube gurus, they’ll tell you, hey, let me show you how to do this with no money and let me show you how to do this with no experience and that’s all great. And you can, it’s not that you can’t, it’s just it makes it much more difficult. If you’ve got somebody guiding you along the way, I mean, that’s really to me is the fast track. You’re paying to play by going into a mentorship. If you really are serious and you wanna get involved, mentorship is the way to go. I mean, I’m still in a mentorship and I’ll never not be.

John Harcar (06:57.07)
Is it?

Yeah, and it’s, you can, we can all get there. It’s a matter of how fast do you want to get there and how much money do you want to spend to get there versus maybe making a investment to shorten that.

John B. Cullen (07:12.212)
Yeah, 100%.

John Harcar (07:14.018)
So with this coaching program, was it to flip houses? Was it to wholesale houses? What kind of coaching was it?

John B. Cullen (07:22.866)
So Advisors’ Council was mostly directed towards wholesaling. However, there was mentorship to help guide you with flipping and other forms of real estate investment. There was a lot of different people in the group, guys from different areas of the United States with different skill sets. And so with that, there was a pretty complete circle of people there at the table when we would go.

go to the meetings and we’d have the phone calls. So it was a really great group of guys that offered a lot of experience in all different facets of real estate, but mostly the majority of it was focused on wholesaling.

John Harcar (08:07.567)
And as you started wholesaling, as you started building this business, what to you were some of the struggles or what were some of the challenges, you know, when he got going, got up and running?

John B. Cullen (08:18.558)
Yeah, I think it’s just deal flow, man, you know, trying to figure out how do I reach people with me myself never doing a deal. How do I go into this with confidence and convince somebody to sign this contract?

And so I think that was probably the biggest challenge and the biggest fear factor for me was, you know, going there and saying to myself, okay, well, if I go and I talk to these people, you know, it’s just the imposter syndrome. like, I’m going here telling these people that I’m to do this deal for them and I’ve never done a deal before. So the imposter syndrome kicks in pretty hard at that moment. But I’ll never forget when I did my first deal, had…

such an adrenaline rush that it solidified to me that, man, you can really do this. And my first deal, yeah, proof of concept, absolutely. And when I went back to my mentor Lee Kearney and I said, hey man, I’ve got this deal. I want you to help me look at it and tell me if you think this is really a deal. So he looked it over and he said, yeah man, you got a banger here. He goes, how did you get this one? So I told him how I got it. And…

John Harcar (09:09.4)
Proof of concept.

John B. Cullen (09:32.57)
After everything was said and done and everything was closed, my first wholesale deal, I made like 68 grand in my first deal. yeah, so for me, right, so for me, I didn’t understand the significance of that. And after I brought that back to Lee and I told him what I did, he was like, how do you feel about that? And I’m like, you know, feels good.

John Harcar (09:41.214)
I made $2,500 bucks, man.

John B. Cullen (09:56.804)
I didn’t know because I didn’t understand that the average wholesale deal was somewhere around, you know, what, $17,000 or something. And yeah, so the more deals I did after that, I realized, I was like, wow, that was really good deal. need to find some more of those.

John Harcar (10:03.438)
Yeah.

John Harcar (10:12.142)
Exactly. So did you just put all that money right back into marketing, right back into your team? Yeah, good. Good for you.

John B. Cullen (10:15.543)
I I did that. Yeah, I paid off some bills and then I did a little bit of work to my own house that needed to get done. So I did both. But I learned very quickly that that money doesn’t last. You got to roll that back into more marketing and, and, you know, yeah, for sure. You can’t spend it. You got to roll it right back in.

John Harcar (10:24.589)
Okay.

John Harcar (10:29.698)
yeah. Yeah, it’s very, it’s no, it’s very much as you’re only as good as your last transaction, especially with wholesaling. So, so what does the team look like now? Like what markets are you in? What do you, what does that business look like?

John B. Cullen (10:36.808)
Yeah.

John B. Cullen (10:44.541)
Yeah, so I’m in the Florida market, primarily in the Tampa Bay area. I love to work in my own backyard. I’m a firm believer that if you’re working in your own backyard, you know the area that I mean, there’s truly enough deals in my own area to to go around for everybody. But I do work the whole state of Florida. If there’s a deal in Jacksonville or, anywhere, really, I’ll work the deal as long as it makes sense. I also work now just expanded recently into Ohio, and I think we’re going to expand into Virginia here pretty soon, too.

John Harcar (11:14.86)
Awesome. Okay. And what are you doing for your lead gen?

John B. Cullen III (11:19.005)
So I’ve got a couple of cold callers that we use that are VAs out of Egypt. And I’ve been through quite a few cold callers, quite a few VAs. It takes a little while to get some good ones. It’s just a numbers game, just like the marketing. You just got to go through it until you find the right ones that are doing the job that you want them to do.

John Harcar (11:41.954)
Are you doing any other type of channels like text or TV or radio?

John B. Cullen (11:48.032)
you

Yeah, a little bit of text and no TV, no radio. I get a lot of word of mouth. so social media works great for me. I’ve got a program where I offer people a minimum of $1,000 for any type of lead generation. So if they know a friend or family member who wants to sell, if I close that deal, I pay them at least a thousand bucks. And that works out pretty good. Yeah, I love paying people money and they love it, of course. So once they

John Harcar (12:13.218)
Yes.

John B. Cullen III (12:18.773)
get that checked and that makes them feel good they want to keep doing it so I’ve got a couple of people that have sent me multiple deals and it works out great I love writing them checks

John Harcar (12:27.758)
You know what, that’s how I got my biggest wholesale deal. It was $65 grand, I think it was. yeah, it was from a guy I didn’t want to sell. He said, hey, buy the neighbor’s house. I said, OK, if I do it, I’ll give you a grand. I walked up with $1,100 bills, and I said, here you go, man. This was a couple of years ago. He was pretty stoked. So yeah, I love that. So what?

John B. Cullen (12:41.631)
Mm-hmm.

John B. Cullen (12:45.407)
Yeah.

John Harcar (12:52.046)
Where do you see your business going? What are your goals? Are you looking to expand more, growth? What does that all look like for you?

John B. Cullen (12:59.475)
Yeah, definitely. I want to keep doing wholesaling and flipping because that’s primarily what I do. But with the market shifting where I’m at and we’re in a downward trajectory, it seems like the market is softening. And with that being said, I would like to now be into buy and hold properties. And so I’m currently looking to begin doing that very, very soon. I don’t believe that I do believe that you can work in wholesaling and flip

and continue to do that as long as you’re buying right. I don’t think that the deals will ever dry up. You just have to buy them right to make money. But at the same time, I really feel like it’s, you know…

For me personally, I don’t want to just continue to wholesale and flip. I want to start accumulating properties and accumulating wealth, especially if I can. I mean, there’s no reason not to if the market is telling me that the prices are right and that I’m able to get these leads at like below wholesale prices. Why would you not keep some of those, you know?

John Harcar (14:05.038)
Yeah, now that same kind of sentiment at our last Mastermind, a lot of guys were talking about, now it’s trying to hold stuff. And we have a program where you get 100 % funding. So it’s like these guys are just jumping on to take advantage of it. Because like you just said, the market is saying, hey, this might be a better time to buy it and hold it. So what are you seeing trends-wise? Are you seeing any trends in wholesaling or anything like that now outside of the buy and hold type of thing?

John B. Cullen III (14:35.262)
Yeah, I’m seeing that the prices that flippers are paying are lowering. so again, we have to buy lower. the profit is made in the purchase. It’s not made in the sale. And so you absolutely have to buy these deals right. And if you do, you will make money. But I have a dispo process that was taught to me, and it works really

well for me and so my typical what you would consider wholesale fees are probably higher than what the average is and I think it’s because my target buyers are landlords. I don’t really target flippers. I want to target somebody who either A wants to buy the property and fix it up and live in it or B who wants to buy the property fix it up and rent it because those are the people that are going to pay me the highest money.

John Harcar (15:33.742)
Sure, sure, they’re basing it off of cash flow, not immediate return. How are you finding these landlord buyers versus Flipper buyers?

John B. Cullen (15:37.437)
Absolutely.

John B. Cullen (15:42.816)
So every single property that I get under contract, well I shouldn’t say every single one, the majority of them, I list them on the MLS and if you list them on the MLS you have just literally marketed to everybody. You don’t have to call people and tell them hey I got this deal and you know do you want to look at it and send to buyers and all that. I know mean I know wholesalers do there’s nothing wrong with that I just don’t.

I would rather list it and have the buyers come to me instead of me chasing them down. I’m just, I’m not about chasing people. list.

John Harcar (16:17.058)
So are you basically doing an innovation?

John B. Cullen (16:20.039)
I you could call it that. sure. sometimes, like I’ll give you an example. I’ve got a property now that I’m actually going to be closing on and buying it because the seller had a bad experience with not only one, but

Two wholesalers and there was two memos on this property and I had to call them and negotiate them down and so the the reason I’m buying this one is because I already know that the Seller has this bad experience with wholesalers, so I don’t want to give her that same business model So I’m literally just gonna buy it out right hire somebody to do a trash out clean it all out There’s there’s a bunch of you know garbage in there So I’m gonna get them to clean it all out and then I’m literally just gonna list it on the MLS

Yeah, so I guess you could yeah, it’s like a hotel or I guess you could call it innovation However, you want a word it doesn’t matter to me. It’s just in the at end of the day It’s I don’t really care what you call it, man. Let’s just get it Let’s put it on the market and sell it and give me the money Yeah, people got all these these names for it, you know, I just say it’s buying and selling

John Harcar (17:06.35)
and it’s called a whole tail.

John Harcar (17:13.262)
Just get it, get it and sell it. Call it a box I sold, whatever you want to call it, who cares?

John Harcar (17:28.75)
Right. Let’s talk a little bit about, know, before we run out of time here, talk a little bit about our topic, which was personal growth, right? For me, it’s something that’s important. You know, it’s the affirmations, it’s the reading, it’s the reflection time, all these different things. But what does personal growth mean for you?

John B. Cullen (17:34.867)
Sure,

John B. Cullen (17:48.25)
Action. Massive, imperfect action,

Like you got to do something about it. cannot just read this stuff and, and affirmations and reading and doing all the things is great, but those are feel good things. If you really want to grow, you got to get out and you got to feel it. You got to feel the pain and you got to be able to go through the motions necessary in order to get to the next level. And the only way to do that is just taking action and getting over things like procrastination. used to be one of those people who would procrastinate so bad and

And know, what do they call it? Analysis paralysis. So yeah, I would say to myself, oh well I’m a researcher. I want to make sure everything is perfect and I want to make sure everything is right. And that is, I learned very quickly, is wrong. Doesn’t matter. Like go out and do it. That’s how you’re going to figure out if it’s right or not. By going out and doing it.

John Harcar (18:25.422)
paralysis paralysis yeah

John Harcar (18:44.014)
percent. You and I mentioned a mutual friend in Tom Kroll and his coaching and stuff. So do you have a coaching program that you offer to people to help them learn the business?

John B. Cullen (18:49.786)
Mm, yeah.

John B. Cullen (18:56.099)
I am working on that right now, however, it is not going to be for real estate. It is more or less going to be for mindset, personal growth, for business, for life. it’s not going to have, it’s not that you can apply it to real estate, and I’m sure there’ll be some real estate investors in there, but it’s not going to be geared towards real estate.

John Harcar (19:20.046)
Kind of more like a life coach type of situation.

John B. Cullen (19:22.377)
I hate that word man, I hate that word life coach. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So my main focus is gonna be men only. I just only wanna work with men that have…

John Harcar (19:24.738)
Well, I hate it too, but it’s just, mean, it’s like, cause I mean, there’s too much stuff within life to say I’m gonna coach life.

John B. Cullen III (19:42.139)
been in my shoes where I’ve been and and I you know like most people like I’m nobody special everybody has their share of problems but I have overcome some things that I feel like are valuable for other people for me to teach them and so it’s it has to do with things like

family life, men maybe going through a divorce, men maybe that have lost their job, men that have lost their way, that have lost their masculinity, so to speak, and men that are searching for answers like I was. And I just think that there’s a need for that right now. I know everybody has something that they need to deal with and something that they need to work out.

And again, I’m nobody special. I only have experience from the things that I have conquered and the things that I will conquer. And a huge part of that is mindset and understanding that you can do it. And so my job is to build confidence in people, show them how to do it, show them that they can do it, and give them permission to do it.

John Harcar (20:47.234)
love that. If folks that are listening on here want to talk to you about maybe doing deals in Tampa together or maybe talk about your coaching, how is the best way to get in touch with you?

John B. Cullen (20:58.611)
Well, if it’s real estate related, they can go to my website, which is, I’ll say it and I’ll spell it. It’s MrSonHomeBuyers.com and it’s spelled M-R-S-U-N HomeBuyers.com and my phone number is 727-308-8485.

John Harcar (21:21.772)
Awesome. Guys, I hope you took some good notes today. John, thank you so much for coming on here, sharing your knowledge. Reach out to him. We’ll put all your contact information in the show notes down below. And just thank you again, man. It was a very good conversation, and I enjoyed having you on here today.

John B. Cullen (21:27.327)
Yeah, you’re welcome.

John B. Cullen (21:39.679)
Awesome. Thank you so much, John. I appreciate you having me.

John Harcar (21:43.293)
Alright guys, we’ll see you on the next one. Cheers!