Gino started his real estate journey at the age of 19 when he found REI Wholesaling videos on Youtube, making $170k in his first year wholesaling while in college.
Just a few years later, Gino owns 24 rental units and his company makes over 6 figures a month in net profit with a team of 45 people located all over the world.
See full episode transcriptTranscript is autogenerated by AI
welcome to the Real Estate Game Changer Show. I'm your host, Mike McKay, based in the Jacksonville, Florida market. And each Friday at 4:00 PM we dive deep with guests from all over the country who are changing the game in real estate. This is a live show so make sure you comment with any questions for our guests to answer. This week our guest is Gino Colomba. Gino started his real estate journey at the age of 19 when he found some wholesaling videos on YouTube making$170,000 on his first year wholesaling while in college just a few years later. Gino owns 24 rental units and his company makes over six figures a month in net profit with a team of 45 people located all over the world. Gino, welcome to the.
Gino: 0:38Thanks for having me, Mike. I appreciate it. Thanks for bringing me
Mike: 0:41Of course, man. So usual, first question I always ask and we covered it a little bit in your intro, but if you could dive into a little bit more detail about how you got started watching those YouTube videos and kind of leading up to your first deal.
Gino: 0:53How I did it was simply, I was on my couch one day, it was the beginning of sophomore year in like October. And I was just going around YouTube and what came up was a Max Maxwell video of wholesale and real estate. And so I quickly picked that topic up. I watched as much videos as I could as many as I could, and within about a month and a half my first deal. All starting from that YouTube video of Max Maxwell.
Mike: 1:14That's awesome. And you know, from watching that video, you said it took about a month and a half month and a half to get your first deal. What did you do between watching that video and getting that first deal that allowed you to get that first deal?
Gino: 1:25Yeah, good question. So what I do, like one of his first videos I watched was talking about bandit signs. You know, the signs we buy houses right on the side of the road. So I immediately ordered from the website, he said, ordered 200 and started putting'em out within about five days. Once I received them and I got my first like, funny enough, the seller called me probably like day seven of full sound real estate. And for instance, when I saw the video, At that time I thought that I was kind of learning from a buddy's. My buddy from baseball. His dad used to do a bunch of real estate, and I just texted him and I was like, Hey, I'm getting into it. He said, great, make sure you do 0.7 times a r v minus repairs, minus your wholesale, you know, Fee. Like he told me that's what I should do. Cause I asked him how should I decide what property's worth or not. And so I, again, this seller calls me seven days in and I followed the strategy he told me with that calculator. And long story short, I went on the appointment and I was like 50. And I was like, oh, there's nothing I can do. And again, this is like day seven or eight of doing, you know, real estate. And I was like, fuck man. There goes a failure already. Fast forward about two weeks, I started calling buyers, right? I started building a buyer's list and the buyers, one of'em answered and he. Where, do you have anything? I said no, but I did have a property over here that the seller, was looking for, a certain amount of money I would want to make around two 10, and I would want to, excuse me, sell around two 10. He said, I'll be there tomorrow. meet me there. And I'd even had the agreement and I told the seller buyer that too. I just said I had this, he said, call that seller up. Say you want it and I'll want to come out and see the property. And actually I told the buyer two 15, cause I remember he went there, I that day the next day, it was like a Friday, Saturday, I told the seller, meet me at the property at like 9:00 AM I got the signature signed for with the seller at 200 oh. And then at like nine 30, the buyer walks in and I was all nerve wrecked and the seller knew what I was doing too, pretty much. And I got so lucky on this first day, the seller knew what I was doing. He is like, who is this? It's your investor, right? That's gonna buy the property? I said, yeah, and he didn't care. He's like, just as long as you can close in seven days at 200,000, I don't care. And so he immediately signed the contract. The buyer came in. I was scared to hit, crapless and the seller comes in at two 15. excuse me, the buyer, I told him I wanted at two 15 and he ended up like coming back. He's like, could you do two 10? And of course for me, I was like, this is like, of course I could do two 10. You, I make$10,000. 19. It's like my first couple weeks through. And so long story short, that's how the first deal happened. It was definitely a special one. I did a lot easier than some other people. I got lucky. But it's. part of the process, I guess, right? I guess you gotta get lucky sometimes.
Mike: 3:40Yeah. That's awesome, man. It goes to show you too, how important the market knowledge is. Right? You know, that 0.7 formula. I mean, if you can get it at that price, I mean, that's great, but that's not always the price that people will pay. At the end of the day
Gino: 3:52Yeah, that's the thing. Like in the, for example, number wise, it was like, My offer was like 1 65 and my original offer with that, and I ended up getting two 10 just because it was such a good area and I probably had my ARV too low, which is rare for the beginner wholesaler, but my ARV low. I was like so worried. I think about like, because I kept seeing videos on it, like, don't overestimate. And so like, I guess I went underestimating and got that a great deal. They flipped it, they bought it for two 10 for me. They put 60 into it, so they ended about two 70. They had holding costs, but they sold it for three 70.
Mike: 4:22Wow, that's a good deal for them too.
Gino: 4:23Yeah. It took'em to like 10 months though. I think they were like the first flips or something, but they did take'em a while. But yeah, I was actually, funny enough looking at it this week, for the first time in like two years, I was comping a property near and I was like, oh shoot, is this the one? And we looked That's why I knew those numbers off the bat.
Mike: 4:37that's awesome, man. So you get your first deal. You make 10 grand off bandit signs, what's next?
Gino: 4:42What was next? I just dove into cold calling probates and I had no idea what I was doing. Didn't see a deal happen for another three months, and finally got another bandit sign call my second deal was a house that was completely remodeled and the seller was just motivated. It's gonna be, again, I used some formulas, like I offered em two. He said heck no, but could you do two 30? I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, two 30 and I sold it for 2 55, like two days later and the house is really worth like three 50. Looking back now, I could have got so much more, but yeah, I know. So what was next? Just cold call. Cold call, and never had any success. Funny enough, in cold calling, I had that bandit sign hit, and this is again, November. I had cold called for about three or four months, no deal. And then come again in, you know, March or in February I got my second deal and it was like a bigger one, right? 25 count. Like, all right, here we go. then I started finding actually why I was not missing, why I was not doing that great and cold calling. And that was because I was not using great list. I just kept calling probates, nothing would happen. Like everyone was calling probates. And then I finally realized like, Hey, I need to buy some absentee data. I need to skip trace. And that's when we started seeing the deal flow pick up.
Mike: 5:43And did you stop putting in Bandit signs out, or you were still kind of doing that
Gino: 5:46Yeah, that was a dumb thing for me. Like I, no, excuse me. I did put up bandit signs for another psych four or five months and actually kept getting deals. So I got that one deal in March, and then I got another deal after that. But then I was like, my third deal in, I was like, all right, I need to start cold calling and texting to scale up and like looking back on it, I should just kept putting Bandit signs out. But I did keep getting like calls from the sheriff's office probably once a like in my county and the city just saying like, come take these down. And I scared. These people that might be watching it were watching the recording in Georgia, there's a city called Marietta. It's a pretty historic city cuz it was kind of around a lot of the civil war. Monuments and things, and they would take pride. You know, it's like a nice they got a square, like an old Southern square, like all this. And I started just putting all these signs on stop signs. I put signs on the stop sign, zip tied. And like I probably put out, me and my buddy probably put out 25, 30. And I just remember, and it's a pretty big city, but we put out a bunch and I just remember the next day, like getting a call, Hey, this is, officer Bennett with the Marietta Police, depart. We see that you've placed signs all over public property, or excuse me, all over, like government, like owned property, and you need to take these down to us. We're gonna charge you a thousand dollars per sign. And of course he just saying that to scare you, but like for me, I'm like, shit, that's 20 or$30,000. I'm a, I need to get those. So like the next night at 1:00 AM we went out and put'em all down and at that point, I think that's when we're like, all right, let's start cold calling. And then we actually found texting like a couple months later.
Mike: 7:04So you start cold-calling. Not successful first, and maybe it picks up a little bit when you get the right leads. Were you cold calling yourself?
Gino: 7:11Yeah, it was just me. It was me cold calling for the first five months. Right. It was just me calling. Just nothing. It just kept calling and finally, like you said, I got better leads, better data, and may I think I closed my first cold call lead. I mean, what is that, seven months later my first cold call to, so I guess I did, can I take a while, first one?
Mike: 7:27And then at that point, you decided to. To switch to texting or you discovered texting? What happened there?
Gino: 7:33Yeah, I specifically remember discovering texting May of 2019 because I went to an event on the way to the event. It was the event of Tony Robinson Max Maxwell's mentor, and I went to an event. and it was in May. It was in Charlotte of 2019. And I remember like on the way home, we were listening to some podcasts and they started talking about texting. I was like, oh shoot, we should start texting people. And we actually started just texting land. That's what we did. We texted land deals. Well, that didn't go anywhere for two months. We didn't get any land deals that turned out to anything. But then I was like, why don't we do just texting properties? Long story short, by like July of 2019, we were full force texting properties and by that next six months, I mean we got so many under contract and deals compared to. That's what turned us probably like$50,000 in July to where we finished at 180, 190,000 the end year.
Mike: 8:20And do you think that it was all attributed to texting there or were you getting better in other areas that allowed you to do that?
Gino: 8:27I would say we are obviously getting better business people cuz every single day we're watching stuff, getting better, watching podcasts, whatever it may be. But I would attribute a lot of its success, just consistently marketing and, you know, being able to texting, reach so much more people and cold calling even. just because you can send a text a lot faster than a call and people answer the text more, right? So just having a lot more attract there. And that was the beginning of texting too, like 20 19, 3 years ago, not a lot of people were texting. And so like you could dominate your market with that.
Mike: 8:55So that was 2019. So 2020 comes around, what did 20, 20 look like for you? I mean you, you know, you kind of go from doing a few deals, I mean, the end of the year with 170 grand which is pretty damn good. And then, you've obviously taken things to the next level today, but what did 2020 look like? 2021 up here?
Gino: 9:13Yeah, so 2020 is good then. Good question. So I actually invested in Steve Chang's mentorship, which is how we met in December of 2019. So I remember it was like right before New Year's, and so I was like, all right, I'm starting January fresh. So joined his mentorship at that point I had one lead manager, one admin assistant, and I had another partner at the time, and. We were still lined up pretty good, but we knew we had a lot of room to grow. So we ended up joining Steve's mentorship, Steve trg, and immediately saw a bunch of success, right? I was closing all the deals. I immediately increased my closing number deals from doing one a month, one to two a month if that, to now going up to three to four, right? And so, and Steve I would give him all the credit on that respect cuz I didn't have a sales process and it was. I always wanted to get outta the acquisition manager role. Not that cuz I didn't enjoy it and that I was good at it like I did, but I just knew that I could be working on the business and you can't do that unless you have that sales process. And so at that time I didn't have that. Steve started teaching me that. I started implementing it myself. And then by March of that year I hired an acquisition manager.
Mike: 10:10Wow. Okay.
Gino: 10:11And soon as that happened, we started shooting up like Chris, so the end of that year we did about 700, 7 50 in 2020. And I highly credit all that to being able to outsource myself and focus on more of a owner's role. Becoming a better leader and manager versus having to do all the roles in the company. And so I still was obviously in charge of the department, but I just wasn't the one making the calls. And so that was, again, 2020. By the July, 2020, that's also when Chandler decided to start working with We finally convinced him it took forever. We finally convinced him. He used to be our roommate. And me and my other partner who actually was my other roommate in this townhouse that I'm in, We're the ones putting out bandit signs. I remember we used to drag Chandler out like at one o'clock in the morning. Like Chandler just come with cuz we just wanted him to put the Bandit signs out Like we didn't want to get out the car. We were just convinced Chandler do And it worked like every time. And so Chandler was a big help in the beginning. And we finally convinced him like, bro, start texting for and that's how he started out. We had a marketing director at that time who's actually still the marketing director now from Venezuela. And yeah, so Chandler was started out texting and then quickly we saw that we needed his help. He took over again in the marketing role. He took it back over and started like growing that tremendously systemized. It got that Venezuelan grow up to. Marion and then immediately started working on other departments, and by then, by that time it leads us to 2021, where we started really
Mike: 11:28Did Chandler go to school with you? Is that how you guys knew each other or, yeah.
Gino: 11:31Yeah. So I actually knew Chandler from when we were 12. Then from 12 years on. We didn't really connect until his mom or his dad texted my dad and he is like, Hey, Chandler's looking for a place to stay. Can he come stay with you guys? This is sophomore I mean, this is 2019 and so then we were like, all right. Yeah, Chandler, come on. And again, remember I have another partner at this time, and he was also on the same baseball team as me and Chandler too. We're like, oh shoot, we're about to have Chandler. We haven't seen him in 10 years, I'm telling everyone everything here, but we used to get Chandler when we were like 12, used to just hold him down and like, just harass him as like a little baby. Cuz he was so small he would be dying laughing right now. Me and my partner at the time were like, yeah, get let's, we're ready for see Chandler again. We're gonna mess with him. And then he comes back just jacked. He comes up juiced, he's a, he was a state champion wrestler. We're like, oh shit, we can't mess Long story short, yeah, Chandler was living with us and then this is, he didn't join us until about eight, nine months after he moved Like into real. He was just down here while we were doing stuff and you know, he was doing some other marketing stuff for his dad that owned a business, but finally he decided to come and then at the end of that 2020, I decided to tell my partner at that time like, Hey, bro, let's just separate, because we've been good friends since we were like seven, and I only brought him in the whole selling business. Literally when I was watching that video, max Maxwell that I explained earlier, he was filming a movie, a main role in a Netflix movie.
Mike: 12:45Wow.
Gino: 12:46And so at that time, he had no clue. So he came back and we always did a lot of business stuff together. Did a lot of entrepreneurial stuff together before this. So when he came back like later in October and I was like already putting Bandit signs out and he's like helping me with it. And I was like, bro, I found the new thing for us to do. It's this wholesale real And so long story short, he helped me put out like my first. a couple bandit signs and I gave him like 10% of the first deal. Anyway, we partnered up on that, but why I brought that up is cuz the end of 2020, he was focusing more on acting what he wanted to do. I brought him into the wholesome business. He didn't really like, it was more like a job for him. Even though he was an owner in the company, I felt like I was holding them like an employee. Like I had to hold'em accountable. Like employee, like, bro, did you make those calls? Oh no. You were studying your script. What the fuck, man? Like we would get pissed. And then when Chandler joined in August, Chandler helped push me to make the decision cuz he's like, bro, he's not doing anything, get, so we part our ways. We had a mutual agreement. We're still friends. And we just decided to part ways. So 2021 was me and Chandler's first year together.
Mike: 13:40And then you said like a lot of your stuff shifted when you joined TRAs Mastermind and learned his sales stuff. And obviously I was in that Mastermind as well. Learned a lot from Steve. What did you shift in your sales process? Or I guess you didn't really have one before, but what was the biggest thing that you changed coming from Steve's mastermind that helped you that closing rate? Dramat.
Gino: 14:00I would say two things. One is understanding that how to dig deeper into a seller's pain. How to use that pain to get bigger discounts, right? How to expose it more. To the seller, come out and share more of that pain to you so you can dive deeper into it and asking those questions, right? He taught us those questions to get us there, right? Taught us how we asked certain questions to make us make us dive deeper into a seller. And then the second thing in there one of the most important things, Was actually have an appointment. I used to never set appointments. I would just be like calling sellers up that the lean manager said was good. Hey, I think we're around this range. I don't know. What do you think about that? Like I didn't have specific appointments I was measuring. It was just, Hey, free for all. Let's just call'em, this guy seemed kind of interested. Let's just hope it works. Versus having a process of how we can set up appointment, what expectations we set, all that good
Mike: 14:48Yeah. And were you closing from the beginning, all your stuff on the phone or were you running in-person appointments for a certain amount of time?
Gino: 14:54Well, actually, funny enough, my first deal, was the only deal. I actually went intentional in person other deals, like, and I went there and I didn't get it, but I called him on the phone on, you know, like those three weeks later and said, Hey, I could do it at this price. And he said, all right, meet me to send. Yeah, no, I was for my eternity, it was just locking things up on the phone. Other than that first.
Mike: 15:11And now, I mean, you guys run, you know, a fairly large phone sales team. I think Jared was saying earlier, you guys are up to eight lead managers and I think four acquisitions guys. I mean, How do you manage a sales team that large and make sure that they're all being effective?
Gino: 15:27Big question there is I got very good people. So for example, the LM team, I have stopped managing'em about six months. I allowed the best LM that we knew was a great leader as well. It's not just the best LM because if you just give the best LM leadership roles, you'll more than likely just. probably not succeed, right? Because a person that makes a good a, a person that's a good l m doesn't mean they're probably not a good manager, right? But this guy we knew was really good at managing people. He was an athlete, he was a captain of his football team. This guy knew what he was doing in terms of management. So, to answer your question, Mike, how I'm able to do it is I have Jordan, who's that LM director. He manages all lead managers. I don't touch lead managers. I don't even look at their numbers. He manages them all. Obviously I look at the numbers as a C E O, but I don't look at'em as a sales director. He manages all of them. He trains'em, he does all that. And now with AM director, I just recently took back over that role about three or four months ago. I'm able just to manage four people. Four people for me is a lot easier than managing the other eight LMS too. So for me it's just, multiple meetings every day, about 30 to 45 minutes, maybe even an hour worth of meetings a day of constantly checking numbers, role playing live calls, right? We do about 30 minutes in the morning of role playing plus recapping the day before, and then the afternoon we spend about 30 minutes, five minutes of that 30 being that we recap already what happened today. So we'll meet at three, we'll say. How has your day been going so far? Any rebuttals, any objections, any people we need to talk. To get you to the finish line No. Okay. The next 25, 20 minutes, we're gonna listen to a live call. And that's what I'm handling now and that's how I'm able to manage the people. Acquisition management side of things is just constantly having these calls now.
Mike: 16:55You said a key to that is having good people. Right. Obviously hiring is a huge part. What does your guys' hiring process look like to make sure you get people who are a players?
Gino: 17:04Yeah, good question. So first thing we do is we track their core values, right? Or we see what their core values are. So our company obviously has core values that we defined, and it's commitment, integrity, and growth-minded. So we'll ask the individuals and say like, Hey, when we're hiring them, Please put three people that you're really close to. Write down those three people that you admire the most that you actually know, right? Family, me, members, friends, or cu whatever. It's But someone that you personally know. Don't pick LeBron James. You don't know'em. So three personal characteristics. Write down of the three people you admire. So three each, right? So there's nine total. And what you'll start seeing is that they're gonna write down my mom. Why? Cuz she works so hard. She's selfless is the second thing she's constantly trying to make our family better. you'll, they'll do that for the three people. And what they'll start seeing is that person's core values will start showing cuz your core values are the come from the three people you admire. That's who you want to be. You wanna be like them because attempt to act like them. And so like you can see there, like if you start seeing a trend that like, hey, this person shows commit. He's talking about his mom who went through above and beyond measures to, to raise him as a child, as a single mom. That's commitment. He shows integrity, right? His always, his mom always tells him, don't tell a lie. You know, like, and again, it's not ever going to be completely personal, like they're gonna match all three of your core values in terms of like their examples. But you can start getting a feel of it just find a way to make things. I mean, that's commitment, right? Like it's just certain things that you look at. And so that's how we start out with it. Mike is, that's our first filter. After that it's a couple tests, right? I'll tell you for salespeople specifically our lead managers, cuz we only hire lead managers to be ams. That's our flow. So it's how we find LMS is, look, we'll send him another key tip here. We'll send em the recording. Out there that have the right core values. We'll then send them the script. We'll have them say, Hey look, read us the script and send a recording back. Once they give us the recording back, we'll listen to it. We don't expect'em to be good at first, right? We just wanna listen. And then what we'll do is we'll actually send him or her a video back of us reading the script or one of the directors like Jordan showing it the right way. Then we tell'em, Hey, we'll send this to you, watch it, and then send us another one. and we wanna see if they're teachable. We wanna see if they've learned anything and gotten better. They're still the same as they are in the first call, or they're similar. They're not someone we want. We want someone that can quickly learn the process, the script We want someone that's been maybe very bad in the beginning, that first one they sent to us, but then now it's become sounds pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty And that will tell us that this person is actually someone that could be on our team that can grow with who we're doing what we're doing and that can actually teach them learn to be taught. Cause some people you can tell'em exactly how to do something. Like that's why I usually don't like to hire people that have been in real estate because if they think they know already, like, Hey, I was a lead manager for someone else. Those are gonna be the hardest people to teach cuz they think they already know the answers. Right.
Mike: 19:38So you put'em through that, you have their script improvements. Good. What's the next stage in your hiring process?
Gino: 19:44Yeah. So once we figured out their good fit, they'll do an interview, right, with, and this all happens usually with our HR person, our hiring person, right? And they'll do the interview with core values. They've already got the video back. If they pass that, then they'll go to the LM director, Jordan will sit on a call at them, ask'em questions, get a better feel of who they are, see if they really just bond in. And what he's just trying to do is feel like, Hey look, is this someone I'm gonna want? Directing. Does this guy seem stingy? Does this guy seem like he's a self, you know, selfless or selfish? Is this guy like what is this? How's the feeling we got here with this girl or boy? Then if they pass that test, then they're gonna get on a call with Chandler. That pretty much means that they've gotten far enough now they've already done a number of tests, right? Even in the beginning I left out some where they do predictive index testing, trying to see what kind of personality which is, we don't heavily rely on that, but it's something to look at. And then also we, let'em do a cog. Again, something that we don't unhi and hire for. Like, we're not using that solely for to hire that person or not, but it's something that we can at least look at and see how quick do they learn something. Cuz that's how, what a cog is, right? How quickly you can process the information and learn or complete the test, right? So long story short, we do all those tests. They have the interview of dj, who's our HR guy. Then you have with Jordan, he's testing the person's character. He is still talking with them, has about a 15, 30 minute call. And then there'll be a call the COO and with Jordan, and they're now gonna come in different angles. Hey, tell me what you would do in this scenario. What would happen if you don't get a deal in the next six 60 days? What would you do? Obviously, they're gonna tell you some things at first that they want, oh I'll stay, I'll keep working hard, but are you okay knowing that you're not gonna make money then for, and so just role playing stuff. See how they react if they start getting. Again, this is what they'll do on the phones with a seller too. So just feeling em out and they'll decide there if they get the job and Chandler's there, then to welcome them and start that process of onboarding with Jordan.
Mike: 21:21So I don't think we've finished your journey from before. So I think you were through 2020. Your other partner's out, you and Chandler 2021. I mean, you guys grew a ton in 20 20 22. Can you tell me more about those years?
Gino: 21:34So beginning of 2021 we joined CG Collective Genius, the big Mastermind. Quickly got into learning how to even scale up even more with our team members. We went from probably in 2020, we probably had like 10 people to the end of last year being at 25. So almost more than doubling our team about like 150% from 2020 to 2021. Texters Cold callers. We hit it hard, man. We sold a bunch of deals to Open Door. We took advantage by, getting mentorship from a bunch of high level individuals and the collective genius and other masterminds where they told us like, way ahead of anyone, go start selling open doors, start selling to people. And that just allowed us to get on top of a lot of things. So we rode that wave, did about 1.8 million last. and led us into this year where we took a big jump into just let's go from massive scale. And so beginning of the year was great. Our first quarter was a dream. We did like 50 in the month of March run a good pace. And to be honest with you, since the second quarter, a lot of it we got not destroyed, but we got pretty handed it to us as a business owner, what could happen quickly? We ended up only closing or locking up nine deals in April when we were projecting to do 22. So we went from doing March 23 contracts. I have something at the end to talk about it wise is we realized that, you know, we went from, again, hitting our goal of 22. To only being able to be hit nine. March or May. Excuse me. We did 11 when our goal was 24, so we were missing our goal. Right? We had a great march, great February, great January, big deals, big profits. And then we hit these months and obviously we still made a lot of money in April and May because the deals we locked up in March, were closing in May and June. But by the time those deals caught up with us from the ones that we only got in April and May. Our July, we lost money. mean, it's just the truth of the matter, right? We lost money in July because it, by the time those deals that were supposed to close in May and April, we missed by so much numbers that, look, we lost money. And not only that, what happened, and this is a good learning experience, the last, the Q2 was the market also 45 k per spread. We end up going down to. Which is still a lot, but you're talking about 15 K extra per deal that we already projected and now we have less deals. We've made a lot less money than we thought during those two q2. And so this month, this year has been really a truthfully testing just our ability to be able to grow and pivot quickly. And me and Chandler did. We were, we knew it was coming and that's what was gonna only gonna get nine contracts, But now, like we knew we were gonna lose money in July because we projected out, we looked at our numbers and here's the biggest thing we. you need to hire 50% and more people than what you think you need especially with salespeople, dispo and acquisitions and or dispo lead management acquisitions, So like we're hiring at 50% of capacity. Like if I'm gonna want, for example, I only need one more aM to hit my contract goal per month, I'm gonna hire two because what you wanna bake into there, what happened in May and happened in April. is our stamina on our sales team diminished. One person gets sick, then they're out a week. The next person starts having a bad day because their girlfriend broke up and this is not really what happened, but something like similar to where their mindset diminished, right? They're like feeling down. They're sad on themself. And it's my job as a leader, I failed, right? As a, and that time I was the AM director of. you know, making this person feel as if they could be doing better and not bringing them up. Just focusing more on numbers on my part. I was like, bro, come on, keep going. Just make this amount of calls. You'll do it, you'll do it. Long story short, the reason you hire 50% more, especially in sales, is one, it's mostly commission based anyway. And two, you need to be able to know that you're gonna fail and you meaning the people in your system, they're gonna fail. Your employees aren't gonna be a hundred percent every time you can't project that. They're gonna be perfect. That's just the human beings. You can't be perfect. You, I wasn't perfect, obviously, but if I had another two ams, excuse me, we wouldn't have, at that time, we only had three. We had five ams. We would've hit our goals. I guarantee that. It was just that when you only have three, right? If one, like I said, has a bad mindset or something that they're not closing deals, the other one gets sick, then you're down to one. Then you can't hit your numbers. You can. So these are just little things. And again, I'm, I know I'm talking a lot. I like talking about it, but these are things that matter, right? And this is why I brought it up. We lose money, but it's because of decisions we made earlier. It's also, this is something you gotta think of worth. Me and Chandler are preparing for Q1 right now of 2023, and we know how many people we. We gotta start hiring those people now, and that's why we're hiring a lot of those LMS because it also takes 30, 60 days on average for us to get a lean manager performing consistently every day, understanding the whole process of the job role. Getting a agreements or getting con or appointments set up, it takes 60 days for them to consistently be a hundred percent confident in performing. And so if we hired them today, it's gonna be November. until they're performing right. November 9th, two months like that's what we wanna do because when January kicks off, we need them already. We don't wanna hire them in January, cuz then we'll be halfway through the quarter and not see anything from and maybe, yeah, again, they're gonna be able to have success in 30 days. And we have one at LM that's locked up like four contracts, right? He signed up appointments, four contracts in his first third, which is great, but you can't bank on that. You wanna have like a little cushion. 60 days, I'll give you 60 days to perform. And then, like I said, you don't wanna wait till the, when you need them to hire, you need them beforehand.
Mike: 26:16Yeah. No, that makes sense. It takes a while to get people off and running. And then I think one thing that's really unique about your team is everyone is remote. which I mean, I know a lot of companies have a certain amount of remote employees, but very few. Have everyone remote. Can you talk about why you decided to go with that model and how you've made it successful?
Gino: 26:33Yeah, good question. So it's 2018 when I started this business a month after I got my first deal. about a month later. I went to Switzerland. This is my second time going to Europe. I went with my girlfriend at the time and now she's my fiance, so it's not who we broke she was a girlfriend at the time. But no, she lived in Switzerland four years. She took me back to where she grew up and I was like, dang, I want to do this more often. I feel like I got a million dollars in my pocket anyway cause I just made 10 K and I'm like, I could do this for a living. Like I could just go around, we could live in Europe. This is in 2018. I have text messages from it too. Like I text my, I wanna live in Europe, like I want to do this. And so, I knew that I'd wanted to build a virtual model. I don't want to be in an office. I don't wanna be in person going on appointments cuz I can't do that virtually in Europe or I can't do that traveling. So I wanna build this business around that. So that's exactly what sparked it and how we did that. It's just we created a team of great core and great people. Right. And Chandler's a big attest to that. He's the one that hired a lot of those people. Like I told you, when Chandler was joined us, we had about six, seven. Since now, as of today, we are actually have 39 well that's including me. So 38 people on our team. We just hired about like eight people in the last three weeks. But 39 people on our team. And so looking at that, realizing like, Hey look, we've came a long way. Like Chandler had seven, he hired 30 people and we've had people with great core values. We've let go of course of some people. But at the same time, Chandler's done a great job finding people with our core values, sticking with our culture fit like what our culture is. And I think it's a great test. Like why do you think do I think successful? How do I keep it successful is cuz we use Discord. It's like a, pretty much, we're in an office we just started about a year and a half ago, two years ago, discord, and it's changed our game because in the last year it also incorporated offices. So literally everyone in our team, depending on their role at their dispositions, if they're acquisition management, if they're lead management, they have their own office where they join. And I can come in there at any time and literally just put peep in, Hey, how's how you guys doing here? And it kind of makes it more of an office right? As well as having every Friday, a call with our entire team everything that's not work related. This case today was sharing about our culture. What's one thing you like about your culture? So, you know, we're on that call. I mean, we got people from Kansas, people from India, people from Argentina, Venezuela. And so that's what really makes our culture good. That's what made I think the virtual model for us very well is cuz we feel like as if we are in an office with that discord and with that feeling of the culture with those weekly meetings.
Mike: 28:47Is that Discord room? Like it's just a chat, or there's like, you can do audio in there too. Is that what makes it different than a Slack?
Gino: 28:54Yeah. Audio. That's what I'm saying. So it's, so yeah, that's what makes it different than Slack is that there's offices, like literally they're called offices or we call mine. The one I'm in is the AM room and like at any time I can join this room and all my acquisition managers there. So I can literally say, Hey boys, we're changing this up to, I can just go into the room, they can unmute themselves, they can listen to me, or they can even deaf in themselves, which means like if I go in there and they're on a live call, they can just block out and so they don't hear. So that's what makes it different than Slack Exactly. Is that you can do more of that. Like true office like scenarios.
Mike: 29:22yeah. That's pretty cool. And then I know we we're running short on time, but one thing that you guys implemented this year, and you've made a huge difference in your business is your MLS strategy. So for the what that is?
Gino: 29:35Yeah. So great question. So beginning this year we started talking to one of our mentors of ours that did this model of where every single wholesale deal he gets, he puts on that MOS wholesale deal, not wholesale. Right. We're not buying it. And he started teaching us, and we started tweaking it in our own favor in own ways. And so, We pitch everything to a seller in a way that we can get accessibility to the property to list on the multiple listing service. So out of all of our deals this year I would say only probably 5% were not listed on the market, and those are deals that they didn't want us to have any accessibility and we had to buy and put on the market or even some, maybe a rental I bought, but. The strategy we do is, you know, again, just, and I'll go very briefly into it, is if the seller wants us to come up in price, there needs to be a, something that we get in return. We can't just come up 20 K to their price, right? They want one 50. I say I'm at one 30. I can't just come up to one 50. I need to be able to have something given to me as the buyer, right? And so for one, our example, our quick pitch, and I just posted a little bit on my Instagram story, Hey Mike, you want one 15? And by the way, in this scenario, I know I can give'em one 50 because I know I can sell it on the market for 1 95. But as a wholesale deal, you might only be able to sell that property for 1 65, 1 70, right? But I can, I know I can sell it for 1 95, 200 on the market. So I say, Mike, You know I told you in my original offer, cuz we don't give him one 50 at first and my original offer's one 30. You told me there's no way you would come down to one 50 or come down to one 30. You want one 50? That's it. I've asked you twice, you know what, if I could get 1 35 approved and would that work? And you told me no, Gino, you would hang up on me. You would only ever do one 50. So Mike, by the way, I can see that one 50 is important to you, you say? Yeah, it is important for me to get. Okay, well. I believe I have a way I can get you to that one 50. Now I just need you to be flexible with me on one thing. And you would say, what? And I would say, you need to be flexible with me, or could you be flexible with me on accessibility to the property? And you know, you might ask, what do you mean? Well, I need about three or four times a week during our due diligence period to get access to the property, to allow Mike, our retail investors that are accompanied by agents to come through the. now this is the way I can get you one 50. Now if you, if that's something you don't like, then I don't know what we should do. And then by that time, Mike's begging me, he's like no, you can gimme another 20 K and you just need to come to my house three times or four times Yeah. Come on. And so it's again, like it's a perspective shift. Cuz like when I first heard this, I'm like, no one's gonna let you put on the market, but let's think about it. If we can prove to the seller that. We can come up to if the price is so important, so, which we know that 95% of the time, it's not really the close quickly that the sellers care about, we just make it seem as wholesalers that everyone wants to close quickly. It's more of, can I get price? And so we simply just go up to'em and say, look, I can get you it, but you need to do this. They're thinking, oh, okay, do it. Cause they don't even want to even think about listening on the market, even though they know we're doing that. They don't care. We're handling everything for them, right? And they're getting the price they So that's a little bit about the pitch. We do that at most, again, every single deal that we are have access to, we put it on mls. And yeah, it's pretty much a very brief fish. Obviously there's hundreds of objections you could throw at me but just to keep it simple that's basically how it goes down.
Mike: 32:25And that has allowed you guys to just increase your spread on every deal,
Gino: 32:28yeah. Like I was telling you, like we started last year, our average spread was like 25 k and beginning of this year until about, like I told you where the market shifted in June for a disposition side of things, we were averaging 44 k per deal on wholesale. Right? So, you know, that's where, help us get those 500 K or 450 K months. That's what help us get multiple$300,000 months was cuz of that.
Mike: 32:48That's a great margin. I mean, a lot of guys slipping aren't even making, at least in Jacksonville, I can speak, are not making 45,000 on a deal and they're putting a lot of work into it.
Gino: 32:56Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it was a great time. Now, since this was changed, it went down back to like 33.
Mike: 33:00Still pretty solid though, for a wholesale deal.
Gino: 33:02Yeah. It's good. Now that we know, right, the market shifted. We gotta adapt to
Mike: 33:06Awesome man. Oh, looks like we got a comment in here. Alexza says, so you list in the m it in the MLS for your dispo price. I'm not sure what he means by that.
Gino: 33:14Yeah, he maybe means like dispo process or whatever. Yeah. Everything goes on mls. That's our dispo process. We evaluate how we evaluate. This allows us also, Alex, To pay more for properties because now I just offered Mike one 50 cuz I know I can sell it for 1 95 and still make after all fees and commissions make around 30,$35,000. Right? I can spend way more than if Mike was the other wholesaler that says, shoot. Okay, yeah, market value's 1 95, but as an I gotta give an investor some discount. So the most I can offer this seller is, you know, like one 30 cuz I need to make money too. And then I just came up 25 k. And again, you have my calculator where you could actually see the math. But I g I just paid 20 k more than Mike and I made the same money as some, just cuz I had a different dispo strategy. Right. And so, ex answer your question Alex I list it for what it's worth on the market. Cause like, Worth on the market. I don't sell for a, like people say a R V. no. What is the property worth as is on the market? That's what I list it for. Right.
Mike: 34:08What is the As is market value versus what is the wholesale off market value, is obviously significantly less.
Gino: 34:14Exactly.
Mike: 34:15Gino, I know we're running out of time here, so there's always two questions that I like to end with. And you don't do, you don't really do in-person appointments. So this one, you can extrapolate something here, which is what is the most uncomfortable situation that you guys have ever encountered with a seller?
Gino: 34:31Oh, I gotta get one. This will be a 20 minute story, so I'm gonna try to shorten it up. We gave a seller 60 days ahead of time notice to pack up her all her belongings. Because she was, it was during a divorce thing. We bought the property anyway, we gave her 60 x extra days after we bought it. We said, Hey, go pack up all your stuff. We'll help you move your stuff into the truck. Cuz she's like 55 with a kid my age. Right. The kid was actually a little bit older than me and he's like I said, just pack. Come back on day 59 to go get ready to pack her stuff. It was a hoarder. Nothing was been moved, nothing had been even touched. And I'm talking about we talked to her like every like five days do it. She said she was doing nothing. I had the house ready to sell it open door. Three days later already a contract signed with them to buy, to make 90 k off. This was like the height of the right, it was May of 2021 year. And I was like, what? I didn't wanna jeopardize my first deal with open door. Long story short, we spent about two straight days moving this lady's stuff out, packing this stuff for her, not just moving it, packing it. I had about eight people. I got runners and people messaged on or posted on Instagram that came out and helped me. I got threatened pretty much almost with a gun by the sun because we threw away their dog's ashes without knowing it. And it was bad It was a horror But yeah it was just a bad story. It was just like, and that was not the bad part. The bad part is like, yeah, it, there was a lot of bad things that happened. Not on our, we got threatened with a gun before that to we're helping them out cuz I, we didn't have to do it. so the, it was the last and when they started coming out yelling at us, so long story short, we just like, we just told'em, look, you have 12 hours to move all this stuff out. We moved probably 90% of it. So it's not like we left them dry. You have 12 hours we're gonna. A code on it. I'm done helping. Anyway, it was a nightmare. I'm just thinking about it, bro. I hate that. Oh, real quick. Last thing, cuz I know I like Last thing with that, again, that was May, 2021, about two months ago. So a year later, you know, July I get something, the mail, it says state Farm Insurance, the lady's name has requested or filed a claim on your behalf or filed a claim on you for like, Just ruining or whatever it say, you know, legal terms like for destroying her personal property. You have seven days to respond to this. Like, she like filed a claim on me with like State Farm, I haven't heard anything since, but she was trying to like sue me like later, like trying to get money from me. I was like, fuck that, no. Oh, and we about six K to put her in extended stay for three months. Wow. But yeah, we ended up making still like 90 or 85,000 after everything. Wow. That's a crazy story. So that was a long horror story, but that was it.
Mike: 36:48So one final question, Gino. If you could go back to 2019 before you'd done your first deal and you were trying to get it, and you could one thing, knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourself?
Gino: 36:59Knowing what I know now, what would I tell myself? I would probably tell myself, knowing now, text more, text sooner. That just came to my head. I don't know if really that's what I would but that's what I'm thinking right now is like text more. Because like when we started texting, we saw credible responses and that's this year. It's like a 15 x. on like a hundred thousand. Like, it's like a crazy, like we're just texting is the thing that's took us to another level. And it was a thing that would've saved me also. That's probably what I would say because it saved me four months of cold calling nonstop, even though that probably did help me cold calling, getting better at sales and talking. So maybe I wouldn't change it, but it would at least helped me get it some more money
Mike: 37:32cool man. Well if people wanna reach out to you whether they wanna send you deals or JV on a deal in the Atlanta market or for any reason they wanna reach out to you, how can they do that?
Gino: 37:41Yeah man, they can reach out to me on Instagram, Gino, g i n o, underscore just like my name here, underscore twice actually. Columba, P A L O M B A. So you guys can follow me there.
Mike: 37:51Awesome man. Well, thanks for being on the show. We really appreciate you sharing everything with everyone and I'm sure I'll see you soon,
Gino: 37:56For sure. Thanks for having me, Mike. Yes, sir. We'll see you next week. I'll talk to you.
