Episode 88 | Bill Allen | Military Millionaire Podcast

00:00 - 05:00

Alex:

What's up, man?

We're gonna have Bill on. Today he is hosting us for this veterans RAI project, which I'm extremely excited about. Although my guess is we're gonna release this, this is gonna come out. It's got to come up before the event.

David:

Absolutely.

Alex:

Well, I'm speaking about burs. Anybody wants to learn about bur, buy your tickets, come see me speak. And then I already have planned to take over this entire interview. Because Bill is flipping. I'm a new flipper. And so I'm just gonna make this whole thing about myself.

David:

Perfect. Well, I don't really know what else I need to say if you don't know who Bill Allen is. You should. And you will, when you're done listening to this little bill was on my show about a year ago before Alex was a piece of this. And before Bill had taken over seven figure flippers, and so this is going to be entertaining because at the time Bill was Bill, and now bill is a much bigger deal. I mean, he's just got a really cool brand. He's doing very, very good things and honestly, I went to his event last year, and it's just very impressed by what he does and who he is as a person, so it was really cool to be able to get him back on the show.

And yes, we are going to release this before the virtual event. So if you haven't got your tickets, the link will be down in the show notes. The Veterans RAI live, which was going to be in St. Louis. Now it's gonna be virtual, but we've got a whole bunch of veteran real estate investors talking about what they do. I will be talking about networking and content marketing.

Intro:

You're listening to the military millionaire podcast, a show about real estate investing for the working class. Stay tuned as we explore ways to help you improve your finances, build wealth through real estate, and become a person that is worth knowing.

David:

What's up everybody? Its Dave from the military millionaire podcast and I'm here with my co host, Alex Felice and the Mr. Bill Allen, who, for those of you who don't know if you don't know who Bill Allen is, he is now The head of seven figure flippers, which puts on flip hacking live, which is an incredible event that I went to last year. But he's also a Navy pilot still in the reserves, obviously a veteran and runs an extremely successful business wholesaling, flipping, and I could probably go on and on. Bill is just an impressive individual. So I'm gonna shut up and let him take it away. Bill, welcome to the show.

Bill:

Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me back. I remember the first one of these we did. It was a while ago. So a lot of things have changed since then. I think so.

David:

Yeah. Let's hear a little bit about that. But you had not taken over seven figure flippers at that point. So can you kind of walk us through? Well, I guess a little bit about yourself and where you're at right now?

Bill:

Yeah, I think I think when we talked last I was so I was the CEO for the company before that. And so if you know anything about the company, it's, we help other wholesalers and house flippers basically kind of like unlock freedom is kind of the concept that I've created since I've taken over it's it used to be just, let's figure out how to get them to make more money. And when I realized a lot of people come in, it's not necessarily about money, that it starts that way. But some people want a company that does, you know, 2030 houses, some people want a company that does $10 million.

So everybody's a little bit different. So that's the name seven figure flipping. A lot of times people think like, do I already have to be doing seven figures? What does it look like? So we just basically get together and mastermind and help, like, figure out how we can share different concepts, different strategies and things like that to help systemize our business. So we kind of, you know, designers in life, right.

So, it was June or July of last year, it was June of last year in 2019. When the owner, Justin Williams, he came to me and he said, hey, I, um, it's about time for me to start thinking about doing something else. I just, I'm thinking about selling the company, would you be interested in buying it?

We talked a little bit and came to a deal and agreement. And sure enough, by July 1, I own the company and I had to come up with a plan to get a live event together in three months and make changes and redesign all the logos and make it my own.

So I spent A lot of like countless, countless hours working on that in July, August. I still remember it was tough. But we put on a great event for the packing lab. You were there, Dave. So you saw, I think it turned out really, really well. And we're obviously prepping for that now. So that's what that company looks like. And my real estate company has pretty much the same thing that we talked about before my CEOs running it, he's an animal, he's awesome. And there's not a lot that I have to do over there. So it's kind of he's running it day to day, and now I'm working, you know, 60 70 hours in the seven figure flipping company.

David:

Yeah, you I will say on flip hacking live that as far as events go, content wise, that was probably the best event that I've been to is probably the only event that I've been to where I've actually sat and all the sessions. So it was very well done.

Bill:

Well there. that's by design, a lot of times so so the reason people don't sit if you if you run an event or you go to an event, when you get a you get a program and it has every topic and the time, that there's there's speaking, you'll, you'll look in there and say, I don't really need to see that. I'm gonna go take a call during this, this one.

05:00 - 10:00

Bill:

And so I specifically designed the event not to tell people exactly who's speaking with the topics or things like that this is the session. Because what I found is that a lot of times we don't know what we need when we come to events like that. And it's very easy to miss something.

So if you've ever come to any of my events, or anything that we do, I'm just I'll apologize ahead of time, I'm not going to tell you who's speaking when, I'm not going to answer you. When you ask me. Like, when is this person on? Because I know that what you're doing when people come to an event, they look at the program, they're like, what event can I skip? And sometimes like that one thing, you need that one thing and you don't know what it is, if you knew what it was, you don't even need to go there. Like, you would have already figured it out. Like you came here to find the Epiphany to get that one little tip that's gonna change your business and you could miss it.

So I highly recommend if you're gonna pay the money, you're gonna fly out to these events, attend the whole thing, like sit through it. And look, I've gotten up and left but at least I checked the speaker like if the speaker is not holding me, it's just not good then sure, maybe I'll make a transition. But it's my job to figure out how to, like you said, put every speaker on there that's gonna hold your attention and give you content. So same thing with the event that we have coming up. So..

Alex:

I need that so badly because I go to conferences and for me, it's just vacation. Let's hang out at the bar for three days straight. And I go to very few sessions generally, and probably to my detriment.

Bill:

Yeah, you know it, so I was that way too. I love going to events but the interesting thing is I'm more of the like the facts seeker. I'm more of like the knowledge I'm taking my I take the notebook there and I just take notes and notes and notes and notes. And, and then there's people who just want to network like they go there. They want to talk like they're just people. They're just people. Right? And it's not that so you guys. Yeah. So yeah, you're gonna be over by the bar, you're gonna be chatting, you're gonna be like, I can get more out of this in small groups than I can in like, you know, one to many presentations.

So I understand that. That's why we try to structure it where we have a lot of that built into for those people. But a lot of time and that might be what you think you need. So it's my, you know, our job is we put on events like that to figure out how, how do we hit the 80%? Like, how do we make 80% of the people happy? And, and how do we make sure that we, you know, deliver, and it's set up to deliver that content correctly. Like, Dave, you probably saw it, it takes I take seven months to design that event and plan it. And we, we throw ideas out and we scrape them and then we change it. And even before the event, like we're still fine tuning it the day before we're fine tuning the program.

And like making changes in real time we're making changes but it has to build a certain way and it's by design like this speaker than this speaker they build on each other or these concepts or strategies or structure of real estate investing.

And if you just throw the speakers in there randomly the audience doesn't feel like they're watching. Almost like a movie or like a play right? You're seeing three days it is building on itself and kind of going up and going down. So I have an awesome event planned. Like without them, I would just be like throwing stuff at the wall right? I'm not. I'm not that smart. So.

David:

Also, I dream that one day I'm cool enough to have an intro video like yours was for the event. That was solid. I was watching your intro video. I'm like, man, like, getting pumped. Like, Hey, I know this guy. Hey, who's this? Whoa, oh, Superman. And anyway, so yeah.

Bill:

Yeah, I agree. My videographer did an awesome job on that. I told him what the concept of what I just said was like, I want this song. And, and then he came up with the whole concept and did it all . The first time I saw it was like I was like, 11 o'clock the night before because we were just working nonstop on that. And yeah, it was good. I agree that he did an awesome job. Andre is amazing. So..

Alex:

Speaking of videography, talk about YouTube.

Bill:

That is a very broad question. So talk to you about YouTube. So I don't know. I don't know anything about YouTube.

Alex:

Do you have a Youtube show coming out?

Bill:

We do have a YouTube show coming out. So you know, it wasn't necessarily designed for YouTube because I don't. So I'm trying to learn YouTube. So I think social media is interesting, right? So everybody, every channel is a little bit different. So I do, I've done some Facebook Lives where I'll go publish on Facebook.

And the interesting thing that I find about Facebook is, it's just like a newspaper, where it's just like, you don't go read the newspaper from last week or two days ago or last month, people don't save newspapers, they throw them out, right? So your content just goes down and down and down on Facebook. So why live streaming is great, I get views unless I boost right pay traffic and run ads to it. That content is gone. like nobody's watching reruns of my talk show. Right? And so Instagram, you know, that's, I'm, I'm working on that. I'm trying to figure that out a little bit. My team just forced me over there. I have like 200 friends on Instagram or Twitter followers, whatever you call it. So like, I'm trying to figure that out personally, right?

10:00 - 15:00

Bill:

And that's a little bit different, like what goes over there where people are following hashtags and seeing images and, and different things. And then I think the interesting thing about YouTube is, YouTube is a place where it's more like a sitcom. It's like a Seinfeld area where people can come and like, watch your stuff and watch your shows, they can watch reruns, and they can see all these different things.

So this the concept here where we created the show, like we created the show before we decided where to put it. Right. So the concept for the show was, we have all these amazing members that are doing really cool stuff. And so what can we do with that, like, how can we have this great videographer who, like Dave said, he produced this awesome intro. I specifically hired him. He's my lead manager in my other company. She's now my sales manager and my real estate company. It's her husband. When I bought the company, I said, I need somebody to do this retirement video that I want to create for the previous owner as a gift.

And we created this thing and I was like, This is so awesome. Like, how can I hire you full time and we figured it out. I moved him up here to Nashville. He quit his other job right away. full time. And so now we said, okay, what can we do? And so we're creating a show about a guy who's been flipping houses in seven days, like 30 $40,000 rehab houses. In seven days, we created the show. And I said, Where should we put it? How should we do it? And I've been personally playing around with YouTube with some of the care act PPP stuff, and I've been able to get, you know, 5000 views on a video of mine a couple thousand views. Well, when I only have like, we have like 100 subscribers then so it's like, what works like thumbnails content like I was I played around with it for months, right?

So behind the scenes of everything like you see, I mean, we could get conceptually what happens in business too. You see this person who's like this overnight success but they've been working nonstop at it to try to figure it out. Like I've been putting in the time on my own trying to figure it out reading about it researching and all this stuff. So we have this video that came out of this and I saw the video and I said the first we saw I saw the first three episodes like a rough cut of them. And I said Holy smokes like this is this is better than I thought it was gonna be like I knew it was gonna be good because I know the videographer but it is I think, I feel like we have taken like pulled the curtain back from HGTV, like the we're gonna make this much money and this is we put real life people real life house flipping into a 10 it'll be 10 to 12 episodes.

And I said, Okay, what are we going to do with this? Like how are we going to roll it out? What's the launch strategy going to be like? Where does it go? Where does it work? How do we drive traffic to it and doesn't make sense to put it on Facebook or Instagram or any of these other places like YouTube seems to be the only place to house something like this. People can keep going back to it, they can watch it. It's almost like you can binge on Netflix just like you can on these YouTube videos.

And then it'll recommend the next one. So anyway, long answer to your very short question of Tell me about YouTube. That's kind of how I landed on YouTube for the show. And like the idea and concept that I have for it, and I can tell you how I plan to launch it if that's where you want to go.

Alex:

No actually the Evergreen binge piece is the piece that I've been focusing on for six months now. I do my own videography, and I'm kind of doing my own flips. I don't have the I'm behind where you are. It sounds like but I'm ramping up extremely fast those same reasons. I like that it's evergreen. I like that it's binge worthy. And I like that. Well, all I do is real. So I figure over time.

YouTube is tremendous and is a tremendous magnet. So no, I mean, what I was curious was if you look, that was my strategy. And so it sounds like, well, if you're right, then I'm right.

Bill:

Well, we'll find out if I'm right. But I think I think the answer here is like each piece of content, there's, there's a different strategy for what you're creating. And like, what I really, I see, the problem that I have is I want to do it all, right? I want to be like, okay, I got this thing at Facebook. I got YouTube, we have Instagram, we have like, what do we do with it all? Like, where does it go? We don't use all the other stuff like tik tok and Periscope and all this other stuff that people are also your Twitter, like, I'm not on Twitter. I just don't understand that platform.

It's just not me and the problem that I have is if we lose focus on that, like right now and podcast. So I have a podcast, and the podcast is probably our number one. A traffic source like number one traffic source for me is my podcast. So when we started getting on YouTube, I just said, well, why don't we just take our podcast? And we record video just like this? Why don't we post it on YouTube? People are gonna watch it, right? No, they're not. Like, you're not just gonna watch an hour long podcast and be doing an interview on there. It's my talk show, right? Like, people are gonna listen to it in the gym and carry around. So some people will watch it on YouTube. And you know, who does it's the people who are on YouTube that are also like, follow us already. It's not like new subscribers and new traffic that are gonna watch that.

And then so we played around with thumbnails. And I was like, man, we are not cracking this code. So you got a couple options. You can quit or you can figure out okay, what's the what's the strategy now. So now what we do is we're building up pressure, like I want to build up pressure for the show, and then I want to launch it. So like we're gonna my plan for this is I'm going to launch it on Monday night at eight o'clock Central. And we're like, I have a community of people that follow me that are that that, you know, will follow us that Tyler Tyler Johnson is the guy in Salt Lake City who's doing it.

15:00 - 20:00

Bill:

And we 'll be watching with us, I'll be commenting on it, we'll be talking, we'll watch it like a premiere, like a live premiere. And it'll be scheduled, it'll all be ready to go.

And then the next thing that we're going to do is I'm going to do a YouTube Live, later in the week to talk about that episode. So the episode is going to drop once a week. And it'll be the same time, same week premiere once a week. And I don't know, we'll see what happens. Like it's not, it's not done yet. I don't know if it's but I'll tell you the content is so good that I am excited about the future of it.

David:

Well, the other cool thing, I mean, you both mentioned evergreen, and you're spot on because I've shot, I've got a video that still gets like 40 views a day and I it's over a year old and I'm nothing special on the video. But the other big thing with YouTube is that it's owned by Google. So it's the second largest search engine in the world. And so you can rank videos on YouTube that show up and so I've got a video or something now where if you type in, you know, whatever keyword, my face pops up as the video above my blog even does for that. So, yeah, YouTube's YouTube's huge if you get the right content. And so I think that also very well.

Alex:

Also YouTube works on momentum. So the bigger you get on YouTube, the more that YouTube drives people to you.

And so it's a, it's a persistence game for sure I've got a buddy who's been doing it, and he's, he's just doing talking heads, but he's been doing it long enough now. And it's like, well, he got 2000 subscribers and then got 5000 really quick, and now he's up to 25,000. It's making them real money. And it's he's not doing anything different. It's just I think YouTube doesn't want to reward the people who have been doing it for three months.
They want to reward the people who have been doing it for three years, for that exact reason. Because they want you to have enough content, they can go back and binge.

Bill:

Yeah, I agree. And I think that just if anybody's listening and wants to get into content creation, the thing that I found is you expect a result right away. And that's the problem that we have a lot of times. What I think you want to do is you want to just constantly publish and create stuff and put content out there and see what works and see what doesn't work and test different things. Like I was testing different thumbnails, I took my iPad for my Kerouac stuff. I just wrote words on there to create different thumbnails. Like if you go to our seven figure flipping YouTube channel, you'll see I have a Kazakh section where I was talking about PPP, the 10 I, I basically was creating those videos for my community.

Anyway, I was going to drop them in my private Facebook group for our mastermind members, and my public Facebook group. And I said, you know what, I'll drop them in there, but I'll just put the link from YouTube in there, like put on YouTube and there's one that like 5000 people found it so then I'm like, Okay, what did I do? What I write in the description is to learn more and more about it, but the thing is, with content is like how many so there's a there's a marketing guy that I follow. His name's Russell Brunson. You guys may have heard of him. But he talks a lot about this. Just publishing is so important because how many Netflix shows did you hear about on season five, or season six, and then you go back and watch season one right? The same thing with content publishing, like you talked about Alex, like, take three years sometimes to get going. But if you stop creating and stop publishing, then your show never makes it to season two or season three. So people will go back to season one. So what I'm telling people right now is season one episode one of this, because this is not going to be the end of this by any means for me.

Like we already have plans to shoot the next show in the show after that. And we're like, I have four shows on the storyboard right now that we're going to create 10 or 12 episodes. So I know that the people that now I'm going to get in front of season one, episode one, how many? How many shows how many? When did you drop off of 20 for season five, season six, season four, like, everybody's when you stopped watching last season for season five, season seven, but everybody stops watching it, but who? Who stopped who didn't watch season one, episode one.

Everyone watched it. So it's interesting to think about that. And as I'm talking to people who are being involved in this and maybe could have a little piece of this. That's the conversation that I'm having with them because I don't know how big it's gonna get. But I'm excited about it. I think it's, I think It's got some legs, and I don't usually feel like everything that we do. I'm not usually as excited about it as I am this.

David:

Well, and it's exponential, like you said, like my channel grew has grown over 30% in the last month and and it's just as it as it gains momentum and as you get better at it, but as you gain

Bill:

That's cuz you brought Alex on.

David:

Well I walked in.

Alex:

Post that on Instagram that's a quote that's a that's a that's a content piece right there.

David:

Thank you for everything you do for me. Oh, humble pink shirt. Oh, my gosh. But you're right, though, on the YouTube video. So Alex, you'll appreciate this on Tuesday and Thursday. Next week, Scott trench is gonna have two more. I basically took small clips, two different clips out of that podcast post them because I had the same realization that Bill had been like, nobody watches the full podcast. So I took I'm starting to I'm trying to play with taking clips out of those two put up a little YouTube video like Bill Allen talks about this and just like that clip to see how those do as well.

20:00 - 25:00

Bill:

Well the other great thing to do with those smaller clips is you take those and then you repurpose them on the on the platforms where people will watch a minute so we put we'll take a minute of something and put it on Instagram and or under a minute and then we'll take some other stuff and put it on Facebook or I'll run a Facebook ad.

So I will create content from the from the YouTube TV show whether it's a trailer for the next episode or the trailer for the first episode or something we'll create that specifically for another platform or that you know, that can repurpose on both platforms, but I can't put an hour long TV show on Facebook just people are just put yourself into like, what are you doing when you're watching this stuff? Like you're sitting at your computer watching YouTube, and you're not just gonna sit there for an hour like most people are scrolling on Facebook or like unfortunately they're like on the toilet usually. So I think about that when I'm running ads for my company to my we run ads for our house house buying company.

So what are people doing? They're usually in bed like if you don't have if you don't have subtitles, like who turns the audio on? Just think about how you use it, how to use the platform and what's the purpose of it? And then what are those? What do the owners of the platform want to do with it? Like you said, Google owns YouTube. So they want to turn it into the search engine. So what does your description say? What do your titles say? Like, how do people find it? So that's what I had to realize. I was like, I'm not gonna write anything in the description. Well, I do now I've read very specific keywords and to make sure that it's it's I played with keywords nonstop for like a month with that care stuff to try to figure out and that's when that one kind of took off. And so I said, Okay, I got something here. I started to understand it.

David:

Whoooh I finally got, I got an email yesterday, I got the loan. I'm not..

Bill:

Oh, nice.

David:

I don't think I'm taking it though. They offered me a whopping four grand with a 30 year payback and I'm like, I don't feel like going to the government for 30 years for something that's not going to make a dent in my finances. So I'm gonna go ahead and say thanks, but I'm gonna be okay.

Alex:

Also important to note that Facebook and YouTube are competitors. So if you post your YouTube content on Facebook, it ranks low, as far as I'm told, because I don't want you to leave Facebook to go to Google essentially.

Bill:

Yep. That makes sense.

Yeah. And it's the same thing with ads on Facebook, like if I can, Facebook is definitely going to, you're going to prioritize my ad if I run it and keep them on Facebook instead of driving them to my website. So you really have to think about where you're driving your traffic, how you're capturing their information, and all that stuff plays into your strategy with all of it. So.

Alex:

So at the event.

David:

Yeah, I was saying we were moving to the event now?

Sounds like we're moving the event.

Bill:

Yeah.

Well, before we do that, you have a YouTube channel. So I want my, my show is going to be called the seven day flip. So I'm going to try to run ads on David's platform towards my YouTube channel, but I think it's gonna be like that. That's gonna be fun, like the, I think, I think a lot of your listeners, I think anybody can watch it. I think like, just uh, if somebody's watching HDTV right now, I'm hoping that we could create like the platform that's going to just crush them because this is like real, real people Flipping Houses and I'm excited to see what Alex what you put together too. And I'm sure we can learn a lot from each other with what sounds like you're, I've been watching your videos. Like I said, I subscribe to your channel.

I'm watching the biggest thing right now if you're getting into content creation or what you're doing, whether you're a podcaster, Facebook or YouTube or Instagram or Twitter or Snapchat or tik tok, or whatever, you know, think about like, just focus on one I might record, start there and then figure out like, what is your strategy and build it out?

So like I have a production strategy for our four channels of production is like, how do we produce that? What kind of content are we doing and what's our, what's our delivery schedule, like Tuesday and Thursday, my podcasts come out Tuesday and Thursday. Everybody should know that. Those are the days that's it. That's our publishing program.

So I hack the pros like I'm watching everybody. If somebody's got a bunch of followers, I go follow them and I say like, what are they posting? What's working? Same thing on Instagram. I'm, I only I'm trying to figure out Instagram right now. So I only follow like 20 people but I followed the 20 people that are in my dream 100 that I'm watching what they're I'm seeing it and I'm saying what's working? What's the most like that they're getting? What's happening? And then I'm trying to ask, can I recreate that stuff? So try and figure it out.

David:

Alex, it sounds like you need to go watch Bill's video so you can learn how to record stuff.

Alex:

I subscribed. Well, you know, I like I said, I do videography. So for me, this is both a challenge in real estate, but it's also a creative challenge for me storytelling through video. Because I could, I wouldn't hire the I can't hire a videographer yet. But I also like the creative aspect.

So for me, it's more of a deeper personal endeavor, a challenge to video storytelling, but so part of my channel is me learning videography, but also telling stories about real estate.

What's interesting, though, about the way you described your story, what you're trying to produce is, I have been quietly producing a 12 part series for BiggerPockets about real investors where we do probably not the same as you but similar with people of different backgrounds, and we're trying to do you know, HGTV for real estate investors.

Instead of HGTV for homeowners. So I don't know what you sell. Do you have a great video production guy? So I'm still kind of new at it, but it's one of those things where I don't ever I don't care about season one. I care about season six. And so I'm playing for season six.

25:00 - 30:00

Bill:

Awesome. Yeah, it sounds like we're doing something pretty similar like that's like I want to show real estate investors like what's possible we're not we're not gonna dive into the like all like they put the thing up there. They bought it for this they like it's it's really about like, just showing it like, I want to challenge. We want to challenge the status quo. Like can these guys get a house flipped in seven days that has $40,000 renovation costs like can they do it and then show you how and show you it's actually happening? This is real life. And I mean, they had some crazy things that happened. There was an earthquake in Salt Lake City where Coronavirus happened and there was a meth house. The government was shut down like all this crazy stuff happens inside of here. It's just, I mean, the cool thing is we don't reveal whether they got it done until the end. So we'll see.

David:

Like it.

Alright, so veterans live. Talk to me. I mean, that's my vague Alex style question. Did I yeah..

Bill:

This is an interesting, interesting interview here. It's like, YouTube, tell me veterans live. Tell me. So, you know, it's funny because the three of us on this call are actually speakers at this event at this event. And we're actually talking about like, kind of Dave's presentation, right, this content marketing side of things, right. And, becoming a publisher.

And so I don't know when it was, but it was probably like six months ago. Now, it's probably probably four, four months ago was like, hey, we've got all these all these veterans, all these active duty military folks like building their own communities that seemed like a little silo, and kind of working together kind of not, but everybody kept telling me, like, I want to do a live event. We should do a live event. I want to do a live event. I was like, okay, well, when just go do it. They're like, well, I don't know how to do it. I don't know any of this stuff, the typical objection right to just go out and do it. It's like, I don't know, I don't know enough. I need to learn more. And I said, Well, I've done a bunch of live events. So why don't we just figure it out? If we put it on the calendar, we schedule it, and I booked a place, and I get a hotel, and I put my money at risk.

And kind of the Field of Dreams concepts, right? If we build it, they'll come. people show up. And we did that. So may 29. And 30th. We booked a hotel in St. Louis. And then we started saying, okay, who's going to talk? Who's going to speak at this? Who do you guys know? And we wanted it to be something. Initially, the concept was more like, the attendees will primarily be military folks, right? Veterans, active duty, reservists. And now we kind of have said, does it does it matter? Like we had to take a virtual obviously, with COVID-19. I remember our first call all together. We're like, forget it. It's No big deal when it doesn't matter, we're going to keep going.

And I made the deposit on the hotel. And sure enough, it did become an issue, right? We couldn't travel. I mean, the god I can't even go back down to Pensacola from Nashville until after June 30. I can't I can't even go back to my reserve unit until July at the earliest right now.

So that's just not gonna happen. So we went virtual. And all these speakers we went out and we kind of created a list, we put the call out and said, do you want to speak to this? What would you speak about? What's your topic like? And we had like this draft pick, right? kind of had a list of one, two and three.

And the first person that we reached out to you said yes, in every niche, and we basically just found, like, what would somebody who is interested in real estate investing is coming out of the military or is just getting started or an experienced investor who might be looking at a different channel, and we're trading in kind of we brought in kind of experts from each industry or each niche inside of real estate, I should say, and they're gonna speak on their topic. So on the thing that they're really good at telling their story a little bit about, like, teaching some of their concepts their topic and then we got 20 we got 20 sessions over two days. And I'm excited about it. I'm pumped about it.

David:

We don't have to lie to Alex. We can tell him he was the fourth or fifth pick.

Alex:

Save the best for fourth.

Bill:

Yeah, so I'd say Dave, like, I know, I don't know you guys well enough to really rub on you that much. But Alex does seem to be like the, he does seem to be like the guy. I picked up on a few things. So I just like to jump in. The, you know, the, the interesting thing is I reached out to Dave and Stu Grazer, so Stu and I know each other from the Navy from the fleet. We are both helicopter pilots over in San Diego. And, and I know they were building communities and stuff like that. So they jumped into help. And some of the other real estate folks that have some bigger networks and we just said...

30:00 - 35:00

Bill:

Who do you guys know? Because I only knew a handful of people, there's probably only three or four people that I know who were active duty or events. And fortunately, they knew a bunch of people. And we kind of just said, okay, what do we want? What kind of topics do we want? And who do we want to go after? And everybody said, Yeah, and they're showing up. And I know he's giving you a hard time. But you're obviously Alex, you're obviously the first first pick.

So it's, I think it's great. I mean, the people that we have speaking are amazing. They're doing some incredible things. And they're not necessary. Not all of them are necessarily the, like the biggest player in that industry. But their story is directly relatable to events like they know what the veterans have gone through. Like, we didn't go out to the number one podcast or the number one coach or the number one thing like that, like, it's, it's more about motivating and inspiring people based on their story.

And they know the audience, they know the people that we're trying to come across, like, get across to, and they're gonna be amazing. So I'm excited. I think just right now. In all honesty, like the struggle is when you have something really, really good. We talked about publishing and content creation, right?

When you have something that's really, really good, the struggle is how do you get it out there? Like how do more people find out about it? How do you get something like this in the hands of everyone, because it's not expensive, it's cheap, to show up, you get all the recordings, you can go back and reference it on a regular basis. You don't even have to be there. And 100% of the money goes to charity, not like 100% of the profits, not like 100% of like the money that comes in minus paying me for my time and day for his time and stupid and all the speakers and travel and all the stuff like the speakers paid to buy a ticket to the live event. And then I asked them if they wanted their money back and nobody asked for their money back. They said just put it towards a charity. This is really amazing to see that kind of dedication.

So we just agreed on the charity that we're gonna push the money towards, and it's a charity called the veterans community project. And they build tiny houses for homeless veterans, and it's like $35,000 to donate a house so I'm hoping we can at least build one house with the money that we bring in. And so like, my biggest thing is how do we get it out there to more people? So obviously, this is a good way and share it with a bunch of people that you know.

David:

Absolutely. It's gonna be..

Alex:

I'm very excited about it.

I'm very excited, and I'm going to deliver upon you the greatest piece of value that I can to the people who attend, because I want to make sure that you know, everybody, well, certainly, I'm happy that the money is going to charity. And then I also want to make sure that people get as much value as I can out of it. And despite all my smack talk and pink t-shirts, I know what I'm talking about, and I'm happy to I'm really excited to share with people.

David:

Well, you know, Bill, we talked, I was one of the people who mentioned that I wanted to start a live event at some point and had this excuse where I'm locked in a windowless vault and don't have a life.

Alex:

And I'm really glad that you decided, sorry, I'm cutting off all day.

David:

It's normal. The whole show is used to it. You can go for it.

Alex:

I'm really excited that you got that we will let you go. We're gonna do this if we switch to virtual we're gonna do it anyways because I think it sets a really good statement and a really good stage for next year when it is live. You know?

Bill:

Yeah, and you mentioned season six right? Of the show and that's what I think that's what we're playing for here, too. So definitely here and you know it this wasn't something where it's pre planned big agenda, stuff like that. We can't have it, we're not gonna make enough money. Let's cancel it like and the big testament to all the speakers too is that I said, Hey, we're gonna go virtual you guys don't want to do it? And they're like, Yeah, absolutely. I'll still say not a single one of them dropped out, not a single one. In fact, one of them that actually couldn't make the live event actually said yeah, I will do it now, I can do it. And I think it also allows for other people to attend that are deployed that are overseas that maybe they can't even make those two days but they want to join, get a ticket and grab the recordings afterwards.

You know, it gives us the opportunity to do lots of different things. We would have recorded it professionally anyways, and in giving out the recordings of the live event and stuff. And we, we've done, my company's done a couple live, like live virtual events, I call them. So there's these live events that we would do live, but we do them in a virtual environment. And we've gotten really good at creating like more of an experience than just a long webinar, a two day podcast or something, where we're really going to focus on the experience that the person that's coming has, and we've gotten good at it. And this is going to be another way that we can, we can deliver and I think people will be pleasantly surprised with what they get from a two day virtual event. Because you know, virtual events sound like I'm gonna be sitting by my computer watching, not interactive, not an experience, not any of that stuff. And we're gonna change how they feel about that at this event. So I'm excited about it. It'll allow us to show what we can really do and test us.

35:00 - 40:00

David:

Yeah, it's gonna be awesome.

Alex:

It's gonna be awesome.

David:

All right. So we've talked about YouTube. We've talked about events, but we haven't talked at all about real estate. So I am going to ask something kind of in that sphere what I guess it's not directly in that sphere but what do you think is the biggest thing you've learned over the last year with all your growth because I know you you have essentially replaced yourself for for a decent majority at your at your job and your business has grown exponentially. So I'm just curious like what are some of the biggest lessons you've taken out of everything that you've done over the last year?

Bill:

People.

People are the number one thing so the only reason that I'm not in the day to day operations in my company is because my CEO is an absolutely amazing individual. He's uh, he's incredible and and his leadership team, like our sales manager, our marketing director, our lead intake reps, the dispositions manager, everybody on the team like the the leadership team, the, my, my CFO, like all of those people are just phenomenal at what they do and they're truly dedicated to the company.

So I think the leadership aspect that we learned in the military that we see throughout our lives, whether you're a military person or not, but you're you're leading yourself on a regular basis, you're leading your mindset, the way that you think obviously your community, your family, your, your church, group anything. And to think back, like, that's what it's all about is building a team. It's, I have a bunch of systems and processes and all these things. And people always say, oh, you're the system's guy, like, what's the system? Give me the system. Like, it's the people. It's just it's finding the people and it's, it's inspiring them and motivating them and casting the vision to them so they can see where they're going and get, like, get the buy in from it. So that's the biggest thing for me is everybody's looking for that silver bullet.

And, you know, what it is, is just surrounding yourself with and it doesn't have to be full time staff like I have, it can be contractors, it can be the people that you work with, but, and the first step in all of that, what I've realized is it's your core values. So figure out who you are, first, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and then you don't need to go like Alex is talking about like, I can't hire a videographer, because it's what I love to do and what I'm really good at and, and he shouldn't, he should go figure out his weaknesses and hire those things out and like, pour into the strengths and make them really, really strong. And that's something that I hear people talk about all the time. It's like strength and working on your weaknesses. Like no, don't like to forget about them, like, be okay with having, like, figured out how you can turn that weakness into a strength some other way. And that's delegation. It's elevating and delegating yourself. So I think that's the biggest thing for me is I was afraid to hire that first person. I was deathly afraid of it. And over the last year, I mean, I have like 3540 people that work for me full time. So in two different companies, and so I'm kind of addicted to it like really figuring out how to just move the puzzle pieces, the chess pieces around the board and get the right people in the right seats when you have that explosive growth.

So that's my biggest recommendation is like, you got to get over that at some point like bringing in that first person or hiring that person or hiring something out because there's other people that can do it. 10 times better than you do.

Alex:

Your weaknesses, somebody else's strengths? Don't Don't try to be good at what they're good at. Let them do it.

Bill:

Yeah, yeah. Dan Sullivan has an awesome concept of who not how. And Dave, you've probably heard me talk about it. I talked about flip hacking live a little bit.

But everybody tries to figure out how to do that. So that's my problem, right? You probably heard that in the beginning, like, I'm on YouTube, trying to figure out like, how it works and stuff like that.

So I have an engineering background, I like to figure out the way things work. It's a little bit of sometimes the problem that I have, like, I have trouble giving things up. I've learned over time that I need to do that. But instead of figuring out how to do it, what happens is entrepreneurs, they get in a circle, they hit a wall, and they say, you know what, I got to figure out how to build a website.

So then they spend all this time building a website, then they have their website up, and they're like, okay, now I got to figure out how to drive traffic to my website to get leads. And so now then they go figure out how to do that. And eventually they just start like, I'm just not good at this. I can't do it and they quit and they walk away, they do something else.

But instead of that, if you can figure out what you're really good at and figure out those who like who already knows how to do that. You take the person who knows, already already knows how to do that you plug them in. And then the two of you like they already know you're saving time. Like you can just go you're going in the same direction, let them do that stuff. Like, I hate talking on the phone. And when I started driving traffic and led to my real estate business, I didn't want to send any more mail out or any more marketing because the phone would ring more. And I don't like talking on the phone. When I hired somebody to talk on the phone. I was like, send the mail. Like, I'd dump more money at it. It's working dumb, more money. And then I hated going on the appointments like I hated leaving my family on a Saturday to go sit in somebody's house for three hours to tell me they don't know how much their house is worth. And then I give them an offer and they kick me out and say I'd rather burn my house down for that.

They go out to the porch and they say that house sold for this house. I was like, we could have saved me three hours. I just wanted some company. It's like lonely, and I'm leaving my family for three hours. So when I hired a sales rep to go into houses and do that, who was who loved their job, that's what they liked to do. They don't mind spending some time with somebody trying to build a report, then I said, Okay, let's go on all the appointments like I don't care if they want retail, I don't care if they want double retail, go on the appointments, send them.

40:00 - 45:00

Bill:

And that's when the business took off. Because I was able to do the things that I'm really good at, which is turning the dials in the back end, like looking at the money looking at, like sending the marketing, doing all that stuff, looking at the KPIs, looking at the numbers. And if you're not good at that stuff, hire somebody to do that. And you do the sales side.

David:

Love it. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Not that I'm anywhere near that level yet. But I've hired a few virtual assistants that have just, I mean, just just the ability to have someone else edit my videos or my podcasts. I mean, that saves me 234 hours, everything I do, and it's allowed me to go from one or two videos a week to right now I'm doing four.

And, you know, it's incredible. And I also do not like the fielding of the phone calls. So which is funny, I think it's just I get flashbacks from recruiting duty, but it's like, yeah, so..

Alright, so I do have a few questions that I always ask. I guess and the first one is if anyone was to walk up to you looking for life advice, what would be the first thing that you would want to tell them?

Bill:

Get your financial house in order first.

Is that short enough for you?

Like I see a lot of early enlisted folks that will buy that new car or overextend themselves, keep up with the Joneses. really figure out your savings plan, your investment strategy and figure out like your financial house. Yes, yeah,

Alex:

And buy a Mustang.

Bill:

You don't buy a Mustang.

Unless, actually you can buy a Mustang by 1987 like a two liter Mustang.

David:

Just don’t mind the 30% interest.

Bill:

Look, I'd say look around, look around at the people that you want to emulate. And like the interesting thing is on the surface like everything is that is not what it seems. So the person who you're sitting next to on the airplane who is dressed, I don't know like me, t shirt, shorts, sandals, flip flops, like like a Alex pink shirt like you know they might be have $10 million in the bank like that that's the kind of you go read the Millionaire Next Door and just execute on that okay.

David:

I like it.

Alex:

Yeah stop chasing the consumer as a dream like wearing fancy clothes and a nice car. It's like those people now I know that I'm painting with a broad brush but I've been in finance and consumer and commercial lending for a very long time.

The people who are the flashiest are generally in the worst shape or I wouldn't say the worst shape but it's not they're the flashiness far out seeds exceed what they really have in my experience. And like you said, the guy who dresses with a pink shirt, right like that guy has his stuff together.

I mean, just you know, for an example.

David:

Oh man, all right. So if you had to recommend something, what resource, whether that's a book, course or website, would you recommend anyone looking to get started in real estate?

Bill:

Hmmm. It's hard like, here's, here's my recommendation for this.

Everybody seems to start, like in the same place.

Part of the reason why I wanted to put this veterans RAI live event together was because I don't think you need to start in one place. So you don't think you need to start as a wholesaler, I don't think you need to start as a flipper, I don't think you need to start with the same book. I don't think you need to start with the same course.

Like, I'm really big on personal development. I read a lot, but I used to, I used to try to read 50 books a year. And that was like a goal for me because I saw somebody else do it. And I was like, Oh, they read 50 books a year, they got to be really smarter CEOs read all these books.

And I did that for two years. And I was getting some nuggets but I wasn't implementing anything. And it was what it was doing that was causing confusion for me. Like I wasn't focused, it was giving me like I have I have too many ideas and a lot of times I have trouble filtering them down and focusing on them.

And so what now I tell people is go figure out like what you need now what do you need today to make forward and go do that, like read that book, follow that person and look for somebody that you that you relate to that you can kind of you you, you could follow like they have your core values, you're attracted to them, their core, their values, those kind of things and follow them, like listen to what they say do they say, and that's what I did.

I locked out to drop into the right group around the right people from the start the very first, but you can start with a commercial real estate, you can start with mobile home parks, you can start flipping, you can start wholesaling, you can start as a landlord, you can start lending money, you can start there, like you don't have to start, like here at the bottom and say, I got to start as a whole so everybody's like, oh, start wholesaling cuz it doesn't take any money. Well, I have plenty of thoughts on that too.

So as like a volume wholesaler that we do $3 million or more in profit per year, like I know what it takes to do it. Right. And so I got a lot of feelings on what I'd say, there's very specific books that I would recommend for very specific areas and places.

45:00 - 48:20

Bill:

But just go find your world like find your tribe, find your community, listen to a bunch of stuff in the beginning, like take in a bunch of information and say, I'm not interested that I mentioned that I miss you that my recommendation is come to our event that come to veterans RAI live, because you will hear 20 different people tell their story, their niche, and you'll say it's like a job fair. It's a career fair for real estate investors or potential real estate investors.

They say, Oh, I can do that. Like I had that skill set. Like Alex said, that's my strengths. I'm gonna go do that. So I've never seen an event like that before. Everybody's like, Oh, I got to spend a bunch of money on a multifamily event. I gotta spend so much money going to real estate and or the flipping event the wholesaling event.
So I mean, obviously, I'm really proud of the stuff that we put out, but it's not for everybody. It's not and I know that everybody's got their own community, you go find the place that you like, find your tribe, and just go all in there. Go all in there.

David:

I love it.

Oh, and for the record, for those of you listening, it's not just for veterans, you can go to the event if you're not a veteran. So although most of you listening to this are veterans so it's probably pointless for me to say, that being said.

Bill, where can people get a hold of you? What's the best? What's the best of the social platforms you're experimenting with?

Bill:

Well, the interesting thing is, is people that are watching this are probably on YouTube. So you can go to our YouTube channel, a seven figure flipping YouTube channel, so you can subscribe there, you can watch our show, the seven day flip series that we have coming out. Everybody's got their own place. That's the thing like everybody's got their own world that they live in, right if they're on Facebook, we got a Facebook group, a seven figure flipping group, if you go to websites, I'm finger flipping will show you all that stuff.

Instagram, obviously, I've been trying to give a shout out for that for me, because I don't have any friends. So I'm Bill Bill Allen RAI on there.

So @BillAllenRAI, I'll be testing you'll see I'm testing a lot of stuff. Alex, you might like it. I just put up a bunch of pictures of my trip to Africa last year, some awesome photography. So if you like photography, I was like, let me try and see what these pictures of the Safari or like, you know, are people going to respond to this? Like, what's it like? What's the hashtags that I can play with? And use and bring in some people that might want to follow me. So yeah, and I have a podcast seven figure flipping podcasts. That's what I'm probably most proud of. That's where I spend most of my time. And we've had some awesome guests on there.

David:

Yeah, yes. You definitely have. And I'll be sure to tag your Instagram in this when it comes out. Try to try to give you some of them rather than followers.

Bill:

Give me some friends. I need some friends. I'll have many friends.

Yeah, the one thing that I will say is we haven't mentioned like how to get tickets at veterans, our veteranslive.com. So veteranslive.com and grab your tickets there. So hopefully you hang out to the end of the show.

David:

Well, I mentioned in the intro that it'll be in the show notes. So yeah, you're good. So. Awesome. Bill, thank you very much for joining us. It's always a pleasure.

Bill:

Yeah, it was fun. I'm excited about this event. I'm excited to see you guys . I'm most excited to take notes from both of you guys.
Because I'm sure that you're going to share some stuff that I don't know and I'm going to be a learner on that thing. I'll be emceeing it. I'll be running it but my iPad is gonna be full of notes from that, I'm sure.

David:

Thank you for listening to another episode about my journey From military to millionaire. If you liked it be sure to visit Frommilitarytomillionaire.com/podcast to subscribe to future podcasts. While you're there, we'd love for you to rate the show, give us a review on iTunes. Now get out there and take action!