Wholesaling Secrets: 5 Key Strategies to Overcome Financial Struggles

John Harcar (00:01.093)
Alright. Hey, guys. Welcome back to our show. We’re here today with Eric Richards, and what we’re going to talk about is building businesses with zero money out of your pocket. Remember, guys, here at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, really all real estate entrepreneurs, 2 5X your business, and it allows them to build the businesses they want to build and live the life they’ve dreamed of. Eric, welcome to our show,

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (00:26.806)
Appreciate you having me, John.

John Harcar (00:28.174)
Yeah, yeah, I see you’re you’re in sub two as well. And I’m super ancient or interested in talking about the building of business or building businesses thing, because I think that’s been a kind of a I don’t want to call it a trend or maybe something that people have been getting into and buying businesses and whatnot. Before we get into all that, we jump into the weeds, kind of tell our audience about you, you know, where you came from, your background, how you got into real estate and how you got here.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (00:52.584)
Absolutely. My background is construction.

I was in the insulators union for 17 years before I started into real estate. I actually got into real estate with no experience at all. I’d never done my even a deal for myself. mean the last seven eight years that I was in the union I was a general foreman or a superintendent on every job I was on. I was doing hundred million dollar plants and projects and I was you know the last project I was on was a 15 billion dollar plant that was built. I had

503 people that worked underneath of me in that plant. You know what mean? And I made really good money. Yeah, it’s not bad, but the drawback was that I had to travel all the time. So you go to where the plant is, they don’t build the plant in your backyard. So if you want to have any sort of a life, if you want to do anything other than work seven days a week, 16 hours a day,

John Harcar (01:30.434)
Man, yeah, sounds like a pretty good position.

John Harcar (01:40.088)
you

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (01:51.414)
It’s just not for you. And I did it for 17 years and it was very promising. I learned a lot about life and traveling and seeing things that I’d never dreamed I would ever see. But eventually you’re getting a little bit older and I got newly married and she had a couple of kids from a previous marriage that much like sub two, I took over the payments of, you know, and I turned my kids to rich.

John Harcar (02:02.061)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (02:16.814)
Except to your kids,

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (02:21.244)
So I finished that $15 billion plan or whatever it was and

They, the company I worked for asked me to go to Minnesota and run a refinery job for 18 months. They were rebuilding. I said, I haven’t seen my family in two years, like every other weekend for like four or five hours, maybe let me take 30 days off. I’ll take them on vacation. I’ll actually let my wife know who her husband is again. And then I’ll go and run your plant. big deal. So we went to Myrtle beach, South Carolina and spent a week. The last week we were down there. We were at an Airbnb on the

John Harcar (02:33.24)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (02:38.594)
Man.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (02:56.888)
Beach, sitting on the back porch enjoying our last night at the beach and the youngest kid, he’s got up on my lap and he was probably four at the time and he said, you know, when we get home, are you going to go back out on the road again? And I said, yeah, buddy, we just moved to a new area of closer to my wife’s parents. Her dad was having health issues and I said, you know, we had just moved to the new town and you’re living with grandma and grandpa right now, but I’ve been trying to find us a new house so you can have your own bedroom again.

We can have the house that she wants again and we can get back to being us again and everything like that. And he just started crying and he said, I wish you could just stay home because I miss you. And that was it, I was done. Like absolutely just ripped my heart out because I.

John Harcar (03:37.299)
man.

Yeah, I don’t care how tough of a dude you are, that’ll eat you alive.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (03:45.786)
murder and I at that point I realized that you know I thought I was working these hours and making all this money and benefiting my family and at that moment I realized it was a detriment I was hurting my family that I could make it I can make all the money in the world and all he wants is me to be there so that was it

John Harcar (04:05.186)
You just want daddy time.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (04:06.752)
That’s it. I didn’t sleep at all that night. The next day we were driving back, got halfway home and I just looked at my wife and said, I’m not going on the road again. And she’s like, what are you talking about? And I said, I’m done. I’m going to be home. I’m not going on the road. said, I told my boss that give me 30 days off and I would run that plan. So I’ve got 30 days to find something that’ll supplement my income. So I don’t have to go on the road again.

And she’s like, well, you make a lot of money. Like, you’re not going to find something in 30 days to replace your income. And I said, probably not, but let’s get home. Let’s balance the budget. We don’t need me to make all of that money for us to be able to get by. We’re very conservative people. We don’t buy flashy new stuff. don’t wear the latest Yeezys or whatever it is. Like we’re just very conservative people. Right. So I said, let’s get home. We’ll balance the budget between what you make as W-2 and what we would need for us to be

John Harcar (04:49.493)
Mm-hmm, sure.

John Harcar (04:54.947)
Right.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (05:01.812)
comfortable. Like I’ll find out what that number is and I just have to make that to get started. And then after that I can build from there. But at least if I make that I can be home and we’re good. And it turned out that that number was $43,000. And which is not, I mean it’s it’s barely you know middle of the road income and national averages. It’s you know you know.

John Harcar (05:23.79)
Right, But that’s just bare bones. That’s, you know, keep the lights on, keep the food, you know, kids fed, cars running.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (05:30.166)
I think keep everything as it was and then I think we were putting like 5 % in the bank as a savings if I made 43 grand. And like that’s really nothing but just to get started that’s enough for us to get running home. So that’s what I did. So I got back and I realized that number was really miniscule and I had a friend.

John Harcar (05:44.952)
Sure.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (05:54.664)
recommend that their nephew got into wholesaling real estate and I should look at wholesaling and I started looking into it and they’re like, know with your work ethic, with your drive, like he’s a loser that never graduated high school and he’s making $10,000 a month. Like the way that you operate, the way your mind works and the way that you go after things, like you could be a millionaire at wholesaling.

John Harcar (06:17.688)
Right? Right?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (06:19.198)
And so I looked into it and I was actually looking at Jamil Domjie’s. I wasn’t just going to be a wholesaler. was, yeah, I wanted to get into astro flipping. I wanted to do a Keighley franchise and I wanted to be my own boss and run it and build it up. Like he said, have drive that’s probably second to none.

John Harcar (06:24.695)
Astro Flippin’.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (06:36.38)
So I got on of course YouTube University. I was watching all the Jamil free content that I could get. And because him and Pace had the triple digit flip show on A &E and it was real popular at the time. I don’t even know if they still have it but at the time it was…

John Harcar (06:50.734)
I don’t think so.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (06:54.728)
Every time I watched a Jamil video, the algorithm would throw a pace video in. So I would watch 12 Jamil, one a pace. And then the next day I’d watch eight Jamil and four a pace. And then I’d watch four Jamil and eight a pace until finally I was like one Jamil when I would wake up in the morning. And the rest of the day I was watching pace morning videos. And I just bought into the idea of using other people’s money, you know, raising private capital, building real estate for yourself, having your own rentals, having your own property.

having your own equity and building a lifestyle. You’re building an empire to pass down to your kids as opposed to wholesale, you’re just chasing the next deal. And that really resonated with me. So that’s how I got started.

Talked to one of Pace’s onboarding agents and God bless him. That kid earned every penny he got for commission for signing me on because I got to day 28 before I was supposed to go run that refinery job. And I was telling my wife, said, hey, I got this figured out. I know what I’m going to do. And she’s like, what are you going to do? I said, I’m going to jump into real estate. And she’s like, what do you mean jump into real estate? And I said, I’m going to be an investor. And she’s like, you’ve never done a real estate deal in your life. you and Pace.

John Harcar (07:39.534)
Mm.

John Harcar (07:45.742)
There you go.

John Harcar (08:07.154)
I could just, I’m sorry, I could just picture her going like, wait, what are you talking about?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (08:09.672)
yeah.

And my wife at the time was a mortgage loan officer that works for a very prominent bank. Right. So she sees loans all the time. She deals with real estate transactions all the time. Like she’s in the forefront of it. And, and she’s like, the only properties you’ve ever owned, you paid cash for, and you had a, like a note on a napkin that you just walked into the courthouse. Like that’s the only transaction you’ve ever done. Like you’ve never seen a purchase contract. You’ve never been in negotiations. You don’t know any of this stuff. She’s like, and you’re going to go.

against other investors with 30 plus years of experience. At the time it was coming out, was 2022, it was May of 22. So you’re coming out of the COVID bubble, which is probably the most competitive time in real estate. And she’s like, you have all of this stacked against you.

And you don’t even know how to get started. Like, how are you going to do this? And I said, well, I found this mentorship that basically teaches me how to do all this creative financing, raise private capital, build a business. They have all the contracts and everything that I would need to get started. All I need to do is jump in, do the online schooling, and then apply what I learned to start building my business. And she’s like, where did you find this mentorship? I said, on YouTube. And she’s like, well, how much does it cost? I said, I think it’s $10,000. And she’s like, so let

me get this straight. You’re giving up a very well six-figure job.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (09:36.566)
you’re paying $10,000 to jump into a mentorship that teaches you to use other people’s money to buy your properties when you’ve never done the first real estate transaction and you want to pay $10,000 for us to do that. And I was like, yeah, pretty much. And she said, and you found all of this on YouTube. And I was like, yeah, pretty much. And she’s like, you have got to be out of your mind. So pretty much. So I say to this day,

John Harcar (09:59.534)
Pretty much. But it worked.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (10:03.582)
The greatest deal I ever negotiated in real estate was getting her to sign me up for this. Like I wore down, she got on the phone with that onboarding agent for an hour and a half and grilled it.

John Harcar (10:08.748)
That’s an awesome story,

John Harcar (10:14.67)
that’s why he earned all his commission because he got the wife on the phone with that. Yeah. She let him know.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (10:19.478)
I was moving my apartment. Yeah, was moving the apartment that I had when I finished that big plan. I was moving out of that apartment. I was loading the U-Haul while she was sitting in the living room of the apartment, just grilling this kid for an hour and half.

John Harcar (10:35.256)
Did you have that money saved up? Did you have to go, you know, you take five credit cards like they say to do? Everybody says to do?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (10:38.774)
Yeah, we had savings and everything built up because like I said, I had made all that money for two years. know what I mean? So we had all that money saved up and stuff like that. We paid it. I did do the installment. I didn’t pay it all upfront. So I did installments so I had more working capital to where if I needed to get started and pay for whatever I did. But ultimately that’s how I got started.

John Harcar (10:45.928)
Right, yeah.

John Harcar (11:06.894)
Okay, so you got the course, you watched all the videos and did all the training and stuff. What was your first step to go find a deal?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (11:13.045)
Yeah.

the next day, like the day I signed up, was waking up at seven in the morning, taking my kids to school. And then from that point on, I had the Kajabi videos playing in the car while I was door knocking. I would have them playing in the car while I was going to real estate agencies and meeting every agent, every broker, pitching them creative. You’ve had, you have bad deals like call me. I’m, I’ll make sure I can do that.

John Harcar (11:41.398)
Yeah, let’s get you paid somehow, then not get paid at all.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (11:44.606)
I would hit every wholesaler up in the East Coast, anybody that was in Ohio, hey, do you need help with your team? I was the most, they say take action. There is not a chance that you could take more action than I took.

John Harcar (11:53.379)
Mm-hmm.

It sounds like it. How did you have a… Maybe it’s just a personal thing, but you got all this knowledge. How did you gain up the confidence to go and just attack all these people? Because I know going and talking to the realtors would be kind of, for some people, a little bit daunting to convince them because realtors don’t like sub 2. Well, some do, some don’t.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (12:10.911)
It is.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (12:15.166)
No. Yeah. honestly, I, I, I seen it as I had no other choice. Like I gave up 17 year career. This was the only way I was feeding my family. Like if you, it’s, I don’t want to say it was desperation because financially like we were okay. Like we had savings and

John Harcar (12:27.224)
Yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (12:33.91)
stuff like that. But if I was going to make this work, like I needed to be getting income immediately from it because I knew getting started, was going to be small. Like I wasn’t going to make big money for the first year. Like if I made $500 a month, it was a successful month and getting into this, you know what I mean? So the only way I knew how to do it is get started immediately. Like I was in

John Harcar (12:40.462)
full bore.

John Harcar (12:47.628)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (12:52.216)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (12:59.444)
Looking back on it now, I probably spun my wheels doing things I shouldn’t have done more than I should have done. Like there were…

John Harcar (13:05.901)
Like what?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (13:08.148)
real estate agents firstly, like during that time, coming out of the COVID bubble, they were still getting listings that the day the listing went live, they were getting six offers, three of them above asking price. And it’s like biggest and best by noon, right? And I’m sitting in there wasting 45 minutes trying to explain to them how creative financing is the thing that’s gonna save their life. You know what I mean? Like.

John Harcar (13:21.614)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

John Harcar (13:31.982)
Now is a better time to go talk to him.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (13:34.022)
I have incredible relationships with agents now, but at the time, like they weren’t interested in me. And I didn’t know my audience because I didn’t even know what I was talking about. Like I literally.

John Harcar (13:37.431)
Yeah.

John Harcar (13:44.735)
Hahaha

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (13:47.126)
listening to what I heard on a Kajabi about what lease option was, and then I would go straight into the office and start pitching them. I can do lease options, you know what I mean? When you’re home on, hey, no clue, no gravity of what I was saying. I was saying, just give me a shot. let me see.

John Harcar (13:49.624)
Yeah.

John Harcar (13:55.818)
Yeah, right. You figure it out later. Yeah.

John Harcar (14:03.714)
Guys, take notes of this alone. I mean, this is the biggest thing if you take from this whole thing. Action. Get the information, put it into effect. How long did it take you to get your first deal?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (14:09.93)
That is.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (14:14.101)
Yeah.

I started, officially started, LLC started, was in sub two June 6th, 2022. So it’s not quite three years yet, coming up on my third year total. My first deal happened in October of 2026.

John Harcar (14:32.12)
So June, July, August, September. So five months. In those five months, I know there had to be some doubt. There had to be some, you know, some hard conversations with your wife. I mean, what are some of the things, because I think this is probably the second most important thing is when you take action, it’s one thing. Then you get beat up. What mindset, what tools, what things did you use to help keep you focused on the goal?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (14:35.572)
Five months.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (14:44.669)
every day.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (14:53.11)
Yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (15:00.662)
The thing that really, really helped me is I kept a log book. I kept almost like a business diary for those five months. Hey, Tuesday, this is what I did. Every hour. Like every hour I would do a checklist. I stopped at this realtor, I did this, I did this, I did this. Like the day that I didn’t have…

John Harcar (15:10.083)
Hmm.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (15:21.47)
Six items in there was a day that I wasn’t really trying and I myself kind of won’t be like, know You’re like if you’re supposed to be losing weight You’re supposed to be counting calories if you’re supposed to be making money you’re supposed to be taking account of what you’re doing that are money generating activities and And for that five months like I kept that in the car with me and every time I did something I would fall back to that and I would go back and look at it like days that I thought I wasn’t good enough because there are days you doubt yourself there man, like did I do it

John Harcar (15:25.198)
Hmm.

John Harcar (15:36.835)
Right.

John Harcar (15:48.909)
yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (15:51.224)
enough, did I do this right? Did I do whatever? I would go back to that and be like, well, yesterday I stopped at 13 places and was door knocking and went to this foreclosure auction and was talking to the auctioneer, went to this probate attorney and tried to build that relationship. Like, I don’t know what else I could have done better than that. So if that’s I’m doing on a bad day, how am going to do 1 % better today? And it just like drove me to keep driving.

John Harcar (16:09.08)
Yeah.

John Harcar (16:16.44)
Yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (16:17.376)
God bless my wife, she really didn’t hammer me like a lot of people would think. You would think that, after two months of not having a single income, watching our savings continue to dwindle and go down because driving seven days a week, 16 hours a day, the fuel alone was killing.

John Harcar (16:35.072)
Mmm, yeah, yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (16:38.12)
she never really hammered me. Like it got to the point to where I think in September we were putting our kids into school and.

John Harcar (16:40.6)
Good.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (16:48.95)
we had to go get, I think we had to go get clothes or something like that for them to start school. And all schools now like set a checklist of all of the supplies that were supposed to be, you know what I mean? And she got the checklist from both our kids’ and we looked in the bank and we had $763. That’s it. That’s all the money we had. Two weeks later,

John Harcar (16:57.715)
yeah, I get him.

John Harcar (17:10.776)
Man, panic button.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (17:14.805)
Two weeks after that our car payments were due for 635 of the $763 and she’s like I have to get these like Stuff for the kids and then we have our car payments and we don’t have enough money But and that’s the first time the only time probably that she looked at me and said

When’s enough enough? When do you go back? Because it’s one thing to be supportive. It’s another thing to where I’m signing on for you to be destructive for our family. So when’s enough? It was, I probably, it’s the only time that I’ve been with her that I ever felt like I failed.

John Harcar (17:39.789)
Mmm.

John Harcar (17:47.948)
Right, right. That’s a difficult conversation, man.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (17:59.816)
So it was rough. It was a very rough evening, very rough day, very rough time. You know what mean?

John Harcar (18:05.868)
And when was that? When was that in correlation to when you finally got that first deal? Like how it was the time frame between it? Okay. So not maybe within a month. Nice.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (18:09.59)
middle of September probably, middle of September. Yep. Middle of September and then I think the first week of October I finally got paid for a deal. Yep. $2500. Yep. I JV’d on a wholesale it was $5,000. I got 25 of it and

John Harcar (18:21.912)
Proof of concept, yes. How much did you make on that first deal? 2,500 bucks. That’s the same as much I made on my very first one, it’s 2,500 bucks.

John Harcar (18:36.204)
You got the bug though.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (18:37.462)
I did. I said, I can do this. And that 25 basically just covered what we needed to cover for the month. Like that barely got us by the month of October. But at the end of October, I got another deal. And the second or the second week of November, I got another deal. And then the third week.

John Harcar (18:58.57)
All your work up until that point paid off.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (19:01.3)
Yeah, absolutely. was getting, by that point, the market started to shift where people weren’t getting the deals they were getting. Things were overpriced and inflated. A lot of these real estate agents that didn’t give me the time of day in the summertime started reaching out to me because stereotypically, when you get closer to Christmas time, like the agents start drying up. People aren’t necessarily buying. And that’s when they started calling me and say, Hey, you know, what kind of creative thing can you do for this? I started picking up doors. We started getting some rental income. We started to get some of this.

John Harcar (19:10.317)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (19:31.234)
and just kind of started building and going to where, hey, we may just be able to make something out of this.

John Harcar (19:37.132)
I love that. Okay, so fast forward to today. What does it look like? What does your business look like? What kind of volume are you doing now? How happy is your wife?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (19:40.694)
to do that.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (19:44.726)
My wife is… I don’t know how happy she is. She’s overwhelmed.

John Harcar (19:52.854)
Is she helping you with the business? Nice.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (19:54.422)
She is involved. She, um, she still has a W-2 that she’s doing because she is a very conservative person and she’s terrified of giving up something that she’s worked for years in and jumping over and just being self-sufficient. You know what I mean? And I can’t falter for that, but, I don’t think it’s much longer before I’m just going to say, you’re done. Like we, you’re going to make the business way more money by being in it than being a part-time, part-time

John Harcar (20:10.104)
Yeah, rightfully so.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (20:24.406)
this book.

John Harcar (20:25.126)
Yeah, I mean that is a real thing, right? It’s like, know, once she might be afraid, but just think how more effective the business could be when she’s dedicating full-time into that. So that’s huge. So what does your volume look like today? What does your team look like?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (20:38.652)
So we have 73 rentals now, full-time hard rentals. I think we’re bringing in close to $45,000 a month just in rental income. We have two full-time crews that work with us that we do two to three flips a month now with.

John Harcar (20:43.628)
Whoa!

John Harcar (20:49.358)
Wow.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (21:00.25)
our bare minimum, like our basic, like if we don’t net after we take private money and everybody back, if we don’t net 25,000 a deal, it’s not a deal for us. Like we won’t do the deal because of our threats. So we think…

John Harcar (21:12.044)
Awesome. So now just so our folks know, you’re net 25, meaning after your rehab costs, after your fees with your private money, all that stuff.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (21:21.62)
Yeah, so purchase price is paid off.

Our private lender has paid off closing costs, commissions, holding costs, everything that we have spent to get to the closing table, to sell it to an in-buyer. All expenses gone if I don’t net $25,000. That’s not a deal. Yeah. So that’s our basic. That’s our bare minimum. That’s the basement of our foundation. Our average is 38. That’s what we have. That’s really good. Yeah.

John Harcar (21:38.646)
It’s not a deal.

John Harcar (21:50.228)
Nice. That’s really good.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (21:54.608)
So we’re going, we’re averaging two a month right now for that. I’m building a relationship right now to where we’re going to be doing it on new market that I hope in the second quarter of this year, I’m doubling that because I’m going to have two more crews in another market that I’m going to be able to flip two to three here and two to three there to where we can go hopefully average around five a month at that. is your market? Akron, Canton, Ohio.

John Harcar (22:15.862)
or what market.

wow.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (22:23.37)
I took it upon myself to further my education last year and went to another mentorship for a company that’s called Results Driven. They’re very prominent in Columbus, Ohio for wholesaling and doing fix and flips. They do, I think, 300 deals a year between wholesaling and flips. And they basically, if you do their six month mentorship course,

They give you a coach that holds you accountable. You’re doing everything. It’s a business in a box. They teach you exactly how they do things to be able to do that volume and you incorporate it and do it the same thing in your business. So I pay you to go through that mentorship and it has paid dividends for us to go through that course, having the coach having that affirmation like, Hey, if you do this, this, and this, we guarantee results. there’s no way it’s going to fail. Like all I need you to do is show me the way.

John Harcar (22:59.342)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (23:15.363)
Yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (23:20.128)
enough drive and ingenuity that we’re gonna get it. And since then I’ve built my own acquisitions team where we’ve started wholesaling. I have two acquisition specialists now just in the last from last Thursday to this day so seven days. They don’t work Saturday Sunday so we just say five working days. They’ve locked up 14 deals in five days.

John Harcar (23:44.77)
Whoa, that’s awesome.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (23:48.086)
Part of those are going to be flips for us, part of them are going to wholesale. When they got to 11, I started adding up that, you know, our rough average, if we paid private money and did everything and flipped the ones I thought we were going to flip and just did what our real estate agents are giving us on CMAs of what we should sell it for, our median average.

When they hit 11, I started averaging it was $298,000 in profit is what we should have pulled. They’ve done another three deals since then. So that number’s gone up.

John Harcar (24:15.31)
That’s incredible.

John Harcar (24:19.608)
Where you do new Legion or how you do new Legion?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (24:22.902)
I go through a company called REI Print Mail and we do check mailers. So they generate the list based off of the zip codes that we want them to do. I personally go through, scour, they give us a proof to go through and see what we like, what we don’t like. I fine tune the list based off of what they pull as far as data and get it fine tuned and then give them the green light to start doing the mailers and sending that out. Mailers are probably the most successful marketing for us. We also do PPL leads.

organic leads and then starting to do a lot of social media stuff now to get four to five different marketing channels that all kind of funnel back to us.

John Harcar (25:04.002)
What’s your closing percentage on your mailers? Or your spon- actually just response rate on your mailers.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (25:08.982)
Sponsor rate, so in Akron Canton it’s about one and a quarter which national average is 0.5 so one and a quarter is pretty good.

John Harcar (25:16.558)
This yeah, I’m about to say it’s it’s a lot higher than what everybody else is getting or a lot of other people getting

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (25:21.044)
Yeah, yeah. Here in our local area, it’s about four, four percent. So and like I said, with the flip returns and everything that we’re getting out of it.

John Harcar (25:25.718)
Hmm

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (25:33.114)
we’re not going in and doing full gut rehabs. have, we have the flip game refined and fine tuned because I’ve been in construction. Like I kind of worked with my general foreman and everything like that to build this thing up. Like we’re averaging three weeks in and out of a flip to where they could be working on one flip by the fourth week, they’re moving into the new one. So about every third month, we’re turning an extra flip over just because it hits our timelines that way. So.

John Harcar (26:01.966)
Sweet.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (26:03.028)
building. Yeah, it’s been crazy.

John Harcar (26:04.712)
Sounds like you got a you got a nice doubt plan. Well, because we’re running out of time here, what is some advice? What’s that come a main pearl or word of wisdom that you could tell our audience set if they’re getting into the real estate game, whether it’s flipping, wholesaling, whatever it might be.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (26:21.6)
top three things. Everybody says that every…

Real estate podcast you see your network is your net worth that is the truest statement that you will every year like the people that you talk to the people that you’re connecting with are the reason you will be successful bar none and It may not be because they’re gonna give you money or partner with you But they’ve experienced something that you have it that’s going to save you a month and if it saved you a month How much further you gonna be not having to waste that time? You know what I mean? Like it’s it’s insanity that I should have been network

John Harcar (26:31.65)
Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

John Harcar (26:48.663)
Heck yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (26:56.152)
working a lot sooner, should have been connecting with people a lot sooner, I should have been putting my name out there. The second thing I would say is raise capital. As much capital as you can possibly raise based off of yourself and what you can bring value-wise. Don’t over-inflate yourself, don’t lie because people will find you and it will ruin your reputation.

John Harcar (27:14.151)
It will be, yeah, you don’t, it’s too small of a world in this game, man. Too small of a world.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (27:18.934)
It doesn’t matter if you’re just getting started. There is somebody out there that just got started and wish somebody would throw him a bone. If you’re raising capital, somebody will give you a chance. Don’t lie to them. Make sure you’re 100 % transparent, even if things go bad. I can’t stress that enough. I wish I’d have raised 10 times the capital that I’ve raised up to this point. The third thing is build your brand. If you’re going to be anything, your name and your brand is going to represent you way bigger than your name ever

John Harcar (27:27.862)
Yep. Yep.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (27:49.526)
Social media is the greatest tool in the world for that. Getting your name out there, getting people to understand who you are, you could go through and be the greatest roofer in the history of roofing. Name me one roofing company right now. You can. But you know who… Yeah, but I mean national-wide. Like, you can’t.

John Harcar (28:09.26)
my local market I can but no yeah yeah

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (28:13.398)
I mean, but name me a national brand, name me anything. You have just like the Tony Robbins and Cody Sanchez’s, Pace Morbys, the, you know what I mean? Like those people build their brands based off of exactly. Investorship is massive. You know what I mean? So your brand and what you’re doing is going to bring attention. It’s going to bring eyeballs. It’s going to bring capital. It’s going to bring

John Harcar (28:23.672)
Yeah.

John Harcar (28:27.32)
The investor fuel.

John Harcar (28:40.174)
credibility.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (28:41.012)
credibility and your business will explode if you put time and effort into that. Those are the three things that if you’re getting started like that’ll that’ll it’ll be a rocket ship.

John Harcar (28:54.348)
And those are the three things that if you didn’t write anything else down, you better write those down. man, you’ve dropped a lot of good things in and we might have to schedule another podcast to keep talking because I mean, there’s so many things I can ask you in questions. How do folks get ahold of you? If they want to reach out, they want to partner, they want to do whatever. How do they get in touch?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (29:12.47)
Our website richinvestmentsgroup.com you can get on and see things that we’ve done I have links on there you can contact me directly you can contact our acquisitions people I’m actually getting ready to I have a YouTube channel for the Eric Richards we we haven’t even touched on this yet, but I

starting to build my brand, actually built our own podcast studio and we’re going to be, we’re going to be getting our podcast up and running. then this is our first episode this coming weekend. Just got the studio together. So, the road to riches podcast is what we’re going to call it. And it’s going to be all about what we’ve talked about today. Not necessarily all real estate, but how the people that are successful in businesses, whatever that business is, if you are the greatest underwater basket weaver, you can feed your family. Like, how did you do it? Like, how did you get

John Harcar (29:34.97)
nice.

John Harcar (29:41.473)
Awesome

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (30:01.418)
the ground. Where did you come from with the ideas? How do you market yourself? How do you put this out there so at ways somebody else out there that loves weaving baskets underwater and can be, you know, the next big thing, you know what I mean? So that’s what we’re going to highlight and that’s what we’re going to emphasize.

John Harcar (30:10.573)
Underwater, right?

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (30:19.51)
And I built the studio so that way we can have our podcast. But I’m also know for anybody else in this area that wants to do a podcast, I’m going to rent them the space where all they gotta do is show up, plug and play. We have all the equipment. I have an engineer ready to go. Like he can help you cut it, market it, do whatever you need to do for pennies on the dollar. it is. I have 15 other things going on that we couldn’t touch you today, but.

John Harcar (30:38.958)
Serial entrepreneur, man.

John Harcar (30:46.296)
Like I said, we can always do another one, man. We can share some more stuff. everybody, seriously, this has been a fantastic episode. Eric, thank you again for sharing all that you shared. Guys, if you do want to reach out to him, I’ll put all the information in the show notes. You’ll be able to link up with him and utilize his knowledge, man. Because the guy, I you heard the story. I hope you guys had a great episode. I know I did. I look forward to talk to you on the next one. Cheers.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (30:49.652)
Yeah.

Eric Richards SUBTO-Ohio/WV (31:14.614)
I appreciate it. Thank you.

John Harcar (31:16.12)
Thanks, Eric.