A solo wholesaler’s daily schedule is the entire business. Cisco Brown, operating out of Iowa, runs a one-person wholesaling operation that averages $10,000 per assignment in a market where other wholesalers take $2,000 to $5,000 — and he does it on a calendar sliced into fixed blocks, including 15-minute tasks.
His day: personal routine finished before 9am, email and callbacks until 9:30, Facebook group engagement until 11, a post timed for the lunch scroll, cold calling from 12:30, and networking from 2 to 3. About 100 cold calls a day when he’s running his own marketing. Roughly $120,000 in revenue last year, one to two deals a month.
Below is the actual block-by-block schedule, how the Facebook channel works, why he holds a fee minimum, and the honest ceiling he hit — he rates his own operations a 6, and says if he stepped away for 30 days everything would take a hit.
Key takeaways
- Block the calendar down to 15-minute tasks, not just two-hour chunks — Cisco calls it "time slicing," and the rule is one task, full presence, nothing else during that slot.
- Earn top-contributor status in local Facebook groups with engagement-bait posts before you post lead-bait; posts from top contributors sit at the top of the feed.
- Set an assignment fee minimum and keep it. Cisco’s $10,000 average sits in a market where local wholesalers take $2,000 to $5,000, and he believes a $20,000 minimum would produce $15K–$18K averages.
- Teach buyers return on investment instead of cash flow and you can contract houses no other wholesaler will touch — one investor targets 12%, deals typically land at 8–10%.
- Maintain at least four cash buyers per area if you’re operating virtually, and dedicate three days a week to cold calling buyers, not just sellers.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Cisco Brown of Cisco Buys 365 on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Quentin Edmonds.
What a Solo Wholesaler’s Day Actually Looks Like
The workday starts at 9am because everything personal is already finished. Cisco wakes around 3:30 without an alarm, juices, hits the gym, reads a chapter, then sits for 38 minutes in a dark office with no electronics and observes his thoughts. By 9am he’s had a full day already.
From there the calendar takes over:
- 9:00–9:30 — email and callbacks to anyone owed a response.
- 9:30–11:00 — Facebook group engagement: joining groups, commenting, posting questions designed to pull replies.
- 11:00–12:00 — the actual lead-generation post, timed so it lands as people start scrolling on lunch break.
- 12:00–12:30 — lunch, 15 to 20 minutes.
- 12:30–1:00 — cold calling.
- 2:00–3:00 — networking: nurturing existing relationships and building new ones.
The distinction he draws matters more than the specific hours. Most people time block — a one-hour or two-hour chunk for a category of work. Cisco time slices. A 15-minute task goes on the schedule as its own entry, and for those 15 minutes that is the only thing happening.
He built this by applying the same logic he used on his morning routine. If he’s at the gym, he works out — no email, no texts, no scrolling. If he’s reading, he reads. He carried the presence rule straight into the business, and the discipline of it is what made the schedule stick long enough to become a habit rather than a to-do list he ignores.
The honest part: he describes himself as never off. That’s a feature of being one person, not a badge.
Facebook Groups as a Lead Channel, Not a Billboard
Posting “I buy houses” in a local Facebook group gets you buried. Cisco’s approach is to earn visibility first, which he calls seasoning the group.
During the 9:30 to 11 block he joins local groups and posts questions engineered to generate replies — his example: “Where’s the best place I can go to get a beard cut and a boy’s haircut?” The ambiguity is deliberate. People comment to point out the contradiction, the thread fills up, and the algorithm marks him a top contributor. Once he holds that status, the post he actually cares about sits at the top of the group feed where everyone sees it.
He calls those later posts traps. The framing is hunting: you set the trap, then you wait.
He rates his marketing a 7 to 8 out of 10, and the reason it isn’t higher is quality, not quantity. Facebook produces a large volume of leads, but he has to filter realtors and tire-kickers out of the pile. His own comparison is that cold calling closes almost as well despite producing far fewer leads — so volume alone isn’t the metric.
What makes the channel defensible is that almost nobody runs it. Other wholesalers he talks to are all dialing. When he explains the Facebook process, the common response is that they don’t understand how it works. He has it written down step by step so anyone could execute it, which is also how he’d hand it to a VA later.
I time block, I time slice. The block means it’s two hours, one hour. I time slice — I don’t care if it’s a 15-minute task, it’s going on the schedule. And for 15 minutes, we’re going to do that one thing and we’re going to be present in that moment.
— Cisco Brown, Cisco Buys 365
Where the Leads Come From When You Stop Marketing
Cisco’s network is his most reliable lead source, and it’s the reason he can throttle his own marketing up and down without the business going dark. Other wholesalers and investors call him. Investors send him deals and ask him to be the one who talks to the seller, because sellers tell him the conversation felt consultative rather than like being sold.
When network flow slows, he turns his own marketing back on. That means roughly 100 cold calls a day, though the number flexes — three genuinely interested sellers in a session eats the rest of the hour.
The call list is built for free during errands. Dropping his son at school, he routes through a neighborhood and logs distressed properties. Same on grocery runs. By the end of the week he has a driving-for-dollars list, and that list becomes the following week’s cold calls. No separate time block required, no lead cost.
On the buy side he runs the same discipline in reverse. Three days a week he sets time aside to cold call buyers, not sellers. His rule operating virtually: at least four active buyers per area. That floor is what lets him contract in markets he isn’t physically standing in, because dispo is solved before acquisition.
Lead flow is still the thing that keeps him up at night. Organic generation means good weeks and slow weeks with no way to forecast which is coming — and Iowa winters add a seasonal dip he used to solve by shifting to warmer markets.
Holding a $10K Assignment Fee in a $2K–$5K Market
Local wholesalers in Cisco’s area average $2,000 to $5,000 per assignment. He averages $10,000. When they ask how, he gives them the whole answer in one sentence: he never lowered his minimum.
That’s it. There’s no sourcing trick underneath it. He set a floor and held it, so the deals that don’t clear the floor don’t get done and the ones that do pay properly. He still takes the occasional $6,000, $7,000 or $8,000 deal, but the minimum anchors the average.
His own read on the next step is worth sitting with: if he raised the minimum to $20,000, he’d probably average $15,000 to $18,000. The fee you decide to accept sets the fee you get, and most wholesalers negotiate against themselves before the buyer ever does.
Context on volume, because $10,000 a deal only matters alongside deal count. He’s done about seven deals this year while splitting his time into other ventures — roughly one to two a month. Revenue was $120,000 last year with heavy JV activity, and he projects around $110,000 this year after taking December off.
Those are small-operator numbers from a small-operator schedule, and he’s candid about that. The point isn’t the top line. It’s that a solo wholesaler running one or two deals a month cannot afford $3,000 assignments, because there’s no volume to make them add up. The fee minimum is what makes a low-volume, one-person business viable at all.
Selling Houses in Neighborhoods Buyers Avoid
There’s a road in Cisco’s market. North of it, a fixed-up house is worth about $120,000. South of it, the same house is $90,000 to $100,000. Most investors won’t touch the south side.
His read is that they’re running the wrong number. Everyone looks at cash flow — money now — and the south-side deals don’t produce enough of it to clear the mental bar. Nobody’s calculating return on investment. One investor he works with targets 12%; the deals they actually close typically land at 8, 9, or 10%.
So when he markets a south-side property and a buyer says the spread isn’t enough, he doesn’t argue price. He sends the full ROI breakdown: buy at this number, these are the inputs, here’s your return. They buy it.
Two things happen as a result. First, his buyer pool widens, because every investor he teaches becomes a buyer for a category of property they previously refused. Second — and this is the real edge — he can now contract houses no other wholesaler wants and nobody else is competing for. His line when a buyer comes back asking for another one: there are hundreds of them downtown.
He uses a BiggerPockets analysis tool for the ROI math, borrowed from the investor who taught him the approach. The teaching is also what’s pulling him from wholesaler toward consultant, and he frames it as rebuilding neglected neighborhoods rather than extracting from them.
The Ceiling of Doing It All Yourself
Cisco rates his operations a 6 out of 10 and his team strength a 7. Both ratings come with the same explanation: he’s one person. The schedule is tight, the processes are documented, but there’s a hard limit on throughput that no amount of discipline moves.
Asked what breaks if he leaves for 30 days, his answer is everything. Not collapse — he’s stopped before and come back to make $30,000 in under a month — but no income during the gap and no follow-up beyond whatever the CRM does on its own, which isn’t much engagement. His tooling is deliberately thin: Deal Machine for lists, Deal Boss as CRM and dialer. He doesn’t think you need more than that.
The first hire is a VA, plus a transaction coordinator he wants in-house rather than outsourced, so he can spend his own hours on acquisitions and network growth. His caution to anyone at the same stage: coaches told him to hire early and he didn’t, because hiring because someone told you to, while you’re still figuring the business out, isn’t a smart move.
The decision he’d take back is partnering early. Less than a year into the business he brought people in and went into debt over it. His lesson: nobody cares about your business the way you do, and some partners walk away even with skin in the game.
The one function he won’t hand over is systems and processes. Acquisitions, yes. Dispo, yes. But changing how the machine runs is control of the business, and that stays with him.
Frequently asked questions
How many cold calls a day does a one-person wholesaling operation need to make?
Around 100 a day is the benchmark Cisco Brown works to when he’s running his own marketing. That number flexes — if three sellers on the list turn out to be genuinely motivated, the conversations consume the rest of the block and the dial count drops.
The more useful point is that he doesn’t dial every day. Cold calling occupies a specific window, roughly 12:30 to 1:00, against a list built during the previous week’s school runs and errands.
Is a $10,000 assignment fee realistic in a small Midwest market?
Yes. Cisco averages $10,000 per assignment in an Iowa market where other local wholesalers report averages of $2,000 to $5,000. The difference isn’t lead source or market size — it’s that he set a minimum fee and never lowered it.
He also believes the ceiling is higher than he’s testing. By his own estimate, raising the minimum to $20,000 would likely produce averages in the $15,000 to $18,000 range.
How do you convince cash buyers to purchase in lower-value neighborhoods?
Show them return on investment instead of cash flow. Most investors reject lower-value areas because monthly cash flow looks thin, without running the full return calculation on the capital deployed.
Cisco sends buyers a complete ROI breakdown when they say a deal isn’t enough. One investor he works with targets 12%; the deals they close usually land between 8 and 10%. Once a buyer sees the math work, they come back asking for more of the same.
What should a solo wholesaler hire first — a VA or a transaction coordinator?
Cisco’s plan is a VA first, with a transaction coordinator brought in-house rather than outsourced. The logic is that a VA frees his hours for acquisitions and network building, which are the two activities that directly generate deals.
His caveat matters as much as the order: don’t hire because a coach told you to while you’re still working out how the business runs. Document the processes first so a new hire can actually follow them.
How many cash buyers should you keep per market area?
At least four per area is Cisco’s standing rule, and he operates entirely virtually. Below that threshold, a contract in an unfamiliar market becomes a gamble on dispo.
He protects the number by dedicating three days a week to cold calling buyers — treating buyer acquisition as its own recurring block rather than something he scrambles at once a property is under contract.
The bottom line
If you’re running the business alone, start with the fee minimum and the calendar — set a floor you won’t go below, then put every task on the schedule including the 15-minute ones, and work them one at a time. Those two decisions are what let a one-to-two-deal-a-month operation clear six figures without a team.
