148: Build a Real Estate Cash Machine That Never Stops Printing Money | Chris Jefferson – 8FE

Want to build a real estate cash machine that never stops printing money?

In this episode of Beyond A Million, Brad sits down with Chris Jefferson, an 8-figure real estate entrepreneur and educator who has mastered cash flow management.

Chris reveals how he’s evolved his approach to real estate wholesaling, scaling businesses, and building recurring revenue models that work. He introduces his innovative SaaS product, designed to streamline wholesaling by reducing costs for investors and simplifying the process for new entrants. Leveraging AI, Chris’s software optimizes lead generation and acquisition, giving users a faster path to success.

He also breaks down the importance of generating immediate cash flow while balancing mid and long-term investments to ensure financial stability.

Ready to start generating real wealth?

Tune in!

Inspiring Quotes

• “Most people today have this delusion that they can have a side hustle and get rich, but it doesn’t work that way.” – Brad Weimert
• “You need to have something that can produce money for you all the time.” – Chris Jefferson
• “If you can master creating opportunities, you can feed yourself forever.” – Chris Jefferson
• “I don’t use the term wholesaling anymore. We’re in the sales marketing and customer acquisition business.” – Chris Jefferson

• 00:00 Intro 
• 01:39 Real estate education and AI integration 
• 03:46 Challenges in wholesaling 
• 06:18 Sales and marketing fundamentals 
• 11:13 Team incentives, company culture, and profit sharing 
• 29:28 Scaling and margin optimization 
• 34:15 Adapting business strategies 
• 37:36 Building a real estate cash machine 
• 44:45 Outro

Brad Weimert 0:00
Most people today have this delusion that they can have a side hustle and jump into business and get rich.

Chris Jefferson 0:06
Yeah, it doesn’t work. Do it? Why do CEOs make so much money? Think about the management component of being a CEO at a fortune 100 fortune 500 Oh, if I can focus on making people on the team as much money as humanly possible, that’s going to help us grow so much faster than me operating from the space of this marginal growth year over year, because I want to try to get more money for myself off the business.

Brad Weimert 0:31
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Chris Jefferson, yeah, thank you so much for escaping the educational schedule downstairs. I know you were really prioritizing learning about a killer’s funnel? Yeah,

Chris Jefferson 1:23
let’s do another game. Man,

Brad Weimert 1:25
that’s really, honestly, I really respect it. I want to talk shit and I really just want to hang out and do this. But Patrick riddle, who is a client at easypa Direct, also good good buddy, is no question worth listening to. Appreciate

Chris Jefferson 1:37
you having me over. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 1:38
definitely. So let’s start with, you’ve got a big real estate background, and now you’ve got a big real estate education company, yeah, which is, you know, the nature of being here, sure? What a well, let me just ask you this before we even get into background. So you’ve got a eight figure real estate education company. You’ve got a background of flipping, a background of wholesaling, yeah, I want to talk about a bunch of those things, and now you’re deep into AI as well. But what did you get from Patrick’s funnel? What

Chris Jefferson 2:04
did you learn? That’s a great question. So we created a SaaS product, software product for our community. And the reason we created this, this community software, is because, you know, we’re selling a coaching product for, you know, $5,000 ticket on average. And, you know, I started, like, getting all this guilt internally because I’m selling a 5k package, and then I gotta, then point people to all these other affiliate companies, once they sign up, and say, hey, now you gotta, you know, you gotta spend another $500 a month, $1,000 a month, on software to do a deal, right? And so we started taking a look at it, and we wanted to create a piece of software for our community to help them kind of lower that expense. And Patrick just broke down like a really creative way to grow your software business simultaneously with your coaching business, which was like the nugget I was trying to get from him. So to catch it in his presentation kind of speaks to the point of like being in these type of rooms. I mean, what was it? Can you share? Yeah, so it’s like setting up your your funnel with a direct VSL funnel, and then in your oto one and two. So your upsells, right? Making your time offer, yeah, making your upsells based around the software itself. So literally, packaging your software as a one time charge up so and then a monthly subscription after that was just kind of that, Okay, I gotta get with that. Why you’re doing that. And I get why that makes a ton of sense.

Brad Weimert 3:29
So fundamentally, the idea is there, there is that you sell your core product, what you’re good at, and the stuff that you were gonna ask people to go to another source for later, you bundle it correct. Say, Hey, functionally, we’ll give you a discount to do it right now.

Chris Jefferson 3:42
Everything you need you can buy and get literally right here.

Brad Weimert 3:46
Yeah, I would imagine that like, not only does that create more revenue for you, but probably more importantly, it reduces the barrier to implementation for them, yeah, so they have the capacity to get going immediately, yeah.

Chris Jefferson 3:57
So you get it right. So how we, how we got here is, you know, one and more importantly, maybe than anything, is we wanted to create a space where, like everybody in this space right now, and I look at what we do with wholesaling is a biz, op, right? And so people are looking for a result fest. And so in the world of social media, where there’s e commerce, there’s all these other things that people could do to make money when they come across wholesaling. Well, when I started out 14 years ago, wholesaling felt fast, right? The timeline to make money on a wholesale deal, like in my head, was quick, right? It’s like a 3060, 90 day action item, if you could create a lead opportunity. Well, now in 2024, it’s actually slow, right, traditional, relatively speaking, right? So when you look at in comparison to maybe other things that you could do, if I want to sell courses online, if I want to start, start a clothing company, or whatever the case might be, like something that can give me a return immediately once I’ve created a product, well, then you start to look at wholesaling, and you say to yourself, well, it’s going to take me too long. Make Money if I do that. So our whole, our literally, our whole goal right now is, how can we decrease the window of time that it takes somebody to get a tangible result with the doing a wholesale deal? And so that’s kind of how we’ve created our product. It’s called Hands off wholesaling, and it’s literally focused on bolting down to the acquisition process of customer acquisition, or client acquisition, with sellers and getting somebody with our software, with our education product, to just go find a lead, right? So I’m not asking you anymore to, Hey, Brad, go do a wholesale deal. Hey, you got to find a seller. You got to, you know, show the property. You got to deal with the title, attorney. No, look, all I need you to do is take this piece of software, take this piece of education, implement the software itself, and then when you get a result from the software, give it to me. I’ll complete the rest of the transaction. I’ll give you 50% of the profit. So you’ve got a

Brad Weimert 5:51
bunch of bird dogs out there.

Chris Jefferson 5:53
Yeah. So it’s, it’s a which

Unknown Speaker 5:55
is, which is a win, win.

Chris Jefferson 5:57
You get it. You get it. It’s funny. The reason I’m kind of like is, because what we’re doing is we’re turning people into bird dogs, yeah? And we’re letting them be wholesalers, right? Because, you know, you know how it is, man, we all want to be who we are in our head.

Brad Weimert 6:10
It’s also teaching one step at a time, yeah, right? Because if you can master

Chris Jefferson 6:13
this in creating opportunities, yeah, you can feed yourself forever regardless, right?

Brad Weimert 6:18
And that’s actually how I look at wholesaling. So first and foremost, I’ve probably done, I’ve done a handful episodes of people that wholesale, yeah, and but for non real estate investors, all the language is super confusing, and things are flying fast happening. So like wholesaling, fundamentally, the idea is that you’re, you are getting very good at generating leads, right people that would like to get rid of their property for a variety of reasons, and you’re trying to buy it at a price point that will allow a margin where you can sell it to an investor, that’s correct, and hopefully no money out of your pocket or very little. And you basically are assigning the contract. So you write a contract to lock up a piece of real estate which says, Hey, you give me the rights to buy or sell this to somebody else within 30 days, for example. And then you can assign that contract to an investor, and you make the spread 100% basic idea of wholesaling, one of the things that I like about wholesaling as a business model is the focus around learning lead generation, yeah, and so, like, that’s the core skill set, right? Is you learn how to generate leads

Chris Jefferson 7:19
100% and that’s about us. Yeah, I mean, it’s because, like, when you think about it, and I generally don’t even use the term wholesaling as much anymore, I tried not to, at least, because we’re really in the sales marketing business, like we’re in the game of sales and marketing and customer acquisition. And so once you understand that, like, okay, there’s a cost to customer acquisition, and if I can optimize for that cost on back end profit, then all I need to do is figure out how to create as many customers as possible, and even if I have no idea, right? So if I have zero clue what to do with this lead, once I created all right? It’s the law of economics, right? It’s very easy to understand the concept that well, if I can create a lead. I don’t have to know what to do with it. All I need to do is know how to find someone, or have a relationship with someone who does know what to do, because in the world of business and sales, who’s going to turn down a free lead this revenue. So if I call up any wholesaler across the country and I’ve got a property under contract, or I’ve talked to a homeowner that wants to sell, and I call you up I’m like, Hey, Brad, got this property under contract. You’re a wholesaler. You know what to do is in your backyard in Austin, yada yada yada. There’s no reason for you to tell me no, because it’s an infinite return for you. It didn’t cost you anything to acquire that customer. So I do think that when people are starting out with business, when people are starting out with things, if you can figure out Sales and Marketing for whatever it is that you’re looking to do when you get to a point of scaling later, optimizing later people, people that don’t do only business, they missed that part.

Brad Weimert 8:49
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree, dude, when I was so I grew up in hardcore sales, yeah, I’m gonna close you at the kitchen counter. Insane. Yeah. What did you grow up selling? So

Chris Jefferson 8:59
I grew up, man, uh, selling. Me too. The,

Brad Weimert 9:03
I was the number one rep in Cutco in 2001 oh no, yeah, that’s great. Yeah. Grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then I’ve got still to date. I probably got eight very close friends that were all the Cutco high performance.

Chris Jefferson 9:17
That’s awesome. Man. I wasn’t a high performer at Cutco. But what it but what it did for me is it taught me how to cut my teeth, getting told, No, yeah, you know, because that’s the that’s, that’s the mindset problem when you get in the sales, especially like hardcore sales like that. I did Bill collections, man, I used to work at an amusement park, yeah, selling people to play games and spend their money to do, you know, the games to take your money around the amusement park. And so when you figure that, like the verbal component of sales and like the power of communication, one, it does a lot for you, business wise, but it also does a lot for you just in life, once you can figure out communication, understand how to talk to people, and really understand that we’re all basically the same, yeah. And if you can accept and understand that, while we. Have our differences. Maybe it’s different perspectives, different views on different things, whatever, at the core of it, how we communicate as people generally, on average, is all the same. Yeah, right. So something that’s going to make you upset or agitated likely would probably make me upset or agitated too. So if you’re talking to somebody by phone and you can or in person, you can figure out how to sell people in just regular conversation. That’s how you go from that’s how you become the top cut CO sales guy. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 10:28
well, so when, when I, I got so many things out of that experience. One was, oh yes. I mean personal development, organizing, my schedule, ownership. And when I say ownership, what I mean is, ultimately, you are responsible for your outcome, right? No matter what, yeah. And sometimes you have a little control, sometimes you have a ton of control, but anyway you want to slice it, it’s still on you, yeah? And that was probably the biggest lesson out of that. But when I was leaving that, I and getting into merchant services, I I slid into third base playing kickball.

Chris Jefferson 11:04
I haven’t heard of a sliding kickball in a long time.

Brad Weimert 11:08
I might be a little bit aggressive, little bit competitive. My foot hit the bag, and my leg just kept going and my foot fully dislocated. I mean, it was some Frankenstein shit. Yeah, it’s crazy, but I couldn’t walk for six months. I couldn’t run for a year and a half. Sheesh, yeah. And during that time, I was laying on my couch in Ann Arbor, Michigan, studying internet marketing, and it occurred to me that sales and marketing were going to be present in anything that I did in life period. And if I could lock down sales and marketing, and I got sales, so if I could understand the marketing component, it would apply to everything else in business, 100% so I really appreciate that. And I think that the idea of conditioning people to learn one step at a time is also an interesting one. Hey, if you can get the lead gen thing down and learn that part of it, most people today have this delusion that they can have a side hustle and jump into business and get rich. Yeah, it doesn’t work. Do it. It really doesn’t. And what most people do when they try to move from, like, specifically the sales guys or girls that move from a high paying ish sales job, yeah, like, Oh, I’m gonna do it on my own, right? They have no fucking idea, yeah, how many other things they’re gonna have to manage.

Chris Jefferson 12:26
So I talk about this a lot, and this, this is the unspoken thing about business, right? I had operations manager that used to work for me a while back, and high school friend we, you know, we grew up together, really close friends, got him into the business. He was doing a really good job. And so one day he comes to me, and he’s like, Hey, Chris, you know, I want 50% of the business on leaving. I’m like, wow, bro. I’m like, 50% you know. And I’m like, How did you come up with the 50% right? Yeah, because I’m kind of, you know, I’m kind of taken aback. I’m like, 50% of the, you know, yeah. And so I’m like, Hey, like, how did you come up with the 50% ask, like, where did, where did it come from? And so he’s like, running me through, you know, what he’s doing, you know? And I’m like, I’m like, that’s a job. Like, that’s your job is to do these things. Like, you’re managing operations, right? So you’re managing different people, different segments of what we’re doing. And I said to him, right? I said, Hey, you’re not ready to go out on your own, right? And I said, you know, I would hope that you would trust me enough that if you are ready, that I’d tell you that, right? Because I’m not trying to keep you here forever. I’m not trying to keep anybody works for me in the same space or same position forever. I want to support people to pursue whatever they want to pursue. So, you know, he’s like, Hey, if I can’t get the 50% I’m out all right. So he quits, right? Hurts my business, because now I have operations person, so now I’m back in the seat, you know, kind of doing some of these different things. And you know what I what I kind of realized in the conversation with him, in in that moment, right? Is that he had no reality of everything else that went into place for the whole thing to work, right? You know, he didn’t understand that, you know, there’s a bookkeeping process. Didn’t understand there’s, hey, there’s all this other stuff that has to happen, has to get done for the whole business to function, and so it’s easy, I think sometimes for people to see that they’re part of the process, or their contribution to the process is more significant than at all. But business ownership is being able to have the visibility understanding of all these components and how they function, how they work,

Brad Weimert 14:42
yeah, dude, I totally agree. And specific you want to talk about arrogance, like, specifically, when you are the number one rep in sales in the company, yeah, you think you’re the shit always and so and, like, my mentality when I was growing up in sales was like, I’m fucking making it

Speaker 1 14:57
rain, no doubt. Oh, my God. That, yeah, I’m the guy, and

Brad Weimert 15:02
I had a manager Tell me. His name’s Chris Heigl. He’s still, he’s still a good friend of mine, but he’s a division manager. So there’s, like, district managers that run the offices, and there’s a division that runs the districts. Yep. And we’re at like, some payout dinner one night, and Chris is like, yeah, how much did you make last year? And I’m like, 19, and I made 130 grand. Oh, yeah, you were balling up as a 19 year old, crazy 99 or whatever, going crazy. Yeah, crazy. I was like, you know, I’m doing good and and Chris was like, I can’t remember what his number was, but he was like, I made, you know, 450 grand last year. And I probably worked a third of what you worked, that kind of gets you a brain turning. It was crazy, because my defiant arrogance didn’t allow that message to absorb when I was 22 or 19, or whatever it was. But later I heard it. What was the moment

Chris Jefferson 15:56
where you were like, because, because that does happen often, where we reflect back to, you know, moments where somebody tried to guide us, help us, educate us on different things. What was that moment for you, where you’re like, I know, I know what Chris was talking about.

Brad Weimert 16:10
You know, it really wasn’t until I so when I started easy pay to act, I got into payments first, and I had no intention of starting easy pay direct. And there’s a long story to this, and you probably don’t know this, but I had a real estate education company for probably three years. Okay, we’re doing a few million bucks a year. And to some people, that’s a lot. Some people it’s a little, but it’s enough that I got to understand the model really well. Yeah. And from that, when that partnership dissolved, I launched easy pay direct. And the reason that we’re so deep in, like, the reason we do, like, everybody’s processing and real estate education is because and all the other education places is because I had that foothold. So you

Chris Jefferson 16:47
understood the experience, you understood the model, right? That’s dope,

Brad Weimert 16:50
yeah. So when I started, it wasn’t until I started easy pay direct, where I started hiring people and had expectations of them to do things, that I saw the management side of it really because the education company didn’t run smoothly enough where I really got it. Yeah, and so we’re talking like a decade later or longer, I finally learned this lesson that I should have learned at 22 or 19 realize, oh man. You know, the perspective of management or executive man is broader than what you could possibly have. And it’s not good or bad. It is reality. The reality is that if you’re an employee, you have a narrowly focused perspective, as you should, and that’s great if that’s what you want to do, but don’t be deluded to believe that you understand how the business works, right? It’s like when people

Chris Jefferson 17:36
make the argument of, why do CEOs make so much money, and it’s in this like, hey. Like, think about the management component of being a CEO at a fortune 100 fortune 500 I mean the workload and the level of understanding you have to have. Now, that doesn’t mean that you know the CEO of Ford knows how to build the car on the assembly line, right, but he does know the process in which is needed, and he is, he’s managing out the process and then managing out the people that then manage the people. So he’s managing maybe the district manager that’s then managing the local manager and division manager, that kind of thing. But that, that is the key piece of business that we all, I think we all catch later, unless you’ve got the experience coming in, right? I got into business when I was 21 years old, right? I’m 38 now, and so when I got in the business, I didn’t know anything about managing people, right? I didn’t I didn’t understand org charts and how they flowed, and this person does this, and that had no concept of it, all right? And so these are the things that we just figure out later, from our own understanding, or from from coming to places like this, right? Doing masterminds and

Brad Weimert 18:42
different things, yeah, I find it. One of the things that I find perpetually fascinating is, like most of my world has been surrounded by, you know, as you know, our upbringing, so sales, yeah, which really transfers into bootstrapped entrepreneurs, probably. But what I didn’t get exposed to was sort of corporate America, corporate execs or funded companies. And both funded companies in corporate America operate differently, and they offer different perspectives. And so over time, as we started, as easy pay direct grew, we got clients in all these different verticals of different sizes, and I started getting exposure to both entrepreneurs that were VC backed and sort of C level execs for companies that were big, yeah, and you’re right. Like, when those people come into an organization, they come with a different view, right? And for clarity, I don’t like that view when I’m hiring people, I deliberately avoid hiring execs from big companies, because they’re typically used to having other people do things for them and not being as hands on as I need them to be. They

Chris Jefferson 19:51
don’t have that integration component to their their process of

Brad Weimert 19:56
how they how they operate, more delegation, more management, yeah, and less. Execution, yeah. And that’s fine if you’re in a multi 1000 person organization, but when you’re in a, you know, sub 100 Sure, yeah, you’re gonna be doing shit, yeah, yeah.

Chris Jefferson 20:09
It’s funny you say that, man, we’ve been actually having this conversation internally recently that we got a guy on our team, and I’ve been, like, kind of, really trying to emphasize to him, you know, like, hey, I need you to take some level of ownership in your part of the process, right? And when I say take some level of ownership in your part of the process, I mean, I need, I want you to think as an owner, right? I want you to think as you know, someone that wants to understand, how does what I How does, how does what you do fit into everything else that takes place, and from an implementation standpoint, not just from a visualization standpoint or projection standpoint, you know, how does what you do on a daily basis, how does that connect, and how does that feed into everything else that we do? And how can you also then take some ownership of that creatively? So, how can you come to the table in a meeting and say, Well, hey, Brad, like I was thinking, What about if we did XYZ, or hey, did we ever think about, you know, going and doing this, or doing like you want people around you on your teams that are thinking in that context at all times?

Brad Weimert 21:12
Yeah, the question is, how do you get them to and the question is, you have to, is it, is it unfair or unrealistic to have the expectation that staff should have ownership if they don’t have the incentives that are tied with ownership? Yeah, man. So

Chris Jefferson 21:26
what we started doing recently, to that point is we’ve started doing profit sharing with some people that are in our in our team. And the reason we started doing that is because of that point right when we really bolted down to it really had the conversation. We said to ourselves, hey, well, you know, we can continue to pay this guy a salary, right? But we can’t expect from him ownership thoughts or responsibility, because he doesn’t have any incentive equity wise to do so, and that’s fair, right? So how can we provide him some sense of equity that’s manageable and reasonable to the business, that that as we scale, is enough where we can, we can handle it at scale, right? But also it doesn’t, you know, doesn’t give up too much of the business in any way. But it’s enough to incentivize him to start thinking, all right, well, what if I do this, or what if I created this, and it helps grow the business? You know, 2x 3x 5x in the next 12 months. You know, we want people on our teams now that are thinking in that way, because we feel and we think we can optimize faster. We think we can scale faster in that way.

Brad Weimert 22:30
Yeah, that’s a, that’s another one of these very long learning curves for me. But I have a, I have a I write shit on my mirrors, yeah, to remind me to do things. Yeah. So I’ve got a whiteboard marker under my mirror, my bathroom, my primary, and I, I have a thing on the top of the mirror that says the most important thing today is colon, and there’s a blank space, yeah? And I like to change that thing.

Chris Jefferson 22:57
I might steal that. Man, I might help my ADHD. Man, it honestly,

Brad Weimert 23:00
dude, there’s too much going on in the world today, period. Your devices are fighting for your attention. Your computer’s fighting for your attention. Your staff is fighting for your attention. Social friends are fighting for your attention. The pen and paper, yeah, in a clear message is powerful because it’s just right there, yeah. So right now, that blank in my mirror says the most important thing today is making my staff rich. I love that, and that reminder to me is that there’s this shift in priority of like, I’m fine now, right? And this is not altruism, right? I’m not doing it because I’m a good guy. No, this is a pragmatic approach. Yeah, to growth. Yeah, same. And it creates a win, win for everybody, right? If I can get the biggest win for the staff, then my hypothesis is that it will give me the biggest win in the company, yes, and for the clients as a result.

Chris Jefferson 23:55
So we got to the same spot, because that, you know, you get to a point we start asking yourself, like, how much, and it’s not necessarily how much do you need, but it’s how much do you need right now, right? So, you know, we started taking a look at our revenue. And I remember I used to be this person that was very like me, me, me, me, me, about the revenue, right? So I was always thinking from a perspective of, oh, how much more am I going to make next year, right? And so when I started shifting to, oh, if I can focus on making people on the team as much money as humanly possible, the way they’re going to fight, the way they’re going to show up, the way they’re going to think about things that I got blind spots on, things that I can’t see because, again, I’m not on the assembly line putting the car together right? Like that’s going to help us grow so much faster than me operating from the space of this marginal growth year over year, because I want to try to get more money for myself off the business, right? Yeah,

Brad Weimert 24:49
yeah. I you know, everybody works differently on this front, and that’s part of what’s interesting about looking at the sort of disparity between a bootstrap founder and a VC backed founder. It’s completely different type of business. Their perspectives on money, revenue and utilization of money are totally different, yeah. So the bootstrap founder tend to you and I tend to look at things through that lens of like, what am I going to take? Yeah, what am I going to make? And the VC backed people, it’s, you have to utilize the money, yeah. And most of those founders take very little while they’re growing. And the whole game is exit, right? The whole game is for exit, and they have a board or investors that don’t allow them to take more anyway. So it’s how you optimize the business for growth. Yeah, for me, it was a requirement to build so much security in my retirement that I felt beyond comfortable with it, that I didn’t that it was like no longer possible for the world to explode for me. I mean, that’s a blessing.

Chris Jefferson 25:46
But how did you, how did you get to this, this thought process of, hey, I really want to focus on making sure my retirement is just super lined up as tight as possible. What was the motivation on that? Yeah,

Brad Weimert 25:58
I mean, I think it was, it was upbringing, right? I think it was, I think it was family. And I had an uncle that would scrimp and save everything, yeah, and he amassed a small fortune, like he, he amassed several million dollars as an engineer, but he did it through, sort of the Dave Ramsey, like, don’t spend any money you’re not allowed to have fun in life, you know, don’t enjoy anything and put it all away. Yeah, that’s Dave Ramsey, for sure, yeah. But that mentality, there is a way to win that way, but it’s painful and it sucks and it’s slow, yeah, and I think there are better levers, but my relationship with money needed to change for me to be able to utilize the better, the bigger levers, the better levers. Yeah. And so I think I’ve, I’m still learning it, but I’ve learned that over time, and so I had this attitude of, like, I need to, I need to make sure that I, I, I don’t die. Eating cat food is the phrase that I like to use, stolen from some friend. I’m sure

Chris Jefferson 27:00
I just recently got a cat

Brad Weimert 27:03
careful, doesn’t kill you. Now, thinking

Chris Jefferson 27:05
about the cat food, but

Brad Weimert 27:08
I think the transitional moment is the thing that’s important to me now, which is like, damn good, yeah. And so you know, me optimizing what I’m taking off the table every year. That’s not the important part. And part of it is that I can see how that is getting in the way of more growth. Yep, right? If I’m not redeploying the capital that I’m making, I’m not going to grow as quickly.

Chris Jefferson 27:30
But the problem as a bootstrap founder, though, is you’re you’re usually in a position, right? So most people, I think, are in the position when they’re their bootstrap founder, like, like, I am, like, it sounds like you were, too, is you’re generally coming from somewhere else where your life is built around that income, right? So generally, you’re gonna have a w2 your life is built around that income, and so you only have a minimal amount of money that you can actually invest into the business. That’s how you start the business, right? So when you’re talking about like venture capital and stuff like that, the unique thing about venture capital is you create the business before you profit, right? So you’re going to raise capital, you’re going to get an office space, you’re going to hire your team, you’re going to create a salary for yourself, and you’re going to do all that before you ever make $1 right? Well, 99% of the world that starts a small business starts it as a bootstrap entrepreneur. And when you start as a bootstrap entrepreneur, it’s okay. I got this w2 my whole life, my car payments, my kids, my mortgage, whatever is built around this job income, right? Yeah. And so how can I take a small piece of that and start investing it in this business idea that I want to try to get off the ground? So you start as a bootstrap person, and then what happens, at least for me, and I think most people, is you never get away from that mindset of taking a little bit from here and then reinvesting and putting a little bit into the business. And so you have good ideas, good concepts, whatever. And so then business starts to grow. And that’s where I felt, you know, early on in my business career, too, is it took me too long to shift into, oh no, no. I need to. I don’t need to, like, have a lifestyle over here and then start now building my lifestyle around my business income, because it’s more than I was ever making at a w2 No, I need to just keep the same lifestyle that I’ve had right maintain maybe even the w2 as long as you possibly can, and then reinvest as much money, because there’s so much more elevation to take later. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 29:28
and I think that I largely did that because of my upbringing, until, probably until we started to make until we were in the millions, when we were in the millions, and we’ve always run like a 50, 60% margin. So, yeah, yeah, it’s great, yeah. And a lot of that is that we’ve been SEO driven and some partnerships, and so paid is the fastest way to suck up your margin. Yeah, we do a lot of paid traffic. If you’re driving, if you’re building your business based on paid advertising, your margins are going to get. Us quickly, yeah, so

Chris Jefferson 30:01
that’s why I was listening to riddles presentation. Actually, it’s funny. Brought this up. So we spent a significant amount of money on traffic every year, right? And, you know, we start looking at our revenue on a month to month basis, and we’re like, holy shit, like we’re spending so much money on paid traffic, right? You know? And it’s and it’s making money. But I don’t know if most people know this. As you scale and paid traffic, your margin decreases, right? So you know, we might go from a 40, 50% margin now we’re at lower 30s, right? And then you start looking at that, and the math is showing you the data, showing you are that 30 is going to become 25 that 25 is going to become 15. And here’s the harsh reality, too. In most of the world, if you’ve got a business that’s doing 10 15% profit margin, somebody will patch you on the back, they’ll give you an award, and they’ll say, Brad, you got a great business, right? But in the world of the internet, right? And in the world of, you know, virtual operation, digital thing of that nature, we started really looking at and saying, all right, how can we push the margin back, right? And like Patrick was just talking about, you got to find a way to self liquidate, or liquidate the cost of advertising, because that’s gonna be your biggest expense. All right, so how can and that’s what we’re doing now. How can we sell cheaper products? And when I say cheaper, maybe it’s not the fair word, but how can we sell more inexpensive products that can help people and serve people, right? But instead of we got a $5,000 course and a $10,000 course. And it occurred to us, like, you know, earlier this year, why are we only selling, why is our lowest price item $5,000 right? You know, like, so we’ve got to spend all this money to get somebody to buy this $5,000 ticket, right? And so we really started looking hard at that, and said, What about if we sold them a $10 item? What about if we sold a $27 item, a $200 item, a $500 item? Yep. And then started really focused on the ascension of somebody’s lifetime value as a customer, and what that can do to revenue. And that’s been really increasing our margin.

Brad Weimert 31:57
Looking at the space at large, mean that educational space at large, and that you could apply this to lots of different spaces, like supplement space, selling widgets online in general. I mean, the internet sounds sort of grossly broad to try to make a categorization about. But truly, if you I think the key point there is the SLO the self liquidating offer, right, right? It’s what can you sell on the front end that will cover the cost of the ad that got them to click? Right? So if it costs you, you know, seven bucks to get somebody to click the ad, then sell a $7 product or sell a $10 product to them, and then once you have that lead, you can follow up with email or retargeting or whatever. And

Chris Jefferson 32:40
now, now, now it becomes an insane return. So I where it really hit me is, do you remember East Bay magazine? All right, East Bay magazine used to be this morning where they sold the tennis shoes out of the magazine. Yeah. All right. It was either east bay or Sports Illustrated one of the one of those two magazines. But I remember seeing this documentary late last year that really kind of got my wheels turning. And it was talking about how East Bay or sports, illustrate, whichever one it was, was starting to get ready to go out of business. They were having all these problems, and they just had a margin issue, right? And so people understand a company can make rev and have a significant margin problem, right in terms of profit. And so they talked about how it was because they were spending so much money on advertising, okay, to get people to get these magazine subscriptions, to buy these sneakers, etc, so to self liquidate. What they ended up doing is, I don’t know if you ever remember this, but they created this football telephone, yeah, all right. So, if you subscribe Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated All right. So if you subscribed to the Sports Illustrated magazine, you could order bump, all right. At the time, this is back when order bump was literally on a piece of paper

Brad Weimert 33:52
right back of the Sports Illustrated magazine, exactly,

Chris Jefferson 33:55
right. So you could order bump and add the football telephone, the telephone that was shaped like, like a football, yeah, and that’s how they that’s how they blew it up. Blue Sports Illustrated back up. That’s so frequented it. So all these people started order, bumping, buying the phone. Then it covered their advertising cost, and then their revenue went through the roof. First

Brad Weimert 34:15
of all, that football phone was the shit. I was like, eight, and I definitely wanted second. I think the lesson is, like, the the elements of marketing don’t change.

Chris Jefferson 34:31
In that, in that funny how that works. It’s wild. The medium

Brad Weimert 34:35
changes, sure, and the tactics change, but the strategy largely doesn’t change, and with new mediums and tactics, yeah, you’ve got evolved strategy, and you have new opportunities for innovation. But the basics, the underlying principles, are the same.

Chris Jefferson 34:49
And I think that goes back to what I was saying earlier, about once you can accept and understand that most of us all think the same way about things, you know, the basics of things, right? So we all, we all think in the capacity of we’re filling out an order form, we’re buying a product, and then there’s a pop up box that says, Hey, would you like to add on for $7 such and such. We all look at that and think, do we need it or not? Right? And so, yeah, there’s these underlying structures and principles to marketing that apply to literally any and every type of it doesn’t matter if it’s a car dealership. Doesn’t matter if it’s a doctor’s office. It literally doesn’t like don’t think you’re not going to the doctor and not getting up sold, right? It’s the same it’s all the same game,

Brad Weimert 35:31
yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the the biggest word of warning for new entrepreneurs, but really for anything, is that if you hear business advice and your response is, yeah, but my business doesn’t work that way, right? You’re wrong. Yeah, 100%

Chris Jefferson 35:48
and the other thing on that too, man, I like to talk to people about is make sure you’re taking advice from people that are at the spot you want to actually be at. You know, like, we’re in this, like, information age now because of social media. So like, everybody’s fucking learning from everybody about everything every day, every way, and a lot of people have gotten so lost in so I’m 38 right? I don’t need to match a guy’s strategy who’s 64 and do exactly what he’s doing today at 64 because he’s playing his game at his moment in time, right? Right? He’s he’s moving and making decisions based on being 64 Right, right? If I’m 38 my my decisions today shouldn’t necessarily mirror what he’s doing, yeah. And so either you have to have the ability to self analyze and say, Okay, I can see what he’s doing at 64 How can I take that and how can I apply it to where I’m at, and what makes sense for me to do, not do make sure you test everything. But in reality, it’s like, well, there’s a bunch of 38 year olds that are killing it mark as a bunch of 38 year olds that are in my age group, right, that are killing it in real estate. Like, Well, maybe you should look at what they’re doing. Yeah, right. Maybe you should identify those people that are closer to where you’re at and see how you can kind of mimic how you can kind of pick up. I use this term all the time, man, where I’m like, Hey, don’t be a copy and pasteer, right? Worst thing you can do in business is try to be a copy and pasteer, right? Because you don’t understand the how, what, when and why that somebody did whatever it was that they did. So there’s nothing wrong to be with being inspired, influenced, however you want to word it, but like you should go to look at what somebody else does and then, and I’m sure this probably what you guys have done, this is what I’ve done. So a lot of people done say where the deficiencies that lie here, and how can we make those better, right? Or how can we address those deficiencies and create profit centers as a result?

Brad Weimert 37:36
And it might not even to be a deficiency, but it might be a modification for your specific model, right?

Chris Jefferson 37:40
Yeah,

Brad Weimert 37:41
what’s different? Yeah. Also, like, you hit on age, but for clarity, it’s obviously not just age, right? It’s in that that’s a proxy for, like, where you are in life in a moment, sure. And for you, for example, most 38 year olds don’t make what you make sure don’t have the businesses you have. And it’s, it’s, it’s one of the most difficult things to do for somebody trying to learn. But it’s really important to know kind of what business somebody’s in, what their margins are, yeah, how big the business is, if you want to take advice and try to follow their path, right? Like, do they have pragmatic information that might actually help you move forward? Yeah? And

Chris Jefferson 38:20
one thing I’ll say to men is, took me a long time in business to learn this. It took me probably being in business seven, eight years before this clicked, you know. So we talked about being like this Bootstrap, you know, entrepreneur, right? And what I started to quickly realize, you know, after a few years, is how, how and how I look at money today, all right? So in my own life, how I look at money? I look at I look at my money, family money in three buckets, right? So I look at money in a now income bucket, which is money that we can create, you know, in 3060, 90 days. Then I look at money in a midterm income bucket. So, what money can I create within six to 18 months, and then I look at a long term income bucket. All right. So what money can I compound and turn over 18 plus months, right? So that’s in my world, that’s that’s how we’re always looking at money is all right, what bucket does it? Does it fall into? Well, what happens with most people that are trying to make more money, they’re trying to get a better life, or whatever is they come out in pursuit of a long term income bucket, they come out in pursuit of a midterm income bucket, where, in reality, that’s not going to make you any money right now, right? To really make money and really scale anything, to really do it with any sort of speed, is you have to have, I call it a cash machine. You have to have some sort of now income bucket, whether, again, that’s your w2 whether that’s your current business, whatever that is, you have to have something that can produce money for you all the time, right? And you have to have it where that’s stable, that’s foundationally set, because then you take that money and put that into midterm opportunities. Maybe that’s, you know, a fix and flip, or maybe that’s putting into a money market, whatever that is. Is, right? And then you can build and compound money over time. That way most of us, though, in myself included, we because the midterm and long term is what’s sexy. So it’s sexy to say, Hey, Brad, I got 100 doors, right? Yeah. Well, if you know, the reality is that most landlords, on average, make $300 net per door, right? So if you’re making $10,000 a month at your job, $15,000 a month at your job, and you say, hey, I want to replace my income with rental properties, you have to have a significant amount of rental properties to just replace your income. It’s much easier to go find an active income, a cash machine to make 10 or $15,000 a month and then replace your w2 because then that money can then easily go get you 5030, 100 doors, right? Like you can go buy 20 properties at a time that are cash flowing, that are going to make you money, if you’ve got a cash machine that can help you go get it.

Brad Weimert 40:56
Yeah? I mean, I agree with you and my I think that’s tough, because most people are educated to learn how to invest in real estate, for example, yeah, but when they’re learning how to invest in real estate, they’re not learning how to make a cash machine in real estate that prints money. They’re learning how to find solo one off things that might produce a little bit of cash flow and hopefully will store value and provide a payout and increased value in the future, right? But without question, the most significant thing, not only in terms of my investment opportunities, but also in terms of my mindset and my stability, is having this big cash engine that you know, that you know is hidden. You got it that I can count on that if I make a bad move about investment, it’s okay, yeah?

Chris Jefferson 41:47
Because here’s the thing, because you’re going to, yeah, right, like you’re going to make a bad move, you’re going to make a bad investment. Anybody who tells you they don’t or haven’t is full of shit, right? And so what happens is you have to have this reliance on this, on this foundational cash machine when that occurs, because you don’t know how significant those hits are going to be, right, right? Because some of those hits will take you out, right, especially if you don’t have some sort of now income cash machine that’s creating money for you, yeah. And a lot of times when I see people get taken out, and I almost got taken out in 2017 right, which is really, when this really light bulb to me. I almost went bankrupt in 2017 I had a huge real estate business. I’m doing a ton of fix and flips ton of new construction. And so my monthly overheads over $200,000 a month at the time. So I got to make over $200,000 a month for me to take money home. Okay? And so, you know, when you get to the point where the people that are working for you, or your contractor stuff like that. They got new trucks. They got new boats. You know, you’re, you’re sitting there, like, I can’t even go get a I can’t even go get a new car, right now, right? Yeah, and you start really kind of thinking about it. And this, this, this place that you really start to get to, at least for me, was this level of clarity and understanding that okay? Like, let me go talk to the people that are successful. Like, again, like I said earlier, let me go talk to the people that I want to be, where I see them, or where, at least, where I perceive them to be. Okay, because if I’m running these pro if I’m running to these problems, I gotta assume they’ve, they’ve encountered them, or they’ve did, they’ve navigated around them somehow. So I went out and started talking to a bunch of people. And ironically, one of the guys is here that I sat down with. I had lunch with. And so I remember I sit down with this guy’s name is Richland, and him, and I sit down, and he starts talking to me, and this is where this whole cash machine, you know, and midterm, long term bucket thing kind of came up. And so I’m talking to him, and I’m like, Man, you don’t seem stressed at all, you know. Like, what are you what the fuck are you doing? You know? And so we start talking, and I’m like, because I’m you’re doing just about as many fix and flips as me, you know. Why? Why you don’t got gray hairs? Man, why are you not stressed out? You know? And I’ll never forget it. Man, we’re sitting at lunch, and his response to me is he’s like, Well, I got 32 free and clear rental properties. And he goes, they’re bringing me about $46,000 in cash every month. So he says, I just use that money. He said, I don’t put it in my pocket. I just use that money and put it into my wholesale business. I’ll use that to pay my employees I use and I’m like, oh shit. I’m like myself all this time where I was like, flipping all these deals, building all these houses, just taking the money, taking the money, taking the money, and not not picking up rentals, not doing this, not doing that, not creating that underlying cash machine that when something goes left, something goes wrong on you, because again, it will right. You’re in a position where you can support it, deal with it, and kind of shake out of it, keep moving. Yeah, I

Brad Weimert 44:44
love that. Man, I think that’s a great lesson. I have probably six more hours of things to talk to you about.

Chris Jefferson 44:50
We have to get together again in Austin. Man, I

Brad Weimert 44:52
love it. Man, I love it. Chris Jefferson, absolutely. Man, I

Chris Jefferson 44:55
appreciate your time. Yes, sir.

Brad Weimert 44:56
I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it. I need your help. There are three places you can find beyond a million. The podcast itself, beyond a million.com, which has some cool free resources, including a free course, and we finally launched the beyond a million YouTube channel. I would love it if you would go there and subscribe, and if you don’t want to, you still would probably enjoy seeing the visual content. Check it out, youtube.com, forward slash at beyond a million.