Deep Dive: Into The Mind Of An Entrepreneur w/ Rafael Cortez


Participant #1:
Are you ready to bring your real estate game to the next level? My name is James Prendomano. I'm the CEO and founder of Prereal. For the past 25 years, I've closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate each week, a meeting with outstanding and investors, high performing individuals and visionaries operating in the real estate space. These are the people that are actually out there in the real estate game right now. Getting it done. This podcast aims at bringing anyone's game to the next level. This is the Prereal podcast. Welcome everyone to the show. We're joined today by Raphael Cortez. Raphael is the CEO of the Pulse Group. Raphael is one of these incredibly high energy entrepreneurs that seems to have this drive that from a very young age has absolutely been out there killing it. And by the tender age of 23, seem to have accomplished more than most people accomplished in a lifetime. So, Raphael, thank you so much for joining us today. James. The pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So this is the remix, folks. For whatever reason, our Max or the batteries are melting down. I don't know if anyone else is experiencing that out there, but we got everything teed up, it crashed and we had to reboot. So we're going to redo part one here. Why is the fun? Yeah, right. This is not norm, but why not? Let's get a little extra time together. So you're born and raised in Yuma, Arizona, and you're described as a second generation entrepreneur. Can you just speak to the audience about what you mean there? Yeah. So I was raised by a single mom, and this is a border town. So I actually grew up in a border town, which is San Luis, delivered further south of Yuma. But nobody knows that town. Everybody just kind of connects Yuma. Right. Anyway. So border town. She was a single or she is. She raised me as a single mom, and she set up her shop. So she had a mom and pop like, little grocery store in Mexico. So when I grew up, I grew up thinking that owning your own thing, that was the norm. That was a regular thing to do. So. Yeah. That's why I feel like a lot of stuff that I'm doing, the curiosity that I have and the drive that I have and whatnot it's really adopted from the stuff that I saw growing up. She would kind of do whatever she wanted with her schedule because she had my aunt working in the same grocery store and whatnot? And she got to the point where she owned her options right in her little sphere. And again, I thought that was a normal thing. So one way or another, you get conditioned right to think of certain ways of growing up. And I think that was a big factor. Yeah. So also a product of a single mom, it imprinted on me at a very early age that if you worked all hours of the day and you were kind of always on call, that was, as you had said, that's just the norm. Right? This becomes part of the DNA and how we operate. So at the age of 14, you got your first job at a local grocery store. And as I've already learned, that wasn't Mom's grocery store. You went out and got a job at a separate grocer, right. Right. Yeah. At that point, she had already sold the grocery store, and we're doing some other stuff. And I just went out there and got a job as the produce kids. But I was 14 years old, and I remember it was really kind of like the first thing that exposed me to the real world because every Tuesday, they would have this massive produce sales. And I had to perform like I had didn't care. I was 14 years old. I had to come in and keep the stuff clean, keep it stocked and then do the thing. When they were having massive, massive sales, there was a lot of traffic on those days. And when I went in, when I started working for that company, there was a manager. The produce manager was there. Two weeks later, the guy quits, and they just left me by myself. I was running the thing for a good six, eight months. And that was interesting. Did you recall having a real sense of pride in doing this at that age? You know what, 100%. I remember thinking and feeling really good every time I crushed it like, okay, cool. Yeah. This is on point. This is my area. This is my Kingdom where all the bananas go and all that stuff. It's my responsibility, right? It was like the first time that I really kind of assumed the responsibility of something. It's produce in the grand scheme of things. Right? It's just a section of the store. But to me, it meant something big, right? I had a responsibility for that lady that was walking into the store again, going back to mom, having that shop, customer service was always at the top of the priorities. And I just carried on, and I got to use it there. Right. Long story short, how you do one thing is how you do everything but those behaviors and those habits really getting green in you. And you grew up doing bigger things just in the same format. So do you think that can be taught? Absolutely. Yeah, I do. We're a combination. We're a combination of natural behaviors and learn behaviors or borrow behaviors. So you've probably heard me classical conditioning, right. The stuff that we are exposed to is stuff that we adopt, and we start to model our behaviors and habits after that kind of stuff. Now, with that being said, if you're around an environment where nobody's producing, it doesn't matter if you're the smartest tool in the shed, nothing's going to happen. There's got to be a combination of the two right. And on the opposite side of the token to kind of draw your question. I think that if you put yourself in a space where you're surrounded by people who are producing, where you're surrounded by people who are thinking bigger than you are, where you're surrounded by doors and people who are actually taking action, that's going to rub off on you. So it's totally something that can be learned and better. Even you can borrow motivation from somebody else if you just put yourself in that type of space. So I want to take a deep dive into this after we catch up on the history. But you're an organizational psychologist, and you do coaching, which for us, has had a profound effect on everything that we do. And I really want to take a deep dive into what an organizational psychologist does and how you're able to reach in and untap some of that potential. We have found more times than not. And many of the I think the external factors have a lot to do with it. But people change and people grow. But you can't change the stripes. We have found at least that more times than not. One of the great disappointments for me in life, really disappointment was I used to look up to my elders, and I just assumed that there was this profound wisdom that came with getting older and becoming an adult. And we found that that is just not the case. A lot of the folks that we came up with that had certain behaviors at an early age were unable to or unwilling to explore themselves and unlock and change some of those behaviors. So I'm really interested to dive into how you're doing that and the benefits from it. But before we get there, I want the audience to understand, okay. It's not just a kid who got a job at 14, from 15 to 18, you had a bunch of jobs, right? You were kind of running around hard labor, construction, supervisory positions in retail. You ran quite the gamut here. Yeah. It was an interesting time. And again, I feel lucky that I was able to put myself around people who were doing bigger things, right? I was conditioned to think like an older kid, not a 14 year old kid. All my friends were like the people who I was actually hanging out with were 1718 year old kids. I was a police Explorer. I became a police Explorer, which is kind of like the Boy Scouts, but for the police Department. And the average age in that group was 18 years old. So that's the people who I spent most of my time with, right? You have 18 year old kids, and then you have cops. And then when you're done with that, you go to school, and after that, you go to work and it just became a routine. But I got exposed to just different ways of different interests. Very early on. And from that, I spent a few years in the police explorers and had a lot of fun there and ended up being becoming a fireman. Is it true you were the youngest firefighter in Yuma County ever? Not ever. I'm sure there's somebody else, but at that point, I was the youngest firefighter there. I literally turned 19. And on my birthday, I was working there when I turned 19. I was a fireman in Yuma. And it was interesting because I would show up to the fire scenes and EMS scenes and whatnot? And people look at this 19 year old kid. Are you taking my vital? What are you doing? Where's your dad? An interesting experience. But again, just putting myself in the path of just people who knew more than I did, putting myself in the path. Like, for example, captains loved me because I was always asking questions. If I were to say that I have a virtue, it's curiosity. I work a lot. I mean, I know 1000 guys that can work just as hard as I do, right. But I think curiosity hasn't one thing that's led me to the experience that I've been able to have. I'm just curious about things. I wonder how that works. I wonder how this conversation can go. I wonder what else can be done here. And what if question and being inquisitive about stuff. I think it's one of the things that has really positioned me just in the path of things and then taking action. Right. So while you are with the fire Department, any close calls or any kind of profound experiences. Oh, yeah. I had a few one time I had a roof on my head. I had the helmet, actually. Is it it's here. Let me pull it up. Give me a second. Yeah, sure.

Participant #1:
Oh, wow. There's a crack on the back of this helmet from a roof. It just landed on the back of my head. It took me out. I was out for a little bit. I mean, it wasn't one of those near death experiences, I think. But it was scary. It definitely scary. I was 19 years old. I passed out and a few minutes later, I woke up. But it was during a fire ground scene. And it was interesting. But one thing that you do learn is to appreciate stuff. You see, a lot of stuff. I mean, more than the stuff that happens to us as individuals in the firehouse. Right. We get exposed to a lot of things. We get exposed to a lot of tragedies. We get exposed to a lot of accidents, people losing everything in a matter of an afternoon. And it really is impossible not to put yourself in the gratitude space you walk away from that. It's like, wow, I have a car. I have a home to go tonight. Didn't burn down. This person just died on that scene. They were going to lunch and they passed stuff like that, and it really hits you, right. Especially. I think when you're seeing that stuff on a regular basis, really, it makes you grateful. It helps you become more grateful about the stuff that you have, the opportunities that you have, the people around you. And it's a thing of beauty at the end of the day. Perspective, brother. Yeah. Absolutely. So at 21, you began your first, I guess, official entrepreneurial project, right? Yeah. So I launched it when I was 21. I started building the business plan when I was putting together a business plan was around 20. But it's a non emergency medical transportation business. It's a long title, basically what it is. It's a wheelchair and stretcher patient, non emergency patient transport system. So we would take people to and from medical appointments, doctor's visits, dialysis and that kind of stuff. But they need either a wheelchair or stretcher. Right. And they used to take a unit, an actual ambulance out of service to go do that. So you're taking an emergency vehicle. It's going to cost thousands of dollars to the taxpayers just to take it out of service for an hour when it's not something that's an emergency and you have your crew out your vehicle out. So I started seeing that gap in Yuma, but the market wasn't big enough, so I moved. I started working my relationships and building that kind of stuff here in Phoenix. I'm in Phoenix now, and I launched the business. I actually launched it in Phoenix instead of Yuma. So was that idea born out of your experiences in the fire Department, or is this separate path completely? I can't take full credit. Honestly, I was having a beer with one of my captains, and we're talking, we have 24 hours every other day. And there's something that can be done, right. Like, a lot of firefighters have a contractor's license, and they have a side hustle. They have a side gig. And it's just what we do because we have a day on day off, day on day off, and then you get Kelly days, which are four days consecutive of just not working. Right. So there's got to be something that can be done there. And we started talking. He's like, I'm going to set up a mortuary. We started kind of bouncing around ideas, and he says, you know what other business would be good. And he goes a medical transportation business so fast forward a few years. And he owns two mortuaries and funeral homes in Yuma. And I built that company. I sold that company already, but I had it for ten years. Wow. It was a very productive meeting. Yes, I would say so. It's a hell of a beer. It's a hell of a beer. So how do you make the jump from medical transport to real estate and several derivative operations? You've got several organizations underneath the Pulse Group where does that connection come in? I got my first paid client. So when I launched, I started working on the business, like I said, and putting it all together. But I got my first paid client in 2007, and that's when I jumped into the transportation industry. I did well, I landed a couple of contracts with the government, and I grew the company. So by 2009, I had some cash just built from that. And I want to replace it somewhere. I don't know a thing about real estate. I've heard that you come in and then fix. All I knew about real estate was the construction work that I had done prior, which was framing houses and then dropping concrete and that kind of stuff. I didn't know how any of it worked. So 2009, I was like, I'm going to do a flip. I can swing a hammer. Let's just go ahead and take on my first flip, and the business started running. Right? So I had dispatchers. I had drivers. I already had a good, solid fleet at that point. So I had some time on my hands to just do something else. And I went into real estate, did a couple of flips. And, yeah, so 20, 09, 20, 10 prices were crazy. 2011. Even you could buy properties for a fraction of 10% of what you can buy them right now. So I did a few of those. And then I came across wholesaling. That just made a ton of sense to me. It made a ton I didn't really like dealing with. I was already dealing with enough people in the transportation business, drivers and mechanics and people in the team and then dealing with contractors and subs and handyman and whatnot it was becoming heavy, right. And then I came across wholesaling. I was like, Wait, you can do you can sell your vested interest in the property, and I can make a profit. And I don't have to worry about swinging Hammers or any of that stuff. And, yeah, I took that as my big Mo. And I've been doing wholesaling, and I still flip. So we cherry pick flips, but we mainly focus on wholesaling. Can you walk the audience through what is wholesaling? It's like the buzzword, right. We hear now everybody's wholesaling. What exactly is wholesaling. So wholesaling. When you find a property from a distressed seller, there's got to be some type of distress. There's a problem that's in place, right? You find a property and you buy it, you have to buy it under at a discount. You buy it at a big discount, and then you take that contract. Now, you have a signed contract with the seller, and you take that contract and you sell the contract to a cash buyer. Somebody is going to come in and actually flip it. Right. But in between that, there's a space for profit, which is an assignment fee. So you take that assignment fee. Let's say for the sake of numbers that you find a property that's worth $100,000 in the market. Right. And then you go to a seller, need some rehab, a little bit of work here and there and whatnot? And you buy it for $60,000. You sell that contract to somebody who's going to come in and fix it. But you sell to them for 70,000, and you keep that spread of $10,000 for yourself. So you're not selling the actual property. That's the technicality of it. You're selling your vested interest in that contract, and then the new buyer is actually executing on the contract and closing. Exactly. So you use their money to close on that transaction. If you're doing assignment, you're not putting any money out of your pocket. It's low entry to barrier. You just got to know how to do it, right. So it doesn't require a lot of capital to get going on that. And once you have a good system in place, you can really create a machine that is pumping out leads, pumping out sellers. If you become really good at negotiating, which is what I Dove head first into in 2013. It really makes a big impact on the results that you get. Sure, in a very few sentences there, you described what I know being intimately involved in the business is an extraordinarily complex accomplishment, right? To put together a system that is finding the opportunities, generating those leads, giving you the chance to go in and close those leads, making sure that you have the right contracts with the right language in it. And then you've got to work the other side of it. And you've got to find the counterpart that's willing to come in and step into your shoes, replace your deposit, and that they've got the right language in the contract so they can go execute on it. Right. How did you build an infrastructure like this without having significant experience in the market? Well, I went to YouTube University. I started listening to podcast, and again, I get curious about something, and I get obsessed almost to a point. So I did that at the beginning. I actually started listening to Sean Terry's podcast Live to Freedom Podcast. And I think it was 2012 when I was buying homes for Fix and Flip. I kept seeing assignment fees. I never questioned it. I mean, I didn't know what it was like. All right. Just sell me a house. That's my price. And I kept seeing assignment fees, assignment fees. And later I found out that there's a middleman from the seller to me. Right. And they're making that assignment fee a lot of times. Those were big, fat assignment fees. You're talking 15 $20,000 markups. And long story short, I want to get better. And I go to a real estate seminar. A rich dad, poor dad seminar. They talk about wholesaling for about maybe 20 minutes. They really dive deep into it. They kind of mentioned it but it was just enough for me to get interested. Right? So what do I do after that? I leave. I started looking into it. That's when I come across all the podcasts and I close, I think two or three deals, wholesale deals. After that, it took me a couple of months, but I signed up on everybody's email list, right? For Properties, and I get an email, and it's coming from Sean Terry. I'm on his mailing list, and he's looking for an acquisitions rep in Maricopa County. I was like, wait, I'm in Maricopa County. And at that point, I was kind of done with the transportation business. I wanted to sell it, and I was still doing both things. So I'm thinking, like, okay, I want to dive into this. I want to cut the learning curve. And if I can do it by going to work somewhere where I can get trial by fire and really learn from the best, that's what's going to happen. I met with them. He brought me on on the spot, ended up selling a company that transportation business. I sold it a few months later, and I started running acquisitions. So I went from being my own boss to working for somebody right. There wasn't a goal to this whole thing. I want to learn more about it. I want to be more in it, neck deep into it. So long story short, I spent just under three years doing acquisitions for Shantary, and, I mean, I got exposed to so many seller appointments. I was able to practice everything that I was learning at that point. I went back to school, and I was working on my second master's degree in psychology. So I was doing a lot of things at the same time. But everything in my head was connecting, right? Everything in my head was okay. Psychology has a lot to do with sales. I mean, it's the backbone of having a good wholesaling business place. And then you tie in business and my experience in building that other company and fine tuning processes and stuff like that. So it was all just kind of taking shape from that point forward. It's just like one thing kind of led to the other. After I left Sean's company, I launched a brokerage. So I opened up a brokerage. I already had my real estate license at that point. And then I went back to doing wholesaling and then fixing and flipping and having that, which is Pulse Capital. So now I have Post Capital, Post Realty and Associates, and then CEO polls, which is my organizational psychology practice. So, yeah, it's kind of like a big rundown of how it all came together. But the brokerage would happen if I wasn't doing wholesaling. The opportunity just came about because we monetized leads. Right? So now we have leads. We have people that we're bringing in. What do we do with those leads if they don't want to do a wholesale deal, we push them over to the retail side. Yeah. It's like this little ecosystem.

Participant #1:
The thing I love most maybe about real estate is that no day is ever exactly the same. And there are several opportunities within the opportunities. Right. Okay. There's a lot of different ways you can monetize this industry if you have all of the disciplines pulled onto one roof. So if you could describe for the audience, you said you cherry pick some. What's the incentive or what are the reasons that you landed on the whole selling side instead of the full execution side? It's easier. Transactions are a lot faster. You can be in and out of a deal in two, three weeks, meaning that you get it locked up and then you find a buyer for it. You push it clear title and then you get paid. And if you know how to negotiate deals, right? I mean, you're talking big spreads. I think our average right now average spread is around $32,000 per deal, which is a good, healthy spread. We have a very specific way of negotiating deals and working it from both sides, on the seller side and on the buyer side. And at the end of the day, it still makes sense for the flip. I got to practice a lot of that, a lot of those closings and putting it together. So it just makes I'd rather make $30,000 in three weeks than maybe $45 in two months. Right. So, yeah, that's one of the things. Whenever we do have deal, that's okay. It's like a wholesale type of stuff. We don't do full fix and flip full got jobs and remodel. It's not my wheelhouse. We're doing speed. So we go into deals for speed. We can come in and then rehab something in a couple of weeks and then put it out in the next couple of weeks and do a total hold time. Right now, the market is fast. So we'll hold the property for two months, two and a half, and it's gone. Right. But if it's something like that, that's going to be relatively easy to do. And it makes sense. The numbers make sense. Yes. We'll absolutely do a wholesale on it or fix and flip it to ramp up the profits. Another 30 $40,000. Are you focusing on, like, one typeology, one specific type of product that you're looking to negotiate these deals on? Or is it a wide variety? No. We've done everything from raw land to mobile homes to single family multifam. And if the numbers are there, we have a pretty solid buyer's list. I've been building that list for years, and it's responsive. Right. So when we get deals through the door, they move. They hardly ever linger. Or we have to reach out to coholsalers and whatnot? But we have a very systematic approach of displaying the deals, and that helps out because we have

Participant #1:
not selected what's the word? I'm trying to find the word. We have segmented that's word. We have segmented buyers. Right. So we have buyers that are specific for land, some other commercials, some other ones just residential. So we break it down and we'll do a good relationship building throughout the process and whatnot and reach out to push them. But, yeah, if the numbers are there, we'll make it happen. So at the end of the day, nothing works on the wholesaling side. If you're not buying the deal, right? Yeah. You make the money on the purchase. And here's the thing. Right. Again, you can have the best system of the best CRM, the best, whatever you want to put together in your business. But if you don't have the skill set and the soft skills required to apply that action and bring forth those results, nothing's going to happen. It really comes down to that. So how are you so accurately comping out such a wide variety of asset types? We use a couple of different services. The one that we use in the county will use the MLS. My brokerage is in Arizona, so we have access to the MLS. We use this as a backbone market. So we're buying properties. We're doing deals in Mercola County, which is very competitive. There's still a lot of opportunity out there. So for that stuff, we'll use our brokerage resources, anything that's out because we'll do virtual as well. We'll do batch leads. We'll comp properties using batch leads. We love that service. They have great data, same stuff for skip tracing. So I highly recommend that service for that kind of stuff. So you're identifying the deals, you've broken out your leads similar to how we do it, because someone that's looking to buy one family fix. And Flip is not the same person that's looking at raw land. It's not the same person that's looking to buy a multi million dollar shopping center. You're targeting your lists as the typology fits. You're copying these things out through local resources and some third party sites. Are you buying anything out of state or is everything localized? No out of state will stick to wholesome. We won't flip. I'm not holding out of state either yet. So I have different things in the burner. I'm building a software right now. It's a full operating system for Wholesaling. So I'm caught in that project, and I have a couple of other things going on. So outside will strictly. I mean, right now, the model that we have is just push it. We'll assign the deal double close on it, double escrow. So I don't know if there's a space I'm more excited for. We're also developing proprietary software. I feel like that is the one place where there's absolutely. It feels like unlimited opportunity and insane growth opportunity. I think so. Man, there's a lot of stuff out there, but this is what happens. This is what happens. A lot of tools that we use as investors a lot of them are put together by coders, right. They're put together by the code is done by coders, but the actual infrastructure, the flow, the model of the business, the model of software is put together by somebody who knows code. These people are engineers. They work well that way. But they haven't done the business. A lot of these people have no idea how a wholesale transaction works, where the little gaps are going to be in how a fix and flip works, and where you're going to have efficiencies, and you're going to have bottlenecks in the process. If you're sitting down and thinking theoretical about anything, right, you can write three books on that thing just by the stuff that comes into your brain, right? Ideas. But until you put it into practice and you're actually in the trench doing the work, the real questions don't come up. And I think that's one of the big things that we're lacking in the space of technology in real estate, specifically in investments. So my thing, it's not going to be a lead generation thing. I'm focusing on operating system and actually have it. I have the model. I have it inside podium. So I have a podium set up and it really runs the entirety of my business. So I'm taking that and doing a standalone software. But you have to do a lot of stuff. You have to be in it consistently to fine tune, to be able to see how you can lean it out, how you can make it better and improve it. Right. And you can't see that from if you're not in the business. So we're in a really unique time where there are those of us that grew up with enough technology. So we've got a good base. We understand it. But we've also been deal makers long enough where if your software does not fit into a deal makers workflow, it will not get used. Period. And the people that are putting these, it's crazy to me. We see all the time, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars that are raised. And these programs are being built out by folks who wouldn't know a real estate deal if they tripped over it. And while on paper, it sounds great. And it feels like it's a wonderful solution. When you sit down and you actually try and interface at the speed and the tone and tempo of the way we operate in the business, they don't work. Yeah, it doesn't translate. So I see that quite a bit. And my background and especially because of my psychology back and business psychology background, is it's people in systems, right? It's hiring the right buttons in the right seats and then assigning the right tasks and knowing how to hire. So putting all of that stuff together in an operating system that runs the business. To me, it's a no brainer. It's a no brainer. We have CRM. You'll have a CRM. That's not really a CRM. It's like a lead generation thing or it's a transaction coordination thing or something like that. But it's not really an operating system for the business. It's a segmented tool. So what I'm working on is the whole thing. I'm selling the machine. I love it. So as you're scaling now, this wholesale operation, the demands for capital start to skyrocket. Right. So are you taking in outside? Are you doing raises or how are you backstopping the increased flow? No, actually, we have a pretty controlled marketing budget and the way that it works, I don't know if you're okay with this. They can break it down. But I break the business down in six sections. So I have a philosophy called the less business, more profits philosophy, but less of a lean, effective, strategic and simple. Right. So you have lean processes, strategic vision, effective models. And at the end of the day, you have easy to understand accountability. So it just encompasses everything. Less business, more profits, lean effects, digging and simple. And what happens when you have a business that's running like that? You'll recognize the bottlenecks you'll recognize. Ok. Where am I getting stuck? Where am I having redundancies. Where am I spending money that I'm not supposed to be spending. We have KPI galore. We have KPI parties every Tuesday, so we track all the metrics and the navigators and the KPIs for the business of what happened with this particular marketing campaign. Or we're getting a good ROI and we follow scorecards. And we're very adamant about having a systematic approach to all that. But it helps in the overhead. Now we're putting money out there for marketing. And again, you make the money when you're locking the deal. Right. So we want to make sure that we have the people who are trained to do the negotiation per se. That's what they're doing. They're not cold calling. They're focused on that particular role. One thing that I see is people. Usually I want to scale, quote, unquote scale. Right. I want to get bigger. I want to hire. I need to bring people in and they'll have somebody who's really good in acquisitions and then they'll have them cold call for 8 hours. You're breaking the behavioral strengths of that employee or that team member. They're being broken down with something that is not their highest and best. So to get around that and really optimize, minimize the overhead and optimize the Efficiencies, I break it down like this. So we have a sourcing, right. We have a source in stage stage one of the business, you start sourcing the leads, that's all. It is sourcing. It's not pre qualifying. It's not negotiating, none of that. There are specific people that fit into that role. You have cold callers. If you're doing PPC kind of stuff, you have SMS, you're sourcing. But we keep it separate from Legion and acquisitions because there's a lot of turnover. People switch coal colors. I mean, every other Sunday. It's just the reality of the business, right? You're not going to have the same quality team member in a cold caller than you are somebody who's just an absolute assassin when it comes to locking deals and negotiating, it's just not the same behavioral strengths. We're wired differently for each one of those roles. So you have to find the right person for each one of those. So we source at stage one. Stage two, I have lead managers and she'll pre qualify. So she'll go through condition, motivation, timeline and the price of the property. Pre qualify. And if this turns into a prospect, then it gets sent over to my acquisitions reps. So my role, I want to see enough prospects on the acquisition reps desk. Right. I want to see them inside our operating system. We have a number. I want to make sure they have enough people to talk to. If they don't have enough people that they can talk to because we have this process, I go back and I can identify what's happening because we're not converting, right? Are we not pre qualifying, right. Does the lead manager have enough leads to pre qualify? If they do, then it's a conversion problem, right? If they don't, it's a sourcing problem, and I can backtrack it. And really, like, pinpoint the origin of it and get rid of those bottlenecks. So stage three is acquisitions. When we make offers, we find multiple ways of monetizing on leads, we make a wholesale offer, we'll move on to an option offer. If that doesn't work, if it doesn't work, we'll do creative financing. If that doesn't work, we'll push it over to the brokerage side. Right. So we have multiple ways of being the solution for that seller. And at this point, the seller has already had two conversations, one with the cold caller and then one with my lead manager for the pre qualification process. They're not all the way there, but you know what I mean? There's something that we can have a conversation about, and it keeps my acquisition team rolling on follow ups on your leads on prospects. If that number drops, I know they got ramp up marketing or fine tune the conversion one of the two. It's simple, right. When you have a system in place. Now, if I had $100,000 and I was going to throw it all into marketing, then you're going to get a bunch of leads. But where are your bottlenecks like that's? Where a lot of people miss the Mark, right? Yeah. I'm getting a ton of leads. I don't know where they're coming from. I don't know if they're pre qualified. I don't know what's happening to them as the process goes. So first three stages, we do that. The fourth one is going to be Dispo. We come in and then we have a couple of different strategies on the disposal side to maximize the profits. The assignment fees, and then we get paid right after the Dispo stage. Most businesses stop there. We actually have a stage five, which is measuring and stage six, which is improving every single deal. We'll do a breakdown, or the team does a breakdown. Okay. What happened in this deal? We closed on it and our revenue was $32,000. What if we had done this on that deal? Could we have taken 40? What if we had marketed this way and new? Sops come out of that new processes, you come in, you adopt them, they make sense, and then you'd run them to the next deal, and that's improving. So we have those six stages. Boom, sourcing, converting, pre qualifying acquisitions, disp, measuring and improving that same process on every single one of the deals builds a machine. And anytime something is a little off, you can go back and then fine tune where the bottlenecks are. It really keeps the overhead low. I have to say, I'm blown away by your process. So the hardest thing to do is scale, and we find over and over and over. I am number one guilty of this. In the past, we have spent so much time working in the business that we're not working on the business. You have put immense energy on working on the business as opposed to in the business. And by that, I mean, when you're quickly rattling through this process and KPIs key performance indicators and you're looking at if there's a drop in leads, it's not just go throw a bunch of money at marketing which specific types of leads was the fallout? Why was the fallout? All of these incremental steps incredibly optimized the bottom line and make you incredibly efficient. How the hell did you get to a point where you were able to graduate from being in the business to on the business so quickly? Well, it wasn't that quickly, but I brought in Renee. He's my director of operations. He handles Dispo, and I brought him in a couple of years ago, so I never delegate anything that I don't want to say I'm an expert on, but I don't at least know enough about it to be dangerous in it. So I have to go through the process. And one thing that I'm really good at is documenting everything as I'm doing things as I'm doing new things. Okay. This is how I did it, and I'll write it down. I'll do a quick little video about whatever it is that I'm doing, I can come back. And now it's training material, right? But more importantly, you come back and then you revisit what you're doing. So it's having an active learning mentality in that curiosity, what if, instead of asking for EMD of $5,000? What if I do? I don't know, $3,000 EMD and a shorter, close escrow. Does that improve my length of the deal? That kind of stuff and just playing with it? Fine tuning and again, something happens, something works, you take it to adopt it, and then you drop it into your SOPs, your standard operating procedures, your business model. But having a good process in terms of protocols and what to do that really does it. It's going to take you 1520 minutes extra to record a video. When you're doing something, when you're going through a deal, when you're filling out a contract to send it out to a seller. Here's the thing Hustle is going to get us to from point A to point B. Right. But hustle is season. It's not a business strategy. It's not sustainable. You're going to burn out if you're always in that Hustle state, you're always trying to figure things out, right? It's connected with figuring things out and kind of shooting from the hip. I'm hustling through things. I'm trying to find the next deal. I don't know where, but I'm going to Hustle so I can get it. And there's this glorified sense of righteousness from living in the Hustle, which is all fine and dandy for the first couple of years. Why? Because we need that vibe. We need that traction. We need that energy. We need that thing to just propel us and push us forward. Right. So having a Hustle mentality is a good thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying it's not sustainable. Soon enough, you have to jump into something that's going to set up your systems. The freedom really is in the system. It's really cool. When you're in Costa Rica and you're looking at a deal, you just closed it's. $40,000, $42,000 just went into your account. You can't do that without systems. You can't do that without a team that knows what they're doing and that they can take responsibility for what in owning the results, right. You may have the best kind hearted people in your team, but if there's no fundamental process that they can follow and step one, step two, in a leaner type of way, you're going to lose them. Why? Because people get confused. People do not operate well in places where there's confusion. You can scale a system, a process, or you can scale chaos. It really comes down to that without a doubt, something you touched on earlier. Also, again, I give you a lot of credit for it, because typically, people don't understand this until it's much further down the line and they've done a lot of damage in their organization. We call it operating in the gift. You referenced it in the context of not taking a deal maker. That is a fine tuned machine. A deal maker is a special breed and dropping them into eight hour cold calling sessions every day? Is this stuff that you learn through the psychology classes and the degree that you took or where did all of this start to weave its way in? Yeah. So I've been playing with this. Well, some people, like video games. I like psychology, and I Dove into disk assessments and profiles very early on. I'm talking about maybe 2009. That's when I kind of got exposed to that. And we're all algorithms psychologically. We are algorithms, right. We are wired in certain ways. We have natural tendencies. We have natural behavioral strengths that we're just kind of come out of the womb, out of the box. We just wired that with those. Now to that, you add on learn behaviors, you add on different skill sets, you add on exposure. Your parents had tenacity. You borrowed tenacity. Right. But we're going to be naturally wired for something. And when you're able to hire based on the strengths of what the role needs, here's one thing that happens. Let me know what you think about this, but here's one thing that happens. People will do, for example, a personality assessment for hiring. Right. And they're like, all right, cool. I like this person, but they'll do the personality they'll hire for the person, as opposed to the qualifications of the actual role. Meaning if you have somebody who's an introvert, they're not social. They like to have that steady, slower, more controlled, more predictable space to operate in. You can't put them as an acquisitions rep because it's highly volatile. You're out there all the time. You're engaging with people. It's a people business. It doesn't mean that they can't do it. It doesn't mean they can't do it. Now, here's the difference. All it means is that you're going to get burned out. You're going to get tired a lot faster. For example, I'm good with spreadsheets. I'm really good at creating the fancy ones with the graphics and then doing all kinds of tricks. I just been working on spreadsheets forever, but I know that I can only handle spreadsheets for maybe 2 hours at a time, and then I'm just fed up like, the hell with this. I need a break, right. Because I'm adapting my behavioral style to the analytical side, and it's not my natural strength. So on the opposite side, the same is true for somebody who's in acquisitions. If you're familiar with the disk assessment you're looking for, like, your ideal acquisitions rep is going to be somebody who's a high driver and has a good high secondary influencer profile or influential profile. So Di is kind of like the mold for acquisitions. Hiring. Your profile is different for lead management. Your profile is going to be different for dispositions. You don't need the same behavioral traits or strengths. Right. So if you're able to kind of see that and hire based off of that and then to that, you add an attitude and you can train for skill when they already have that wiring, things just flow better. The attrition that I have is really we don't have attrition in the business. We have people that come in and they stay. They stay for a long period of time. It's just attrition drops I started doing the same thing in the transportation business and just kind of paint a picture. Usually the average attrition rate, meaning somebody quits comes in and quits after three months in that industry as a driver, just driving all day long, people in wheelchairs. So three months, my attrition rate was three years. That's the retention. That's how long people stay. But I was hiring based off of those strengths. Okay. This person fits this role. So are you doing those assessments prods on the way in, or are you doing this on your own? Who's evaluating? Because that's a hell of a skill set. Who's doing that evaluation? I do in the operating system that I have for my company. I built just hiring applications. Right. And there's questions in there. There's short, brief questionnaires to give me highlights of what these people are. And I get an idea of that. And then I have a couple of other hiring questions in there that I mean, they're important just to know information. And then they cross you're almost like fact checking some of the stuff they're saying as you're hiring them. So that tells you quite a bit. So we do that within the but each one of the roles, like, for example, the roles are defined in the coaching program that had the roles are defined. So we know what to look for, where to go get the test or the assessments from. If you're not the person that can do it on the fly, that's fine. There's still assessments that can give you a good insight of where they're at. Now, the coaching program that you've put together. Is that specific to wholesaling, or is it for other business opportunities as well? No, it's specific to wholesaling. However, the structure works. So once you learn, we focus on wholesaling getting to that first deal and then ramping up from their different stages of business. That sort of thing. Right. So we focus on the how to get the deal and it's all instruction. It's pragmatic information. Step one, two and three. It's very linear. So do this. And now do this. Now do this. Now. There's no ambiguities. It's a process, right. When you have that process down, you can take the same framework. And I have the same framework, and I'm running my brokerage with it. I run the six and operations. We run it the same way with it. Again, you have this business model in place and you shift a couple of things. But when you already know how to think like an entrepreneur instead of a hustler, you wire things differently. And now, in your course, you're offering all of these different steps and the infrastructure and how to do all of that. Yeah. So we break it down. I mean, we get really detailed on individual businesses and people, especially not everybody is ready to hire right out of the gate. But the time comes and the time comes really, really fast. So it's important to know how to do it when you get ready for it. And that's what we do. We break it all down. So everything's laid out. But we also have on group coaching calls every single week and we break down scenarios and believe it or not, we tackle a lot of the psychology and the mindset on the real estate training calls. I believe it. I have to tell you, Rafael, I'm very impressed at the operation that you've put together and how pragmatic you've been in building it step by step. I know how difficult it is, and I really give you a lot of credit. By far and away, people talk about mindset coaching and people talk about the buzzwords, but to see it in practice at this level is pretty damn impressive. Man, you should really be proud of what you put together. I think it's amazing. Where do folks find out more information? Thanks. I appreciate it. I'm pretty active on Instagram. Somebody wants to shoot me a message DM or whatever. Raphaelcortez CEO that's my handle. And you can find me everywhere. As Raphaelcortes CEO YouTube. I post a lot of content on YouTube. I have podcasts on entrepreneurship series on wholesaling where I break it all down. I mean, I just give strategies and tactics on how to do real estate wholesaling, and I do a lot of videos on mindset and just entrepreneurial principles as well. Again, I'm really impressed. And that doesn't happen very often. You've really got this on lock, man. Congratulations on the success. I'm excited to see where you go next, and we'll certainly be in touch. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate you having me and then give me the opportunity to come and talk to your audience. I appreciate the time. As always, everybody out there. Please stay safe.