Investor Quarterly™ Issue 1 - May 2015 | Page 8

8 Leverage: “The use of something to magnify a desired result.” For many years, I was a focused real estate investor. My wife and I started in 2008 with zero experience, and quickly started buying 60-70 houses per year. Life was good. Hectic at times, but good. Prior to that time, we were corporate folk, and while very happy to be self-employed, there was an aspect that always seemed to be missing from everyday ‘investor life’. As a full-time real estate investor, it can be a very lonely world. No matter how you buy houses, you likely don’t talk to the seller much, if at all, and rarely ever talk to your end buyer. If you do any volume, you likely use technology to minimize trips to the title company, banks, and anyone else you can eliminate. From our own experience, we were busy all the time, but had little social interaction with others. While real estate investor clubs are great (I advise everyone reading this to belong), meetings are infrequent, and participants are either newbies that don’t have a lot to ‘give’ (not knocking newbies, I was once one!), or veterans that are tight lipped about everything as they see you as their competition. Real Estate Investing can be a very lonely place, especially if you value relationships with others. with anyone and everyone that was interested. Very literally, I had a videographer on staff to help me record videos at my rehab projects. It wasn’t uncommon for us to be rehabbing 4-6+ houses at any given time and the opportunity to share with others lit a fire in me that had been reduced to just ‘smoke’ in recent years. Through this experience, I realized the power of Knowledge. Not just sharing the knowledge I had learned from buying hundreds of houses, but this experience forced me to always learn from others and to improve what I was sharing. I also learned that the more I would share, the more I would benefit in a number of ways. Knowledge, like money, can be leveraged to magnify your results. At the beginning of 2014, I started, FlipNerd.com, an expert Interview show. So far I have interviewed 210 real estate investing experts and leaders from across the country. I didn’t know what to expect when I started, but felt a need to help other investors tell their stories and share their knowledge. Now, thousands of people watch or listen to my show every single day. In fact, the one and only Pete Asmus joined me recently for Episode #200, where Pete tells us all about how to, “Shatter Who You Leverage Your Knowledge Are For Who You Want To Become” (c X