From Medical Coder to Real Estate Coach: 5 Secrets to Success

Christian (00:01.798)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today we have a special guest here, Sabrina. Sabrina, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you on. You and I were just speaking offline before we started recording. So super excited to speak with you today about your experience and what you have going on in all your businesses right now. So why don’t you just introduce yourself to the audience, your background, and just how you got here.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (00:24.814)
Okay, thank you. My name’s Sabrina, like Christian said. I have been doing real estate for almost five years now. I’m originally a Thatch Wynn student, so I started off trying to do burrs and I ended up getting into flips. I worked myself out of my nine to five. In the middle of all of that, I got divorced and became a single mom and now I’ve built kind of like a pretty decent size.

real estate, I guess, journey scenario. I still wholesale, I still flip. I have one out of state rental and now I teach people how to do all of those things as well.

Christian (01:07.442)
Very cool, very cool. So what inspired you to get into real estate?

Christian (01:19.59)
Can you still hear me?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (01:21.282)
No, you know, you broke out. I heard very cool and then nothing else.

Christian (01:26.178)
I’m not sure what happened there, but we’ll just start from the top again. So what inspired you to get into real estate, Sabrina?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (01:32.27)
I was so, believe it or not, it was kind of COVID. I was still married at the time. I was the financial head of household. My husband was a stay at home dad. And when COVID hit, I was a medical coder and I lost all my hours. And I had been kind of thinking about real estate here and there for years before then and just never did it. Cause I worked so much at my medical coding job. When COVID hit and I had all that time, I was like, okay, I’m going to do it now.

That’s what got me to get into Thatch’s mentorship. And then nine months later, I got my first flip and that first flip I made $80,000. So that kind of started the journey. It basically made my entire year’s salary on one house. And I was like, yeah, let’s, I’m going to keep doing this. Now how fast can I get myself out of my nine to five? My son at that time was also nine months old. So it’s like,

Christian (02:21.362)
Yeah.

Christian (02:27.57)
Mm-hmm.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (02:31.0)
how do I get myself out of working 10 to 12 hour days so I could spend more time with him and make the same amount of money and that’s kind of how the fire started, I should say.

Christian (02:42.79)
No, that’s awesome. Yeah, I definitely am a firm believer that those things kinda needed to happen to propel you to where you are now, right? So everything happens for you, not to you. It’s the old saying, right? So that’s awesome. So why don’t you catch us up to speed on like, what is your current business models look like today? mean, I know you’re doing some flipping and wholesaling and things like that, but why don’t you just walk us through, what does your day to day look like? And then how does your operation just look like as a whole?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (02:56.131)
Right.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (03:10.68)
So I worked myself out of my nine to five on those flips that I did in Washington and I just recently moved back to Arizona. So I’m starting kind of ground up as far as prospecting goes. I have five VAs right now that I’m training and that are on my team. So we kind of JV deals is they get the lead, I nurture and close and then we split the assignment fees 50 50 or depending on what it is, cause I’m also an agent.

Or if I end up flipping it, I will partner with them on it things of that nature. So it’s kind of a well-rounded machine I also just started hard money lending also, so I know that side of the game so I would say my day-to-day basically includes a lot of Calling for loans nurturing my VA’s nurturing the leads that I have I do social media as well. I do webinars. So it’s a

crazy day on top of I homeschool my son. So that usually happens first and then all the real estate stuff comes after. yeah.

Christian (04:10.033)
wow.

Christian (04:15.312)
Yeah, sounds like you got a lot of stuff going on. So why don’t you share maybe some of your biggest lessons you’ve learned from maybe, you know, flipping and wholesaling properties that you’ve had in your experience.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (04:25.428)
I have learned a lot of lessons. My most recent one, I lost $70,000 on a project that I did. I did, yeah, it’s rough. So that was probably my biggest lesson. That house was on a septic tank. I did not update the septic tank when I had the chance to, and then I had to sell it because then I was moving back to Arizona. It’s kind of like a series of events that happened.

My ARV went from 750 and I ended up selling it at 560. So that house was my biggest lesson. I’ve learned other small lessons like don’t emotionally buy, I’ve made that mistake. Don’t buy a house without a sewer scope because I did that before also and then the sewer was bad and I had to pay 16 grand to have it fixed while I was in contract with my buyer.

Don’t let off on your prospecting. I’ve learned that lesson also. If you stop cold calling, if you stop having people doing outbound outreach, your business stops. So that one I’ve learned also. Lots of, lots of, lots of lessons. Just as many wins, but the lessons seem to sting a little bit more. You know what I’m saying?

Christian (05:44.154)
No, know what you’re saying. Yeah, definitely, yeah. Wow, that sounds like, definitely you took some hits there, but I mean, it’s great that you learned it now, right? Because now you’re able to help other people avoid those same mistakes, right? So it’s kind of good that you got caught up a little bit, right? And went through the fire, but you got through it and you’re here, right? So that’s just a testimony to showing that adversity, right? A lot of people, they’ll go through something very difficult like that, and they’ll just get a bad taste in their mouth and then they almost give up.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (05:45.646)
you

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (06:04.803)
Yep.

Christian (06:14.042)
right? And also heard something you mentioned as far as, you know, your marketing. A lot of times, you know, you have to keep, you know, the train rolling, right? Because if you stop your marketing, everything resets, it goes back to zero. You got to start all over again, especially if you’re doing, you know, inbound marketing, you know, Google PPC, things of that sort, you know, direct mail, things like that. I mean, it takes a little bit, you know, for the campaigns to start to, you know, build up.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (06:15.01)
Mm-hmm.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (06:28.386)
Yes it does.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (06:41.23)
Mm-hmm.

Christian (06:43.62)
and nurture, right? So I’m curious, Sabrina, what type of marketing have you done since you started and what type of marketing are you doing for your businesses right now?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (06:55.16)
So when I initially started, was cold calling after work. Like after my nine to five, I would cold call two to three hours a day. And then I would door knock every Saturday, because that’s the time I had to do it. That eventually graduated into mailers. I did postcards for a long time. And then I’ve done outbound text message, which I do not recommend to anybody. Don’t be text blasting people. I’ve done social media ads. I’ve done…

a landing page, but I never ran enough ad spend to it. So I can’t fully say yay or nay to that. PPCs, I just tried to do that, but you have to have like a business license and the Google and all that other stuff. So was like, forget that. And now I’m at the point where I’m training VAs. So I have five of them on a dialer. I upload the lists. We do role play calls once a week, and then I split any assignment fees or things I make with them. So that’s

where I am at on my prospecting. On the mailers, I’ve done postcards, I’ve done the fake check looking things, I’ve done the, we noticed you haven’t been here. Like I’ve done personalized letters. I feel like I’ve done like a little bit of all of it, so.

Christian (08:00.879)
Yeah.

Christian (08:10.118)
Yeah, yeah. So what would you say your favorite marketing channel is? Or is there not one? You you take advantage of everything.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (08:15.872)
My, hi, I hate text messaging. If you want a creative way for somebody to tell you multiple ways to leave this earth, text messaging would be your optimal solution. Yeah, mailers, I liked a lot because I would write my story in there saying like, I’m a mom, I’m building this legacy for my son. And a lot of times I would get calls back saying like, the only reason I’m calling you is because you put your personal

Christian (08:29.02)
That is true.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (08:45.802)
story on here and I aligned to it because of XYZ. But that’s the least amount of contact rate, right? I can send a thousand mailers out and I might get two calls. So as far as contact ratio, cold calling I feel like is the best. Obviously you can talk to a ton of people, but then it comes with the like F off, not right now, things of that nature.

Christian (09:10.866)
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. So I’m interested to know, you don’t have to say where you get your data from, but do you think it’s important that, you know, let’s say somebody is really wanting to explore cold calling, how important is getting really good data when you’re cold calling?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (09:32.172)
I think it’s very important. I don’t know as far as like quality data because there’s some skip tracers that charge you like five, seven, 10 cents a skip. Then you have things like Deal Machine where it’s included. Then you have PropStream and PropertyRadar, like all of those. I used one dialer that had terrible, like terrible data. I basically would spend three, four hours calling and never get an actual homeowner.

Christian (09:34.076)
Mm.

Christian (09:49.34)
Uh-huh.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (10:00.384)
So in those scenarios, like when you’re using the free data stuff, that’s kind of the only sucky part. So I would say it is important to get something qualified. I would say most skip traces, you get what, like six phone numbers and address, and usually it’s the first two that will actually take you somewhere. So it’s very important to get good data.

Christian (10:16.433)
That’s about right. Yep.

Christian (10:22.546)
Hmm.

Yeah, 100 % agree. I to transition more into your house flipping background as well. I’m interested to know what type of mistakes have you learned with flipping a house? Have you managed multiple properties at one time? How did that work for you? Were you ever flipping more than one house at a time?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (10:46.166)
No, and that’s kind of what opened the thing to wholesaling, which now, knowing what I know, I wish I had been doing multiples at the same time. I’ve always done the flipping on my own. I never had partners, and as I’ve met more people who are really big in flipping, doing like 10 projects a month, things of that nature, they all have money partners. They are, none of them are doing it on their own, and I was doing it on my own the entire time.

When I would do a flip, if I had another lead from my outbound stuff, that’s when I would wholesale it. So I wholesale in between the flipping. I enjoy flipping more than wholesaling. So that’s kind of how that balance came about. It was like, still wanna make money on this deal, but because I’m not partnering with people on the money side, I’m only stuck in this one project. So yeah, that’s more of what I’m gonna bring into my business now is…

Christian (11:13.074)
Mmm.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (11:40.67)
actively looking for money partners to flip projects with. So I don’t have to take them all down. I can leverage it more, do more properties at once and go from there.

Christian (11:51.11)
No, that’s great. That’s a great game plan. Thanks for sharing. That’s awesome. you know, when you learn flipping and wholesaling and things like that, you know, as you grew and as you scale, you you start putting more deals under contract and start making more transactions. You know, how would you say, you know, the importance of networking and mentorship is to getting to that point? Did you invest into, you know, getting different mentors, different coaching programs, things like that? You know, how did that look like for you throughout your journey?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (12:16.79)
Yeah, I would say it’s so important because there’s so much free information out there. You could sit for hours just listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos and things of that nature. But it’s like everybody has a little thing that they do differently. So then if you’re watching this person, then you watch this person, then you get confused. So to me, I paid one mentor. I did it exactly the way he told me how to do it, which was thatch win. And he’s what got me started on this whole thing.

Since then I’ve joined like Tarl Yarber’s group. I’ve gone to other, what would you call it? Like real estate conventions where they teach you how to do things, build systems, things of that nature. So I’ve taken little bits of everybody’s and kind of mashed together what I like about them. But I think it’s very important. You need a guide, you need a mentor, you need somebody to smack you on the hand when you’re looking at a terrible deal, cause you have deal fever. Like you need…

the mistakes of the mentor to kind of help you not make those same mistakes. Not that it’s gonna ensure 100 % success rate, but it will allow you to skip some big uh-ohs if you choose to mentor and coach and continue growing and doing all those things.

Christian (13:34.224)
No, 100%, because just like you said, mean, there’s an unlimited volt amount of information out there. And everybody out there is telling you how to go do it this way and then comparing it to this way and doing it that way. And it’s it’s information overload, right? So it’s important just to kind of just focus on one thing and focus on, you know, this person can get me from A to Z. They’ve made the mistakes. They’ve had the experience. You know, you can kind of trim through the fat, if you will, not have to spend as much time trying to find all this stuff on your own.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (13:46.168)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Christian (14:04.06)
you’re gonna make a lot of mistakes too, right? Because you’re not gonna get that hand-on-hand connection that you need when working with somebody on more of a one-on-one or maybe like a group setting type of basis. So that’s awesome. I’m interested, right? Because you and I were talking offline and I know you help people in this business, for those that don’t know. So why don’t you kind of explain Sabrina, what does your program look like? How do you help other people achieve the success that you have in real estate?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (14:35.384)
So I have a school account, which is basically group coaching. I’ve created, I want to say it’s 10 hours of recorded podcasts, but not podcasts, but very similar to this, like me teaching you A through Z, how to find a deal, what determines a good deal, how to talk to contractors, the GCs, how to estimate rehab budgets, how to get it under contract in the first place. Then once your project is complete, like how to find a good agent.

what your listing should look like, how you should price this thing. So it goes through the entirety, everything that I do on my own projects, it goes through all of it. Like I did not miss or hide or do anything, it’s all there. And then I also have mini course on wholesaling because that’s also a big part of my business is cause I do that while in midst of flips. And then I am working on an out of state investor.

Christian (15:17.586)
Yeah.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (15:33.014)
rental course because a lot of people live in these really expensive markets like you know Seattle or the Bay Area or SoCal or New York and they can’t exactly start their rental or real estate journey in their backyard So it’s going to go through that as well The coaching itself has all those videos plus three calls a week with me. So we have a roleplay call

Christian (15:49.073)
Mm.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (16:01.772)
We have an accountability call. So depending on where you are in life, like I have some people who are focusing on flipping, some people who are focusing on wholesales. I have agents in there also. I have people who make a lot of money, like dentist doctors, and they need to know where to park this money, things like that. And then on Friday, we have a Q and A call. So like for my people who are prospecting or my people who are in the middle of a project and they need advice, we go through all of that on the Q and A call on Friday.

Christian (16:32.508)
That’s great, that’s super cool. I heard you say accountability. So when you’re going through the accountability calls, are you kind of just giving more accountability on like, you know, where are they at, you know, making sure they’re on track? Are you diving into maybe, you know, mindset, personal development? What does that look like as far as the accountability?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (16:50.776)
I would say all of those, we do it in a group setting. And I know where each one of my coaching clients is at in life and things. So I stress that they have a self-care routine of some sort because we can all get, oops, we can all get like caught up in this real estate thing and lose our self-care. So we have self-care. I make sure if they have some sort of like…

Nutrition goals like one of my clients he’s trying to gain weight. So he’s like I need to eat 3,500 calories That’s one of his accountability things if they’re prospecting like Mailers like how many mailers are you gonna do this week? How many calls are you gonna make if you’re not doing that? Let’s say you’re a busy nine to five person. How many houses are you evaluating? How many wholesaler lists are you on things of that nature? So it is very much like a well-rounded health

Christian (17:21.01)
and y’all.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (17:43.904)
real estate, also like life things. Like if one of my clients has a, he’s a single dad. So it’s like when it was his daughter’s birthday, okay? Like what are you gonna do for your daughter’s birthday? When is that happening? How are you gonna move your other stuff around so that you can get that stuff done on and also be present for your daughter, things like that.

Christian (18:04.046)
I love that. Yeah, I like how you have the personal touch to it. I think that’s important, right? There’s so much out there to where it’s make money, make money, make money, grind 16, 18 hours a day. it’s like long-term, it’s just not sustainable. You have to actually, like you said, take care of yourself because you’re not going to take any of this when you go, right? Let’s be real. You really want to build this type of business or any business for what?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (18:17.91)
No.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (18:25.016)
Right.

Christian (18:30.566)
to get more time, to get more freedom, spend that time with people that you actually care and you love, right? So I love how you have that personal touch to your coaching. That’s awesome. Well, cool, Sabrina. So where do people need to go? Where can people reach you to find you and work with you?

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (18:37.208)
Mm-hmm.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (18:43.374)
Thanks.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (18:49.506)
at maples and vests on Instagram is the easiest way you can DM me there. If you wanted to check out my school coaching course, it’s maples academy. I have Tik Tok and Facebook and all the other things, but I, it’s easiest to reach me on Instagram. then we can go from there.

Christian (19:10.94)
Cool, awesome, well we’ll make sure we drop those in the description on our YouTube so people can find you. But thanks so much for joining, Sabrina. I hope the audience got a lot of value from this. Hope everyone did, and I definitely did, and it was great speaking with you.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (19:16.738)
Thanks.

Sabrina Maples @maplesinvests (19:24.834)
Thank you, thanks for having me.

Christian (19:26.554)
No, of course, of course. Well guys, hope you enjoyed today’s episode. As always, my friends, and as always, we will see you on the next episode. You take care.